English Language and Literature

Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 432.2233
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Director of Graduate Studies
Jill Campbell (107A LC, 432.2226, jill.campbell@yale.edu)

Professors
Harold Bloom, Leslie Brisman, Richard Brodhead, David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, Roberta Frank, Paul Fry, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Langdon Hammer, John Hollander, Margaret Homans, Vera Kutzinski, Traugott Lawler, Lawrence Manley, Annabel Patterson, Lee Patterson, Linda Peterson, David Quint, Claude Rawson, Joseph Roach, John Rogers, Robert Stepto, Alan Trachtenberg, Alexander Welsh, Bryan Wolf, Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Associate Professors
Thomas Otten, Sarah Winter

Assistant Professors
Nigel Alderman, Ala Alryyes, Jennifer Baker, Joseph Bizup, Jessica Brantley, Wes Davis, William Deresiewicz, Elizabeth Dillon, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Laura Frost, Matthew Giancarlo, Blair Hoxby, Amy Hungerford, David Krasner, Pericles Lewis, Sanda Lwin, Stefanie Markovits, Christopher R. Miller, Diana Paulin, Michael Trask, Elliott Visconsi

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; by July 15 following the second year, each student must have completed at least twelve courses with grades of Honors in at least four of these courses and not more than one Pass. 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. The three-language option: three languages, all to be passed by departmental exam, 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); and (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 Graduate School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of English Language and Literature offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. 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 Director of Graduate Studies, English Department, Yale University, PO Box 208302, New Haven CT 06520-8302.

Courses
ENGL 500a, Old English. Roberta Frank. Mon/Wed 9-10.20
Introduction to Old English language and style as well as reading and critical analysis of representative Old English poems (heroic narratives, elegies, religious meditations) and a few prose selections.

ENGL 500b, Beowulf. Roberta Frank. Mon/Wed 9-10.20
A close reading of the Old English poem Beowulf and related verse such as Deor and The Finnsburg Fragment. Attention is given to the general qualities of the Northern heroic tradition, and class members are asked to sample Beowulf scholarship and criticism, early and late. The course includes a final examination and a short paper.

ENGL 505bu, Readings in Old Norse Poetry and Prose: Chronicles of the Vikings. Roberta Frank. Mon/Wed 11.30-12.45
An introduction to the literature of earliest Norway and Iceland. Texts (read in the original) include runic inscriptions left behind by the Vikings, verse of their official skalds, the sometimes irreverent mythological poetry of the Edda, and the sagas telling of the Norse discovery of America. Prerequisite: LING 182/582 or permission of the instructor. Also LING 583bu.

ENGL 534au, Piers Plowman. Traugott Lawler. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
A reading of the whole poem in the B text, with some reference to the A and C texts; regular assignments also in the critical and scholarly literature.

ENGL 545a, Early Chaucer. Matthew Giancarlo. Monday 3.30-5.20
A study of Chaucer's early works, focusing on the Troilus and Criseyde as well as his other early narrative poems, but not including the Canterbury Tales. Attention is paid to Middle English language and culture, as well as to the modern critical reception of Chaucer's poetry.

ENGL 550a, Spenser. Lawrence Manley. Thursday 10.30-12.20
A study of The Faerie Queene and several of the minor poems, with some attention to antecedent and collateral works, Spenserian influence, and modern critical approaches.

ENGL 565a/b, Introduction to Renaissance Studies. David Quint [F], Lawrence Manley [Sp]. Tuesday 10.30-12.20 [F], Wednesday 3.30-5.20 [Sp]
An introduction to major texts, issues, bibliography, and methods in the interdisciplinary study of the Renaissance. Emphasis in the first semester on Italy and in the second on northern Europe. Also CPLT 501, RNST 500.

ENGL 672au, Milton's Shorter Poems. John Hollander. Monday 1.30-3.20
This seminar provides an occasion to explore the range of Milton's shorter poems, as well as introducing students to a considerable sample of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. Texts include Comus and Arcades along with other Stuart masques; Lycidas with other pastoral elegy, and with Spenser's January; the earlier and later sonnets along with exemplary English (and, in translation, some Italian) sonnets from the mid-sixteenth century on; Milton's translations for the Psalms along with the history of the Psalter in English. Some attention is paid to the erotic poetry that Milton generally eschewed.

ENGL 672b, Milton. David Quint. Thursday 1.30-3.20
A study of 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. At least seven weeks of the course are devoted to Paradise Lost. Also CPLT 672b.

