ENGL 5303 - Studies in Medieval British Literature: Beowulf

This course will be an in-depth translation and analysis of Beowulf, the first major epic poem in the English language. Topics to be discussed: early medieval English conceptions of monstrosity and Otherness; Germanic social structure as depicted in the poem versus the realities of early medieval English society; the role of women in the poem and women in early medieval English society; the tension and accommodation between Christian and Germanic elements in the poem; the paleography and codicology of the text and the application of digital technology, especially the online Electronic Beowulf project at the University of Kentucky, to the study of the poem and the Beowulf manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv). Requirements: leading one online class discussion; one 20- to 25-page seminar paper; weekly translation and reading in Old English. Texts to be announced but will probably include Mitchell and Robinson’s edition of Beowulf, Klaeber’s Beowulf Fourth Edition by Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, The Beowulf Reader (ed. Bjork and Niles) and A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Orchard).

Note that ENGL 5301 (Old English Language) is a prerequisite for ENGL 5303. ENGL 5334 (History of the English Language) is not a satisfactory substitute for ENGL 5301.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Literature; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry; BHDH, MRSC; Philology/Methods Sequence for Foreign Language Requirement

ENGL 5307 - Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature: The Lineage of Romance

Romance may be among the most denigrated of genres these days (just think of Harlequins) . . . but it is also among the most venerable in its long history and tradition, with origins traceable to the Greeks. In this course, we will study romance as a genre that changes and adapts as it moves through history. What does it mean for a text to be a romance in the Middle Ages? In the eighteenth century? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? And how do romances from these various historical periods both share generic characteristics and diverge from each other? As we read the capacious genre of romance and attend to its range of cultural contexts, we will investigate the particular aesthetic and ideological values sought by the readers of these texts.

Assignments will include a presentation, annotation assignments, and a seminar paper.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Lit; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5309 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Victorian Literature and the British Empire

This course will introduce students to literature composed in the Victorian era, a period of industrial, social, political, and cultural change. Specifically, they will explore how literature at the time both reflected and shaped the ideologies, anxieties, and contradictions of British imperial expansion. Students will also engage with theoretical material to complicate their understanding of Victorian novels, poetry, and plays. Using postcolonial and intersectional lenses, the class will grapple with key concepts such as the constructions of “British” identity, representations of race, class, and gender in colonial and noncolonial settings, and the lingering effects of such narratives on contemporary views of power.

Requirement Fulfilled: LSJE; British Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction OR Drama OR Poetry

ENGL 5315 - Studies in Fiction: The Lineage of Romance

Romance may be among the most denigrated of genres these days (just think of Harlequins) . . . but it is also among the most venerable in its long history and tradition, with origins traceable to the Greeks. In this course, we will study romance as a genre that changes and adapts as it moves through history. What does it mean for a text to be a romance in the Middle Ages? In the eighteenth century? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? And how do romances from these various historical periods both share generic characteristics and diverge from each other? As we read the capacious genre of romance and attend to its range of cultural contexts, we will investigate the particular aesthetic and ideological values sought by the readers of these texts.

Assignments will include a presentation, annotation assignments, and a seminar paper.

Requirements Fulfilled: British Lit; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5317 - Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Global South Literature and the Making of a Global Economy

This course primarily examines late nineteenth to twenty-first century fiction from the Global South and beyond that deals with a longer history of the unfolding of the global economy in its colonial as well as neocolonial forms. It focuses on aestheticizations of commodities such as ivory, sugar, cotton, opium, and oil, moving between literary texts and historical contexts in an effort to trace the outlines of the circulation of capital, power, and anticolonial resistance from discrete nodes in global trade. In doing so, the course tackles questions on the significance of literary study in the twenty-first century, the contemporary legacy of the anticolonial project, the human experience of globality, and questions of scale that continue to shape studies of globalization and literature. Possible readings include texts by Jospeh Conrad, Naguib Mahfouz, Nawal El-Saadawi, Amitav Ghosh, and others.

Requirement Fulfilled: LSJE; CLGT; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5323 - Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Political Poetess

*NOTE: This is an “Advanced Seminar.”  To register for this course, you must be either (a) a PhD student or (b) an MA student with at least 24 hours of completed coursework by the start of the Spring semester. *

In order to be published, nineteenth-century American women poets had to write as the “Poetess,” a persona that appeared to offer the poet’s own private thoughts to a reading public. Poetess poems performed privacy in public by convincingly communicating to readers the personal thoughts and feelings of a woman who was moral, sincere, and ideal. Even after the antebellum heyday of the Poetess, these expectations adhered to public women poets during the early twentieth century; we can still see traces of these expectations in women artists today. This act of profession constituted both the Poetess’s allure and her greatest difficulty. Our class will examine the dialogue established between the Poetess’s complex performance of sincerity and broader shifts in law, immigration, nationalism, philosophy, art, and culture. As the expectations surrounding public female expression transform, we will investigate how the Poetess maintained her public voice by adapting to and disrupting the ideal intimacy associated with women’s poetry. The course will begin by defining the Poetess at the height of her American popularity, with works by authors such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Frances Sargent Osgood. The next units will examine Emily Dickinson as a counterpoint to Poetess practices and the diversity of the Poetess with readings from women poets of color such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Native American poets such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and ethnic minority poets such as Emma Lazarus. Our final unit will examine the legacy of female poets during the modernist era, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, who evoke the Poetess’s profession of privacy as a strategy to comment on contemporary culture. This course will provide a solid overview of nineteenth-century poems and authors, combined with current critical discussions/debates. Each week will focus on a single poet. Requirements for the class include in-class presentations, weekly Blackboard posts, a research proposal, and a final written assignment. The syllabus is designed to introduce students to a broad range of authors, texts, and critical methodologies.

