English

  • GRS EN 744: Less Read Nineteenth Century British Novels
    Studies in less often read major novels from the British nineteenth century, including "The Heart of Midlothian," "Mary Barton," "Hard Times," "Villette," "Daniel Deronda," and "New Grub Street." Some emphasis on cultural thickness and old sectarian groups versus modern populations.
  • GRS EN 745: Information Revolutions and Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature
    What happens to literature with the rise of mass print culture, quantitative science, bureaucracy, and facticity? Poe, Dickens, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Browning, Henry James, and Wilkie Collins. Historical methods, plus some information theory, philosophy of science, and digital humanities tools.
  • GRS EN 746: 1950’s America
    Beyond consumption, Cold War, conformity, this course explores the 1950's as a decade of cultural and political ferment, with literature, film, social theory-- Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, Marlon Brando films, books by de Beauvoir, Arendt, Mills, Riesman--reaching wide audiences.
  • GRS EN 763: History of the English Play
    The context, social values, and formal techniques of the innovative, often bizarre, popular "historical" dramas that became authorized "history" (English, Roman, and British) for subsequent centuries. Special attention to interplay of social division, hierarchy, gender, and nation-building.
  • GRS EN 775: Theories of Gender and Sexuality
    This course explores the recent history of literary critical approaches to gender and sexuality, organized around a special topic. Readings include classic and recent theoretical works, and literary texts from a range of historical periods.
  • GRS EN 776: Stevens and Auden: Rhetoric and Poetry
    Modernism tried to forge a new unrhetorical language, but two radically different poets, Stevens and Auden, both "return to rhetoric" as a condition of thought and language to be exploited and reformed. Focus on public/private divide, poetry in war times.
  • GRS EN 778: Succession and Early Modern Tragedy
    Early modern stagings of the logic and tragedy of succession. Readings include historical texts on Tudor- Stuart succession crises, several Shakespeare plays (incl. Lear, Macbeth), less canonical plays (Spanish Tragedy, Massacre at Paris), and contemporary letters (Queen Elizabeth, Arbella Stuart).
  • 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 786: Postcolonial Theory and Literature
    Situating literary activity in models of decolonization posits the literary as an arena of such contested values as originality, authenticity, hybridity, language, and allusiveness. Seminar studies a series of texts in and around which these contestations have taken place.
  • 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. Topics may include formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, New Historicism, gender theory, speech acts, and post-colonialism. 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 823: Renaissance Literature and the Visual Arts
    Interrelationships between visual and verbal representation in early modern Europe, from Giotto's narrative frescos to late Tudor literature. Renaissance and contemporary theories. Topics include iconophobia; the book as visual artifact; portrayals of power, industry, and otherness in image and word.
  • GRS EN 833: Irony & Post-War
    An examination of irony and its detractors, concentrating on post-1945 American fiction and theory. Focus on fiction by Bellow, Heller, DeLillo, Powers, and Wallace, and philosophical work by Kierkegaard, Cavell, Rorty, Derrida, de Man, Sperber and Wilson.
  • GRS EN 843: The Novel in Theory and Practice
    Beginning with Don Quixote, novelists are considered whose formal innovations may be understood in a larger cultural context. Writers include Defoe, Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, Kafka and others. Theorists include Auerbach, Benjamin, Lukàcs, Bakhtin, and Kundera.
  • GRS EN 846: Law and American Narrative
    Intersections of law and narrative in American literature and culture. Texts include judicial opinions, novels, law review articles, literary criticism. Issues include storytelling in law, readers as jurors/jurors as readers, outsider voices, marriage and divorce, race and gender, intertextuality.
  • GRS EN 855: Modern Exoticism: Transnational Exchanged, Collaborations,Appropriations
    Modernism as a global phenomenon marked by longings for and fears of the exotic, but also by encounters, collaborations, and generic exchanges. Focusing on dramatic and poetic forms, with readings in translation, performance, and postcolonial theory, subaltern and gender studies.
  • GRS EN 993: Directed Study in English
  • GRS EN 994: Directed Study in English

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