Fall 2009  l TOP l

ENG 600  Introduction to Graduate Literary Studies      Dr. Emily Garcia

Thursday, Allendale campus

(Required for all students in the English MA program, recommended early in the program)

ENG 612  Women Writers      Dr. Helen Westra

Tuesday, Allendale campus

Women Writers in America: Life, Liberty, and Pursuits

        In Toni Morrison's recent novel, A Mercy, set in America's colonial seventeenth century, a young female who thinks to give herself away for love, is told by a candid companion, "Own yourself, woman." But owning and asserting one's self was no easy accomplishment for women anywhere in the colonies (think of Anne Hutchinson) and certainly not in the world of literary production. Indeed, Anne Bradstreet, author of the first published book of poems by an American colonial, felt this keenly when it took the initiative, connections, and validating preface of a brother-in-law to bring her work to press in London. And when Mary Rowlandson, writer of a best-selling colonial Indian captivity narrative, first saw her own work in print, it was sandwiched between a sober preface by one minister and a sermon by another. Not until the late eighteenth century would women writing in America begin to test and vigorously claim fiction as a vehicle for imagined lives, longed-for liberties, and fascinating pursuits.
 
       To observe the progress and development of American women as novelists and short story writers, we will examine the genres that women authors explored and developed in distinctive directions; the difficulties they overcame in publishing climates that privileged male authors; the affiliations women formed to support each other as serious writers; and the recovery by 20th-century feminists of women's texts previously by-passed or marginalized by male literary establishments. Accordingly, we will engage a range of American women fiction writers, enjoy the depth and complexity of their achievements, and examine the various cultural contexts in which their works were inspired, created, and published. Moving across some two hundred years, this course will address works (some novels and a number of short stories) by Susanna Haswell Rowson, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich.

ENG 651  Period: Irish Literature since the Gaelic Revival      Dr. Kurt Bullock

Wednesday, PEW campus

ENG 651  Period: Romantic Period      Dr. Ashley Shannon

Thursday, PEW campus

ENG 661  Author: African-American Writers      Dr. Veta Tucker

Monday, PEW campus

African American Writers: Forging, Framing and Claiming Kindred

In ENGLISH 661, African American Writers, we will consider how African American writers from the 17th century forward address the following questions:  what iterations of sentiment, memory and imagination enabled networks of African American kinship to persist when extreme regimens of displacement and dispersal were imposed on Africans and African Americans by hegemonic culture?  What literary constructs, metaphors and myths have African American writers invented to narratize the kinship and kindred formations that African Americans forged in efforts to nullify the effects of enforced kinlessness and involuntary separation?  What distinct literary strategies, i.e. themes, motifs, personae, etc. constructed to represent African American kinship and kindred formations are still inscribed in 21st century African American literature? 

Spring/Summer 2009 l TOP l

ENG 651  Period: Victorian Literature           Dr. James Persoon

Winter 2009 l TOP l

ENG 614 Literature of American Ethnic Minorities    Dr. Veta Tucker

Eng 614 will focus on the voices and viewpoints of Black North American Women from their earliest known expression in frontier New France through the colonial and antebellum periods to the end of the nineteenth century.  The course will be framed as an examination of the expression and identities of Black North American Women as Icons and Iconoclasts.

ENG 616 World Literature In English: Nations and Migrations    Dr. Bertrand Bickersteth

ENG 624 Genre: American Non-Fiction     Dr. Rob Franciosi

Browse through the “New Books” at any Barnes and Noble and you will find evidence of an American publishing trend that shows no sign of slowing—the growing prominence of literary nonfiction. This course will focus on the rise since 1945 of what some have termed the “fourth genre” or “creative nonfiction,” a type of writing perhaps better described as the “literature of fact,” including such forms as memoir, autobiography, reportage, popular history, and literary journalism.

Besides reading classic examples of American nonfiction from the past sixty years and engaging the larger generic questions they provoke, we will pay particular attention to the cultural moments which produced them. Because nearly all prominent works of nonfiction since 1945 have been first published in magazines like The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly, one goal of the course will be to situate works by John Hersey, Rachel Carson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion and others within their original contexts. Students will also be expected to sample work by current practitioners, offering guidance to the rest of the class on the current state of the art of literary nonfiction.

ENG 661 01 Odysseus's Journey    Dr. David Alvarez

This course focuses on 20th century versions of two Ancient Greek texts, Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" and Sophocles' play "Philoctetes." We will start the course by reading Stanley Lombardo's recent translation of "The Odyssey." We will then proceed to read the 20th century's first version of Homer's epic, James Joyce's "Ulysses," and consider the ways in which the latter text reworks "The Odyssey" by recasting it in modernist form and by situating its action in early 20th century Ireland. We will then turn to a late 20th century version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Philoctetes, a hero of the war that constitutes the backdrop to the storyline of Homer's poem, is also the name of a character in a major 20th century revision of "The Odyssey" by the St. Lucian poet and dramatist, Derek Walcott. Heaney's version of Sophocles's play will therefore serve as a transitional text between Joyce's Irish version of "The Odyssey" and Walcott's two Caribbean versions of the latter. Walcott's epic poem "Omeros" and his play "The Odyssey: A Stage Version" will occupy us for the remainder of the semester.

