Graduate English Courses
Spring 2008

Go to Detailed Listings

ENGL 601      Seminar in Verse Composition                                 TTh     2:00-3:15        Dings
The semester will be spent primarily reading and discussing peer work; however, books by a few contemporary authors will be also be assigned and discussed.  Grading is by portfolio.  Only MFA students may sign up for this course without permission; all others must first submit a writing sample to the instructor for assessment.  If the instructor feels the quality of writing is on par with the level of the course, then the student will be allowed to take the course.

ENGL 602      Reading & Writing the Short Story                          Th        3:30:6:00        Hospital
The course involves a number of assigned readings by contemporary masters of the form of the short story.  These readings are designed to extend awareness of the possibilities of the form.  Special attention will be paid to techniques of structure, narrative voice, tone, characterization, and style.  Students will be provoked and stimulated by in-class writing exercises.  Two short stories by each student will be workshopped  in class, and three short stories will be presented in portfolio for grading.  Techniques for submitting stories for publication will be discussed.

ENGL 610      Writing the Novel                                                      TTh     11:00-12:15    Blackwell
This is a small, intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary novel. While we will spend some time discussing whole and partial published works, the majority of class time will entail workshop-format critique. Participants will work on an original book-length work (novel or collection of interrelated stories) 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 and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. We will also give some general consideration to the novel as a form-its history, definitions, justifications, limits, variations and possible futures. We’ll fill out the rest of our time with the occasional writing exercise and discussion of professional issues, including process and publishing. Prerequisites: admission to the MFA program, admission to another graduate English program combined with experience reading and writing literary fiction, or permission of the instructor.

ENGL 701B   Teaching College Literature                                  TTh     8:00-9:15        Stern
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 702      Old English                                                                 MW    11:15-12:30    Gwara
A study of the language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.  Emphasis on language learning, with special attention paid to grammar and translation of selected prose passages and major poems.  Grammar quizzes, translation project, final paper, final exam.

ENGL 712      Shakespeare II – The Tragedies                              TTh     9:30-10:45      Rhu
A survey of Shakespeare's major tragedies and romances from Hamlet to The Tempest.  Attention to genre and other matters of literary interest will be set against the background of Renaissance thought and English political history.  A range of current critical and creative responses will also be explored.  There may be, in addition, some discussion of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry.

ENGL 716      Milton                                                                         MW    9:30-10:45      Shifflett
A survey of John Milton's major prose works and poems, with six weeks devoted to PARADISE LOST. The seminar format will encourage collaborative study and original research using the holdings of the Rare
Books and Special Collections Department of Thomas Cooper Library.  Requirements are likely to include two class presentations, one conference-length paper, and one article-length paper.

ENGL 730      Modern British Fiction                                              MW    1:25-2:40        Cohen
This course surveys major concerns of 20th-century British fiction with special emphasis on the relations between empire, gender, and modernist culture. To what extent did imperialism make possible the Modernist project, and in what ways did that project incorporate systemic (and systematic) critique? What role did gender play in such representations (and how does that help us recognize modernism as plural)? What new models of Englishness can we see emerging in empire’s wake? We’ll explore such questions through a range of works by some or all of the following writers: Kipling, Wells, Conrad, Lewis, West, Woolf, Forster, Joyce, Warner, Bowen, Rhys, Selvon, Kunzru, Evaristo; there will also be dollops of secondary reading, both critical and theoretical. Requirements will include weekly responses and/or discussion questions, a formal paper of 15-25 pages, and spirited participation, including one oral presentation.

ENGL 732      Principles Literary Criticism                               M        5:30-8:00        Mucklebauer
Over the last several decades, there has probably been no debate in English departments more contentious than that concerning the role of “theory.”  Nevertheless, regardless of whether you despise theory, love it, or just find it intimidating, it is virtually impossible to become an active scholar in an English department these days and avoid being involved with theory in some substantial way.  This course is designed to provide you with a general introduction to the main theoretical questions, concepts, and currents that have been circulating through English departments over the last 30 or so years.  The syllabus is structured primarily as a survey, meaning that we will examine a wide array of different types of theoretical questions, from questions about authorship, interpretation, and context, to questions about gender dynamics, historiography, and labor conditions.  As a result, the course will introduce you to theoretical currents that are recognizably “literary,” as well as some that might be more aptly named “critical theory” or “social theory.”  The reading list will be diverse, but to give you some sense of the direction of the course, we will read work from scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul DeMan, Stuart Hall, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Louis Althusser, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Henry Louis Gates.  Course requirements will likely include weekly response papers and an abbreviated final research paper.  Contact me if you have any questions about the course.

