Graduate Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 5019-001/002: Survey of Contemporary Literature Theory
Instructor: Professor Eric White
Call No. 75356 (001) / 75357 (002)
T 9:30-12 (001) / R 9:30-12 (002) — LIBR M549
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This seminar will sample a variety of modes of theoretical discourse that have influenced contemporary literary and cultural studies, ranging from Deconstruction and the New Historicism, to Feminism and Gender Studies, to Postcolonial Theory and Media Studies. Theorists on the syllabus will include Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. The emphasis in the course will thus be on breadth of coverage, and on comprehending the fundamental principles and assumptions of each theoretical ethos or orientation. To the extent that time permits, we will also apply the work of selected theorists to specific literary texts.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Eric.White@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5029-001: Intro to Literature of the British Isles, Pre-1660
Instructor: Professor Katherine Eggert
Call No. 75358
W 2-4:30 — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course is an introduction to Anglo-Saxon, medieval, and early modern English literature via the topic of “Nation and Vernacularity in Pre-1660 Britain”: when and how does English become a literary language? How does “English” come to subsume the regions/nations that make up the British Isles? How do writers in English come to understand English as possessing a literary history equivalent to that of other European nations? And how may we understand regionalism as a kind of multiculturalism, one that transforms when the British encounter other cultures in Europe, West Asia, and the New World?
We will approach these questions while also learning the skills essential to advanced graduate study in pre-1660 literature: prosody; rhetoric (especially the kinds of tropes); poetic form; paleography and the history of the book; major genres (romance, dream vision, epic, pastoral, elegy, drama, etc.). We will also attend to essential research tools in medieval and early modern literature. Poetry, prose, and drama will be equally covered. Our texts will be drawn primarily from the 1350-1660 period, but there will also be some attention to Anglo-Saxon and earlier medieval literature.
For more information, please contact Professor Eggert at Katherine.Eggert@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5059-001: British Literature 1660-1900
Instructor: Professor Padma Rangarajan
Call No. 75359
R 2-4:30 — LIBR M549
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
The guiding concept for this course is “Exotic Nation-Making”—an examination of the interrelation between imperialist and nationalist discourses in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature. We will be covering topics like: travel and transculturation; ideology and genre; exoticism and satire; and gender and sensibility. Authors include Owenson, Beckford, Gibbes, de Quincey, Collins, Bronte, Hamilton, Kipling, Byron, Southey, and Scott.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Padma.Rangarajan@Colorado.edu.
ENGL 5139-001: Introduction to Twentieth Century Literature in English
Instructor: Professor Jeremy Green
Call No. 84180
W 6-8:30 — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course will introduce three areas of study and debate in twentieth-century Anglophone literature: modernism, postmodernism, and post-colonialism. In
addition to reading a selective survey of works typifying each rubric, we will examine the problems of definition, description and periodization that frame the
three categories. In addressing modernism, we will take our bearings from the high modernism of Eliot, Pound, H.D., Williams, and Woolf, and then investigate
apparently marginal works that complicate received perceptions of interwar innovation; here the readings will include work by Loy, Butts, Barnes and Cunard. To
turn to postmodernism involves assessing the significance of late modernism (Beckett and Nabokov will serve as reference points); we will then examine the claims,
both expansive and modest, of postmodernism as a stylistic and conceptual category. Primary readings in this part of the course will include works by Pynchon,
Acker, Ashbery and DeLillo. The third section of the course will address post-colonialism. Once again, we will move between theoretical and literary readings; the
latter will include writing by Achebe, Coetzee, Hagedorn, Brathwaite and Adichie. A final coda, time permitting, will look at recent innovative writing in the
context of globalization.
Response papers, a presentation, a term paper.
For more information, please contact Professor Green at Jeremy.Green@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5239-001: Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Professor Elisabeth Sheffield
Call No. 75362
M 2-4:30 — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Creative Writing Standing or Instructor Consent
The primary activity in this class will be the reading and discussion of student work, in a workshop format. The workshop will be “craft-driven,” which means we will try to regard each other’s work with writerly eyes, looking less at the “what” and more at the “how.” I will emphasize technique and knowledge of form partly because it is difficult to be original without them—to play with form you need to know it, to recognize its possibilities. There are many ways to tell a story and it is my hope we will explore some of the more interesting ones this next semester.
For more information, please contact Professor Sheffield at Elisabeth.Sheffield@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5269-001: Publishing Workshop
Instructor: Professor Elisabeth Sheffield
Call No. 75363
W 2-4:30 — HLMS 259
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course is designed to provide a hands-on introduction to small press literary publishing, through work on the creative writing program’s own Subito Press. Small press publishers provide a major venue for fiction and poetry considered too risky (in terms of form, content or both) by the major houses. At the same time, small presses must still march to the imperatives of the marketplace, different drummers notwithstanding. This semester we will consider and hopefully take up the small press commitment to innovation while at the same time recognizing and operating under the necessary technical and economic constraints: that is, we will learn to run a business. We will, in the words of Brian Evenson, be looking for writing that isn’t “one of the millions of cars on the same superhighway, inching along with everyone else,” while at the same time figuring out how to practically and affordably get readers “off road.”
