Fall 2006 Graduate Courses
5301.001 Old English Language
Brian McFadden
MWF 11:00-11:50
This course will introduce students to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology, and morphology of Old English and examine its relationship to the language we speak today. Our primary focus will be to develop a reading knowledge of Old English for the study of basic Old English prose and poetic texts, as well as preparing students to begin reading Beowulf in the Spring 2003 semester (this course is a prerequisite). Course requirements: midterm exam, periodic quizzes, and one final translation project. Texts: Moore, Knott, and Hulbert, The Elements of Old English; Mitchell and Robinson, A Guide to Old English; J. R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; possibly a coursepack of supplemental materials.
5305.001 Studies in Shakespeare
Marliss Desens
W 2:00-4:50
Shakespeare and Love
Although we think of love as a universal emotion that evokes universal responses, different societies conceptualize love, sexuality, and marriage in distinctive ways. Understanding Shakespeare’s portrayal of love in his plays thus requires knowledge of the conceptual and literary framework from which he approached love relationships, as well as knowledge of the social context. In addition to being a man of the theater, Shakespeare was a keen reader of nondramatic literature, and he often interrogates within his plays the portrayal of, and conclusions about, love and relationships, found within those works. The purpose of this seminar is for students to gain this background, the apply it in examining Shakespeare’s plays.
We will begin this class with a discussion of selections from Book VI (discussion of neoplatonic love) of Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature). Please read these selections before the first class meeting. We will then examine how these ideas are used in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems, Sir Philip Sidney’ Astrophil and Stella and John Donne’s love poems, before examining the depictions of love in Books III and IV of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. After this crash course in Renaissance Love Theory (think of it as Love 101), we will turn to Shakespeare’s plays: Loves Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Course Requirements: Active participation in class discussion; e-mail submission of five substantial discussion points prior to each class meeting; 8-page researched paper and oral presentation of it; presentation on final paper’s work in progress; 15-20 page researched, critical essay. (I encourage you to make this final paper an expansion of the shorter paper.)
*This course satisfies the British Literature pre-1660 requirement.*
5306.001 Studies in 17th-Century British Literature
Feisal Mohamed
M 2:00-4:50
Liberty Before Liberalism: Rights and Freedoms in the English Revolution
The tumults of England’s seventeenth century reflect in many respects the desire to assert religious and political liberties in a way that anticipates modern formulations. We see calls for greater democracy, debates on censorship, lively and sustained dialogue on religious freedom, and interrogations of the subjugation of women. And yet there was no readily available language and praxis in the period addressing human rights and liberties in the way provided later by the liberal tradition. This course will explore the terms of the seventeenth century’s pre-emergent liberal concern, examining especially the influence of the individualist emphasis of Reformation theology and Renaissance humanism. Our readings will be both literary and non-literary, and will include the period’s canonical writers as well as such radical voices as leading Levellers and Diggers—who call for universal suffrage and implement early communism, respectively—and the women writers of the period whose works have been uncovered by recent scholarship. We will also examine how the century’s growing print market and the emergence of the newspaper bring to the fore the issues of censorship and reshape the political status of the subject by allowing readier dissemination of ideas. As the course concludes, we will look at how seventeenth-century views on liberty can inform the debate on the current status of liberalism, which often describes the present day as post-liberal in the communitarian and cultural challenges that seem to have defeated teleological progress toward purely rationalist civil society.
Preliminary list of Authors: James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, Lucy Hutchinson, John Lillburne, John Milton, Rachel Speght, and Gerard Winstanley.
*This course satisfies the British Literature pre-1660 requirement.*
5309.001 Studies in 19th-Century British Literature
Sean Grass
T 2:00-4:50
“Portable Property”: Theft and Identity in Victorian Narrative
Between 1850 and 1870 in England, autobiography and sensation fiction emerged simultaneously as major sub-genres of narrative prose. Our aim in this course will be to investigate how and why these sub-genres—apparently so different—both appealed so strongly to Victorian readers, and to consider whether they share cultural or ideological roots. This seminar traverses considerations that range from commodity to consumerism to identity politics to narrative form. We shall spend the semester investigating these topics and addressing other theoretical and analytical questions that interest the group. In pursuit of these investigations, we will read widely across certain theoretical and critical areas and the subgenre of Victorian sensation fiction, even including works (like Eliot’s Silas Marner) that critics have not typically considered “sensational.” After three weeks of studying the Victorian literary market, Victorian autobiography, and sensation fiction, we will turn our attention to an intriguing group of novels: Dickens’s Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds. Grades for the course will be based upon class participation; several 2-3 pp. reader-response papers; a 30-minute presentation; and a critical essay of 5000-7000 words.
