Pro.Seminar: Research Methods An introduction to English studies at the graduate level, emphasizing bibliography, scholarly writing, and critical intervention. Although the emphasis of the course will vary according to the aims of the instructor, areas covered may also include book history, textual editing, historical research, and other issues of professional concern to graduate students. All incoming doctoral students must take this course during the fall semester of their first year. Required Bugg, J.
ENGL 5175
CRN 21962
Master Class: Poetry For graduate students and undergraduates by application only. This will be a small, intense course addressing the complexities of line, voice and form, taught by a brilliant young practitioner in the field. The course will involve both writing new poetry and revision of previous work. NOTE: This course is open to five undergraduate students with the instructor's permission and five graduate students for a total of ten students.
For more information on undergraduate application to the class, please click here: http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/
creative_writing/undergraduate/application_to_maste_73648.asp WritingLegaspi, J.
ENGL 5216
CRN 21963
Three Medieval Embodiments In this course, we will explore three models of human embodiment (theological, medical, and musical) available to the high and late English Middle Ages; we will examine how writers, doctors, artists, and musicians gave expression to those models; we will locate and interrogate the places they overlap, interweave, and fall apart; and we will challenge ourselves to imagine how they constituted alternative modes of embodied experience in the world. To reach these goals, we will cast a wide net and study diverse primary sourcesdrawn from philosophy, medicine, theology, drama, poetry, music, and visual art alongside secondary sources in historical phenomenology, cultural studies, and performance theory. Major authors/texts include: Bernardus Silvestris (Cosmographia), Chaucer, Second Shephard’s Play, Aristotle (De anima), The Trotula, Boethius (Consolatio philosophiae and De institutione musica). All readings in English or Middle English. British 1Albin, A.
ENGL 5849 CRN 21964
Approaches to American Literature Before 1900 An introduction to recent Americanist literary scholarship, comparing and contrasting methodologies that have been brought to bear on three or four important works of U.S. literature published before 1900. American 1Hendler, G.
ENGL 5930
CRN 21965
Neuro-Lit in Historical Perspective Our current literary interest in neurology has a history. This course will look at the relatively recent history of the move from philosophical approaches associated with Cognitive Theory to biological brain research (fMRI scans of brains reading Jane Austen). And it will look at a longer history in which early-modern brain research influenced literary representations of the self. In each of these historical moments, 17th and 18th-century writers have played curious and important roles, and so authors including Milton, Marvell, Swift, Finch, Addison, Pope, Sterne, Austen, and the Scriblerians, will be considered. British 2 Boyle, F.
ENGL 5940
CRN 21966
Novel, She Wrote Novel, She Wrote: Black Female Writers and Their First Novels - “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then,” Toni Morrison declares, “you must write it.” The impulse for black female authors to write novels and the diverse manifestations of that impulse will be of primary concern in this course. What compelled black female authors in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century to write their first novels? How are themes of sexuality, motherhood, beauty, respectability, and intra- and interracial conflict represented in their texts? In what ways do their novels complement, build upon, and refer back to each other and other works? These are a few of the questions we will tackle as we read through the literature. Texts will include Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953); Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982); Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); A.J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress (1995); Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998); and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012). American 2Tyler, D.
ENGL 5992
CRN 21969
Art of Literary Nonfiction Story-Telling and the Verifiable World: The Art of Literary Nonfiction. “A reader,” according to Lee Gutkind, “doesn’t want to hear what you have to say. A reader wants to hear a story you have to tell.” And so a primary focus this literary nonfiction course will be on learning how to a) “find the story;” that is, to recognize what the facts and concrete details of a given experience are pointing to, and then b) how to shape the experience, to dramatically render your experience so that whatever point, or idea, or theme you have identified is presented to the reader indirectly, between the lines, without excessive commentary. Thus, you will learn how to transform real-life experience into a story that is true, accurate and verifiable, yet yours will be stories that have attained the level of art. If, as a writer of prose, you have spent most of your time in the role of an “explainer”—writing essays that explain the symbolism of a poem by Wallace Stevens, for instance—you will find your role as a writer in this course to be very different. Here we will ask you to become a more artful kind of explainer—in fact, not an explainer at all, but a dramatist. You will be introduced to the techniques of non-fiction writing by closely reading a wide variety of authors and by putting the lessons gained therein to practice in your own non-fiction pieces. Thecourse will focus upon the basic techniques of non-fiction writing—which, in a phrase, amounts to telling a story about the verifiable world. This course will introduce you to a number of different non-fiction genres, including the profile, the personal essay, the informative or “reported” piece, the social commentary, and the review. There will be lectures on the genre, short exercises, and in-class writing, but the main emphasis will be on work-shopping student writing. We will broaden the notion of “research” to include interviews and non-traditional fact-gathering methods as well as the standard approaches. We will discuss and practice the notion of shaping and restructuring linear “reality” in order to sustain reader interest while maintaining allegiance to fact. There will be three medium-length writing assignments of approximately 5 to 7 thousand words each plus short assignments. Writing(for MA wWC) or Elective (for MA) Kupperman, K.