ENG 661 02 Author: African Writers    Dr. Corinna McLeod 

This course is a broad survey of contemporary African Literature and an investigation into the plurality of this literature through such expressions as “African Canon,” “Regional Literature” and “Other Africas.”  Students in this class will explore literary aesthetics, economic issues, and political development, as well as common themes such as power, culture and identity as they are expressed through various genres.  While an emphasis will be placed on the reading of primary texts, supplemental articles will help locate the conversation and support discussion and analysis.  Authors include but are not limited to: Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Zakes Mda,  and Bessie Head.

ENG 600 Graduate Literary Studies Seminar     Dr. Jo Miller

ENG 605 Seminar in American Literature      Dr. Helen Westra

This seminar will focus on authors and texts that reflect America's search for literary, cultural, racial, and national identity. In so doing, this course will explore a central literary theme that spans four centuries (1608 to 2008) and appears pointedly in the now-classic 18th-century question framed by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: "What is an American?" Initially imagining an energetic, prosperous people virtually "melted into a new race, " Crevecoeur became increasingly disenchanted with his own answer. Walt Whitman, however, by mid-19th century again grandly asserted that America entirely "encloses old and new" and Americans are above all "the race of races." As Americans have continued to ask who or what is an American, writers have vigorously and creatively engaged these questions. Their works and voices, in forming our nation's literature and vision of itself, have been critical, enthusiastic, cynical, celebrative, probing, ironic, hyperbolic, humorous, pensive, dramatic, and passionate. Accordingly this course will examine captivity narratives, essays, short stories, novels, political cartoons, and autobiographies to understand how American images, myths, and narratives have evolved into increasingly complex, multi-cultural challenges to and assertions of American constructions of identity and American selfhood. What it means to be an American has always been important to mainstream writers, but this question has also had profound implications for slaves, immigrants, women, indigenous peoples, and th ose on the margins of American society. The course will examine (with attention to genre, ideology, class, gender, race) a range of authors across the centuries, such as John Smith, John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Jemison, Samson Occom, Mark Twain, Charles A. Eastman, Henry James, Pearl Buck, Oliver La Farge, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and James McBride.

ENG 624 Genre: Life Writing: Saints and Sinners      Dr. Rachel Anderson

This course will explore the genre of biography from some of its earliest incarnations in Western literature to the present day. We will focus on the sub-genres of literary biography, including Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare biography Will in the World and Janet Malcolm’s examination of Sylvia Plath biographies; hagiography, including medieval saints’ lives and an investigation of more modern hagiographic impulses in biography; and political biography, including Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, Thomas More’s Richard III, and present-day (and election year) biography.   We will conclude the course by looking at some fictional texts that both exploit and reexamine biographical conventions, such as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.   

ENG 651 Period: Modernism      Dr. Michael Webster

ENG 655 History of Literary Criticism and Theory   Dr. Kurt Bullock

Our purpose in this course will be to trace historically the philosophies, ideologies, attitudes and doctrines that have led us to perceive literature as we do today. This foundation of interconnected ideas will span 2,500 years, beginning with the diametric opposition of Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s humanist constructs; throughout, we will discern how allegiances to and reactions against the ideas of these two men, and of those who followed, have led to our own approaches to narrative criticism. As a general foundation for the understanding of literary thought and insight, our course will serve admirably to illuminate the ideas of those who have influenced writing and criticism and the socio-cultural contexts that, in turn, influenced them. We will rely upon a compilation such as The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism for primary texts by, among others, Plotinus, Sidney, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Poe, Arnold, Pater, Eliot, and Richards.

ENG 661 Author: Geoffrey Chaucer     Dr. Kathleen Blumreich

This semester, our primary focus will be on Chaucer’s best-known text, The Canterbury Tales. We will begin by acquainting ourselves with Chaucer’s life, times, work, and language (Middle English); then we will move to analysis of the tales. Although we will concentrate on the ways in which Chaucer’s masterpiece reflects its historical context, we will also consider how the stories can be (and have been) read through a variety of critical lenses.

Spring/Summer 2008 |TOP|

ENG 624 Genre: Contemporary Poetry     Dr. James Persoon

A study of contemporary poetry written in English (American, British, and World), including anthologies and complete collections by some of our best-known poets, as well as lesser-known but brilliant contemporaries.

