Eng 599R: Masters Thesis
Elliott, TBA, TBA
(Written permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 700R: Studies
in Old English Literature
Morey, TT 10:00-11:15,
Max: 12
Content: The poem known
as Beowulf constitutes
approximately one-tenth of the
extant corpus of
Old English poetry and it survives in only one manuscript.
This fraction and number disguise the importance of the poem
to scholars from Elizabethan to modern times, from its emergence
as an antiquarian curiosity to the ongoing investigations of
its historic, mythic, and literary dimensions. Classes will
consist of prepared
translation, short lectures, and discussion. Reading in relevant
scholarship will provide a basis for discussion and for term
papers.
Texts: Beowulf: An Edition,
ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson. Blackwell,
1998.
Beowulf: A
New Verse Translation, Roy
Liuzza. Broadview,
2000.
A Critical
Companion to Beowulf,
Andy Orchard. D.
S. Brewer, 2003.
Particulars: midterm (translation),
term paper (approximately
15 pages), and final examination (translation). Introductory
Old English (English 300) or equivalent preparation in reading
Old English (please see the instructor) is required. While
proficiency in class translation is not graded per se, regular
attendance and preparation of the material are crucial to success
in the course.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 710R: Studies in Renaissance Literature: Making
Love: Seventeenth-Century Amorous Poetry
Rambuss, W 1:00-4:00, Max: 12
Content: This graduate seminar
is about the poetry
of courtship, seduction,
d sex, and love. It will begin
with the anti-Petrarchanism,
anti-dualism of Donne’s “Songs
and Sonnets.” It
will end with his “Holy Sonnets” and the question
of sacred eroticism
(what does it mean
to make love to God?). In
between, the seminar
will treat—anthology-like—a
variety of other
seventeenth-century
English poets (Jonson, Herrick, Suckling, Carew, Herbert, Crashaw,
Milton, Philips, Behn) on an array of amorously inflected topics,
such as: love and friendship; early modern varieties of same-sex
eroticism; misogyny and misanthropy; lyric poetry and fetishism;
literary pornography; libertinism; ecstasy; and hagiography
and martyrology. The
course will also
undertake a fairly
close reading of the first volume of Foucault’s The
History of Sexuality (along
with some consideration
of volumes two and
three).
Particulars: A seminar presentation;
annotated bibliography;
and final seminar paper.
(Written permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng
730R: Studies
in Romanticism: Theories and Practices
Reed, Th 1:00-4:00, Max: 12
Content: An introduction
to the literature
of the Romantic era,
considering some influential theories of what defines or constitutes
this era or period or movement in literary and cultural history,
along with the salient literary practices that might be called
Romantic, the distinctive genres, authors and ideological agendas
that inform the current canon of works (or archive of interesting
texts). Recent theorist
will include Geoffrey
Hartman, Paul de Man, Jerome McGann, Frances Ferguson, Marshall
Brown and Orrin Wang. Romantic
practitioners will
include the traditionally canonical (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley and Keats) and the recently rehabilitated (Charlotte
Smith, Mary Robinson, Walter Scott, William Hazlitt, Thomas
De Quincy, Thomas Moore, James Hogg, Mary Shelley and Felicia
Hemans). Emphasis will be on
representative genres
and texts rather than exhaustive coverage.
Texts: The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed.
Stuart Curran. The Romantic Period, vol. 2A
of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed.
Abrams and Greenblatt.
Particulars: Two
short papers and
a presentation to
the class will be
required in addition
to a seminar paper
at the end of the
semester.
