Graduate Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 5029-001: Introduction to the Literature of Britain, pre-1600
Instructor: Professor Elizabeth Robertson
The goal of this course is to provide you with the critical tools to be able to contend with most of the major genres of the Medieval and Renaissance (or Early Modern) periods. Many of the ‘tools” will be helpful to you in your work in later periods. Those you will be introduced to include not only definitions of genres (always subject to debate) with examples and basic critical tools for close reading (an understanding of meter, syntax, and punctuation), but also the historical debates around, and raised by, the texts under consideration. We will begin the course with a consideration of the English literary tradition beginning with a discussion, within a general consideration of the nature of canonicity, of why “Caedmon’s Hymn” is believed to be the first English poem . We will then learn the basic tools needed for a study of medieval manuscripts and medieval and early modern printed books. After a discussion of the challenges posed by editing and punctuation, we will turn to prosody and learn about Anglo-Saxon and Middle English alliterative verse, rhyme royal, and the beginnings of iambic pentameter. Renaissance experiments in prosody (sonnets, concrete poetry, etc.) and the anxious debates in the period about rhyme and meter will be our next topic. We will then turn to the history of Bible translation and Biblical commentary in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. After establishing these foundations, we will turn to case studies from each period of form: allegory, pastoral, elegy, saint’s life, drama, and romance. We will conclude with a consideration of crusades, conversion, travel literature, and selections pertaining to England’s colonialist ventures in order to formulate approaches for post-colonialist readings of medieval and Early Modern literature.
Please contact the instructor for further information:Roberte@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5559: Studies in Special Topics: Theory and Practice of College-Level Writing Instruction
Instructor: Professor Steve Lamos
This course is designed to introduce MA and PhD students to fundamental theories and practices of effective college-level writing instruction as conceptualized within the contemporary field of composition studies.The first part of the course will focus on a number of key “how-to” pedagogical strategies relevant to the teaching of writing: how to design and implement course syllabi, writing assignments, and classroom activities geared toward promoting students’ “higher-order” (e.g. argument, organization, evidence) and “lower-order” (e.g. grammar, style) writing abilities; how to assess student writing both formally and informally; how to conduct a variety of one-on-one, small-group, and large-group writing workshops; how to introduce students to useful academic research strategies; how to integrate technology into writing instruction; and how to address the needs of diverse learners. The second part of the course will ask students to analyze the pedagogical strategies covered in the first part of the course using various theoretical perspectives on contemporary writing instruction (e.g. “expressivist,” “social constructivist,” “cultural studies,” “post-colonial,” “post-process,” etc.). Coursework will include the following: a number of short written responses to reading material; a short self-reflective teaching project / presentation rooted in students’ own teaching experiences; a statement of teaching philosophy intended for use on the academic job market; and an extended critical project related to some set of pedagogical and/or theoretical issues discussed in the course. Key course readings will likely include the following: Villanueva, Crosstalk in Comp Theory; Glenn, Goldthwaite and Connors, The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing; Meyer and Smith, The Practical Tutor; and a coursepak made up of articles from College English, College Composition and Communication, Written Communication, Rhetoric Review, Pedagogy, the Journal of Basic Writing, and various others.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Steve.Lamos@Colorado.EDU.
ENGL 7019-001: Spenser and Milton
Instructor: Professor Katherine Eggert
In this course we will study the major poetic works of these authors: The Shepheardes Calender, about half of The Faerie Queene, Lycidas, Comus, Paradise Lost, and either (depending on class interest) Samson Agonistes or Paradise Regained. We will also have a look at selections from each author's prose: Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland and Milton's divorce and regicide tracts. As well, we will examine major trends in recent criticism of these authors. Among the topics we will consider are: genre and poetic design; literary history and literary influence; politics and religion; gender and sexuality; colonization and imperialism; landscape and ecopoetics; books and print culture; science, geography, and cosmography; and ideas of authorship and of authorial career. Assigned work will include a short paper, a conference-length paper, and class presentations on secondary readings.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Katherine.Eggert@colorado.edu.
ENGL 7059-001: Time & Literature
Instructor: Professor Sue Zemka
This course will explore some classic statements on and experiments in the textual representation of time. As we will see, these statements constitute a long and evolving dialogue on the temporality of meaning, specifically as it emerges in text-based culture, and specifically as pertains to the possibility of immanence - - or the ramifications of its impossibility. The readings for the course are divided into groupings of writers: (1) Augustine, Heidegger, & Derrida; (2) Wordsworth & Geoffrey Hartman; (3) Charlotte Bronte, Frank Kermode, & Paul Ricoeur; (4) Proust & Kristeva; (5) Bergson & Deleuze; (6) Benjamin, Lukacs, & Henry James; (7) Herodotus, Virginia Woolf, and Ann Carson; (8) N. Katherine Hayles & Mark Z. Danielewski.
This course is offered with COML 5350-001.
Please contact the instructor for further information: zemka@colorado.edu.
ENGL 7119-001: America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic
Instructor: Professor Jordan Stein
The map of what Americanists as recently as five years ago called “the Atlantic world” is fast being replotted with the Caribbean as its center. This advanced graduate seminar will review this emergent scholarship and related texts in order 1) to engage the methodological and disciplinary questions this work raises, 2) to explore the archives through which these questions have been posed, and 3) to theorize more broadly about the aesthetic dimensions of space and place for literature.
Guiding questions include: As American studies pursues a post-nationalist research program, how does it keep sight of or reimagine its identity as “American”? Does this work have implications for British studies as well? If, as recent scholarship has suggested, British colonial North America was complexly dependent on the West Indies, might early America be properly considered a subtopic of Caribbean studies? By what range of processes (disavowal, denial, misrecognition; discrimination, judgment, racism; proselytization, conversion, redemption; rebellion, betrayal, violence; writing, literacy, print; history, memory, trauma) do any claims to identity (be they national or mongrel, hybrid, creole) cohere in a colonial world? How might canonical texts be reread or reengaged in light of Caribbean history? What archives remain to be explored? How can literary scholars best engage archival materials?
A list of likely readings includes:
Charles Brockden Brown, An Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French
William Wells Brown, St. Domingo, its revolutions and its patriots
Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity
Colin Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods
Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic
Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Peter Parley (pseud. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody[?]), Universal History, On the Basis of Geography
Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo
Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World
Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
And essays and excerpts from Ian Baucom, Lydia Maria Child, Jedediah Morse, Susana Rowson, John Bunyan, George Whitefield, Susan Buck-Morss, David Scott, Donald Pease, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Paul Gilroy, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Walter Benjamin, Susan Gillman, Ralph Bauer, and others.
For the first class meeting on August 29, students should read Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Penn, 2008), available at the campus bookstore and on-line.
Those keen to read or discuss particular texts (including ones not listed above) should contact the instructor.
Seminar papers may approach the theoretical or methodological questions raised by the course through alternative archives, including British, Irish, or Scottish literature; European political philosophy; historical research; or US literature from any historical period(s). In lieu of a final essay, seminarians may choose to research and prepare a fellowship application to perform their own archival work.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Jordan.A.Stein@colorado.edu.