Graduate English Courses
Spring 2007

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ENGL 566S    Split Screens: Hollywood in the ‘50s & ‘60s                 Courtney  TTh 12:30-1:45
(crosslisted FILM 566S)
This course examines two significant decades of rupture and change, at the movies and in American culture at large.  While popular mythologies of the U.S. in the fifties like to imagine them simply as the years of “Father Knows Best” and white suburban splendor, even popular Hollywood texts reveal a far more unstable and contested cultural landscape—especially with regards to dominant institutions of race, gender, and sexuality.  The sixties, too, were more of a mixed cultural bag than popular memory often would have it.  Provocative mixtures of change and convention are particularly evident in Hollywood cinema in these decades, registered by the eruption of contemporary conflicts in plots and characters, but also by subtle and dramatic transformations of “classical Hollywood” style itself.    This course is concerned with ruptures of both kinds, social and aesthetic, and particularly with how these interact in the “post-classical” period of American cinema.  What, for example, does the manipulation of conventional Hollywood codes allow to be said, and not said, about shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality?  What can we learn about the ongoing significance of the Civil Rights Era, its “successes” and its “failures,” by interrogating popular culture’s own attempts to narrate and envision racial progress?  And how might the analysis of particular fantasies of mid-20th century life and change help us understand our own 21st century investments in selectively remembering and forgetting the past?  Questions like these will guide our readings of selected films and related critical texts. 

ENGL 601      Seminar in Verse Composition                                          Dawes  TTh  9:30-10:45

ENGL 603      Seminar in Prose Composition                                                  Hospital  Th 3:30-6
This will be a reading-intensive and writing-intensive workshop on the short story.  A wide variety of examples of the form will be studied, and the techniques of the finest practitioners will be analyzed.  Students will write their own short stories and submit them to the workshop process.  A rigorous standard of editing and revision will be expected before final versions are submitted.

ENGL 611      Publishing the Novel                                                    Blackwell  TTh 11:00-12:15
This is a small, intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary novel. Students will write a précis of an original book-length work and submit individual sections/chapters for group analysis. Our discussion will focus on each writer’s aesthetic decisions and the elements of fiction, including language choices and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. We will devote some time to the practice of close reading, and we’ll give some consideration to the novel as a form—its history, definitions, justifications, and variations. (Prerequisite: acceptance into the MFA program or advanced permission from the instructor based on writing sample and experience.)

ENGL 701B   Teaching of Literature in College – Sec 001                     Rivers  MW  3:30-4:45
                        Teaching of Literature in College – Sec 002                      Watson MW 3:30-4:45
Introduction to the methods and critical principles of teaching literature at the college level.  Required of and limited to Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics teaching assistants in their first year of teaching at USC and currently teaching English 102.  Spring Semester only.

ENGL 703      Beowulf & Old English Heroic Verse                                 Gwara TTh 12:30-1:45

ENGL 710      The Renaissance                                                                Shifflett  TTh 3:30-4:45
A survey of English literature and literary culture at the threshold of the modern world. Writers studied are likely to include Wyatt, Gascoigne, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Jonson. Emphases will be placed on the formation, combination, and evolution of literary genres, on the social and political functions of literature during times of great social and political change, and on ancient and early modern ideas of form, beauty, and reason that encouraged writers to look beyond their daily lives and imagine better lives and better worlds. Requirements are likely to include two in-class reports on current scholarship and one conference-length paper also presented in class.

ENGL 712      Shakespeare II: The Tragedies                                      Gieskes  TTh 9:30-10:45
We will read a selection of Shakespeare's tragedies from early in his career (Titus Andronicus) to the four great tragedies of the turn of the century as well as Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest. In addition, we will read at least two non-Shakespearean tragedies (for certain Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy) as we place Shakespeare's plays into their dramatic context. Shakespeare did not develop early modern tragedy in isolation, nor did any of his contemporaries.  We may also look at tragicomedy and romance as part of our effort to develop a better sense of dramatic context.  Some works of social history will also be assigned.

Our collective goal will be to develop a sense of the social and cultural resonances of tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean society as well as a working definition of “Shakespearean Tragedy.” We will also strive to understand some of the generic changes that can be seen in Shakespeare's later career. 

We will read a selection of non-dramatic texts whether they be sources, influences, or responses; these will include period theorizations of tragedy. We will pay attention to the literary, historical, and political contexts of the plays in early modern England. In addition, we will read and discuss a variety of critical approaches to the study of Shakespearean tragedy.

