Courses

• GRS EI 902: Directed Study
  
• GRS EN 606: Literary Criticism II
  Survey of literary critical perspectives and trends in humanistic theory relevant to literary interpretation from the middle of the twentieth century onward, including formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, gender studies, new historicism, and post-colonial studies. Frequent writing assignments of varying lengths.
• GRS EN 666: Critical Studies in Literature and Society
  Topic for Spring 2011: Joseph Conrad. CLose reading of some of Conrad's major novels, shorter fiction, magazine stories, essays, and letters, with excerpts from the broad history of Conrad criticism. His influence on later twentieth-century writers. Some reference to movies derived from his work.
• GRS EN 668: Critical Studies in British Literature
  Two topics are offered for 2010-2011. Topic for Fall 2010: Literature and Science. While literature and science turn different lenses on the world, both disciplines identify patterns and construct narratives of change over time. This course explores microscopic worlds, vast cosmoses, evolution and ecology; writers include Swift, Tennyson, Darwin, Twain, and Pynchon. Topic for Spring: Time and Literature, 1800-1930. We examine models of time (pace, narrative, scale) in Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist texts during major transformations in science and technology (geology, dinosaurs, Darwin, railways, film, and Einstein). Authors include Byron, Tennyson, Hardy, Wells, Proust, and Woolf.
• GRS EN 676: Gender in Literature and Film
  Topic for Fall 2010: Representing Gender in American Literature and Film. Gender representations in American literature, film, graphic novelsâ??1950's through present. Topics: "Cultures of Consumption," "Class and Social Mobility," "Critique of Gender," "Backlash." Works: "Lolita," "Catcher in the Rye," "Streetcar Named Desire," "Diary of a Teenage Girl," "Paris is Burning."
• GRS EN 680: Critical Studies of American Writers
  Topic for Spring 2011: Pragmatism and American Literature. Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatist philosophers such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• GRS EN 686: Studies in Anglophone Literature
  Topic for Fall 2010: Comparative Readings in Postcolonial Literature. Examines how postcolonial writers have explored the themes of historical upheaval and modernization. We focus on the fictional and non-fictional works of V. S. Naipaul and compare them with Wole Soyinka, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, J. M. Coetzee.
• GRS EN 694: A1 Critical Studies in Literature and the Arts B1 Critical Studies in Literature and the Arts: Renaissance Literature of the Visual Arts
  A1 TBA B1 A survey of interrelationships between visual and verbal representation in early modern Europe, from Giotto's narrative frescos in the Arena Chapel, to the book as art, to the "painter poems" of late seventeenth-century England.
• GRS EN 695: Critical Studies in Literary Topics: American Literature and Pragmatism
  Major American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Du Bois, and Frost) read in relation to classical pragmatists such as William James, Peirce, Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• GRS EN 696: Critical Studies in Literary Topics
  Three topics are offered 2008-2009. Students may take one or all three for credit. Fall 2008: Section A1 Book Work. How do versions and editions of literary works matter? We will study books as material bearers of meaning, focusing on textual criticism, bibliography, aesthetics, media and transmission, editorial intervention, and cultural legacy. Emphasis on 19th-century literature. Section B1: Freud & Lacan. Not the application to literature of psychoanalysis as an alien technology, but 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. Spring 2009: Dialogue, Laughter, and the Grotesque. Philosophies and aesthetics of laughter and carnival in criticism and history, through dialogues, novels, poems, other genres. Selections from Bakhtin, Rabelais, Sterne, Byron, Dickens, Freud, Bergson, Marx Bros., Koch, others. Critiques of this tradition also.
• GRS EN 699: Teaching College English I
  The goals, contents, and methods of instruction in English. General teaching-learning issues. Required of all teaching fellows.
• GRS EN 706: Writing Plays
  A workshop in the writing of plays. Manuscripts are read and discussed in class. Individual conferences. Limited enrollment.
• GRS EN 727: British Poetry from 1660 to 1780 in Cultural Context
  Major concentration on Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson. Students may choose other poets from a list including Davenant, Marvell, Cowley, Philips, Behn, Wilmot, Killigrew, Prior, Finch, Montagu, Addison, Gray, Collins, Smart, Seward.
• GRS EN 776: Later Modernism
  Changes in modernist poetics in response to social and historical pressures. Focus on work of the 1930s by Stevens, Williams, Moore, Bishop, Auden and Oppen.
• GRS EN 778: Shakespeare, Tragedy, Succession
  Early modern stagings of the logic and tragedy of succession on the political level as well as that of the family. Readings include historical texts on Tudor-Stuart succession crises, Shakespeare's Richard II-Henry V tetralogy, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and others.
• GRS EN 781: Time and Narrative Since 1800
  This interdisciplinary course pairs history of science and technology with narrative theory to explore how literary texts play with time. How do geological theories, railways, industrialization and Einstein affect the pace of narrative or the feeling of simultaneity in Hardy or Woolf?
• GRS EN 787: Birth of Modern Drama
  A survey of the origin and development of modern theatre from roughly 1835 to 1900. Writers may include Büchner, Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Boucicault, Wilde, Nietzsche, and Shaw.
• 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.
• GRS EN 794: Perspectives on the Modern
  Examines key themes in postcolonial and transnational studies by way of major works of non-European fiction and theory. We will also consider how history and political economy have shaped contemporary debates in this field.
• GRS EN 815: Old English
  Poems such as "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer," and "The Wife's Lament." Riddles from the Exeter Book, King Alfred's prose; all in the original, all well-glossed and made available by a concise, clear grammar and by discussions of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Back to full list of Graduate School of Arts & Sciences