Course Descriptions, Fall 2008

Introductory study of nine major plays, including comedies, histories, tragedies, and occasionally romances, with background material on biographical, cultural, historical, and literary topics. Lectures include taped professional performances of scenes; required or recommended viewing of selected performances on stage, film, and television. Writing assignments: frequent detailed quizzes, two one-hour essay tests, final examination, optional extra paper.

Enrollment limit: 100.

Texts: The Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition, 2008 & Arp’s Synopses of the Plays

ENGL 1360-001+# (5880) [1355]. AMERICAN HEROINE. 11 MWF. 116 Dallas Hall. Prof. Schwartz.

Works of American literature as they reflect and comment upon the evolving identities of women, men, and culture. Novels will be supplemented by other readings. Writing assignments: four examinations and frequent quizzes.

Enrollment limit: 45.

Texts: Chopin, The Awakening; Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Cather, A Lost Lady; Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Erdrich, Tracks; Oates, Black Water.

ENGL 2302-001 (4055). BUSINESS WRITING. 12:30 TTh. G18 Clements Hall. Prof. Jackman.

This course introduces students to business and professional communication, including a variety of writing and speaking tasks, and the observation and practice of rhetorical strategies, discourse conventions, and ethical standards associated with workplace culture. The course includes much active learning, which means students will attend events on campus and off and will conduct a detailed field research project at a worksite. The course meets in a computer lab, and may not be counted toward requirements for the English major. Writing assignments: summaries, analyses, evaluations, letters, reports, memoranda, and individual and collaborative research reports, both oral and written.

Enrollment limit: 15.

Texts: Kolin, Philip C. Successful Writing at Work 8th ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2007. and additional readings, as assigned.

ENGL 2302-002 (4056). BUSINESS WRTING. 2 TTh. G16 Clements Hall. Prof. Tongate.

Enrollment limit: 15.

Texts: Philip C. Kolin, Successful Writing at Work, 8th ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Readings on Blackboard or distributed in class.

ENGL 2311-001 (3369) [2305]. POETRY. 3 MW. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Schwartz.

Introduction to the study of poetry and how it works, examining a wide range of poems by English and American writers. Special attention to writing about literature. Writing assignments: occasional quizzes and written exercises; four short essays; two one-hour tests.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Text: An Introduction To Poetry, Kennedy and Gioia.

ENGL 2311-002 (4057) [2305]. POETRY. 9:30 TTh. 156 Dallas Hall. Prof. Holahan.

An introduction to the reading, study, discussion, and enjoyment of poetry. Topics range from meter and rhythm to diction, image, metaphor, symbol, and theme, as well as to different types of poems and kinds of interpretation. Writing assignments: short essays, occasional quizzes and in-class writing, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 2312-001H+ (2814) [2306]. FICTION (HONORS). 12 MWF. 157 Dallas Hall. Prof. Sudan.

An introduction to the genre of fiction with an emphasis on the Gothic novel. The course will combine primary texts with short secondary texts. Writers include Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker. Writing assignments: weekly quizzes, two short essays, one longer essay.

Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 2312-002+ (4058) [2306]. FICTION. 12:30 TTh. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Murfin.

This course will introduce narrative fiction by looking at three of its sub-genres: the short story, the novel, and the novella. We will begin by studying some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best-known stories (1832-1844), which will be followed by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel involving the rearrangement of story (defined in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and iterary Terms as “a narrative of events ordered chronologically”) into a complex achronological plot. Next we will read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella featuring an achronological plot and a potentially unreliable narrator. The course will conclude with one or two more works, including Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, a twentieth-century American novel that readdresses themes and issues (coming of age, religious orthodoxy, tolerance and intolerance, the birth of a nation) raised in Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century short stories

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories, Hawthorne; Wuthering Heights, Brontë; Heart of Darkness, Conrad; The Chosen, Potok; possibly another text TBA.

ENGL 2312-003+ (5879) [2306]. FICTION. 2 TTh. 101 Dallas Hall. Prof. Foster.

This introduction to narrative fiction takes as its premise the idea that narratives provide a way of understanding the world, other people, and ourselves. The theme of the course is “cover stories,” a title suggesting that we come to know the world better not by stripping away the covers, but by learning to read the stories the world tells. Fiction's representations enable us to see what otherwise remains cloaked in the ordinariness of daily life. Like history, law, psychology, and biology, fiction questions and analyzes the appearances of things, revealing connections, motives, and patterns in the seeming chaos of the world, while it also reveals mysteries where the world seems all too immediately comprehensible. The course is intended to sensitize you to the designs of narrative literature so that you will see its effect in other literature and in other aspects of your life. Writing assignments: four short papers and a final exam.

Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: Julio Cortazar, Blow Up and Other Stories, Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day, Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" and other short Novels, Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, Nabokov, Lolita, Vintage, and Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.

ENGL 2314-001H+ (6278) [2308]. DOING THINGS WITH POEMS. 10 MWF. 120 Dallas Hall. Prof. Newman.

Introduction to the study of poems, poets, and how poetry works, focusing on a wide range of English and American writers. Writing assignments: several short essays totaling about 15 pages, distributed evenly across the semester; frequent short exercises; two short in-class presentations, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry; Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason; M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (optional).

ENGL 2315-001 (3763). INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY STUDY. 12 MWF. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Siraganian.

Introduction to the discipline for beginning English majors, covering methods of literary analysis in selected texts spanning a range of genres and historical periods. Writing assignments: brief weekly exercises, four essays, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: Baldick, Oxford Book of Literary Terms; Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”; Austen, Emma; Heckerling, Clueless; Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Shakespeare, As You Like It; selected poetry and short stories available online and in handouts.

ENGL 2315-002 (3764). INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY STUDY. 1 MWF. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Moss.

Introduction to the discipline for beginning English majors, covering methods of literary analysis in selected texts spanning a range of genres and historical periods.

Writing assignments: brief weekly exercises, four essays, midterm, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Wright: Native Son; Nabokov: Pale Fire; Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; Shakespeare: The Tempest; Césaire, A Tempest; selected poetry and short stories available online and in handouts.

ENGL 2315-003 (3807). INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY STUDY. 3:30 TTh. 106 Dallas Hall. Prof. Ards.

Introduction to the formal analysis of literature, covering texts that span a range of genres and historical periods. Writing assignments: brief weekly exercises, four essays, mid-term, and final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 2391-001 (3055). INTRODUCTORY POETRY WRITING. 11 TTh. 120 Dallas Hall. Prof. Key.

This is an introductory course designed to expose students to a wide array of poets; to develop a vocabulary with which to discuss poetry; and to practice, refine, and enjoy the art of writing poems. Writing Assignments: class exercises, writing and revising poems.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: Vital Signs, ed. Ron Wallace.

ENGL 2391-002 (4062). INTRODUCTORY POETRY WRITING. 2 TTh. 337 Dallas Hall. Prof. Key.

Enrollment limit: 21.

Texts: Vital Signs, ed. Ron Wallace.

ENGL 2392-001 (3476). INTRODUCTORY FICTION WRITING. 11 TTh. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Smith.

A beginning workshop in theory and technique, and writing of fiction. Writing assignments: various class exercises, writing and rewriting short stories.

Enrollment limit: 20.

Texts: The Contemporary American Short Story, ed by Shreve and Nguyen; Letters From the Horse Latitudes, C.W. Smith.

ENGL 2392-002 (3477). INTRODUCTORY FICTION WRITING. 3:30 TTh. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Haynes.

A beginning workshop in theory and technique, and the writing of fiction. Writing assignments: class exercises, writing and rewriting short stories.
Enrollment limit: 20.
Texts: TBA.

ENGL 3310-001 (2816) [3304]. CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO LITERATURE. 12:30 TTh. 337 Dallas Hall. Prof. Householder.

What is literature? How do we read it, and why? How can students make sense of and use literary criticism? This course introduces linguistic, cultural, and theoretical issues informing contemporary literary discourse and applies a variety of contemporary critical approaches to a few literary texts. Writing assignments: several short response papers, longer formal essay, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 21.

Texts: Tyson, Critical Theory Today; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ; Joyce, The Dead; Shakespeare, The Tempest; plus additional essays and poems.

ENGL 3310-002 (6277) [3304]. CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO LITERATURE. 11 MWF. 343 Dallas Hall. Prof. Crusius.

An introduction to contemporary methods of interpreting literature and to the theoretical assumptions-about language, culture, gender, politics, sexuality, and psychology-informing these methods. Writing assignments: four short essays, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: Stephen Lynn, Texts and Contexts; Lex Williford and Michael Martone, eds., The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction; course packet of readings

ENGL 3329-701^ (5936) {CF 3302}. WORLD OF KING ARTHUR. 6 W. 156 Dallas Hall. Prof. Wheeler.

