BYU English Department Graduate Courses, 2009-2010
Tentative Schedule (subject to change)Fall 2009
Program Requirements
600: Introduction to Graduate Studies (Graduate Coordinator)
630R: Aesthetic Theory, Aesthetics and Theory, Aesthetics after Theory, Etc. (Wickman)
This course will examine a range of aesthetic theories in the eighteenth century, addressing not only questions of beauty and ugliness but also the meaning, perplexity, and promise of form in late modernity. Theorists we discuss will include--without being limited to--Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, Cixous, Jameson, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lyotard, de Man, and others.
American Literature
627R: Late 19th-Century American Literature and Film (Cutchins)
This course will study late 19th and early 20th Century American literature through the lens of film adaptations. Though not a standard approach, looking at books through their adaptations creates some specific and productive tensions. When approached carefully, the study of linked cinematic and literary texts allows students to focus on the space of disjunction between texts and ask what that space, that necessary difference, enables. One is reminded of Derrida's concept of the "aporia" of texts. According to Derrida, a text's promise can never be fulfilled because it poses a "promise [that] is impossible but inevitable" (Memoirs 98). Derrida was referring specifically to the gap between the text and reality, but that same disjunction exists between a novel, for example, and a film adaptation. Thus the texts (both the novel and the film) open themselves to a multitude of interpretations, and some part of the texts remains ineffable. Adaptations, rather than "adapting," in the simple sense, a prior text, actually create a new text with its own manifold relationships to source text(s). In the intersection between novels and films (and many other forms of adaptations across media) there is a sort of cross-fertilization that is both artistically and pedagogically productive.
Film adaptations of literary works can thus be invaluable to the study of literature. Since, for instance, both film adaptations and literary analyses are, at their centers, acts of interpretation, films can offer both good and bad examples of literary interpretations. Moreover, adapting a work of literature for the screen forces a change, an "adaptation" in the text, and often these changes expose the limitations or boundaries of both media. Through close readings of written texts and films students can sometimes learn what is distinctly "literary" about a written text, and, at the same time, what is distinctly cinematic about a film. In part, this course will work to establish a workable distinction between "literary" and "non-literary" texts, and will analyze works of fiction through the lens of film. Students will read theorists including, but not limited to, Barthes, Bakhtin, Derrida, Richardson, Leitch, Stam and Whittock. In addition, we will explore the notion of metaphor as a primary feature of literary texts. A tentative reading list includes Henry James's Turn of the Screw, Stephen Crane's "Blue Hotel" or Red Badge of Courage, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, and several other yet to be decided texts.
The course will require one 18-25 page research paper, at least one class presentation, submission of a proposal for a conference presentation, and a significant bibliographic assignment.
628R: Contemporary Revisions of the American West (Snyder)
I propose to lay the foundation for an early 21st-century critique of traditional Western literature and culture by 1) surveying the history of its largely masculinist construction, 2) examining four ground-breaking late 20th-century feminist Western texts, and 3) turning the graduate students loose to do their own individual studies of some representative post-2000 texts to determine what sorts of critiques have recently entered the contemporary Western canon. Although we'll be focusing primarily on gender and ethnicity during the seminar, students will be free to explore whatever kind of critique seems most relevant to them in their semester projects. Primary Texts: Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin, Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston, Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko, and Borderlands / La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa.
British Literature
520R: Old English I (Wilcox)
English 520R (cross-listed with ELang 525) introduces students to Old English, the principal ancestor of our present day English, and the language of daily life in early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) England (from approximately the mid 400s to the mid 1100s). Our main goal will be to learn Old English grammar and syntax to facilitate reading Old English literature. Most of class and study time will be devoted to translation work from Old to Modern English. We will complement our study of Old English by investigating the historical and cultural context of Anglo-Saxon literature.
Assignments: weekly quizzes, a class presentation, two midterms, and a final exam.
Required texts: Peter Baker, Introduction to Old English; Michael Lapidge and Malcolm Godden, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature.
621R: Communal Romanticism (Mason)
One of the most enduring legacies of British Romanticism is the notion that writing is inherently a solitary process. Great writing, the Romantics would have us believe, occurs in private, after a solitary excursion in nature or an extended period of self-reflection. Contrary to this myth, however, many of the most famous literary works of the Romantic age were the product of communal, rather than solitary, composition. In this course, we will first study the economic, social, and political motivations behind the Romantic theory of solitary genius. Then we will examine four of the age's most famous writing groups: the Wollstonecraft-Godwin circle; the Lake School (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey); the Cockney School (Hunt, Keats, Shelley, and others); and the Blackwood's circle (Lockhart, Wilson, Hogg, and others).
