Graduate
Prospective Students
Sample Courses
The English Department offers a wide array of craft and critical literature courses in the 500, 600 and 800-level ranges. While 500-level courses tend to be offered at the survey level, 800-level courses are small seminars with very specific topics. Below is a listing of some representative recently offered graduate courses. Please click on the course for a description, please note some descriptions are faculty specific and are subject to change. For a full listing of current courses, please visit the LSA Course Guide 
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526 Literature and Culture: The Rise and Fall of American Literature
When and where was “American literature” invented? What role do academies—from elementary schools to graduate schools—play in defining and redefining it? Given powerful challenges to the practice of writing literary history in national terms, should we even be using the category--and if not, what will we substitute?
In this course we will engage the intellectual and institutional history of American literary scholarship, examining both instances and critiques of its intertwined projects of nation-building and discipline-building. We will also discuss the field’s current state and its future. Specific concerns include:
* the cultural politics of national literatures, and of ‘literature’ as an object of study;
* the nature of claims about literature, history, and literary history;
* the conceptual foundations of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity;
* the canon debates, and arguments for desegregated, multilingual American literature(s);
* the ongoing transformation of literary studies and culture itself through electronic information technologies;
* the relation of American literary studies to English Departments, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and other interdisciplines;
* the classroom teaching of American literature;
* the development of colleges and research universities in the United States, and the nature of the academic profession.
We will, in other words, take an interdisciplinary approach to a particular case in the production of knowledge.
The course is designed as an inquiry into its topic, not the presentation of a set of claims, and our meetings will proceed primarily by discussion; it should be possible to incorporate topics not mentioned above but of urgent concern to participants. Students have considerable latitude in designing topics for their term papers, to enable them to make connections between the course materials and their individual professional orientation and research interests.
The course is specifically designed to offer graduate students in English (including the joint programs) and American Culture the opportunity to examine the origins of their own situation. But it should be useful for anyone wishing to reflect critically on the history of the research university and the practices that produce and legitimate academic discourses. Students from History, Education, and the School of Information have taken the course in past semesters, and made vital contributions to our discussions.
540 Topics in Language and Literature: Performance/Performativity: An Inter-American Introduction
This seminar will examine contemporary performative cultural production (theatre, cabaret, poetry, performance, new media, installation, video, political protest, music, cinema, and criticism) from across the Americas to consider the keywords “performance” and “performativity.” Participants will re-stage Performance Studies’ rhetorical “foundational fictions”: what is Performance Studies? Why do discussions concerning race, gender and sexuality, and more broadly speaking identity and difference, permeate the terms of debate in this interdiscipline? Why is performance often read as a particularly political medium? What happens when one adopts an inter-American perspective on the above-mentioned questions? Probable texts (originally written in English or in translation), which will shape classroom discussion, include: Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies: An Introduction, Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino’s Holy Terrors, José Muñoz’s Disidentifications, Coco Fusco’s The Bodies That Were Not Ours, and selected works by Culture Clash, Ana Mendieta, ASCO, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, Lourdes Portillo, Selena, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, Diamela Eltit, the Mares of the Apocalypse, Denise Stoklos, various drag kings and queens, and the Zapatistas. Course requirements, with any luck, will prove less than tedious and more than fun: participation in conversations, a final project, and a performance/“intervention.”
540 Topics in Language and Literature: Postcolonial Theory
This course will examine the multiple and contested genealogies, the major interventions, and the possible futures of the body of writing that has come to be known as postcolonial theory. The postcolonial era, according to Arif Dirlik, begins "when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe." Dirlik's half-serious assertion offers a problematic for this introductory survey of postcolonial theory: the course will aim to compicate the notion that postcolonial theory is largely a late-20th century, metropolitan affair, at the same time that it will take seriously the importance of the sites of production and reception for the constitution of the field. We will examinie the relationships between postcolonial theory and other theoretical formations, including poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism, and ecocriticism. We will also consider what counts as theory in postcolonial theory: in what ways have novels, memoirs, or revolutionary manifestos, for example, offered crucial, generalizable statements about postcoloniality? What are the tensions and convergences between theorists located within First World academe and those situated eleswhere? How does Said's account of Orientalism, or Fanon's account of Algerian subjectivity and revolution, come to be figured as ontological truth about "the postcolonial"? How do the exigencies of disparate historis pressure modes of theorizing and models of the public intellectual? How can "postcoloniality" offer an explanatory rubic for sites other than those shaped by late 19th century European imperialism? How can we understand, as Dirlik would as us to, the relationship between rise of postcolonial studies in the United States and the role of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era? How do postcolonial theory and its insights about European imperialism contribute to analyses of contemporary globalization? Course requirements for graduate students will include response papers, class presentations, at least one exam, and a final essay.
