BYU English Department Graduate Courses, 2012-2013
Tentative Schedule (subject to change)
Fall 2012
ENGL 613: Rhetorical Theory, Criticism and Judgment (Clark)
We’ll examine rhetorical theory and criticism from the 20th century perspectives offered by Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth, literary critics for whom rhetoric became a primary interest as each became increasingly concerned about the state of American society. We’ll begin by reading their concepts of rhetoric and criticism as well as philosopher Paul Woodruff’s The Ajax Dilemma, that offers a 21st century perspective on the primary rhetorical work of judgment. We’ll study unpublished correspondence between Burke and Booth to see what happened as they tried to practice what they preached as well as discuss it together and found their concepts complicated by their personal relationship. The object of the course will be to develop from all this your own approach to rhetoric, criticism, and judgment.
620R: The English Literary Renaissance and Modern Cinema (Siegfried)
In this course students will have the opportunity to read works by Spenser, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Cavendish, Milton, and others. They will also read segments from the 1611 King James Bible. Several of these 16th and 17th century literary figures and their works became the focus of film in the 20th century. This course will explore the religious, philosophical, and aesthetic aspects of Renaissance literature in relation to their modern film avatars. The concept of transposition -- the replacement of verbal passages with visual analogues -- constitutes the central theoretical thread of the course. The main focus of inquiry will be twofold: (1) the role of imagination in completing the "worlds" created by literature and film, and (2) the possibility of strengthening, expanding, and deepening our awareness of beauty in relation to moral awareness by engaging thoughtfully in the artistic experience of both literature and film.
Engl. 621R: “Literature and Human Rights” (Leman)
This seminar will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of literature and human rights. With broad attention to the strengths and limitations of interdisciplinary methodologies, we will focus primarily on “world Anglophone” or “postcolonial” literatures, which often represent or intersect in complex ways with historical conditions marred by human rights abuses and can, therefore, be brought into productive, and even confrontational, conversations with human rights discourse. In addition to reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and theoretical and historical texts, we will address topics such as: the Bildungsroman and “personhood”; literature, censorship, and imprisonment; states of emergency, trauma, and representation; sentimental literature and humanitarianism; and gender and sexuality. Authors may include: Brian Friel, Wole Soyinka, Nuruddin Farah, Michael Ondatjee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Dionne Brand, J.M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, and Athol FugarEd.
American Literature
628R – The New Old West: Contemporary Western Anglo American Literature (Snyder)
This seminar will focus on Anglo American tradition, selected readings from Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation and other sources to set an historical foundation for a study of representative texts in paired generic units: 1) Autobiography –The Meadow (Galvin) and Riding the White Horse Home (Jordan); 2) Short Story – Where Rivers Change Direction (Spragg) and Fine Just the Way It Is (Proulx); 3) Novel – Blood Meridian (McCarthy) and No Country for Old Men (McCarthy). Requirements include a subscription to Western American Literature, a Digital Dialogue post and response on every text, a perception paper on each unit, and a conference paper or creative nonfiction project.
640R – African American Folklore (Thursby)
This course is an overview of common folkloric elements focusing on African American folklore and its interpretations. Exploring the scope, diversity and vitality of black folk culture, the class is discussion-based with topics derived from articles and texts. African slave-immigrants carried within their minds treasures of complex musical forma, dramatic speech and stories by which they preserved arts and customs of their homelands. This course will provide an in-depth examination of many of these elements.
Rhetoric and Composition
613: Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Judgment (Clark)
We'll examine rhetorical theory and criticism from the 20th century perspectives offered by Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth, literary critics for whom rhetoric became a primary interest as each become increasingly concerned about the state of American society. We'll begin by reading in Burke and Booth their concepts of rhetoric and criticism as well as philosopher Paul Woodruff's new book, The Ajax Dilemma, that offers a 21st century perspective on the primary rhetorical work of judgment. On that basis we'll study the unpublished correspondence between Burke and Booth to see what happened as they tried to practice what they preached as well as discuss it together and found their concepts complicated by their personal relationship. The project of the course will be to develop from all this your own approach to rhetoric, criticism, and judgment.
Creative Writing
667R: Creative Nonfiction (Madden)
Engl 667R will teach advanced students the nuances and joys of creative nonfiction, with a heavy focus on the personal essay. Students will read voraciously a sampling of canonical and contemporary published work as they write several short experiments and three long essays for workshop aiming for publication in literary journals. The class will focus on experimental nonfiction.
