Current & Upcoming Course Descriptions

FALL 2009
SPRING 2010

Graduate English Course Schedule
Fall Term 2009:  September 9-December 11, 2009

GENG 513-01:  Issues in Criticism (3 credits, CRN 40362)
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Young-ok An
Surveying contemporary literary theory, we will examine our basic assumptions about literary studies (such as "what should we read?"; "why do we read?"; and "how do we read, and read well?"; "what is the role of the reader?") as well as various critical and theoretical ferments in the field. We will engage with three interrelated activities in this class: studying the most significant thinkers and concepts that have reshaped English studies today; exploring the history and movements of theoretical schools and their debates; and grounding those theories in a set of assigned literary readings. We will study a variety of theoretical premises, concepts, and their ramifications--including structuralism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-colonialism. These theories have made a profound impact on our analysis of literary texts, and current discussions involving any "texts" often assume the participants' familiarity with critical theory and vocabulary. Requirements: a consistently active and informed participation in class discussion, regular response papers and posts on the Blackboard, oral reports, mid-term, and final research paper utilizing critical theories.

GENG 528-01:  The Rise of the Novel (3 credits, CRN 43096)
Tuesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Ray MacKenzie
In this course, we’ll study the eighteenth-century novel as it developed both in Britain and on the Continent. Early novels often took the form of autobiographies, and we’ll examine the connection between life-writing and novel-writing. In tracing the birth and growth of what came to be a major genre, we’ll be exploring class, gender, cultural and economic issues, and their relationship to what we now call the novel’s realism. The writers we will study include Defoe, Fielding, Equiano, Austen, Laclos, and Goethe, among others.The course takes its title from Ian Watt’s classic study from 1957, which tied the novel closely to the emergent capitalism of the early eighteenth century. To what extent has recent criticism and theory moved beyond Watt? Do we still see the phenomenon of the rise of the novel in the same way he did? Among the many critics and theorists of the novel, we will read work by Michel Foucault, Michael McKeon, Walter Benjamin, and Nancy Armstrong.

GENG 547-01:  The Multiplicity of Voices in 19th-Century American Literature
(3 credits, CRN 43097)
Monday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Liz Wilkinson
We are all familiar with transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, but how did Margaret Fuller fit in? Bronson Alcott believed in the transcendentalist movement, but what did his daughter Louisa May think? Emerson wrote an impassioned letter about the rights of the Cherokee, but did he know that William Apess, a Pequot Indian, was writing for the rights of New England’s Native Americans at much the same time? How do the poetry and persona letters by Creek writer and activist Alex Poesy build on and reflect the writing and poetry of Walt Whitman? Frederick Douglass wrote a ground breaking slave narrative, but so too did Harriet Jacobs; how does gender inform their texts? James Fennimore Cooper wrote about the intersections between American settlers and Native Americans, but what is Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s contribution to this genre? And, moreover, what did writer-activist Sarah Winnemucca, a Piute woman, have to say on the topic? Yes, women were relegated to a separate sphere, but how do Alcott, Fanny Fern, and Kate Chopin use their fiction to break out of that restrictive sphere? In English 547 we will explore texts that have been deemed canonical and those that perhaps should be in order to discover the multiplicity of voices that make up 19th-century American literature.

GENG 560-01:  The Neo-Slave Narrative (3 credits, CRN 43098)
Thursday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Todd Lawrence
Critic Ashraf Rushdy has termed the large number of novels written over the last forty-five years that have “assume[d] the voice of the slave and revise[d] the conventions” of the large body of historical slave narratives “neo-slave narratives.” This extensive appropriation and redeployment of the slave narrative form by writers such as Margaret Walker, Ishmael Reed, Ernest Gaines, Octavia Butler, and more recently Edward Jones and Toni Morrison, proves instructive of the ways in which contemporary African American writers from the sixties forward have attempted to repossess their own history and excavate it with a particular awareness of its power to reveal cultural and political resistance. Rather than see the slave narrative simply as an enfeebled product of the abolitionist protest movement, contemporary African American writers have embraced the narrative of slavery times as a fertile ground within which they could explore the complex dialectic of oppression and resistance and establish an oppositional literature. In reading both celebrated and less well-known neo-slave narratives, along with attendant criticism, this class will endeavor to identify the numerous ways narratives of oppression and exploitation can be understood as an empowering depiction of the “brave souls too often denigrated” in the popular culture of the twentieth century. We will seek to discover ways that these brave souls of history, both historical and newly imagined, have been used by contemporary African American writers to interrogate and challenge structures of power and subversion existing in their own times.

GENG 619-01:  The Visual Image in 20th-Century Poetry:  Theory and Practice
(3 credits, CRN 43099)
Tuesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Leslie Miller
In this course, we will consider the status and permutations of the visual image in 20th-century poetry from Ezra Pound’s Imagist program to the contemporary moment’s appetite for the cinematic. Along the way, we’ll consider very deliberate competitions between word and image, such as those in ekphrastic poetries, practical conversations about what the image can do by poets like Robert Hass and Stephen Dobyns, as well as theoretical conversations from art historians and literary critics such Murray Krieger (Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign) and W.J.T. Mitchell (Picture Theory) who consider the variety of relationships between textual and visual renderings of the image. Texts for the course will include Cole Swenson’s Try, contemporary poetic explorations of late medieval and early Renaissance paintings, and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Cinema Muto, a recent collection of poems on Italian silent films, among others.