TEXTS:

Contemporary American Poetry, R.S. Gwynn, ed.; The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt, eds.; The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, eds.; Cape Coast Castle: Poems, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang; Native Guard, Natasha Tretheway; Babel’s Stair, Rhoda Janzen; Seasonal Fires, Ingrid de Kok

(The total price for these seven texts is estimated to be around $100.00.)

ENG 651 Period: American Renaissance       Emily Garcia

"The American Scholar" (1837), in which he states: "Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" The nineteenth-century American writers we will read in this course each held a commitment to breathing "new life" into American democracy and letters, but not all were always considered part of the period and movement. In this course, we will pursue two goals: to examine the literature for what it adds to the literary tradition and to consider the ends served by the concept through literary criticism. We will consider aesthetic innovations both purported and practiced, cultural issues engaged and omitted, and historical contexts reflected and refracted.

Readings will likely include:The Blithedale Romance (1852), Melville’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President (1853), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Daughter’s Uncle Tom (1852), poetry by Walt Whitman, and prose by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Assignments will include response papers and a critical essay. For further inquiries email: garciaem@gvsu.edu.

ENG 661 Author: Willa Cather      Dr. Linda Chown

“A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.”

American poet Wallace Stevens said that we have nothing better than Willa Cather’s writing. Her life and writing were at the heart of American Modernism, yet without being fancy, word cluttered Modernism. Originally from Virginia, she spent early years in Red Cloud Nebraska’s extreme winters and equally extreme summers. She went then to New York City where she developed as a writer. She is not a writer of excess, valuing the importance of the things not said. In this class, we’ll look at various stages of her life in terms of her writing and also of the volatile criticism associated with her oeuvre. She has been applauded as a feminist Modernist, a chronicler of the new populations and customs in the American West, a visionary thinker of a spiritualized America, writer of mini-American epic narratives, iconoclastic example of new gender roles. We’ll read one book together from each period of her writing life: 1) Alexander’s Bridge, 2) A Lost Lady, 3) My Antonia 4) The Professor’s House; 5) Death Comes for the Archbishop; and 6) Shadows on the Rock.  We will also read her brief book The Writing of Fiction. There will be critical works on closed reserve. I will ask the class to buy Janis Stout, The Writer and Her World.

Students will give a report on one of these novels in its critical settings, write one extended paper on this novel (or another novel of their choice); write a weekly on-line response journal and a final exam.

Class sessions will be conducted seminar style—there will be films shown on Cather’s life and on reactions to her. Office hours will be times when we can talk and design papers and concepts. I will post for student perusal a lot of supplementary material to abet understanding.

Cather’s approach and writing are direct and clear, inviting readers to know her better. She is a wonderful deep example of American Modernism at its finest.

 “I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”

“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

Willa Cather

ENG 663 Shakespeare            Dr. Benjamin Lockerd

Shakespearean Romance. Our focus will be on the romance genre. We will read romantic comedies and the romances (or tragic-comedies) Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career.  The course will also include two tragedies which might be described as romantic tragedies.

Tentative list of plays:

The Menaechmi, by Plautus; Comedy of Errors; The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado about Nothing; As You Like It; Romeo and Juliet; King Lear; Cymbeline; The Winter's Tale; The Tempest

Text: The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel

ENG 603 Seminar in British Literature
Dr. Ashley Shannon

Forging the Nation

The title of this course borrows from Linda Colley's seminal discussion of the formation of a definably British national character in 18th and 19th century literature. This course, however, will cast its focus both backward and forward from that point to undertake a discussion of the formation of both a distinct English national identity as well as responses to and revisions of that identity from what we might call England's "peripheries": Ireland, and East Asia, as well as more contested identities such as gender and sexuality. Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, we will consider the formation of the very concept of nation in the medieval period; we'll also look at contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney's translation/rewriting of Beowulf as a reaction to the deep divisions between England and Ireland. We'll review the role of King Arthur is creating a national mythos of a heroic British national character, and examine the national status of Shakespeare's Henry V. Turning to the 18th and 19th centuries, we will debate the insider/outsider status of non-English members of the United Kingdom in Edgeworth's The Absentee and Scott's Heart of Midlothian, and finally, we'll consider two 20th century narratives of British national character, Stephen Frears's film My Beautiful Laundrette and Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty.

