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Department of English
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Department of English

Spring 2011: Department of English: University of Minnesota Home > Graduate Studies > Courses : Spring 2007

English Graduate Courses Spring 2012

EngL

ENGL 4003 History of Literary Theory

57293 -001 LEC , 04:00 P.M. - 05:15 P.M. , Tu,Th (01/17/2012 -05/04/2012) , AkerH 327 ,
TCEASTBANK , Brown,Tony C. , 3 credits
We will appraoch the history of literary theory through a close reading of four major texts: Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production, and Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconcious.

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ENGL 4232 American Drama by Writers of Color

61578 -001 LEC , 02:30 P.M. - 03:45 P.M. , Tu,Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 229 , TCEASTBANK , Lee,Josephine D (Morse Alumni Award, Grad and Profl Teaching Award) , 3 credits
This course will concentrate on selected works by African American, Latino, American Indian, and Asian American playwrights. Readings will focus on plays by writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzanne Lori-Parks, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, David Henry Hwang, and others. Our central question will be how racial and ethnic differences are integral to shaping different visions of "American theater". We will also examine larger issues such as the history of minority and ethnic theaters, the politics of casting, and the mainstreaming of the minority playwright.
Meets with: AAS 4232 section 001

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ENGL 4613 Old English II

(prereq 4612; credit will not be granted if credit already received for: EngL 3613, EngL 5613)
58294 -001 DIS , 05:30 P.M. - 08:00 P.M. , M (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , FordH 115 , TCEASTBANK , Scheil,Andrew , 3 credits
The second semester of Old English is devoted to a full translation and study of the great Anglo-Saxon epic "Beowulf." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote of the poem that "its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote." "Beowulf" is an exciting tale of strife and heroism; but it is also a subtle meditation upon the character of humanity as it struggles to understand the hazards of a harsh world, the inscrutability of fate, and the nature of history itself. "Beowulf" is not only important for a detailed understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture, but it is also a significant and moving poetic achievement in the context of world literature. We will read and translate the poem in the original Old English; thus ENGL 4612 (or a similar course resulting in a basic reading knowledge of Old English) is a prerequisite. "Beowulf" has been the object of intensive scholarly study; we will delve into the debates over the poem's date, genesis, manuscript and historical context and critical interpretation. Spending an entire semester studying one complex work can be an invaluable experience. Please contact the instructor for any questions concerning the prerequisite.

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ENGL 5090 Readings in Special Subjects

(max crs 9; 3 repeats allowed; Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ENGL 5100; prereq grad student or instr consent )
69238 -001 LEC , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , VinH 364 , TCEASTBANK , Fitzgerald,M. J , Virginia Woolf, 1 - 4 credits
For this class, which both literature graduates, cultural studies graduates and creative writing graduates are welcome to join, we will be reading Woolf’s three major ‘modernist’ novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves , and discussing not only the novels themselves, but their relevance for today’s readers and writers. Around this core I plan to create a syllabus that will depend on students’ interests and curiosity. As you sign up for the class, I will expect an e-mail from you (with WOOLF on the subject line) letting me know in one paragraph what else either by her or about her you would like the class to read and talk about: we can read Flush, The Diaries, The Common Reader, Quentin Bell’s book on her or Hermione Lee’s book on her. We can read anything that you have found problematic or interesting. Or that you have always wanted to read and have not yet read. The more varied, the more fun, so don’t be afraid: the Literature scholars among you will have as much to contribute as the Cultural Studies Scholars, and the Creative Writers will bring their own particular contributions. The core of the class is an exploration of the woman, her time and her writing.
Meets with: ENGW 5130 section 002

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ENGL 5110 Readings in Middle English Literature and Culture

(max crs 9; 3 completions allowed; Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ENGL 3110; prereq Grad student or instr consent ; credit will not be granted if credit received for: 5210)
66007 -001 LEC , 02:30 P.M. - 03:45 P.M. , Tu,Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 203 , TCEASTBANK , Farber,Lianna , 3 credits Meets with: ENGL 3102 section 001

