Graduate Level Course Descriptions: Fall 2013
8815 ENGL 504 01 Advanced Creative Writing II: Tth 4:00-5:15PM (Dr. Griner)
Prerequisite: two undergraduate college courses in creative writing, or graduate-student status. This is a workshop-style course in the writing of original fiction. Class sessions are used primarily to discuss work written by class members, which is distributed and studied in advance of the discussion. You are also required to write three short papers: two will be responses to fiction readings you attend during the semester, and the third will be about a collection of short stories or a novel published in the last five years. Before selecting a book, please check with me.
You know better than I do what you hope to get from the course, and the most important goals are probably the ones you yourself discover and define. Personally, I expect to see all of you improve as writers, readers and critics. That doesn’t necessarily mean I expect you to become more polished writers; it may mean you’re more willing to take risks, or that you’ll gain greater expertise in things you’ve already learned to do well. The direction(s) in which you decide to push yourself is(are) largely (but not completely) up to you; I ask mainly that you do.
1195 ENGL 506-01 Teaching of Writing: MWF 12:00 – 15:50 PM (Dr. Kopelson)
This course introduces students to research and theories about the writing/composing process and its teaching. Readings will be drawn primarily from Rhetoric and Composition Studies (and our primary text will be _The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook_, Corbett, Myers, and Tate, eds), though we will also read in related fields and disciplines such as literacy studies and Education. This course will be of interest to students who see themselves going into careers as secondary or post-secondary teachers. However, it would also be of interest to anyone wanting to be introduced to the field of Rhetoric and Composition, or to anyone wanting to come to a more scholarly understanding of writing processes and the art of teaching these processes.
As major course projects, students can expect to produce 1) a classroom-observation report (you will observe a teacher teaching writing and write an extensive, researched paper about what you observed), and, 2) by the course’s end, a statement of your own philosophy of teaching writing. Also required are several other short writing assignments, weekly responses to the readings, regular attendance, and rigorous participation.
This course fulfills the General Education requirement in Written Communication (WR).
8816 ENGL 507-01 Teaching Creative Writing: MWF 12:00 – 12:50PM Professor Petrosino
This course will introduce a variety of approaches to teaching creative writing. Though we will focus on the benefits of the "workshop model," we'll also learn techniques for diversifying instruction to meet the needs of various student groups. Through a series of hands-on projects, students will explore methods of leading workshops and discussions of published work, responding to student work, implementing writing exercises, structuring a sample syllabus, and building individual lesson plans. Readings will include: texts on creative writing pedagogy, writers on the writing process, and craft essays. In addition to the projects enumerated above, students will conduct an in-class teaching demonstration covering a literary genre of their choice.
5437 ENGL 510-01 Grad Coop Internship MA Level (Dr. Kopelson)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
8989 ENGL 518-01 Foundations of Language: W 4:00 – 6:45PM (Dr. Patton)
Pre-requisite: ENGL 102 or 105; junior standing. Note: Cross-listed with ENGL 518. A survey of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Linguistics. This is not an in-depth exploration of single-topic in the field of Linguistics. This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the discipline of linguistics. The course is, simply put, a graduate level introductory linguistics course. NOTE: If you have taken LING/ENGL 325, this may not be the course for you! Please see the instructor to determine the suitability of this course to fit your particular needs if you are an undergraduate student and/or if you have recently taken LING/ENGL 325. This course will introduce students to aspects of theoretical (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) linguistics and explore various aspects of applied linguistics. This course will also encourage graduate students to think critically about language and its use.
7071 ENGL 520-01 World Englishes: TTh 2:00 – 3:15PM (Dr. Soldat-Jaffe)
English has rapidly spread throughout the world over the last few decades; it has replaced other (national) languages or taken the function of "the other" additional national language –a so-called intranational language. Why English? If we can assume that English has not become the international language due to intrinsic merits in the linguistic system, is it just a historical accident? How can we understand the role of English in a foreign country if a (national) language is generally been used as a tool for unifying a nation, for establishing political boundaries, and for creating dissent. We will explore to what extent a language may be used (for non-communicative ends) in a particular national context, how different varieties of English have their own sociological, linguistic, and literary manifestations in different countries, and we will try to understand why an artificial or constructed language (as opposed to English) could not be used as an international language. What are the motivations and attitudes favoring the spread of English? What is the perceived status of English? Is it an institutionalized or just a performance variety? This is a sociolinguistic course exploring the above questions from an ethnolinguistic and/or sociolinguistic point of view.