560 Chaucer: Major Texts
We will treat Chaucer's major works, focusing especially on the incomparable classical romance Troilus and Criseyde and the joys of variety in the Canterbury Tales. A few of the shorter poems--The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame--will also help us get a sense of Chaucer's poetic career as French, classical, and Italian materials were melded together into something new: serious, ambitious literature written in English. Since I want your efforts to focus on your reading, I will ask for somewhat less, and different, writing than in most graduate courses; it will come primarily in several short papers intended to raise issues for discussion rather than a final term-paper. Classes will balance lecture and discussion; I will provide historical, social, and literary backgrounds, and we will cooperate on questions of approach and interpretation. I assume no prior knowledge of Chaucer’s writings or his Middle English; we will work on language enough so that you can read the poetry (and prose) with comprehension and pleasure, but language will always be subordinate to literary and narrative issues.
578 Imitations
A course in the nature and technique of prose fiction, from the apprentice reader-writer’s point-of-view. The article of faith on which this enterprise is based is that imitation – fifty written exercises – is not merely the sincerest of flattery, but also a good way to grow. What I want to focus on is craft, the craft of our five modernist exemplars, and the specific problems they pose. Instead of asking, “What does Joyce mean?” we’ll talk of what rhetorical means he deploys; instead of discussing Woolf as incipient suicide, we’ll talk of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in a parenthesis. The course will deal, in two-week discussion segments and in the following sequence, with these five novels: A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway THE GOOD SOLDIER, Ford Madox Ford TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf AS I LAY DYING, William Faulkner ULYSSES, James Joyce
579 Poetry for Non Poets
Priority given to PhD’s & MFA Prose Students –This course begins with a contradiction. A very good place to start if you are a poet or non. It will be taught by an internationally acclaimed poet who spent her early years as a non poet who wrote poetry. It will take the form of a workshop where non poets (hereafter referred to as N. P.'S) will be encouraged to generate a sizable body of work. The professor promises to share with N.P.'s, almost everything that she has learned over forty years about finding one's own voice, and nourishing said voice on delicious poems from all over the world once it has been found.
627 Critical Theories: Feminist Literary Criticism & Theory
This seminar is an introduction to feminist literary criticism, surveying major shifts in feminist theory and gender studies over the past four decades. We will read with care a variety of critical and literary texts that foreground the question of gender, and we will evaluate the uses and limits of gender as a category of (and for) literary interpretations. In addition to comparing different approaches to feminist literary criticism (e.g. interrogating images of women in literature, recovering women writers, constructing a separate tradition, defining women’s writing, analyzing the relationship between gender and genre), we will trace the influence of poststructuralist and queer theories, historicist work, and important debates/dialogues between critics who have shaped the field. Throughout the semester we will attend to the rhetorical strategies and political ideologies associated with gender criticism, as well as its institutional histories and future trajectories.
627 Critical Theories: Post-Post Colonial? Carbon-Footprinting the Global and the Neoliberal
This course will address the converging and diverging legacies of critical theories, cognizant of everyday “Othering” practices (in particular, postcolonial theory and Latin American and South Asian subaltern studies), ethnic studies, and cultural studies. Its syllabus will pay particular attention to the Americas, Empire’s empiricism (the United States’ “workshops”—be they internal or external), and the somewhat rhetorical question, “What is the difference between neoliberalism and globalization?” Finally, because this seminar has dual citizenship in the Program in American Culture and the English Department, it will privilege discussions, which ponder the relationship of the political and the aesthetic, the limits of (re)presentation, and “signatures of the (in) visible” in the making of inter-American cultural geographies. Its archive will track the carbon footprints of work in several media (and their hybridizations)—theory, criticism, ethnography, performance, installation, prose, poetry, film, and activism.
