UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GRADUATE COURSES
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Descriptions and Schedules

Spring 2006

 

ENGL 101X - English for Speakers of Other Languages

            5:00-6:15 TR                           P. Worley                     GL 319

English 101X is a course for international graduate students.  Primary emphasis is on writing, but listening, pronunciation and giving presentations are also covered.

Exams & Papers:  Students write numerous papers, including a final research paper, and make two presentations.

Teaching Method:  Discussion and group work

Text: TBA

 

ENGL 103X - English Pronunciation

            3:00-4:15 MW                         P. Howren                    GL 302
            3:30-4:45 TR                           P. Howren                    GL 318

This course is designed to improve the oral communication skills of international students.  It will provide opportunities for practice in pronunciation, listening, conversation, and giving short presentations.

Exams and Papers:  None

Text:  TBA

 

ENGL 131 - Rhetorical Theory and Practice

            12:30-1:45 TR                         Todd Taylor                 GL 316

 

English 132: History of Rhetoric: Recovery, Extension and Revision
           
            2:00-3:15 MW                         J. Jack                          GL 316

This course will acquaint students with the study of rhetorical traditions, from the ancient rhetorics of Greece, Rome, Africa, and Asia through the 20th century. In particular, we will focus on how contemporary scholars are recovering, extending and revising rhetorical histories to account for current scholarly concerns such as gender, race and ethnicity, language, and pedagogy. Thus, we will explore alternative definitions of rhetoric, diverse conceptions of the ideal rhetor, various rhetorical purposes, and differing views of the relationships between language, representation, and knowledge. Finally, we will consider how rhetorical scholars have conceived of the pedagogical role of rhetoric, from ancient rhetoricians and educators such as Isocrates and Quintilian to rhetorical educators in 19th and 20th century America. 

Required texts will include Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition, Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's collection, Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, Carol Mattingly's Appropriate(ing) Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth Century America, and selected scholarly articles.

Primary texts will be drawn primarily from The Rhetorical Tradition, and are likely to include selections from Gorgias, Isocrates, Plato, Aspasia, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Christine de Pizan, Madeleine de Scudéry, George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Kenneth Burke, I.A. Richards, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Wayne Booth, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

This course primarily involves discussion of primary and secondary texts. Students are expected to contribute to each course meeting and will be required to prepare short, informal responses before each class. Formal assignments will include one brief oral presentation, a project proposal and annotated bibliography, and a conference paper and abstract. Students will be encouraged to work on projects that involve historical research into rhetorical theories or practices, or that apply material or concepts covered in class to contemporary issues. Students will form panels and submit proposals for the 2007 College Conference on Composition and Communication (CCCCs).

Required Texts:

Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, 2nd ed. Bedford St.Martin's,

2000. ISBN: 0312148399

Mattingly, Appropriate(ing) Dress: Women's Rhetorical Sytle in Nineteenth

Century America. Southern Illinois UP, 2002. ISBN: 0809324288

Lipson and Binkley. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. SUNY P, 2004. ISBN: 0791461009

 

ENGL 140 - Intro. To Literary Theory

            2:30-5:00 M                 T. Curtain                     BI 301

 

ENGL 166 - English Literature, 1660-1780

            2:00-3:15 TR               R. Salvaggio                 BI 317

Almost 20 years ago, an anthology on the "new" 18th century sketched out directions in 18th-century studies that would guide a continuing critical reassessment of this field.  In our survey, we will devote special attention to two of these critical interventions:  first, the emergence of women writers and gender as a category of critical theory and analysis, and second, the shaping of post colonial perspectives on an age that marks the continuing expanse of British empire.  While surveying other critical matters as well, our emphasis on the anxieties surrounding gender and empire will guide our readings on such authors as Behn, Dryden, Pope, Cavendish, Finch, Swift, Johnson, Barbauld, as well as critical readings in the varied kinds of "contact zones" and "torrid zones" that have stretched the boundaries of this literary terrain.  Requirements include several written reports on critical material, and a final paper.

ENGL 179 - Literature of the Americas

            12:30-1:45 TR             M. DeGuzman              GL 302

ENGL 184 - African American Fiction & Poetry

            12:00-12:50 MWF       R. Fisher                      GL 319

This course undertakes an examination of the use of metaphor in African American fiction. It begins with readings in metaphor theory from such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, and examines texts through the African American literary tradition in an effort to determine the ability of metaphor to bring about new meanings in the social and political context. Authors studied may include Du Bois, Toomer, Hurston, Ellison, Walker, and Morrison.

