Current & Upcoming Course Descriptions

Graduate English Course Descriptions 
Summer Term 2008: June 16 - August 15, 2008  

GENG 560-01 The African-American Literary Tradition:  The Locations of Culture in African-
American Literature, 1903-1952  (3 credits, CRN 30646)
Monday/Thursday 4:00 - 6:00pm
Dr. Andrew Scheiber

At the beginning of each chapter of his 1903 collection The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois juxtaposes the musical text of an African-American “Sorrow Song” with an epigram from a “high-culture” poetic work in the Anglo-American tradition.  Du Bois thus prophesies an African-American literary future that is both dynamic and hybrid, partaking at once of the canons of the vernacular and the socially privileged, and marked by the attempt to negotiate (or, perhaps more accurately, discover or invent) the territory that lies between them.  In this course we’ll explore how Du Bois’ analysis of Black cultural achievement and aspiration can serve as a point of reference for African American literature and criticism in the crucial first half of the Twentieth Century.  Other texts to be examined will include James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  This course satisfies the Multicultural Literature requirement.

GENG 604-01 Seminar: Writing Literary Nonfiction (3 credits, CRN 30645)
Monday/Thursday 7:00 - 9:00pm
Prof. Chris Hallman

This course will offer an introduction to what is a very large umbrella--everything from, say, literary journalism to memoir. That's a broad array, of course, and we'll really just try to sample it. Our process will be to write two very short pieces (750 words) and one longer piece (around 3,000 words). For the shorter pieces, we'll look at a variety of examples from the online magazine Brevity, which offers a fair introduction to the idea of the genre.  It can be accessed using the following link: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/. This course counts as a 600-level elective.

Graduate English Course Descriptions 
Fall Term 2008: September 3, 2008 - December 18, 2008 

GENG 513-01 Issues in Criticism  (3 credits, CRN 40517)
Monday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Martin Warren

Issues in Criticism is an introduction to critical frameworks used in the past and the present to theorize and/or critique literature. The term "theory" encompasses widely diverging definitions. The goal of the class is to give students a foundation in theory’s terminologies, the different methodologies used in literary and cultural analysis, and a sense of the various schools of criticism that have developed most especially in the post-World War II  period.
Underlying all this are basic questions such as:
• What should we read?
• How should we read?
• Is it possible to arrive at a single correct interpretation?
• How are texts related to other texts?
• How are texts related to their historical contexts?
• Why is there so much controversy around the issues of literary criticism and theory?
This required course must be taken as one of the first three courses in the program.

GENG 529-01 The Romantic Age in Britain  (3 credits, CRN 42910)
Monday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Young-ok An

The period between years 1789 and 1832 in Britain saw a literary cultural movement shaped by the French Revolution and its radical, innovative ideas. This class will explore aesthetic, ideological, and cultural issues of British Romanticism through an in-depth reading of a range of literary and theoretical works. The organization of this course will be partly thematic and partly theoretical, examining the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemens, and Letitia Landon, along with theoretical/critical texts that will shed light on those literary texts. We will work toward an understanding of Romanticism that incorporates historical, biographical, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches. Throughout the semester, we will focus on questions concerning aesthetics, subjectivity, and textuality. This course counts as a 500-level elective.

GENG 541-01 Women's Colonial and Early American Literature  (3 credits, CRN 42911)
Tuesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Heather Bouwman

In Early American Women Authors we read primarily eighteenth-century poets and novelists (such as Phillis Wheatley, Susannah Rowson, and Hannah Webster Foster), though we will also read some earlier colonial authors (such as Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson) and authors who wrote in less public genres such as diaries and letters.  Course requirements will include reading and giving presentations on critical and theoretical writings about this period.  In the final project for the course, students will research a colonial or early American text that has since disappeared from the literary landscape and will prepare a critical introduction to that text.  Since we will be working with the digital Evans collection (“Early American Imprints”) to locate and read our “forgotten” text, the final project for this course will require some significant research time in the online database.  This course satisfies the Pre-1900 American Literature requirement.

GENG 562-01 The Modern Tradition   (3 credits, CRN 42912)
Wednesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Michael C. Jordan

This is a course on the modern European tradition in literature reaching back to the Renaissance.  We will reflect upon the emergence of the modern novel in Don Quixote by Cervantes and move steadily in our reading as we follow the accelerating development of literary movements and periods in Europe (excluding literature written in English). Figures we will encounter along the way will include Marie de La Fayette, Racine, Flaubert, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Anna Akhmatova, Kafka, and Bernanos. In the final weeks we will glimpse the emergence of literary works from places beyond the European continent (and from outside the United States) that nevertheless attach themselves to the European tradition while transforming it.  We will occasionally observe parallel developments in the visual arts and in music in the hope that such non-linguistic arts will enhance our understanding of the literary art we read in translation.  This course counts as 500-level elective credit.