(Written Permission
of DGS required
prior to Enrollment)
Eng 751R: Studies in Nineteenth
Century American Literature:
Beyond the Middle
Passage:
Narratives and Notes
of Africa, the Americas,
and Other Ports of
Call
Foster,
Tu 1:00-4:00, Max:
12
Content: This seminar will chart new routes of discovery and
exploration through
the literature and
culture of early African America. We
will examine lesser
known documents that
describe areas of emigration
and immigration, travel
and communication among
people of African descent
and between these people
and others with whom
they come into contact. We
will review some well
known writings with
emphasis this time
upon expressions of
cultural DNA that eventually
create the groups we
now fairly simplistically
classify as “African
American.” This
seminar will require
archival research,
creation of bibliographies,
and a fair number of
short writings of various
genre germane to graduate
study and professional
development. Writings
with which we most
likely will begin
are by Olaudah Equiano,
Nancy Prince, Victor
Sejour, and Nicolas
Said.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior
to Enrollment)
Eng 752R: Studies in
Twentieth-Century
American Literature: Afro-Cuban
Culture Then and
Now
Sanders, Th 10:00-1:00,
Max: 12
Content: This
course will examine
Afro-Cuban history
and culture from the last decade of the eighteenth century
to the contemporary moment. Divided
into three periods, colonial (1791-1895), early republic (1895-1959), and revolutionary
(1959-now) the course will address the history, political movements and cultural
forms of expression (religion, music, literature, film, graphic arts, etc.)
for each period.
Texts: Author/artists will include Gabriel
de la Concepción
(Plácido), Juan Francisco Manzano, Juan Gualberto Gómez, Ricardo
Batrell, Esteban Montejo, Nicolás Guillén, Nancy Morejón.
(knowledge of Spanish is not required).
(Written Permission of DGS required
prior to Enrollment)
Eng 752R: Studies in
Twentieth-Century American
Literature: Native American Critical Theory
Womack, Tu 10:00-1:00,
Max: 12
Content: Native-authored
Literary Criticism
and Theory.
Texts: The
Sacred Hoop by
Paula Gunn Allen, Other
Destinies by
Louis Owens, Keeping
Slug Woman Alive by
Greg Sarris, Tribal Secrets by Robert Warrior
That the People Might Live by Jace Weaver, Why
I Can’t
Read Wallace Stegner by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Reasoning Together by
The Native Critics Collective.
Particulars:
Before the class
starts, students
need to have already
read the novels House
Made of Dawn, Ceremony,
Darkness in Saint
Louis Bearheart,
Love Medicine, and Winter
in the Blood since
constant references
will be made to them
in the criticism
and discussion. The
course will cover
book-length works
of Native American
authored criticism
between the years
1986-1997. The historical
contexts for Native
criticism and theory,
as well as its relevance
to larger aspects
of Native experience,
will be the main
emphasis of the course.
(Written Permission
of DGS required prior
to Enrollment)
Eng 780R: Studies in Criticism and Literary Methodology: Aesthetic
Theory and Postcolonial
Literature: From Plato
to Postcolonialism
Bahri, W 4:00-7:00,
Max: 8 Eng
780R (8) /CPLT 752 (4)
Content: This course
will focus on theory
that places art
in a dialectical
relation with historical
conditions, allowing
us to pose the
following questions:
How do aesthetic
considerations
contest and moderate
the social function
of literature?
How do we identify
the "truth-content" of
what novelist Julian
Barnes describes
as the "beautiful,
exact, and well-constructed
lies" of art?
Finally, how do
we learn to see
the aesthetic as
political and moral
without surrendering
literature to a
transparent and
reductive purpose?
In an age that
treasures scientific
reason and demonstrable
proofs, teachers
of literature increasingly
face the challenge
of demonstrating
to students that
literature may
be "false," but
it is not therefore
trivial. Given
the growing anxiety
over its relevance,
uncertainty about
its value, and
suspicions of the
death of literature
as a significant
social form, this
course intends
to reactivate the
question of literature's
multiple ends through
examination of
a carefully developed
set of theoretical
readings on aesthetics
in philosophy and
critical theory
from Plato to Postcolonialism. The
goal of this course
is to develop in
students an appreciation
of the purpose
and relevance of
literature through
an examination
of the relationship
between aesthetics
and worldly reality.
Texts: Plato, Aristotle,
Kant, Lukacs, Adorno,
Marcuse, Benjamin,
Horkheimer, Bhabha,
Said, Spivak, and
selected postcolonial
novelists
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng
789R: Special Topics in Literature: The Profession of English
Foster, M 1:00-4:00, Max: 12
Content: This course
includes a brief
historical survey
English as a profession
and the profession
of English. It
considers elements
of the profession
as it is popularly
presented and currently
practiced. We
discuss some of the
contemporary debates
and new directions
in literary studies
and give some attention
to pertinent questions
of theory, practice
and methodology. Throughout
the semester we will
engage in practical
learning of skills
that make professing – and
studying towards
becoming a professional
professor – easier
or more effective. We
will talk about conferences
and publishing. We will invite
other faculty to
share their ideas
about these and other
issues.