ENGL 190 - English and American Literature of the Twentieth Century

                              Literature, Race, & Ethnicity
           
            3:30-4:45 TR                           J. Ho                            MU 204

This course will provide an introduction to contemporary Asian American literature and theory.  Through novels, films and critical essays we will explore the richness of this burgeoning field and examine how Asian American literature fits into yet extends beyond the canon of American literature.  With the 1989 publication of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Asian American literature has flourished at an exponential rate.  And even before Tan's wildly successful publishing phenomenon, in the mid 1970s, Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin pioneered the wave of current Asian American literature.  Asian American writers have won the Pulitzer Prize, been featured in an anthology of the best writing of the century, and enjoy an unprecedented popularity among readers in the U.S. and abroad.  Texts/films under consideration include Woman Warrior, Donald Duk, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, My Year of Meats, Interpreter of Maladies, History and Memory, Who Killed Vincent Chin,  and Chan Is Missing.

Exams & Papers:  1 15-20 page paper (research based)

Teaching Method:  Discussion based with some lecturing.

 

ENGL 196D - War in Shakespeare's Plays

            3:30-4:45 TR               C. Armitage                  GL 302

This course examines the causes, conduct, and results of wars as depicted in about 18 of Shakespeare's plays.  They include all his Roman histories, most of his English histories, all his major tragedies, even some of his comedies, e.g. All's Well That Ends Well.  My methodology will differ from the traditional one used in course about Shakespeare, e.g. for Hamlet, my focus will not be his problems with his father's ghost, his uncle, his mother, his girlfriend, but the pending invasion of Denmark by Fortinbras of Norway, its getting diverted to attach the Poles instead, Hamlet's great soliloquy on the madness of slaughter to win a worthless bit of land - events which are the macrocosmic frame of the play.  Another feature will be the relating of such aspects of the plays to their historical context.  For example, Henry V's victory at Agincourt will be looked at in the play, and in Olivier's and Branagh's movies of the play, and in John Keegan's account in The Face of Battle of what being in that battle meant in human terms.

Exams and Papers:  Quizzes on assigned readings, several short papers for undergrads, longer for graduate students.  Midterm and final exams.

Texts:  The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th edition
            John Keegan, The Face of Battle

ENGL 212 - ProSeminar:  British Lit., 1500-1660

            2:00-3:15 TR               J. Wolfe                       DE 205

Mud-wrestling nymphs, maps of nowhere, war and lechery, the perils of pork barbecue, a knightly adventure inside the human digestive system, sexually active angels.  Where else could you find all this except in the Renaissance?
We'll focus on major works by six writers - More, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton - with supplementary material from primary and secondary sources.

Exams and papers: 
Option 1 [long paper]:  20-25 research paper and 2 response papers of 1-2pp.
Option 2:  two shorter essays, 1 bibliographical project, and 2 short response papers
**For both options, students will sit a final examinations (structure and scope to be decided at a later date).**

Texts:
More, Utopia, ed. R.M. Adams (Norton Critical Edition)
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (Penguin)
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Hibbard (Norton)
Donne, Major Works, ed. John Carey
Milton, Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Edition)
Plus electronic reserve readings, print services, and readings in the rare book room.      

 

ENGL 213 - ProSeminar:  British Lit., 1660-1770

            12:00-12:50 MWF       T. Reinert                     GL 321

This is a survey of 18th Century British Literature.  We will review some predominant currents in recent 18th century studies, including discussions of political philosophy, colonialism, theories of literary character, the history of emotion, and feminism.  Primary authors include Behn, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Cowper, and Burney.  Criticism includes essays (in copy form) by J. G. A. Pocock, Suvir Kaul, Laura Brown, Laura Quinney, Adela Pinch, Deirdre Lynch, and Jane Spenser.  Students will have a choice of writing two mid-length papers or one long research paper.

Texts:  Behn, Oroonoko; Thomson, The Seasons; Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield; Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, Burney, Evelina; and a copy packet of poems and essays.

ENGL 214 - ProSeminar:  British Lit., 1770-1870

            11:00-11:50 MWF       J. McGowan                GL 321

This class will serve as an introduction to the professional study of English literature in the Romantic and Victorian periods.  We are going to read five key literary texts: Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh; Robert Browning's Men and Women; George Eliot's Middlemarch; and Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.  Students will be given various scholarly tasks to complete in relation to these texts, from ascertaining textual provenance to reading contemporary reviews to discovering the current issues in the field.  There will be a few lectures, but class time will mostly be devoted to student-led discussions and instructor-led discussions.  Every student will complete three short assignments; students will then have the option to write one long (20-25 pages) seminar paper or complete four additional shorter assignments.

