Department of English

From puckish sprites to island savages, from man-eating bears to speaking statues, Shakespeare’s plays are populated with otherworldly or extraordinary elements that we might term exotic. Interestingly, most of these examples of exoticism occur within the context of romance, understood in two primary senses: as a genre encompassing Shakespeare’s last four plays, and as a gendered narrative trajectory of the knight-wins-damsel variety. Rather than simply survey his last plays, this course will try to deconstruct that generic category by drawing connections to two earlier plays and asking how Shakespeare makes exotic the conventions of romance. There will be a strong theoretical/critical component, as well as some archival research. Primary texts may include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, A Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest.

Beginning with a study of the major writings of Samuel Johnson and his circle of literary friends, this course traces the formation of the canon of late eighteenth-century British literature and the ways in which that canon has recently been revised. In addition to Johnson, attention will be given to the poetry, novels, biographies, letters, criticism, and moral, philosophical, and historical texts of writers such as James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Hester Thrale-Piozzi, Horace Walpole, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Dickens (Graduate) Leona Fisher Spring 2010 We will examine five of Charles Dickens's novels in detail: two from his early period, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and three from his mature period: Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Each student will also be responsible for independently reading one major biography (by John Forster, Edgar Johnson, Fred Kaplan, or Peter Ackroyd), exploring critical articles in their areas of interest, and familiarizing themselves with Dickens's journalism and letters. Methodologies to be focused on include feminist, Marxist, narratological, psychoanalytic, and New (or old) Historicist. Students will write weekly critical responses, participate in small groups to direct class discussion, and write a major (15-20-page) original research paper at the conclusion of the semester. Warning: this is a very heavy reading course and will require a major time commitment.

English 632: Reading Toni Morrison In 1993, Toni Morrison became the eighth woman, the second American woman, first African American, first African American woman, and first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy praised her as one “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” This seminar—Reading Toni Morrison—seeks to identify and to examine that “essential aspect of American reality.” We will read the writing of Morrison, exploring the ways in which she represents history, identity, nation, race, gender, sexuality, and community in novels and essays that both challenge and complicate our understanding of these themes. We will read fiction and nonfiction by Morrison as well as essays of literary criticism that engage her works specifically and African American literature in general. We will examine her works as cultural and social historiography while also analyzing the formal/literary aspects of her novels. Students can expect to write several short papers, to lead discussions, and to produce a publishable critical essay, employing a sound methodological approach and engaging a significant yet under-examined aspect in Morrison scholarship.

Virtually Black (Graduate Seminar) English 640.001 R. S. Heath Spring 2010 T 4.10-6.10p What happens when black bodies are projected and propelled across time, across space, and across the so-called digital divide? How are contemporary boundaries of margin and center problematized in the appropriation of advancing technologies? In this graduate seminar we will discuss what is conventionally and conveniently called “science fiction,“ and we will explore the relative limitations of this nomenclature as black writers, artists, and intellectuals conceptualize radical models of representation through less conventional approaches to genre and form, designing afrofuturisms. Considering that agency and subjectivity are inevitably mediated through a shifting conjunction of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, it is important that we take an accurate measure of the extent to which what we understand to be reality is informed by ruptures in and modifications of this media. During this term we will discuss the contemporary utility of a range of speculative text, including but not limited to novels by George Schuyler, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Nalo Hopkinson; films by Sun Ra and Melvin Van Peebles; and music by Prince, Norman Connors, and MF DOOM. We will think through the ways in which blackness in particular and race in general are constructed and reconfigured as cultural workers theorize new modes of critical resistance. With attention to the weblog as a useful discursive site we will investigate the ways in which alternative histories and presents are imagined through the production of various futures.

Sex and Time in Nineteenth-Century America Spring 2009 What does it mean to “do” the history of sexuality from a literary-studies perspective? This seminar examines methods of reading sex and sexuality across time. We will divide our time between an overview of contemporary theoretical and critical developments in the field of sexuality and a consideration of selected literary texts from antebellum America. As we examine the relationship between literary works and their cultural contexts, we will put considerable pressure on how “appropriate” cultural contexts are defined and developed by literary scholars. In additional to several short response papers and a seminar essay, students will also complete a semester-long independent research project, developing a critical-historical archive of materials on a chosen subject relevant to the seminar topic. Research training and support will be available outside class.