*This course satisfies the British Literature post-1660 requirement.*
5320:001 Studies in 17th- & 18th-Century American Literature
Cristobal Silva
R 6:00-8:50
Negotiating Speech, Place, and Gender
Before she was excommunicated and banished to Rhode Island in March of 1638, Hugh Peters accused Anne Hutchinson of having “stept out of [her] place.” He added: “you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.” This admonition highlights an anxiety about the relation between place, speech, and gender in Early America. The goal of this seminar will be to focus on how these three terms helped to negotiate colonial identities, and how they shaped Early American literary history. We will ask ourselves how gender helps to frame communal spaces, and how, conversely, communal spaces frame representations of gender; we will examine the late eighteenth-century fascination with voice, and seek to understand the position of speaking subjects within a complex network of political, authorial, and narrative concerns in the early Republic. The course trajectory may include work on the Antinomian Controversy, Ann Bradstreet, the Salem Witchcraft trials, and Women’s Captivity Narratives, and Judith Sargant Murray, as well as the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and Tabitha Gilman Tenney.
*This course satisfies the American Literature pre-1900 requirement.*
5325.001 Studies in American Fiction
John Samson
W 6:00-8:50
Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov was the most accomplished novelist writing in Russian in the 20th century, until he managed to flee the Nazis (as he had managed to flee the Bolsheviks) for America and American citizenship. He then proceeded to write (in English) some of the most beautiful and challenging novels in American literature. They are filled with innovative narrative techniques, elaborate aesthetic patterns, and word games of all sorts. In reading them, we will concentrate upon what Nabokov calls “aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Students will write two shorter (5-7 pp.) interpretive papers and a longer (15-20 pp.) research paper. Texts: Speak, Memory; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Bend Sinister; Lolita; Pnin; Pale Fire; Ada, or Ardor; Transparent Things; and Look at the Harlequins!
*This course satisfies the American Literature post-1900 requirement.*
5337.001 Studies in Linguistics
Min-Joo Kim
TR 3:30-4:50
Semantics
Course description: We use language for various purposes. For instance, we use it to convey information about ourselves (e.g., “I am under the weather today”), to transmit the knowledge we have (e.g., “Semantics is fun”), and to describe the states of affairs in the world (e.g., “There is a lot of construction going on at TTU.”). In addition, we also use language to make assertions (e.g., “We should take an immediate action.”), give commands (“Please open the door for me.”), and ask questions (e.g., “Is this course going to be fun?”), etc. Furthermore, it is not always the case that what we say is what we actually mean (e.g., “This is great” with a certain intonation does not carry a positive connotation.)
In this course, we will examine basic concepts in word and sentence meaning, and the way in which sentences are used and interpreted in context. Topics will include ambiguity, vagueness, presupposition, entailment, implicature, sense and reference, semantics vs. pragmatics, and speech acts.
5339.001 Studies in Linguistics
Colleen Fitzgerald
TR 2:00-3:20
Phonology
One of the core areas of the field of linguistics is phonology. This course surveys the study of sound patterns, phonological description and analysis, and generative phonological theory. Languages may display substantial variation in terms of phonological segments and processes that occur, but there is still a fairly constrained set of phonological processes in the world's languages. In this course, we will study how languages treat different aspects of sound systems, such as segments, features, syllables, and feet. Time permitting, the course will include units on English accents (American, British and possibly more), Spanish phonology and accents, and poetic meter.
5340.002 Research Methods
Ann Hawkins
TR 12:30-1:50
This course prepares students to undertake research on the graduate level. Students will gain a thorough grounding in using library resources and in applying bibliographic theory. Students will undertake intensive literary research, creating enumerative and annotative bibliographies, and writing a textual history and/or research guide for their topic. Students will consider the technological aspect of books by analyzing their physical characteristics (binding, cover, printing, font, impression, etc) as well as their nature as socially constructed material objects. Students should expect to complete a variety of practical skills-building exercises in analytical and descriptive bibliography and in textual editing (including a project in TEI-coding for electronic editions). Note: This is not a course in literary analysis or literary criticism, but in the historical, cultural and technological contexts of books, contexts which are essential to any understanding of a literary work.