We will read and we will write texts of various lengths and
designs. At the first meeting, each participant will
have read an “academic novel” and will present
a five-minute oral review. For more details and for suggested
titles contact me at the end of the Fall semester.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng
789R: Special
Topics in Literature: Colloquium in
the Pedagogy of Literature
Cahill, W 10:00-1:00, Max: 12
Content: This colloquium, which is required of students
in their fourth year, considers the pragmatics of teaching
independently designed courses in one’s major field of
literary or cultural interest. Participants can expect
to meet b-weekly to consider such pedagogic matters as syllabus
design; the selection of assigned texts; the value of a variety
of classroom practices; and the significance of a different
institutional settings. The colloquium will combine readings
on the pedagogy of
literature with workshops
in which participants share their work and solicit feedback
from others. Students will receive credit on a S/U grading
basis.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng
789R: Special
Topics in Literature:
Inventing the American Novel
Reiss, Th 10:00-1:00, Max: 12
Content: This course will explore the early
American novel (1790s – 1860s)
as a historical phenomenon
and as a tradition
that is endlessly
reinvented by critics
and readers. We
will begin by reading
some classic theories
of the novel as a
genre (by Mikhail
Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs,
Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong,
Benedict Anderson,
and others) as well
as foundational essays on the early American
novel (by D.H. Lawrence,
Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Nina Baym, Gillian Brown, and
Jane Tompkins) and ask which tradition(s) they bring into being
and why. Following
this, we will be
reading a few classic
novels of the period
that have received
strong re-readings
in light of recent
critical paradigms
such as postcolonialism
and transnationalism, ecocriticism, and
the history of sexuality – as
well as a few that
those approaches
have recently brought
back into view.
Assigned
novels will likely
include: Royal Tyler, The
Algerine Captive,
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, James Fenimore Cooper, The
Pioneers, Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World,
Martin Delany, Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
House of the Seven
Gables, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick,
and Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons. **Note:
Although Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin is not on our reading list, I strongly recommend
reading it before
the first session of
the course.
Particulars: Two short
papers, a 15-page seminar paper, and a discussion-leading
session.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 789R: Special
Topics in Literature:
Contemporary
World Writers
Rushdie, Tu 4:00-7:00, 2 Credits, Max: 16
Content: A
four-week seminar
on contemporary world
literature, discussing
authors such as Angela
Carter, Hanif Kreishi,
Anita Desai, and
Kaszuo Ishiguro. All
students will be
expected to attend
each seminar meeting
and to produce a
short paper on each
of the four novels.
Note that this seminar
will be for two credits
only, and that all students will be graded on an S/U basis. The seminar
will meet for four weeks, from January 29-February 19.
Texts: Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats:
Collected Short Stories; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha
of Suburbia; Anita
Desai's In Custody;
Kazuo Ishiguro, The
Remains of the Day.
Permission is required
to register in
this course. To request permission,
follow the instructions
below:
Send an e-mail with
the subject line, “Rushdie seminar” to Melanie
Tipnis at mtipnis@emory.edu.
The e-mail should
contain the following
information:
Your name, your graduate
program, your year
of study, and your
student ID number. In
a short paragraph,
please provide an
explanation of how
this seminar relates
to your academic
course of study. This
e-mail must be received
by noon on Monday,
November 28.
(Written Permission of DGS required
prior to Enrollment)
Eng 789R: Trauma, Time and History
Caruth, Th 1:00-4:00,
Max: 5 Eng
789R (5), ILA 790
(5), CPLT 752 (10)
Content: This course will examine notions
of time and history
as they emerge over
the course of Freud’s
work and in later
psychoanalytically
informed theory. Freud’s
texts, beginning
with the very early
writings, will be placed
in conversation with
psychoanalytic and (literary) theoretical readings of Freud
in order to consider problems of repetition, erasure, witness
and event. In
the latter part of
the course we will
pay particular attention
to traumatic temporality
as it informs the conceptualization of war and of political
history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Authors
include Sigmund Freud,
Jean Laplanche, Jacques
Derrida, Harold Bloom,
Robert Lifton, Davoine and Gaudilliére,
Shoshana Felman, among
others.