ENGL 724      English Prose & Novel of the Romantic Period               Feldman  TTh 2:00-3:15
By examining major prose works by British prose writers of the romantic era, this course will provide a framework for a fuller understanding of all British and American 19th‑ and 20th‑century literature.  We will trace the transformation of aesthetic values as we explore the development during this crucial period of the novel, the short story, literary criticism, and the personal essay.  The reading list will include the following works: Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater; William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; Susan Ferrier, Marriage; Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian; Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; Jane Austen, Northhanger Abbey; Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House; Mary Shelley, Matilda and a selection of short stories; William Hazlitt, Selected Essays; Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice; Joanna Baillie, De Montford; and selections by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

ENGL 732      Principles of Literary Criticism                                    Muckelbauer  T 5:30-8:00
Over the last few decades, there has probably been no more contentious word in the humanities than the word “theory”.  Whether you despise the term or champion it, it is virtually impossible to be a scholar in an English department these days and avoid being involved with theory in some substantial way.  This course is designed to introduce you to a number of concepts, questions, and currents that have been circulating through the “theory” world over the last 30 or so years.  The syllabus is structured primarily as a kind of survey, meaning that we will spend a relatively short time on a wide array of different types of scholarship and different types of “theoretical” questions, from questions about authorship, interpretation, and context, to questions about labor conditions, gender dynamics, and colonization.  As a result, the course will engage currents in theory that are recognizably “literary,” as well as those that might be more aptly named “critical theory” or “social theory.”  The reading list will be diverse, but to give you a sense of the direction of the course, some of the work we will read comes from scholars such as Paul DeMan, Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Louis Althusser, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Henry Louis Gates.  

ENGL 734      Modern Literary Theory                                                   Donougho  W 5:30-8:00
(crosslisted CPLT 702)
The course will survey a number of European and North American literary theories and thinkers from Romanticism (c. 1800) amost to the present (c. 1980).   We’ll begin (and perhaps end) with some general reflections on the nature and definition of literary theory, as distinct from criticism.   Inevitably that will involve considering the concept/institution of ‘literature’ itself, and perhaps ways in which it is taught in academic departments.   We’ll proceed to examine German Romanticism, against the background of Idealism (Kant-Fichte-Hegel), since these are crucial in formulating both modern  ‘Kritik’ and theory itself, and feed directly into Anglo-American theory and practice..   At least two classes will be devoted to Kant and Hegel, necessary for a basic understanding of subsequent developments.   The bulk of the course will run through several 20C theoretical movements, using Zima and Wolfreys (or Rivkin/Ryan) as a guide.   These might include Russian Formalism (Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum), Bakhtin, Czech Structuralism (Jakobsen, Mukarovsky), Marxism (Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, or Jameson), Hermeneutics & Reception Theory (Gadamer, Iser, Jauss), French 20C Criticism (e.g. Barthes, Greimas, Genette), Deconstruction (Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller), Feminism (e.g. Kristeva, Cixous), and Psychoanalysis (e.g. Lacan, Zizek).   The aim of the survey is to provide a sense of where current literary theory has come from and (perhaps) still remains.  Texts:  Julian Wolfreys, Literary Theories: a reader and guide  (1999)(or Rivkin/Ryan, 2004),  Peter Zima  The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory (1999).  Evaluation:  participation (c. 20%), class presentation (15%) summary of a given theorist (10%), short take-home mid-term (20%), term paper (35%).

ENGL 742      American Colonial & Federal Literature                       Shields  MW 11:15-12:30
The course will be a workshop in primary texts and original research.  It will be concerned with constructing narratives about literature, considering revisionary history, original history, and biography.  From the multitude of texts generated by the exploration of America, English colonization, imperial war, American Revolution, and Nation Building from 1580-1800, we will focus on several themes: 1. the explosive creativity of Puritan Reformed Christianity in generating new forms of and functions for writing 2. the role of belle lettres in the “civilizing process” 3. imperialism and the literature of piracy 4. natural science and the creation of new paradigms of knowing, and 5. inscribing Enlightenment in the founding charters of the United States. 

ENGL 745      American Realism & Naturalism                                               Davis  T 5:00-7:30
It is probably more true of this period (1865-1915) than any other in American literary history (except perhaps the 1930s) that its writers watched, read about, and commented on the events of their day – social, political, technological, philosophical, artistic, historical, literary.  In this course, so will we.  In addition to the readings and a final exam, each student will be responsible for two presentations/papers:  one based on 19th-Century archival material and social history, the other on her/his reading of an assigned critical text related to the writer or mode of writing currently being discussed.  These two short papers may or may not form the basis of a final article-length paper.  Writers covered will include De Forest, Howells, Jewett, Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Chesnutt, James, Twain, Crane, Norris, Chopin, Harper, and Wharton.  We’ll also try to squeeze in a Dime Novel, since, for reasons we’ll want to examine, at the time these typically outsold any of the above writers’ works.  

