Graduate Program
Course Offerings 2008-2009
Course offerings are subject to change. Official Yale College course information is found at the Yale Online Course Information Website.
Fall 2008 | Spring 2009 | 2009-2010
Fall 2008
ENGL 500a, Old English.
Traugott Lawler.
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 518a, Medieval Visionary Writing.
Jessica Brantley.
An examination of the most persistent and popular medieval genres: the dream or vision. We will consider texts that range from courtly reverie to spiritual epiphany, paying special attention to the common hermeneutic puzzles that arise from the interpretation of dreams. Readings to include Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame; Langland's Piers Plowman; the anonymous Pearl; and Julian of Norwich's Showings.
ENGL 550aU, Spenser.
Leslie Brisman.
While it is impossible to read The Faerie Queene without awareness of Spenser's primary debts to Vergil, Ovid, Ariosto, and Tasso, it is almost as impossible to compare passages in Spenser with those to which they allude without sensing a diminishment--or at least a questionable transumption of the source. This seminar is dedicated to the study of a Spenser repeatedly challenged by the achievements of his precursors--and challenged too by the messiness of the ethical dilemmas he probes and the solutions that so often seem inadequate. *In 2008, the seminar will take a form that will be determined by the graduate enrollment. We will, in any event, meet at least twice a week. If there is substantial interest, we will meet regularly on Mondays and Fridays. On Mondays, we will join my undergraduate seminar, and on Fridays we will meet alone. If fewer graduate students are interested than could constitute a lively discussion group, we will regularly join the undergraduates on Wednesdays as well, supplementing this by a number of sessions devoted to the secondary literature. It is my hope that one or the other of these mixed formats will allow both for the luxury of savoring the sample of Spenser's poetry in manageable units and the luxury of meeting in a small group, sharing our reactions to some of the more interesting Spenserian critics of our time. Even meeting twice a week, however, we cannot comfortably prick our way across the entire plain, and so for 2008 we will omit Faerie Queene Book V.
ENGL 601a, Shakespeare and Collaboration. David Scott Kastan.
Studies of collaboration normally intend to undo it; that is, they seek to unravel the collaboration to separate out the individual hands involved, reinstating the very idea of authorship that the collaboration should unsettle. This course seeks to understand collaboration as a normal, perhaps even a necessary, procedure in the early modern theater, and seeks to see Shakespeare as working within this familiar economy (not, as is usually the case, as the exception to it). The course will begin by considering the manuscript Book of Sir Thomas More, where Shakespeare (if Hand D is his) did work in a conventional collaboration with other professional playwrights, and Two Noble Kinsmen, where dual authorship is proclaimed by the title page, as well as other plays where the case for various kinds of collaboration has been asserted and seems plausible (e.g., Pericles, Henry VIII, and even Macbeth). We will also think about collaboration in a more radical sense: in terms of the various kinds of collaboration necessary to perform a play on stage or get it into print, focusing on topics like revision and multiple texts, censorship, the acting company, and the products and procedures of the print trade as they may force us to rethink the nature of the plays we read and complicate any easy notion of authorship.
ENGL 666a, Law, Religion, and Literature in Post-Revolutionary England. Elliott Visconsi.
This course offers a cross-disciplinary encounter with literary, legal, and religious discourse in post-Revolutionary England (chiefly 1649-1700), with special emphasis on the public life of constitutional theory. Some of our questions: do literary texts enjoy a privileged status as mediators of popular legal reasoning? What is the proper relation between religion and government in the expanding commercial nation-state? What are the limits of religious toleration and the hazards of pluralism? To what degree does the English national character depend upon its legal, literary, and religious institutions, including the immemorial and unwritten constitution? To what degree does the period demonstrate a thickening of religious experience rather than a secularizing break from the past? We will consider literary texts alongside trial transcripts, law reports, political and historical writings, sermons and devotional tracts in order to approach an understanding of the age's deep entanglement of law, literature, and religion. We will consider the theories and modalities of constitutional interpretation best suited to interdisciplinary scholarship, and along the way, describe the field of "law and humanities" scholarship. Primary authors will include Hobbes (some of Leviathan, Behemoth), Milton (all of Paradise Lost, plus key prose tracts, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes), Locke ( Letter on Toleration, Second Treatise, the Constitutions of the Carolinas), Dryden (historical dramas and religious poetry), Richard Baxter (The Holy Commonwealth); other writers and texts to include Roger Williams on toleration and government, John Toland and other freethinkers, William Sancroft (Archbishop of Canterbury), Sir Matthew Hale on blasphemy and witchcraft, the Marvell-Parker controversy and the attempt to prosecute Hobbes for blasphemy, popular narratives of King's Philip's War in Massachusetts Bay, and other historical materials of this sort. Students will be expected to write a short paper and a long one, in addition to a substantial presentation and active class participation. No previous experience with legal history or constitutional law required.