GENG 690-01:  James Joyce (3 credits, CRN 43100)
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Dr. Mike Bellamy
We will feature Ulysses in this course, one of the most ambitious literary works ever undertaken. With this in mind, we will begin with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, either one of which would have established Joyce as a major master of prose. These two books will provide biographical, historical and cultural settings for our typical weekly meetings to consider two chapters of Ulysses. (We will not read Finnegans Wake, a curiosity which Joyce only-too-accurately boasted would take the critics centuries to decipher.) Ulysses is in many ways the perfect book for a graduate seminar. Graduate students usually have both the curiosity and the commitment for such a task. Studying such a “must read” as a group, we will come together in what I sometimes facetiously refer to as a “Joyce Support Groups,” for communal support to make our way through a monumentally complex work. At the same time, Joyce’s masterpiece usually precipitates a wealth of individual readings characteristic of what Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism calls an “Anatomy,” a microcosmic work which views the human condition through an especially specific lens—in this case a single day in Dublin in 1904. (Think of another anatomy, Moby Dick, for an idea of how anatomies work.) Whether read with all, some or even none of the scholarly apparatus, Ulysses is an extraordinarily funny book. My own first reading of it occurred with two friends in India, where we had a indecent amount of leisure on our hands. None of us was familiar with the specific Homeric parallels with which Joyce was playing, to take perhaps the most obvious shortcoming. Still, three Peace Corps Volunteers–one not even especially interested in literature–read the book out loud and laughed out loud together at the hilarity of its prose. The best, and as far as I can tell, the most enjoyable way to enrich all kinds of readings of Ulysses is Richard Ellmann’s masterpiece James Joyce, a stunning biography which provides the consistent instruction and pleasure which many literary critics typically and exclusively reserve for art.

   SPRING 2010

Graduate English Course Schedule
Spring term 2010:  February 1-May 21, 2010

GENG 521-01:  J.R.R. Tolkien:  From the Middle Ages to Middle Earth (3 credits, CRN 22628)
Monday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Martin Warren                  
Note:  This required course satisfies the pre-1800 British Lit requirement

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works that have been popular since they were first published. As an Oxford Professor and eminent medievalist, he wrote out of what he knew about Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English literature. He was a ground-breaking medieval scholar who loved his work so much that he created fictional works rooted in the language and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Gothic, and Celtic cultures that he studied. This class is for those who wish to journey through these cultures, traditions, and languages with other like-minded student-scholars to examine those wonders that make J.R.R. Tolkien's writings so fascinating for so many modern readers. Recent attention has focused largely on Tolkien's most popular works, his work in medieval scholarship, and medieval sources that influenced his thought. Students already familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will be able to explore his works in an academic context and come to better understand the immensity of this writer’s impact on contemporary popular culture and the genre of imaginative fiction. This course explores Tolkien’s work as rooted in ancient and medieval legends, mythologies, and literary genres and practices. We will seek to understand Tolkien’s achievement both in its own right and as the continuation of the classical and medieval narrative traditions it both springs from and renews. This is not a course for beginners new to the works of Tolkien or for those who have seen only Peter Jackson’s movie versions. Prior knowledge of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will provide the foundation for much of our analysis.

GENG 635-01:  The Victorial Sensation Novel (3 credits, CRN 22631)
Thursday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Alexis Easley                 
Note:  This course counts as elective & satisfies one 600-level requirement

GENG 668-01:  Postcolonial Cinema (3 credits, CRN 22632)
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 p.m., Dr. Kanishka Chowdhury        
Note:  This course satisfies Multicultural & one 600-level requirement

Postcolonial Cinema will introduce students to a range of questions and concerns that emerged from the decolonization movements beginning in the 1960s. We will study various filmmakers’ attempts to devise a cinematic language that was not merely imitative of western film form. All along, we will interrogate these filmmakers’ works and place them within the context of issues of race, gender, empire, and decolonization. Our discussions will be informed by the political and cultural writings of critics such as Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon, as well as theorists of film like Sergei Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembene, Glauber Rocha, and Fernando Solinas. We will also consider the continuing evolution of postcolonial film in specific contexts: gender, nation, class, migration, and globalization. These issues will be contextualized by the works of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Manthia Diawara, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hamid Naficy, Ella Shohat, and others. We will base our discussions on the following films: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment, Shyam Benegal’s Manthan, Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien’s The Passion of Remembrance, Flora Gomes’s Mortu Nega, Tracy Moffat’s Bedevil, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, Abderrahamane Sissako’s Life on Earth, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces, Trinh-T Minh-ha’s Reassemblage, and Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace. Students will write a mid-term paper and a final seminar paper, and will be responsible for a substantial presentation, as well as weekly web postings on Blackboard.

SPECIAL NOTES ABOUT SPECIAL COURSES

Registration for the following courses is not possible through the MURPHY online system:

          GENG 598/599    Undergraduate Course (300-level or Higher) taken for graduate credit 

          GENG 698          Independent Study

          GENG 699          Master's Essay

          Instructor and/or Graduate Program Director permissions and special registration forms are
          required for enrollment in these classes. Please contact the graduate program coordinator
          at (651) 962-5628 or gradenglish@stthomas.edu for assistance.