For more information, please contact Professor Sheffield at Elisabeth.Sheffield@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5319-001: Studies in Literary Movements: Modernism
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey DeShell
Call No. 85529
R 2-4:30 — HUMN 335
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course will examine at a small slice of the aesthetic pie known as Modernism. We will experience a great deal only peripherally, and ignore even more. We will read three major works, Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (selections) and Kafka’s The Castle (and other short works). We will take tiny journeys into the sister arts, with brief discussions of music (Schoenberg and Stravinsky), painting (Cezanne, Picasso and Schiele), film (Eisenstein and Dreyer), psychoanalysis (Freud), philosophy (Nietzsche and Ortega Y Gasset) and literary theory (Benjamin and Lukacs). A final seminar paper of 20 pages will be required. Students are requested to read as much of Ulysses as they can before the first meeting.
For more information, please contact Professor DeShell at Jeffrey.Deshell@colorado.edu.
ENGL 5529-001: Liberalism and the History of the Novel
Instructor: Professor Janice Ho
Call No. 83404
T 2-4:30 — LIBR M549
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course does not aim to present a comprehensive history of the novel, but rather, to examine the ways in which the English novel has been read as a
quintessentially middle class form in various critical accounts of the novel. As such, we will read only three major novels, taking them as representative texts of
their periods—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela for the eighteenth-century novel; George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda for the Victorian novel; and Joseph
Conrad’s Lord Jim for the modernist novel—and use these novels as litmus-test cases for the theoretical texts we will read. (If we have time, we will
possibly include a late twentieth century/postmodernist novel.)
We’ll begin with Ian Watt’s seminal sociological study, The Rise of the Novel, which established the critical parameters for understanding the English
novel as a vehicle for reflecting and perpetuating the liberal values of economic individualism and bourgeois privacy. We will subsequently focus on four different
narratives of the novel (as well as challenges to these narratives): (1) Foucauldian accounts that read the novel in terms of its disciplinary functions and its
production of bourgeois subjectivity (Nancy Armstrong, D.A. Miller, Lauren Goodlad); (2) Habermasian accounts that see the novel as a central component of the
public sphere, a mode of staging critical debate and argumentation (Jürgen Habermas, Amanda Anderson); (3) Marxist historiographical accounts that theorize the
relationship between the form of bourgeois realism and its socio-historical contexts (Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson); and finally (4) accounts of the role of the
novel in imagining national forms and its links to ideologies of liberal nationalism (Benedict Anderson, Pericles Lewis, Irene Tucker). Some of the questions we
will consider include: to what extent do these critical studies rely on a very specific version of the novel (the realist novel, in particular)? How useful are
these accounts for reading later modernist and more contemporary texts? How do these theories of the novel define liberal-bourgeois ideology, a notoriously
slippery term whose meanings alter across different time periods? To what extent do changes in liberalism produce corresponding changes to novelistic form?
Graduate students who wish to enroll in this course are strongly encouraged to read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda over the summer break (given that it’s
almost 1000 pages long).
For further information, please contact the instructor at janice.ho@colorado.edu
ENGL 5549-002: Lynching: Representations and Histories
Instructor: Professor Natasha Barnes
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This course will examine both the history and representation of racial violence that surrounds the post-bellum lynching practices in America. We will chart its rise during the Reconstruction era and beyond, paying attention to the myriad of ways that lynching becomes "memorialized" in photography, film, fictional narrative, oral history and local community activism. Along with the study of some important spectator lynchings which took place in northern as well as southern states, we will track how organizations such as the NAACP as well as a host of important African American and European American activists such as Ida B wells, Jesse Daniel Ames, Walter White and W.E.B. Du Bois developed a cogent moral and political opposition towards the practice. In addition we will see how literary representation by writers as diverse as James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner and Lewis Norman turned the spectacle of racial violence into a moral crusade against the treatment of blacks in Jim Crow America. This course will make use of the Allen-Littlefield collection of "trophy" photography which re-opened the discussion of lynching and its meanings in our present.
Natasha Barnes, Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, is visiting CU as the Cox Family Visiting Scholar in the Center for Humanities and the Arts. Her research interests are in anglophone Caribbean and African American literature and culture. Her first book, Cultural Conundrums: Race, Gender, Nation And The Making Of Caribbean Cultural Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2006), attempts to historicize the manner in which "the popular" has come to occupy a central position in the Caribbean postcolonial imaginary. In its discussion of cricket, carnival, dancehall and beauty pageants, this book is interested in the kinds of investments (social, political, ethical) brought to bear upon the popular arts to date. More recently, Barnes has been involved in the Atlanta 2002 exhibition of lynching postcards collected by James Allen's award winning book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America and is currently writing about the exhibition process.