627 Critical Theories: Poetess Poetics
This seminar is an introduction to "Poetess Poetics" during the long nineteenth century (British and American, Romantic and Victorian, with a possibility of crossing over into early twentieth-century women's verse). Rather than "recovering" lost women poets, our goal will be to develop a critical theory of the Poetess: as a generic figure closely linked to the shifting conventions of sentimental reading in Anglo-American verse culture, and as a gendered figure for circulation across the Atlantic and indeed around the globe. The seminar will be an exercise in historical poetics, in which we combine close rhetorical reading of selected women poets with an analysis of the larger discourses surrounding the Poetess in various literary genres (e.g. obituaries, reviews, essays, biographies, anthologies) and print media (e.g. newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, periodicals, books). We will also consider the recent return to anthologizing women's poetry and evaluate different approaches to reading sentimental lyric, as well as tracking other current debates in the growing field of Poetess studies.
627 Cross Cultural and Critical Theories: New Directions in African American and Diaspora Literary Studies
This course will explore the following questions: what do these related fields look like at this moment, in terms of their intersection with feminist and gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and traditional literally studies? How did African American and African diaspora literary studies become established in the first place? As we continue to see the rising popularity of African diaspora studies, can we support the idea that the “transnational” is antithetical to the “local”? Finally, how have identity politics shaped these fields, methodologies and canons? Requirement: One class-presentation, a mid-term paper, and a 15-20 pg. end of term paper.
630 Special Topics: Hazarding the Atlantic in the Long Seventeenth Century
As an “Atlantic World” was cinched tightly together over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hazards were experienced by subjects around its perimeters and by subjects crossing its previous divides. Old understandings about embodiment, spirituality, geography, social order, rank, and selfhood were put in jeopardy as this new, irreversibly connected, world came into formation. Focusing primarily on the British Atlantic of the long seventeenth century, this course will introduce you to its key primary texts and the most recent, dynamic scholarship in the field. We will look at the English absorption of and response to Iberian dominance in the Atlantic, apprising how English experience in a broader world was predicated on (and against) these models. We will look at how the English Atlantic arose after and through experimentation in the Mediterranean and Asia. We will try to take the (later 18th- and 19th-century) certainty of ‘empire’ out of the British 17th-century experience by teasing out the period’s internal debates about: the colonial social order, enforced and enslaved labor, risks of creolization, and the fragility of Christian humanism in an expanding world. By reading secondary sources (by historians and anthropologists), we will try to ascertain how the birth of the Atlantic was experienced by Amerindian and African peoples, and, with that knowledge, then try to read English accounts ‘against the grain.’ Two presentations; research in the Clements Library; conference style presentation at the end of course and submission of revised essay. Students from History and AC quite welcome. Primary Texts: Hans Staden, The True History and Description of a Country Populated by a Wild, Naked, and SavageMan-munching People, situated in the New World (1557), Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), Richard Ligon, True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) Aphra Behn, The Rover; or, the Banish’t Cavaliers (1677); Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688); the Widow Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia (1690); Pindaric on Jamaica, Sir William D’Avenant, Madagascar (1638); The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), Mary Rowlandson, A true history of the captivity & restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife in New-England (1682), Thomas Phelps, ATrue Account of the Captivity of Thomas Phelps (1685) (in the Mediterranean), Daniel Defoe, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (1708). Secondary Texts: Michelle Burnham, Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (2007), Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: technology, the body, and science on the Anglo-American frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), Jonathan Elmer, “Aphra Behn and the Deterritorialized Sovereign” from On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (2008), Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (2008), Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (1995) and “The Gendering of Sugar in the 17th Century”, Carla Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (2004), Richard Price, Alabi’s World (1990) (on Maroon African community in Colonial Surinam), Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001).