ENGL 734      History of European Literary Criticism                    M        3:30-6:00        Steele
(crosslisted CPLT  702)
This course looks at the major problematics for the study of critical theory from the Enlightenment to the present. Students will be introduced to the theoretical approaches to history, subjectivity, aesthetics, ethics and politics that define the modern and postmodern eras. The course begins with the crises of modernity and the systematic response to the dilemmas of the Enlightenment proposed by Kant. The course moves historically through important paradigms that followed Kant, beginning with Hegel and Marx and continuing to present. We will cover phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism and poststructuralism as well as postcolonial, feminist, and legal theories. Students will be asked to write a 20 page term paper in which they bring a theory or theories to bear on their particular area of interest, make an oral presentation (15 minutes maximum), and do a take-home final exam .

ENGL 735      Post-Colonial Literature & Theory                           TTh     12:30-1:45      Dawes
A careful study of the key texts in post-colonial literature and theory, the course seeks to problematize the concept of post-coloniality while exploring the themes that emerge from that evolving field of study.  This course will examine the works of post-colonial authors and scholars from around the world and will explore themes that shape contemporary post-colonial writing while contextualizing them in post-colonial cultures.

ENGL 744      American Romanticism                                             MW    12:40-1:55      Walls
American Romanticism was bracketed by revolution and war: the American and French Revolutions set the conditions for Romanticism in America and the Civil War brought it to a close. Contestation was the hallmark of the period, for America, it turned out, had been founded on a contradiction: the Declaration of Independence asserted that "all men are created equal," yet the nation it founded was increasingly invested in slavery and Indian genocide. That deep contradiction threatened to tear apart the fledgling American union. As religious and political authority was collapsing, financial markets were crashing, and governments were fomenting war, reform, rebirth, seemed essential. This was, in short, the literature of a continuing revolution, a literature often named by F.O. Matthiessen's phrase "the American Renaissance"-America the Twice-Born. It was the time of exploration, abolitionism, and women's rights, Emerson's defiant "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau at Walden Pond, Hawthorne's twisted psychic dramas and the extravaganzas of Herman Melville, the grotesque fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe and moralistic best-sellers by Alcott and Stowe, Walt Whitman's expansive poetry of the body and Emily Dickinson's dense poetry of the mind. What connects such disparate writers with each other? With their time? With us?

ENGL 752      Modern American Novel                                           TTh     3:30-4:45        Glavey
This course will examine a series of American novels from roughly the first half of the twentieth century. Texts will likely include Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies, Willa Cather's The Professor’s House, John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, William Faulkner's, Absalom, Absalom, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's, The Sun Also
Rises, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Nella Larsen's Passing, Laura Riding's The Progress of Stories, Gertrude Stein's, Three Lives, and Richard Wright's, Native Son. In addition to a final research paper and
active participation in discussion, each student will be responsible for assembling and presenting a reception history of one of our novels.

ENGL 753      American Novel Since WWII                                    TTh     12:30-1:45      Cowart
This course will focus on fourteen or so contemporary fictions, with selected criticism.  Prospective texts appear below.  Of course books go into and out of print--I welcome suggestions for books to include (cowartd@mailbox.sc.edu).  Such suggestions can often be incorporated when problems develop with book orders.