ENGL 6004
CRN 13269
Colloquium:Pedagogy Theory/Practicum
Once students receive a grade of Pass for ENGL 5999, they will be approved to take the second part of the course in the fall semester (when English Ph.D. students begin to teach). The second part, ENGL 6004 Colloquium: Pedagogy Theory/Practicum (taken in the fall of the English Ph.D. student's 3rd year), introduces students to different pedagogical approaches and methods. Required 10th Course - English Doctorate StudentsGold, M.
ENGL 6215
CRN 21970
Medieval British Historical Writing History-writing was fundamental to medieval and early-modern literary sensibilities, but in its relation to truth, genre, and identity, medieval history differs dramatically from contemporary understandings of the discipline of history. This course will introduce you to the major historiographical thinkers and practitioners of the English Middle Ages and include selections from Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, and the Middle English Brut. British 1O'Donnell, T.
ENGL 6320
CRN 21971
Queer Renaissance This seminar will explore the intersections between early modern studies and queer theory, focusing on three key issues: the charged relations between queer theory and other critical frameworks such as psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuralism; the ongoing role of historicism in shaping major debates and conversations in the field; and the place of aesthetics, genre, and form in early modern and contemporary treatments of eroticism. Writers to be discussed will likely include Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Marlowe, Nashe, Crashaw, and Philips, alongside Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lacan, Bataille, Edelman, and others. British 2McEleney, C.
ENGL 6767
CRN 21972
Marriage and Nation in 19th Century British Literature This course will explore literary and cultural conceptualizations of British marriage in the nineteenth century—the period traditionally seen as an age of nationalism and one in which Parliament passed or attempted to pass an unprecedented number of reforms of the marriage law. We will examine how marriage plots written after the Union with Ireland Act (1800) envision the mutually constitutive relationship between British identity and British marriage, as well as how they address crises of national self-definition and uphold—or question—the sense of national uniqueness and superiority that the institution of marriage was meant to reinforce. British 3Vranjes, V.
ENGL 6800
CRN 21973
God and Mammon in British America Did the English explore, conquer, and settle North America in the name of true religion or the earthly pursuit of gain? How was the one aim shaped by the other, and how have these mutual concerns shaped colonial American writing? Reading both literary texts and recent scholarshipin Puritan studies, economic criticism, and Atlantic world history, this seminar will explore the discourses of spiritual and material wealth in colonial New England, the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Indies. We will examine both major texts of dissenting Protestantism from the perspective of the colonial economics and social class and major literary representations of colonial-era social class, economics, and economic self-making from the perspective of theology, morality, and the transformation of religious culture in British America over the course of nearly two centuries. Authors will include Bradford, Smith, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Taylor, Shepard, Rowlandson, Mather, Edwards, Wheatley, Equiano, and Franklin. American 1Cahill, E.
ENGL 6921
CRN 21974
Modern Language Politics Early twentieth century literature and theory was preoccupied with the relationship between language and politics, from the acknowledgement of minority and non-standard linguistic forms, to questions over the relationship between violence and language (whether or not, to paraphrase Adorno, one can write poetry after Auschwitz), to the idea of literary form itself enacting a kind of political resistance. In this course, we will analyze some of the competing philosophies about language circulating during this period and interrogate how modernist writers responded and contributed to these discussions. Likely authors include James Dawes, Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Américo Paredes, Zitkala-Ša, and Jean Toomer. American 2 Sanchez, R.
ENGL 8935
CRN 19290
Dissertation Writing Seminar Designed as a resource for all doctoral students who have passed the comprehensive exam. Students working on the dissertation proposal are encouraged to take this class. During each meeting students will present and respond to work in progress. Across the semester, the seminar will treat challenges of bibliographic research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects. Attention will also be given to the preparation of material for academic publication. Prerequisite: Post Ph.D. Comps Bugg, J.
ENGL 8936
CRN 14025
Issues in Scholarship and Academe This 0-credit seminar, open to all doctoral students, will provide a forum in which to discuss the issues that shape the pursuit of a career professing literature as well as the pursuit of a career outside of the academy. Each semester’s combination of guest-presentations and brief, selected readings will vary according to participants’ desires, but typical topics mightincludethe following: General Education and the English Department; Journal Editing and the Intellectual Life; Humanities Education and Globalism; and The Ph.D. in English and the World Outside. Selected readings mightinclude excerpts from Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (2010); Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (2008); Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities ; and Katherine N. Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Highly Recommended for all Ph.D. Students, open to both English M.A and Ph.D. students. Cahill, E.