5209 ENGL 522-01 Structure of Modern English (Dr. Stewart, Jr)
Note: Cross Listed: LING 522.01
This course is designed as a linguistic exploration of the various forms and combinations of words, phrases, and sentences that contemporary speakers of English typically recognize as belonging to that language. To help in this exploration, students will:
• examine both popular and technical conceptions of the term “grammar”
• consider some of the ways in which one can vary from Standard American English (SAE) and still be speaking English
• acquire terminology and methods that permit clear description of English grammar
• collect real-life examples of actual English usage for detailed description
• identify and monitor trends in English usage to evaluate “changes in progress
The text of the description above is slightly different from what I have used for this course in the past.
Please note also that the official name of the course has changed – the descriptor “American” has been deleted (even though not all UofL databases currently reflect this change, the new title has been approved administratively).
8819 ENGL 542-75 Studies in Tudor and Elizabethan Literature: TTh 7:00-8:15PM (Dr. Billingsley)
Early modern English poets used prosody, metrics, stanza form and the genre expectations identified with those conventions to organize, discipline and elaborate their poetry. In this intensive survey of sixteenth-century English poetry, we will examine those conventions and expectations in detail to develop our understanding of Tudor poetic practice; you will exercise your ability to describe that practice in rhetorically effective critical writing. Since no familiarity with these conventions is assumed, instruction in technical prosody and metrics will be integrated with analysis and criticism of the poetry. Prose readings from the period illuminate the cultural context in which these poets worked.
By successful work in this course, students should be able to gain or reinforce the following objectives:
· General familiarity with sixteenth-century English poetry and its formal conventions, cultural context and social purposes;
· Basic understanding of English prosody as a formal and intellectual discipline for writers;
· Increased familiarity with the structure and organization of secondary critical arguments; and
· Improved ability to identify or synthesize common threads of agreement and understanding in a community of readers.
5548 ENLG 551-01 American Realism: TTh 11:00- 12:15PM (Dr. Chandler)
The course will build on study of American realism and naturalism in the 300-level literature survey by exploring each in depth. In addition to representative works of late 19th- and early 20th-century realism and naturalism, we will read and discuss period writing about each kind of literature. We will also explore relevant socioeconomic changes informing the literature, such as rising immigration rates and urbanization. And we will examine the influence of technological developments such as the appearance of photography, film, and mass-market publishing. Among the writers we may study are Jewett, James, Howells, Zitkala-Sa, Dunbar, Crane, Twain, London, Chopin, and Chesnutt. The course will also rely on scholarly studies of realism and naturalism.
8809 ENGL 554-75 Women’s Personal Narratives: CANCELLED
8817 ENGL 562-01 Shakespeare: TTh 9:30-10:45AM (Dr. Biberman)
8803 581-01 Cash and Monsters: MW 2:00 – 3:15PM (Dr. Stanev)
This course is actually titled "Civic Heroes and Foreign Devils". The listing in the schedule will be updated soon.
ENGL 581, "Civic Heroes and Foreign Devils: The World of Renaissance Drama (1598-1625)”
This course will investigate a complex set of relationships between stage, street, performance, and ideas of economic migration, capital enterprises, credit, aliens and alienation, fashion, expression, transgender identities, parody, and sexuality. The main questions that we will pursue address the ways in which drama in the age of Shakespeare negotiated specific forms of metropolitan identity that often opposed domestic to foreign, familiar to exotic, native to accented, satirically depicting the urban landscape in fluid, almost unfamiliar terms, unleashed by the sweeping currents of foreign labor, proto-capitalism, consumerism, and the disintegration of stable social markers of self, gender, and status. We will further explore closely the rapid development of urban life and economic migration under Queen Elizabeth I and her successor King James Stuart, and study the material and cultural conditions of play-acting and play-going at the turn of the seventeenth century. We will consider ultimately how the staged version of London at the turn of the seventeenth century created a new understanding of the city, polarized between domestic civic virtue and the menace of alien enterprises, affecting space and social structure, as well as reflecting on the significance of city life on both domestic and national terms. Primary dramatic texts will include Jonson’s Epicene, Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid at Cheapside and A Trick to Catch the Old One, Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, Marston’s Dutch Courtesan, Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho, Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
1206 ENGL 601-01 Introduction to English Studies: T 4:00 – 6:45 PM (Dr. Rabin)
Note: this course requires permission from the instructor)
An introduction to graduate study in the context of the intellectual and institutional history of English and American literary scholarship over the course of the past century. We will look primarily at the development of professional literary study in the United States, with attention as well to British and Continental trends and contemporary global developments. The course will focus on case studies, with clusters of readings that illustrate major issues and varying approaches to the study of literature in a university setting.
