Courses for Spring 2010 - Lit and Crit

Select course name for a detailed description.

ENGL 674: Bibliographical Methods: These are exciting times for literary scholars; but, due to the immense body of information on the web and even more in the world’s libraries, they can also be rather scary. This course—labeled the world over as “bib methods”—is designed to put the methods and materials of literary research into perspective and to use.
ENGL 676: Critical Approaches to Literature: ENGL 676 Critical Approaches to Literature Dr. Tom Slater M 6 00–8 45 p.m. This course will introduce students to issues in critical theory through the use of film study. The primary texts we will use will be fairly recent.
ENGL 762,862: Topics in American Literature since 1870: Southern Women Writers: This class will explore the rich tradition of 20th Century southern women writers. Women played a central role in the blossoming of southern literature labeled the Southern Literary Renascence, and they continue to compete successfully with men in southern letters and literary achievements. We will try to discover why women have occupied such a significant position in southern writing. We will also attempt to answer the following questions: To what extent do women writers explore the typical concerns of male writers of the Southern Literary Renascence? To what degree do second (and third?) generation southern women writers reflect the concerns of first generation southern women writers? In what ways do the concerns of the feminist movement intersect with the concerns of southern women writers?
ENGL 763,863: Topics in British Literature before 1660: Middle English Classics: Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain-Poet: Today, we think of Geoffrey Chaucer as the “father of English poetry” and The Canterbury Tales as one of the finest works of medieval literature, but two other poets also writing under Richard II (1367-1400) have equal claim for greatness: William Langland, the allegorist of Piers Plowman, and the anonymous author of Gawain and the Green Knight and several other alliterative poems including Patience, Pearl, and Cleanness. We will survey such classics of Ricardian literature as we attempt to gain a better sense of both Middle English and the broader context for Chaucer’s revolutionary achievement.
ENGL 764,864: Topics in British Literature since 1660: “The way we live now”: literary responses to 9-11 and its aftermath: This course will examine the literary response to the events of 9/11 and to subsequent events of international, national and domestic anxiety and trauma and place them within a larger historical context of terrorist acts both in Europe and in the United States during the twentieth century. The texts chosen will be multigenre in nature and will reflect the different ways authors have come to grips with not only this attack on American soil but with the psychic fault lines that have impacted citizens on a global level.
ENGL 764,864: Topics in British Literature since 1660: Irish Writers of Nature and Place: It is a truth universally acknowledged that Ireland, the “Emerald Isle,” is “green” in at least two different senses. The vibrant, year-round green of its countryside is both a political emblem of nationalism, of the historical struggle to free Ireland from many centuries of British oppression—and also the subject of many Irish writers who have immersed themselves in that green countryside, writing of (and out of) it in compelling natural terms. Sometimes green as both nationalistic and natural, and also both urban and rural, come together in single texts—as they famously do in Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916,” to cite just one of many examples.
ENGL 765,865: Topics in Literature as Genre: August Wilson: Roots and Legacies: We are only just beginning to appreciate August Wilson, whose death in 2005 came shortly after he completed the tenth and final play in The Pittsburgh Cycle, which tells the story of African America in the twentieth century from diverse perspectives, though always with resolutely Black voice and vision.

ENGL 766,866: Literature and the Environment: Social Justice and Postcolonial Perspectives: Ecocriticism has been a flourishing field of inquiry for some years now, but literary critics are just beginning to explore literature and the environment from postcolonial and social justice perspectives. As part of this effort, this course will examine emerging literary and theoretical paradigms of environmentalism, including Marxist Ecology, Environmental Feminism, Environmental Justice, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism. As we survey these frameworks, we will consistently strive to contextualize the ways literary and cultural environmentalisms emerge from movements for environmental justice, decolonization, nationalism, and feminism.
ENGL 772,872: Topics in Women’s Literature: “The Monstrous and The Exotic”: In this course, we will consider women’s figures and figurations as “monstrous” and/or “exotic” as they appear in literature from a colonial/post-colonial theoretical perspective. We will think about various attempts to write/ (re)write or perhaps name/ (re)name female figures in these texts and worlds that would prefer see or read them in particular ways without necessarily acknowledging their writings, their voices, their unique identities or their perspectives.
ENGL 773,873 Topics in Minority Lit: Black Writers, White Lives: African American intellectuals and writers have a long tradition of theorizing White subjectivity and the politics of race in American culture. This seminar will introduce students to a number of texts within the African American literary tradition that interrogate U.S. racial politics, and specifically engage the construction of whiteness in this country. We'll examine a number of understudied texts that can be classified as “white life literature” (texts written by African American authors that focus primarily on white characters) as well as several others books that do not fall specifically within that subgroup.
ENGL 797,897: Independent Seminar: Independent Seminar provides an opportunity to pursue interests not accommodated by course offerings. It is not recommended during a student's first semester of course work. Students wishing to take an Independent Seminar in Fall 2009 must file a completed application in the Graduate English office by August 1, 2009.
ENGL 956: Literary Theory for Teachers and Scholarly Writers: This second required theory course for Ph.D. students only examines numerous intellectual traditions of the diverse and extraordinary twentieth-century critical cultural theories and literary criticisms, including feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, Asian American & Asian diasporic cultural criticism, African American cultural criticism, and pedagogy.
ENGL984: Seminar in British Literature: Constructing the Woman Artist: 1820-1960: What is women’s art? What is its cultural relevance? In this course, we will consider literary, social, and cultural constructions of the woman artist from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.