Study of Britain’s greatest native hero and one of the world’s most compelling story stocks: the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Writing assignments: In-class debates, short papers, final paper and critique.

Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain; The Mabinogion; Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances; Eugène Vinaver, ed., Works of Sir Thomas Malory; on-line course reader.

ENGL 3331-001+ (3469) [3305]. BRITISH LITERARY HISTORY I. 10 MWF. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Rosendale.

Introduction to the major works, genres, writers, issues, and periods of earlier English literature (c. 800-1750), with careful attention to close reading and analysis of texts. We will also attend to the political, religious, and social history in which these texts were written, and to which they responded in complex ways. Authors covered include Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Lanyer, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope. Writing assignments: three or four short essays, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I (8^th edition).

ENGL 3341-001+ (6030) [3306]. BRITISH LITERARY HISTORY II. 3 MW. 101 Dallas Hall. Prof. Bozorth.

Introduction to the later periods of English literature from the end of the eighteenth century, with practice in close reading and in the analysis of texts. Study of major authors along with consideration of historical contexts, critical problems, and themes. One third of the meetings are lectures, the rest discussions. Writing assignments: three short essays, two hour tests, frequent one-page writing assignments or quizzes, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 27.
Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II (8th edition); Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Wilde, Salome; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Lunsford, EasyWriter.

ENGL 3360-001+ (4064) [3360]. TOPICS IN MODERN / COMTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE CITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. 11 TTh. 153 Fondren Science. Prof. Dickson-Carr.

This course addresses the following question: How has the transformation of America from predominantly rural to primarily urban affected and influenced American literature? We will trace the development of the urban setting in major American literary, cultural, and intellectual movements from the late 19^th century until the present. While most of the focus will be on novels, we will also read (auto)biographical works and select short stories. Our goal in the course is to explore ways American authors have read and utilized urban spaces as metaphors for American cultures.

Enrollment limit: 75.

Texts: Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York), Sinclair, The Jungle, Yezierska, Bread Givers, Wright, Native Son and “The Man Who Lived Underground”, Anne Petry, The Street, Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (excerpts), Ross, Oreo, Auster, The Brooklyn Follies, Whitehead, The Intuitionist, and DeLillo, Cosmopolis

ENGL 3362-701+# (3845) [3367]. AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE. 6:30 T. 111 Hyer Hall. Prof. Ards.

This course traces the evolution of African American literature from the oral traditions of the spirituals and folk tales to late twentieth century narratives. We will explore works by canonical writers, as well as lesser-known pioneers, paying close attention to the way authors build on, or depart from, earlier styles and conventions. We will move constantly between identifying the significance of these texts within the literary history and interpreting writers’ narrative choices as they engage in critical debates about the aesthetics and role of African American literature. Requirements: Weekly writing exercises; two short papers (5-7pp and 6-8pp), midterm exam, and a final.

Enrollment limit: 39.

Texts: Works by writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Henry Box Brown, Charles Chesnutt, WEB Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson and Toni Morrison.

ENGL 3374-001H (5947) [3363] {CF 3345}. LITERATURE OF RELIGIOUS REFLECTION HONORS. 3:30 TTh. 156 Dallas Hall. Prof. Murfin.

Examination of issues of faith and doubt in British and American literature, drawn from texts reflecting both Christian and Jewish traditions as well as secular rationalism, agnostic questioning, romantic vision, meditative mysticism, and other modern approaches to religious and spiritual issues. Writing assignments: three essays, mid-term, final examination.
Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: George Eliot, Adam Bede; Potok, The Chosen; poems by Donne, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Dickinson, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and others; essays by a variety of authors in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

ENGL 3377-701+# (4066) [3358]. LITERATURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HOMOSEXULAITY. 6:30 W. 142 Dallas Hall. Prof. Bozorth.

Normal, perverted, evil, heavenly, unhealthy, beautiful, backward, queer: all ways to label same-sex desire and love for thousands of years. The course will focus on some of the most important literature by and about lesbian and gay people since the modern "invention" of homosexuality. It will also set this writing in historical context, considering the ongoing influence of ancient Greek, Judaic, and Christian views of sexuality. Finally, it will examine how AIDS has shaped contemporary writings about homosexuality. Writing assignments: weekly response papers and longer essays, totaling twenty pages; final examination.
Enrollment limit: 35.
Texts: Plato, Symposium; selections from the Bible and the writings of St. Augustine; Shakespeare, Sonnets; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Portrait of Mr. W.H., Salome; Merlis, An Arrow's Flight; Bechdel, Fun Home; selected poetry by Homer, medieval monks, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Christina Rossetti, Walt Whitman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, and others.