641 Medieval Drama - Early English Drama
Early English drama is arguably the least studied body of literature in the discipline. Few scholars—including specialists in drama—can quickly name a dozen plays written before Shakespeare’s first efforts. Yet the dramatic traditions stretch for centuries and involve the entire population of England at one point or another. Abbots and university students write Latin comedies that are simultaneously bawdy and philosophical; sometimes the plays anticipate performance, sometimes they only serve readers’ voyeuristic pleasure. Monastics and cathedral scholars produce fabulous liturgical dramas, retelling biblical stories and saints’ legends with occasionally vivid special effects. Late medieval towns and cities sponsor spectacular performances that retell all of Christian history, from Creation to Last Judgment. Morality plays reveal the beginnings of a professional, popular theater. Whether performed or read, drama offers unequalled perspectives on Medieval and Early Modern culture—from conventional ways of interpreting Scripture, to unconventional representations of gender. This course traverses both Catholic and Protestant modes of thought and representation, examining the various genres of early drama both within and against their cultural contexts. (Latin texts will appear in translation.)
642 Topics in the Renaissance: Early Modern English Poetry
Some of the finest lyrics in the English language were written during the Early Modern period. Subsequent writers have continually found a source of inspiration, not to mention competition, in the works of this period. The purpose of this class is to examine the immensely productive tension that emerged between formal accomplishment and passionate expression in the poetry of early modern England. Understanding form widely, as both the necessary vehicle and the restricting container of desire, we will look at a range of short and long poems written in England between 1500 and 1680. We will read a wide variety of poetry, largely lyric and narrative, from Wyatt and Surrey in the early sixteenth century through Milton, Dryden, and Katherine Philips in the later seventeenth century. We will spend a lot of time on Shakespeare, whose remarkable accomplishment in sonnets and narrative poems is sometimes overshadowed by his dramatic works. We will work to situate poems amid the careers and the historical situations of their authors, but we will also aspire to keep questions of form and genre well in our sights. We will also explore the various ways that issues of class and gender mark lyric utterance? We will investigate the range of possible motives for putting into fastidiously patterned language the unruly vagaries of emotion and appetite. Reading poetry amid the continuing philosophical dispute between the respective claims of reason and passion in the formation of an ethical self, we will look at how the poets of early modern England created models for articulating and manipulating inner desire. Requirements include attendance, participation, one short and one longer paper, and various in-class reports.
646 Romantic Period: On the Beautiful and the Sublime
What do we mean when we say "that sunset, or that painting, or that face is beautiful"? Would you characterize that utterance as a proposition (a claim about the object; or, a claim about the experiencing subject) or as a command ("You! find that object beautiful!")? To what other claims and beliefs does that statement commit us? Why do some scenes, events, and artworks strike us as "awesome" or "sublime," and why during times does speechlessness seem the most appropriate "description" of what's happening? Is it possible, when in the presence of beauty or sublimity, to distinguish the object from our reaction to it, and is the reaction really "to" the object or is it prompted by either internal processes or environmental cues, or both? Is everyone able at all times to offer such descriptions or to feel such responses, or are there historical, cultural, or circumstantial restrictions at work? Do our feelings about or in the presence of sublime and beautiful phenomena have any bearing on our cognitive and/or ethical capacities (that is, our faculties of knowing and doing)? Does beauty have anything to do with justice; does sublimity have anything to do with freedom? How can we explain the force that these terms have enjoyed since their emergence in the later 18th century? Readings will include Longinus, "On the Sublime" (or, "Perihypsous"); Edmund Burke's Essay on the Beautiful and the Sublime; Immanuel Kant (from the Critique of Judgment); selections from the Frankfurt School Writers (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno); and a set of contemporary reflections on our topic (e.g., Clement Greenberg, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Terry Eagleton, Tobin Siebers). Our art examples will come from the canons of British Romantic poetry and painting and from the modernist and postmodernist arts. Weekly written commentary required, to be assembled and expanded into a thesis-driven essay at the end of term. Weekly oral reports, conducted in groups of three.
