Graduate Program
Course Offerings 2009-2010
Course offerings are subject to change. Official Yale College course information is found at the Yale Online Course Information Website.
Fall 2009 | Spring 2010 | 2008-2009
Fall 2009
ENGL 500a/LING 500a, Introduction to Old English Language and Literature. Roberta Frank. MW 9:00-10:15
The essentials of the language, some prose readings, and close study of several poems: Caedmon's Hymn, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, The Wife's Lament, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer.
ENGL 590a, Materializing the Word: the book as object, technology, concept, and event, 1500-1800. David Scott Kastan. W 1:30-3:20
This course is designed to explore various aspects of books as they appeared and were experienced in early modern England. We will focus on the material and institutional conditions that enabled -- and sometimes inhibited -- reading and writing in the period, though also work closely with actual volumes, with the aim not only of understanding the historical conditions shaping the production, circulation, and reception of books (not only printed books) but also what this understanding might contribute to our scholarly reconstructions of the period.
ENGL 595a, Early Modern Drama and the English Reformation. Brian Walsh.
Th 1:30-3:20
This course will examine how drama of the late-Tudor and early-Stuart periods put continually evolving aspects of the English Reformation under scrutiny. Through close examination of the language and dramaturgy of plays by Marlowe, Greene, Shakespeare, Dekker, Peele, Jonson, Webster, Cary, Fletcher and others we will consider how practical and theoretical shifts in spiritual life that the break with Rome entailed were advocated, contested, and more generally worked through in dramatic poetry and stage action. The question of Protestant Christian identity that these plays broach will allow us also to investigate representations of and allusions to other confessional identities, namely Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism. Our main focus will be the plays themselves, but we will also devote attention to primary texts from the period that represent facets of its traffic in religious ideas and controversies, to recent trends in historical scholarship on the Reformation—such as the vigorous re-appraisal of “traditional religion” and its persistence in English culture—as well as to examples of what some scholars have called the “turn to religion” in literary criticism of early modern England, especially over issues that impinge on the stage such as idolatry, ritual aspects of performance, and debates over theater as a “desacralizing” institution.
ENGL 711a, English Satire 1660-1750. Claude Rawson. M 4:00-5:50
A study of English Satire in verse and prose in the period 1660-1750. Authors include Rochester, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson.
ENGL 728a/CPLT 756a, Defoe, Sterne, Scott. Ala Alryyes. W 3:30-5:20
Readings of fiction and other prose works of three authors who seminally contributed to the development of the poetics of the novel, setting up modes of fabulation that had a lasting influence on European and world fiction. Focus on how Defoe, Sterne, and Walter Scott negotiated boundaries between fiction and "reality"-crossing disciplines and complicating such categories as persons, things, description, knowledge, science, rhetoric, history, nation-and also on how their writings have proven a fundamental influence on our own critical and theoretical approaches and systems.
ENGL 772a, Romantic Poetry and Criticism. David Bromwich. M 1:30-3:20
Exploration and close reading of selected Romantic poets and critics, with emphasis on the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Keats. We will discuss the invention and revision of the lyric poem as the dominant genre of nineteenth-century English poetry, and its connection with a new psychology of the imagination. Other issues to be covered include the emergence of an idea of the aesthetic, and the relation between "character" and "passion" that derives from a change in the habits of reading earlier poetry, especially Sheakespeare.
READING: Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, major odes, 1802 preface.
Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, Biographia Literaria, Shakespeare criticism.
Hazlitt: Principles of Human Action, The Spirit of the Age, Table-Talk.
Keats: Endymion, Hyperion, major odes, letters.
ENGL 819a, Novels of the 1860s. Janice Carlisle. W 10:30-12:20
Focusing on a well-defined historical period, the high-Victorian decade of the 1860s, this course examines the relation between literary works and their cultural, economic, political, and technological contexts. Readings include canonical favorites such as Dickens’s Great Expectations and lesser-known novels such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg, as well as historical accounts of Victorian Britain from G.M. Young’s classic Portrait of an Age (1936) to the volume written for the New Oxford History of England (1998).
