ENGL 610

History of the English Language

Dr. Mize

Distribution requirement: pre-1800 literature

Continued study of the Old English language at the intermediate level.  The class will read and translate the 3182-line poem Beowulf in its entirety, with attention to the work as literature through supplementary readings and class discussion.  Because students are not starting from scratch with the language in this course, a critical essay is required along with graded translation exercises.  This course follows another language-study course that also includes the reading of Old English literature, so completing the second semester with Beowulf is counted, in total, as fulfilling the pre-1800 literature requirement.  Prerequisite: ENGL/LING 610, Old English, or equivalent.

English 611 

Convent Cultures

Dr. Warren

TR 11:10-12:25

Distribution Requirement:  Pre-1800

Far from being an impermeable boundary, the convent wall in the early modern world was highly permeable; individual nuns and nunneries as institutions were strongly connected to their local communities and were deeply engaged in both secular and ecclesiastical politics.  As Protestant reformations and Catholic reform movements (both monastic reform movements and the larger movement generally known as the counter-reformation) unfolded, nuns and nunneries took on significant symbolic meanings for polemicists of all stripes.

This seminar explores writings by, for, and about early modern women religious in continental Europe and the New World.  We will consider such subjects as the ways in which English convents in exile in France, Portugal, and the Low Countries served as loci of English Catholic political activity and textual production; Protestant satirical writings about nuns and nunneries; versions of medieval monastic texts for early modern women; the convent and the literary canon; relationships among and textual exchanges among English, French, and Spanish nunneries; and the roles of nuns in French and Spanish colonization of the New World.

We will encounter such fascinating women as Gertrude More (the great, great granddaughter of Thomas More who founded a Benedictine nunnery and took on Jesuit hegemony in female spiritual direction), Mary Ward (who took on Jesuits from another front by working to overcome their prohibition for women’s involvement), Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (who, with spectacularly bad timing traveled to England in the Gunpowder Plot year of 1605 to reconvert the country to Catholicism, and Catalina de Erauso (who escaped from a Basque convent to cross dress as a man and join the Spanish Army in the New World).

English 623

Creative Writing

Dr. Mary Ann O’Farrell

Spring 2023

Tuesday 6-9 p.m.

Course description:  Creative Critical Writing

As part of its mission statement, the program in creative critical writing at University College London defines creative critical writing as “a research method that treats the form of academic writing as constitutive of its conceptual argument.”  In our class, I propose that we take up and stretch this definition by reading, thinking about, and writing both alternatives to and alternative approaches to the traditional academic paper.  We will do this by thinking about form and style in critical writing through reading and discussing selected classics of strong critical writing, alongside some more recent works in traditional academic venues that take surprising formal and stylistic approaches, and works in some of the new book series devoted to shorter essayistic volumes. While doing so, we will also work together as a class to find and explore sites—online and otherwise—for the publication of essays that speak to a broader audience, an audience interested in literature and culture beyond academia.

Assignments will ask students to try all this out:  to make style and form part of their thinking and to write a critical essay with a smart not-necessarily-academic audience in mind.  Some classes will be devoted to workshopping student projects, and students will be expected to submit, by the end of the semester, a piece for possible publication.

A goal of our work will be to make ourselves responsive to developments in the way good work gets done and read right now.

ENGL 642 

Studies in Genre: "Science Fiction and the Human-Machine"

Dr. Pilsch

Science fiction has long been a symptom of social and cultural views on technological change. This seminar, intended as a general overview to the history and mechanisms of the science fiction genre, will explore this relationship through the human-machine, people reduced to status of machines and machines elevated to the status of people. The course will explore the development of this trope across 20th-century science fiction and into the 21st, especially as the subject has been treated in feminist SF. Students can expect to read works by Cordwainer Smith, C.L. Moore, Isaac Asimov, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells.

This course fulfills:

* One course in any literature, 1800-present or concepts, issues, or themes.

ENGL 645

Gender and Cold War Narrative

Dr. Sally Robinson

(Can count as any literature post-1800; OR, topics, themes, issues)

This is a cultural studies course, focusing on the ways in which the narratives produced in the shadow of the cold war reproduce, challenge, and/or remake gender. There has been an explosion of interest in the Cold War recently, with a large number of books by literary and cultural critics, historians, and political theorists on topics ranging from race and the cold war; sexuality and the cold war; brainwashing; feminism and the cold war; the cold war and interior design; the cold war and television; and so on.  Scholars have stressed certain key themes in cold war discourse: anxiety about the bomb and nuclear annihilation; anti-communism, homophobia, misogyny, and anti-Semitism; conspiracy and paranoia in a climate of secrecy and uncertainty; worries about the fate of individual autonomy and control in an increasingly bureaucratic world; containment of women, sexuality, and the home; the masculinity of cold war discourse and the underlying fear of “feminization.”

The course is divided into five sections, with a good deal of overlap among the sections Anti-Communism, The Cold War State, Conspiracy and Paranoia, and The Logic of Contagion.  I have paired fictional with non-fictional texts each week.  Some of these secondary readings deal explicitly with the primary text under discussion that week, and some offer historical or theoretical context.  During most weeks, class will be split between discussion of the reading; a mini-teaching session on the secondary reading prepared and run by a student in the class; and an oral presentation of a book review.

Tentative reading list

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969)

E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (1971)

Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (1972)

Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm (1981)

Joan Didion, Democracy (1984)

Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1992)

 Films (available on Media Matrix):

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

JFK (1991)

A selection of secondary reading, posted to Canvas.

ENGL650

Readings in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture

Dr. Eide

“International Modernism”

Requirement: Literature, 1800-the present

Over the last 30 years, literary scholars have been making the argument that Modernist movements reach exceeded its European context and its early twentieth century period.  This course follows modernism across continents and into the twenty-first century.  We will consider how literatures of this period contest the nation and nationalism to initiate conversations about the challenges of an increasingly global society.  The course will introduce formalist and narratological methods understood as socially and politically invested.  The assigned readings consider how the formal innovations of Modernist texts register and produce epistemological shifts in the century-long project of modernity.

Readings include:

Portrait of Artist as Young Man by James Joyce

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Emigrants by George Lamming

Beloved by Toni Morrison

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

So Far from God by Ana Castillo

Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Poetry will be assigned during seminar discussions

Assignments include:

Weekly reflections

An essay suitable for conference presentation (approximately 2500 words)

ENGL/COMM 654

Classical Rhetoric

Dr. Crider

Theory

This course examines and questions the origins of rhetoric in ancient Greece. While primarily concerned with the canonical tradition of classical Greek and Roman rhetorical theory, this course also looks to rhetoric’s origins in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and China. Major themes of study in the course include: the relationship between rhetoric and power, the role of the body in speech and writing, the function of persuasion in politics, and what it means to “know thyself.” Students will read major figures from classical rhetoric, as well as important modern works that apply classical rhetoric to our contemporary moment. This course seeks to survey, expand upon, recontextualize, historically situate, challenge, and otherwise explore the classical rhetorical canon.

ENGL 695

Publications and Professionalization

Dr. Howell