GENG 668-01 The Contemporary Black Novel:  Reconsidering the Black Aesthetic
(3 credits, CRN 42913)
Wednesday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Todd Lawrence

In 1968, Black Arts theorist and creator of Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga declared that the only art worthy of consideration was art that served “the Black Revolution.” Twenty years later in 1989, in his article, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Stanford graduate and novelist Trey Ellis heralded the age of the “cultural mulatto,” claiming that young, black bourgeois artists were establishing a new period of creative openness in which race would not be the single defining factor determining the value of the art they produced. In 1992, poet Ras Baraka, son of Black Arts Movement architect Amiri Baraka, and writer/critic Kevin Powell (incidentally—a cast member from MTV’s first season of The Real World) wrote in the introduction to their anthology, In The Tradition, of being “children of the post-integration (nightmare!), post-Civil Rights Era, abandoned to find our way in a pot bent on melting our culture into mainstream oblivion.” Though Baraka and Powell saw their project as reconnecting with Blackness in a new way (thus the title of their movement: “New Black Consciousness”), they, as well as Ellis, also saw their task as stretching and adapting the definition of Blackness to include a variety of points of view.

This recent effort to find room within the concept of Black authenticity has been referred to by journalist and critic Nelson George and others as the “Post Soul” aesthetic. And most recently we have heard a world in which Barack Obama, a bi-racial man with an African father, has a legitimate chance of becoming president referred to as “post-racial.” The black novel of the last thirty years has reflected this growing instability in the notion of blackness and the black aesthetic. This class will explore the varied ways black authors negotiate this uncertain racial, cultural, and political landscape in their work. Beginning with Beloved, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning work and moving to novelists such as Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Lisa Teasley, and Mat Johnson, this class will investigate the myriad ways writers who identify themselves as black or who are identified by others as so have chosen to represent the world they know. This course satisfies the Multicultural Literature requirement and one of the 600-level seminar requirements.

GENG 672-01 Literature and the Self  (3 credits, CRN 40518)
Thursday 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Dr. Ray MacKenzie

In this seminar, we’ll explore a set of topics of great interest to contemporary literary studies.  What is the self, or subject?  Is it something given, or something constructed?  Is it constructed by us, or for us by outside, cultural forces?  What are the relationships between self and language, or between self and gender, class, or race?  To help us think about these and related issues, we’ll read a number of literary texts that bear directly on the issue, by authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, and Jennifer Egan.  And we’ll read a number of theorists as well, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Slavoj Zizek.  This course is an elective and satisfies one of the 600-level seminar requirements.

Graduate English Course Schedule
Spring Term 2009: February 2, 2009 - May 22, 2009

GENG 504-01 Issues in Linguistics: Theory and Practice (3 credits, CRN 22435)

Monday 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Juan Li

In English Studies, we navigate in language – reading, writing, and talking in order to construct meanings in the textual world. Although language is such a central term in our discipline, we rarely step back to analyze how it functions in our reading and writing experiences. Linguistic studies in the past decades have offered concepts and tools that help us understand the nature of language and our manipulation of it (from sound to syntax, from pragmatics to politics, from community dialects to individual language use). In this course, we will examine both the structure and use of language. In doing so, we will look at different ways of understanding the relationship between language and social and personal life. To this end, we will consider various theoretical approaches for conceptualizing language, including structuralist, functionalist, generativist, cognitivist, and sociolinguistic models. We will also apply these approaches to analyzing language use in various texts and contexts, literary or non-literary. The overarching concern of this course is with how we can use linguistic concepts and methods to describe meaning. No background in linguistics is required.  This course counts as a 500-level elective.

 

GENG 572-01 British Literature and Culture of the 1890s (3 credits, CRN 22436)

Wednesday 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Alexis Easley

Oscar Wilde referred to the 1890s not only as the “fin de siècle” but as the “fin du globe.”  Anarchist threats, anti-marriage campaigns, decadent literatures, free love movements, socialist utopianism – these any many other forces seemed to suggest that the world as Victorians knew it had indeed come to an end.  It was of course also a period of exciting new beginnings as artists and writers developed art forms that would express the spirit of the age. The detective novel and New Woman novel arose as significant genres during this period, and poetry was infused with new vitality due to the influence of French symbolism. The 1890s likewise produced the most innovative drama of the century, as epitomized by the works of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. We will examine these literary developments in an interdisciplinary context, focusing on key texts in relation to rise of Aestheticism, mass journalism, consumerism, professional medicine, celebrity culture, environmentalism, the women’s movement, socialism, and many other cultural forces. In addition to Wilde and Shaw, the reading list may include works by William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Algernon Swinburne, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, and Olive Schreiner. In addition, we will examine a variety of cultural materials, including art, journalism, and advertisements.  In the process, we will come to understand a crucial decade in British history -- when Victorian writers transformed the nation’s sense of itself and laid the groundwork for twentieth-century modernism. This course counts as a 500-level elective.

