Graduate Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 5019-001 and 5019-002
Instructor: Mark Winokur
This course will concentrate, not on classical theory, but on twentieth-century -- largely post-structuralist -- texts. We shall read from Friedrich Nietzsche and the origins of poststructuralism to Homi Bhabha and the most recent post-colonial criticism. We will spend the most time on feminist, Marxist, race, queer, post-colonial, and contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Though the emphasis will be on literature, the texts will cover a broad range of disciplines: art, film, and media, among others. Class assignments will include a short and a long paper.
Please contact the instructor for further information:Mark.Winokur@colorado.edu.ENGL 5029: Introduction to Literature of British Isles: Pre-1660
Instructor: Valerie Forman
Tuesdays 1-3:30
This course is intended as an introduction to graduate study of British Literature before 1660. This particular course will have a greater emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the major questions for this course is, "how do we read 'early' texts?" We will thus spend a good bit of time close reading texts and also thinking about the critical frameworks with which we can do so. The course will introduce you to some of the major debates in scholarship in this field (e.g., on the importance of manuscript and print culture, about authorship, about religion and secularization, about changing socio-economic relations). We will also explore the ways that current critical and theoretical debates (e.g., new historicism, cultural materialism, new formalism, gender and sexuality studies, globalization studies) have taken shape in pre-and early modern studies. We will also explore what difference form, genre, and media make in the literature of this period.
ENGL 5259 Non-Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Prof. Sidney Goldfarb
This class is intended to allow students to explore non-fiction as a literary form. Several non-fiction writers will be assigned as references and inspirations, but students are free to expand or modify the form as they see fit. What is hoped for is uniqueness of style and originality of intention. The core requirements for the course will be an extended piece of non-fiction, or several shorter pieces. Writers to be discussed include Jimmy Santiago-Baca, Aldo Leopold, Susan Howe, James Baldwin, David Foster Wallace, Carole Maso, and Jan T. Gross.
Please contact the instructor for further information:s.goldfarb@comcast.net .ENGL 7059: Advanced British Literature 1660-1900
Instructor:David Glimp
Topic: States of Emergency: Catastrophe and Other Extreme Experiences in
Renaissance English Literature
This seminar proposes to explore how various kinds of emergency define, condition, or otherwise inform Renaissance moral philosophy and English literature. Engaging the work of contemporary scholars of risk and political emergency (Beck and Giddens, Agamben, David Harvey, and possibly others) along with crucial statements by early modern political theorists (Machiavelli, Lipsius, Hobbes, and possibly others), we will strive to come to terms with the conceptual resources available for defining, comprehending, and responding to catastrophe. Our primary objective will be to explore how these concerns can illuminate a reading of early modern literature and can inform an effort to understand the work of genre in this period. The syllabus will likely include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, lyrics of Wyatt (along with some of his Petrarchan pretexts), Shakespeare, Mary Wroth and George Herbert, Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia alongside Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Elizabeth Cary, possibly concluding with a discussion of the periodical essays of Addison and Steele.
Course Requirements: Active class participation, occasional in class presentations, final essay of 18-20 pages.
ENGL 7069: War & Terror in the Long 19th Century
Instructor: Sue Zemka
Not a single year of Victoria’s 60-plus year reign passed without a British military skirmish somewhere in the world. And yet very little of the literature of the period is directly about war. In this class, we will trace those works of literature that do represent war; in addition, we will consider their implications for the elision of military and political violence from works now considered canonical. We will trace some of the literature, essays, and debates that arise around Britain’s main wars of the century (Napoleonic, Crimean, Boer). We will also study the debates around five violent insurrections pertaining to British colonialism and global influence (the Eyre controversy; the India Mutiny; the Fenian bomb campaigns; Gordon’s anti-slavery campaigns in Sudan and the subsequent Madhist rebellion; the Amritsar Massacre). Finally, we will consider the history, theorization, and cultural implications of the first diagnosis of shell shock during the Boer War and World War I. Students will be asked to choose one of these topics as a research area and will identify primary and secondary materials for the class to consider. Required readings will be drawn from the following list (final decisions depending on student input): Scott’s Waverley; Austen’s Persuasion; excerpts from The Prelude; excerpts from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon; Tennyson’s Maud; poems from Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise; Morris’s News from Nowhere; selected poems by Yeats; Conrad’s The Secret Agent; Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Three Guineas; Hitchcock’s Sabotage; and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon; excerpts from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Theoretical readings will include works by Benjamin, Gandhi, Agamben, and Paul Virilio.
Please contact the instructor for further information:Zemka@Colorado.EDU.ENGL 7079: The Romantic Dark Ages: Poetry from 1820 to 1835
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey Robinson
The 1820s and early 1830s are often seen as a hiatus, a period of low intensity in poetry, between the brilliance of “high” Romanticism and the upsurge of “high” Victorian poetry. Yet during these years poets (and essayists) wrote powerfully, in a manner at times retrospective and at times prospective, to be sure, but very successfully in a spirit of exploration and re-definition. Like the so-called Dark Ages of the early Medieval Period, these turn out, upon close observation, to possess their own vitality and immense importance. In this course we imagine a scenario in which poets such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, Felicia Hemans, and Laetitia Landon looked back to the poetry of Keats, Shelley, Byron and the latters’ contemporaries as their immediate predecessors (whose more experimental work in poetry and poetics will begin the course): what would the poets of the 1820s have gleaned and transformed from them? What kind of poetry would have emerged? At the later end of this decade, how would the “late” and still very active Wordsworth and Coleridge have responded to the current events in poetry? In short, we will open to view a decade of poetic intensity seen as an extension and re-definition of “the Romantic” and one that feeds into the Victorian poets Tennyson and EB Browning. We will place emphasis on the experimental side of Romantic poetics (the principles upon which poets make decisions) and will in this regard read from the manifestos and essays of Shelley, Hazlitt, Hunt and others.
A short mid-semester paper will be followed by a 20-pp. paper near the end of the term. Some class sessions will take place in the Norlin Special Collections Room as we look at first and early editions of Women Poets of the Romantic Period. The C.U. M.A. level Introduction to British Literature 1660-1900 or the equivalent (see the instructor), in particular this level knowledge of the canonical Romantic poets, is a prerequisite.
Graduate Level Course Descriptions
COMING SOON