622R: Diaspora Studies (Eastley)
The postcolonial theoretical subfield of "Diaspora Studies" has recently become well established in both literary and cultural studies, and usefully interrogates a wide range of key issues. Among these are discussions of globalization, of travel away from and return to a homeland, negotiations with the hostland, the marginalization of diasporic cultural production in a world that is organized into nations, memory, history writing, the anxiety over authenticity, gender inflections and generational dynamics. The journal Diaspora was founded in the early 1990s and has greatly expanded the ongoing conversation on these issues. Other influential works such as Robin Cohen’s Global Diasporas have also contributed to a newly dynamic field of critical inquiry.
This course will combine criticism and literature, including work from such prominent theorists as Rey Chow, Paul Gilroy, Lisa Lowe, Vijay Mishra, R. Radhakrishnan, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Khachig Tololyan, and creative work from authors ranging from Salman Rushdie to Derek Walcott, and from V. S. Naipaul to Paule Marshall. The focus will be on introducing and applying diaspora models across a wide range of world situations, in a way that students with interests in virtually any literary tradition should find rewarding.
Creative Writing
667R: Creative Non-fiction (Madden)
668R: Fiction (Bennion)
This graduate fiction class will be primarily workshop; we will act as a writing group, reading and commenting on classmates. work. We will also read three essays on writing fiction: the Preface to Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, "Against Epiphany," by Charles Baxter, and "Not Knowing," by Donald Barthelme. These will hopefully give us a common basis for discussion of literary fiction. You will also be asked to read 300 pages in your genre. The class is open to writers of either novels or short fiction, adult or young adult, in any form or format. We will consider any genre of fiction.
Rhetoric and Composition
610: Composition Pedagogy (Comp Coordinators)
611R: Teaching Advanced Composition (Comp Coordinators)
616: Research in Rhetoric and Composition (Hansen)
For students who are planning to emphasize rhetoric and composition in the MA, this course, taught only once every two years, is an excellent way to start, continue, or complete a master?s thesis. By the end of the course, students enrolled in it will have completed either a proposal for or a chapter of their thesis.
This course is ideal for students who want to do research related to the history, theory, and/or practice of teaching composition because it will equip you with the methodological tools to do so. Even students who plan to emphasize literary studies in their MA program have found the course helpful, as some of the methods are applicable to the study of literature as well, and the course can fulfill an elective requirement.
Some of the research methods and texts the course will cover include the following:
- Historical research
- Discourse analysis
- Experimenting
- Surveying
- Interviewing
- Case study research
- Teacher research
- Grounded theory
- Contextualist research
- Theorizing
In addition to reading, class discussions, and student presentations, the course will include guest speakers from the rhetoric and composition faculty, who will come to the class from time to time to describe their research and to suggest possible thesis topics. Although the thesis may still seem a long way off to you, the first semester of your program is really not too soon to get focused on a topic and learn how to go about researching it carefully. In addition, the reading for the course will complement nicely reading done in English 610.
Winter 2010
Program Requirements
American Literature
627R: 19th-Century American Poetry (Perry)
English 627 is a graduate seminar on major American poetry during the mid-19th century, highlighting Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson, with some attention to lesser known women and transcendentalist poets.
628R: Territories of 20th -Century African American Literature (Roberts)
In his lecture "Going to the Territory," Ralph Ellison told audience members that "geography is fate," reminding them that throughout African American history, freedom has been "attained through geographical movement." Drawing upon Ellison's observations, this course treats early 20th-century African American literature with an eye toward analyzing the ways geographies grow into literary structures and the ways literary texts re-create their foundational geographies. Texts are drawn from African American fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction of 1900 through the 1950s.