Naylor, Bailey’s Café,                                                 Hawkes, Whistlejacket
Barthelme, Snow White The Dead Father                    Hoban, Riddley Walker
DeLillo, Falling Man or  Mao II                                  Mailer, Armies of the Night
Pynchon, V.                                                                  Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Gardner, Grendel                                                         O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge Updike, Rabbit Run                                                      Spiegelman, Maus
Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight              Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban
Powers, Echo Maker or Plowing the Dark                 Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
McCarthy, The Crossing                                             Salinger, Nine Stories
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker or Aloft

SEMESTER GRADE:  10% Daily quizzes  10% Book Review  60% Three papers  20% Final exam

ENGL 756      History of the Book in the US                                   TTh     9:30-10:45      Jackson
Print Culture and American Literary History
The History of the Book is a new and dynamic interdisciplinary field of study that explores the production, dissemination, and consumption of printed texts and the nature and meaning of print culture in a rich variety of contexts.  Although the study of print culture draws from many disciplines, including legal studies, sociology, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and the history of technology, it speaks especially compellingly to the study of literary history.  The goals of this course are therefore twofold: firstly, to offer an intensive introduction to the history of books, print culture, and communication in America from the seventeenth century through the middle of the nineteenth; and secondly, to consider how the study of print culture can inform, enrich, and complicate our understandings of literary history.  Under the first rubric, we will consider 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; the 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.  Just as importantly, however, we will apply these insights and bodies of knowledge to a range of canonical and non-canonical American texts, using case studies to examine how book history can come into dialogue with literary history.  We will also explore the pedagogical challenges of using book history 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.  Although the primary texts will be American, the class will be structured in such a way that it should be useful for those interested in British, and especially Atlantic, literary history.  The class will follow a seminar format with analysis of scholarly articles and book chapters paired up with selected literary materials, many of which the class will choose together. Pedagogically, the class will be somewhat more akin to a theory course than a literary historical one, although it will be profoundly rooted in history and textuality.  Assessment will focus on a substantial research or pedagogically-inflected term project.

ENGL 758      Southern Literature Pre-1900                                              MW   11:15-12:30     Shields

ENGL 765A   Topics/Cinema and the Archives                                         M        2:30-5:00        Cooper
(meets with HIST 700H)                                                                               Screenings 7-9 p.m. Sundays
Motion pictures are archival objects as well a technology for  archiving--a coincidence that promises to teach us about archives themselves as well as about cinema and the histories in which it has  participated. The seminar will proceed from interdisciplinary consideration of how knowledge is produced by means of an archive to the practical work of using cinematic archives in research. Students are expected to produce seminar papers that will lead to publication.

ENGL 783      Applied English Syntax                                                        W       5:00-7:45     Disterheft
(crosslisted LING 725)
An intensive survey of the major structures of English, designed especially for English teachers (EFL, primary, secondary); a practical course with little theory explicitly taught, but based on generative principles. Topics include phrase structure, verb classes, the tense-aspect system, the auxiliary system, adverbials, adjectivals, nominals, coordination, and discourse strategies.

Text: Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, The Grammar Book (second edition).

ENGL 797      Current Rhetoric & Composition                                          MW    2:30-3:45        Watson
The Practice of the Profession
This course is designed to help graduate students, especially those in Rhetoric and Composition, to understand and succeed in the process of academic professionalization.  As such, we will address twin concerns: scholarly publication and contemporary issues in the field.  One’s research agenda and publications grow out of intellectual engagement with the most current debates and pressing issues characterizing the discipline today.  Ideally, advanced students in the program who have existing work they would like to revise for publication, or concrete ideas for a publication, will take this course, since one of the primary requirements will be to supply, early on in the term, an academic paper for in-class workshopping and submission to a scholarly journal.  Our readings and discussions will cover a range of theoretical and practical issues related to academic publication (within Rhetoric and Composition), which will involve reading extensively in recent scholarship (books and journals) and addressing the craft of scholarly research more broadly.  In addition to the a publishable article-length work under review, other course requirements include placing a book review, submitting at least one conference proposal, teaching one entire class, regular reading responses, and evaluations of peers’ work. 

ENGL 812K   Lit. Metamorphosis Ovid to Shakespeare                           TTh     12:30-1:45   Miller   
(meets with CPLT 880K)
Metamorphosis is a central topic in European cultural history—so central that it comes to stand for the powers of the artistic imagination itself.  In this seminar we’ll start with Ovid and follow the metamorphoses of metamorphosis through Dante and Petrarch to the English Renaissance, ending with Spenser and Shakespeare. 

