Courses - Spring 2007 Graduate Seminars
Eng 599R: Master's Thesis
Reiss, TBA, TBA, Max: 99
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 717R: Milton: Epical Milton
Rambuss, Th 1:00-4:00, Max: 12
Content: The centerpiece of this seminar is a close reading of Milton’s monumentally significant epic poem, Paradise Lost. The course will also treat several other poems by Milton—“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; Paradise Regained; and Samson Agonistes—that deploy, elaborate, and revise epic topoi.
“That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I in my proportion, with over and above, of being a Christian, might do for mine.” So Milton ambitiously projected of his own poetic career in an ecclesiastical tract written twenty-five years before the appearance of his epic. In fact, at this point Milton hadn’t even published his first volume of poetry.
What are the literary, cultural, religious—and personal terms—of Milton’s epical poetic vocation, as he inhabits it? How does he fashion and present himself as a poet? In what sense does Milton conceive of himself as a poet who has already surmounted his epic predecessors, both classical and Christian, even before he has produced his own epic? What does it mean for Milton to write epic—a nationalist genre par excellence—after the failure of the cause of the English Revolution to which he was so publicly committed? What are the relations between Milton the political and theological pamphleteer—Milton the early modern public intellectual—and Milton the poet? What does it mean for Milton (or for any poet) to write epical poetry after Paradise Lost, the story of all things?
The course will also entail a consideration of the state of the art of Milton criticism.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 730R: Studies in Romanticism: Romantic Subjectivities
White, W 4:00-7:00, Max: 12 (8) Eng 730R/(4) CPLT 752
Content: This seminar takes as its point of departure the romantic engagement with the problematic status of self-consciousness or, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, “the link between consciousness and self-consciousness or knowledge and guilt.” At issue are the different ways romantic subjectivity formulates itself as an impossible species of reflexivity—a structure of inwardness that turns (or returns) to itself even as it nonetheless remains subject to an exteriority it can never entirely contain. The reading will focus on two crucial texts of British Romanticism to be explored at length during the semester, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan. The seminar’s reading of these works will also be framed by a small selection of other romantic texts including writings by Kleist, Austen, and Carlyle with additional attention to critical and theoretical writings to be drawn from Althusser, Batten, Benjamin, Butler, Christensen, De Man, Galperin, Hartman, Liu, McGann and Rajan.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 751R: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: "Till Death or Distance Do Us Part"?: Love and Marriage in early African American Literature
Foster, Tu 10:00-1:00, Max: 12
Content: This seminar considers ways in which early African American print culture augments or changes our understanding of early USAmerica and its literature. It also hones our own skills and aspirations for producing texts that outlive us – or at least have a place in our lives when we actually leave Emory. Using both canonical and noncanonical texts and writers, using both archival skills and theoretical concepts, we will work towards developing our understanding of African American literary culture and our abilities to use our research as public intellectuals as well as esteemed scholars. To increase the edginess of our project, we will focus upon the Afro-Protestant press. To spice up our gumbo of data, we will focus upon love and marriage in antebellum African America.
Texts: Among the authors we will consider are Frances E. W. Harper and Thomas Detter.
Particulars: Among the requirements will be (1) production of a draft of a publishable text, an academic conference paper, or a community focused presentation and (2) creation of a proposal for n community-focused workshop or exhibition, a web page or other techno-savvy publicly accessible resource or an academic conference paper.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 752R: 20th-Century American Literature and Extraordinary Experience
Kalaidjian, Th 4:00-7:00, Max: 12 (8) Eng 752R/(2)CPLT 752/( 2) ILA 790
Content: This seminar will explore literary representations of the relationships among traumatic events, terrorism, delusion, and extraordinary experience generally. We will survey a broad range of major authors, periods, genres, and cultural objects of study from the First and Second World wars through post-9/11 fiction. In addition to reviewing the emergent field of trauma studies, we will focus in particular on the connection between loss and psychosis as theorized by such figures as Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and W. D. Winnicott among others. The seminar will also include film and popular culture in our consideration of emergent forms of mass delusion in the public sphere.
