English Language and Literature

Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 432.2233
www.yale.edu/english/
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Langdon Hammer

Director of Graduate Studies
Linda Peterson (106a LC, 432.2226, linda.peterson@yale.edu)

Professors
Harold Bloom, Leslie Brisman, David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, Janice Carlisle, Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, Roberta Frank, Paul Fry, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Langdon Hammer, Margaret Homans, Amy Hungerford, Pericles Lewis, Lawrence Manley, Alastair Minnis, Lee Patterson, Linda Peterson, Caryl Phillips, David Quint, Claude Rawson, Joseph Roach, Marc Robinson, John Rogers, Robert Stepto, Katie Trumpener, Michael Warner, Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Associate Professors
Ala Alryyes, Jessica Brantley, William Deresiewicz, Laura Frost, Christopher R. Miller

Assistant Professors
Tanya Agathocleous, Shameem Black, Wes Davis, El Mokhtar Ghambou, Paul Grimstad, Hsuan Hsu, Stefanie Markovits, Susan Miller, Diana Paulin, Nicole Rice, Caleb Smith, Elliott Visconsi, Brian Walsh

Fields of Study

Fields include English from Old English to the present and American literature and language.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree

In order to fulfill the basic requirements for the program, a student must:

1. Complete thirteen courses—six courses with at least one grade of Honors and a maximum of one grade of Pass by July 15 following the first year; at least twelve courses with grades of Honors in at least four of these courses and not more than one Pass by July 15 following the second year. One of these thirteen courses must be The Teaching of English, ENGL 990.
   
   
2. Satisfy the language requirement. The requirement can be satisfied in two ways and is to be completed by the end of the second year.
   
   The two-language option: two languages, one to be completed by passing two advanced literature courses (graduate or undergraduate courses taught in and requiring papers in the language in question) with a grade of Honors or High Pass; the other to be passed by departmental exam. One of these two to be Latin or Greek. Students specializing in periods after 1750 may, with the permission of the director of graduate studies, substitute a second modern language.
   
   The three-language option: three languages, all to be passed by departmental exam (in the case of the ancient language, by exam or by a year of successful Yale course work), selected from among the following: (a) Latin or Greek; (b) French or German; (c) one of the preceding languages, or Biblical Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish, or another language agreed upon by the director of graduate studies. Students specializing in periods after 1750 may, with the permission of the director of graduate studies, substitute a third language for selection (a). Two terms of Old English (or one term of Old English and one of the History of the English Language) may be substituted for selection (c). The three-language requirement is to be completed by passing two exams by the end of the first year and the third by the end of the second year.
   
   
3. Pass the oral examination (before or as early as possible in the fifth term of residence).
   
   
4. Teach a minimum of two terms.
   
   
5. Submit a dissertation prospectus from three to six months after passing orals (depending on when these were taken).
   
   
6. Submit a dissertation.
   

Upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus, students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. Admission to candidacy must take place by the end of the third year of study.

Combined Ph.D. Programs

English and African American Studies
A combined Ph.D. degree is available with African American Studies. Consult departments for details.

English and Renaissance Studies
The Department of English Language and Literature also offers, in conjunction with the Renaissance Studies program, a combined Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and Renaissance Studies. For further details, see Renaissance Studies.

Master’s Degrees

M.Phil. See Degree Requirements. Additionally, students in English are eligible to pursue a supplemental M.Phil. degree in Medieval Studies. For further details, see Medieval Studies.
M.A. (en route to the PH.D.). Students enrolled in the Ph.D. program may receive the M.A. upon completion of six courses with at least one grade of Honors and a maximum of one grade of Pass, and the passing of two of the languages, ancient or modern, by departmental examinations.

Master’s Degree Program

Students enrolled in the master’s degree program must complete either seven term courses or six term courses and a special project within the English department (one or two of these courses may be taken in other departments with approval of the director of graduate studies). There must be at least one grade of Honors and there may not be more than one grade of Pass. Students must also pass examinations in two languages, ancient or modern. Full-time students normally complete the program in one year.

Program materials are available upon request to the Graduate Registrar, English Department, Yale University, PO Box 208302, New Haven CT 06520-8302.

Courses

ENGL 500a, Old English.  Traugott Lawler.
TTh 11.35–12.50
The essentials of the language, some prose readings, and close study of six poems: Caedmon’s Hymn, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, The Wife’s Lament, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer.

ENGL 500b, Beowulf.  Roberta Frank.
M 9.25–11.15
A close reading of the poem Beowulf, with some attention to shorter heroic poems.

ENGL 502a, Advanced Old English.  Roberta Frank.
M 9.25–11.15
Readings in a variety of pre-Conquest vernacular genres—e.g., scriptural poetry, hagiography, prose fiction, riddles, homily, colloquy, prognostics, praise poetry, and laws. Supplementary reading in current scholarship. Also LING 502a.

ENGL 531a, The Middle English Cycle Drama.  Nicole Rice.
W 1.30–3.20
This course investigates the late medieval English creation-to-doomsday play in several different regional contexts. We consider the development of this dramatic practice in connection with religious festival and economic and civic structure, reading the plays closely along with contemporary documents, religious polemic, and recent criticism. Topics include the idea of Corpus Christi, the performance of civic identity, gender and devotion, the challenge of heterodoxy, and the question of violence onstage.