ENGL 868a, Antebellum American Literature and Culture. Caleb Smith. M 3:30-5:20
The literature and culture of the United States in the antebellum period, roughly 1830-1861. Readings include literary works by Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Douglass, Thoreau, Whitman, and Poe, as well as important documents from the political, legal, and intellectual history of the age. A study of a single, transformative period, the seminar is also designed to introduce students to the modern history of Americanist criticism, from F.O. Matthiessen’s “American Renaissance” (1941), through the various critiques of identity and ideology, to the historicism and renewed trans-nationalism of contemporary “New Americanists.” Special attention will be paid to the problems of judgment and justice that have animated the critical debates.
ENGL 971a/CPLT 598a, Moderns, 1914-1926. Pericles Lewis. Th 9:25-11:15
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 will pursue group research projects on poetry, drama, the novel, or intellectual history. The final syllabus will depend on student interests.
ENGL 984a/CPLT 578a/PHIL 711a, Metapragmatics and Textual Culture. Michael Warner. T 1:30-3:20
This course is an introduction to theoretical issues of textual analysis, and the difference between structuralist and metapragmatic approaches to language and culture. We will review debates over performativity, the langue/parole distinction, indexicality and metaindexicality, and the nature of text. We will then see how these traditions for analyzing the social dimensions of language inflect various attempts to theorize modern forms of discourse and power--including the public sphere, concepts of genre and media, religion, and the practice of criticism itself.
Reading List (tentative):
Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Searle/Derrida exchange about Austin
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Charles S. Peirce, “Pragmatism” in The Essential Peirce
Roman Jakobson, “Langue and Parole: Code and Message” and “Shifter
and Verbal Categories” in On Language
Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language” in Problems in General Linguistics
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Social Sciences” in Writing and Difference
Michael Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function” in Reflexive Language
Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric” in Allegories of Reading
M.M. Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Greg Urban and Michael Silverstein, Natural Histories of Discourse
Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideologies”
Michel Foucault, “The Author Function”
Eve Sedgewick, “Queer Performativity” in glq 1.1.1993.
Martin Puchner, from Poetry of the Revolution : Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
Hannah Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm” in The Human Condition
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” in Publics and Counterpublics
Seyla Benhabib, “Deliberative Democracy and Multicultural Dilemmas” in The Claims of Culture
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
Michael Silverstein, Talking Politics
Virginia Jackson, from Dickinson’s Misery
Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism”
Andrew Ford, from The Origins of Criticism
Saba Mahmood, from The Politics of Piety
Webb Keane, from Christian Modern.
ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English.
Amy Hungerford. T 9:25-11:15
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.
Courses in Other Departments That Count Towards the Degree
AFAM 563U/AMST 921aU, Ralph Ellison in Context. Robert Stepto. M 1.30-3.20
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.
AFAM 596U/AMST 641aU, African American Poets of the Modern Era. Robert Stepto. W 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.
Spring 2010
ENGL 501b/LING 501b, Beowulf and the Northern Heroic Tradition. Roberta Frank.
W 9:25-11:15
A close reading of the poem Beowulf, with some attention to shorter heroic poems.
ENGL 533b, Medieval Drama. Jessica Brantley. F 1:30-3:20
An exploration of medieval dramatic traditions in the context of contemporary performative practices, including liturgy, song, spectacle, recitation, and meditative reading.
ENGL 546b, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Three Earlier Poems: Discourses of Dissent.
Alastair Minnis. M 3:30-5:20
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 606b, 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. In line with Coleridge’s view that to be a history play must by definition depict the history of the people who are its audience, the main focus will be English history, especially the eight plays of Shakespeare dealing with fifteenth-century English history (1399-1485) in relation to their main Tudor sources (Thomas More’s life of Richard III, the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, the Mirror for Magistrates and Daniel’s Civil Wars), in relation to contemporary affairs and beliefs, and in relation to such non-Shakespearian dramatic texts as Thomas of Woodstock, The Famous Victories of Henry V, The First Part … of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, The First Part of the Contention between the Houses of York and Lancaster, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, The True Tragedy of Richard III, Legge’s Ricardus Tertius, and Heywood’s 1 & 2 Edward IV. Consideration will also be given to legendary history (Gorboduc, Locrine, and King Lear), to plays on thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century history (reflected in Shakespeare’s King John, John Bale’s King Johan, the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John, Peele’s Edward I, Marlowe’s Edward II, and the pseudo-Shakespearian Edward III), to plays on sixteenth-century history, such as the anonymous Book of Sir Thomas More, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Dekker and Webster’s Sir Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Rowley’s When You see Me You Know Me, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Dekker’s Whore of Babylon, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck.