ENGL 216 - ProSeminar:  After 1870

            6:00-8:30  W               G. Flaxman                   GL 526A

ENGL 238 - History of the English Language

            2:00-3:15 TR               P. O'Neill                     BI 309

A broad survey of the English Language with emphasis on its cultural and intellectual background.  You will be encouraged to apply the material of the course to your own area of expertise in English/American Literature.

Exams and Papers: 
            Notebook
            Presentation and written project
            Final Exam

Texts:  Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language

 

ENGL 251 - Early Middle English Literature

            12:00-12:50 MWF                   J. Wittig                        GL 318

ENGL 258 - Studies in Shakespeare: Somatic Shakespeare

            11:00-12:15 TR                       M. Floyd-Wilson          HM 423

In this class we will read lots of Shakespeare (about 18 plays), plus excerpts from a variety of early modern non-dramatic pamphlets, guides, tracts, etc on a range of topics (from manners to monsters), and a good deal of secondary criticism.  Our focus will be how Shakespeare, in particular, as well as others in the period understood the body.  Potential discussions will dwell on the body's perceived relationship to identity, gender, sexuality, emotion, ethnicity, normalcy, sanity, health, monarchy, geography, the macrocosm, the mind, and the soul.  We will also survey the Shakespeare corporeal criticism of the past two decades with a discerning eye.
Exams and Papers:  a couple of in-class presentations, some bibliography work, a prospectus, and one long essay.
Teaching Method:  Seminar format, primarily discussion.  Can be taken for seminar credit with the professor's permission.
Texts:  The Norton Shakespeare
Other texts:  TBA

 

ENGL 292 - English/American Poetry 20th Century

            2:00-3:15 TR                           Harmon                        GL 526A

 

ENGL 372 - Seminar in Nineteenth-Century Literature

6:00-8:30 R                              J. Viscomi                    GL 526B

This interdisciplinary course examines ideas of the sublime, the picturesque, and the anti-picturesque as expressed by major Romantic poets and painters. It will discuss aesthetic theories, productions, and experiments of Burke, Gilpin, Cozens, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Turner, focusing on the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the landscape painting of their contemporaries, and key works by Byron and Shelley. We will pay special attention to the new ideas about nature, the social role of art and artist, the idea of the sketch, the concepts of genius, originality, and spontaneity, and the problem of representation. By paying special attention to qualities inherent in each medium and technique, as well as to aesthetic and cultural contexts, the seminar demonstrates ways in which seemingly incompatible and even contradictory aspects of literature and art are structurally analogous in responding to similar historical and aesthetic forces. Also, despite dissimilarity in theme, media, or subject, the works examined are shown to address, solve, or manifest similar theoretical problems the identification of which will help to illuminate artistic styles and rhetorical strategies characteristically Romantic.

Exams and Papers:   Students are required to present an oral report, write a few short critiques of paintings and poems, and to write an essay of an interdisciplinary nature.

Teaching Method: Instructor and student-led discussions, slide lectures on specific painters and their techniques, and a studio exercise in wash drawing according to 18th-century techniques and formulae (that anticipate modern ideas about the role of the unconscious in art).
 
Texts: Electronic course packet of essays, poems, prints, and 18th-century
treatises on art, online.

Essays on reserve in Gaskin Library and in the online course packet. A limited amount of art supplies.

 

ENGL 381: Seminar in American Literature to 1855

                     Reloading the Canon:  Antebellum Fiction

            6:00-8:30 W                            P. Gura                        GL 525

We focus on the practical results of canon revision for the period 1798-1862, specifically regarding fiction. Writers as Hawthorne and Melville have long been held up as pioneers in an American prose tradition because of the ways in which they constructed the genre of the American "romance." We will reexamine these writers' achievement in light of, for example, the historical fiction of Catharine Sedgwick, a serious challenger to Cooper and Simms; the "domestic" fiction of Fanny Fern and Maria Cummins, who raised questions about the vagaries of woman's place in antebellum America; and the psychological fiction of Elizabeth Stoddard, who rivaled Hawthorne and Melville and anticipated James in her analyses of human motivation. We always will keep before us the question of what difference it makes to our teaching and writing if we add to our reading lists such hitherto "forgotten" authors.

Requirements: Each student will be responsible for brief in-class reports on secondary material relating to the week's reading. In addition, there will be a substantial research paper on a topic to be negotiated with the instructor. The topic must relate to fiction in the period covered in the course.

Texts: Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Sara Parton Willis (Fanny Fern), Ruth Hall; Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter; Herman Melville, Pierre; Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Louisa May Alcott, Work; (and a few others).