648 Topics Modern Period: Introduction to Modernism
This course is designed to introduce students to questions and ideas central to literature and culture during the period from c. 1890-1945. We will focus primarily on works of what has come to be called “Anglo-American modernism.” The field of modernist studies has grown enormously over the past several decades and, though I intend us to spend a good deal of our time working with texts that have for some time been considered canonical, this course will also provide some introduction to the expanding dimensions of the field. Issues and questions around which we shall focus our study include how men and women in the twentieth century respond to and initiate radical redefinitions of their places in society and their relations with one another; how the wars of the first half of the previous century shape and deform the texts written in this period; how the volatile questions surrounding race inform modern writing; the ways in which class, economic mobility, social and political revolution and reaction inflect literary texts; the vexed relationships modernist texts maintain toward social and literary history—the events and texts from which they in many senses derive. We will read both poetry and prose and will spend some time thinking about the changes to genres in this period of experiment and reaction. I will solicit suggestions from the class, after registration, regarding texts you might want to see on our syllabus. Among the texts we are likely to consider will be poetry by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love; Gertrude Stein’s The Geographical History of America; James Joyce’s Dubliners, Earnest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Jean Toomer’s Cane. We will also read poetry from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Students will not write a single, long research paper but will instead write a series of shorter pieces in the genre of the conference proposal; one of these will become the basis for a conference paper (about 12-15 pages in length).
653 Topics in American Literature: The Twentieth Century Novel in the United States
This seminar will meet once a week to explore prominent works of fiction that will allow us to gain a perspective on the 20th century U.S. novel. While our reading list includes only a small slice of what is available to the modern reader, we will especially cover texts that foreground issues in realism, naturalism, modernism, race, ethnicity, gender, region, class, canon formation, folk culture, and mass culture. We will probably use two volumes from the series of Norton Critical Editions that will enable seminar members to become familiar with types of literary criticism that predominated through the early 1980s, and our contemporary perspectives will be guided by information about work-in-progress for The Cambridge History of the American Novel (with which several U-M faculty members are involved). The novels to be studied are likely to include: Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Jean Toomer, Cane; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; William Faulkner, Light in August; Henry Roth, Call It Sleep; John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle; Richard Wright, Native Son; Ann Petry, The Narrows; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin); and perhaps a recent novel selected by members of the seminar. This seminar is an introductory one; it is aimed at graduate students who wish to familiarize themselves with the basics of the 20th century U.S. novel. It will provide reading material and discussion issues that should be of use in preparing a reading list for a Ph. D. qualifying examination in this area, as well as a foundation for teaching undergraduate courses on the topic. Of course, the seminar is also designed for those who wish to do more specialized and advanced work within the framework of the readings. To that end, requirements for this seminar may be somewhat individually engineered to meet the needs of particular students. What is essential is regular participation in the weekly meetings, which means that the assigned reading must be accomplished on schedule. There will also be a preliminary essay for diagnostic purposes and everyone in the seminar will participate in organizing a discussion of one of the readings. A final essay (approximately 15 pages) is due at the end of the semester. Depending on needs and interests, this can be a research paper, a work in the area of theory, or even a draft for a syllabus for teaching a course in the U.S. novel (with explanatory materials). We will work out the topic through individual conferences and everyone will present information about his or her final projects during our last class.
695 Pedagogy: Theory Practice
Required of all second year Lang & Lit and E/WS students - This course is designed to provide support and perspective as you begin your teaching career at the University of Michigan. We will address both the immediate questions that come up in the classroom and the slower-paced challenges of course planning, framing them in terms of the theoretical and historical issues that constantly inform the choices we make. Our discussions should help you develop a set of strategies for reflecting on your own practices and development as a teacher. Sessions throughout the term will focus on the practical concerns of the graduate student instructor: facilitating discussion, grading, negotiating your relationship with students and with professors, managing your time--and whatever else comes up. In the second half of the course we will turn our attention to course goals and syllabus design, including specific writing assignments, to help you prepare for the time when you will teach English 124. These discussions will be complemented by selected readings. Written assignments will revolve around the work you are doing in the classes you are teaching. I will visit each of your classrooms so that I can give you specific feedback on the kinds of student interactions I can observe within the context of your class and your own pedagogical strengths and weaknesses. Our weekly meetings as a community of professional teachers will be a forum where you can share teaching worries and successes, learn from each other's experiences, and develop pedagogical strategies and skills that will guide you throughout your teaching career.
