2022—2023 English Graduate Course Archive
Fall 2022
ENGL 5023: The Phenomenon of Oprah's Book Club
Dennis Tyler
CRN 48107
Since its inception in September 1996, Oprah’s Book Club (OBC) has transformed the literary landscape—from ushering in a new wave of enthusiastic readers and spiking the sale of books around the globe to reshaping the advertising and marketing of literature and offering readers strategies for engaging it. This course will explore the phenomenon of OBC, thinking through its formation and rise as well as its strategies and approaches to literature. We will tackle these matters as we examine closely themes of racial beauty, sexual assault, racism, imprisonment, disability, and politics in OBC-selected texts, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
ENGL 5108: The Visionary Epic Writers: Spenser, Milton, Blake
Mark Caldwell
CRN 48105
We'll discuss manageable selections from three classically “canonical” English writers who worked between 1591 and 1827, from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Spenser, Milton, and Blake (both a writer and visual artist) all wrote epics--historically the career-topping genre for ambitious writers. All three were powerful, even extreme imaginers—visionaries--who in some ways affirmed the dominant values of their times, but who also questioned, attacked, and saw beyond them--pre-moderns, in other words, who often uncannily foreshadowed post-modernism.
ENGL 5111: Race, Religion, And Monstrosity in Medieval Literature
Suzanne Yeager
CRN 48105
The medieval taste for the exotic has introduced many audiences to a range of monstrous beings, from ferocious giants and dog-headed men to the peace-loving sciapod. Medieval studies of monstrosity have often been linked solely to the pre-modern understanding of the exotic East, and have been viewed as attempts to theorize the different human “races” found there. Moreover, crusading further complicated the discourses of monstrosity in the perception of non-Christian religious other who was perceived, as Debra Higgs-Strickland put it, “as ugly as sin.” Yet, the medieval language of monstrosity was not always limited to travel narrative, nor to the pejorative, for it was used to describe heroes, saints, even the Christian deity in far more familiar contexts than many would imagine. In this course we will examine the discourse of monstrosity as a complex critical lens through which pre-modern writers asked important questions of race, religion, civic virtue, and human morality. In our study, we will read selections from Pliny, Augustine, and others before moving through a range of texts, including the Beowulf manuscript, medieval drama, romance, and Mandeville’s account.
ENGL 5122: Camp, Art, and Kitsch: Questions in Postmodern Aesthetics.
Daniel Contreras
CRN 48106
This class will employ literary and theoretical perspectives to define and critique problems in contemporary aesthetics and cultural difference. We will draw on historical works on the aesthetic which will include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the primary focus of the course will be on “camp” and “kitsch,” which are important and vital aesthetic categories but remain fiendishly difficult to define. This class will work to historicize these slippery terms and then employ them to critique postmodern Latinx literature and art. One of the objectives of the course is to think of cultural difference (for example, Latinx) as being composed of a history and an aesthetic, rather than one that is based on an “identity.” Camp and kitsch, I argue, are a way out of the impasse of identity politics and offer a resistance that comes from irreverence and subversion.
ENGL 5194: Master Class: Fiction and Other Art Forms Fiction and Other Forms
Stacey D'Erasmo
CRN 45543
Neither the writing nor the reading of fiction happens in an aesthetic vacuum. We read, watch, listen, feel, and even taste all manner of other art forms, and these experiences inspire us, move us, and often find their way into what we write and how we write. In this course, we will explore the influence of music, the visual arts, theater, film, and even cooking on the fiction we read and write, and vice versa. Bring your curiosity and your willingness to be changed as a writer by other ways of making art.
ENGL 5634: Modernists/Victorians
Christopher GoGwilt
CRN 48109
This course examines landmarks of Victorian literature and transatlantic English modernism, exploring breaks and continuities between Victorian and Modernist writers. Covering major texts from the 1840s to the 1940s, the course will also consider theoretical arguments about the status of the "classic" in literary history, and specifically as these define the fields of Victorian studies, modernism, modernity, and the classifications of "English" and "American" literature.
ENGL 5843: Early Women Novelists
Susan Greenfield
CRN 48110
In this course we will read a selection of early novels by English women authors, including at least some of the following: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Frances Burney’s Evelina, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, and the anonymously authored The Woman of Colour. Our goal is to develop rigorous, historically sensitive, close readings of each novel, in part by focusing on the representation of gender, class and race. The last category is especially important. Several of the novels above feature Black characters and address the slave trade, slavery and/or British colonialism. Given our own moment in history, I believe it is imperative to foreground discussions of race and antiracism, and I will organize my pedagogy accordingly.