ENGL 725a/WGSS 771a, The Eighteenth-Century Novel.
Jill Campbell.
Studies in the emergence of the "novel" as a category of literature and of "fiction" as a basis for experience in the course of the long eighteenth century. Likely authors include Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley. Special emphasis on the forms of selfhood developed by the novel; the claims to attention of suppositional persons in fictional forms; and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century experimentation with the uses of fiction for didactic and political ends. Readings will also include a sampling of prose fiction for children and of non-fictional, polemical prose.
ENGL 766a/CPLT 850a, The Remarkable Wordsworth and his Critics. Geoffrey Hartman.
Reading and analysis of selections from Lyrical Ballads (including Coleridge’s contributions), “Home at Grasmere,” The Prelude, and The Excursion. The seminar aims to clarify just how remarkable Wordsworth is, and why it is so hard to define his originality and the break that made him, arguably, the first modern English poet. Many topics will be broached: animism, associationism, psychoesthetics the role of “material reverie,” the ballad genre, ecology. Very close reading will be the standard method. A short paper of no more than 3pp. (which can also be the basis of a presentation) and a term paper will be required. The short paper is there simply to acquaint me and perhaps others in the seminar with your method of reading; it can also be a book review of a major critical study of the poet. The topic of the term paper should be discussed individually with the instructor. Because many seminar sessions will be closer to three hours (but with a break!) rather than two hours, the number of seminar sessions may be limited to 10. I also hope to persuade Paul Fry to contribute to our discussions. The seminar will accept six graduate students and hopes to welcome two or three advanced undergraduates.
ENGL 807a, Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
Stefanie Markovits.
An overview of the careers of Charles Dickens and George Eliot exploring a series of paired texts that will allow perspective on two different approaches to a variety of novelistic modes, including the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the political novel.
ENGL 810a, Victorian Poetry in Its Contexts. Linda Peterson.
Readings in the poetry of five major Victorian writers: Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, and one of the Rossettis. We consider the poetry in various contemporary contexts: literary (including its relation to Romantic poetry, book history, and questions of genre), social, political, and imperial. Supplementary reading in current criticism and scholarship.
ENGL 849a/AMST 885a, Genres and Media of American Literature. Wai Chee Dimock.
A survey of the varieties of American literature, poetry as well as prose, with equal attention to well-defined genres (science fiction and detective fiction) and to idiosyncratic works hard to classify (Walden and Moby-Dick). We will consider a range of media: printed text, painting, music, and film. Authors include Mary Rowlandson, Washington Irving, Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Harriett Jacobs, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Raymond Chandler, Gloria Anzaldua, Octavia Butler.
ENGL 928a/CPLT 933a/FILM 751a, British Cinema.
Katie Trumpener.
Key films and topics in British cinema. Special attention to the overlaps between literary and visual modernism; attempts to build on the British literary and dramatic tradition; role of cinema (especially documentary) in the war effort and in redefining national identity; postwar auteur and experimental filmmaking; "heritage" films and alternative approaches to tradition. Accompanying readings in British film theorists, film sociology (including Mass Observation) and cultural studies' accounts of film spectatorship and memories. Films by Maurice Elwey, Anthony Asquith, Len Lye, John Grierson, Alfred Hitchcock, Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphry Jennings, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, David Lean, Karol Reisz, Lindsey Anderson, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Stanley Kubrick, Laura Mulvey, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Michael Winterbottom, Patrick Keillor.
