Graduate Seminars

Introduction to profession of literary studies. Covers wide array of topics including state of discipline; scholarly organizations and conference presentations; critical and methodological approaches to literary studies; writing and publishing for scholarly and general audiences; building curriculum vitae and résumé; developing professional skills; understanding academic job market and humanities careers.

This class will offer a graduate-level introduction to studying the Victorian novel and a practical course in formal analysis of the novel. We will explore deeply one extraordinary nineteenth-century novel, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1851–53). Dickens’s novel ramified across the ocean, where it influenced Hannah Crafts, an enslaved woman recently escaped from North Carolina, and, in conjunction with reading Bleak House we will also read Craft’s novel—“possibly the first by a Black woman anywhere”—The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written circa 1853–1861, published in 2002. Both these literary texts will ground a series of readings in novel theory. Theorists we will read may include M.M Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Catherine Gallagher, Jack Halberstam, Toni Morrison, Raymond Williams, and Sylvia Wynter.

 

This course meets the post-1800 breadth requirement.

This course uses various histories of Atlantic medicine and illness to investigate the basic terms that inform literary criticism. Our primary goals will be to recognize how medical and caregiving practices structure colonial encounters, to explore the relation between medicine, community, and citizenship, and to imagine how the formal legacies of colonial medicine might guide us toward new and productive modes of analysis in the contemporary world.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

In this seminar, we will consider new directions in recent Asian American literature, including novels and collections of short stories and essays, alongside interdisciplinary scholarship in Asian American studies that engages with literature, art, performance, film, and video. The seminar will be an opportunity for students to discuss contemporary shifts, interventions, and developments in Asian American literature and Asian American studies. In particular, we will prioritize Asian American studies scholarship that intersects with other fields including, but not limited to, queer studies, disability studies, performance studies, and food studies.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This class will trace two main investigative arcs. One will focus on an introduction to key critical figures and concepts in the unfolding of a Chicanx literary heritage. The other will focus on current critical issues relating to discussions of biopower as a manifestation of modernity, of the end of modernity and history, and considerations of the posthuman. The first arc will serve to familiarize us with the field of Chicanx literary studies while the second will provide the opportunity to explore exciting and challenging theoretical formulations together, Course work, besides active attendance, includes an annotated bibliography and a final research project.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This course aims to introduce graduate and advanced undergraduate students to basic concepts, theories, and methods in research on narrative across the media of fiction, nonfiction, fictional film, documentary film, videogames, graphic novels, and digital forms of narrative on and off social media. Each week, we will explore a basic dimension of narrative (for example, narrators, major and minor characters, or narrative endings) and narrative in a particular medium (for example, fiction, graphic novel, or videogames).

The class will explore storytelling situations, plot structure, character construction, fictionality and nonfictionality, cultural story templates, modes of reading/viewing narrative, image-text relations, cross-media translation, audiences, and fan communities. We’ll also survey different approaches to these issues, from sociological, feminist, and critical-race approaches to theories that emphasize empirical study, quantitative tools, and digital media. The course materials will emphasize environmental forms of storytelling in particular as a focus and point of departure for analysis; students will be encouraged to explore and apply the theoretical and methodological tools to their own areas of interest and research in narrative across different languages, genres, periods, and media.

The class is designed as a combination of short introductory lectures on crucial concepts, paradigms, and traditions with extensive seminar discussions.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

This course will survey recent trends in media theory, internet studies, digital culture, speculative aesthetics, and video game studies. We’ll work through a range of monographs from the very recent past alongside works of digital art, video games, and media poetics. The “speculative” gesture of this course looks at how (new) weird game imaginaries might surface otherwise invisible aspects of network culture and digital platforms, up to and including ongoing developments in AI, LLMs, and other emergent media platforms.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement. 

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Writing workshop designed for English PhD students who are preparing for their Part II qualifying examinations, typically taken by end of their fourth year. Students draft dissertation prospectus and bibliography by end of quarter.

 

Please note this workshop can be taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

This course will explore the philosophy and literature of friendship, a concept that undergoes continuous transformation from antiquity through the beginnings of modernity.  We will consider the relationship of friendship to social hierarchy and politics on one hand, and to the history of sexuality on the other, while also examining the complex connections and divergences between models of male and female friendship, and (perhaps just as queer), models of male-female friendship.  Throughout we will be considering the relationship of “friend” to “enemy,” “friend” to “family,” and “friendship” to “love.”   The essay and epistle in a variety of forms—philosophical, poetic, personal– will be of special interest to us as important linguistic mediums of friendship.  Montaigne saw his essays, for example, as letters to a lost friend.  Because of the complex and dense intellectual history of this concept, we will spend a good deal of time on crucial texts from antiquity and the early modern period which we will then use to focus on various case studies, which may include members of the Scriblerian circle, in particular Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and their working-class heir Mary Leapor,  the Bluestocking circle of Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott, the iconic “Club” of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson,  and, with an assist from an expert, the sentimental friendships of novelist Lawrence Sterne and Ignatius Sancho.

 

This course meets the pre-1800 breadth requirement.

This seminar focuses on the development of aestheticism and decadence from the 1860s to 1900, with particular reference to a range of British, Indian, Irish, and South African writers. Readings include works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Walter Pater, Toru Dutt, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper).

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course may meet the post-1800 breadth requirement OR the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement. Students may apply the course to only one of the above breadth requirements, and final seminar paper must cover territory within that breadth area.

Detailed description coming soon.

 

This course meets the genre/theory/methods breadth requirement.

Structured as writing workshop. Determination of what publishable article looks like. Independent revision of student work. Circulation of student papers. Class-wide discussion of writing.

 

Please note this workshop is taken for an S/U grade only and cannot count toward the coursework requirement for the Ph.D.