Spring 2007 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 fall 2007 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.
*This course is one of the three required for the foreign language Philology option.
5304.001 Studies in Renaissance British Literature
Marliss Desens
R 2:00-4:50
Love, Lust, and Revenge in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
In this seminar, we will examine how the drives for love, lust, and revenge are explored and interrogated on the English Renaissance stage in the tragedies of Shakespeare and some of his contemporary dramatists. There will be a reading assignment for the first class. Seminar participants will be notified of it by e-mail in December. We will read these plays by Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra. Plays from Shakespeare’s contemporaries will likely include: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy; George Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois; Anonymous, The Revenger’s Tragedy; William Rowley and Thomas Middleton, The Changeling; Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil; and John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
*This course satisfies the requirements for British literature pre-1700 and genre: Drama.
5307.001 Studies in 18th-Century British Literature
Jennifer Frangos
W 6:00-8:50
Transatlantic 18th-century Literature
From the colonization of Virginia in the 1580s to the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), the American colonies were a part of the British Empire; thus, to some degree, our separation of Early American and Eighteenth-Century British literatures is an arbitrary and anachronistic one. In order to explore the shared intellectual, cultural, and literary histories of England and the United States, ENGL 5307 and ENGL 5380 will be taught together during the spring semester of 2007. One of our central aims will be to think about how this dual approach to literary history changes our understanding of both Early America and Eighteenth-century Britain.
The purpose of this course will be to theorize the concept of Transatlanticism: whether defined by geography, traffic, ideology, modernity, mercantile capitalism, print culture, etc. To that end, we will read a wide range of 16th–18th century texts as well as contemporary criticism, and interrogate the basic convergences and divergences between these closest of nations.
Primary texts may include: Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly. Secondary texts include Philip Round’s By Nature and By Custom Cursed, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Imaginary Puritan, and David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick’s The British Atlantic World 1500–1800.
*This course satisfies the requirement for British literature since 1700.
5315.001 Studies in British Fiction
Jen Shelton
W 2:00-4:50
James Joyce
This course will examine the major works of James Joyce, with the bulk of the semester devoted to intense study of Ulysses. We will take advantage of the department's Marathon Reading –Ulysses, on Joyce's birthday, February 2—and, perhaps, of my concurrent undergraduate class, which will also read Ulysses (possible pedagogical exercise). Students should expect to participate in an electronic discussion forum and to engage in other activities meant to make your journey through Dublin both fun and illuminating. Major theoretical questions involve the status of the self and of writing in the period of Modernism. Students will conclude the semester with a conference-style paper delivered in our own mini Joyce conference.
The International James Joyce Conference will be held this year in Austin, in June. Students contemplating this course might think of visiting the web site for conference information and the call for papers. I plan to attend the conference, so a road trip might be arranged. This conference is held in the US only in alternate years, so it is a particularly good opportunity to hear active Joyce scholars at work, as well as to become an active Joyce scholar oneself.
*This course satisfies the requirements for British literature since 1700 and genre: Fiction.
5324.001 Studies in 20th-Century American Literature
Michael Borshuk
T 6:00-8:50
“Soul/Post-Soul”: African American Literature, Popular Culture and Civil Rights, 1960-2000
Writing of connections between African American literature and grassroots civil rights activity in 1968, the black intellectual Hoyt Fuller announced: “The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.” Indeed, the 1960s and 70s are commonly remembered as a period in which African American progressive politics, literary expression, and popular culture complemented each other in an organic network of collective action and racial pride. However, as cultural critic and journalist Nelson George has argued, by the late 1970s, African American culture—at least in its various popular manifestations—had entered a “post-soul” period, in which the assertive Afrocentrism of the civil rights era had diminished or vanished from view. Expanding on George’s claim, Mark Anthony Neal opens up the term “post-soul” to describe, in his own words, “the political, social and cultural experiences of the African-American community since the end of the civil rights and the Black Power movements” more broadly. As Neal writes, the “post-soul” period offers a “radical reimagining of the contemporary African-American experience, attempting to liberate contemporary interpretations of that experience from sensibilities that were formalized and institutionalized during earlier social paradigms.” Thus, for example, in the move from the “soul” era to the post-soul, essentialist notions of blackness give way to less stable (and often progressively ironized) visions of black identity.