ENG 661 A Author: Berger
Dr. David Alvarez

Few writers alive today have produced a body of work as formally and thematically wide-ranging, original, and influential as John Berger. Best known around the world as the author of such pioneering studies of painting and photography as Ways of Seeing and Another Way of Telling, Berger is also a major fiction writer of our time. He published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, in 1958, when he was 33. During the 1960s, Berger published several more creative works, as well as a series of art-historical monographs, including an important appraisal of the career of Pablo Picasso, then the world's most feted artist. In 1972, Berger published G, which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize. In that year, he also presented Ways of Seeing for BBC television. A revisionist study of the heritage of Western art, both the television series and its accompanying text have influenced and challenged an entire generation of art-history students and professors. From the early 1970s to the present, Berger has penned a steady stream of fiction and art-criticism. Moreover, he has published plays, screenplays, and translations. Always formally innovative, Berger has also written a variety of unclassifiable texts that embrace cultural commentary, personal reflection, Art-criticism, scientific fact, philosophical speculation, and poetry. In this course, we will focus on Berger's fiction writing, but we will also have occasion to read some of his essays on art as well as at least one of his category-defying books. I hope that by the end of the semester, you will agree with the view advanced by The Daily Telegraph's reviewer of Berger's most recent work of fiction, Here Is Where We Meet (2005), to wit:
He has created a body of work unrivaled in the breadth of forms and genres it spans, its sensuous intelligence.

ENG 661 B Author: Joyce
Dr. Susan Swartzlander

Bold, brassy, and bawdy text by Irish genius James Joyce seeks equally bold readers up for the ultimate literary challenge. Join us when we drop into "dear, dirty Dublin" on June 16, 1904 with this graduate seminar on James Joyce's Ulysses. Find out what happened on this Dublin day and why people all over the world still celebrate Bloomsday every June 16th.  Discover why Ulysses was banned until a Supreme Court decision ended the need to smuggle the novel into the U.S.. Learn why Ulysses always tops the charts whenever people list the most important texts of all time.  Learn about Irish songs, toasts, and folk traditions. Enjoy puzzles, puns, and parodies.  Find out what James Joyce, Blazes Boylan, Molly Bloom, and Rodney Dangerfield have in common. We will look at the novel in the context of Irish history, as well as through a close explication of the text.

ENG 651 A Period: Early Modern Drama
Dr. Jo Miller

In the wildly popular London theatre scene from the late 1580's through Elizabeth's death and James I's ascension to the throne in 1603, and well into the 17th Century, Shakespeare was only one playwright among many. In this course, we will read several of the best plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, including those of his most important rivals and successors, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker. Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, Masters Beaumont and Fletcher and the rest of this company will entertain and enlighten us as we explore the immensely varied and richly textured world of the early modern theatre.  

ENG 651 B Period: Early American Literature
Dr. Emily Garcia

"What is an American?": Revolutionary Voices in Early American Literature

This course reconsiders Farmer James's now famous question from Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and asks whether, in the early period at least, "American" denotes not so much an identity as a subject position, one that gives voice to early Americans' frustrations, grievances, and desires for change.  We'll begin in the colonial period, when individuals such as the Puritan wife and mother Anne Hutchinson in Massachusetts and the Spanish Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas in Mexico challenged the assumptions that informed European missions in the New World.  Next we will consider revolutionary "declarations" of various forms, such as the Seneca Handsome Lake's rendition of "How America Was Discovered" and the Black abolitionist writings of Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall and Toussaint L'Ouverture.

The second part of the course will more carefully consider how "literature" in the usual sense (poetry, drama, fiction) addresses revolutionary matters, particularly as print culture becomes more prominent in the early republic.  Readings will include works by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, Mercy Otis Warren, and Herman Melville.  These later readings suggest that we consider to what extent, in the words of historian Gary B. Nash, the American Revolution is "unfinished." 

In addition to expanding our definition of revolutionary American literature to include voices of women's rights, abolition, and Native American resistance, we'll consider how early American writing challenges the terms on which the distinctions between "margin" and "center" are based.

Students will write a series of short (one- to two-page) reflection papers and one research paper.  They will develop their ideas for the research paper in part via a class presentation.

Fall 2007 |TOP|

ENG 600 Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
Dr. James Persoon

ENG 624 Genre: American Fiction
Dr. Helen Westra

This course on "The Roots and Branches of American Fiction" will explore American literature in its beginning and formative stages and observe how at its roots American literature is about borderlands and boundaries--geographic, political, ideological, racial, gender, and literary--about asserting, crossing, protecting, testing, and resisting boundaries. In examining narratives and fiction that emerge in the often contested soil of America's cultural landscape, we will address a variety of American eighteenth and nineteenth century works and their links to domestic, gothic, sentimental, romantic, and historical fiction, and our texts will range from seventeenth and eighteenth century writers such as Cotton Mather, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown, to nineteenth century authors such as James Fennimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa Mae Alcott. Throughout the semester we will consider themes such as land, citizenship, women, home, Native Americans, slavery, individualism, and westward movement as America's fiction increasingly becomes both cultural marker and instrumentality in the newly formed and expanding republic.

ENG 655 History of Literary Criticism and Theory
Dr. Benjamin Lockerd

Literary theory is practically as old as literature itself.  This course will examine changing ideas about literature from ancient times to the present.  Some of the thinkers who will come under consideration are: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Eliot, Marx, Lukacs, Freud, Jung, Frye, Lacan, Bakhtin, Brooks, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Booth, Fish, and Armstrong.