 

ENGL 384 - Seminar in African-American Literature

                     

            3:00-5:30 T                              T. Harris                       GL 525

English 384 will focus on African American drama of the post-1950 period (though we will take a short detour prior to that). We will read plays in the realistic mode as well as in the surrealistic and impressionistic modes (and some just plain weird stuff). From Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Alice Childress's  Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band, we will move to Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. We will read two or three of August Wilson's plays (Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone) and at least two by Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog Underdog and Venus). As winners of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Wilson and Parks will enable us to explore the politics of that judging phenomenon. Less well-known playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy (Funnyhouse of a Negro) will also garner our attention, as will George C. Wolfe (The Colored Museum).

Students will complete a short paper (8 pages) and work toward producing an article-length paper (25 pages) for their major project. For each session, two students will volunteer to lead class discussion (provide reviews, produce discussion questions, offer annotated bibliographies, suggest critical articles for reading).

As opportunities arise, we will view (individually and/or collectively) dramas that have been transformed into films.

Possible Texts:

Baraka, Amiri, Dutchman
Childress, Alice, Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band
Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Kennedy, Adrienne, Funnyhouse of a Negro
Parks, Suzan-Lori, Topdog/Underdog and Venus
Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
Wilson, August, Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Wolfe, George C., The Colored Museum

 

ENGL 390 - Seminar in Twentieth Century Literature, English and American
 

                          The Thirties:  Left Culture & Politics in the U.K., 1930-1940

            3:00-6:00 M                             E. Carlston                   GL 526A

This course will examine the numerous intersections, conjunctions and collisions between British art and world politics in the decade before the Second World War, thinking about what it meant to be involved in cultural production as the Writers' International called for politically engaged art, fascism spread across Europe, and poets died fighting with the Popular Front in Spain. Our investigation will begin by focusing on the "Auden Group," looking at major works by W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and Rex Warner. But we will also move outward from the Group to their fellow travelers and adversaries: Wyndham Lewis, Hugh MacDiarmid, Roy Campbell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf. Finally, there will be opportunities for students to investigate related movements and groups, according to their interests: Rupert Doone and the Group Theatre, the music of Benjamin Britten, Spanish Civil War writing, relations between the Auden Group and Bloomsbury, the documentaries produced by the General Post Office. .

Students in the course will engage intensively and cooperatively in creating their own narratives about the 1930s and researching relevant critical texts. The assignments emphasize creative, cooperative and original thinking, and are designed to raise methodological and ideological issues in the study and teaching of this body of literature; they may include submitting proposals to appropriate conferences, writing a literature review or annotated bibliographies, teaching class in conjunction with other students, and developing individual or group research projects.

Note on required texts: Many of the major texts of this period are out of print. The following reading list is, therefore, provisional and intended only to suggest the kinds of works we will be reading. Student Stores is trying to get hold of as many of these books as possible; students enrolled in the course may in some cases be responsible for locating their own used copies at powells.com or amazon.com. See instructor before the semester begins for further information.


Provisional syllabus (don't use as a shopping list without consulting instructor):
W.H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin; The Ascent of F6; Journey to a War
W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland
Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories
Cecil Day Lewis, The Magnetic Mountain
Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Stephen Spender, Ruins & Visions
Rex Warner, The Wild Goose Chase

Selected short pieces will be placed on e-reserves; required films "Coal Face" and "Night Mail" are available at Duke.

 

ENGL 390 - Seminar in Literary & Cultural Theory

            3:30-6:00 R                              P. Cooper                    DE 206

We will study examples of post colonial discourse - mainly fiction but also criticism and theory - and consider the interplay among gender, ethnicity, and ideas of nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century. The texts chosen examine and shape the issues under question (both within and outside the academy) in our times - including historical continuity, tradition, representation, frontiers, and the controversial politics of identity. Gender and sexuality permeate these topics, inflecting them through other paradigms of difference, and challenging the various readings of alterity which postcolonial scholarship has offered. We will think about some of the relationships among these issues, including their institutionalization in the university: how do postcolonial, gender, and queer studies overlap as intellectual projects in our profession? We will discuss the set texts both on their own (rhetorical and generic) terms, and as contributions to current debates about postcoloniality and sexual difference as entangled expressions of cultural change and political uncertainty at the century's end. Readings will include:
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
Bessie Head, A Question of Power
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Nadine Gordimer, None to Accompany Me
Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps
Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

 

CELT 106A - Readings in Old Irish

            3:00-5:30 M                             P. O'Neill                    

This course builds on CELT 105A, strengthening your knowledge of Old Irish grammar while improving your reading skills with a variety of Old Irish works including the Tain.

Exams and Papers: 
            Mid-term
            Project
            Final

Texts:  R Thurneysen, A Grammar of Old Irish
            John Strachan, Stories from the Tain

**Note:  This course is only open to those who have completed CELT 105A or its equivalent.**