669R: Poetry (Larsen)
670R: Writing for Children and Adolescents (Crowe)
Engl 670R is a workshop designed for graduate students who are working on a young adult novel. Students should have read widely in YA literature and have already begun working on their novels. It is essential that every student have a manuscript already underway. In late Winter semester or early Spring term, every student enrolled in the course must submit a writing sample for me to review; next, we’ll meet to discuss the sample and to discuss the individualized required reading (three books) to be completed prior to the start of class in Fall 2012.
Winter 2013
English 621R: Let the Games Begin: Sexual Politics in the Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century
This seminar will examine the ways literary texts represented, and informed, courtship practices, marriage customs, and gendered spheres during what is often referred to as the Long Eighteenth Century, roughly 1660-1800. We will focus much of our attention on two genres, drama and the novel. Titles like The Reformed Coquet, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, The Conscious Lovers, The Man of Mode, and Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World suggest a preoccupation with sexual politics and the relationships between the sexes and indicate ways literary currents were shaped by social and political factors.
American Literature
623R: American Exceptionalism Abroad (Christianson)
This course will examine American nationalism in a transnational context between 1870 and 1920. Readings may include novels by Wharton, James, Twain and Howells, as well as autobiographies by Carnegie and Cody. We will use these texts to ask what role the American encounter with Europe plays in the process of national self-definition. How did writers use the experience of European travel to define, affirm, or satirize American cultural values?
628R: American Modernism and Terraqueous Literary Studies (Roberts)
Focusing on American literature from the first half of the twentieth century, this course maps a set of aesthetic, cultural, and geographical relationships among three modes of American literary modernism: the high modernism of US expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, the New Negro modernism of Harlem Renaissance figures including Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston, and the Southern modernism of Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, and others. As seminar participants pursue literary readings, they will also read and become familiar with current critical and conceptual work on US and transnational modernisms. In tandem with investigations into American modernism, seminar participants will become familiar with what might be termed terraqueous literary studies, or a mode of literary studies that makes itself attentive to the interrelations (within literature and culture more generally) among oceans, continents, islands, and archipelagoes. Conceptual and critical readings in this vein will be drawn from scholarship published largely within the past five to ten years.
British Literature
621R: The Early 19th-Century British Bestseller (Mason)
This course will explore a pivotal shift in British literary history by studying the most successful literary commodities (i.e. bestsellers) of the century’s opening decades. While some of these texts have become entrenched in the canons of British Romanticism (i.e. Byron’s poems and Scott’s novels), others remain unheard of even by specialists in the field. By studying these texts we will gain new insights into historical shifts in literary taste, the mechanisms of canon formation, and the interplay between aesthetics and commerce.
Rhetoric and Composition
612: The History of Rhetoric (Christiansen)
This course will provide an overview of rhetorical theories from the beginnings in ancient Greece to the present day. We will trace rhetoric’s history as a debate between philosophers and rhetoricians, identifying perennial issues and stances that still continue today. We will examine the relationship between rhetoric and ethics, politics, poetics, philosophy and dialectic – imitation and innovation, content and style, rule and interpretation.
Creative Writing
617: Creative Writing Theory (Larsen)
This course will examine creative theory including Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. The course will include assigned reading from Library Reserve, daily preparation, oral presentations and a final essay.
668R: Fiction (Tuttle)
This section of 668R will focus on short fiction. Students will write and submit no fewer than three original short stories and participate in regular workshop discussions. Students will complete several brief writing exercises in which they experiment and develop new techniques, give an oral presentation on one contemporary short story writer, as well as read and discuss a number of short stories and collections by contemporary writers.
669R: Poetry (Howe)
This workshop will examine the relationship between form and content. Students will be expected to write poems that make use of such received forms as the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, etc., and also explore less structured means of creating pattern and movement within their poems.
Spring 2013
Program Requirements
630R: Theoretical Discourse (Cutler)
British Literature
622R: Dead and Undead: Reinventing the Victorian (Horrocks)
We are living among the dead; or perhaps more accurately, the dead are living among us. From www.Victoriana.com to scrapbooking templates to SteamPunk, we are immersed in what scholars have begun to call “the Victorian afterlife.” This course examines that afterlife—the ways in which those living after the nineteenth century (some very shortly after, some decades later) have reconceived, recreated, and reinvented the Victorian. No matter how vociferously we may protest our postmodern condition, we are post-Victorian, and this fact inspires a series of questions about the historiography of culture, the nature of “revival,” the uncanny familiarity of the Other , and the paradoxes inherent in the practice of remembering both forward and backward.