This course offers an introduction to graduate study in English for entering M.A. and Ph.D. students, with emphasis on the key conversations and debates animating the discipline right now as well as the professional skills and knowledge necessary to succeed on a changing job market. Course content will draw proportionally from the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and language & rhetoric; readings will be both exemplary and representative, covering some of the best and most essential recent work in English, helping us understand how we got here as a discipline, and giving us a roadmap for promising new directions in theory and method that might relate to our scholarly interests. In addition to regular readings and seminar discussions, we will meet periodically with faculty members from across the department for special sessions on individual areas of research. Assignments will be given over to questions of professional development, large and small: What is your subfield and where (e.g. journals, conferences) does it live? How do you formulate a generative research question? What does good academic writing look like? Where do you want your M.A. or Ph.D. to take you?

This course will present a compendious overview of the major transition that took place in the 60s and 70s  from “humanist” to “structuralist” and “contextualist” approaches of various sorts.  Humanism, in the loose, large sense intended here, refers to the notion that individual consciousness is the prime source of agency.  By contrast, structuralism and contextualism analyze agency in terms of forces and structures that give form to individual consciousness itself, and are therefore in crucial ways behind its intendings.  There are difficult conceptual issues that arise around the dichotomy between these two approaches, and in this class we will work through these issues in rigorous detail.  All of this will be brought to bear on the fundamental issues of reading and interpretation, and particularly on the question of what constitutes valid interpretation. We will be reading some standard theoretical texts that you might well have encountered before, but we will read them at a depth that you might well not have previously experienced. The theorists discussed in this course laid the foundations for everything that criticism does today, but unfortunately younger scholars are no longer getting the in-depth background knowledge they need to understand the theoretical basis what contemporary scholarship does.  This course is intended to provide that foundation.

Tentative reading list:

Volosinov, Ch. 3 of Marxist Philosophy of Language

Foucault, “What is an Author”

Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” selections from Of Grammatology

Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”

Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

Lacan, selections from Ecrits

Staten, "Kant Avec Sade, or The Bride Stripped Bare"

An exploration of the powers-- and limits-- of cultural mechanisms seeking to impart integrity and communalizing focus to a sprawling US society during the nineteenth century. At the outset, we’ll study US art and culture in general-- maps, Currier and Ives engravings, and other cultural artifacts through the lens of which ostensible American wholeness and identity are imagined—as well as major theorists of the nation-building process such as Sacvan Bercovitch, Homi Bhabha, and Benedict Anderson. We’ll then proceed to focus throughout the remainder of the course on how the problem of a US focal center plays itself out in literary texts. To what degree do versions of a US communal imaginary become persuasive and credible against a backdrop that includes increasingly globalized, trans-national space, racial, class and gender inequities, Indian removal, immigration, slavery, and civil war? What sort of cultural work do rhetorics and symbols of American unity perform–-or fail to perform-–throughout this period? To what degree does the accreditation of symbolic affirmations of American unity require a supplementary amnesia: a forgetfulness of underlying conditions which much American literature and art then proceeds to remember?

Let me emphasize that by virtue of its very subject matter, this course gathers in a representative selection of literary and visual materials from across the spectrum of nineteenth-century American culture, and so serves to provide a fairly comprehensive guide to this period, and to nineteenth-century studies in general.

Readings will include the following (either in totality or by focusing on selections): Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne; Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Whittier, Snow-Bound; Melville, Moby-Dick; Frederick Douglass, Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom; Chief Seattle’s Speech and the text of the Indian Removal Act; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Stephen Crane, The Portable Stephen Crane; Henry James, The American Scene.

This Cultural Studies course explores public scholarship as both an outcome and a domain of inquiry. This course will ask how humanities research engages various publics and how that engagement can be made legible beyond the university – through publication or dissemination of resultant scholarship – and how that engagement can be treated as itself a domain of scholarly inquiry.  We will do this by studying one sample practice: collaboration across geographies or architectures of incarceration. Readings will be drawn from the humanities, social science disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and various public sectors including mainstream journalism, alternative media, digital platforms, community-based organizations, and currently incarcerated groups.  Course outcomes will include content knowledge in critical carceral studies; skills acquisition in multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral literacies and communication; and production of a project in “public scholarship” connecting content knowledge and skill versatility, including self and collective reflection on process and outcomes. While the main readings for the course will focus on incarceration, students may develop individual course projects focused on collaboration across walls in other domains.  If you have questions about how your individual project fits with the goals of this course, please feel free to email me directly.

More on our approach: This class will take a two-pronged approach to the status of public scholarship in the humanities by asking students to consider public scholarship as means or ends. In considering public scholarship as a means, we will ask: How does public scholarship become a means to achieve specific research, teaching, or community-action goals? How does it become a means to change who counts as a knowledge-producer and how the value and rewards for producing knowledge are distributed? By attending carefully to public scholarship as a means to specific goals, how might the university participate in circuits of knowledge production and dissemination without asserting copyright or other domain privilege over the product? In considering public scholarship as an end in itself, we will ask: What does public scholarship do that traditional academic scholarship does not? What is the role of publication – in print, online, in community fora – in defining a public? What is the role of research – in print, online, or community fora – in defining scholarship? How can attention to cross-sectoral protocols of research and publication change how we define the goals of humanities scholarship?

Catalog Description: Readings in composition theory and discussion of practical classroom applications.

Catalog Description: Readings in composition theory and discussion of practical classroom applications.

English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESOL teaching. The course involves daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, a video teaching demonstration, and seminar discussion. There are weekly writing assignments and a final project. No required texts. Only open to MATESOL students.

This course is a combination of the theoretical and the practical. The goal is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the historical developments in TESOL methodology from the current perspective of a ‘post-method’ era. Students will explore evolutions in the field by reading, analyzing, and discussing research related to second language teaching methods and materials development. They will organize and participate in workshops and a wide range of hands-on activities aimed at familiarizing them with diverse pedagogical approaches, teaching philosophies, instructional materials, and classroom techniques. The course will help learners enhance their professional skills, analyze learning situations, and increase their ability to promote second language learning. They will learn to develop and adapt instructional materials based on current research and on students’ needs, desires, learning processes, and institutional environments.

Catalog Description: Research and writing project under the close supervision of a faculty member expert and with the consultation of a second faculty reader. The field of study is chosen by the student. Work is independent and varies. The model is an article in a scholarly journal.

Catalog Description: Intensive reading in literature or criticism, directed by members of doctoral supervisory committee.