1729 ENGL 602 Teaching College Composition: Th 4:00 6:45 PM (Dr. Brueggeman, Director of Composition)
Note: this course requires permission from the instructor
1617: ENGL 604-01 Writing Center Theory and Practice: MW 4:00 – 5:15 PM (Dr. Bronwyn T. Williams)
Note: this course requires permission from the instructor
This course prepares incoming GTAs to teach in the University Writing Center. In this course we will discuss the theoretical foundation necessary for examining pedagogical issues important to an effective writing center. We will cover topics including ways of approaching writing consultations with students, responding effectively to student writing, the role of style and grammar instruction in the writing center, consulting strategies for ESL students, digital media and writing center work, assessment and record-keeping, and resource development. We we read a variety of scholarship on issues of literacy, composition and rhetoric, and writing center work as well as discuss issues raised in weekly work in the Writing Center.
1196 ENGL 606-75 Creative Writing I: M 7:00 – 9:45 PM (Professor Skinner)
Note: this course requires permission from the instructor)
This graduate-level workshop is for writers of poetry, fiction, and drama. Because this is an advanced course, I expect students to demonstrate a working knowledge of the basic literary terms appropriate to each genre. This workshop-style course invites students to continue developing their own writing practices, while adding new compositional and critical techniques to their repertoires. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated works-in-progress, but we’ll also discuss some published texts in each genre and take time to explore other relevant elements of the creative process. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions (i.e., “workshop”) in addition to polishing their own writing. Students will assemble a portfolio (containing 30-60 pages of prose/drama OR 20-30 pages of poetry OR some combination of these) at semester’s end. Each student will also write significant responses to each peer manuscript and compose 4 brief responses to selected published pieces. The final grade will be calculated based on the above items, plus attendance and participation.
5483 ENGL 610-01 Phd Coop Internship (Dr. Kopelson)
Note: this course requires permission from Dr. Kopelson
1197 ENGL 615-01 Thesis Guidance (Dr. Kopelson)
Place holder hours for students working on a thesis project only. This course requires permission from Dr. Kopelson.
8984 ENGL 621-01 Sociolinguistics: T 4:00 – 6:45 (Dr. Soldat-Jaffe)
Note: cross listed: students can inquire with Dr. Soldat-Jaffe about spaces in the linguistics section if the English section fills.
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in its social context. As such we study language primarily as a means of communication. The identity of the speaker and of the speech community defines the choice of the language. We will look questions like: What are the different language varieties? Who speaks what language variety to whom, why, and with whom? What happens when we find languages in contact? What influences the speaker’s language attitude? How does language spread, shift, die, or revive? In addition to the textbook we will also be reading scholarly articles that I will post online. This is a sociolinguistic course exploring the above questions in an interdisciplinary manner by using critical thinking.
8804 ENGL 653-75 Irish Studies – Joyce: Th 7:00 – 9:45 PM (Dr. Henke)
This graduate seminar will focus on James Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, with culminating discussions of style in Finnegans Wake as time allows. Students will be expected to take part in the critical debate about Joyce's millennial status and his contributions to the modernist movement, postcolonial literature, Irish politics, and 20th-century experimental art. Why was Ulysses judged the most important novel of the 20th century? Do you agree that Joyce is the most significant English-speaking author of the century?
