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{Home > Courses/Schedules> Fall 2008 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions}------------ Fall 2008 Graduate Expanded Course Descriptions ENL 200 This seminar introduces Ph.D. students to graduate study in English by focusing on contemporary and ongoing debates in literary study. The aim of this course is to prepare new students for advanced work in the field and to orient them in the profession. Much of what we do as scholars is familiarize ourselves with debates and problems both inside and outside our field, follow our own curiosities, and work to shape new interventions. In order to model this process and develop your own engagements as scholars, we will read selections of work that helped define and move forward some of the developments in our field. Occasional faculty visitors will supplement our readings by sharing their own thinking about these developments. Possible topics include both conceptual and methodological issues such as the problem of form (new formalism and the underlying issue of what is form); reading (the recent emphasis on the practices and processes of reading); the status of evidence; transnationalism; post-humanism; new forms of historicist criticism. A few literary texts will be paired with these topics so that we can think more concretely about what kinds of claims we make for texts, and how we back them up. In addition, this course will address a few practical issues in graduate study: the seminar paper/writing; library resources; and the practice of teaching.
Reading a variety of prose -- novels, short fiction, and reportage -- we
Enl 236 Note: This class is required for graduate poetry students and is offered every other year. Fiction students may also take it to fulfill one of their three courses. This course will consider in detail a famous opposition which has haunted 20th Century poetics. This opposition has been formulated in numerous ways: "close reading" vs. "theory," New Criticism vs. Historicism, "autonomy of poetic language" vs. "symptomatic reading,"
aesthetics vs. politics... to name a few. While each opposition is imperfect, they have sometimes risen to heights of pitched disagreement, and the conflict continues to this day — even and especially if one follows it into the abodes of younger poets: undergraduate and graduate curricula, writing programs, the leading institutional conferences, debates in Poetry Magazine/Poetry Foundation, poetry blogs, et cetera. In this course, by reading mostly 20th Century poetry and criticism, we will seek to understand the terms of the debate as it relates to our own creative and critical practices — and perhaps to dissolve the tired antinomies and encampments, and throw our arms around the world. Yeay poetix! ENL 240: Troilus, Criseyde, and the Undead Past (4 units) This class will center on Chaucer’s great poem, or as he called it, his “litel…tragedye,” the story of an ill-fated love affair entangled with the ill-fated Trojan War, a conflict that exercised a lasting fascination in medieval literary and political culture. The poem is framed not just by this cataclysmic event but also by the deaths of its main characters, imagined or actual, and we will consider the ways in which those deaths, and the living past that haunts its composition, act on the poem and on Chaucer’s imagination. Thus we will dig into the text itself, but also look back toward its sources and forward to some of its offspring (literary and critical) to consider Chaucer’s preoccupations in his text and those of the critical industry the poem has spawned; we will in a sense use Troilus and Criseyde as a lens through which to look at Chaucer studies (and, more broadly, medieval studies in general), as well as vice versa, with particular attention to the difficulties and desires associated with the study of the past. Course requirements will include a presentation to the class, an annotated bibliography, a short translation exercise, and a final paper of approximately 15 pages, written in two stages. Required text: Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2006. There will also be a course reader.
ENL 244: Research Approaches to Shakespeare (4 units) ** UP-DATED** It can be daunting to find something original to write about an author as canonical as Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the field of Shakespeare studies continues to grow, and the demand for scholars who can write on and teach the plays remains high. This course provides an introduction to research methods in and approaches to Shakespeare so as to help students engage productively in and make original contributions to the field. We will focus our reading on less canonical plays and on scholarship dealing with topics of continued and emerging importance in Shakespeare studies (including criticism on physiology, religion, economics, sexuality, and performance). Students will also become familiar with journals, databases, and other resources in the field. A central goal of the course is to help students learn to position their work in relation to the range of scholarship on Shakespeare’s plays. To that end, each seminar participant will be responsible for becoming familiar with past and current work on one particular play, compiling a bibliography to be shared with the class. On the day the play is read, the student will present an overview of critical approaches and lead part of our discussion of the play, focusing on the student’s area of interest. Other course requirements include a short paper and a final 10-12 page paper with abstract. Required text: The Norton Shakespeare. (You may use any edition of the Norton, but, especially if you plan to remain in the field, you might find it helpful to purchase a set of the genre-divided paperbacks, which are more portable) Possible plays include:
CANCELED! ENL 264: DANTE AND MODERN POETRY (4 units) Required Texts:: ENL 290F: Seminar in Creative Writing of Fiction (4 Units) This is an advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to present two to three submissions (stories or novel chapters) for workshop and read closely of their peers’ work as well as assigned books. There will be discussion on revisions but the course will focus more on producing new material, and students are expected to write 40-50 pages of new work for the class. My approach to workshop is to use each story as a springboard for discussions about the arts and crafts of fiction writing. Readings:
ENL 290P: Seminar in Creative Writing of Poetry (4 Units) The Sighted Singer by Allen Grossman (The Johns Hopkins University Press; revised and augmented edition (December 1, 1991) Poems of Paul Celan by Paul Celan and Michael Hamburger (Persea Books; Revised edition (November 2002)
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