ENGL 672b/CPLT 672b, Milton. David Quint. Th 9:25-11:15
A study of Milton’s poetry and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to Milton’s literary tradition and historical contexts, focusing on issues of genre and on the religious, social and political forces that shaped Milton’s writing.
ENGL 810bU, Victorian Poetry. Leslie Brisman. MW 11:35-12:50
The major Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, in the context of the Romanticism they inherit and transform. Significant attention to Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and some attention to Swinburne, the Rossettis, and Morris. In 2010, the course will meet together with the senior seminar in Victorian Poetry, English 412b, and in addition to the twice weekly meetings, graduate students will each be responsible for researching and presenting on one of the minor poets such as Arnold, Hopkins, Houseman, Meynell.
ENGL 851b, American Literature: Fields, Genealogies, Webs. Wai Chee Dimock.
W 1:30-5:20
A survey of genres and methods, with special attention to these broad areas of inquiry: multiple diasporas; cross-mappings of poetry and prose; movement across words, image, music; memories, adaptations, and rewritings from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first; morphologies of the human, the subhuman, and the nonhuman; and the fate of close reading in a global world. We will read Hawthorne in conjunction with Maryse Conde; Poe with Ishmael Reed; Whitman with Allen Ginsberg and Sherman Alexie; Faulkner with Suzan-Lori Parks; Olaudah Equiano with Dave Eggers; Emily Dickinson with Richard Powers.
ENGL 874b, Henry James, Novel Theory and Critical Practice. Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
Th 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 901b/AMST 899b, Research Seminar: Twentieth-Century Poetry. Langdon Hammer. F 9:25-11:15
This course will provide 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 will 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 will discuss Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens in the first weeks of the term; poets studied later will depend on student choices.
ENGL 929b/AFAM 835b/CPLT 697b, The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans. Joseph Roach. T 1:30-3:20
Representing, memorializing, and constructing the Crescent City's past and re-envisioning its future, imaginative literature has traditionally generated the idea of “New Orleans” in the minds of readers world-wide, and, now more than ever, it is being generated by the city in turn. This seminar will combine the approaches of English literature, American studies, African-American studies, and comparative literature to explore the sources of creative inspiration that writers find in NOLA, including its cultural mystique, its colonial history, its troubled assimilation into Anglo-North America, its tortured racial politics, its natural and built environment, its spirit-world practices, its raucous festive life, its eccentric characters, its food, its music, its predisposition to catastrophe, and its capacity for re-invention and survival. Readings will be selected from among the novels and short stories of Victor Séjour, Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein, George Washington Cable, Grace King, Charles Chestnut, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, Ishmael Reed, Michael Ondaatje, Tom Piazza, and Ellen Gilchrist; the dramas of Dion Boucicault and Tennessee Williams; the poetry of Les Cenelles; the popular ethnographies of Alan Lomax and Robert Tallant; the journalism of Lafcadio Hearne and Andrei Codrescu; and the travel narratives of Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, and Benjamin Henry Latrobe.
ENGL 932b, Modern American Drama. Marc Robinson. T 9:25-11:15
A seminar on American drama from World War I to 1960. Among the playwrights to be considered are O’Neill, Stein, Wilder, Barnes, Hurston, Odets, Williams, Miller, and Bowles.
ENGL 948bU/AFAM 588bU/AMST 710bU, Autobiography in America. Robert Stepto.
M 1:30-3:20
At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the 'American Renaissance' to the present. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation.
ENGL 969b/CPLT 520b/WGSS 776b, Narratives of Formation. Barry McCrea.
M 9:25-11:15
An examination of models of personal progress and maturation in a variety of narratives and periods. We read critical, anthropological and psychoanalytic texts in conjunction with primary texts. All non-English language texts are read in translation. Authors might include some of the following: Mme de Lafayette, anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Dickens, Balzac, Musil, Wilde, James, Forster, Chandler, Bechdel.
ENGL 988bU/AFAM 838bU, Contemporary African American Poetry. Elizabeth Alexander.W 1:30-3:20
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.