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ENGL 5140 Readings in 18th Century Literature and Culture

(Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for: ENGL 3141; prereq Grad student or instr consent )
66008 -001 SEM , 01:25 P.M. - 03:20 P.M. , Tu,Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , Brown,Tony C. , 3 credits
We will read in literature broadly defined (novels and poetry, but also travel accounts and slave narratives), as well as in philosophy and political theory. Of interest will be the debate over human rights and society in the context of the various Revolutions (American, French and Haitian), of the Slave Trade, and of the conquest of the New World. To this end, we will read Burke’s Reflections and Wollstonecraft’s and Paine’s responses, in addition to the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, accounts of the supposed natural slave in writings on the New World, and material on the Haitian Revolution; texts that ask what society is and whether or not animals have it or are capable of it (Buffon, Mandeville, Rousseau); and various literary attempts to imagine living under conditions radically different to those in eighteenth-century Europe (Swift, Diderot, Chateaubriand).

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ENGL 5711 Introduction to Editing

( credit will not be granted if credit received for: 5401)
52313 -001 WKS , 05:30 P.M. - 07:10 P.M. , Tu,Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , AkerH 327 , TCEASTBANK , Tortorello,Michael , 4 credits
If the media doomsayers are right, editing is a dying craft. Right now, polytechnic institutes are training the next generation of copyeditors in Bangalore. Newspapers are shedding weight like dueling celebs in an US photospread. Bloggers are proving that no one need come between a rant and a reader. (Granted, they're doing it one typo at a time.) But someone, somewhere, has to generate that alumni magazine, the St. Paul Saints season guide, and the co-op newsletter. In other words, a demand persists in the American marketplace for someone who knows how to turn slop into steak. In this class, we'll study editing as a process, a protocol, and a philosophy. To elaborate, we'll study the conventions of editing (grammar, story, and style) and we'll meet professionals who do it well. (Fall '08 guests included the editor in chief of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, the art director of City Pages, the media analyst at MinnPost, and an executive employment lawyer at U.S. Bancorp.) We'll analyze why creative collaboration can feel like a playground brawl. Mostly, using real, raw manuscripts from newspapers, magazines, and books, we'll practice how to screw up the written word--with the ultimate goal of screwing up a little less.

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ENGL 5992 Directed Readings, Study, or Research

(max crs 45; 15 repeats allowed; prereq instr consent , college consent )

Each instructor has a section. See class schedule.

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ENGL 8090 Seminar in Special Subjects

67444 -001 SEM , 02:30 P.M. - 05:00 P.M. , W (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , AmundH 158 , TCEASTBANK , Rabinowitz,Paula, Scandura,Jani, The Document, the Archive, the Monument, the Museum, 3 credits
This course looks at repositories of memory—documentary film, museum and archival collections, sites of remembrance. It seeks out the stuff contained within them as it tries to sheer off bits for the sake of producing new forms of understanding. Each form encodes history even as it fragments its narrative into millions of bits and pieces. The course will use the laboratories of archives and museums available in the Twin Cities and online to build students’ archives; it will seek to examine the practices that go into using, cataloguing, retrieving and excising the materials and traces of lived history. The course will thus be at once a hands-on encounter with the document, archive, museum and monument as well as a theoretical investigation of their origins, function and meaning to contemporary culture.

Readings include: works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, Henry James, Michael Renov among others as well as readings in museum studies, locations of cultural memorializing, theories of documentary, the archive, and memory.

Films include: Capturing the Friedmans, Stranger with a Camera, What Farouki Taught, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Naked City, When the War Was Over, Atomic Café—among others\

Meets with: CL 8910 section 005, CSDS 8910 section 005, CSCL 5910 section 002.