The Richard M. Kain Collection of Anglo-Irish Literature is an archival treasure-trove available to students in the Ekstrom Library Rare Book Room. The 63-volume James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden, offers an invaluable resource in the preparation of class reports and graduate research papers. Consult Delinda Buie, rare books curator, for more information.
Warning: Seminar Participation may result in a life-long addiction to Joyce Studies!!! Students who write distinguished seminar papers will be encouraged to submit them for presentation at the international James Joyce Symposium in Utrecht, Netherlands, June 2014.
7062 ENGL 673-01 Clarissa & Blogs: T 4:00 – 6:45 PM (Dr. Journet)
In this seminar;
1. We will read blogs (and research about blogs) -- particularly blogs in which people write about deeply personal issues such as (only examples) coming out, or engaging in unconventional sexual activities, or responding to abuse or illness. While we will look at a range of blogs in class, you will select the specific blog you want to follow for the class project.
2. We will read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (and research about Clarissa)--one of the longest, sexiest, most compulsively readable novels in the English language. (If you have read Pamela and think you know Richardson, you are in for a surprise).
3. We will read work in narrative theory of identity.
Our take on this reading will be how individuals construct narrative identities as they write for an audience, particularly in times of stress, complexity, and trauma.
We will put Clarissa, blogs, and narrative theory together because both this novel and many blogs share an epistolary (letter-writing) structure and a concern with domestic and personal writing. Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that "these two factors [epistolary style and personal writing] . . . suggest that blogs that are interested in the ongoing production of a personal narrative are in fact poised to become a literary form with all of the resonance and sophistication of the novel." Reading Clarissa, reading blogs, reading research and theory, we will test this claim.
The primary project of the class will be to remediate parts of Clarissa as a blog. We will do this by posting excerpts from Clarissa and Lovelace's letters and writing back to them. Our responses will take a number of forms: as 18th century readers, as 21st century readers, and as scholars interested in identity, narrative and media. We will thus explore how blogs (like letters) can function as sites of identity formation, and we will make our argument in a blog.
The ultimate goal will be to shape this blog into a scholarly artifact that can be submitted to an online journal. (The editor of KAIROS has already expressed interest in the project and has offered suggestions for us to consider as we construct the blog .) At the seminar's end, I will ask anyone who wishes to be a co-author of the article, to participate in editing the blog for journal submission. (So, this course will contain an optional publishing opportunity.)
8805 ENGL 674-01 Community Literacy: W 4:00 – 6:45 PM (Dr. Sheridan)
This course will examine the histories, theories, and methods of our field’s current engagement with researching community literacy practices. We will then try to enact, on a small scale, our own understandings of meaningful community literacy work.
We will read approximately 5 book-length research studies (such as those by Ellen Cushman, John Duffy, Linda Flower, Eli Goldblatt, Jeff Grabill, Caroline Heller, Paula Mattieu), a series of foundational articles (largely fromWriting and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook), institutional documents about community engagement, and primary documents from our research sites. In addition to reading, we will research and/or participate in community literacy practices; students are encouraged to work with partners where they already have connections, or many of us may work with a class-identified partner. Assignments will include weekly responses, a mid-term academic paper, and a final textual or digital project that responds to the needs of our community partners.
8807 ENGL 681-01 Scenes of Reading: W 4:00 – 6:45 PM (Dr. Griffin)
1800-1900
This seminar will explore depictions of, research on, and theories about reading in nineteenth-century America and Britain. Book History and Cultural Studies have made this an important area of study in recent years, and we will draw upon this new work. Reading is also represented as central in the life-stories of many Victorians, historical and fictional, although reading experiences differed wildly depending upon class, race, gender, family, as well as geographic location.
Attempting to understand these varied reading experiences raises many scholarly and research questions, e.g.: What reading materials were available at a given historical moment? How were they produced and distributed? What did they cost? How, literally, were they read--aloud? silently? in a group? alone? How were they understood? What functions—personal, cultural, economic, educational—did reading serve? What were “bad books”? Why?
Possible readings: Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading; Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction; Cornelius,"'We Slipped and Learned to Read'" Slave Accounts of the Literary Process"; Garvey, Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating"; Hochman, “Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as History in the 1890s; Hughes & Lund, The Victorian Serial; Leighton & Surridge, “Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction”; Machor “The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction"; McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies; Radway, “What’s the Matter with Reception Study? ; Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class; Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America; Sicherman, Barbara. Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women; Smith& Wilhelm. Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men; Sweeney, Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons; Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public, as well as works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frederick Douglass, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson.