ENGL 3379-001# (5948) {CFA 3379}. CONTEXTS FOR DISABILITY. 9 MWF. 115 Dallas Hall. Prof. Satz.

This course deals with the literary and cultural portrayals of those with disability and the knotty philosophical and ethical issues that permeate current debates in the disability rights movement. The course also considers the ways issues of disability intersect with issues of gender, race, class, and culture. A wide variety of issues, ranging from prenatal testing and gene therapy through legal equity for the disabled in society, will be approached through a variety of readings, both literary and non-literary, by those with disabilities and those currently without them. Writing assignments: two short essays, one 8-10 page essay; mid-term, final examination.
Enrollment limit: 44.
Texts: Grealy, Lucy, Autobiography of a Face; Spiro and Wagner, Divided Minds, Haddon, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night; Lessing, The Fifth Child; Sarton, As We Are Now; Cohen, Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse , Mairs, selected essays; O’Connor, selected stories.

ENGL 3383-001 (3800) [3348] {CF 3305}. LITERARY EXECUTIONS. 12:30 TTh. 101 Dallas Hall. Prof. Holahan.

A study of the literary treatment of capital punishment. The aim is to locate a social issue of continuing importance within literary traditions that permit a different kind of analysis from that given in moral, social, and legal discourse. The literary forms include drama, lyric, novel, and biography; the periods of history represented range from the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Renaissance to the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and contemporary America. Writing assignments: three short essays, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: Bolt, A Man for All Seasons; Sir Thomas Wyatt, "Tower" Lyrics; Shakespeare, Othello and Macbeth; Andrew Marvell, "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland"; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Wiesel, Dawn; Capote, In Cold Blood.

ENGL 3392-001 (5944) [3392]. INTERMEDIATE FICTION WRITING. 2 TTh. 137 Dallas Hall. Prof. Smith.

An intermediate workshop in fiction writing, building on craft techniques taught in ENGL 2392.
Writing assignments: various class exercises, writing and rewriting short stories.
Prerequisite: ENGL 2392.
Enrollment limit: 15.

Texts: The Contemporary American Short Story, ed by Shreve and Nguyen; Letters From the Horse Latitudes, C.W. Smith.

ENGL 4323-001^ (6034). CHAUCER’S EARLIER POEMS. 5:30 M. 156 Dallas Hall. Prof. Wheeler.

Reading and discussion of Troilus and Criseyde and Chaucer's dream poems in relation to literary traditions and contemporary theory. Writing assignments: commentaries, short papers, and final examination.

Enrollment limit: 27.

Texts: Riverside Chaucer; Gordon, The Story of Troilus; Ovid, Metamorphoses.

ENGL 4332-001^ (3846) [4336]. STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE. 3 MW. Prof. Sudan.

In September of 1666, a few short years after the restoration of Charles II to the throne in England, the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the commercial and topographical center of London in three days, and, in the process, destroyed everything that had represented London to Londoners. The social, historical, commercial, cultural, and physical city that had been in place for them was simply gone, and the task of rebuilding, re-imagining, and re-conceptualizing the "city" became the major project of Restoration London. Among the many tasks of social reconstruction Londoners faced was the changing face of sexual identity: building the modern city on the ruins of the medieval one worked in tandem with building a modern sense of self, including a sexualized and gendered self, on older forms of social and national identity. This course examines the ways in which concepts of sexual identities developed as ideologies alongside the architectural and topographical concept of urban life in England. Urbanity, in both senses of the word, is an idea that we will explore in various representations stretching from the late seventeenth-century Restoration drama to the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century. Readings include poems, plays, novels, and prose by Wycherly, Pope, Swift, Defoe, Cleland, Burney, and Lewis. Writing assignments: weekly quizzes, two short essays, and one longer essay.

Enrollment limit: 21.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 4332-002 (6279) [4336]. STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE: POETIC OCCASIONS. 3 MW. 106 Hyer Hall. Prof. Moss.