ENGL 546b, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Discourses of Dissent.  Alastair Minnis.
M 1.30–3.20
This course seeks to investigate Chaucer’s manipulation of certain “discourses of dissent,” types of language use that can only be understood if related to the wider ideological contexts which stamped on them a distinctive—and potentially dangerous—significance. The discourses here chosen relate to authority both textual and social, the possibility of virtue and salvation beyond the Christian Church, the problematic existence of secular values within a theocentric society, inversions of gender-norms that could put “women on top” if only for precarious textual moments, and the orthodox policing of the relationship between Church authority and human fallibility.

ENGL 550a^u, Spenser.  Leslie Brisman.
MF 11.35–12.50
A reading of most of The Faerie Queene, together with some of the minor poetry and attention to Spenser’s classical and Italian precursors. The class meets once a week together with the undergraduate seminar and once a week as a separate group.

ENGL 606a, History and Historical Drama in the Age of Shakespeare.  Lawrence Manley.
W 3.30–5.20
A study of the imagination of history on the English stage in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peele, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and others in relation to both nondramatic forms of historical writing and contemporary affairs.

ENGL 672b, Milton.  John Rogers.
T 9.25–11.15
This course studies Milton’s poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to its historical contexts, focusing on the literary, religious, social, and political forces that shaped Milton’s verse. We are concerned, in addition, to survey and assess some of the dominant issues in contemporary Milton studies, examining the types of readings that psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and historicist critics have produced.

ENGL 721a, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution.  David Bromwich.
M 1.30–3.20
A partial survey of the political writings of Burke in the context of the theory of empire and of revolution. We emphasize his writings on India and France, which reveal a common theme: innovation—sudden change in a way of life—always depends on violence, whether its agents are internal or external to the society. We touch on a wider subject: the birth of modern ideology, from the demand for systematic excuses to justify empire and revolution.

ENGL 727b, Prose Satire and the Novel: Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Austen, Beckett. Claude Rawson.
T 1.30–3.20
Explores the role of irony, self-conscious narration, and the unparodying of parodic forms, in the evolution of the novel. Works include Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Shamela, Joseph Andrews, and Jonathan Wild, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Austen’s short fiction (Love and Friendship, Sanditon, etc.) and Emma, and Beckett’s Murphy and Watt.

ENGL 739b, Literature and Economics in the Eighteenth Century.  Catherine Labio.
T 1.30–3.20
The role played by literature in the formation of a new economic and moral subject as well as the key role played by modern economic thought and new economic realities in the emergence of modern literary forms and of literature as an academic discipline. Works by such authors as Defoe, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Taught in English. Also CPLT 761b, FREN 762b.

ENGL 742a, Fiction, Didacticism, and Political Critique: 1790–1818.  Jill Campbell.
Th 1.30–3.20
A study of writings that seek a specific effect in their reader—whether didactic instruction and moral formation, or an instigation to take action toward political change—and their uneasy alliance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the literary genre of prose fiction. How do writings that seek to inform or reform the real person or the real world put fictional narratives to use? How is the genre of the novel shaped, explicitly or implicitly, by writing to a specific “end”? Texts include novels, tales for children, life-writing, poetry with a “cause,” polemical essays; possible authors include Olaudah Equiano, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley.

ENGL 802a, Victorian Prose and the Uses of Life Writing.  Linda Peterson.
T 9.25–11.15
A study of seminal Victorian autobiographies and biographies, along with other prose that uses life writing as a form of history, argument, or example. Authors and texts include Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, Of Heroes and Hero-Worship), John Ruskin (Praeterita, Sesame and Lilies), John Stuart Mill (Autobiography, “The Subjection of Women”), Harriet Martineau (Autobiography), Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte Brontë), Matthew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy), Walter Pater (The Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean).

ENGL 822a, First Person Singular.  Peter Brooks.
W 9.25–11.15
The problem with first-person narration, said Henry James, is its “terrible fluidity.” James points here to a lack of formal limits in “stream of consciousness” narration; he may refer also to the deceptive, and self-deceptive, potential of first-person discourse, even at (especially at?) its most self-analytic. The seminar studies the workings of first-person narratives, particularly characteristic of the confessional (and also the false confessional) mode of much Romantic and post-Romantic fiction. Readings include works by James, Mary Shelley, Balzac, Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Benjamin Constant, Joyce, and Proust. Also CPLT 894a.

ENGL 827b, Novel Minds: The Representation of Consciousness from Austen to Woolf. Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
W 3.30–5.20
Close study of selected novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, with particular attention to the representation of consciousness and the development of the free indirect style. Our reading of fiction is supplemented by narrative theory drawn from James, Wayne Booth, Kate Hamburger, Ann Banfield, Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, and others.

ENGL 851b, Research Topics in American Literature.  Wai Chee Dimock.
Th 9.25–11.15
A broad survey of genres and methods in the field, with equal attention to historical processes (war, migration, modernization) and to salient analytic categories (race and gender, word and image, nation and globe). Authors include Anne Bradstreet, Olandah Equiano, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Leslie Silko, and Octavia Butler.