ENG 661 A Author: Faulkner
Dr. Mack Smith

Spring/Summer 2007 |TOP|

ENG 612 Women Writers
Dr. Avis Hewitt

When asked in Persuasion if she had noticed who had opened the door for her the previous day, Jane Austen's Anne Elliot replies, "No. Was it not Mrs. Speed, as usual, or the maid? I observed no one in particular." Critic Julia Nash has noted, "`No one in particular' may be what the masters and mistresses of history and literature wished their servants to be, but literary depictions of servants from medieval times to the twentieth century expose a high level of anxiety that in fact servants just might be people to be reckoned with." In this course we will study a number of works, beginning with Persuasion (1818), that allow us to tease out the implications of servitude. As we do, we will also take up the changing status of various women's texts "with regard to the canon," as the catalog course description states.

Using Austen as arguably the most universally esteemed female fiction writer in English, we will gauge by her aesthetic excellence the achievement of several canonical U. S. texts by women that deal with servitude: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911), and Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Finally we will read Margaret Mitchell's blockbuster 20th century bestseller, Gone with the Wind (1936) and Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (2001) to hear intertextually from characters on multiple sides of the servitude issue and to frame informed judgments regarding the likelihood of Mitchell's masterwork moving from popular culture to canonical status as Stowe's did in the 1970s with Jane Tompkins' incisive critique of it. We will augment our study of servitude in American fiction with short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather, and Flannery O'Connor. My aim will be to persuade you, starting with Persuasion, that servitude is, in fact, a potent stance for characters and a powerfully deconstructive literary force.

Dates for this course will be Tuesdays in May-the 8th, the 15th, the 22nd, and the 29th. In June we will meet Tuesday, June 5th, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays for the other weeks of the month:  June 12 and 14, June 19 and 21, June 26 and 28. In July we will not meet, but you will have reading and research assignments. In August we will reconvene on Thursday, August 2nd, as well as on the final exam date: Tuesday, August 7.  

ENG 624 Genre: Short Story
Dr. Kurt Bullock

We will trace the short-story form from its roots in folklore to its fragmentation in contemporary texts. While the short story holds consistent significance in American literature since 1840, the development of its form is equally attributable to writers beyond our nation: 19th-century Continental writers such as Chekhov and Maupassant; British Modernists such as Mansfield and Lawrence; Irish writers such as Joyce, O'Connor and Lavin; and more recently, world authors such as Borges, Garcia Marquez, Valenzuela, Xingjian, and Rifaat, who use the genre as an act of resistance. Our study will consider historico-cultural conditions that prompted emergence of the short story at different times in different locales while paying particular attention to the ever-evolving narrative form of the genre.

ENG 651 Literary Period Seminar: Medieval
Dr. Kathleen Blumreich

This semester we will focus on medieval epic and romance, considering such texts as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Havelok, and Chretien de Troyes' Yvain. Our aim will be two-fold: first, to explore the characteristic features of each genre; and second, to gain a better understanding of why romance came to displace epic as the preferred literary form during the early medieval period.
Required Texts:
R. Barton Palmer, Medieval Epic and Romance (College Publishing, 2007)
T. Steinberg, Reading the Middle Ages (McFarland, 2003)

ENG 661 Author: Hardy
Dr. James Persoon

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had three careers in his 88 years, each spanning roughly a third of his life: until his mid-thirties he was an up-and-coming architect and aspiring but unsuccessful poet; in his middle years he became a successful, even eminent, Victorian novelist; and then in the last thirty years of his life he made himself into a major 20th-century poet.

From the first period of his life we will look at his rejected poetry and his second published novel, the delightful Under The Greenwood Tree, published by him anonymously and mistaken by reviewers for the work of George Eliot, high praise indeed. From the middle period we will read his two most powerful novels, Tess and Jude. Finally, we will plunge into as many of the 1000 poems in The Complete Poems as we can manage. If we don't read all 1000, never fear: as Philip Larkin remarked, there is always something new and interesting to find in those poems, wherever one dips, even randomly.

This course will cover the major Yoknapatawpha County novels written during what is generally considered Faulkner's major period of artistic achievement, the years 1929-1942.  The novels we will cover include Flags in the Dust (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942).  We will study the novels through several approaches.  First, we will consider relevant aspects of Faulkner's biography to understand how someone without a high school education, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, and battling throughout his life with dire financial circumstances and alcoholism could become arguably the most important American novelist of the twentieth century.  We will study the evolution of Faulkner's style from his early work, heavily influenced by French Symbolism, to his later experimentation with stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and his unique handling of time.  We will also consider his creation of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its imaginary population of characters that are diverse in age, gender, class, and race.  A major focus will be his handling of the theme of slavery, which he considered to be the "original sin" of the South and the nation.

