Graduate Level Courses, 2003-2004

Department of English
Semesters I and II, 2004-2005
Graduate Credit Courses in
Language and Literature

(All courses listed = 4 credit hours unless otherwise noted.)

Boston University Department of English
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
(617) 353-2506
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Creative Writing

CAS EN 503, 504 Fiction Workshop Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom two or three stories or a portion of a novel must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. A workshop in the writing of fiction. Manuscripts read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students. Cooley, 1st semester, Ha Jin, 2nd semester

CAS EN 505, 506 Poetry Workshop Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom a selection of poems must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. A workshop in the writing of poetry. Manuscripts are read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students. Pinsky, either semester

CAS EN 507 Seminar: Creative Writing, Fiction Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom two or three stories or chapters from a novel must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students. Epstein, either semester

CAS EN 508 Seminar Creative Writing, Poetry Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom a selection of poems must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. Individual conferences. Enrollment limited chiefly to graduate students. Walcott, 1st semester, Warren, 2nd semester

CAS EN 509, 510 Exercises in Dramaturgy Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom a short play, or scene from a play, must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. A seminar in the writing of original plays, emphasizing a dramaturgical approach to structure, language, and theme. Exercises in imitation of the masters of modern drama to be assigned, beginning with Ibsen (Fall semester) and ending with Mamet. Snodgrass, 1st semester, Schotter, 2nd semester

GRS EN 706 Writing Plays
Prereq: consent of instructor, to whom one act or a full-length play must be submitted during the period just before classes begin. A workshop in the writing of plays. Manuscripts are read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Limited enrollment. Walcott, 1st semester, Snodgrass, 2nd semester

Language and Linguistics

CAS EN 513 Modern English Grammar
A systematic analysis of English, applied to the reading of literature and the writing of essays. Tropp, 1st semester: (A1) TR 9:30-11; (B1) TR 12:30-2

CAS EN 515 History of the English Language I
The English we each use has a rich heritage, mostly from the seventeenth century on. We explore what that heritage is, what its sources are, and how it came to shape our present speech. Green, 1st semester: TR 8-9:30

CAS EN 516 History of the English Language II
Dryden said that few in England could read Chaucer. How did English change radically in three hundred years, from 1400 to 1700? We explore the social, cultural, and linguistic dynamics of this change. Green, 2nd semester: MWF 9-10

CAS EN 518 Linguistic Problems in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
Prereq: consent of instructor. Application of linguistic concepts to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Includes description of contemporary English grammatical structures that pose problems for learners and teachers. Saitz, 1st semester: T 4-7; Zlateva, 2nd semester: T 4-7

Literature

CAS EN 525 Literature of the Seventeenth Century
Poetry, drama, and prose of the first half of the century in historical context. Topics will include genre, gender, and the relationship between politics and literature. Authors may include Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Speght, Herbert, Wroth, Bacon, Browne, Ford, Webster, and Milton. (EN 526 not offered in 2004-2005.) Murphy, 1st semester: TR 9:30-11

CAS EN 527 Literature of the Eighteenth Century
Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, Astell, Defoe, Haywood, and others, read in their historical contexts. Literary structures understood in conjunction with social, political, institutional, and intellectual structures of the age. (EN 528 not offered in 2004-2005.) Winn, 2nd semester: TR 9:30-11

CAS EN 529, 530 The Romantic Age
Romanticism considered in light of social, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical issues. First semester, from 1789 to 1810: authors may include Blake, Burke, Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, and others. Second semester, from 1810 to 1832: authors may include Byron, Cobbett, Scott, Clare, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, De Quincey, Hazlitt, or others. Wagenknecht, 1st semester: TR 12:30-2; Stauffer, 2nd semester: MWF 12-1

CAS EN 533 American Literature: Beginnings to 1855
American literature from the beginnings to the brink of the Civil War. Puritan origins, print culture, American poetic taste, entertainment, and the debate over slavery. Works by Bradstreet, Jefferson, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Jacobs, and Melville. Otten, 1st semester: MWF 10-11