821 Seminar: Critical Theory Visuality and the Image in Theory and Practice
Recent work in the emerging field of visual culture studies has closely considered the place and role of images—particularly photographic images—in the production of textual and social meaning. This seminar is designed to provide intensive work with such theoretical accounts, and focused opportunities to apply them to specific bodies of texts and historical contexts. During the first part of the term, we’ll engage with key critical claims: on the photographic image as cultural and temporal artifact of modernity; on the image within discursive fields and practices; on ekphrasis and the image-text relationship; on the image and the construction of textual and social others. We’ll then take up critical accounts of visuality and the image related to several specific cultural frames, which will be drawn from among the following: the antebellum U.S. and its imaging of a national culture (via Whitman and Mathew Brady); the creation of image archives in relation to Anglo-American imperialism; the development of progressivist and liberal social agendas through photographic and photo-text accounting for the poor (Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, James Agee and Walker Evans); recent debates over the production and uses of lynching photographs; the digital era of image-making, representation, and perception. Throughout, our goal will be an intentioned working-through of theoretical concerns in specific, carefully delineated historical contexts. The last part of the course will be devoted to the development of individual seminar projects, developed independently and via workshop activity, of each student’s choosing. Note: there are no specific prerequisites for this course, and I specifically welcome students with comparative or transatlantic frames of critical reference.
821 Seminar Critical Theory: Queer Fictions of the Past
A striking feature of the imaginative literature about gay men written in English during the last two decades has been its focus on the past. Some of this writing is based on new historical research undertaken by the writers themselves, but a good deal of it has been inspired by recent scholarly inquiries into the history of homosexuality. The priorities of historical and fictional work are different, of course, but they also disclose a common set of emotional needs and political desires. The purpose of this seminar is to examine what history and literature can do for the gay male past and to examine the traffic between fact and fiction in the history of sexuality. Much of the best new gay male fiction seems to be preoccupied with situating contemporary gay male life in historical perspective. One way of doing that is to rewrite history so as to bring out in it, or restore to it, a gay male presence that had been missing from standard accounts of the past. Another way is to rewrite the present by measuring the way we live now against earlier forms of gay male existence. The seminar will review some recent gay male historical fiction (both literary and cinematic), surveying its imaginative efforts to portray important events in gay male history, to describe what gay male life was like in other times and places, to place gay male characters at the center of otherwise well-known historical events, or to understand contemporary gay male life in relation to historical calamities such as slavery or HIV/AIDS. We will also read a number of historical treatments of the same topics. What explains the turn to history in recent writing by or about gay men? How does this literature reinterpret the past? How does it change our sense of history, both official history and minority history, in ways that history itself may not be able to do? At the same time as it attempts to alter our notions of where we come from, gay historical fiction also redefines who we are. Why do so many writers look to history in order to reinterpret gay male life in the present? What new models of contemporary gay existence does this historical fiction produce? What are the political implications for the current gay movement of different versions of the past? Who wants this history, whom does it serve, what purposes does it advance? What sort of queer future does it project? And how does it help us to trace the workings of desire in more traditional historical scholarship? We will study such authors and filmmakers as Neil Bartlett, Alan Hollinghurst, Stephen Frears, Tom Kalin, Mark Merlis, Derek Jarman, André Techiné, Tony Kushner, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Mark Christopher, Tony Ayres, Jamie O’Neill, and Maria McCann, along with historians and critics such as Jeffrey Weeks, Richard Ellman, Scott Bravmann, Morris Kaplan, Matt Houlbrook, Mark Turner, Alan Bray, James Gardiner, Patrick Higgins, Dianne Chisholm, Christina Sharp, Jay Grossman, David Alderson, Jodie Medd, and Robert J. Corber. Students enrolled in this seminar will also be required to attend a weekly film screening from 6 to 9 pm one evening per week (exact schedule to be announced later).