5342.001 Critical Methods
Jennifer Shelton
W 2:00-4:50
No description provided.
5351.001 Studies in Film and Literature
Scott Baugh
T 6:00-8:50
Studies in Film: Theory to Criticism
“Studies in Film: Theory to Criticism” offers an introduction to critical cinema studies for graduate students. In some detail, however, the course surveys international movie aesthetics, paying special attention to the significance of visual and aural conventions predominant in fictive narrative features. Surveying a relatively broad range of classic and contemporary theoretical-methodological models provides a basis to consider how viewers “read” films critically. Put another way, there will be an explicit drive in this course to move from a discussion of theories to praxes of criticism. Examples of these models include conceptualizations of “style”; semiotic-syntagmatic approaches to “film language”; spectatorship issues like gendered and racialized “gazes”; phenomenological “addresses”; “voice”/focalization; intertextuality/self-reflexivity; cinematic “polyphony”; “computerization”; among others. So, the main objective of this course is to establish and practice close-reading strategies for interpreting cinematic texts.
Two textbooks: Robert Stam’s Film Theory (Blackwell, 2000); and Margo Kasdan, Christine Saxton, and Susan Tavernetti’s The Critical Eye (3rd ed., Kendall-Hunt, 2002). Shorter, theoretical readings include “classics” by Bazin, Eisenstein, Metz, and Mulvey to more contemporary pieces by Mellencamp, Fischer, Small, Burton Carvajal, Manovich, among others. Film screenings might range from Hollywood classics including Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Hitchcock’s Rear Window to contemporary films such as Haggis’ Crash and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine; from international landmarks including Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin, Godard’s Breathless, and Kurosawa’s Rashomon to hits like Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. A final portion of the course will extend our “film” study to the emergence of digital cinema, applying theories to criticism of some of the most provocative moving-image work being produced today.
Course requirements: assigned readings and screenings; one short (5-7 pp.) critical essay; one class presentation; a “greenlight” term project; and one article-length research essay.
5353.001 Studies in Poetry
William Wenthe
T 6:00-8:50
Yeats and H.D.
Early in 1918, William Butler Yeats, by then the most prominent poet in the language, invited the younger poet known as H. D. to visit him and his wife for a weekend at their house in Oxford. But H. D. declined, explaining some twenty years after Yeats’s death that “something held me back.”
What was that “something”? She didn’t know at the time, but later wrote that it had to do with her own developing sense of “psychic experience,” and a need to develop it on her own, without the influence of Yeats. She wouldn’t have known, in 1918, how Yeats, throughout his career, fed his writing through intense relationships with strong, creative women; nor that her own creative life would become characterized by a series of intense encounters with men whom she later termed “intiators.” Whatever it was, this “something” seems to have intuited an important truth about the striking similarities—and by the same token, pointed differences—between these two major Modernist poets; to have understood that they must remain separate in order for each to, in Yeats’s phrase, “accomplish fate.”
By bringing them together in this class we can explore the richness and intellectual depth of their poetic achievement: poems of both lyric and epic scope, the development of myth from psychology, the meeting of ancient occult tradition and modern technology, and how they both informed and were informed by British Modernism. Between the two, they wrote in just about every genre (H. D. even acting in a film with Paul Robeson), but it’s the poetry that made them famous, and so we will focus on generous selections of the poetry, supplemented by biographical material; student reports will cover other relevant materials. There will be two essays: a shorter close reading, and longer research paper. There will also be a final exam.
*This course satisfies the British Literature post-1660 requirement.*
5355.001 Studies in Comparative Literature
James Whitlark
R 6:00-8:50
Scriptures
General description: Although the majority of the term will be spent on the Bible, we shall also examine two works from China and one from India. The class will teach techniques of interpreting scriptures and of analyzing their influence on later literature. Texts for the course include: The Bible (any translation); Monkey: A Folk Novel of China, translated by Arthur Waley; The Tao Te Ching, translated by Ursula Le Guin; The Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God, translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Aside from excused absences, students are expected to attend class, participate in discussions, take a midterm and final, and write a term paper.