ENGL 935a/CPLT 727a/WGSS 714a, Postcolonialism and Its Discontents.
Sara Suleri Goodyear. CANCELLED
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.
ENGL 947aU/AFAM 596aU/AMST 641aU, African American Poets of the Modern Era. Elizabeth Alexander.
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.
ENGL 974a, Defenses of Poetry.
Paul Fry.
What Socrates called “the ancient quarrel between the poets and the philosophers” is fiercely pursued to this day, as trustees and state legislators cut teaching budgets, because philosophy (with science and history) and literature (with the other arts, at least at times) continue to disagree about the nature of reality, why reality matters, and how it should be represented.
The major statements in literary criticism and aesthetics are concerned first and foremost with problems of definition. No sooner is “poetry” defined, however (as imitation, as expression, as a type of affect, as significant form, or as some combination of these), than it must be defended against rival agendas for the evocation of reality. Beginning with Plato, poetry’s detractors say that it tells lies, corrupts moral integrity, preserves outmoded ways of thinking, obscures the nature of reality, has no use, and offers an escape from social and historical responsibility. Poetry’s defenders fight back on each of these fronts by saying that it finds truth by connecting the specific with the general, encourages moral sympathy, opens visionary possibilities, reveals the true nature of reality, transcends utility, and helps shape the course of history.
It should be understood that the term “poetry” is for the most part (but with interesting exceptions) a loose and elastic concept stretching to cover all verbal art and sometimes the other arts as well.
Readings in defense of poetry will include Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, Dryden’s “Preface to Fables,” excerpts from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, Arnold’s “Literature and Science,” and Wilde’s “Preface to Dorian Gray,” together with essays and excerpts by I. A. Richards, the Russian Formalists, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Heidegger, Sartre, the New Critics, Paul de Man, Julia Kristeva, and even the instructor. Interspersed will be defenses in verse and narrative by Donne, Keats, Woolf, Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop. And yes, Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen” will also be considered. Chief among detractors read will be Plato, Stephen Gosson and Jeremy Collier (who provoked Sidney and Dryden, respectively), Rousseau ( “Letter to D’Alembert”), Thomas Love Peacock (who provoked Shelley), Hegel (from “Introduction to Aesthetics”), and Thomas Huxley (who provoked Arnold).
ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English.
John Rogers.
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, Directed Reading.
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.
Spring 2009
ENGL 501b, Beowulf.
Roberta Frank.
A close reading of the poem Beowulf, with some attention to shorter heroic poems.
ENGL 546b, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Three Earlier Poems: Discourses of Dissent.
Alastair Minnis.
Chaucer lived in an age of extreme political, social and intellectual turmoil. This course seeks to investigate his manipulation of certain ‘discourses of dissent’, types of language-use which 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 the problematic existence of secular values within a theocentric society, authority (auctoritas) both textual and social, the possibility of virtue and salvation beyond the Christian Church, inversions of gender-norms which could put ‘women on top’ if only for precarious textual moments, and the orthodox policing of the relationship between Church authority and human fallibility (a relationship which, for example, on the one hand afforded value to the immoral male priest but regarded gender as a major obstacle to the witness of virtuous women). The course will also feature a consideration of Chaucer’s intellectual stance in relation to the anti-Semitism which was endemic in medieval culture.
The fundamental required text is The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson ( Boston, 1987). We will concentrate on The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women, in addition to a substantial selection of Canterbury Tales. (The final syllabus will be determined in light of student interests and preferences.) A course-reader will be available at the beginning of the quarter.
ENGL 561b, Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature.
John Rogers.
A survey of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, exclusive of Milton. With an emphasis on the impact on the period's literature of the Puritan Revolution and the Scientific Revolution, the class will investigate such topics as authorial "election," biblical translation and interpretation, the emergence of women writers, the poetics of puritan austerity and Catholic eroticism, the relation of epistemology and political philosophy to literary style, and the impact of Puritanism on the rise of the novel. Readings will be drawn from a range of genres, including lyric and narrative poems, philosophical and political philosophical prose treatises, and prose romances. Texts to be studied include poems by Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, and Dryden; and prose works such as Hobbes's Leviathan, Browne's Religio Medici, Urne Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
ENGL 599b, Non-Shakespearean Drama.