Texts: H.D., Collected Poems; Robert Lowell, Selected Poems; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Ray Young Bear, Black Eagle Child; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel; Patrick McGrath, Spider; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days.
Secondary Readings: excerpts, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia; W. D. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”; excerpts, Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses; excerpts, Robert Lindner, The Fifty Minute Hour; excerpts, C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky; excerpts, John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Contact with Aliens; excerpts, Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace.
Particulars: In addition to the readings, assignments will comprise a short response essay, a research paper, and a seminar presentation.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 780R: Studies in Criticism and Literary Methodology: Conservative Cultural Criticisms
Bauerlein, Tu 4:00-7:00 , Max: 12
Content: Readings in literary and cultural criticism that issue from a conservative perspective, understanding 'conservative' in relative and historical terms. Background writers studied include Burke, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Adams, Eliot, and Hume. Post-war readings include Orwell, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, Whittaker Chambers, Lionel Trilling, Irving Kristol, Raymond Aron, Friedrich von Hayek, Roger Kimball, and David Horowitz.
Particulars: Short (5-page) weekly papers on assigned readings.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 789R: Reparative Fictions: Slavery, History, and (Collective) Memory in Post-Civil Rights Afro-American Narratives
Awkward, W 10:00-1:00, Max: 12
Content: This course will test the assumption that fictional, filmic, musical, and scholarly engagement of the subject of slavery following Martin Luther King’s assassination marked, among other things, a collective “liberal” response – in Richard Rorty’s disputatiously honorific use of the term – to murdered dreams of socioeconomic equality, perceived needs for acts of inspiriting racial memory, and the strategic absence of “the peculiar institution” from both the legislative agenda and the monumental history of the United States. In addition to engaging critical analyses of such topics as history, memory (collective, counter-, traumatic, and otherwise), reparations, historical fiction, and the connections between history and literature as modes of storytelling, we will focus on novels that focus on the subject of slavery fully (i.e. Dessa Rose, The Known World, The Oxherding Tale), significantly ( Beloved, Kindred) or partially, albeit in essentially illuminating ways ( The Chaneysville Incident, A Visitation of Spirits, Corregidora). Our investigations, which will also include selected documentary and fictive films (parts of Roots) and songs (The O’Jays’ “Ship Ahoy,” Wynton Marsalis’s jazz epic, Blood on the Fields), are intended to help us discover some of what slavery means to contemporary Afro-American intellectuals and the communities whose collective histories they seek to represent (including those contemporary figures who advocate reparations), and how – if at all – these representations fill a honorific void by discursively monumentalizing the suffering of Africa’s enslaved descendants during a shameful period in our national history whose enduring wounds America has not, in the estimation of many, adequately recognized, let alone sought to heal.
Particulars: Three brief responses to the reading material, one or two of which will serve as the basis for oral reports; a class visit to Atlanta’s historical sites recognizing slavery; a 200 word abstract of a final paper; and a final, 15 page essay.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 789R: The Profession of English
Elliott,W 1:00-4:00, Max 12
Content: This course will serve as an introduction to the profession of English as it is practiced in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We will survey the current configuration of the discipline, and review the history that has produced it. We will also spend some time discussing a few of the contemporary debates and new directions in literary studies that characterize the field as a whole. Throughout the semester we will engage in practical learning of the skills necessary to function as a professional scholar of English. We will talk about writing conference abstracts, presenting papers, and publishing articles. Finally, the course will include invited faculty from the department to discuss recent innovations and scholarly methodologies in their fields.
Texts are likely to include: Gerald Graff, Professing English; Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters.