CAS EN 534 American Literature: 1855 to 1918
Idealism and realism in American literature. Poetry of Whitman and Dickinson. Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams. Theory and practice of fiction in Twain, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. Otten, 2nd semester: MWF 3-4

CAS EN 535 Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
A survey of major figures and movements in British and Irish poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, including Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Auden, the Imagists, the Georgians, and the War Poets. Fogel, 1st semester: MWF 10-11

CAS EN 536 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Study of five or six poets from the following: Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Ammons, Ashbery, Plath, Ginsberg, or Merrill. Fogel, 2nd semester: TR 12:30-2

CAS EN 543 The Nineteenth-Century English Novel
The novel from Scott to Hardy. Among the works to be discussed: Scott's Waverley, Austen's Emma, Dickens's Bleak House, Eliot's Middlemarch, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Fogel, 1st semester: MWF 12-1

CAS EN 545 The Nineteenth-Century American Novel
From its beginnings through the nineteenth century. Works by Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Howells, and others. 1st semester: Van Anglen, MWF 3-4. 2nd semester: Van Anglen, TR 12:30-2

CAS EN 546 The Modern American Novel
From 1900 to 1950. Works by Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others. 1st semester: Matthews, TR 11-12:30. 2nd semester: Mizruchi, TR 9:30-11

CAS EN 547 Contemporary American Fiction
Study of major American novels from the 1960s to the present by DeLillo, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Oates, Pinckney, and others. Chodat, 1st semester: MWF 9-10; Mizruchi, 2nd semester: 12:30-2

CAS EN 561 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Studied as a literary exploration of old hierarchies and new economies, Chaucer's poetic sense of personal engagements, social disruptions, and spiritual challenges. Levine, 1st semester: TR 12:30-2

CAS EN 565 Spenser
An extended study of The Faerie Queene, exploring Spenser's deep admiration for and profound criticism of Elizabeth's political and cultural regime. Martin, 2nd semester: MWF 1-2

CAS EN 571 Hitchcock
A study of desire and death in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, from the silent period through The Birds. Readings in Freud, Poe, and film theory (Mulvey, Modleski, Jameson, Zizek). Weekly screenings. Monk, 1st semester: M 2-4:30; W 2-4

CAS EN 572 Coming of Age in Fiction and Film
The theme of coming-of-age in fiction by Austen, Balzac, James, Joyce, Lawrence, Bellow, and Ozick and in films directed by Richardson, Ray, Cacoyannis, Olmi, Wyler, Schlesinger, and others. Brown, 2nd semester, TR 2-3:30

CAS EN 573 Victorian Poetry
Introduction to major poets writing in the period 1830 to 1914. No prior knowledge of Victorian poetry is assumed. Emphasis on detailed analysis and discussion of formal and topical concerns characteristic of verse written in the period. Karlin, 2nd semester, TR 2-3:30

CAS EN 574 Victorian Controversy
Political, religious, and aesthetic controversy in the Victorian period. Texts by Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Newman, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rosetti, Wilde and other. Brown, 1st semester, MWF 11-12

CAS EN 575 American Renaissance Poetry
The poetic practices and programs of Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson examined in relation to their modes of publication and to the verse of their popular contemporaries. Van Anglen, 1st semester: MWF 2-3

CAS EN 577 17th Century Literature and Gender
By placing major canonical seventeenth-century works of literature, like Milton's Paradise Lost, in conversation with texts by women writers and other contemporaries, we will consider the centrality of questions of gender to writing of the period. Murphy, 2nd semester: MWF 2-3

CAS EN 578 Fiction of the Migrant
Primary focus on the experiences of immigration and exile, with reading also of fiction on other kinds of human migrations. Works by Willa Cather, O.E. Rölvaag, Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, Shusaku Endo, and contemporary authors. Ha Jin, 2nd semester: R 2-5

CAS EN 579 Literature of the U.S. Civil War
This course examines literature's place in a time of national crisis, when writers were re-evaluating key terms of American identity: freedom, slavery, patriotism, democratic representation. Attention to relationship between literature, photography, and history. Whitman, Dickinson, Brady, Melville, Lincoln, Alcott, Crane. Miller, 1st semester: TR 9:30-11