GENG 572-02 Writing Literary Nonfiction: From Exposition to Erasure (3 credits, CRN 22437)

Tuesdays 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Matthew Batt

Through this class you will be exploring the various ways in which we endeavor to translate ourselves into print.  We will each write three essays to be workshopped; they will be the basis for the majority of our course material.  You will be encouraged, though not necessarily forced, to work in forms from popular memoir (like, say, David Sedaris), to topical autobiography (Anthony Bourdain, Sarah Vowell), to experimental nonfiction (John D’Agata, Jenny Boully).  This course counts as a 500-level elective.

 

GENG 590-01 Shakespeare: the Contemporary, the Unknowable (3 credits, CRN 22438)

Wednesday, 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Amy Muse

Shakespeare’s lifetime saw the birth of whiteness as a category of race, the shift of England from an entirely Catholic to an enforcedly Protestant nation, a keen curiosity about Islam sparked by the height (the threat) of the Ottoman Empire, and the enthusiastic advancement of European colonization and imperialism. All of these matters surface in his work, yet his plays have also outlasted or “transcended” their time, which has allowed them to be read and staged in every conceivable setting, around the world, for almost 400 years now. As Gary Taylor writes, Shakespeare has been continually reinvented since the early seventeenth century. He has mutated from William Shakespeare, poet and successful playwright in the cutthroat London theatre scene, to a site of cultural production, long-contested and fought over—most heatedly in educational institutions, where he is nearly the only author whose works are always required in curricula. In this course we will approach Shakespeare’s texts as literary critics, historical scholars, and textual editors; and as directors, dramaturges, and performers. We will draw upon historiography and performance theory to understand Shakespeare’s work as both contemporary and forever alien, as poetry and drama that can feel universal yet was written in response to a specific time and place.  This course satisfies the pre-1800 British literature requirement.

 

GENG 643-01 Modern Irish Drama (3 credits, CRN 22439)                         

Thursday 6:00 – 9:00 pm      

Dr. Thomas Redshaw                         

While Ireland has no continuous, native tradition of drama and theatre dating back into the Medieval Era, as does England, it now has a strong and eccentric national stage and a script tradition that are one of the foundations of the country’s contested national identity. One of the objects of this seminar will be to explore the ways in which Ireland represents itself to itself in the twentieth century.  We will read a handful of plays in the modern tradition collected in Harrington’s Modern Irish Drama and, eventually, contrast them with contemporary plays that have not yet entered the Canon in Ireland and abroad.  Finding and researching those contemporary plays and their productions will be the focus of the final seminar paper assignments.  Along the way we will read Chris Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre, 1601 – 2000 (2002), Christopher Murray’s Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to a Nation (2000), and Terrence Brown’s Ireland: A Social and Cultural History (1987), as well as selected essays. Students will be expected to write short, weekly discussion papers and to do library research of primary and critical resources in support of the seminar’s presentations and conversations. This course satisfies a 600-level seminar requirement.

 

GENG 668-01: Marxist Cultural Theory (3 credits, CRN 22653)

Monday 6:00 – 9:00 pm

Dr. Kanishka Chowdhury

In his landmark work, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson argues that "aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally." Jameson's designation of the cultural object as commodity in the age of late capitalism is part of a rich and varied history of cultural readings within the Marxist tradition, readings that have viewed the cultural object as a means of political control, as a site for political possibilities, and as everything in between. In this course, we will explore several elements of this tradition, as well as examining specific cultural texts (a play, a novel, and a film). We will begin with a sustained engagement with Marx's work, especially sections of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, Part 1, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Capital. We will then explore some of the key voices in early Marxist theory, including Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. These foundational theories will inform the next segment of the course, where our focus will be on the debates about aesthetics and culture in the 1930s between Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, and Lukács. Some attention will then be given to Raymond Williams' rethinking of culture and Fredric Jameson's understanding of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capital. All along, we will interrogate these writers' ideas and place them within the context of issues of race, gender, and decolonization. We will study feminist readings of labor, patriarchy and sexuality by critics like Michèle Barrett, Rosemary Hennessey, Barbara Smith, and Gayatri Spivak. Within the postcolonial tradition, we will look at theories of culture developed by, for instance, Amilcar Cabral, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon. 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.  This course satisfies the Multicultural Literature and the 600-level seminar requirements.

 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 Nicole Mass at (651) 962-5628 
          or gradenglish@stthomas.edu for assistance.