ENG 661 B Topic: American Literature and the Holocaust
Dr. Robert Franciosi

For six decades American writers and filmmakers have faced a representational dilemma: how to depict an event whose significance over time continues to grow, even being termed a metaphor of our times, yet which challenges the very limits of the imagination? How to confront the Holocaust?

This course will explore the history of American literary and cinematic engagement with Auschwitz, what has been called the Americanization of the Holocaust. We will study the entire sweep of this response, from the immediate post-war years to the present, giving particular attention to the complex cultural dynamics which have impacted these works and their receptions.

Among the texts to be considered: John Hersey,The Wall, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker, Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, William Styron, Sophie's Choice, Art Spiegelman, Maus, Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost, as well as films by George Stevens, Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, and Steven Spielberg.

Winter 2007 |TOP|

ENG 600 Graduate Literature Study Seminar
Dr. Linda Chown

ENG 614 Literature of American Minorities
Dr. Mack Smith

ENG 616 World Literature In English
Dr. Corinna McLeod

This class will negotiate the term "world literature" through the framework of postcolonial studies.  The term "postcolonial" has been assigned to a group of literatures that have in common a history of European colonization.  The theoretical approach examines the impact colonization and decolonization has had on identity (cultural, national, linguistic), migration, issues of exile, diaspora, and contemporary sociopolitical and geopolitical constructions of nation.  We will read a variety of novels, poetry, and critical essays from Africa, the West Indies, Europe, and India.

ENG 651 Period: Renaissance Literature
Dr. Benjamin Lockerd

This course will offer a broad survey of the English Renaissance engaging a wide variety of texts and authors, including a number of minor writers (such as Daniel, Drayton, Davies, Elyot, Googe, Raleigh, Waller) along with some of the greats: More, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Milton. We will be reading non-dramatic texts: poetry, prose fiction, essays, sermons, etc.

ENG 661 The Brontës
Dr. Ashley Shannon

This course will consider the major novels of the Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Despite growing up in relative isolation and poverty in the north of England, these three women wrote some of the most significant novels in nineteenth-century England. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights are probably the most familiar to modern readers, but Anne's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the prolific Charlotte's Shirley, The Professor, and Vilette are all important parts of the English literary canon as well. Dealing with questions of religion, the status of women, the nature of love, and even colonialism, the novels all help us answer the question: what did it mean to be English (and specifically, an English woman) in the nineteenth century?

Since time constraints prohibit us from addressing all of the Brontë's novels (let alone their short fiction and juvenilia), we will limit our exploration to six texts: Jane Eyre, Shirley and Vilette; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These novels will be accompanied by scholarly articles intended to provide a critical vocabulary for our discussion of the novels.

In addition to the reading load, coursework will consist of two major research essays, one due mid-semester and the other at the end of the term. There will also be smaller assignments-such as annotated bibliographies and class presentations-designed to assist you in producing those essays.

Fall 2006 |TOP|

ENG 605: Seminar in American Literature
Dr. Linda Chown

English 605, Studies in an American Literary Period, focuses this time on a moment when much seems new, unfamiliar, uncertain, exciting. Some writers talked not of character but of "allotrophic states," said that "human nature had changed." This world felt propped up by unstable "atoms," centered by physics' an "uncertainty principle," crowded by repressions, the energetic, secretive Unconscious. Additionally, these are the times of The First World War and its various kinds of explosions, the first motor vehicles, the first outdoor lighting and, by the end of the teens, the outbreak of the disastrous influenza epidemic.

Internationally, artists, writers, sculptors, musicians tried to find new ways to keep apace with this speed of change and do so in a way which seemed able to express all this new in a new way. One of our goals will be to discover what makes American Modernism unique. There will be a lot of time spent providing a sense of what the world artistic, political and cultural was like before all this change began. Then, we will read four novels. The first two, Cather's 'A Lost Lady' and Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury,' are each in their own way pieces of regret. Then, we'll read Hemingway's 'In Our Time' and Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' to examine links between the personal and the social more directly.

To help give us both answers and questions, we'll read and discuss, Bradbury's collection of essays, 'Modernism' and then the more recent book by Childs, 'Modernism: the New Idiom.' I'll bring in material from American poets, painters and musicians, which talks about what they want their art to be able to do (from Stieglitz, Stevens, Cummings, Anderson, Williams, Hurston, Hughes, Dreiser, etc.) Several books will be on Closed Reserve, Kalaidjian, Walter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism and A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers We will consult frequently chapters from these books. We'll write frequently in class--both response pieces and also effort to find conclusions. Class requirements include a midterm and final examination, one oral presentation, an analytical paper and a final research project of some 15-20 pages. We'll work together on this latter project from the course beginnings.

