Graduate Course Offerings
Spring 2010
English 5000: Introduction to Graduate Study
Sweet
R 4:00 LH 450
A course designed to prepare students for the professional study of English. The course will both familiarize students with basic bibliographic tools and scholarly methods and introduce them to issues that are of current critical interest to those engaged in the advanced study of literature. These issues include gender, textuality, reader-response, multiculturalism, feminism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literary history and the relationship of literature to philosophy, history, and science. Selections from a book of poems will complement readings in criticism and theory. An “academic romance” will pose questions about English studies and novelistic form.
English 5100: Graduate Workshop in Poetry
Schreiner
R 6:55 LH 450
Open to students in the creative writing program and to others with permission of instructor. A writing workshop in which the poetry written by the students enrolled in the course is discussed and analyzed by the instructor and members of the class. Students taking this course will be expected to write original poetry throughout the course. May be repeated for maximum graduate credit of fifteen (15) hours.
English 5130: Graduate Workshop in the Novel
Dalton
T 6:55 LH 493
Open to students in the creative writing program and to others with permission of instructor. This graduate fiction workshop is open to both long and short forms of prose fiction. Most workshop classes emphasize the short story because stories are of a manageable length for workshop consideration. And, certainly, the 5130 workshop welcomes lively and well-crafted short stories. But it’s a class that also emphasizes its readiness to consider novel chapters and to broaden the range of class discussion in order to include novel craft. In practical terms, students will turn in for workshop two novel sections (each section may be in the range of 20-35 pages and comprise several chapters) or two short stories. Expect handouts and craft lectures. Expect student fiction to be closely read and carefully considered by both the instructor and other students. The tone of the discussion will be encouraging but frank. By semester’s end students will come away from this class with a list of specific recommendations for improving their novel chapters or stories and a surer sense of how good fiction works.
English 5170: Techniques, Methods, and Their Effects in Fiction Writing
Troy
W 6:55 LH 493
Open to students in the creative writing program and to others with permission of instructor. This course is designed first for writers of short fiction who struggle with form and theory as they create, and it is designed also for other creative writers who, along with the fiction writers, want to discover what well-published writers did to make their stories work, how the stories work, why they made the decisions they made, and what other options would or would not have been better. (Of course, I won’t dare define “better,” but will let it stand, the burden of proof being on whoever uses it in class discussion.) It is also designed for students of literature who want to understand what goes into a story. This course begins with the understanding that what exists finally on paper is the result of many drafts, many revisions, and numerous decisions made along the way. With every decision, something is gained, and something is lost. There are many possible ways, but no perfectly right way, for writing is not a science. The hope is that by analyzing how others made their choices, and what effects the decisions had, we will all become better at our own stories, be clearer about our own choices because we may understand what we will gain and what we will be giving up. A good side effect is we will become better readers.
Texts
Narrative Design, working with imagination, craft, and form, Madison Smartt Bell Bringing the Devil To His Knees, the craft of fiction and the writing life, edited by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi.
The Art of the Story, an international anthology of contemporary short stories, edited by Daniel Halpern
Students will write two-three page weekly papers, and present a longer conference-like paper at the end of the semester.
English 5190: Literary Journal Editing
Schwartz
R 4:00 LH 493
Open to students in the creative writing program and to others with permission of instructor. Natural Bridge 24 will be a special theme-based issue focused on Franz Kafka. We are seeking poems and stories inspired by Kafka, personal essays about Kafka, dreams about Kafka, new translations of stories by Kafka, translations of writers inspired by Kafka, and any other relevant submissions. General submissions of unpublished poems, stories and personal essays will also be considered. In addition, the final 30 minutes of each class will be devoted to an introduction to Kafka’s life and writings. The text will be Kafka’s The Complete Stories. The instructor has previously edited (with the NB class) two theme-based issues on Genesis (#9) and Dreams (#15). Natural Bridge #15 was listed as one of the “Notable Special Issues of 2006” in 2007 Best American Essays, edited by David Foster Wallace.