This course will compare two generations of African American writers and artists to consider the soul/post-soul shift that George and Neal map. We will consider aesthetic differences between these two periods, with special attention to the relationship between African American art and politics in the final decades of the twentieth century. As well, we will consider the commodification of “soul” and blackness in popular culture between the 1960s and the present, attentive to how this commodification complicates the idealized vision of black cultural revolution described by figures like Hoyt Fuller. While this is primarily a course in African American literature and intellectual trends, we will also look in detail at various popular culture phenomena, including the blaxploitation film genre, the birth and rise of hip-hop culture, and changes in African American television programming between the 1970s and the 1980s.
Our reading list will include literary works in all genres, as well as film, television, music, and relevant cultural theory and criticism. Texts for study may include James Baldwin’s long essay The Fire Next Time (1963); Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (1964) and selected poems; poetry by Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Evie Shockley, and Kevin Young; Colson Whitehead’s novel, John Henry Days (1999) ; the films Shaft (1971), Wild Style (1983), and School Daze (1988) ; music by James Brown, John Coltrane, Afrika Bambaataa and Public Enemy; and visual art by the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Students will be expected to make an in-class seminar presentation, keep an ongoing online reading journal/blog, and compose an article-style research paper.
* This course satisfies the requirement for American literature since 1900.
5337.001 Studies in Linguistics
Colleen Fitzgerald
MW 3:30-4:50
Endangered Languages
Current estimates are that more than half of the world's languages will become extinct during our lifetime. This course looks language endangerment, what it means for a language to become endangered, with a focus on the indigenous languages of North America. The course will also study language revitalization, examining cases where communities are trying to maintain the number of speakers, or revive the language.
The issues of language endangerment bear on many concerns of the contemporary world, such as globalization, technology, and biodiversity. Globalization has become a buzzword, and the presence of major world languages like English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic has threatened the survival of many minority languages. Recent efforts in the documentation of endangered languages has focused on the use of technology in archiving, preserving, and accessing linguistic materials, but individual communities may object to some of these technological goals or lack resources like electricity, broadband access, and computers for technology to be a reality. Linguistic diversity has been argued to provide benefits that parallel diversity in the plant and animal domains, as cultural, medical and other knowledge may be lost as language death occurs.
Studying endangered languages involves three key elements: the structural features of languages (phonology, syntax, morphology); the social context of language use; and the often-conflicting ideologies that communities have about dominant and minority languages. We will study these elements in case studies of different communities, drawing on the instructor's own research with the Tohono O'odham Nation of Arizona and elsewhere in the southwest. We may also have special guests in our seminar, researchers from other universities who visit to share their work on endangered languages.
* This course satisfies the M.A. in Linguistics requirement for sociolinguistics.
5342.001 Critical Methods
Feisal Mohamed
T 2:00-4:50
Criticism from Plato to Žižek
This course will provide the background in critical approaches to literature necessary for advanced study. Beginning with the roots of literary criticism in classical thought and proceeding to those thinkers foundational to modern theory—especially Marx and Lacan—we will finally explore various branches of current theory, poststructuralist, new historicist, feminist, postcolonial, trauma, and queer.
Underpinning our examination of these approaches will be sustained discussion of what constitutes an intellectually valid approach to literature. Can the term ‘methodology’ truly be applied to literary criticism? What are the effects of applying theories developed in the social sciences to humanist study? The course will thus be foundational not only in developing knowledge of critical language, but also in inaugurating an informed and self-aware sense of the affiliations and presuppositions of one’s own intellectual career.
5343.001 Studies in Literary Criticism
Bruce Clarke
MW 3:30-4:50
Developments in Narrative Theory
In this seminar we will survey developments in narrative theory since the 1960s, then sample a range of postmodern narrative fictions. We will get our bearings on the topic with H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, and examine a classic in the structuralist tradition, Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Coming back toward the contemporary moment, we will study Mieke Bal's Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd. ed, the current state of the art in literary narratology, and Marie-Laure Ryan's just-released Avatars of Story, which advances the theory of narrative from old to new media. We will bring these critical and theoretical readings to narrative texts such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Shelley Jackson's hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, Christopher Nolan's Memento, Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Stephen Jones' Demon Theory. Classes will be in seminar discussion format. Students will give several formal class reports and write a midterm and final paper.