ENG 624: Realism and The American Dream
Dr. Victoria Brehm

The genre and technique of Realism was a world-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century, much as Post-Colonialism is today. This class will focus on how both genre and technique developed in the United States, and how the genre came to interrogate the assumptions of The American Dream. The class will begin with a pre-Civil War Realist novel by an African-American, then trace the development of the genre through the nineteenth century, culminating with Henry James's The Ambassadors. Subsequently, we will explore how realism as technique and Modernism as genre intersect in the twentieth, and end with an examination of the resurgence of realism as magic realism in contemporary American minority literatures. Assignments and readings will be posted on Blackboard.

ENG 651: Period: Old English
Dr. Rachel Anderson

While Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf is an excellent way to initially experience that great poem, nothing compares to actually being able to read and work with the original Old English text. This course will both offer an introduction to the Old English language and the opportunity to examine the texts of this period from a literary analysis perspective. Part of each class will be devoted to linguistic matters: namely, acquiring a basic understanding of Old English morphology and syntax, and forming a rudimentary lexicon for reading Old English poetry. The rest of each class will be devoted to reading a wide variety of Old English texts (some in the original, others in translation) in the context of current scholarly trends in the field.

ENG 663: Shakespeare
Dr. Jo Miller

Spring/Summer 2006 |TOP|

ENG 600: Literary Studies Seminar
Dr. Linda Chown

This course will introduce graduate students to current literary studies by explicating historical changes in the field of English in both literary content and critical discourse. Students will explore these changes by studying key concepts in the discipline and by completeing a research project. We will be reading texts in prose, poetry, epic and theater in the light of changing concepts of literary study. Two significant critical studies will help contextualize these changes.

TEXTS:
Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece 
Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway
Gerald Graff. Professing Literature 
Samuel Johnson. Selected Essays
William Butler Yeats. Selected Poems and Four Plays 
J. M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg 
Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English

ENG 624: Genre: Drama 
Dr. Kathleen Blumreich

English 624 involves "intensive study of the historical development of a selected genre...and of the nature of the genre, focusing on selected works." This semester we will begin with a brief survey of the origin(s) and evolution of drama, taking into particular consideration what makes this genre unique. Our energies will be devoted primarily, however, to the study of contemporary, award-winning plays. Course requirements will include (but not be limited to): a major research essay; individual or group performance of a scene; final examination.

TEXTS:
Albee, The Goat
Auburn, Proof
Blank & Jensen, The Exonerated
Brockett & Ball, The Essential Theatre (7th edition)
Edson, Wit
Parks, Topdog/Underdog
Samuels, Kindertransport
Shanley, Doubt

Winter 2006 |TOP|

ENG 616: World Literature in English
Dr. Bertrand Bickersteth

An in-depth study of selected pieces of Asian, African, or South American literature. Issues concerning the development of Third World literature and its status with regard to the canon will be addressed.

ENG 624: Victorian Novel
Dr. WIlliam Osborn

The era of Queen Victoria saw the English novel reflect back on the Romantics, examine the implications of the British way of life, and predict the modern age. In this course we will read some well-known Victorian novels and look at the history of England as it is mirrored in the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, and Oscar Wilde, and others.

TEXTS:
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale; Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations also Oliver Twist, Bleakhouse and The Pickwick Papers; George Eliot, Middlemarch also Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, Adam Bede; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; John Galsworthy, The Man of Property; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd also The Mayor of Casterbridge; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; H.G. Wells, Kipps also The History of Mr. Polly; and Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

ENG 651: Victorian
Dr. Rob Watson

The reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was the longest in British history, the scene of intense religious, social, and intellectual debate and extraordinary literary creativity. This course will examine literature that reflects and addresses the crisis of belief that runs throughout the Victorian Age. The assigned fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfictional prose center on the need for self-examination and re-definition through education in the face of such changes as the industrial revolution, the rising middle class, new theories of geological and biological science, and new notions of the role of women and sexuality.

TEXTS:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam.
Matthew Arnold. Poems. Culture and Anarchy.
John Henry Cardinal Newman. The Idea of a University.
Charles Dickens. Hard Times.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh.
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty.
George Eliot. Middlemarch.
Walter Pater. The Renaissance.
Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. Wessex Poems.
Oscar Wilde. The Critic as Artist. The Picture of Dorian Gray.

TEXTS:
Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed George J. Firmage. New York:Liveright, 1994.

---The Enormous Room: A typescript edition with drawings by the author. 1922. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978.

---. six nonlectures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.

Friedman, Norman. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet, 1962-1993. Gainesville: University P of Florida, 1996. [Recommended only]

Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.

Various articles from Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society [on reserve and on line at http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/Index.htm .]

Fall 2005 |TOP|

ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar
Dr. Lois Tyson

We will explore the state of current literary studies by explicating key concepts that inform the discipline today. In the process, we will note significant changes that have occurred in the field over the course of the 20th/21st centuries. The completion of a research project will help students hone their critical, analytical, and research skills.