British Literature
520R: Old English II (Chapman)
620R: The King James Bible and the English Renaissance (Siegfried)
In the sixteenth century, to attempt to translate the bible into a common tongue wasn't just difficult, it was dangerous. Thanks to the determination and creative wherewithal of heretics, smugglers, and other assorted felons, England eventually produced what has been esteemed for centuries as a standard of Literary English. The KJV is very much a product of the sensibilities honed by the Renaissance and Reformation, and this class follows the fascinating tale of its translation through historical, political, economic, social and (of course) religious struggles. The course also examines in some detail the English bible's influence on 16th- and 17th-century writers,and considers the ways in which the "little library" was a compendium of ancient genres and literary techniques still used today by writers and thinkers for a variety of literary endeavors. Evaluation will be by means of short response papers, a presentation, a midterm exam, quality of participation, and a final research project.
622R: Modern British Literature in Transition from Text to Film (Fox)
British writers at the end of the nineteenth century such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and others objected to the restrictions in content and style of what might be termed a “Victorian” frame of mind. Instead they promoted innovations in impressionism, imagism, symbolism, and anti-realism that helped writers transition to a modernist aesthetic that valued freedom of subject matter and freedom of style, hallmarks of the “high” modernists such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Transitional writers were particularly fascinated with the relationship of literature to painting, music, photography, and later to motion pictures, especially in the practice of transposition d'art--capturing one art form in terms of another.
This seminar will examine the foundational ideas of transitional writers at the end of the century and then focus on two outcomes in the work of twentieth-century writers. First, out of anti-realistic theory came an interest in speculative fiction, exemplified in writers such as H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and, later, J. R. R. Tolkien. Second, out of an insistence on freedom of subject matter, but not wanting to follow the stylistic peculiarities of the high modernists, came masterful writers of social narrative such as E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, the fairly unknown but accomplished writer Elizabeth Von Arnim, and later Alan Paton and John Fowles.
Not coincidentally, the work of the writers of speculative fiction and social narrative produced works that were highly filmable. Although this seminar is not a course in adaptation nor in film per se--although principles from each will need to be established and understood--significant scenes from film adaptations of these will be used for their powerful interpretative approaches to the texts. Students will choose their own area of research within the work of these writers. One of the assignments will be to find a writer from this period who has not received a great deal of critical attention and then to make the case of why that writer's work should be studied, and perhaps filmed. Students will also prepare a seminar paper for possible consideration of such specialty journals as English Literature in Transition.
Creative Writing
668R: Fiction (Bennion)
669R: Poetry (Larsen)
617: Creative Writing Theory (Kim Johnson)
Rhetoric and Composition
611R: Teaching Advanced Composition (Comp Coordinators)
612: Varieties of Rhetorical Experience (Clark)
This course in the history of rhetoric will focus on the resonance of Kenneth Burke's proposal that the rhetorical be understood broadly as a prompt to identification rather than more narrowly as persuasion. In this understanding, persuasion is but one kind of rhetorical experience.
The course will begin with a study of the work of Kenneth Burke that illuminates this revision of definitions of the rhetorical and then will examine important texts in classical and twentieth-century rhetorical theory in those terms. Reading will include canonical texts in the history of rhetoric as well as influential texts from American pragmatism that, together, can help us understand some of the developments of contemporary rhetorical studies.
Spring 2010
Program Requirements
630R: Post Colonial and Post-Imperial Theory: A Historical Overview (Cronin)
This course will lead you through the early foundations of postcolonial and post-imperial theory, and on into the most interesting post-1980s developments. We will primarily be interested in theory that reveals to us the complex interface between the colonizer and the colonized. From examinations of inter-national and trans-regional or inter-ethnic demarcations, we will then move toward an understanding of para-national and trans-regional flows of postcolonial theorizing.
American Literature
620R: Studies in American Autobiography (Snyder)
This seminar will look at the ways in which Americans have constructed autobiographies from 1607 to the present with particular emphasis on the historical, cultural, economic, political, ethnic, racial, and literary contexts from which they come. Robert Sayre?s comprehensive anthology, American Lives, makes it easy to engage such a study because, in addition to a good number of representative readings, it includes a very good introduction to the theory and history of American autobiography as well as solid introductions to each historical period under which the representative readings are organized. We will supplement this text with other theoretical and critical readings in American autobiography. I encourage students to subscribe to a/b: Auto/biography Studies, the foremost journal in the field, or at least peruse some recent issues to get a sense of the current state of studies in autobiography. The major assignment will be a 10-page conference paper. Other assignments in support of this paper, such as a proposal and a book review, will also be required. MFA students are welcome to produce a creative piece with a critical introduction in lieu of a conference paper.