ENGL 5001: RESEARCH METHODS
Frank Boyle
CRN 13250
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.
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Required for all incoming PhD students.
ENGL 5115: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 33500
Open to graduate students who have secured an internship in publishing or other degree-related fields for the fall 2021 semester. Before enrolling in this Tutorial, you must contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
ENGL 5998: MA CAPSTONE
Maria Farland
CRN 45455
Seminar for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone requirement (note: the Capstone requirement may also be fulfilled, as an independent study, during the spring or summer semesters. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
ENGL 6004: COLLOQUIUM: PEDAGOGY THEORY PRACTICUM
Catherine Chaput
CRN 13269
This course introduces students to central histories, issues, and debates in writing and rhetorical studies. By highlighting key theoretical and terminological developments, this course lays the way for informed self-reflective practice based in awareness of the most current scholarly work in rhetoric and composition, thereby helping participants start to define their own identities as teachers of first-year composition as well as literature and other courses.
ENGL 8935: DISSERTATION SEMINAR
Maria Farland
CRN 40212
This 0-credit seminar is designed as a resource for all doctoral students. 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 research and strategies of effective writing specific to large projects.
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Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.
ENGL 8936: ISSUES IN SCHOLARSHIP AND ACADEMIA
Andrew Albin
CRN 14025
This 0-credit seminar, open to all graduate students, serves two purposes. First, it provides a forum for workshopping writing projects apart from the dissertation: qualifying papers, conference papers, article submissions, fellowship narratives (internal and external), job market materials, and the like. Second, it invites speakers and builds conversations around aspects of the profession in need of demystification: collegial networking, edited collections, conference panel proposal/organizing, writing a peer review, writing a book review, etc. Mode of instruction will seek to accommodate the widest range of students, including ABD students.
Spring 2023
ENGL 5026: Ethnic Camera: Race and the Visual Archive
Robert Hernández
CRN 47917
This seminar examines the intersections of race, culture, and technology. Assessments of different camera-generated records will elucidate how ideas of race have been visually prevalent in various photographic genres including (but not limited to): tourist keepsakes, postcards, ethnographic documentation, portraiture, street photography, fotonovelas, conceptualism, and the contemporary selfie. Students will be challenged to not only compare long-standing and emergent thinkers at the cutting edge of race and visual culture studies but to also “read” image-based texts. The origins of these visual genealogies will be foregrounded in seminar while giving students opportunities to see how visions of racial difference continue to shape contemporary life.
ENGL 5123 The Literature and Psychology of Disgust
Leonard Cassuto/ Dean McKay
CRN 47919
Disgust is considered a primary emotion – that is, all cultures have similar expressions and experiences that characterize the presence of disgust. Interestingly, despite the universal experience of disgust, we don’t understand it very well. Recent work has revealed that disgust is a complex emotional state, ranging from basic food-based revulsion to morally-based reactions.
Literature is full of disgust, and so are other media, like the movies. You might even say that storytelling depends on it. Humanists have studied “the aesthetics of disgust,” and there’s good and interesting work on the subject of disgust in literary criticism (including affect theory), philosophy, and anthropology. We’ll be reading in those disciplines in our effort to understand this fundamental but (perhaps because it’s so reflexive) mysterious emotion.
The idea of emotion opens the door to psychology, and the interdisciplinary partnership at the heart of this course. Psychological research on disgust began with descriptions and experiments around the basic experience of the emotion. The nature of disgust has been covered in a wide range of traditions within psychology – basic experimental, social, psychodynamic, behavioral, clinical, developmental, psychometric, and evolutionary psychology, as well as experimental neuroscience. All have research investigating disgust. This collective line of inquiry shows that what was originally considered an emotion with a single aim – protection from ingesting harmful substances – evolved to reflect a highly complex emotional experience.
In this interdisciplinary, team-taught course, we will use the imaginative and philosophical literature of disgust as a way to understand the emotion, and vice versa: we will use disgust (which we will explore with the tools afforded us by psychology) to understand literature and the human imagination that produces it. In implicating the work of one discipline with another, we will put them into dialogue, as we seek to understand a complex and powerful human response.
ENGL 5145 Geographies of the Book: Nation, Colony, Plantation
Jordan Stein
CRN 47920
This theory and methods seminar will assess, explore, and develop connections among book history, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. Our semester will move from major historiographic accounts of books and printing that center England and France, to colonial and postcolonial studies that center the US, India, and New Zealand, before engaging bibliographic research into histories of printing in plantation zones including Haiti and Jamaica. Along the way, we’ll consider how this history bears out against more theoretical accounts that nuance key concepts like nationalism, colonialism, diaspora, labor, and literacy. Course emphasis will skew toward the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but final projects may engage any historical period(s) as well as any geographic region(s). The seminar will support its members as they pursue their own original research in NY-area archives. No prior experience with rare books will be presumed.
