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, Janice Carlisle (Visiting), Michael Denning, Wai Chee Dimock, John Felstiner (Visiting [F]), Roberta Frank, Paul Fry, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Langdon Hammer, Margaret Homans, Vera Kutzinski, Traugott Lawler, Lawrence Manley, J. D. McClatchy (Adjunct), Annabel Patterson, Lee Patterson, Linda Peterson, David Quint, Claude Rawson, Joseph Roach, John Rogers, Robert Stepto, Katie Trumpener, Alexander Welsh, Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Associate Professors
Murray Biggs (Adjunct), David Krasner, Pericles Lewis, Thomas Otten, Marc Robinson (Adjunct)
Assistant Professors
Nigel Alderman, Ala Alryyes, Jennifer Baker, Jessica Brantley, Wes Davis, William Deresiewicz, Elizabeth Dillon, Laura Frost, El Mokhtar Ghambou, Matthew Giancarlo, Blair Hoxby, Amy Hungerford, James Kearney, Sanda Lwin, Stefanie Markovits, Christopher R. Miller, Diana Paulin, Lloyd Pratt, Nicole Rice, 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; 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 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. Traugott Lawler. MW 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. MW 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 546b, Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. Jessica Brantley.
T 1.30–3.20
A reading of The Canterbury Tales that places them in the contexts of both medieval culture and modern critical and editorial practices.
ENGL 577bu, Lyric Genres. Christopher R. Miller. TTh 11.30–12.45
A study in the definition and evolution of lyric genres, including the sonnet, ode, elegy, and epistle. Supplementary readings in genre theory from the Renaissance to the present and in major twentieth-century critical movements, including formalism, feminism, post-structuralism, and new historicism.
ENGL 578b, Studies in Lyric Poetry of the Renaissance. David Quint.
Th 10.30–12.20
A study of several lyric poets writing in Italian, French, and English during the Renaissance, probably including Petrarch, Labé, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne. The stress falls upon textual analysis, although some general perspectives on Renaissance literature are also introduced. Also CPLT 694b, RNST 510b.
ENGL 623b, Jacobean Shakespeare. Lawrence Manley. W 3.30–5.20
A study of Shakespeare's later plays, emphasizing form and dramaturgy, in relation to works by his contemporaries and to the institutions of the Jacobean theater. Nine plays by Shakespeare and masques and plays by Marston, Middleton, Chapman, Tourner, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher.
ENGL 627b, John Donne and Andrew Marvell: Texts and Contexts.
Annabel Patterson. T 10–12.20
The goals are to provide students with an account of seventeenth-century poetry that is neither mere survey nor single-author course. Starting with Donne's satires of the 1590s and ending with Marvell's of the 1660s and 1670s, the course embraces all the poetic genres used by these two very different writers, against a background of Stuart and Commonwealth history. The large matter of Donne's sermons and Marvell's prose tracts is at least broached, if only to put their poetry in what they themselves would have considered its proper place.
ENGL 673b, Milton and His Contemporaries. John Rogers. Th 1.30–3.20
This course studies Milton's major poems and some of the prose, with a focus on their relation to a range of seventeenth-century texts by writers as varied as Herbert, Hobbes, Marvell, Bunyan, and Margaret Cavendish. Special attention is paid to the way in which the writing of Milton and his contemporaries responds to some of the century's most fractious religious, social, and political controversies.
ENGL 716a, Pope, Lady Mary, and the Augustan Age. Jill Campbell. W 10.30–12.20
A study of the writings of Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and members of their literary circles, including Finch, Swift, Gay, Addison and Steele, and Fielding. Readings in a variety of genres—poetry, essays, drama, prose fiction, and personal letters, with a particular emphasis on poetry. Some sampling of work by members of the preceding generation (Rochester, Dryden) and by the contemporaries Pope named dunces (Cibber, Haywood). Particular attention to the lived connections among the writers we consider; practices of manuscript circulation and literary correspondence; the interactions of gender and authorship; and the emerging institutions of print culture.
ENGL 748b, The Life of the Author. Langdon Hammer. M 1.30–3.20
The emergence of the author's life as a matter for literary representation and as a new kind of literary project in its own right. Our approach is a selective historical survey of ideas of the author's life from the eighteenth century to the twentieth (roughly from Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets to Marcel Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve), exploring a number of literary forms en route: for example, Keats's letters, Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontė, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Practical and theoretical commentary on literary biography and on the relationship between lives and literary works by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, William Wimsatt, Virginia Woolf, Pierre Bourdieu, and others.
ENGL 770au, Romanticism and History. Leslie Brisman. TTh 11.30–12.45
Wordsworth and Blake and the history of the self as an alternative to preoccupation with political history. The Wordsworth reading includes The Prelude in its entirety, with special emphasis on the French Revolution books. The Blake selection includes The French Revolution and Milton. Some attention to the question of history in major poems and drama of Shelley and Byron.
ENGL 806b, Dickens. Alexander Welsh. T 1.30–3.20
Selected novels by Dickens, their nineteenth-century contexts, and approaches to reading them today.
ENGL 814b, Nineteenth-Century Women Writers: Myths, Memoirs, Marketplace. Linda Peterson. W 10.30–12.20
This seminar explores the work—and theorizations of work—of nineteenth-century women authors. Readings include autobiographies and autobiographical fictions by and about women artists and authors, including Mary Robinson's Memoirs, Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half Sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage. The course is concerned with the material and social contexts in which women worked, with the actual products they created, and with the myths of authorship that sustained or impeded their work.
ENGL 848bu, Lincoln: Principle, Statesmanship, Persuasion. David Bromwich, Steven Smith. M 1.30–3.20
An inquiry into the problem of statesmanship as epitomized by the career of Abraham Lincoln. Also PLSC 597bu.
