Course Descriptions, Fall 2008

An introduction to English graduate work by way of three foundational concerns—the texts, archives, and professions of literary study. We first take up books themselves as objects of study: descriptive and analytical bibliography, consideration of editorial practices and textual studies, as well as book history (including etexts). Next we turn to what archives are and how we may regard them critically, how we find and use primary materials such as manuscripts and letters, and compile secondary bibliographies using traditional sources and electronic databases. We conclude with considerations of the profession: the history of what we do, including critical-theoretical approaches in advanced studies, as well as the conventions and forms of scholarly presentation, writing, and publication. A hands-on course involving guest presenters, various projects (including some “field-work” in the DeGolyer and Bridwell libraries), several short papers and some oral presentation, our work will require readings in essays and chapters on topics outlined above, as well as of various English and American literary texts, and intensive studies in one especially problematic example—most likely Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor.
Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: Melville, Bill Budd, Sailor; Williams & Abbott, Introduction to Bibliographical & Textual Studies; materials posted on Blackboard.

ENGL 6312-001 (6005). TEACHING PRACTICUM. 9 MWF. 8 Dallas Hall. Prof. Neel. All second-year Ph.D. students must enroll.

English 6312 has two purposes: First and most important, it serves as an introductory support structure for PhD candidates who are teaching their first first-year writing classes at SMU. Second, in a general way, it introduces graduate students to the field of composition studies that has emerged in North American English Departments in the last forty years. The course helps PhD students write syllabi for and plan their classes for the fall term; it also offers an ongoing conversation about grading, conferences, classroom management, etc. In addition, all students read three books that outline the development of the field of composition studies, and each student reads and reports on a fourth book that describes the field as it exists now.

Enrollment limit: graduate students only.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 6340-001 (6298). PROSEMINAR: BRITISH LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS. 9:30 TTh. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Spiegelman.

A study of five or six British Romantic poets and representative critical treatments of them from the past fifty years.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 6360-001 (6280). PROSEMINAR: THE RISE OF AMERICAN PRAGMATISM. 2 T. 138 Dallas Hall. Prof. Dickson-Carr.

"The Rise of Pragmatism in American Literature" will have as its focus the writers and philosophers responsible for establishing pragmatism and applying its principles in the nineteenth century and beyond. We will begin by defining pragmatism broadly as a movement designed to break American aesthetics away from epistemological absolutism in favor of empiricism. We will explore its roots in the American Renaissance, via selected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. We will then study logical outgrowths in Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs, followed by careful study of American pragmatism's prime movers: William James and John Dewey. We will examine the philosophy's students and dissenters: Du Bois; Royce; Alain Locke; H.L. Mencken; Robert E. Park; Richard Rorty; Franz Boas; et al. Most important, we will keep returning to the literature informed by or reacting to pragmatism. Beyond those named above, we will study Cather; Chesnutt; Lewis; Stein; Hughes; Hurston; Henry James; Whitehead; Wright; West. Short papers, presentations, and a substantial seminar paper will be required.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 7340-001 (6032). SEMINAR IN BRITISH LITERATURE: SHAKESPEARE. 2 W. Dallas Hall 137. Prof. Rosendale.

This is a course about the early modern history play, but it’s also, and maybe really, about historiography and the uses of the past. So we will read a variety of things—history plays (primarily about English history) by Shakespeare and others, contemporary historiography, modern criticism—to investigate some important questions: How did early modern playwrights and historians think about the past? What uses did they put it to? How did they reconstruct, rethink, reimagine, re-present, and interpret it, and why? What questions did this allow them to engage regarding religion, politics, identity, and the nature of history itself? And how might thinking intensively about the relation of texts and history help to deepen and complicate our own interpretive and critical practice?

Evaluation: 30-40 pages of writing, seminar participation, and at least one substantial presentation.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 7350-001 (6283). SEMINAR: 20^TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY. 2 M. 138 Dallas Hall. Prof. Siraganian.

What counts as a work of art – and specifically, as a poem -- in Modernism? Does a poem do more or less than capture a view of the world or a piece of the reality? This course considers these questions in relation to a few of the major American poets (Stein, Williams, Stevens, Bishop, Hughes, Olson, Plath, Ashbery) of the twentieth-century. In addition to reading literary criticism and theoretical writing on aesthetics, we will pay close attention to the poetics, or theories of poetry and reading, that played a substantial role in shaping theories of the art object in 20th-century literature. We will also examine these poets in relation to the artists (Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) that they befriended and/or wrote about in their work. Writing assignments: 15-20 page paper and 2 short presentations on literary criticism.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: Ashbery, Selected Poems, Bishop, Collected Poems, 1927-1979, Hughes, Collected Poems, Olson, Selected Poems, Plath, Collected Poems, Stein, Selected Writings, Stevens, Collected Poetry, Williams, Collected Poems, vol. I, and additional photocopied texts.

Right to Know, Nondiscrimination, and other legal statements.