5351.001 Studies in Film
Scott Baugh
M 2:00-4:50
Multicultural American Cinema
“Multicultural American Cinema” offers an introduction to critical media studies for graduate students. However, the seminar also fosters investigations into the extent to which the aesthetics of film represent and express American multiculturalism. With special attention to the dynamics of “mainstream” and independent/alternative fictive-narrative feature films, the course covers a diverse range of issues involved in the formulation of American multiculturalism in cinema, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class and socio-political status. Students, then, not only practice analytical reading skills through film interpretation, but also explore and identify significant aspects of our American culture.
Possible films for the semester include: Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (Griffith); The Searchers (Ford); El Norte, Mi Familia/My Family, and Selena (Nava); High Noon (Zinneman); Shanghai Noon (Dey); Windtalkers, Face/off, and Mission: Impossible II (Woo); Rush Hour (Ratner); Anaconda (Llosa); Thriller (Potter); Manhattan (Allen); Heartland (Pearce); Across the Moon (Gottlieb); Old Gringo (Puenzo); New York, New York and Age of Innocence (Scorsese); Boyz-N-the-Hood and Shaft (Singleton); Shaft (Parks); Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X (Lee); Powwow Highway (Wacks); Mi Vida Loca/My Crazy Life (Anders); Swordfish (Sena); Training Day (Fuqua); Fools Rush In (Tennant); Glory (Zwick); Mississippi Masala (Nair); El Mariachi and Desperado (Rodriguez); The Godfather trilogy (Coppola); Blade Runner (Scott); Philadelphia (Demme); Amores Perros and 21 Grams (González-Iñárritu ); Y Tú Mamá También and Children of Men (Cuarón); and more.
Textbooks for the course include: Ella Shohat and Bob Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994/2001) and Margo Kasdan, Christine Saxton, and Susan Tavernetti’s The Critical Eye (3rd ed., Kendall-Hunt, 2002). Supplemental readings on reserve include articles by Stam & Spence, Mulvey, Silverman, Mellencamp, Fregoso, among others. Course requirements will include assigned readings and screenings; one short (approx. 5 pp.) critical essay; one class presentation; a (“green-light”) term project; and one article-length research essay.
* This course satisfies the requirements for American literature since 1900 and genre: Drama.
5352.001 Studies in Fiction
Wendell Aycock
TR 9:30-10:50
Reassessing Great Works of Fiction from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
During the spring of 2007, students in English 5352 will have the opportunity to read (or reread) some great and near great works of fiction from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will focus on works from Russia, France, Czechoslovakia, Latin America, the United States, and possibly Spain. Writers and works will include Gogol, Dead Souls; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; selected stories of Chekhov and Maupassant; Camus, Exile and the Kingdom; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; García Márquez, either One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera; Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five; and a modern novel from Spain. Some recurrent topics in these works are politics, war, religion, love and friendship. The works will be considered in terms of the places and eras in which they were written and in relationship to current literary theories. Bakhtin, for example, has written extensively about Crime and Punishment. Students will be required to write one or two short essays, present an oral report, and write a fifteen to twenty page paper.
* This course satisfies the requirement for genre: Fiction.
5355.001 Studies in Comparative Literature
James Whitlark
R 2:00-4:50
Orientalism
Beginning perhaps with Homer’s Iliad, Orientalism—“Western” (particularly European and American) response to Asia-- has been a highly charged theme, involving globalism, imperialism, colonialism, exoticism, travel literature, fantasy, adventure, and the collision of worldviews. This seminar will explore the theme from a number of perspectives, including the post-colonial and psychological. Since the Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium will be on American attitudes toward Asia and Asian ones about America, papers for the class might be written with that venue in mind. Although the class will focus on the following texts, term-paper topics may include (but are not limited to) such obvious examples of Orientalism as Taoist influence on Ursula Le Guin, the many American novels inspired by Chinese Monkey King legends (or, indeed, any use of Asian material by Asian-American authors) , exoticism in Othello or Anthony and Cleopatra, John Barth and the Arabian Nights, Salman Rushdie torn between East and West, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” Orientalism in popular literature, or the Orientalism of Samuel Johnson (or of Jorge Luis Borges, or of John Dryden, or of Ezra Pound, or of Allen Ginsberg, or of Voltaire, or of Goethe, or of any of the authors listed here below).