Requirements Fulfilled: LSJE; American Lit; Period: Early; Genre: Poetry

ENGL 5346 - Digital Humanities

What is digital humanities, and what is it good for? This course will serve as an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities, with the practical aim of helping students learn what kinds of digital tools and methodologies can help answer humanities questions and how to find the best tool for your research question. We’ll survey various DH tools, projects, and methodologies in order to learn how to develop and a digital humanities project that intersects with students’ research agendas and goals. We will examine a variety of digital approaches to doing humanities research and will study examples of digital humanities projects to learn what works and to recognize limitations as needed. We will also consider how to develop viable and sustainable projects that are well-scoped, maintainable, and accessible to the target audience. Assignments will include analysis of DH projects and publications, designing undergraduate DH assignments, and DH project proposals.

Requirements Fulfilled: Book History and Digital Humanities (BHDH) Certificate; Language Requirement in Tools/Methods Sequence

ENGL 5351 - Film & Literature: ‘Like a Movie!’: Trauma and Spectacle in Global Film and Media

Witnesses often described 9/11 as “like a movie.” How can we understand this imbrication between trauma and spectacle? What to make of this urge to reach out to the movies, to Hollywood, when witnessing and enacting violence and killing? Perhaps even when dealing out violence? How do filmmakers and artists express viewers' empathetic distance from victims and their closeness, what Raya Morag calls the “intimidating intimacy,” with the perpetrators of such cataclysmic events? How are these concerns mediated in spectacular sports, video games, and graphic novels? Lastly, how do these distinct forms evoke different aspects of trauma’s temporality—where the past can seem to haunt the present? This course brings together myriad histories, films, and media from across the world as we seek an answer to such questions. Our attentions will move between allegorical representations of the Ground Zeroes of 9/11 and Hiroshima, and beyond to visions of the Holocaust and to war mediated through a distancing drone sight. We will linger on estranging moments that punctuate often bombastic spectacles—such as scenes of Navy SEALs reading Punisher comics (Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper), quiet gestures toward the ostracization of disabled populations during brilliantly staged, mythic anime (Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke), and moments where the killing of a soldier is compared to a play in baseball (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). Our theoretical lenses will be similarly expansive, shifting from Sigmund Freud and Cathy Caruth to Frantz Fanon and Brett Ashley Kaplan. The course acts as a thorough introduction to trauma studies as well as its intersections with global film and media studies. Coursework will sometimes be complemented with conversations with the week’s featured artists or scholars. Students will write article-length research papers wherein they will pair close readings with archival research to explore art that is often as dread-filled as it is exhilarating, as terrifying as it is beautiful.

Requirements Fulfilled: LSJE; Genre: Film

ENGL 5380 - Post-9/11 American and Anglophone Literatures

How worlding is American literature in relation to global literatures after 9/11? In reiterating Bruce Robbins’ question, this course investigates post-9/11 American literature in juxtaposition with Anglophone literature not only in terms of trauma and healing but also as literary responses to the social, political, economic, and cultural changes in the United States and around the globe since September 11, 2001. We begin by examining how New York-based poets address trauma and healing, and by considering how diverse literary forms such as the graphic narrative engage the tragic events. Then, we read how the works of Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Jess Walter represent the events differently and reimagine the United States in relation to the rest of the globe geopolitically, historically, and culturally. Meanwhile, we also explore the works of Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie, and Laila Halaby as alternative visions, which explore the US-centered global order, neoliberal capitalism, political and socioeconomic issues in the Global South. Finally, we extend our interest to the war on terror and the aftermath of the Vietnam War by scrutinizing the fictional and autobiographical texts of Paul Auster and Long Bui in light of changing dynamics of the local and the global and critical refugee studies. During our discussion of these primary texts, we employ both the concepts of trauma and healing and the critical notions on terrorism, violence, human rights, and neoliberalism articulated by Cathy Caruth, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, David Harvey, Gayatri Spivak, and Walter Mignolo.

Requirement Fulfilled: LSJE; American Literature; Period: Late; Genre: Fiction

ENGL 5390 - Writing for Publication: Literature

This course, part-workshop and part-seminar, primarily aims to provide graduate students structure and support for publishing scholarship in English studies. Practical activities—like writing exercises, resource inventories and reports, procedural overviews, conference-style presentations—aim at this primary goal of preparing a manuscript for submission to a target journal. Each student will begin the term with a suitable ‘critical studies’ project, likely a seminar paper from a previous course, and begin developing it strategically. Among other things, we will discuss differences between writing a seminar paper and revising toward publication. A greater aim of this seminar, moreover, concerns professional development issues and how an early-career scholar establishes a professional profile, considers relevant academic and academic-adjacent routes, and strategically approaches and refines a research agenda.

Requirement Fulfilled: Foundation course (ENGL PHD)