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ENGL 8444 FTE: Doctoral

(No Grade Associated, unless otherwise noted; prereq Doctoral student, adviser and DGS consent)
54818 -001 THE (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 1 credit

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ENGL 8510 Studies in Criticism and Theory

(max crs 12; 4 completions allowed)
61430 -001 SEM , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , Tu (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , AkerH 215 , TCEASTBANK , Hancher,Michael , Electronic Text, 3 credits
The advent of electronic libraries such as Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Open Library, and of social-networking and crowd-sourcing sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google Plus, has reframed the problematic of electronic text and prompted wide-ranging theoretical discussion, in print as well as online. This seminar will investigate some of that literature, assessing the light it sheds on perennial questions about text, electronic and otherwise: Who is responsible for it? Who owns it? How is it maintained? How can it be shared? How can it be trusted?

In addition to classic works such as Charles Babbage, “On Copying” (1832), Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941), and Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945), readings will draw on books such as the following:

Kathryn Sutherland, Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford UP, 1997).
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (MIT P, 2002).
Peter L. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge UP, 2006).
A Companion to Digital Literar y Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Blackwell, 2008).
Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (U of Chicago P, 2008).
Gary Hall, Digitize This Book: The Politics of New Media (U of Minnesota P, 2008).
Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (U of Notre Dame P, 2008).
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT P, 2008).
Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs, 2009).
Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Ashgate, 2009).
David Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2011).
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York U P, 2011).
James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon, 2011).
Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (U of Illinois P, 2011).
Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (U of Minnesota P, 2012).

We will also explore the large periodical literature about Google Books, which surveys technical, legal, and social aspects of that transformative project.

Each student will write several brief reports and one substantial article on an aspect of the new textuality, informed by our readings as well as by the student’s experience and critical perspective.

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ENGL 8610 Seminar in Language and Discourse Studies

66010 -001 SEM , 02:30 P.M. - 05:00 P.M. , W (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 216 , TCEASTBANK , Sirc,Geoffrey Michael, Teaching College Writing, 3 credits
In this seminar, we'll read through the key pedagogical texts in comp theory/practice, from basically the beginning of the modern era of Composition Studies to today. We'll not only look at articles, but we'll survey representative composition textbooks chronologically. I'm also going to weave in key 'touchstone' texts from extra-compositional Modernism (i.e., literary and visual arts) to see how the field of writing theory and practice meshed (or didn't) with other modernist fields having the idea of 'composition' at their core. We'll spend time mulling over various theoretical views, critiquing and designing writing assignments, trying to evolve a personal curriculum, and just general touring of the past 150 years or so of the field. My hope is that the course will appeal to both students pursuing a specialization in Composition Studies, as well as those who want demonstrated engagement with Composition as part of their graduate course of studies.

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ENGL 8666 Doctoral Pre-Thesis Credits

(max crs 12; 2 completions allowed; No Grade Associated; prereq Doctoral student who has not passed prelim oral; no required consent for 1st/2nd registrations, up to 12 combined cr; dept consent for 3rd/4th registrations, up to 24 combined cr; doctoral student admitted before summer 2007 may register up to four times, up to 60 combined cr)
54819 -001 THE (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 1 - 6 credits

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ENGL 8888 Thesis Credit: Doctoral

(max crs 100; 10 repeats allowed; No Grade Associated, unless otherwise noted; prereq Max 18 cr per semester or summer; 24 cr required)
54820 -001 THE , TCEASTBANK , 1 - 24 credits

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ENGL 8992 Directed Reading in Language, Literature, Culture, Rhetoric, Composition, or Creative Writing

(max crs 15; 15 repeats allowed; prereq instr consent, dept consent)

Each insturctor has a section. See class schedule.