ENGL 753      The American Novel Since World War II                               Forter  M 5:30-8:00
This course plots the American novel since WWII along four main, intersecting axes.  We will read novels whose effort formally to map the dislocations of contemporary life renders them properly “postmodernist.”  We will trace the variegated tradition of multicultural fiction over the course of the last few decades, reading works by African American, Asian American, and Jewish American authors.  We will read novels that focus explicitly on male identity, gay sexuality, and the transmission of male violence across generations.  And we will explore works that extend into a contemporary idiom the “feminine” genre of domestic fiction, focusing in particular on how these texts rework the domestic tradition to portray the most intimate forms of domination. 

Texts (some of the following): Thomas Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior; Philip Roth, The Counterlife; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Russell Banks, Affliction; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room and selected essays; Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin; Jane Smiley, Thousand Acres; Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina.

ENGL 781      History of English Language                                          Goblirsch  MW 1:25-2:40
(crosslisted LING 731)
The course will present an overview of the development of English in the Old, Middle and Modern English periods, examining changes in their socio-historical context. Attention will be paid primarily to phonology and morphology, but also to syntax and semantics. English will be examined in the context of the Germanic languages (Scandinavian, German, Dutch, Frisian). The emergence of the standard language and dialects will be treated.

ENGL 782      Varieties of American English                                           Weldon  TTh  2:00-3:15
(crosslisted LING 745)
This course will examine variation in American English. Social, regional, ethnic, and stylistic variation will be covered, along with models for collecting, describing, and applying knowledge about language variation. Special emphasis will be placed on vernacular varieties of American English, particularly in South Carolina and the American South. In addition, the course will survey current issues in the field of language variation and ongoing changes in American English.

ENGL 791      Intro to Research on Written Composition                          Watson  Th 5:30-8:00
This course introduces students to different paradigms of knowledge and modes of inquiry within the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition.  We will study both methods (specific research techniques) and methodologies (theories of research) in relation to research on writing, rhetoric, literacy, teaching, and history, among other things.  We will investigate and practice qualitative and quantitative research, as well as rhetorical criticism, textual analysis, and historiography, exploring along the way the ethics, strengths, limitations, purposes, and audiences of each.  In addition to learning about the varieties of approaches to research in this growing field, students will learn how to design, plan, conduct, and present a large research project, or portions of one.  Texts will include sample studies and disciplinary journals.  Assignments will include reading responses/critiques, an annotated bibliography, hands-on research exercises (e.g., archival work, mini-ethnography, etc.), and a course project and presentation.

ENGL 793      Rhetorical Theory & Practice, Medieval to Modern     Holcomb  MW 1:25-2:40
(crosslisted SPCH 793)
This course has two primary goals: first, to introduce you to the major texts and authors on rhetoric from the medieval period to the modern; second, to construct (or, at least, begin to construct) an historical pragmatics of the arenas available for rhetorical practice in these periods. The first goal is relatively self-explanatory and involves surveying writers whose works have come to constitute the canon of rhetoric from late antiquity through the nineteenth century, while also examining how the boundaries of this canon have recently been extended to include other contributions—principally, those made by women and writers of courtesy manuals. A major rationale for doing this survey is that for most of the periods this course covers, rhetoric was at the center of the curriculum and that many of the writers we most associate with these periods were products of rhetorical training.

The second goal of this course requires a little unpacking.  The study of “historical pragmatics” assumes that persuasion (a major preoccupation of rhetoric) is not a trans-historical (nor even a trans-situational) phenomenon: to be persuasive, for instance, from the medieval pulpit is a very different thing from being persuasive in the court of an early modern prince—which is itself a very different thing from being persuasive in an eighteenth-century coffee-house or parliamentary address. To chart these variations in persuasiveness, we will begin to reconstruct the settings and conditions in which rhetorical discourse was both produced and received, based on evidence supplied in the rhetoric and courtesy manuals themselves as well as a range of other primary and secondary sources. Accordingly, the course will be organized by genre (which is actually just shorthand for an available arena for rhetorical practice): pulpit oratory, courtly rhetoric, legal rhetoric, and poetry and drama. Throughout, the emphasis will be on the medieval and early modern periods in England, but each unit will end by looking forward to developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Because classical rhetoric greatly influenced rhetorical thought and practice in all of these periods, the course will begin with a brief review of its major concepts, particularly as they are expressed in the works of Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace.