ENGL 892b, European Literature without the Nation: Regionalism, Dialect, "Minor" Literature. Katie Trumpener. M 10.30–12.20
University study of European literatures (and with it, comparative literature itself) often presupposes the nation-state as a unit of organization. Yet throughout the modern period, important literary texts, figures, and circles have positioned themselves outside, beneath, or beyond the nation, championing regional customs and concerns, or identifying with the transnational multiculturalism of Europe's internal empires. Through readings of eighteenth-, nineteenth, and twentieth-century texts, this course explores Enlightenment vernacular revivals; nineteenth-century linguistic and cultural centralization; modernist rediscoveries of folklore; dialect literature; "minor" writing; and the influence of debates over tradition on genres like the fantastic tale. Probable readings include works by Johann Herder, Robert Burns, Richard and Maria Edgeworth, George Sand, Prosper Mérimée, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Federico Garcia Lorca, Libuše Moníková, Erich Auerbach, Michel de Certeau, Renée Balibar, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tom Nairn. Also CPLT 912b.
ENGL 902a, The Modernist and Late-Modernist Long Poem. Nigel Alderman. Th 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 especially after World War II. 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 Pound, Eliot, Auden, Macdiarmid, and Braithwaite. Criticism by Shklovsky, Jakobson, Benjamin, Anderson, Jameson, and others.
ENGL 913a, Empire and Its Double. Sara Suleri Goodyear. W 3.30–5.20
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, Wilkie Collins, Kipling, Forster, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Agha Shahid Ali. Our examination of Conrad's trope of the secret sharer causes us to question the singularity of imperial stories and their slippage into theories of nation. Also CPLT 913a.
ENGL 921au, Ralph Ellison in Context. Robert Stepto. W 3.30–5.20
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 563au, AMST 921au.
ENGL 923a, Race, Nation, and American Modernisms. Vera Kutzinski. M 3.30–5.20
Examination of the vexed relations between modernism and its cultural others in early to mid-twentieth-century literature from the United States. We read select fiction and poetry from this period in order both to question and to understand the different ways in which writers such as James, Faulkner, Fitgerald, Hemingway, Toomer, Stein, Wharton, Eliot, and Williams tackled, or evaded, pressing questions of difference relative to gender, sexuality, race, and class as they struggled to articulate a national identity and/or poetics. Also AFAM 568a, AMST 766a.
ENGL 927a, Contemporary American Drama. Marc Robinson. Th 12–2
A seminar on American drama from 1960 to the present. Among the playwrights to be considered are Albee, Shepard, Kennedy, Baraka, Fornes, Mamet, A. Wilson, Kushner, Shawn, and Parks. Also DRAM 366a.
ENGL 940a, Problems in the Study of African American Literature.
Elizabeth Alexander. T 1.30–3.20
This course focuses on poetry, reading the complete works of selected African American poets and doing extensive bibliographic research toward original scholarship on the work of several authors—Wheatley, Dunbar, Hughes, Brown, Brooks, Baraka, Sanchez, Clifton, Lorde, Harper, Wright, Komunyakaa, Dove—as well as looking at very contemporary poets of the present so-called New Negro Renaissance. In-class reports, library exercises, and a major seminar paper. Also AFAM 595a, AMST 640a.
ENGL 946b, Postcolonial Drama: From Shaw to Soyinka. Joseph Roach. W 1.30–3.20
Inheriting both formal structures and critical stances from modern European drama, postcolonial drama has grown into a contemporary global network of local theatrical production. Significant in itself, this phenomenon also illuminates (and sometimes contradicts) the arguments of postcolonial theorists—Fanon, Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. This seminar engages the theory and practice of postcolonial performance, including its debt to Shavian anti-imperialism in John Bull's Other Island, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, and Heartbreak House. Readings are selected from among the plays of Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Derek Walcott, Ama Ata Aidoo, Kee Thuan Chye, Manjula Padmanabhan, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Thomson Highway, and Guillermo Verdecchia, supplemented by key essays in postcolonial theory. Also AFAM 839b.
ENGL 964b, Modernist Fiction: The Seen and the Unseen. Pericles Lewis. F 9.30–11.20
This seminar surveys a range of modernist stories and novels that describe the interaction between the visible world—of objects, bodies, and the natural and social environment—and the invisible world—of mental states, unconscious desires, unseen social forces, and the occult. Authors considered include Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Also, readings from early twentieth-century social scientists such as Durkheim, Freud, and Weber. Also CPLT 923b.
ENGL 984au, Literary Translation. John Felstiner. M 1.30–3.20
A seminar/workshop in and on the art of translating literary texts with attention to language and theory. Writers include Whitman, Neruda, Williams, Drummond de Andrade, Violeta Parra, Paz, Baudelaire, Celan, Frost, Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats, and Eliot. Knowledge of a foreign language required.
ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English. John Rogers. Th 1.30–3.20
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 and serving as a teaching assistant; introducing students to various literary genres; formulating aims and assignments in composition classes; grading and commenting on students' papers. Continuing attention to important theoretical issues: e.g., how the study of literature and writing can be related to study in the humanities at large; how the increasingly abstruse methodologies of current criticism can be adapted for use at more elementary levels of inquiry; and what linguistic and social assumptions underlie various approaches to the teaching of composition. Occasional guest speakers provide information on teaching practices and related issues. Some assigned reading in teaching methods, pedagogical theory, and consideration of the relation of teaching and scholarship.
Students enrolled in this course are 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 can be accepted. Enrollment limited, with priority given to students in the Department of English. Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory only.
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: Program in Environmental Engineering
|