ENGL 711b, Satire: Rochester to Sterne. Claude Rawson. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
A study of the many forms of satire written in English between 1660 and 1750, generally regarded as the most important period in the history of English satire. We consider the broad range of satiric poetry from the rough, forthright, and often blasphemous or obscene poems of Oldham and Rochester, or the light and seemingly demotic verses of Butler, Prior, and Swift, to the higher and more "correct" couplets of Dryden or Pope or Samuel Johnson. Prose and dramatic satire, including Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Fielding's Jonathan Wild, are also studied, as well as the satirical dimension of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Preliminary consideration of the older satirical models, including the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal, and some early English satirists, chiefly Donne. Attention to satire's conservative or "progressive" tendencies; its aggressive, punitive, or reformative purposes; its potential for self-satire; and its more and less effective forms.

ENGL 726a, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne. Jill Campbell. Monday 1.30-3.20
A study of the major works of three mid-eighteenth-century writers who defined "the novel" in different but interrelated ways. Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey, with selected critical and theoretical readings.

ENGL 751a, Literature and Public Life, 1750-1800. David Bromwich. Monday 10.30-12.20
This seminar is about the consolidation and the decline of the English Augustan ideal of public life. Attention to ways in which the studies of history, political thought, and the arts were brought into conjunction by the use of such metaphors as "representation," and to the implications of the belief in a public ordering of sentiments and cultivation of feelings. A question asked throughout is, What, if anything, connects the eighteenth-century idea of the common good with the emergent idea of "consciousness"? Also CPLT 852a.

ENGL 756a, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Paul Fry. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
Close attention to the major works of the "second generation" poets, with emphasis both on the way they read their predecessors, especially Wordsworth, and on the way they read each other. Underlying this approach is the conviction that between them these three poets divide up, or triangulate, the possible "romantic" stances that the Wordsworthian legacy (varyingly understood, of course) makes available. Underlying this conviction in turn is the oft-challenged belief that "romanticism" is indeed a viable concept in intellectual and literary history.

ENGL 758bu, Romantic Epic. Leslie Brisman. Tues/Thurs 11.30-12.20
Wordsworth, Blake, and the history of the self as an alternative to preoccupation with the French Revolution. Some attention to the general phenomenon of new and old historicism in recent literary criticism, and to the involvement of the second-generation Romantic poets in the politics of their time; but the primary focus is on the monumental poetic projects of Wordsworth and Blake.

ENGL 810b, Victorian Poetry. Linda Peterson. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
A study of the major poetry (with some prose and paintings) of Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, D. G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Swinburne. We pay particular attention to the relation between Victorian poetry and its Romantic antecedents, issues of gender and genre, the publishing contracts for verse, and the cultural function of poetry as it was conceived by the poets and their audiences.

ENGL 818a, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
George Eliot's development as a novelist from Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) through Daniel Deronda (1876), in the context of debates about the nature and function of realism both in the nineteenth century and since. Taking our cue from the novelist's own comparison of her early work to Dutch genre painting, we devote at least some attention to realism in the visual as well as the verbal arts.

ENGL 841b, Transatlantic Print Culture and the Early American Novel. Elizabeth Dillon. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
An examination of the relation between the form of the novel and conditions of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. Rather than reading early American novels as allegories of nation foundation, we consider these texts in relation to the transatlantic print public sphere in which they circulated, and the transatlantic economy in which many of the characters in these novels circulate as well. Readings include a range of theoretical works concerning the rise of the novel, the emergence of the print public sphere, and the development of colonialism, as well as novels from both sides of the Atlantic by Behn, C. B. Brown, W. H. Brown, Cooper, Defoe, Edgeworth, Foster, Richardson, Rowlandson, Rowson, Scott, Tenney, and Tyler. Also AMST 841b.

ENGL 851a, Problems in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Wai Chee Dimock. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
This course, a broad survey of nineteenth-century American literature, is also an introduction to the vocabularies and strategies of reading. Focusing on the phenomenal world of each text as a linguistic construct, we examine its constellation of words through a variety of critical lenses, from racial and gender politics to narrative form, semantic resonances, and literary genealogies. Works by Emerson, Melville, Stowe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Whitman, James, Twain, Wharton. Each primary text is read in conjunction with at least one critical essay. Also AMST 663a .