ENGL 853a, Theorizing Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature.  Hsuan Hsu.
T 1.30–3.20
This course provides a critical overview of key theoretical and historiographical approaches to nineteenth-century U.S. literature. We consider how theoretical and critical studies that have reshaped the field of American Studies interact with primary texts, reading E.A. Poe with commentaries on the print public sphere; Susan Warner with theories of sentimentality; Herman Melville with critical treatments of “nomadology”; Harriet Wilson with critical race theory; Mark Twain with statements on a “transnational” American Studies; Henry James with feminist responses to Freud; and Stephen Crane with Marxist and sociological studies of the leisure class.

ENGL 854b, Problems of Secularism.  Michael Warner.
W 9.25–11.15
This course is both theoretical and historical. Over the past ten years, a debate has opened up about the nature of secularism. It focuses on the viability of secular governance in the current conditions of globalization and violence. How closely is secular governance tied to the Christian culture from which it emerged? Or to the liberal frameworks that are its dominant justification? To what extent is it colonial in nature? This question has led to a reassessment of the Euro-American history as well, renewing basic methodological problems. How do we know “religion” when we see it? How did it come to be possible for people in Europe and America to understand themselves as outside of Christendom? What role is played in this history by modern disciplines of knowledge, including literary cultures of critical reading? Our theoretical discussion is guided by a reading of a major new book by Charles Taylor, to be titled The Secular Age. Some of ou! r case studies are geared to texts he discusses. Others focus on the anomalous history of secularism and Christian nationalism in the United States, from the development of an evangelical public sphere in the eighteenth century through the vicissitudes of the “godless Constitution,” the prophetic dimension of abolition, and the postchristian projects of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Students are strongly encouraged to take part in two major conferences at Yale in April: one devoted to Taylor and The Secular Age, the other to violence and religion in colonial America. Also AMST 851b.

ENGL 901b, Research Seminar: Twentieth-Century Poetry.  Langdon Hammer.
W 1.30–3.20
This course provides a broad overview of twentieth-century poetry in English and an introduction to research in the field. In addition to reading and discussing influential works of literary criticism and theory from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading to recent statements on lyric poetry by Allen Grossman, Susan Stewart, and Mutlu Blasing, students plan individual archival projects on specific literary magazines, poetic movements, and poets, using the Beinecke and other libraries, and share their research in workshop format meetings. We discuss Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens in the first weeks of the term; other poets are selected according to student choices. Also AMST 899b.

ENGL 930b^u, Orientalism.  Mokhtar Ghambou.
M 3.30–5.20
This course examines the main historical phases of European and American Orientalism from the eighteenth century to the present. An investigation of Western representations of the Orient allows us to critically engage with important literary and cultural issues such as the relationship between knowledge and power, the construction of difference in national literary traditions, and the limits and possibilities of transnational dialogue. Writers include Moore, Carlyle, Irving, Emerson, Kipling, Said, and Mernissi.

ENGL 935a, Postcolonialism and Its Discontents.  Sara Suleri Goodyear.
Th 1.30–3.20
A reading of theoretical and fictional texts from the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, and the Middle East to raise questions of cultural, religious, and racial identities. Also CPLT 727a, WGSS 714a.

ENGL 947a^u, African American Poets of the Modern Era.  Robert Stepto.
T 1.30–3.20
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. Also AFAM 596a, AMST 641a.

ENGL 953b, The American Avant-Garde.  Marc Robinson.
W 9.25–11.15
Topics include the Living Theater, Happenings, Cunningham/Cage, Open Theater, Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, Bread and Puppet Theater, Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Theater of the Ridiculous, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and the Wooster Group. Also DRAM 376b.

ENGL 971b, Moderns, 1914–1926.  Pericles Lewis.
Th 1.30–3.20
An intensive research-oriented course on British literature, 1914–1926, with some attention to European, Irish, and American influences. Major figures to be considered include Joyce, Lawrence, Shaw, O’Casey, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Strachey, Woolf, and Forster. Students pursue group research projects on poetry, drama, the novel, or intellectual history. The final syllabus depends on student interests. Also CPLT 598b.

ENGL 978a, Topics in Literary Theory.  Paul Fry.
W 1.30–3.20
Readings in twentieth-century literary theory that set the terms for its recurrent structures of argument, the premise being that the theoretical moment in thinking about literature can be reconsidered as a coherent tradition from Saussure to Butler. Some attention also to critics of this tradition such as Searle, Knapp and Michaels, and Guillory. Also CPLT 580a.

ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English.  Stefanie Markovits.
M 3.30–5.20
An introduction to the teaching of literature and writing. Weekly seminars address a series of issues about teaching: guiding classroom discussion; introducing students to various literary genres; formulating aims and assignments; grading and commenting on written work; lecturing and serving as a teaching assistant; preparing syllabuses and lesson plans.

ENGL 995a/b, Directed Reading.  Staff.
Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the director of graduate studies.

Next: Environmental Engineering