TEXTS:
Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (U of MN P).
Chopin, The Awakening: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Ed. Nancy Walker  (Bedford/St. Martin).

RECOMMENDED TEXT:
Corbett, Edward. The Little English Handbook, 8th ed. (Longman) - or any up-to date grammer/usage handbook that includes MLA guidlines for online research sources.

COURSE RESERVE AT ZUMBERGE LIBRARY:
Lentricchia, Critical Terms for Literary Study (U of Chicago P).
Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton).
Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (Garland).
Tyson, Learning for a Diverse World: Using Critical Theory to Read and Write about Literature  (Routledge)

ENG 603: Fictions of Empire
Dr. Corinna McLeod

ENG 624: Modern Lyric Poetry
Dr. James Persoon

This summer term we will focus on contemporary American poetry. We will read complete collections by some of our best-known poets, including such Library of Congress poet laureates as Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and (currently) Ted Kooser; National Book Award winners Robert Bly and Carl Dennis; and Michigan poets Greg Rappleye, Patricia Clark, and Linda Nemec Foster (who will read from their most recent books).

TEXTS:
Contemporary American Poetry, R.S. Gwynn
My Father on a Bicycle, Patricia Clark
Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Linda Nemec Foster
Orpheus and Eurydice, Gregory Orr
Mother Love, Rita Dove
Sailing Around the Room, Billy Collins
Morning Poems, Robert Bly
A Path Between Houses, Greg Rappleye
Practical Gods, Carl Dennis
Delights and Shadows, Ted Kooser
The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser

ENG 661 A1: Flannery O'Connor in Pleasantville: Writing Redemption in the American 1950s
Dr. Avis Hewitt

This course will focus on O'Connor's major works--two collections of short stories and two novels, as well as selected essays and letters--in the context of mid-twentieth century Cold War culture and will take up the heated issue of reading O'Connor on her own terms, both then and now: "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy...for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ."  In an era when cultural criticism makes a theological lens the one contraband theoretical perspective in literary studies, we will scrutinize not only O'Connor's own uncanny success at controlling reader reception, but also the way her fiction works from a specifically secular perspective.  As we reason together, we will engage both her texts and her critical contexts to answer what Martha Nussbaum considers the bottom-line question in literary studies: How then should we live?

TEXTS:
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works.  Library of America, 1988.
Jon Lance Bacon's Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture.  Cambridge UP, 1993
Ralph C. Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.  Eerdmans, 2004.

Course assignments will include scripted presentations, an annotated bibliography, and a semester paper.

ENG 651: Literary Period Seminar: The Age of De-Colonization
Dr. David Alvarez

This course focuses on an array of literary texts that stem from one of the most consequential processes of 20th century history: De-colonization. In the first instance, the latter term denotes the emergence of independent national-states in territories formerly ruled by European colonial powers. However, in addition to denoting a specific political process in a certain cluster of territories during a roughly circumscribable historical period (from the 1940s through the 1980s), the term "de-colonization" and its cognates can embrace a wider set of terrains and meanings. (For instance, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo has written about the need for formerly colonized peoples to "de-colonize" their minds.) While this course will focus chiefly on texts and contextures linked to the formal demise of European imperial rule in the decades after World War Two, it will also address the wider field of significance evoked by "de-colonization." The geographic scope of the novels, plays, and poems that we will read is similarly broad: they hail from five continents and ten countries. To navigate the vast geography of the Age of De-colonization, we will avail ourselves of key chapters from a landmark study of the period, Edward Said's magisterial Culture and Imperialism.

Winter 2005 |TOP|

ENG 600 A1: Introduction to Graduate Literary Studies
Dr. David Alvarez

This course will enable students to acquire a sophisticated understanding of the issues and debates at stake in English Studies today. It will also help them to hone their own critical, methodological, and research skills and abilities.

Literary theory is practically as old as literature itself. This course will examine changing ideas about literature from ancient times to the present. Some of the thinkers who will come under consideration: Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Nietzsche, Eliot, Marx, Jameson, Freud, Jung, Frye, Lacan, Bakhtin, Brooks, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Woolf, Showalter, Fish, Kermode.

TEXT:The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David Richter

In this course, we will read Austen's six novels and some of her juvenilia and minor works, including "Lady Susan" and "A History of England." We will also read fiction, poetry, and drama that influenced her work, or to which she alluded or responded, including authors such as Frances Burney, Anne Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, George Crabbe, William Cowper, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider Austen in modern contexts: early and late films of her novels, the continuations of her unfinished novels, and novels and films inspired by her novels, including Bridget Jones' Diary and Metropolitan. Topics for special attention include Austens place in Romanticism, her role in shaping the novel, the reception history of her works, and her passionate readers and fans, the "Janeites."