BYU English Department Graduate Courses, 2010-2011
Tentative Schedule (subject to change)Fall 2010
Program Requirements
600: Introduction to Graduate Studies (Director of Graduate Studies)
630R: Theoretical Discourse (TBA)
American Literature
629R: US/Latino Literature (Hickman)
This course will problematize the term "Latino/a" by seeking to understand the literatures of four major communities (Chicano, Nuyorican, Cuban-American, Dominican-American) that write within this tradition. Students should understand how these respective literatures contribute allied but varied textures to the resulting mix and what the implications of these differences are for Latino literature's continuing contribution to emergent American literary studies specifically and the study of world literatures in English generally. The course will also provide an opportunity for students to be introduced to related theory in globalization, hybridity, and diaspora studies.
640: 19th-century Women's Culture and Folklore (Thursby)
This seminar will study 19th-century American women in various settings. The course will have a cultural focus (how practices and traditions influence and shape behavior and society over time) and a folklore focus (oral, things people say/write; material, things people make; customary, things people do; and belief, things people believe). The salient questions for the course will be: Where were we? Who are we? And where do we go from here privately and publically? Students will examine historical fiction, personal journals, 19th-century magazines and newspapers, various historical accounts, and texts representing the cultural climate for women of the time, and its influence on 20th- and 21st-century women.
British Literature
620R: Women of the Renaissance (Johnson)
This course will explore texts written by women during the 16th and 17th centuries. We will examine poetry, prose, political and religious tracts, and drama of the period with an eye toward understanding the cultural position of women in Renaissance England. Our discussions will range through the literary and generic strategies of women's writing, considering it aesthetically and for the evidence it gives of the political, religious, social and generic developments of the period.
622R: Victorian Literature and the Periodical Press(Thorne-Murphy)
This seminar will sample various types of periodical literature: from the high-brow review essay to the burgeoning field of evangelical children's fiction, from the morally earnest writing of Chartist activists to the satire of political conservatives, from serialized gothic novels to the poetry of aestheticism. We will review recent scholarly work on serial publication that demonstrates its pervasive influence on Victorian culture and authorship.
Rhetoric and Composition
610: Composition Pedagogy (Directors of Composition)
611: Teaching Advanced Composition (Directors of Composition)
613: Rhetorical Theory and Criticism (Clark)
This course will use the new Norton Book of Composition Studies (2009)—a collection of essential texts in composition theory—to examine composition studies as an intellectual project in rhetoric, and to explore critically its relationship with intellectual tradition sustained in rhetorical studies. That study will focus on rhetoric as it is used in two disciplines where its traditional work is most prominent, literary studies and political studies, and will examine the rhetorical work of composition studies in that context for the purpose of assessing what productive relationships are possible between composition and rhetoric, as well as between composition and these two disciplines that rhetoric has traditionally informed.
Creative Writing
667R: Creative Nonfiction (Madden)
669R: Poetry (Johnson)
A writing workshop represents an opportunity to hear from disinterested persons about the communicative successes and failures of your work. This course combines traditional workshop discussion of student poems with a larger discussion about the craft and technique of poetry writing. We will frame that larger conversation by looking at a number of poets, identifying their poetic strategies, and assessing the effects of those strategies. Each week, we will seek to acknowledge the imbrications of reading and writing; we will spend the first hour of class discussing a collection of poetry, and the remaining time workshopping student poems.
670R: Writing for Children and Adolescents (Crowe)
This is a workshop designed for graduate students who are working on a young adult novel. Students in this course should have read widely in YA literature and should have already begun working on their novels. The seminar will run on a workshop format, so 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 the class in Fall 2010.
Winter 2011
American Literature
626R: Studies in Early American Literature (Lawrence)
We will explore the emergence of the American historical narrative, beginning with close readings of representative texts by such canonized writers as John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, and Anne Bradstreet. Next, as we study together less familiar narratives in class, students will use out-of-class time conducting professor-mentored primary document research using the Early American Imprints microfiche series. Secondary sources will be used to contextualize and clarify primary documents, and students will summarize their projects in a class presentation. Finally, we will discuss together the emergence of American novels and American drama; early on, such works were invariably cast as historical narratives.
628R: 1950s America: More than Caulfield, Communists, and Containment (Matthews)
How do we read the 1950s? Holden Caulfield? James Dean? The Organization Man? The Status Seeker? This course examines the mythology of 1950s America. While the 1950s are often invoked nostalgically as a time of golden age stability or of ominous surveillance culture, a closer examination of the period's literature and culture reveals a much more complex portrait. Recent scholarship criticizes the given narrative of 1950s American culture that privileges "Leave it to Beaver" conformity and "The Crucible" containment as being too narrow, demanding we reread the immediate postwar period and the ways in which we frame subsequent "revolutionary" literature of the 1960s. This course takes up that charge, first reading 1950s texts from which the nostalgic myth was derived, and later reading texts that complicate this image of white, middle-class, heteronormative malaise — texts that explore shifting conceptions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationalism in postwar America.
British Literature
621R: Introduction to Romantic Studies (Westover)
I aim for us to arrive at a preliminary understanding of the current state of the field, as well as a hopeful sense of the intriguing, valuable research and teaching that remains for us to do. We will spend a good deal of time analyzing the rhetoric of various genres of professional writing (conference proposals, conference papers, articles, books, etc.). Our experience will culminate in our attending the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference in Park City. Students must be able to attend the conference, as the course takes it as a focal point.
622R: Modern and Contemporary British Poetry (Talbot)
The point of departure is 1960, the year Oxford and Cambridge dropped the Latin requirement for admission. Within forty years instruction in the classical languages, for five hundred years the standard for aspiring poets, was all but dead, and British poetry transformed. Classical-English poetic relations remain very active (especially literary translation: nothing encourages a translator like ignorance of the language) but are now on new footings, which are yet only partially understood. This seminar invites fresh investigations. English poets: (pre-1960) Hardy, the WWI poets, Yeats, Eliot, Macneice, Bunting, early Auden. (Late-century and living): late Auden, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, U. A. Fanthorpe, Michael Longley, Christopher Logue, and others. Classical authors: Homer, Sappho, Alcaeus, Sophocles, Euripides, Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, Horace, Ovid. Contemporary scholars and critics: Stephen Harrison, Stuart Gillespie, Lorna Hardwick, Kenneth Haynes, Charles Martindale, D.S. Carne-Ross, David Hopkins, and others.
Rhetoric and Composition
611R: Teaching Advanced Composition (Directors of Composition)
614: Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition (TBA)
Creative Writing
617: Creative Writing Theory (Howe)
This course is designed to give advanced creative writing students experience examining the theory of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; that is, the overall purpose or function of these genres. We will read exemplary texts from Aristotle to the present as well as literary texts that serve as examples of the theoretical practices. Texts will be assigned in all genres, but students will spend most of their time reading texts from the genre they work in. The purpose of such study is to help them formulate a personal theory of what guides and informs their own writing practices. The course should help students consider the range of possibilities for writing within each genre, locate themselves within the tradition, and determine a personal aesthetic. Practically, this course should help MFA students write the critical introduction to their theses.
668R: Fiction (Thayer)
Spring 2011
Program Requirements
630R: Theoretical Discourse (TBA)
American Literature
520R: Young Adult Literature (Crowe)
This seminar is designed to immerse graduate students in critical reading and discussion of young adult literature. By the end of the course, students will have prepared a journal-worthy article on some aspect of young adult literature.