Summer 2013
Special Topics in British Literature: Romanticism and The Invention of Childhood (Cr.3)
56:350:594:Sec.B6:
Cross-listed with 56:606:612:B6
5/29-7/3 Tu & Th 6:00pm-9:40pm
Barbarese, Joseph
Email: ude.sregtur.nedmacnull@eserabrab
When Children’s Literature emerges as a literary genre in the 19th century, it does so as a sub-genre of English and American Romanticism. The course sets out to demonstrate how the combined and sustaining influence on the genre, particularly its shared belief in childhood as a source of visionary strength and in the individual child’s essential originality, is still in force. Particular areas of interest to be explored are the versions of female and feminine archetypes and how the divine is represented in CL. Readings span the full CL canon and include works in English and American as well as works in translation (The Little Prince), beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge and moving from Goody Two Shoes through Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, tracing the elaboration of these influences in the children’s books that begin to appear in the late 18th century, through the 19th, and into the late 20th.
American Literature to 1900 (Cr.3)
56:352:511:Sec.D6
Cross listed with 50:352:337:D6; 56:606:611 D6
06/24-07/18 M,Tu,Th 6:00pm-9:40pm
Singley, Carol
Email: ude.sregtur.nedmacnull@yelgnis
Major American authors from the colonial period through nineteenth-century romanticism and realism, including John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Zitkala-Ša, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We pay special attention to titles on the M.A. Candidacy Exam reading list.
Fall 2013
Introduction to Graduate Literary Study
56:350:503:01 Th 6:00-8:40
Singley
This course introduces you to current issues in the fields of literary theory and criticism and to the aims and methods of literary analysis. The course serves several purposes. First, it provides a foundation that will help you in future graduate courses by reinforcing the important skills of close reading, literary interpretation, and research. You will become familiar with past and present developments in literary studies, learn how to identify and assess critical and theoretical approaches, and select approaches that best match your interests and the texts studied. Second, because the literary material in the course is drawn from the Master’s Comprehensive Reading List, the course will give you a head start on preparation for the examination. And third, the course will introduce you to literary studies as a possible profession.
If you plan to teach English at the college or university level, the course will expose you to a range of intellectual activities that characterize academic careers in English. If you plan to teach at the secondary level, the course will give you understanding of the role that theory and criticism play in literary interpretation and will suggest ways to extend your knowledge of literature and prepare materials for your students. And finally, if you are pursuing a master’s degree for personal enrichment or if your career goals are uncertain at this time, this course will acquaint you with activities at the heart of literary studies. Whatever your specific goal, the course will improve your ability to read, criticize, and evaluate literature.
Assignments include an explication, a bibliographic essay, and a researched critical analysis.
17th Century British Literature
56:350:549:01 Th 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:606:511:01
Marchitello
This course will be devoted to the study of a wide range of writing in English across the 17th century, in poetry, drama and prose. In the first part of the course (weeks 1-8) we will read broadly in four general areas: Political Thought, Devotional Writing, Emergent Science, and Autography. In addition, for five of these eight sessions, we will take up the reading and study of a number of lyric poets. The second part of the course (weeks 9-14) will be dedicated to the rigorous reading and study of two major seventeenth-century writers: Sir Thomas Browne and Margaret Cavendish.
In addition to intensive reading, students will be asked to write a series of response papers, one shorter essay, and a longer essay at semester’s end.
Special Topics: Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature
56:350:593:01 T 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:606:611:01
Blackford
This course begins with Perrault’s tales, collected to entertain a fashionable courtly audience, and the Grimms’ tales, collected for a scholarly and national purpose. After following the course of literary fairy tales in Germany, America, France, Denmark, Italy, and England (de Beaumont, Fouqué, Hoffmann, Andersen, Hawthorne, Alcott, Collodi, Wilde, Carter, Sexton), we will pursue Victorian England’s fashionable interest in fairy stories, its new fetish for childhood, and its imaginative impulse to transform the industrial landscape. The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1862-WWI) saw the flowering of fantasy worlds written (ostensibly) for children. Both carnal and spiritual, these worlds play with religious ideals, Darwin’s visions of human development, politics and social satire, and the relationship between language and reality. They anticipate—then shift to accommodate—Freud.