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to
Enrollment)
Eng 789R: Special Topics in
Literature: Literature
and Laughter
Felman, M 4:00-7:00,
Max: 3 Eng 789R
(3)/CPLT 751 (9)/ILA 790 (3)
/French 770 (3)
Content: Throughout
the centuries, theorists
of different disciplines –philosophers,
theologians, psychoanalysts,
sociologists, literary
critics, poets, dramatists and political theorists--have pondered
about the significance of laughter. “Of all living
creatures only man
is endowed with laughter”, Aristotle
writes, and this
formula enjoyed immense
popularity in underscoring both the humanity of laughter
and the paradoxical conception of this signifying bodily
phenomenon as marking a spiritual privilege of mankind. For
Freud, jokes, wit and humor are
always tied up with
a struggle and a conflict dramatized in language between
sexuality and its civilized inhibition or political
repression. “Laughter,” writes
the French poet Charles
Baudelaire, with his
characteristic combination of sharp—sarcastic--critical
acuteness and poetical
compassion, “laughter is
essentially contradictory;
that is to say that it is at once a token of infinite
grandeur and an infinite misery. . .It is from the perpetual
collision of these two infinites that laughter is struck.” The
course will try to
think together about the difference between laughter
as satire and laughter as pathos, in reflecting about
what triggers laughter (or a smile) in characters, in
situations and in linguistic constructions. We will
analyze the role of the literary writer as comic dramatist
and as ironic storyteller, and explore through literary
texts what constitutes a comic perspective in relation
to life, to society and to the world.
Texts: Close
readings of literary
texts by Shakespeare,
Rabelais, Moliere,
Voltaire, Baumarchais,
Oscar Wilde, Bernard
Shaw, Beckett.
-- Marginal theoretical
and critical texts
by Baudelaire, Bergson,
Freud, Bakhtin, Felman.
(Written
Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 789R: Special Topics in Literature: Making
Places, Placing Makers: Irish and African Diasporic Women Poets
Harper, M 4:00-7:00, Max: 12
Content:
Readings for this course will focus on a small selection of the large field of
poetry by twentieth-century women poets from Ireland, Irish America, African
America, and the Caribbean. The poems and volumes will be examined closely and
at a distance. The method will emphasize aurality, written form, the relation
of individual texts and voices to larger groupings, and also issues that join
the various collections placed in conjunction with each other for the purposes
of this course: questions of place, power, gender, and identity, the changes
to these conceptions over time and across distance, and their relation to poetic
language.
Texts:
Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems; Lucille Clifton, Good Woman:
Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980; Rita Dove, Museum; Tess Gallaher, Moon
Crossing Bridge;
Nikki Giovanni, Those Who Ride the Night Winds;
Lorna Goodison, Controlling the Silver;
Vona Groarke, Flight and Earlier Poems ;
Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems ;
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Brazen Serpent (Wake
Forest;
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pharaoh’s Daughter.
Particulars:
Students will use the manuscript and print collections of the library to write
term papers on poetry from the reading list or the much wider offerings represented
in the archives. The primary research for the papers will give students the opportunity
to address additional issues such as appearances in (or absences from) literary
and other media and the implications for reputations of personal archives for
twentieth-century poets. The instructor is also an unabashed fan of memorization,
so there will be some emphasis on that in class time.
(Written
Permission of DGS required
prior to Enrollment)
Eng 791R: The Teaching of Composition
Cavanagh, W 10:00-1:00, Max: 15
Content:
Texts:
Particulars:
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 797R: Directed Study
Elliott, TBA, TBA, Max: 999
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
Eng 799R: Doctoral Dissertation
Elliott, TBA, TBA, Max: 999
(Written Permission of DGS required prior to Enrollment)