ENGL 899a, The Figure of "The Indian" in American Literature and Culture. Alan Trachtenberg. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
The seminar examines interpretations of the native peoples of North America in writing, thought, art, and popular culture in the United States from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Against a background of the history of contact and conflict between European-Americans and Indians, the class considers how changing conceptions and images of native peoples have played a formative role in the making of an "American" literary tradition. Reading and discussion, and research in Beinecke collections. Also AMST 606a.

ENGL 903b, The Modernist and Late-Modernist Long Poem. Nigel Alderman. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Although the history of twentieth-century poetry is littered with monumental failures and ruins, poets continue in their attempt to construct larger poetic forms. This course begins with the high modernist exemplars of Eliot and Pound, before examining how these forms devolved and expanded into different regions of the British archipelago. We are also concerned with twentieth-century literary theory, especially in relation to genre, to the concept of difficulty or "literariness," and to theories of modernity, modernism, and the modern. Poetry includes works by Pound, Eliot, Auden, Macdiarmid, and Braithwaite. Criticism by Shklovsky, Jakobson, Benjamin, Anderson, Jameson, and others.

ENGL 904b, Major American Poets. Harold Bloom. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Emerson (prose and poetry), Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Frost, Hart Crane.

ENGL 908a, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Langdon Hammer. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Intensive study of the lives and work of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Issues for discussion include the construction of their literary careers, their complex friendship, their relations to their contemporaries, their distinctive positions in American and international literary traditions, problems of sexual identity, the ongoing history of their critical reception, the interplay of their work in different forms (poetry, fiction, plays, letters, painting), and issues in archival research.

ENGL 913b, Empire and Its Double. Sara Suleri Goodyear. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
A course that concentrates on readings of Empire as a "secret sharer" of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British narrative. Rather than solely focusing on images of orientalism, we examine infiltrations of alterity that lie too close for comfort. While attempting to undo the idea of exoticism, we simultaneously address what E. M. Forster calls "aspects of the novel" in order to consider the question, What does the novel want? Texts include Edmund Burke's story-telling in Parliamentary debate, Dickens, Austen, Meredith, Kipling, Forster, Salman Rushdie, Ismat Chughtai, Ahga Shahid Ali. Our examination of Conrad's trope of the secret sharer will cause us to question the singularity of imperial stories and their slippage into theories of nation.

ENGL 917b, American Theory: Cultural Criticism and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Michael Trask. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
Focus on the theory-function in modern U.S. culture, with particular emphasis on the decades between the Great War and Vietnam. We look at both critical and literary texts that actively take up the cause of theory, including those of Bourne, Mencken, Wilson, Rahv, Trilling, Howe, Dos Passos, Hurston, Ellison, Mailer, Friedan, Arendt, McCarthy, Bellow, Marcuse, Goffman, and Ginsberg; and at contemporary theorists of theory, including Jameson, Anderson, and Giddens. Topics include the place of "America" as an object of critical inquiry and the dominance of liberalism in American political thought. Also AMST 842b.

ENGL 921a, Ralph Ellison in Context. Robert Stepto. Thursday 10.30-12.20
This seminar pursues close readings of Ralph Ellison's essays, short fiction, and novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. The "in context" component of the seminar involves working from the Benston and Sundquist volumes on Ellison to discern a portrait of the modernist African America Ellison investigated, with at least Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Romare Bearden also in view. The texts include Ellison, The Collected Essays, Flying Home and Other Stories, Invisible Man, and Juneteenth; K. Benston, Speaking for You; E. Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; A. Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Also AFAM 563a, AMST 921a.

ENGL 922b, Magic Realism in the Americas. Vera Kutzinski. Monday 10.30-12.20
This seminar focuses on remappings of the subject within twentieth-century counterrealist writing from different parts of the Americas. Authors include Isabel Allende, Robert Antoni, Erna Brodber, Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Janet Frame, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville, Juan Rulfo, and Lawrence Scott. Also AFAM 759b, AMST 767b, CPLT 854b.

ENGL 940a, Problems in the Study of African American Literature. Elizabeth Alexander. Wednesday 1.30-3.20
This seminar examines both nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literary texts, and while students gain a comprehensive understanding of the breadth of the field, we focus on several key issues or "problems" central to the study of African American literary history. We read variously from slave narratives, autobiographies, poetry, novels, nonfiction essays, and anthologies, joining close readings of literary texts with the interdisciplinary contexts of history, cultural criticism and theory, and other art forms. Also AFAM 595a, AMST 640a.