Our guide for this journey will be Leonard Barkan, whose book on metamorphosis is a modern classic in the field of comparative literature.  We’ll work through The Gods Made Flesh chapter by chapter as we read the primary texts for the course.  In the process we’ll have the opportunity to reflect on the goals and methods of comparative literary study as they are embodied in a model scholarly text.  In April, Professor Barkan will visit our campus to give a talk based on his current work, and to meet with the class for a discussion of metamorphosis in the visual arts.

Course requirements:  class presentation (10%), short paper (5-10 pages, 20%), seminar paper (20-25 pages with bibliography, 50%), participation (20%).  Required Texts

Class presentation to be on a related literary or philosophical text, e.g. Timaeus, Consolation of Philosophy, Cosmographia, Oration on the Dignity of Man.

ENGL 820      Editing the Romantics                                                           TTh     11:00-12:15    Feldman
Through hands-on textual editing projects using works by Romantic-era writers, this course explores the practice of scholarly editing, along with the theoretical issues involved in making intelligent editorial decisions at all stages in the process.  We will consider the problems and controversies surrounding the choice of a copy text and its presentation, writing a statement of editorial practice, and creating useful historical and textual annotations.  In addition to two individual projects and a class presentation, students, as a group, will produce a scholarly edition of Helen Maria Williams’s extraordinary poem, Peru.

ENGL 821C   Studies/Place & Culture in 19th C Literature                       MW    2:30-3:45        Scott
This seminar course will examine ideas of place and culture, provinciality and cosmopolitanism, rootedness and dislocation in a series of major nineteenth-century texts (poetry, fiction, and essays), in the light both of contemporary comment and of selected recent discussion.  Authors/texts will include Burns, Wordsworth (Prelude), Scott (briefly), Galt (Annals of the Parish), Tennyson (In Memoriam), Arnold (poems and Culture & Anarchy), Clough (Amours de Voyage), George Eliot (Middlemarch), and Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles etc.).  Requirements include: regular attendance, preparation of assigned reading, and participation in discussion; three brief reports or position papers (to be presented in class and also submitted in written form); a full-length paper, to be presented to the class and submitted to the instructor in finished format; and final exit interview with instructor.  The class will meet in Thomas Cooper Library.

ENGL 830G   Violence, Subjectivity, and the Invention of Recognition   
(meets with SPCH 790B)                                                                               Th        5:30-8:00      Doxstader
With high stakes, the promise of recognition’s words has proven difficult to fulfill. For Hegel, the struggle for recognition grew from the experience of domination and the attending desire to create that “unity in difference” which holds the potential for human beings to reach both mutual understanding and “perfect freedom and independence.” Today, this hope to (re)make human and communal relationships is a central concern for those seeking to explain the development of subjectivity, delineate the obligations of ethical life, and promote democratic pluralism. In his seminal work on the matter, Charles Taylor casts the struggle for recognition as evidence of a “vital human need” and argues that the achievement of recognition is crucial to both the redress of violence and the formation of human identity. Increasingly, however, this position is a source of controversy. Looking from critical social theory’s concern for how human beings become human to political inquiries into the dynamics of public life and the protection of human rights, it now appears that the value of recognition may turn on its ambiguous potential to refuse the (paralytic) logic and politics of identity in the name of cultivating an ethos of identification.

What is recognition? What does it mean for one individual to be recognized by another? What is involved in the process of (mutual) recognition? To what ends does the struggle for recognition work? Given to these questions, this seminar will begin by reflecting on the nature and constitutive elements of recognition. Working with both classical and contemporary theories, we will investigate the various occasions and contexts of recognition and we will pay close attention to the variable ways that recognition has been defined and practiced. From this stage, the seminar will then dig deeply into the problem of how (a struggle for) recognition gathers the power to (re)constitute the terms of individual and collective life. More precisely, we will consider whether the desire for recognition is a call to language and consider how different modes of discursive and rhetorical activity serve to initiate and sustain recognition’s work. Examining the connection between recognition and rhetorical forms such as narrative, testimony, gift-giving, dialogue, conversation, and forgiveness, the seminar will afford an opportunity to plot the precise ways in which recognition strives to transform violent division and turn alienated subjects towards an “’I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.”

