English Language and Literature

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

Chair
Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Director of Graduate Studies
Roberta Frank [F] (107A LC, 432.2226, roberta.frank@yale.edu)
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, 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), Elizabeth Dillon, Blair Hoxby, David Krasner, Pericles Lewis, Thomas Otten, Marc Robinson (Adjunct), Michael Trask

Assistant Professors
Tanya Agathocleous, Nigel Alderman, Ala Alryyes, Jennifer Baker, Jessica Brantley, Wes Davis, William Deresiewicz, Laura Frost, El Mokhtar Ghambou, Matthew Giancarlo, Amy Hungerford, James Kearney, Sanda Lwin, Stefanie Markovits, Christopher R. Miller, Diana Paulin, Lloyd Pratt, Nicole Rice, 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.  Roberta Frank. M 11–12.20, W 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 516b, Research Seminar in Medieval Literature.  Lee Patterson. Th 3.30–5.20
This seminar is designed for students specializing in medieval literature. Its purpose is to supervise each member of the seminar in the preparation of a single major research project. We meet as a group for several weeks as we work out the individual projects; students then meet individually with the instructor for the middle part of the term; and the class then meets together for the final several weeks as each student presents an oral report on his or her project (these presentations take the form of a twenty-minute talk, a rehearsal for reading a paper at a scholarly conference).

ENGL 546a, Chaucer.  Traugott Lawler. T 10.30–12.20
The dream poems and the Troilus, with some attention to Chaucer’s sources.

ENGL 549b, Medieval Texts and Modern Theory.  Matthew Giancarlo. W 10.30–12.20
This seminar centers on Chaucer and Langland as textual focal points for modern critical debates. Each week, keying off of particular works or passages, we read a series of scholarly articles demonstrating the specific give-and-take, as well as the more general contours, of literary criticism in Middle English studies for the last thirty years or so. Subjects and schools to be covered may include: exegetics/Augustinianism; textual criticism; post-structuralism; old historicism; new historicism; feminism; postcolonialism; intellectual history; and others. The topics and issues, obviously, are most directly related to medieval studies, but they should offer some insight for other fields as well.

ENGL 550bu, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and English Renaissance Romance.   John Rogers. F 1.30–3.20
A study of the function of the Renaissance romance genre as a means of exploring questions of identity and sexuality amid the rapidly changing institutions of celibacy, courtship, and marriage. Readings include Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Mary Wroth’s Urania, and Milton’s Comus.

ENGL 565a/b, Introduction to Renaissance Studies.  David Quint [F], Lawrence Manley [Sp]. Th 1.30–3.20 [F], W 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 term on Italy and in the second on northern Europe. Also CPLT 501, RNST 500a,b.

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 non-dramatic forms of historical writing and contemporary affairs.

ENGL 681a, The Mock-Heroic Moment: Milton to Eliot.  Claude Rawson. M 1.30–3.20
The course begins with Milton’s critique of military epic in Paradise Lost. It deals with the changes in the status of the heroic following the decline of the traditional military epic in the seventeenth century, partly under the pressure of increasing anti-war sentiment, and of the domestication of subject matter which led to the so-called rise of the novel. Deals with Boileau, Dryden, Swift (Battle of the Books), Pope, Gay, Fielding, Byron, Shelley, Eliot, Joyce, and Auden. Also CPLT 681a.

ENGL 700b, Tragic and Sacred Drama in the Seventeenth Century.  Blair Hoxby. M 3.30–5.20
Authors include late Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Corneille, Calderon, Dryden, Racine, and Otway. Topics include conditions of performance; the representation of the passions on stage; the relationship of the tragic, the sacred, and the ritual; and the place of the theater in seventeenth-century society. Also CPLT 687b.

ENGL 756b, Byron, Shelley, Keats.  Paul Fry. W 1.30–3.20
Poetry and prose of Byron, Shelley, and Keats with emphasis on both their differences and their common qualities. Special attention is given to the complex interactions of these poets with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Especially in the case of Byron and Shelley—in tandem with such writers as Moore, Rogers, and Campbell—we attempt to define a “Regency manner” and discuss its oblique connection with Romanticism.

ENGL 812b, Jane Austen and the British Empire.  Katie Trumpener. M 10.30–12.20
Describing the linked emergence of feminism and nationalism in British-governed Ceylon, Sam Selvadurai’s recent historical novel, Cinnamon Gardens, underlines the transformative effect of Jane Austen’s fiction (especially Mansfield Park) on indigenous readers. Over the last decade, Western scholars have debated whether Mansfield Park is implicitly imperial(ist) or explicitly critical of imperial power. This course seeks to reopen those debates through a broader examination of Austen’s late fiction (Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Sanditon) in relationship to other Romantic novels concerned with empire and abolition (including works by Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Hamilton), and through an examination of Austen’s formative influence on nineteenth-century “colonial” fiction, particularly the emerging English-language novelistic traditions of Canada, Australia, and British India (including works by Margaret Oliphant, Rudyard Kipling, Ada Cambridge, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Rabindranath Tagore, George Moore, James Joyce). Also CPLT 812b.

ENGL 864b, American Romanticism, 1799–1826.  Alexander Nemerov. Th 1.30–3.20
This course focuses on American visual and literary production in the Early Republic. Artists, writers, and other figures to be discussed include the Peale family, John Vanderlyn, Charles Brockden Brown, Benjamin Rush, William Rush, and Benjamin West. Attention throughout the course is on close analysis of paintings, sculpture, and literature. A term paper and a major in-class presentation are required. Also AMST 864b, HSAR 735b.