*This course satisfies 3 credits of a concentration in Comparative Literature.*
5370.001 Studies in Creative Writing
Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe
M 6:00-8:50
Poetry
The focus of the course is your poetry. Workshops will be complemented by discussions centered on aspects of craft. Craft readings will come from practicing poets including Stanley Plumly, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Greg Orr, Jane Hirshfield & Carl Phillips. I ask each of you to email me a list of 2-3 individual goals for the course AT LEAST 3 weeks prior to the semester's beginning. Please give careful thought to how you want to develop as a poet over the course of the semester, and email me your goals. Very Occasionally I will assign a poem, but for the most part I want to work with your developing aesthetics. You will all try a hand at translation and write a sonnet or experiment with another form.
5370.002 Studies in Creative Writing
Jill Patterson
T 6:00-8:50
Non-fiction: Memoir
In this course, students will study contemporary personal essays and book-length memoirs. We'll take a look at different methods of narration: traditional first-person, lyric or montage, dramatic reportage, and metanarratives. Given the recent James Frey incident, we will also study the ethical concerns of writing nonfiction, taking a close look at Creative Nonfiction's upcoming Summer 2006 issue devoted to the topic. Students will be expected to write five to six manuscripts, revise all five to six manuscripts, and submit those manuscripts for publication. Submission of materials to literary journals will constitute a portion of each student's course grade. This is a writing intensive course.
5370.003 Studies in Creative Writing
Dennis Covington
W 6:00-8:50
Fiction
This course centers on a frank, but supportive discussion of original student work in the genre. Participants in the workshop will be expected to produce three short stories, each at least 4000 words in length, and provide copies of the stories for distribution to the other members of the class. We’ll be trying to find the best way to tell the best stories we can. In the process, we’ll be addressing “form,” the elusive quality that Eudora Welty calls “the source of beauty” in a story. In addition to the major writing assignments, there will be minor in-class and out-of-class assignments. The required texts will be Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and the workbook What If?
5380.001 Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Wendell Aycock
TR 9:30-10:50
The Art and Theory of Translation
English 5380-001 will be all about translation. The course will give students experiences in studying the art of translation and in examining some theories of translation. Although the course will focus primarily upon literature and how it is translated, we will also give some consideration to other types of translation. We will review the history of translation and see how translations have been done in various historical periods. We will look at translations of some famous works of literature to see how they have been have changed according to the eras and cultures in which they appear. We will consider how various genres fare when they are translated, and which authors are most easily translated (e.g., Walt Whitman was very popular in Latin America, whereas Emily Dickinson was hardly known at all). A general purpose of this class is to foster new and different appreciations for both literature and language.
It is recommended but not required that students bring some knowledge of a second language to the course. Assignments will include (a) an oral report, (b) a term paper, (c) a translation of a work of literature—it may be short, (d) a final examination.
*This course satisfies the requirement for Comparative Literature.*
ENGL 7000 Research
Colleen Fitzgerald
By Arrangement
ESL/Literacy Internship
How do ideologies about race play out in language? How is language a vehicle for empowerment for marginalized groups? What will you say to prospective employers when they ask for your experiences in diversity and team-building? We will theorize about these questions and more as we learn about multiculturalism and language in the Southwest U.S. This course involves a service learning component, meaning students will apply what they learn in the trenches, working on a community-based project to provide classes in English as a Second Language. Students will form teams of tutors to teach these classes, which will serve diverse students, many of whom are from an international background. They will also meet once weekly with the professor for discussion, debriefing, and debate over theory versus practice. Formal assignments include weekly journals/blogs of reflection, planning, critique, and evaluation of the tutoring sessions, a final research, reflective, and/or creative project, and at the end of the semester, teammates and ESL students will evaluate tutor performance. This course offers a great way to contribute to our community, to experience diversity in Lubbock, to work on communication skills, and to work for a more just and equitable society. Students should be prepared for 8 hours of intensive training the second week of classes (Fri Sept 8, 4 pm -8pm, Sat Sept 9, TBA) to become tutors. Students will also meet weekly with the TTU professor (The meeting is set for Tuesdays 2-3:20, rm 403; in case of conflict with other courses, students may be permitted to make special arrangements.). Graduate students who register for ENGL 7000 will also be in a supervisory role, most likely working with 3-4 undergraduate interns. ESL tutoring assignments will probably be for these times/days: TR 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm, TWR 4:45 - 5:45, and MW 5:30 - 7, although we can also place tutors in existing classes taught by the Literacy Coalition. ESL classes meet off-campus. (Go to http://english.ttu.edu/esl for more information)