Courses

• GRS EN 741: Money and Marriage in American Fiction, 1796-1925
  Marriage as literary plot, legal contract, market commodity, sexual arrangement, gendered constraint, in American fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with background readings in law, economics, history, criticism. Authors include Foster, Phelps, Howells, Hopkins, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald.
• GRS EN 742: Knowing, Feeling, and Judging
  What is the status of aesthetic and interpretive claims? Are they rational, cognitive, or calculative? Are they expressions of preference, emotion, ideology, wisdom? Readings in aesthetics from Kant onwards, including Cavell, Fried, Gadamer, Sontag, Jameson, affect theory, Digital Humanities.
• GRS EN 743: Narrative and Literary Conceptions of Time
  Pairing narrative theory with history of science, this course asks how writers from Dickens to Woolf jolt their readers out of everyday time scales, setting a human lifespan next to millions of years or a tenth of a second.
• GRS EN 745: Accounting for Literature in 19th-Century America and Britain
  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: The South in Modern American Fiction
  Exploration of how US South figured in imagining national modernity. Modernism as problematic with Southern bent: Faulkner, Welty, Toomer, Erskine Caldwell, Hurston, R.P. Warren, Wright, O'Connor. Equal attention to broad, systematic examination of scholarship on major topics in modernism.
• GRS EN 754: 1950's America
  This course moves beyond Consumption, Cold War, and Conformity, to explore the 1950's as a decade of cultural and political ferment, when original works of literature, film, and social theory--Lolita, Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, films of Marlon Brando, books by de Beauvoir, Arendt, Mills, Riesman--reached wide audiences.
• GRS EN 755: Charles Dickens and George Eliot
  How do the formal innovations of two Victorian novelists reflect transformations in society? Readings include Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Middlemarch.
• GRS EN 771: The Novel in Theory and History
  An inquiry into the state of novel theory today and the problem of accounting for the emergence of prose fiction in male and female, Christian and non-Christian, Western and Eastern, Neoclassical and Enlightenment authors between 1650 and 1800.
• GRS EN 777: American Popular Writing
  Survey of best-selling writing (fiction, poetry, journalism, and otherwise) from the American Revolution to late nineteenth century. Questions of race, class, gender, literary conventionality, canonicity, sentimentalism and "reform." Possible authors include Rowson, Cooper, Douglass, Stowe, Alger, Longfellow, Barnum, Twain.
• GRS EN 779: Modernism: Text and Screen
  Multiple relays between the experiments of modernist literature and the emergence of film. How did early film challenge ideas of art, subjectivity, narration, description? Texts by Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, and more, alongside films by Bunuel, Ivens, Pabst, Deren, and Keaton.
• GRS EN 783: Modernist Gothic
  Readings from Dorian Gray through Endgame, by such authors as Stoker, Conrad, Woolf, Barnes, Faulkner, Capote, Ellison, and Morrison, in relation to nineteenth-century precursors, contemporary emanations, monsters as myth, and conceptual framings from Arendt and Levi-Strauss through the posthuman. This is the same course listed as GRS EN 843 in the 2014/2015 GRS Bulletin.
• GRS EN 786: Caribbean Provocations
  Significant texts from the Anglophone Caribbean from 1912 to the present, challenging to read and to theorize. Locally inspired innovations in form, language, and perspective across genres. Likely authors: Naipaul, Harris, Kincaid, Walcott, Antoni, McKay, Goodison, Morris, Roach, Brathwaite, Johnson.
• GRS EN 788: Transnational Modernism
  This interdisciplinary course explores how globalization shaped the emergence of modernist styles in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Topics include transatlantic migration; the effects of mobilization and world war; the rise of black internationalism; and modernist indebtedness to Asian cultures.
• GRS EN 789: After Wittgenstein
  Wittgenstein's later work and some of the literary/critical responses it has generated. Topics include meaning, privacy, aesthetics, "the ordinary," pragmatism, avant-garde, narrative selves, animals. Commentaries by Cavell, Rorty, Diamond, Moi, MacIntyre, Perloff; literary works by Nabokov, Stein, Sartre, Beckett, Coetzee.
• 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 793: Wordsworth
  Intense study of William Wordsworth's life and writings, focusing on the poetry of the "Great Decade," including Lyrical Ballads and the 1805 Prelude, as well as important works of criticism and theory of the last half century or so.
• GRS EN 794: Professional Seminar
  Developing professional skills and preparing for advanced independent scholarship for English doctoral students in the last semester of coursework. Course includes preparation for comprehensive exam and dissertation prospectus; conference paper submission; publication; fellowship and job applications.
• GRS EN 795: World Literature: Theory and History
  We consider whether postcolonial studies might be expanded to include approaches whose primary aim is not to "subvert" empire. Imperial histories as well as Anglophone fictions and autobiographies by minorities will be studied with this in mind.
• GRS EN 981: Cert Ft Study
  
• GRS EN 982: Cert Ft Study
  

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