ENGL 874b, Henry James, Novel Theory, and Critical Practice.   Ruth Bernard Yeazell. M 1.30–3.20
A close reading of selected novels and tales by Henry James in light of critical and theoretical commentary from James’s day to ours. Focus both on James’s development as a novelist and on the history of novel criticism in the twentieth century.

ENGL 897b, Postmodern Fiction, Postmodern Theory.  Amy Hungerford. F 10–11.50
Study of novels and theoretical works of the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on the conjunction of belief and meaninglessness in literary and critical practice. Novelists (about three-quarters of the syllabus) include Flannery O’Connor, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Edgar Wideman, and Myla Goldberg. Theorists (one-quarter of the syllabus) include W. K. Wimsatt, Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp, Richard Rorty, David Tracy, and others. Also AMST 897b.

ENGL 904bu, The Agon of American Poetry with the European Tradition.   Harold Bloom. Th 1.30–3.20
A study of the relationships of American poetry with its European predecessors. Poets studied include Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Ann Carson, and John Ashbery.

ENGL 920a, Rereading Faulkner.  Vera Kutzinski. T 9.30–11.20
This course (and it is not a survey course) explores the potential and the limitations of both traditional and revisionary readings of some of the novels on which Faulkner’s reputation has come to rest. In addition to engaging in close textual work with the novels as a basis for broader theoretical discussions concerning canon formation and literary history, we also consider book reviews and scholarly essays to get a good sense of just how differently critics have assessed Faulkner’s literary achievement during the course of the twentieth century. Readings include The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust (1948), Selected Letters; Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Portable Faulkner; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo; Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi; and a host of critical essays.

ENGL 925a, American Literary Globalism.  Wai Chee Dimock. W 10.30–12.20
What is the relation between American literature and world culture? How important are cross-time translations, and what does it mean for Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and W. S. Merwin to be practitioners in this genre? How important are global roots to authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko? This course explores “globalism” as the broadest possible frame for American literature, bringing together authors across centuries, across racial divisions, and across the customary division between poetry and prose. Also AMST 925a, CPLT 529a.

ENGL 940b, Problems in the Study of African American Literature. Robert Stepto. M 1.30–3.20
A consideration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts and the following critical problems: slave narratives as literary texts; regionalism, dialect, folklore, and the vernacular; oral to written transformations; the genre definition and practice; women writers, non-U.S. writers, and canon definition; period definition, e.g., the New Negro Renaissance; politics, aesthetics, and the modern writer; points of contact between African American and American letters. Also AFAM 595b, AMST 640b.

ENGL 953b, The American Avant-Garde.  Marc Robinson. Th 10–12
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 956b, Modernism and Sexuality: A Literary Approach.  Laura Frost. T 10.30–12.20
This course examines the representation of sexuality in modern fiction through a formal and historical approach. We consider how literary constructions of sexuality reflect modernist aesthetics and formal innovation as well as historical preoccupations such as pseudo-scientific discourses of sexuality from the turn of the century to the mid-twentieth century. Topics include sexology and psychoanalysis, Victorianism and the “repressive hypothesis,” theories of “perversion,” female sexuality and feminism, modernism and mass culture, eroticism and pornography, and the politics of pleasure. Primary authors include T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Critical readings include Bersani, Boone, Butler, Carpenter, Ellis, Foucault, Laqueur, Rubin, and Sedgwick. Also CPLT 956b, WGST 720b.

ENGL 962a, Drama, Performance, Mass Culture.  Joseph Roach. W 1.30–3.20
Taking account of the genealogy of modern drama in eighteenth-century performance, this seminar considers critical theories of the culture industry in relationship to selected canonical plays and popular theater-historical events from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) to The Threepenny Opera (1928). Topics include the transformation of classical genres into the drame, the commercialization of leisure through the mass-marketing of vicarious experience, and the emerging culture of celebrity. Critical readings include selections from the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Plays are drawn from popular comedies, Sheridan to Shaw (Pygmalion and My Fair Lady), and long-running bourgeois dramas, beginning with Lillo’s The London Merchant.

ENGL 970a, British Fiction, 1890–1915.  William Deresiewicz. Th 10.30–12.20
Studies in the first generation of modern British fiction, with special emphasis on the works of Joseph Conrad. Issues of literary form, subjectivity, and the nature of the self; imperialism, Englishness, mass culture, and bureaucracy. Broader consideration of the natures of modernism and modernity as well as of interrelations of inspiration, collaboration, and rivalry among the writers in question. The syllabus includes Conrad’s Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes and most or all of the following: Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Beach at Falesa, and The Ebb-Tide; Hardy, Jude the Obscure; James, The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage; Kipling, Kim; Galsworthy, The Man of Property (Forsyte I); Wells, Tono-Bungay; Forster, Howards End; Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Ford, The Good Soldier.

ENGL 982au, History of Feminist Thought.  Margaret Homans. TTh 1–2.15
This course explores a range of key works from the intellectual history of feminism in Britain, France, and the United States from the Enlightenment onward. We also examine influential writings on gender and sexuality with which these works are in dialogue. The aim is to trace the foundations and development of various strands of feminist thought: liberal feminism with its emphasis on sameness and equality, cultural and separatist feminisms with their focus on difference, and postmodern and third-wave feminisms and queer theory with their questioning of such identity categories as “woman.” Also WGST 590au.

ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English.  John Rogers. M 9–10.50
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.  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.

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