842 Seminar: Victorian Fiction
The notion that society is (or should be) an organic formation, comprised of complementary hierarchical relations serving the good of all, has powerfully influenced British culture since the early modern period. But it became the single most important key to social thought among Victorian literary intellectuals. Contemptuously dismissed by late-twentieth-century critics in the wake of Marxist critiques of the 1970s, the pervasiveness, complexity, and subtlety of British organicism has too long been overlooked. We will explore the psychological structures, literary conventions, gender inflections, ethical immanence, and sociological nuances of Victorian organic social models, paying particular attention to the ways organicism competed and interacted with class-based conceptions of social order. Readings will include influential critiques of organicism by Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, as well as recent theoretical revaluations (including the work of David Cannadine), and newer methodological paradigms for social class (particularly Patrick Joyce). Victorian writers to be considered include: Carlyle, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Ruskin, Morris, Hardy, and Gissing. Seminar paper required.
851 Seminar: American Literature: African American Writers on the Left: from 1930s to 1960s
“African American Writers on the Left” is a seminar sponsored by the English Department that will meet once a week to dialogue about the complex interaction of African-American creative writers with left-wing political movements. Readings will span the era of Great Depression radicalism of the 1930s to the advent of Black Power and the New Left in the 1960s. These are decades when “social protest” was the predominant theme of African American culture; realism, naturalism, and modernism were often infused with “noir” techniques; gender and masculinity were intensively explored; and a “Black Marxist” sensibility was very much present. We will cover many of the key texts and authors in African American Literature that are crucial for any Ph.D. examination list in U.S. literature: Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Lorraine Hansberry, Chester Himes, C. L. R. James, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, John A. Williams, and so forth. We may also view films and documentaries about the Black radicalism/Black Arts. Requirements can be adapted to the needs of individual members of the seminar, but will include a short essay for diagnostic purposes; a longer research paper; and collaboration in seminar presentations.
862 Wordsworth and Coleridge
This course will explore the significance of Wordsworth and Coleridge—together, alone, in their poetry, in their prose, in their lives as figures stalking through the literary imagination—for the history of writing in English. We will focus on their early writings in the 1790’s, their collaborative work on the Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), and their major and minor writings from subsequent years (Wordsworth’s Prelude, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria). The class is designed to be of interest not only to students of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature, but also to students of the history and theory of poetry, to MFA students, and to students of diverse later literary periods. Students wishing to write seminar papers about “WW-STC effects” in later works of global literatures in English will be encouraged to do so; MFA students wishing to fulfill the seminar paper requirement with a creative project will be encouraged to do so.
881 Afterlives of Anti-Imperialism
What are the legacies of anti-imperialism? In what ways do anti-imperialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries remain present even after they have failed, succeeded, or otherwise come to an end? This seminar will consider both the uses to which 19th century primary resistance to colonialism is put within 20th century decolonization movements, as well as the status of anti-imperialism in the current post-Cold War, postcolonial, post-9/11 moment. How does cultural production associated with 20th century anti-imperialism recuperate earlier, “failed” resistance movements, and does that recuperation transform the notion of failure? What kinds of memory work (mourning, melancholy, nostalgia, utopia) offer ways of thinking about how older forms of anti-imperialism might inform a critique of the present? Can we speak of an anti-imperialist aesthetic? Possible topics on the contemporary afterlives of imperialism include Hardt and Negri’s Empire; reappraisals of Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and other mid-century theorists of liberation; Battle of Algiers and its enlistment in the current war on Iraq. We will also read 20th century novels and plays that juxtapose 19th century anti-colonial millennial movements in southern Africa, India, and the United States with the concerns of the present. (Likely texts include Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Ngugi's Matigari, Mahasweta Devi's Chotti Munda, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead). Supplementary readings by figures like Benjamin, Bloch, Dirlik, Freud, Jameson, Lenin, Marx, Parry, Ranger, San Juan Jr., Lazarus, Spivak, Young. Course requirements include response papers, presentations, and a final long essay.