CAS EN 580 The Pearl Poet
The Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight as symptoms of central social, erotic, theological, rhetorical, and prosodic (with emphasis on the alliterative tradition) problems in Middle English Literature. Levine, 2nd semester: TR 11-12:30

CAS EN 581 Wilde/Joyce
Reading of major works of fiction, drama, and speculation about art from 1890 to 1940 by two highly influential, flamboyant Irish writers. Considerable attention will be devoted to Joyce's Ulysses in relation to earlier works by both authors. Riquelme, 1st semester: TR 2-3:30

CAS EN 582 Wordsworth and Coleridge
Poetry and prose of Wordsworth and Coleridge, mainly from 1795 to 1805, with attention to the poets' reciprocal influence within the context of friends, family, and associates, as well as literary tradition and larger historical developments. Principal focus: Lyrical Ballads. Rzepka, 2nd semester: TR 11-12:30

CAS EN 584 The Postwar Epic Novel
A study of experimental epic novels by postwar American writers such as Ellison, Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Silko, focusing on genre, character, and the fate of ethics, politics, religion, and history in an age suspicious of grand narratives. Chodat, 2nd semester: TR 9:30-11

CAS EN 588 Caribbean Poetry
A study of twentieth century Caribbean poetry in English(es). Anthologies and major figures (Walcott, Brathwaite, Goodison, Roach). Consideration of the poet in a small society, creole vs. standard language, oral vs. literate norms, relations to diverse literary traditions. Breiner, 2nd semester: MWF 11-12

CAS EN 590 Book Work
How do versions and editions of literary works matter? We will study books as material bearers of meaning, focusing on issues of aesthetics, media and transmission, editorial intervention, and cultural legacy. Training in library research methods will be included. Stauffer, 1st semester: TR 2-3:30

CAS EN 591 Literary Criticism I
A survey of the most representative and influential trends in western literary criticism --from its classical foundations to the late nineteenth century--with special attention to the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped these responses. Martin,1st semester: TR 11-12:30

CAS EN 592 Literary Criticism II
Survey of principal schools of literary criticism, late nineteenth century through present. Topics: Cultural Studies, Formalism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Marxism, Literary Psychoanalysis, Feminism, New Historicism, Gender Theory, Race and Ethnic Studies, Post-Colonial Studies. Matthews, 2nd semester: MWF 10-11

CAS EN 594 Freud and Lacan
Not the application to literature of psychoanalysis as an alien technology, but the discovery that Freud's and Lacan's texts themselves are "in the loop." How literature is connected to psychoanalysis and philosophy; various theoretical and literary texts. Wagenknecht, 1st semester: TR 3:30-5

CAS EN 595 Early Modern History Play
Historical and quasi-historical drama of the Tudor-Stuart periods. Attention to contemporary history and historiography, to problems of hierarchy, social distinction, gender, urbanization, religious division, and nation-building. Plays by Anonymous, Marlowe, Peele, Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, Ford, others. Siemon, 2nd semester: TR 11-12:30

CAS EN 596 Gender and American Culture
Course explores gender roles, as represented in American literature, film, comics. Topics include, Slavery as Metaphor and Experience, Rites of Passage in Culture of Consumption, Art as Ideology/Utopia. Authors range from Hawthorne to Phoebe Gloeckner. Mizruchi, 1st semester: MWF 1-2

GRS EN 699 Teaching College English
The goals, contents, and methods of instruction in English. General teaching-learning issues. Required of all teaching fellows. TBA. 2 credit hours, 1st & 2nd semester. (Does not carry degree credit.)