ENGL 942a, Race and Representation in U.S. Literature and Culture. Sanda Lwin, Diana Paulin. Thursday 3.30-5.20
A graduate seminar that introduces theories of difference through the lens of Asian American and African American literary and cultural production. We draw from theoretical readings in fields such as gender studies, performance/theater studies, postcolonial studies, and legal studies. Through this critical inquiry we consider questions about the following topics: racial/sexual minorities and the politics of inclusion/exclusion, the "imagined communities" of nationality, alliances across racial and national boundaries, history and memory. Also AFAM 746a, AMST 672a.

ENGL 948bu, Autobiography in America. Robert Stepto. Monday 1.30-3.20
This seminar studies at least a dozen North American autobiographies, mostly from the "American Renaissance" to the present. The selected texts enable discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. The seminar presents an opportunity for students to begin or to continue investigations of slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation, etc. Other likely topics include institutionalizing and/or historicizing the self, literacy and identity, ethnicity and identity, the American self intentionally or unintentionally commodified via the autobiographical act. Also AFAM 588bu, AMST 710bu.

ENGL 951b, Modernity and Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture. Bryan Wolf. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
This course examines the relationship between "liberal culture," visuality, and modernity. It considers the privileged role played by seeing in the modern world, looking both at paintings and literary texts organized around questions of perception. In particular, the seminar focuses on the "dream of transparency," the way that seeing works ideologically to affirm the tenets of liberal belief; we examine both the construction and "deconstruction" of this dream. Topics include visuality and the public sphere; landscape and "depoliticized speech"; genre and hegemony; race and identity; managerial culture and disembodied vision. Painters examined include: Wright of Derby, Copley, Cole, Durand, Church, Mount, Bingham, Homer, Eakins. Writers include: Wheatley, Irving, Emerson, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, H. Wilson, Chestnutt. Methodological sessions are devoted to Barthes, Foucault, and Jameson. Also AMST 860b.

ENGL 953a, Word and Image from Lessing to Foucault. Thomas Otten. Thursday 3.30-5.20
A study of the relations-the fictive resemblances and inevitable assimilations-of verbal and visual media in theory from Lessing's Laocoön to Foucault's This Is Not a Pipe, along with close analysis of poems and novels by Dryden, Pope, Keats, Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hawthorne, James, Stevens, Ashbery, May Swenson, and Jorie Graham. As that list suggests, the course considers several different kinds of intersections between literature and art: the ecphrastic tradition (passages which describe painting or sculpture), the visual shapes of literary texts, the Künstlerroman (the novel tracing an artist's development), and the concept of portraiture. Also CPLT 853a.

ENGL 989b, Poetics. John Hollander. Monday 1.30-3.20
The poetics of scheme and trope. This course considers questions traditionally framed as those of form and meaning, but from linguistic and rhetorical perspectives. Among matters covered are the nature of rhythm and recurrence; prosodic systems in general and those of English in particular; structures of meter and versification; speech and writing; the synchronic and diachronic analyses of form; the critique of formalism; the nature of lyric poetry; and the relation of all these to questions of metaphor and the structure of larger fictions.

ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English. Linda Peterson. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
An introduction to the teaching of literature and composition. Weekly seminars address a series of practical problems connected with teaching: preparing syllabi and lesson plans; generating and guiding classroom discussion; lecturing; introducing students to various literary genres; formulating aims and assignments in composition classes. In addition, we pay continuing attention to important theoretical issues, e.g., how the study of literature and writing can be related to humanistic study at large; how the increasingly abstruse methodologies of current criticism can be adapted to use at more elementary levels of inquiry; what verbal and social assumptions underlie various approaches to the teaching of composition; and other topics, large and small.

Students enrolled in this course will become affiliated with a section of one of the freshman literature or composition courses. This arrangement enables them to observe a class in action and to confer with an experienced teacher on classroom strategies. In addition, with the agreement and supervision of the instructor, students teach the class themselves once or twice during the term, grade some papers, and hold tutorials.

Because this course requires the full involvement of everyone who participates in it, no auditors are accepted. The size of the class is limited, with priority going to second-year students in the English department. The only grades possible are "Satisfactory" or "Unsatisfactory."

ENGL 995a/b, Directed Reading and Research. 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: Epidemiology and Public Health