Graduate Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 5059-001: Introduction to the Literature of the British Isles 1660-1900
Instructor: Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
This course, which is called "Introduction to the Literature of the British Isles 1660-1900," will move beyond those parameters to include a comparative approach. One of the dominant themes, among other concerns we'll address, is “Social Contracts: Individuals, Communities, and Nations.” I'd like us to explore the challenges (including the tragedies and successes) of the national, aesthetic, and romantic contracts individuals and communities form. We will read English, German and French literature (all in translation), including many if not all of the following authors: Voltaire, Pope, Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Fanny Burney, John Locke, Kant, Austen, Mme de Stael, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Barrett Browning, Hugo, Browning, Anne Bronte, Zola, and Henry James. Works will be drawn from the 18th and 19th centuries, and we will learn about the French and British Enlightenments, the Romantic Period, the Victorian Era, Romance, Realism, and Naturalism. Genres will include poetry, fiction, and drama.
Please contact the instructor for further information: jill.heydt@colorado.edu
ENGL 5299-002 Studies in Fiction: The Fat Man and the Thin Man: Joyce and Beckett.
Instructor: Elisabeth Sheffield
In this course, we will be reading, with a writerly attention to language and form, the major works of James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and sections of Finnegans Wake) and Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). The relationship between Joyce and Beckett, who as a young man helped research and also wrote on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, has been described as “an influence a contrario.” Beckett himself said “I realized Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.” One of our tasks this semester will be to examine Joyce’s project of excess in relation to Beckett’s avowed asceticism. For instance, does Beckett, through his drastic “dieting,” manage to shed the weight of Joyce?
In examining these selected works of the “Fat Man” and the “Thin Man,” we will also be considering the project(s) of 20th century experimental literature, much of which, as the critic/theorist Henry Sussman has written, hangs suspended between “terse precision and minimalist expression” and “endless prolixity and qualification.” Our goal, finally, is simply to fill our literary maws with Joyce and Beckett, whose formal innovations and strategies provided (and continue to provide) rich sustenance for later generations of writers.
(1) A presentation, (2) a short, exploratory paper (to be handed in at the time of the presentation), and (3) a final, seminar length paper are requirements for the course.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Elisabeth.Sheffield@Colorado.EDU
ENGL 5319-001: Studies in Literary Movements: Modernism
Instructor: Sidney Goldfarb
Modernism has always been a highly contested term. Recently, a new wave of attention, not only with Modernism, but with the ever more complex subject of Modernity itself, has produced several shelves of critical and theoretical material on both subjects. This course sticks to a somewhat old-fashioned view of the subject. Its attention is given entirely to literary texts, each one germane to one or another of the many theories of Modernism. In this version, Modernism is something that happened around the start of the 20th Century and ended just after the Second World War, and that was international in nature. The hope is that theoretical issues, or overviews, if there are any, will be generated by the reading of the texts themselves. My view is that it is best to read the texts themselves before being clouded by one theoretical view or another. That is, of course, impossible. And even the reading list is a theory of “the Modern.” But I have done my best to provide an occasion to consider those texts from which one could form a broad view of the topic Modernism, what it was and, possibly, is.
Prior Course Reading has Included:
Rilke, Duino Elegies, tr., Snow
Apollinaire, Selected Writings, tr., Shattuck
Neruda, Residence on Earth, tr., Walsh
Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children, tr., Bentley
Kafka, Complete Stories
Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
Woolf, The Waves
Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Bataille, Story of the Eye, tr., Neugroschel
Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, tr., Eshelman and Smith
Miyazawa, Selected Poems
Beckett, Endgame
Celan, Selections, ed, Joris
Requirements I will pose a small number of questions each week, and the class members will type a one or two page response to one or more of them, some of which will be read in class. If none of my questions interest you, you may type a page or two pertinent to the work we are discussing. Each student will give a brief class presentation, a close reading of some part of a work, a poem, scene, or passage that interests them, 45 minutes maximum. Participants must complete a substantial term project, roughly 20 pages, form negotiable, critical, theoretical or imaginative. It may take any shape, but must incorporate in an obvious way some aspect of our exploration of Modernism. It must begin with a one page explanation of how it intends to do that. Typed journals will be turned in at the end of class.
Grading20% class participation; 20% journal responses; 20% presentation; 40% term project.
Please contact the instructor for further information: s.goldfarb@comcast.net
ENGL 5529-001: Nabokov and Modernism
Instructor: Ed Rivers
A study of Nabokov’s major English-language works, with attention to his self-translated Russian and French writing, his literary theory, and his reputation as a scientist in the study of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).
Visit link for detailed description: Nabokov and Modernism
Please contact the instructor for further information: Ed.Rivers@colorado.edu
ENGL 7019-001: Social Poetics: Piers Plowman and Fourteenth-Century England
Instructor: Elizabeth Robertson
This rarely-taught course will be devoted to an in-depth study of William Langland’s neglected Middle English masterpiece, Piers Plowman. This poem consists of a prologue and twenty sections called “passus.” It was written in three main versions (known as the A, B and C texts) over a lifetime by a poet we think was named William Langland. Often taught in history departments for its encyclopedic portrait of late medieval England, Piers Plowman engages a wide range of political, theological, and economic concerns of late medieval England. Among its concerns, it responds to the changing economic circumstances of a post-plague economy; spanning the rule of two kings, Edward III and Richard II, it considers the nature of tyranny and parliamentary government; in its various versions, it raises the question of the relationship between poetry and rebellion; sometimes described as a harbinger of the protestant reformation, it questions the hierarchies and corruptions of the Catholic Church; finally, concerned to establish the nature of poetry as labor after the government’s enactment of the rigid statutes of laborers, it explores the legitimacy of poetry as work. In addition, the poem is poetically innovative in that the poet expands the alliterative line, explores the relationship between satire and lyric, and disrupts the received nature of allegory by showing how the literal and the mundane are the source rather than the distraction from religious truths. The poem encompasses all the major genres of the Middle English literary period: dream vision, allegory, sermons, penitential literature, and alliterative poetry.
Elizabeth Kirk said no one should read Piers Plowman for the first time. It is a difficult poem, but once the barrier of the first reading is passed, it is endlessly rewarding as a passionate poetic engagement with the most pressing social issues of the late fourteenth-century. We will read the poem in Middle English, but no prior experience with Middle English or with medieval literature is necessary and we will be using an edition with a facing page translation. We will move slowly through each passus. Although the focus of the class each week will be on the poetry, we will use the poem itself as a springboard to consider broader issues of concern to our understanding of the late fourteenth-century social poetics more generally. We will work through the poem passus by passus but focus on particular topics raised by these passus such as, 1. Authorial self-fashioning and poetry as work. 2. Gender and The Marxist Pre-Modern 3. The “Hungry Gap” Poverty, Hunger and Need in Medieval England 4. Medieval Literacy and English Vernacular Theology 5. Muslims, Jews and the Virtuous Pagan: Universal Salvation in Late Medieval England 6. The Economics of Redemption 7. Poetry and Rebellion 8. Langland’s Radical Alliterative Poetics.
The poem has inspired some of the most probing criticism of the period by David Aers, Anne Middleton, Elizabeth Kirk, James Simpson, Mary Carruthers and Jill Mann, and the class will consider a number of these works in relationship to the issues raised by the poem.
Please contact the instructor for further information: roberte@colorado.edu
ENGL 7059-002: Victorian Affect
Instructor: Kelly Hurley
“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