ENGL 5196: Master Class: Dragons, Daggers, and Dukes: Writing Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Romance/Mystery
Mary Bly
CRN 48428
Genre fiction is, by definition, writing that bows to limitation: conventions shape the parameters of a story. Yet in excellent genre fiction, the imaginary world is doubly creative despite constraint or convention. In this class, we’ll tackle bestsellers: pop fiction that engages and enthralls readers. We will study and experiment before setting into a final manuscript in the genre of your choice.
MVST 5300: Occitania: Language and Power
Nicholas Paul / Thomas O'Donnell
CRN 47976
This team-taught interdisciplinary course introduces students to the cultural world of a medieval "south": Occitania, a region defined by language stretching from the foothills of the Alps to the pathways across the Pyrenees and from the Mediterranean almost to the Loire. Students will study the Old Occitan language and its manifestations in documentary writing, historical narrative, and the poetry of the troubadours from the eleventh until the thirteenth centuries. In order to best understand the context for this literature, course topics will include urban and rural communities, gender and power, the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath, and the beginning of vernacular book production.
ENGL 5600: Special Topics in Rhetorical Theory & Criticism: Rhetoric, Race, and Identity
Catherine Chaput
CRN 47921
Using a rhetorical lens, this course explores the ontological and epistemological history of race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories as they have been invented alongside capitalism. We will begin with overarching theories, studying scholars like Silvia Federici on gender and sexuality; Silvia Wynter and Cedric Robinson on race and the invention of political economic Man; and Glen Coulthard and Walter Mignolo on settle colonialism. This focused genealogy provides insights for how theorists, critics, and activists might produce alternative political economic, ecological, and humanist relations. Consequently, we will explore a range of contemporary scholarship that takes up these theories to produce more socially just modes of being in the world. There will be a stress on Black Studies scholarship as an extended case study of such future-oriented production, but this work will intersect with feminist, queer, and settler colonial scholarship.
This course will serve as an introduction to rhetorical theory, but no previous experience studying rhetoric is required for this course. This course will count toward the in-process Certificate in Rhetoric and Writing for degree and non-degree students, but will also be of interest to students with diverse interests, including rhetoric and writing as well as capitalism, neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and more.
ENGL 5999: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TEACHING WRITING
Crystal Colombini
CRN 44282
This course builds on the foundation developed in ENGL 5999 by delving into research-supported best practices for preparing students for diverse writing contexts. Readings and discussions will highlight writing and teaching strategies that support students' critical thinking and writing skills, covering topics related to primary and secondary research, information literacy, discourse and disciplinary communities, rhetorical and audience analysis, multimodal composition, effective response and assessment strategies, cognitive scaffolding and assignment design, and more.
Required 10th course for PhD Students. To register, contact the graduate administrator after receiving a passing grade in the first part of the Practicum, ENGL 5999.
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ENGL 6201: Race and Affect Theory
James Kim
CRN 47915
This seminar will stage a dialog between critical race and ethnic studies on the one hand and affect theory on the other. In what ways does the affective turn call for a rethinking of the major themes of race and ethnic studies? In what ways does recent work in race and ethnic studies challenge or complicate the ascendancy of affect theory in the humanities? How might these two bodies of scholarship deepen and enrich each other's insights? And how might we link them to other major issues currently occupying literary and cultural studies (e.g., neoliberal hegemony, temporality, and the limits of the human)? Our discussion of these theoretical matters will be grounded in readings of major works of twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American literature and culture. Possible authors include John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Chang-rae Lee, Susan Choi, Kiran Desai, Young Jean Lee, and others.
ENGL 5115: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 44277
This seminar is open to graduate students pursuing internships in publishing, museum management, or arts administration during the spring 2021 semester. Please contact the Director of Graduate Studies to make sure that your internship qualifies for course credit.
ENGL 5998: MA CAPSTONE (Tutorial)
Maria Farland
CRN 45053
Required course for MA students who wish to fulfill the Capstone assignment. Please contact the DGS if you are unsure about which semester would be best for your Capstone completion.
ENGL 8935: DISSERTATION SEMINAR (Wednesdays, 5:30-8:00 PM)
Andrew Albin
CRN 44283
This 0-credit seminar is 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.
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Required for all PhD students preparing the dissertation prospectus.