In addition to selections from such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, J.M. Bernstein, Jacques Derrida, Franz Fanon, Axel Honneth, Jurgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, and James Tully, the seminar will investigate a number of key works on the dynamics of recognition, including: Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself; Alexander Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition; Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject; G.W.F Hegel, selections from Phenomenology of Spirit;  Patchen Markell, Bound By Recognition; Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition. Questions about the seminar should be directed to Professor Erik Doxtader (email: doxtader@mailbox.sc.edu). 

ENGL 830H   Psychoanalysis and Liberation                                              T          5:00-7:30        Forter
This course examines the radical tradition within psychoanalytic thought, focusing on figures who have conceived of “the talking cure” as a practice for liberating human beings from dominative social arrangements.  We will read a range of Freud’s highly ambivalent writings in this area—writings rich in liberatory potential, but also often skeptical of the possibilities for radical change that they articulate.  Alongside these texts, we’ll read works by psychoanalytic thinkers from the socialist, feminist, queer, and anti-racist left.  The course will seek to identify what’s powerful and compelling in these visions as well as what remains limited or politically unfruitful in them.  It will, in addition, ask class members to ponder the question of how literary criticism might extend the most politically promising impulses of the authors we study.  What does literature have to teach us about the psychic conditions and meaning of radical social change?  What does it have to teach us about the forces ranged against such change?  Texts: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and Its Discontents, “The Passing of the Oedipus Complex,” “Fetishism,” “Femininity,” “Mourning and Melancholia,” “Female Sexuality”; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur; Bersani, The Freudian Body and “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; Benjamin, The Bonds of Love; Brenkman, Straight Male Modern; essays by Butler, Eagleton, Kovel, Marx, Sedgwick, Seshadri-Crooks, Silverman, Whitehook.

Written Requirements:  weekly response papers; two 4-page close reading papers; one final research paper of 15-20 pages.

ENGL 840A   Sass and the City: Modern American Women Writers & Urban Wit
                                                                                                                        TTh     2:00-3:15        Keyser           
Has the image of sophistication embodied by chicly dressed women sipping martinis restricted the output of literary women or enabled their independence? The course will focus on writers often considered to be
middlebrow, traditional, even snobbish or retrograde, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Mary McCarthy.  We will explore the possibility that there is more going on in their works than meets the
(scornful) eye.  We will read feminist literary criticism; gender-focused humor by male writers from the period; and excerpts from the periodicals these women wrote for.  We will look at theoretical and critical works that link humor and gender or mass media and modernism; and we will consider the relationship between modernist irony and the wit that these women writers produced for a living.  Requirements include weekly reading journals, one oral presentation during the semester, a visit to the Rare Books collection to view screenplays by Anita Loos, and a 20-25 page research paper.

ENGL 890D   Studies/Rhetoric & Composition                                          W        5:30-8:00        Friend
Curriculum Development in Composition and Rhetoric: Theories, Issues, and Practice
This class has a dual focus: First, we’ll explore key historical, theoretical, institutional, and design issues relevant to the development of college composition curricula. Then, we’ll draw on this material in developing concrete projects related to the assessment and revision of the English 101 and 102 courses in our department. Although the course is
especially relevant to graduate students in rhetoric in composition who plan careers in writing program administration, students in any area of English or related fields interested in pedagogy and curricula are welcome to enroll.

• Major assignments: Each student in the course will develop, in collaboration with the group, a research project that substantially contributes to the ongoing curriculum revision in English 101 and 102.  You’ll deliver an informal oral presentation summarizing your project to the class.
• Minor assignments: You’ll also complete brief responses to course readings and to classmates’ projects in progress.
• Readings: Readings will likely include excerpts from influential works on curricular theory and design and curricular trends in composition studies (Arthur Applebee’s Curriculum as Conversation: Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning, Richard E. Miller’s As If Learning Mattered; Colin Marsh and George Willis’s Curriculum: Alternative Approaches, Ongoing Issues; Christine Cornbleth’s Curriculum: A Contextual Approach, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps et al’s Composition in the 21st Century: Crisis and Change); recent exchanges on the function of college-level English (including the recent “What is College English” symposium in College English [2007]and case studies of composition curricular reform at Duke University and Temple University); and relevant documents published by professional organizations (the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Writing Courses, the CCC Wyoming Resolution, the South Carolina standards for secondary English, etc.)

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