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EngW

ENGW 5130 Topics in Advanced Creative Writing

(max crs 16; 4 completions allowed; prereq instr consent )
54637 -002 WKS , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , Th (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , VinH 364 , TCEASTBANK , Fitzgerald,M. J , Virginia Woolf , 4 credits , Topic prereq - grad student.
For this class, which both literature graduates, cultural studies graduates and creative writing graduates are welcome to join, we will be reading Woolf’s three major ‘modernist’ novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves , and discussing not only the novels themselves, but their relevance for today’s readers and writers. Around this core I plan to create a syllabus that will depend on students’ interests and curiosity. As you sign up for the class, I will expect an e-mail from you (with WOOLF on the subject line) letting me know in one paragraph what else either by her or about her you would like the class to read and talk about: we can read Flush, The Diaries, The Common Reader, Quentin Bell’s book on her or Hermione Lee’s book on her. We can read anything that you have found problematic or interesting. Or that you have always wanted to read and have not yet read. The more varied, the more fun, so don’t be afraid: the Literature scholars among you will have as much to contribute as the Cultural Studies Scholars, and the Creative Writers will bring their own particular contributions. The core of the class is an exploration of the woman, her time and her writing.
Meets with: ENGL 5090 section 001

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ENGW 5993 Directed Study in Writing

(max crs 18; 18 repeats allowed; prereq instr consent, dept consent, college consent)
46841 -001 DST (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 1 - 4 credits
49171 -002 DST (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 1 - 4 credits

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ENGW 8110 Seminar: Writing of Fiction

(max crs 16; 4 repeats allowed; prereq dept consent )
54813 -001 SEM , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , Tu (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 202 , TCEASTBANK , Baxter,Charles, AntiNarrative Lyric Gestures in Narrative Fiction, 4 credits
This year we'll be investigating certain features of heavily plotted stories and novels, particularly those that border on, or actually enter, slightly disreputable genres such as melodrama, gothic horror, crime, and romance. I am interested in "stealth" plots that appear to be doing one thing while actually accomplishing something else under cover, as it were. Our starting point will be Lady Macbeth's assertion that "What has been done, cannot be undone," and we will be studying plots in which events overtake (and undo) the character who sets them into motion. Readings may include _Macbeth_, Dostoyevsky's "The Double," the stories of Graham Greene, a novel by James M. Cain, Daphne DuMaurier's "Don't Look Now," Shirley Jackson's _The Haunting of Hill House_, Flannery O'Connor's _The Violent Bear It Away_, Muriel Spark's _The Driver's Seat_, and several others. This is a hybrid course and also includes workshopping fiction.

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ENGW 8120 Seminar: Writing of Poetry

(max crs 8; 2 repeats allowed; prereq dept consent )
54783 -001 SEM , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , W (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 207A , TCEASTBANK , Campion,Peter , 4 credits

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ENGW 8130 Seminar: Writing of Literary Nonfiction

(max crs 8; 2 repeats allowed; prereq dept consent)
50449-001 SEM , 03:35 P.M. - 06:05 P.M. , Tu (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 302 , TCEASTBANK , Gonzalez,Ramon,The Essay in Pop Culture: Writings in Rock Music, Cyberspace, and The Apocalypse, 4 credits

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ENGW 8170 MFA Practicum: EngW 1101W

(S-N only; prereq Creative writing MFA student, instr consent )
56709 -001 PRC , 01:00 P.M. - 02:15 P.M. , W (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , LindH 207A , TCEASTBANK , Campion,Peter , 3 credits

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ENGW 8333 FTE: Master's

(No Grade Associated, unless otherwise noted; prereq Master's student, adviser and DGS consent)
49331 -001 THE , TCEASTBANK , 1 credit

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ENGW 8990 MFA Creative Thesis

(max crs 48; 24 repeats allowed; prereq 8140, 8150, 8160, creative writing MFA student, instr consent)
48083 -001 THE (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 2 - 8 credits
49172 -002 THE (01/17/2012 - 05/04/2012) , TCEASTBANK , 2 - 8 credits

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