Graduate Courses in English

Book. You're going to be looking at a lot of these in graduate school

Comparative Literature 500.001. Introduction to Literary and Cultural Study.
Prof. Pamela Cheek

What is theory?  How can we use it and why do we resist it? This course provides an introduction to tools used regularly in literary and cultural study for analyzing cultural texts and artifacts.  It introduces influential movements in theory (including structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxist criticism, deconstruction, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality theory, distance reading) by tracking the filiations and entering the dialogue between theorists. Our focus will be on learning how to ask the questions that theoretical movements have used productively to analyze culture, as well as on identifying an argument’s limits.  By the end of the course, you will be familiar with a number of critical “moves” that you can build on in your future writing and thinking.

CLST 500: Theory and Methodology of Classical Studies
Dr. Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr.                                      

This course is designed for and required of graduate students in Classics, but is open also to graduate students in related disciplines, who wish to acquire a basic working knowledge of the methodology and tools of classical philology. The purpose is to make students familiar with the standard research methods and tools of the discipline, as well as the various sub-disciplines and related fields that constitute the study of the ancient world. In addition to the introductory readings, students will also be given specific examples/exercises and a select bibliography for topics (focusing on introductory titles and standard works of reference). Whereas the bibliography will comprise Greek and Latin titles alike, the practical examples/exercises may concentrate on one of the two languages.  By the end of this course, students will have a working knowledge of the history of Classical scholarship, and hands-on experience working with textual criticism and the methodologies of Classical philology. Students will be able to articulate how the studies of archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, philosophy, reception, and religion pertain to the ancient world.

Comp L 580.001/AfSt 397.005: African Great Books
Prof. Steve Bishop

Great Books courses around the United States, at both the high school and university level, tend to have many things in common, but one of their negative characteristics is a distinct absence of literature from anywhere in Africa. This course seeks to rectify that discrepancy by examining some of the great books of African literature. We will consider authors such as Achebe, Kane, Kourouma, Aidoo, Armah, Laye, Ba, Mofolo, Ngugi, Coetzee, Diop, Senghor, Gordimer, Couto, Oyono, Craveirinha, Soyinka, Tutuola, Brink, and Dangarembga. We will examine the historical contexts of the works, examine what makes them "great", both for their era and today, ask why such texts are routinely ignored in Western education, and investigate to what degree they are "African" and to what degree they are just simply "Literature". We will read a few critical texts that discuss what African literature is (or should be), but the class will be dominated by the literature itself.

Comp 580/Law 593/Engl 511 Law and Literature
Prof. Steve Bishop

In the early 1970s, scholars of both literature and law began to encroach on one others theoretical terrain. Legal scholars began investigating the presence of legal thought and argumentation in canonical literary works, while literary scholars began to apply literary concepts such as narration, subjectivity, voice, etc. to legal discourse. The first thorough presentation of this developing movement was The Legal Imagination, published in 1973 by an American professor of Law, English, and Classics. The movement has developed into a variety of approaches (law-as-literature, law-in-literature, hermeneutics, etc.), generally subsumed under the heading Law and Literature. This predominantly American common law phenomenon has also been developing in civil law France. While French legal scholars demonstrate no particular interest in this genre mixing, such influential writers as Barthes, Duras, Foucault, and Derrida have treated the law as any other readable discourse. Some of their writing, in fact, became seminal in the Law and Literature movement. This course investigates the principles behind the Law and Literature movement, the interaction of various intellectual traditions (especially American and French interpretative strategies), and the usefulness of such theories in "normal" legal and literary study.

Comp 580 Eighteenth-Century Women Writers
Prof. Pamela Cheek

Late Enlightenment and early Romantic women writers developed transnational personal networks and explored cosmopolitan themes in their writing in the very period in which literature began to play a crucial role in the imagining of national domestic identity. This course examines the personal and textual relationships among women writing in Britain, France, and parts of what are now Germany and Switzerland (and, to a lesser extent, North America, the Netherlands and Spain). One of our tasks will be to consider why the biography of the woman writer became ineluctably connected, in this period, to her literary production. Another will be to look at the range of “minor” literary forms relegated to women, such as the novel, letters, pedagogical manuals, and travelogues, and how writers often fused these forms in their investigations of the relation between gender, nation and cosmopolitan ideals. We will also consider the role played by national exile and revolution – conditions usually associated with male citizenship ‐‐ in the lives of women writers and of their heroines.