Required Texts:  Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Sidney’s Apology for Poetry.

There will also be a course packet which will include: excerpts from medieval preaching, letter-writing, and poetry manuals; selections from the works of Erasmus, Thomas Wilson, Henry Peacham, George Puttenham, Sir John Harrington, Francis Bacon, and Ben Jonson; and selections from various secondary sources.

ENGL 796F    Teaching Creative Writing
in School and Community Settings                                                    Dawes/Friend TTh 2:00-3:15
This course, team-taught by a member of the creative writing faculty and a member of the composition and rhetoric faculty, will offer a broad-ranging introduction to theories, research, and methods of teaching creative writing.  The course is designed not only to prepare students to teach fiction and poetry in various school and community settings (appropriate to their interests and backgrounds), but also to give them an opportunity to engage in serious discussion about the larger theoretical, aesthetic, and pedagogical contexts that shape the teaching of creative writing.  As part of their work in the course, students will design and teach one or more workshops in a classroom or community venue, then report to the class about the experience.

ENGL 821A   Victorian Loss & Love: Bronte, Dickens, Hardy         Thesing  TTh 11:00-12:15
In-depth study of novels and reputations of C. Bronte, Dickens, and Hardy.    Focus will be
on the themes of loss, including the workings of memory and views of death.   We will
analyze a variety of love relationships--husband-wife, children-parents, as well as dealings
with siblings, suitors, and rivals.     Love and grief, life and death are both endless and tentative,
fixed and mutable in the Victorian world.   We will explore such questions and issues as the
following:   In what ways was Victorian marriage “a prison-house”?   Who put the madwoman in the attic and why?   Why do Victorian men and women so often choose the wrong partners and what are the consequences?   What are possible strategies of rebellion and betrayal in relationships?    How are the lost remembered?   How persistent or satisfying is the world of
memory?    What are acceptable and unacceptable forms of grief?  Some likely primary texts will include:    C. Bronte’s JANE EYRE (romance) and Rhys’s WIDE SARGASSO SEA (anti-
romance.    C. Dickens’s novels, such as OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, A TALE OF TWO
CITIES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, and GREAT EXPECTATIONS.   Selected poems
by Thomas Hardy about the loss of love and regrets of relationship; such Hardy novels as:
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, THE WOODLANDERS, TESS of the d’URBERVILLES, and JUDE the OBSCURE.    There will be oral reports and discussions on both primary and secondary sources.  We will use the most up-to-date critical and theoretical interpretations, including such books as the 2006 casebook on JANE EYRE (edited by Elsie
B. Michie) and the collection of essays (2005) edited by Patrick Brantlinger and W. B. Thesing,
A COMPANION TO THE VICTORIAN NOVEL.   There will be a 15-page research paper and there will be professional guidance provided for students to present their work at a conference and to submit their final versions for possible publication.    There will also be a comprehensive
final essay examination.  

ENGL 830F    Making the Secondary Primary:
Debates in 18th and 19th Century British Criticism              Jarrells/Stern  Th 6:15-8:45
This seminar will cover literary theory and secondary criticism of 18th and 19th-century British writing.  The readings are designed to prepare students to enter into key conversations and debates within the discipline, and more importantly, to train them to frame the types of questions that preoccupy current scholars.  Among our topics of discussion will be periodisation, genre, empire and race, economics and material culture, gender and sexuality, style, and affect. We will engage various essays, chapters, and books that model the modes, central concerns, and issues at stake in cutting edge criticism of these two centuries, keeping in mind that this work is generating some of the most contentious, engaging, and prescient scholarship in contemporary literary study.  The course is designed to intersect with a workshop with Cliff Siskin and Mary Poovey, who will be visiting our campus from NYU. Requirements include weekly reading responses, an annotated bibliography, 20-25 pages of professional quality prose, and a healthy sense of intellectual curiosity.

Readings include selections from among the following authors: Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Eve Sedgwick, Edward Said, Susan Fraiman, Eileen Cleere, D.A. Miller, Leah Price, Kevis Goodman, Gabrielle Starr, Depesh Chakrovarty, David Simpson, Ian Duncan, Anne McClintock, Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Amanda Anderson, Cliff Siskin, and Michael McKeon.