Particulars: Written assignments will ask students to survey the leading journals in their fields, and to write both individual book reviews and a review essay of multiple books.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 789R: Poetics and Cognitive Science
Johnston, Tu 1:00-4:00, Max 12 (7) Eng 789R/(5) CPLT 751
Content: Until fairly recently, the humanities have mostly ignored developments in contemporary cognitive science. Increasingly, however, researchers on both sides of the assumed cultural divide have found work on the other side to be of great relevance. Literary scholars, for example, have discovered the usefulness of cognitive theories of metaphor like Lakoff and Johnson’s, and that neuroscience has much to contribute to trauma theory. Among other examples, linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has explained why irregular verbs are statistically preponderant in poetry, and evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have argued compellingly from an evolutionary perspective for the functional value of the esthetic response to art and literature. But beyond these scattered examples stands a larger question: How could contemporary theories of mind not be of interest to literary scholars, given that cognitive science is beginning to yield new understandings of consciousness, human memory, emotion, creativity, language and metaphor, and the self ? From the other side, perhaps the distinguished Berkeley neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman put it best when he argued that the humanities constitute the richest database available of the full complexity of human thought, behavior and feeling, and that it therefore cannot be ignored by any science interested in explaining these things. In a recent lecture, after reminding the audience that Plato and Aristotle were the first cognitive theorists, he noted that it was clear from The Prelude and Ulysses that Wordsworth and Joyce knew more about how the human mind works than many of his colleagues.
This course will take up a series of topics in cognitive science as both challenge and theoretical resource for literary study, beginning with “Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach,” an essay by the founder of cognitive science, Herbert Simon. Among the topics to be considered are: the nature of mind/brain, consciousness, memory, metaphor, and evolutionary psychology. Discussion will be based on a selection of short and non-technical readings from books and essays by (in addition to those already mentioned) Antonio R. Damasio, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, Terrence W. Deacon, Christof Koch and others. Interspersed among these selections we will also read several contemporary novels --Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, and Dan Lloyd’s Radiant Cool-- visibly influenced by cognitive science.
Particulars: a short oral report and a seminar essay due at the end of the semester.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 789R: Hannah Arendth: History, Politics, Language
Caruth, Th 1:00-4:00, Max: 20 (5) Eng 789R/(5) FREN 780/(10) CPLT 751
Content: This course will explore Arendt's rethinking of politics and of history in the light of 20th century historical catastrophe. We will examine in particular the relation between the beginning and ending of rights, between deception and action, between political origination and "image-making." Arendt will be put in conversation with three major literary and philosophical theorists of language (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Shoshana Felman) in order to examine the encounter between problems of politics and of language, with attention to the topics of origination, forgetting, lying and testimony.
Texts: Texts by Arendt include selections from The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, Eichmann in Jersualem, "Truth and Politics" (from Between Past and Future) and "Lying in Politics," among others. Texts by other authors include Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater" and "Shelley Disfigured," Jacques Derrida, "History of the Lie" (on Arendt) and Shoshana Felman, "Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust" and "A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law." Readings will also include essays on Arendt by Werner Hamacher and. Giorgio Agamben as well as a selection of Arendt scholars.
Particulars: active class participation, a brief presentation and one final paper.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 791R: Teaching of Composition
Cavanagh, M 1:00-4:00, Max: 15
Content: This is a two-semester (Spring/Fall) practicum in Rhetoric/Composition pedagogy for graduate students teaching English 101 (Expository Writing) or 181 (Writing about Literature) for the first time. We will be concerned with general questions of theory and method, specifically as these apply to course design, textbooks, writing assignments, evaluation, and day-to-day classroom practices. The Spring semester will be concerned primarily with general perspectives and course-designs; the Fall semester primarily with reflection on day-to-day practices.
Texts: Readings in pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and examples of student writing.
Particulars: Evaluation is satisfactory/unsatisfactory, with no formal paper. Brief presentations on matters of common concern are required.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 797R: Directed Study
Elliott, TBA, TBA, Max: TBA
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 797R: Directed Study
Gilman, Sandler L., TBA, TBA, Max: TBA
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
Eng 799R: Doctoral Dissertation
Elliott, TBA, TBA, Max: TBA
(Written permission of DGS required prior to enrollment.)