Testimonial Fictions: Atrocity, Memory and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship US Latino Literature The course surveys mostly literary representations of US Latino diasporic communities negotiating the historical, political and cultural legacies of extreme state-sponsored violence on the part of dictatorial regimes in their homelands. Case studies include Dominican America after Trujillo, Haitian America after the Duvaliers, Cuban America "after" Castro, and Guatemalan/Salvadoran America after the 1980's-era juntas. Writers and texts include Julia Alvarez (In the Name of Salomé), Junot Díaz (Oscar Wao), Edwidge Danticat (The Dew Breaker and Brother, I'm Dying), Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls), Cristina García (A Handbook to Luck) and Hector Tobar (The Tattooed Soldier). Course readings will also include significant scholarly work in Latin American and US Latino Studies, as well as in critical and political theory.

This course introduces students to the major theoretical frameworks and key texts of performance studies. It will trace the history of the field, and also examine its emergence as a key discourse in English literary theory after modernism. The performative dimensions of “theory”—high theory as a kind of literary performance—will be critically examined. We will also consider the limitations of performance studies, in light of postcolonial, performance practitioner, and other emergent critiques. Key texts will include Pierce, Saussure, Austin, Derrida, Felman, Butler, Schechner, Turner, Schneider, Blau, Pavis, Barucha, Taussig, Munoz, Lane, Browning, and Phelan.

English 733: Alternative Rhetorics Nathaniel Rivers This course starts with the assumption that “the rhetorical agent or political subject of […] a moment doesn’t precede the moment a priori, but is rather called into being within the moment — and thus the citizen and the political body […] exists rhetorically in a rhetorical moment as a rhetorical trope or figuration” (Michelle Ballif, “Writing the Third Sophistic” 55). As Ballif argues, and as many contemporary cognitive scientists testify to, this calling into being can be a fully rhetorical endeavor (or, at least, an endeavor that rhetoric takes part in) if the ends of rhetoric are terministically altered to include our biological and environmental dramas in addition to our social ones. Recent cognitive, biological, and environmental science allows us to do just that: to persuasively regain for rhetoric its creative and cultivating force in the lives of individuals and groups and to informatively re-place rhetoric in the social, biological, environmental context out of which they emerge. We should not see rhetorical practice as merely the subjectification of individuals, but the many, sometimes agonistic, ways in which selves are cultivated within the interplay of social, biological, and environmental dramas (as a (re)figuration). Without remaking the rational subject, without reifying the “real,” and without falling back on ancient dualisms and modern monisms, this course proposes that we navigate and negotiate the boundaries between the social, the biological, and the environmental, and, in doing so, reconsider the alternative shapes rhetoric take and the work rhetoric accomplishes.

Sex and Time in Nineteenth-Century America Spring 2009 What does it mean to “do” the history of sexuality from a literary-studies perspective? This seminar examines methods of reading sex and sexuality across time. We will divide our time between an overview of contemporary theoretical and critical developments in the field of sexuality and a consideration of selected literary texts from antebellum America. As we examine the relationship between literary works and their cultural contexts, we will put considerable pressure on how “appropriate” cultural contexts are defined and developed by literary scholars. In additional to several short response papers and a seminar essay, students will also complete a semester-long independent research project, developing a critical-historical archive of materials on a chosen subject relevant to the seminar topic. Research training and support will be available outside class.

Seminar courses offered through the Folger Institute.

Graduate students enrolled in a master's thesis program or a doctoral program who have completed all coursework must register for Thesis Research - 999, section 1, in each Fall and Spring semester; the registration fee is currently $2,500 per semester. This includes students who have completed all course work and plan to take language proficiency examinations or comprehensive examinations before beginning research and writing of the thesis or dissertation.

Students enrolled in a master's thesis program or a doctoral program who are near the end of their coursework, and for whom registration for the remaining required course credits would result in less than full-time enrollment, may register for Thesis Research - 999, section 3. Those who do not need to be certified as enrolled full-time are not required to do so. No additional registration fee will be assessed for this enrollment (i.e., the student will be charged only the tuition rate for the enrolled course credits).