English 5300: Renaissance Literature (Area 1) The Metaphysicals
Aldrich-Watson
T 6:55 LH 450
The seminar will study the works of the three main metaphysical poets of the earlier seventeenth century: John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Although the designation “metaphysical” was not associated with Donne’s poetry until some 50 years after his death, was used primarily to describe later and lesser poets (Cowley and Carew, for example), and is now somewhat out of fashion, the poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Marvell is characterized by features that clearly distinguish it from the poetry of the sixteenth, the later seventeenth, and the eighteenth centuries. Seminar participants will read much of Donne’s poetry, including but not limited to the Songs and Sonets, some of his prose, all of Herbert’s poetry, and much of Marvell’s. Course work will include, but is not limited to, oral reports and a seminar paper.
English 5500: Nineteenth-Century Literature (Area 2) The Victorian Novel
Carroll
R 6:55 LH 450
We shall be reading several of the main novels in this period, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dickens’ Bleak House, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Three of the novels–Vanity Fair, Bleak House, and Middlemarch are Victorian mega-novels. They have multitudes of characters, multiple interwoven plots, and complex narrative structures. Each of the novels can reasonably be called the magnum opus of its author. The three shorter novels are all distinctive masterpieces. Pride and Prejudice is the epitome of classical elegance. Wuthering Heights is the chief English contribution to Romantic Sturm und Drang–the violent and turbulent phase of romantic passion. The Mayor of Casterbridge invests its rough characters with mythic scope, evokes the poetry of the old country town, and envelops this world with Hardy’s brooding melancholy. This is the great age of English fiction, the culminating moment in the development of the novel, and these are among the greatest novels by the greatest writers.
Grades will be based on the average of four grades: a cumulative quiz grade, a set of two short midterm papers, a set of two short late-term papers, and a term paper. All students will sign up identify topics for class discussion.
English 5700: Twentieth-Century American Literature (Area 3 or 4) Literature of the Modern South
Cook, S
W 4:00 LH 450
This course is a study of the fiction and some of the nonfiction of the Southern Renaissance, beginning in the early 1920s and concluding in the late 1960s. We will read from the novels and short stories of a representative range of writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Jean Toomer, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and William Styron. We will also look at the critical and documentary writings of H. L. Mencken, the Southern Agrarians, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, W. J. Cash, James Agee and Walker Evans. Students will be required to write a final seminar paper and to give very brief, weekly, oral reports in class.
Questions about the course may be left on voice mail at 516 5597 or at cooks@msx.umsl.edu
English 5800: Modern Linguistics (Area 5)
Torbert
W 6:55 LH 450
We examine English language variation in the United States from a current sociolinguistic perspective. The course covers social, regional, ethnic, gender, and style-related language variation (AKA dialect), along with models for describing and applying knowledge about language variation. Students are exposed to a wide range of data on language variation focused on vernacular varieties of American English. This course approaches American language variety primarily from an academic perspective based on the last four decades of sociolinguistic research. This Linguistics-based approach does not, however, preclude influences from other scholarly traditions, such as ethnography. By the end of the class, students should be able (a) to recognize and use basic linguistic terminology describing English dialects, (b) to understand varying theories about the genesis of these varieties, (c) to understand the rule-governed nature of all language varieties, whether standard or nonstandard, (d) to better understand linguistic facts about language variety than is possible from following mainstream media, and (e) to understand the communicative competence and social value of all language varieties.
Requirements: The final paper will be due the last day of class, and will be considered to be “the final.” (There will be no final exam). I will help you with bibliography.
- Weekly 1-page responses to assigned reading. You are to make an incisive point about the reading. (15%)
- A 750-word response paper based on some topic discussed during the first third of the course (15%).
- take-home midterm quiz based on reading and class discussion (15%)
- 300-word abstract for final paper (5%)
- A final paper of 12 to 15 pages on some topic of interest related to the course and requiring significant primary or secondary research (50%). I will encourage students displaying heightened interest in language variation to submit an abstract to NWAV in 2010, or ADS in 2011.