Texts will include William Beckford, Vathek (available free on-line); Rudyard Kipling, Kim (available free on-line); Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka; T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (paperback edition); Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader (Counterpoint).
Assignments: term paper, midterm, and final exam.
5370.001 Studies in Creative Writing
William Wenthe
T 6:00-8:50
Poetry
This seminar, as always when I’ve taught it, will be a combination of “workshop” and “form and theory” class; in other words, we’ll be writing poetry, and thinking about poetry. The class is open to creative writing majors; others should submit a group of poems to Dr. Wenthe, along with your contact information, for permission to enroll. Requirements are devotion beyond mere “attendance,” a final portfolio of ten poems, an eight-to-ten-page introductory prose statement, and submission of a batch of revised poems to at least one literary journal.
As with the last time I taught this class, we will do workshops on a “rolling” basis, meaning that each student will be free to submit poems whenever he or she has a poem ready to be workshopped, instead of adhering to a preset schedule. That is, each class session will likely include some workshopping, some discussion of other writing. Students write poems of their own making—I won’t assign exercises or forms, beyond my normal requirement that at least one poem in the final portfolio be written in some aspect of traditional form. (Depending on student interest, we may try something of an experimental nature too; feedback on this aspect of my last class was positive, and may be worth pursuing). One way or another, each student is responsible for completing a final portfolio of ten finished poems, together with an eight-to-ten-page prose introduction to, and commentary on, the poems.
The reason for the prose introduction is merely professional: as a serious writer of poetry, you will be asked to discuss your poetry—its aims and methods, and honest self-assessments of its strengths and shortcomings—in your career, whether it be for admission to a writing program (or a conference, or independent workshop, or fellowship or grant), or graduation from a program (thesis or dissertation in creative writing), for job letters, or, we hope, submitting copy for promotional materials for your book publication. (All this is not to mention the self-knowledge that comes from such writing).
Instead of an anthology, we’ll focus on some particular books. Chosen for their range and accomplishment, they are: Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop, Crooked Run by Henry Taylor, and Leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess. There will also be a xerox packet, with a miscellany of relevant essays, articles, poems, and so forth.
5370.002 Studies in Creative Writing
Jill Patterson
M 6:00-8:50
Non-fiction
In this course, students will study the contemporary memoir. We’ll take a look at different methods of nonfiction narration: traditional first-person, lyric or montage, mixed genre, reportage, and meta-narratives. We’ll be reading Judith Ortiz Cofer’s multi-genre memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood; Lee Martin’s Turning Bones (which narrates Martin’s first-person experiences as well as his families’ “imagined” history); Dorothy Allison’s portrait of the writer, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; and Nick Flynn’s immersion memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. We’ll also be watching a handful of first-person documentaries. Students will be expected to write at least five chapters for a memoir (early drafts as well as polished revisions), prepare a proposal and query letter, and submit the five individual chapters for publication in literary journals. Submission of manuscripts for publication will comprise a substantial portion of the student’s grade. This is a writing intensive course.