When does poetry happen? What compels a poet to sit down and write? The early modern period proved especially rich in occasions for poetry: aristocratic weddings, public executions, naval expeditions, the births of princes, the deaths of fellow poets, and on and on. But poetry was also a private matter: how did poets respond to the death of a loved one, for example, to the good or bad fortune of a friend, to religious misgivings or convictions? In this survey of early modern English poetry, we will study such poetic occasions and the poetic forms and genres they generated, through historically grounded close-reading of poems by Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton, and other major figures, alongside works by lesser-known and anonymous authors.

Writing assignments: two short essays (3-5 pages), longer research paper, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 26.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 4333-001 (3169) [4331]. SHAKESPEARE. 3:30 TTh. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Holahan.

Close reading of the major tragedies along with representative later comedies, problem plays, and romances. Reading will be supplemented by the viewing of videotaped performances. Writing assignments: three essays, quizzes, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Text: Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Shakespeare

ENGL 4349-001 (6180). TRANSATLANTIC STUDIES II. 11 TTh. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Householder.

This course surveys literary responses to the social, political, cultural, economic, and intellectual changes wrought on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of Great Britain’s colonization of North America. Topics include the impact of travel on national and cultural identity, justifications for empire (and rebellion), the changing roles of women in society, depictions of Native Americans and Africans, and the rise of the novel as a distinct literary genre. Writing assignments: two short papers, 12-15 page research essay, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress; Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Behn, Oroonoko; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Winkfield (pseud.), The Female American; Richardson, Pamela; Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Rowson, Charlotte Temple; Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; Brown, Edgar Huntly; Scott, Waverley; Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.

ENGL 4356-001# (4077) [4363]. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WRITERS: HURSTON, WALKER, MORRISON. 11 MWF. Prof. Satz.

The study of three important figures in twentieth century literature—Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison--with attention to the interrelationships among the writers and their works as well as to the relation of the works to important events and movements in American history, such as slavery, segregation, and the Civil Rights movement. Various critical approaches to the works. GEC Diversity credit by petition. Writing assignments: four essays, mid-term, final examination.

Enrollment limit: 21.

Texts: Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, selected short stories; Walker, Meridian, The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy; Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Jazz; essays by Hurston and Walker.

ENGL 4360-001 (6000) [4373]. STUDIES IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE: HISTORY, MEMORY, STORY. 2 TTh. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Weisenburger.

A course of readings in 20^th century historical fictions concentrating on the art and the problems of re-membering the past. How do writers & filmmakers reshape traumatic events as story and what functions do such narrations perform, as something named History? What are these narratives telling us about a century of continuous violence? Indeed our readings should compel us to ask: does violence itself—ordinarily understood as a chaos—unfold according to designs or “plots,” and if so what does this tell us about human being? Readings will take us into histories of borderland violence, slavery, World War II, Vietnam, the Kennedy Assassination, and Desert Storm. Likely texts: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Don DeLillo, Libra; Francis Ford Coppola, “Apocalypse Now.” David Reynolds, “Three Kings.” Perhaps also a visit to Dallas-area site of memory, the Sixth Floor Museum. Papers, midterm, final.

Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: TBA.

ENGL 4392-001 (3170) [4392]. ADVANCED FICTION WRITING. 12:30 TTh. 138 Dallas Hall. Prof. Haynes.

Advanced workshop for students seriously interested in writing the short story or novel. Each student is required to have a new story or chapter ready to workshop at the beginning of the semester. Writing assignments: At least four works of original fiction created during the semester. Prerequisites: ENGL 3392 and permission of the instructor.
Enrollment limit: 10.
Texts: TBA.

ENGL 5310-001 (2817) [5349]. SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEORY. 9:30 TTh. 351 Dallas Hall. Prof. Foster.

An introduction to some of the philosophical and theoretical writings necessary to understand current critical practice. We shall examine assumptions underlying traditional critical methods and then work toward some of the interpretive practices that have more recently come into prominence, including discussions of "deconstructive," psychoanalytic, feminist, New Historical, and cultural approaches to literature. The texts we shall read include essays by Eliot, Foucault, Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Badiou. Writing assignments: several short essays, one seminar essay. Permission of instructor required.
Enrollment limit: 23.

Texts: Books may include: Don DeLillo, The Names; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Michele Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought; Henry James, Eight Tales from the Major Phase; Plato, Phaedrus; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Bram Stoker, Dracula (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism).

ENGL 6310-001 (4181) [6391]. ADVANCED LITERARY STUDIES. 11 TTh. 104 Hyer Hall. Prof. Weisenburger.

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.

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 (6030). 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.