English 5840: Theories of Writing (Area 5)
Duffey
M 4:00 LH 450
The college bulletin describes English 5840 as “an analysis of major modern theories in composition,” but it leaves open just what theories will be subject of study. The typical approach might be to explore the taxonomy into which composition pedagogy has often been divided: expressivist/process, cognitivist, social-epistemic, and post-process theories. Because this taxonomy is so commonly used, it will naturally infuse any examination of composition theories. But this course will reach widely into the range of ways in which composition scholars are exploring theory/pedagogy now, since the taxonomy was constructed. Titles of books being considered for the course further suggest this range:
ALT DiS: Alternative Discourses and the Academy, Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, eds.
Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, Julie Jung
Coming to Class: Pedagogy and the Social Class of Teachers, Alan Shepard, John McMillan, and Gary Tate, eds.
Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice, Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy, eds
Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, Kathleen Yancey, ed.
Through readings and class discussion, we will examine frameworks for understanding writing pedagogy, the purposes of such theoretical frameworks, and the problems with them. Among the course goals are these: 1) become familiar with a number of theoretical frameworks used to conceptualize writing itself, writing instruction, writing course goals, and societal impulses toward writing 2) understand and interrogate the impulse to theory in Composition Studies 3) articulate, in your own words, several of the important concepts through which writing theory is and has been developed 4) synthesize your understanding of theoretical concepts with scholarship about them 5) construct (through reading, class discussion, and writing) an informed teaching philosophy Students who have had at least some previous exposure to composition theory will be more comfortable in this class than students who have none. Students who have no previous experience in either Composition Studies or Literary Theory (English 5000) should confer with the instructor before taking this course.
English 5940/WGS 5450: Seminar in Gender and Literature (Area 6) Comedy: Genders and Genres
Gentile
M 4:00 LH 493
This course will provide an overview of the development of comedy from the Greeks to contemporary film. Readings and viewings will include Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Restoration comedy, Moliere, Austen, as well as 20th and 21st-century comedies. Along with historical coverage, class will examine definitions and theories of the comic from Aristotle to Bergson and Bakhtin. While our focus will be on the gender politics of the primary genres of romantic comedy and the picaresque, we will also consider a variety of comic forms, including satire, parody, and the sitcom.
English 5950: Seminar in Special Topics (section 1) (Area 6) The Mythology of Judaism
Schwartz
T 4:00 LH 450
The primary myths of Judaism, expecially those portrayed in the Bible, became the focus of mythic elaboration in subsequent Jewish literature. This course will examine the ten major categories of Jewish mythology and their primary myth-cycles, such as the role of God and the angels in creation; the myths of God’s Bride, the Shekhinah; the myths of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who became the Queen of Demons; and the myths of the Messiah. So too will many of the well-known biblical episodes about key figures such as Adam and Eve, the patriarchs, and Moses be supplemented with often unexpected mythic elaboration. Students will select one motif or myth-cycle to research. The text will be Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, edited by Howard Schwartz.
English 5950: Seminar in Special Topics (section 3) (Area 5) The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (Eng 5850)
Ebest
T 4:00 3 LH 493
This seminar introduces theories of reading, writing, and thinking; engages students in the strategies and methodologies of qualitative classroom research; teaches students to analyze qualitative research data to refine and refresh pedagogical practice; and emphasizes research in effective pedagogical practices within students’ disciplines. Graduate students will be responsible for finding, critiquing, and presenting pedagogical essays within their disciplines. The final project will be a collaborative classroom research project which students will design, critique, and conduct throughout the semester. (Also counts as Certificate in University Teaching Units 2 and 3)
English 5950: Seminar in Special Topics (section 4) (Area 3 or 6) Irish Literature, Culture, Film: 1945-2009
Wall
M 6:55 LH 450
In this seminar we will explore developments in Irish Literature, Culture, and Film from 1945 to the present. The deaths of the two Irish literary giants--Yeats in 1939 and Joyce in 1941--are watershed moments in the development of Irish culture; therefore, part of our purpose during the period of the seminar will be to explore connections between literary tradition and the present. How artists have branched out in recent decades will be of great interest to us. Among the writers/artists whose work we may consider are: Patrick Kavanagh, Eavan Boland, Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Samuel Beckett, John Banville, Colm Toibin, Seamus Heaney, Moya Cannon, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Nuala O Faolain, etc.