NOTE: The course is designed to satisfy requirements in literary theory, eighteenth-century British literature, and nineteenth-century British literature.  Students may enroll for either section 1 or section 2.  Both instructors will teach and grade both sections collaboratively.

ENGL 841B   Literary Culture and the
History of the Book in America, 1660-1860                                           Jackson  TTh 12:30-1:45
The History of the Book is a new and dynamic interdisciplinary field of study with much to offer students of literature.  This course offers an intensive introduction to the history of books, print culture, and communication in America from the seventeenth century through the middle of the nineteenth.  The class will be organized as a seminar with analysis of scholarly texts paired up with brief contemporary sources.  (Pedagogically, the class will be more akin to a theory course than a literary historical one, although it will be profoundly rooted in history).  There will also besome hands-on experience with rare books, manuscripts, and printing presses.  Subjects covered will include the shifting epistemologies of communicative media, the importance of manuscript and oral cultures for the study of the book, questions regarding the politics and political authority of the printed word, economics and economies of authorship, the transformation of the printing trade, the commercialization of books, the interpretive importance of the materiality of texts, shifting modalities of reading, and the commodification of ideas.  We’ll also consider some of the failings and blind spots of the History of the Book as it currently stands (most notably with respect to race and nation), explore the pedagogical challenges of the field in the undergraduate literature classroom, and query the timing and relevance of the field’s emergence, even as the very future of the book is being called into question.

ENGL 850A   The Great War in Literature                                                  Scott  MW 2:30-3:45
The Great War of 1914-1918 remains a watershed in both social and cultural/literary history.  This course will examine (chiefly British) literary responses to the Great War, alongside official war dispatches, training manuals, guides to France, war letters, diaries, memoirs, songs, cartoons, posters, and other contemporary material.  Authors for study are expected to include Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, A.D. Gristwood, Isaac Rosenberg, Helen Zenna Smith and David Jones, but will depend on in-print availability of texts.  The final segment of the course reexamines the relationship between the War and literary modernism in such authors as Eliot and Woolf.  The course aims to bring together in a seminar format historical, literary-critical and cultural studies perspectives on Great War cultural texts.  Thomas Cooper Library’s interdisciplinary Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection  and its poetry component, the Joseph H. Cohen Collection of World War I Literature, provide excellent resources for doing original project work.  Depending on the student’s major graduate field, research projects for the course may apply the seminar’s approach to non-British Great War literature.    Requirements: participation, two in-class reports, research presentation & paper.
The course will be taught in Thomas Cooper Library.   

ENGL 890 Lit. & Rhetoric: Boundaries, Intersections, Possibilities             Smith  W 5:30-8:00
It is interesting to note that even though the distinction between literature and rhetoric has been profoundly troubled theoretically by many American and Continental thinkers, institutionally the boundary between the two seems to be as clearly defined as ever. This English 890 seminar will begin by examining how the institutional divide between literature and rhetoric (and composition) emerged, solidified, and is sustained in the American academy. In so doing we will gain a better understanding of the historical, political, cultural, and economic dynamics that contributed to the (past and present) institutional division of what was once a more or less singular field of study we might call “the language arts.” Using the work of Kenneth Burke, Fredric Jameson, and others, the seminar will then explore the institutional implications and possibilities embedded within theoretical frameworks that question the divide between the literary and the rhetorical. In other words, we’ll investigate what practical lessons literary, rhetorical, and cultural theory might teach us about the institutions in which we work as scholars and teachers of English. In the final part of the seminar we’ll look into how the practical lessons of theory might help us to begin to re-imagine and, perhaps, enrich and enliven research, pedagogy, and graduate curricula in English.

Readings will likely include work by: Kenneth Burke, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Gerald Graff, Robert Scholes, John Guillory, Richard Ohmann, Samuel Weber, Bill Readings, Gregg Lambert, Steven Mailloux, James Berlin, and David Downing,

SPCH 749       Performance Studies in Communication                                Fenske  M 5:30-8:00
What is Performance?  What is Performativity?  What is/are Performance Studies?  What value does “performance” have as an approach to culture, literature, identity, and art?  This seminar grapples with these questions in its exploration of the often messy (multi and inter)disciplinary conceptual terrain that is Performance Studies.  Major topics include: the growth of the intellectual formation of performance studies with/in academic disciplines, performance and hermeneutics, performance and history, performance pedagogy, and academic writing and/as performance.

We will read, among others: Jon Mckenzie, Richard Schechner, Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Joseph Roach, Shannon Jackson, Jill Dolan, Della Pollock.

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