8806 ENGL 681-75 Ethnographic Methods: (CANCELLED)
8808 ENGL 686-75 Hemispherical American Literature: W 7:00 – 9:45 PM (Professor Clukey)
This course will examine American literature through a “hemispheric” framework. Hemispheric studies seeks to rethink American exceptionalism by recontextualizing the United States within a shared cultural history of the Americas. We’ll begin with a group of theoretical and critical texts that will help us acquire a common vocabulary for literary analysis. Next, we’ll turn to a series of literary texts that think “beyond the nation” to deconstruct and reconstruct traditional ideas of what it means to be “American.” Along the way we’ll look at novels that rewrite American history from occluded perspectives (immigrants, bandits, insurrectionists, indigenous peoples, and slaves) and find cosmopolitanism in some surprising—and not so surprising—places (the modern city, the village, the plantation, the reservation, the border).
8818 ENGL 688-01 Watson Seminar: M 4:00 – 6:45 PM (Dr. Carolyn Miller, Visiting Watson Professor)
Genres can be understood rhetorically as ways of acting together, recurrent communicative interactions that enable social coordination. Genres both constrain and enable; they link together in systems and ecologies that mediate agency and social structure, constituting our social identities, institutions, and cultures. Genre has been an active area in rhetorical studies for the past 20 years. There are studies of traditional genres such as presidential inaugurals, papal encyclicals, diaries, apologias, as well as of professional and workplace genres such as scientific research articles, employee performance appraisals, and corporate annual reports. And in composition studies there is an active interest in classroom and pedagogical genres. But genre is a concept that cuts across disciplines and media—in literary studies, genres are normative traditions that associate form and meaning; in the visual arts, there are genres of painting, sculpture, and public memorials; and films are also classified by genre, both by critics and by movie-goers.
The new digital media have multiplied opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres (for example, Wikipedia has an elaborate taxonomy of videogame genres). But how do new genres emerge? How do they balance stability with change? How do we develop shared recognitions and identifications in unprecedented situations? How do we discern recurrent patterns in an environment of volatility and change? How are new genres related to old ones? Can the same theories that were developed for print genres account for visual, auditory, and digital genres?
In this graduate seminar, we will read widely, to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of genre theory and to begin answering some of the questions raised above. We will also examine a wide variety of genres, to discern and analyze new genres as well as old genres when they were emerging, with an eye on the balance between stability and change and on the relationships between genre, identity, and power.
1719 ENGL 689-01 Dir Reading-Comp Exam (Dr. Kopelson)
Note: requires permission from Dr. Kopelson. Is for students taking PhD comprehensive exams only.
1198 ENGL 690-01 Dissertation Research (Dr. Kopelson)
Note: requires permission from Dr. Kopelson. Placeholder for PhD students only.
8799 ENGL 692-75 Alien Epistemologies: M 7:00 – 9:45 PM (Dr. Jaffe)
To borrow from the semi-ficticious International Necronautical Society: how and why does matter matter? "Speculative realism" is a new term of art for the theoretical turn to materialism contra the linguistic turn and ignoring Marx (forward from Heidegger: Benjamin, Flusser, Serres, Latour, Malibou, Badiou, Luhmann, and Kittler). Others prefer "speculative materialism" or "object oriented ontology” for this initiative, but this seminar - called "alien epistemology" - will examine the various critical yields from debates surrounding knowledge and the posthuman, posthumanism and post-humanities in contemporary literary and cultural studies - moving beyond the work on cyborgs of a decade ago. We'll track the "return" to things or objects and access recent attempts to try to roll back the linguistic turn. We'll spend some time on novels "written" by aliens, dogs, robots, computers and other alternate forms of sentience (Lovecraft, Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl, etc.) but the focus will be mostly theory (the syllabus is likely to include selections from Benjamin, Blanchot, von Uexküll, Serres, Latour, Foucault, Hayles, Quentin Meillassoux, Eugene Thacker, Agamben, Esposito, Cary Wolfe and others).