Together we will journey through the seminal work of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, which baptizes a chimney sweep clean when he throws his blackened self into the river. We will, with the Cheshire Cat, loom over the poor, victimized Alice as she tries to reach the last square in Wonderland and Looking-Glass. We will be rejuvenated with the ex-miner Diamond as the North Wind, with her fairy magic, marks the cultural shift to “the child’s work is to play” (At the Back of the North Wind). We will touch base in Italy with a very famous puppet and turn-of-the-century America with Oz, a parable of capitalism. We will challenge Mr. McGregor with Peter Rabbit, careful not to be made into a pie like his father before him, and we will spend a little time with Peter Pan, the animals of Grahame’s River-Bank (The Wind in the Willows) and Milne’s Hundred-Aker Wood. Not to leave girls behind, we will visit Mary Lennox in her secret garden, Laura Ingalls in her wild woods, and Anne in and “of” Green Gables. We voyage with Frodo and Sam as they, mere Hobbits, try to save the Shire and all it represents from the Hitler-like Sauron. The search for a lost Arcadia would never be the same, nor would ideals of childhood. But perhaps, somewhere in the enchanted wood, a bear and a boy will always be playing. In fact, “the boy who lived” anchors our final two novels from the Harry Potter series. Critical readings (in moderation) will underscore our reading selections.
Coursework includes participation on sakai and in class (including a short presentation to trigger discussion), a final research paper (15 pp), and a final exam. Each comprise 1/3rd of your grade.
Special Topics: Women and Work in the Revolutionary Era
56:350:594:01 M 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:606:661:02
Ledoux
This course, covering the period from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars, will examine women’s complex and growing relationship to paid labor as represented in multiple literary genres (plays, ballads, novels, etc.). In our investigation, we will examine women as authors, actresses, soldiers and sailors, prostitutes and missionaries as they make their way throughout the Atlantic world.
Special Topics: Translation
56:350:595:01 T 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:200:562:01
Barbarese
Translation and revision appear vastly different activities. Are they? During the twentieth century poets often explored the act of translation as a means of “revising” the original in order to master it and own it, the result being an entirely new thing—a super-original, But what is translation—paraphrase, metaphrase, simple imitation—or revision as creative trespassing ? Is translation a public service, satisfaction of personal need, mere play—or all three? The course explores translation in its conventional sense and as the “creative adaptations” of original works by looking closely at the work of Pound, Zukofsky, Lowell, Bly, and others. Along with a look at translation theory (and a guest lecturer on the subject), the readings will include poems by Yeats, Pound’s Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius, Zukofsky’s “homophonic” translations of Catullus, In addition each weekly session include a look at famous revisions of canonical work by poets and fiction writers who have attempted to “translate” their own work, through revision, into something better and often vastly different—and sometimes worse. How do we revise? When is the revision inferior to the original? When stop revising? The course is designed for any student of literature with an interest either in creative writing or scholarship (or both) and in the pedagogy of the writing workshop. During the course of the semester members of the class will perform their work to the class, produce translations from an original language or complied through the translations of others, and present examples of how an original work evolved through the stages of revision.
Special Topics: Three Centuries of American Poetry
56:352:540:01 W 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:606:611:03
Hoffman
History of the English Language
56:615:530:01 W 6:00-8:40
Cross-listed with 56:606:611:04
Epstein
This course will address the growth and structure of the English language from its origins to the present, with attention to methods of linguistic description. In addition to more traditional historical linguistics (i.e. the effect of language change on the phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax of the language), we will devote considerable attention to socio-historical influences on the development of English, addressing, in particular, questions relating to authority in language: Standard vs. non-standard dialects of English, the rise of dictionary making, spelling reform movements, etc. Course requirements: Midterm exam and course paper.
Practicum in the Teaching of Writing
56:842:569:01 W 2:50-5:00
Fiske
This course is designed to assist composition instructors in acclimating to the teaching of college-level writing. Integrating readings and discussions of pedagogy into a workshop environment, the class will allow instructors-intraining to engage with ideas and practical applications of composition discourse; discuss problems in the classroom as they occur on a week-to-week basis; share exercises and experiences with other instructors; and examine strategies for teaching each stage of the writing process. Particular areas of focus include: learning effective sequencing of writing assignments; coaching critical thinking and invention; teaching argumentation and revision; evaluating student writing; and handling conflicts in the classroom. Requirements include a weekly teaching journal, a workshop demonstration, and a final portfolio. This course is mandatory for first-time teaching-assistants.