Fall 2020 Graduate Course Descriptions

ENGL 5103 Proseminar

Instructor: Professor Lori Lefkovitz
Sequence: Wednesday, 6:00-9:20 PM

Introduces the history and current scholarly practices of English studies. Surveys theoretical, methodological, and institutional issues in the development of the discipline; introduces students to the research of the English department’s graduate faculty; and offers opportunities for the practice of key components of scholarly production, including formulating research questions, using databases, conducting literature reviews, and writing and presenting scholarship in common formats other than the long research paper, such as conference proposals, oral presentations, and book reviews. Prereq. English degree students only.

ENGL 7281 Afterlives of the Middle Ages

Instructor: Professor Kathleen Kelly
Sequence: Monday, 6:00-9:20 PM

The pointing finger on your computer screen. The gothic spires punctuating the American skyline. The landscape of many a video game. The US Marine holding a ceremonial sword. These and other residues of the Middle Ages are baked into our everyday lives. The appropriation of the medieval is ubiquitous, and never ideologically innocent, running the gamut from Wagner’s Ring opera to the Med-Ren Faire to Dreamworks’ Shrek to the shields that white supremacists carried in Charlottesville. In this course, our focus is on the persistence of the Middle Ages as a mode and a theme in literature, music, art, and architecture, as well as in film, video games, and other artifacts of popular culture. We will consider such topics as aesthetics, pleasure, danger, canonization, genre, colonialism, the gothic, fantasy literature, and modern responses to medieval representations of class, race, gender, and sexual preference and identity, and pair “host” texts and “symbiont” texts, such as Malory’s Morte Darthur and a selection of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and their reworkings, including film. As we read such texts as the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the French Tristan and Iseult and Roman de Silence (a tale of born-sex vs. cultural assignment), the Icelandic Vínland Sagas (the tale of the Norse discovery of America), and the West African Sundiata, we will explore how—and why—we read medieval texts now. We will also read a few modern texts that are medievalized in some way, but don’t necessarily derive from any given medieval text (such as Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant). Students are encouraged to make connections between the medieval and their own areas of interest, and therefore will choose some of the materials for the last part of the course that should lead to final papers. All medieval texts in translation. Requirements: short responses to be read and discussed in class, a class presentation, and a final paper.

Literature 1700-1900

See Spring 2021.

ENGL 7351 The Graphic Novel

Instructor: Professor Hillary Chute
Sequence: Monday, 2:40-6:00 PM

Today comics works have won Pulitzer Prizes, are required reading in universities, have been adapted for Broadway, occupy special issues of mainstream and academic journals, inspire dedicated imprints from major book publishers, and are reviewed everywhere, and with as much fervor, as novels are. Out of what histories does contemporary comics spring, and what can the form of comics accomplish? How do we describe its differences from other kinds of narratives? We will focus on the contemporary format of the book-length “graphic novel” (or “graphic narrative”). How does style appear as a narrative element in these works? How do they document subjectivity, for both fictional and nonfictional characters alike? How do they build a world through a series of marks? We will consider graphic novels through what they propose about materiality and material culture; through their connection to literary and art traditions (like the artists’ book); and through their connection to histories of the book, along with theories of reading and looking.