ENGL 5559-001: Romantic Drama
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey Cox
Call No. 85292
R 2:00-4:30 — MCKY 202
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
This class will explore the drama and theater of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries particularly in England, France and Germany. We will be reading plays by such key authors of the period as Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Musset, Hugo, Vigny, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and we will also be looking at popular dramatic forms (i.e., melodrama, harlequinade) and successful dramatists such as Kotzebue, Dibdin, and Dumas. The class will read all the plays in translation, but those with the appropriate language skills will be encouraged to read the plays in the original. Topics to be discussed include: the transformation of tragedy in the era of democratic revolutions; staging the world in the era of the global Napoleonic wars; popular vs “high” drama; and the rise of melodrama as a distinctly modern form. Requirements include a seminar paper and a shorter writing assignment.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Jeffrey.Cox@colorado.edu.
ENGL 7019-002: Fifteenth Century Literary Production: Manuscript, Print, and Recursion
Instructor: Professor William Kuskin
W 1-3:30 — LIBR M549
Recommended Prereqs: ENGL 5019, 5029, 5039
English 7019 will investigate the relationship between the medieval and the Modern through the development of the literary book in the fifteenth century.
Broadly, the established perspectives on English fifteenth-century writing and book production argue that it is a century of transition, a contrast to Geoffrey
Chaucer’s isolated genius and a foil for the Renaissance’s originality. This course will take issue with such a view to propose a literary history not of origins
and transition but of contingency and continuity, of texts circulated against the grain of chronology and read in spite of their origins.
Coursework will include readings in primary and secondary materials, a presentation and research paper, and hands-on training in printing. The course assumes no
prior knowledge of book production or Middle English.
Revised Booklist
- Bordalejo, Barbara (ed.). Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies on CD-ROM. Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003. ISBN: 1904628028
- Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. ISBN: 0268030855
- Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regiment of Princes. Charles R. Blyth (ed.). TEAMS; Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. ISBN: 1580440231
- Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Verso, 2002. 1859844502.
- Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen (ed.). The Hengwrt Chaucer Standard Edition on CD-ROM. Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003. ISBN: 1904628001
- Lydgate, John. The Troy Book: Selections. Robert R. Edwards (ed.) TEAMS; Medieval Institute Publications, 1984. ISBN: 1879288990
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 0816611734
- McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN: 052164495X
- Schulz, Herbert C. (ed.). The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Huntington Library, 2004. ISBN: 0873281527
- Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI Part 2. Ronald Knowles (ed.). Arden Shakespeare, 1999). ISBN: 190343663X
- Tanselle, G. Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. ISBN: 08122140
Optional
- Davis, Norman. A Chaucer Glossary. Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN: 0198111711
- Greetham, D. C. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Routledge, 1994. ISBN: 0815317913
Many Additional materials will be distributed throughout the course & placed on CULEARN
Please feel free to contact Professor Kuskin with questions at William.Kuskin@colorado.edu.
English 7059-001: Victorian Affect
Instructor: Professor Kelly Hurley
Call No. 84181
Monday 1:00-3:30 — LIBR N424B
Recommended Prereqs: ENGL 5059, 5069, 5079
“Victorian Affect” is concerned with nineteenth-century representations of subjectivity and emotion. Among other topics, we will study
—the historical development of the idea of “human interiority” during later modernity, and its consolidation during the Victorian period.
—Victorian psychology, particularly as it was concerned with aberrations of subjectivity (depression, neurosis, hysteria, obsession, etc.) and with the idea
of the unconscious.
—representations of affectivity and interiority in psychological realism and lyric poetry.
—popular genres (melodrama, the sensation novel, gothic horror) that sought to arouse a strong affective response in their readership.
The syllabus will include primary works by such authors as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Richard
Marsh, and Bram Stoker. 2ry readings may include selections from Armstrong, How Novels Think; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Luckhurst, The
Invention of Telepathy; Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman; Singer, Melodrama and Modernity; Steedman,
Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority; and Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Kelly.Hurley@colorado.edu.
ENGL 7149-001: Faulkner
Instructor: Professor Bruce Kawin
Call No. 85436
M 2:00-4:30 — LIBR N424B
Prereq: Graduate Standing in ENGL
A close reading of Faulkner's major fiction. Student presentations on critical background of the novels, biography, etc.; papers on the fiction. Books: Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; Collected Stories; Flags in the Dust; Go Down, Moses; The Hamlet; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]; Light in August; Sanctuary; The Sound and the Fury; The Unvanquished. Students should have read Ulysses and "The Waste Land" before the class starts.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Bruce.Kawin@colorado.edu.