GRS EN 725 Milton
An exploration of Milton's poetry and major prose in relation to both his own historical moment and the context of current literary criticism. We will consider Milton as a major literary figure of both the Renaissance and the Restoration. Murphy, 2nd semester: M 4-6:30

GRS EN 734 Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
Intensive study of the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, in the context of current critical debates in the two fields, nineteenth-century cultural studies, and editing issues as they affect reproduction and interpretation of individual poems and these poets' larger poetic projects. Students will be required to produce a brief edition of one of these poets' works, complete with prefatory justification of editorial principles, as well as a seminar paper. Miller, 1st semester: R 12-2:30

GRS EN 743 From Hardy to Lawrence
Hardy and Lawrence, each as novelist and poet, along with some readings from Conrad, Yeats and others, will be studied for their own sake, but also to configure early modernism's changing attitudes towards the parallel measures of prose and poetry. Fogel, 2nd semester: T 4-6:30

GRS EN 752 Conflict and Representation in Jacobean Culture
This seminar considers cultural representations of social and political conflicts -- on topics such as sovereignty, patronage, gender, colonial encounters, and the market -- in the Jacobean period (1603-1625). Texts include Macbeth, The Revenger's Tragedy, King James's political writings, Donne's poetry. Carroll, 1st semester: R 4-6:30

GRS EN 776 Hopkins
Hopkins' poems are studied in the context of, and with close reference to, his sermons and devotional writings, his journals and papers, and his letters to Bridges, Dixon, Patmore, and others. Hill, 1st semester: T 3:30-6:30

GRS EN 788 Transnational Modernism
This course examines the transnational literary relations surrounding the rise of American modernism, focusing first on transatlantic connections, and turning to the hemispheric study of modernism in the Americas. Readings by James, Stein, Eliot, DuBois, Hughes, Stuart Hall, and others. Patterson, 2nd semester: R 4-6:30

GRS EN791 Film Theories
Weekly films studied in conjunction with various film theories, including psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, materialist, and postmodern. Topics include: seeing through gender, cinematic narrative, the technologies of image production. There will be evening screenings of the assigned films. Monk, 2nd semester: W 4-6:30

GRS EN 792 Introduction to Recent Critical Theory and Method
A selective study of recent literary theory and criticism, with emphasis on comparison of critical frameworks and methodologies. Fulfills the graduate requirement in literary theory. Rzepka, 1st semester: M 3-5:30

GRS EN 794 Post-Colonial Theatre
Plays from three Anglophone instances of the emergence of national theatre movements as a feature of decolonization: Ireland (Gregory, Synge, Yeats), Trinidad (Walcott, Matura, Lovelace), and Nigeria (Soyinka, Ladipo). Theoretical, methodological, and interpretive issues raised by post-colonial texts. Breiner, 1st semester: W 12-2:30

GRS EN 796 U.S. Imperialism and Literary Culture
Interplay between U.S. imperialism and modern literature, 1880-1940. Relations between national reunification, foreign expansion, emergent empire, the fiction of region and race. Includes Twain, Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Du Bois, Toomer, Glasgow, Faulkner, Peterkin. Matthews, 2nd semester: W 12-2:30

GRS EN 842 History and Theory of the Novel
The novel's emergence as a dominant literary form during the eighteenth century. Social, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic contexts shaping the early novel; the central role of female writers; recent historical and theoretical commentary. Prince, 2nd semester: F 12-2:30

GRS EN 845 Religion and Violence in American Culture
Religion's root association with violence has long been recognized by scholars of American religion, anthropology, and literature. Course explores American cultural works from 19th c. to present, along with secondary materials from various disciplines. Mizruchi, 1st semester: W 4-6:30

GRS EN 892 Romanticism and the East
Building on and querying the concept of Orientalism, this course will examine the imagination of the ancient and modern East in Romantic-period writing, considering literary aesthetics and innovation alongside issues of empire, sexuality, race, commerce, and power. Stauffer, 1st semester: T 4-6:30

GRS EN 993, 994 Directed Study in English
Variable credit hours, 1st and 2nd semester

Department of English Semesters I and II, 2004-2005 Graduate Credit Courses in Language and Literature

(All courses listed = 4 credit hours unless otherwise noted.)

Creative Writing

Language and Linguistics

Literature

© 2002 Boston University Department of English

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Department of English
Semesters I and II, 2004-2005
Graduate Credit Courses in
Language and Literature