David Quint.
A
survey of major authors of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors: Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Kyd, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, Brome. Attention will be paid to the development of a theatrical tradition and to the history of the public and private theaters themselves, to the multiple-plot play and metatheatrical structures, as well as to various genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy, Roman plays, satire, domestic tragedy. The usual reading load will be two plays a week. One term paper.
ENGL 765b, Keats and His Contexts.
Christopher R. Miller.
An intensive study of Keats’s poems and letters, with attention to literary precursors (Shakespeare’s sonnets, Paradise Lost, eighteenth-century odes, the poetry of sensibility, Coleridge’s conversation poems), contemporary critical discourses (Hazlitt, Coleridge, journal reviewers), circles of friends and mentors (Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Haydon), and later reception (from the Victorian discovery of the poet though present-day scholarship). The course will conclude with a consideration of poetic tributes to Keats (undoubtedly the most elegized of all Romantic-era poets), beginning with Shelley’s “Adonais.” Keats once suggested in a letter that “any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel—the points of leaves and twigs on which the Spider begins her work are few and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting.” On that premise of textual connectivity, we will read the poems of Keats as points on which to hang an account of Romantic poetry and aesthetics, as well as the present-day field of Romantic studies.
ENGL 847b/AMST 670b, Colonial and National: American Literature 1730-1830. Michael Warner.
Readings beginning with Jonathan Edwards and Ben Franklin, ending with the generation of Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Cathering Sedgwick. In between it will deal with evangelicalism, Revolutionary writing, the rise of African-American public intellectuals, the differences among different varieties of nationalism, and the changing perspective from the Atlantic colonial world to the mainland nation.
ENGL 880b/WGSS 774b, Victorians to Moderns.
Tanya Agathocleous.
A survey of the literature of the British fin de siècle and an introduction to research in the field. The course is designed to introduce newcomers to a period of literary and cultural transition and to examine its implications for earlier and later periods, as well as to raise questions about periodization. We will focus on key avant-garde and political movements of the period—Aestheticism, Decadence, feminism and socialism—and consider the material forms in which the writing and art we will examine first appeared, making use of collections at the Beinecke Library. Figures include: Olive Schreiner, Wilde, Michael Field, Pater, Beardsley, Edward Carpenter, Gissing, Conrad.
ENGL 894b, Wallace Stevens.
David Bromwich.
All the major poetry and much of the prose of Wallace Stevens. Some attention will be given to theories of modernism in poetry and in the arts generally, with attention to the writings of Baudelaire, Valery, Rilke, Eliot, Clement Greenberg, and Iris Murdoch.
ENGL 909b/CPLT 909b, Joyce and Proust.
Barry McCrea.
This course is devoted mostly to the close reading of Joyce's Ulysses and parts of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. We will read Proust in translation, but special guidance will be given for students who can read French.
ENGL 931b/AMST 681b/DRAM 386b, American Drama to 1914.
Marc Robinson.
Topics include the European inheritance, theater and nation-building, melodrama and the rise of realism, popular and non-literary forms. Readings in Tyler, Dunlap, Aiken, Boucicault, Daly, Herne, Belasco, and others.
ENGL 983b/CPLT 579b/WGSS 772b, Literature in the Age of Globalization.
Shameem Black.
This course focuses on interdisciplinary theories of globalization and explores how these phenomena affect the production, circulation, and interpretation of literature. Placing sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and literary theory in dialogue with contemporary prose narratives from five continents, the class explores different ways to conceptualize and evaluate the increasingly transnational and transcultural flows at the turn of the millennium. Topics will include the globalization of labor, violence, and affect; the changing roles of women, gender, and sexuality in transnational contexts; the production of knowledge across national borders; the question of translation and the status of English; and the recent retheorization of "world literature."
ENGL 995b, Directed Reading.
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.