5380.001 Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Priscilla Ybarra
M 9:30-12:20
Place, Space, and Mestizaje in Chicana/o Cultural Production
From the lost land grants of the nineteenth century to the imaginary homeland of Aztlán and the endless fields of migrant farmworker horizons, place and space play key roles in Chicana/o cultural production. Much of Chicana/o literature elaborates the feel of a particular space and the deep history of a specific place, or environment. Yet, Chicana/o literature is also deeply invested in a culture of mestizaje and draws critical strength from this hybrid background, especially as it allows for an ever-shifting identity. How does Chicana/o cultural production and critical theory reconcile the “root-edness” of space and place with the mixture and movement that defines mestizaje? This course will explore the relationship among place, space, and mestizaje by reviewing some of the foundational texts in Chicana/o literary studies as well as some of the most recent studies on place and mestizaje. Primary readings will include recently recovered texts from the nineteenth century by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Jovita González, as well as more contemporary works by John Rechy, Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Helena María Viramontes. Secondary works include The Chicano Studies Reader, which selects from the first 30 years of landmark articles in the journal Aztlán, Rafael Pérez-Torres’ Mestizaje, Ramon Saldívar’s The Borderlands of Culture, and Mary Pat Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies.
* This course satisfies the requirement for American literature after 1900.
5380.002 Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Marjean D. Purinton
TR 11:00-12:20
British Romantic Drama
After more than a decade of recovering and recontextualizing Romantic drama in Great Britain, we have come to recognize the central role that drama played during the period of the 1780s to the 1830s. Romantic drama, staged and read, was its culture’s most popular medium, crossing class, national, and gender divisions, as well as a serious literary form written by the period’s major writers. Manifested in diverse ways (melodrama, gothic, verse drama, opera, pantomime, puppet shows, children’s drama, monodrama, tragedy, comedy, burlesque), Romantic drama performed, reflected, and influenced the political, social, and cultural issues of its day. The Licensing Act of 1737, granting patents to the Royal Theatres of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship (unwillingness to grant performance licenses) meant, however, that playwrights had to be clever in their stagings of controversial and taboo subjects.
In this seminar, we will examine diverse plays from the period as negotiations of theatrical politics. We will look at the performative aspects of Romantic drama, including the role of the actor, the design of stage, non-dramatic performances (such as itinerant medical shows), and private theatricals. We will consider the thematic and dramaturgical handling of the revolutionary and changing Romantic culture from which its drama emanated. We will contextualize the ways in which Romantic drama engaged with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as British society became increasingly democratized, commercialized, and bourgeoisie. We will discover how the theatre was a site for performing gender and how playwriting was particularly problematic for women. We will situate Romantic drama in the history of theatre.
Because my pedagogy and scholarship are informed by feminism and feminist theory, you will encounter in this seminar a learning environment of decentralized authority with an invitation to participate in your own learning/discovery process, your own meaning-making knowledge. And because Romantic drama is a genre of performance as well as of the printed page, be prepared to engage in some reading and performance activities that will require you to learn affectedly as well as intellectually.
Our primary texts are included in The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer (2003), Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, edited by Peter Duthie (Broadview, 2001), and hypertexts found on the website British Women Playwrights around 1800. Our activities will include brief response papers, a book review, a presentation about performance reviews, a research-based, critical essay, and ample amounts of stimulating conversation and commentary.
Questions or comments? You may contact Marjean D. Purinton at 742.1828 or marjean.purinton@ttu.edu.
* This course satisfies the requirement for British literature after 1700 and genre: Drama.
5380.003 Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Ann Hawkins
W 9:30-12:20
Scholarly Editing
Scholarly editing is the means by which reliable editions of literary texts are made available to literary critics and readers. It requires that the editor understand the composition, production, dissemination, and reception of texts, and articulate that knowledge to readers clearly and concisely. This course will examine the history of scholarly editing and the various theories that undergird textual scholarship, in order to answer the following questions (among others):
. What do editors do?
. What kinds of editions can one produce, and what are the differences between them?
. How does the choice of an edition (and by extension the choices of an editor) influence literary interpretation and theory?
. How do editors determine a copy-text?
. How does one manage multiple, varying "authorized" versions of a text?
. How much attention should an editor pay to authorial intention?
. What theories guide editorial decisions?
. What does one annotate and how?
. How does one accommodate variants between one edition (or stage of production) and another?
Students will complete small editions as their major class project. Students will learn the mark-up practices of the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI) as well as gain familiarity with other tools including Collex and Juxta.
This course is required for students chosen to work on the Digital Dickens and Conradiana digitization (in cooperation with the TTU Press) projects. Applications for those projects will be available next month. There are several errors in this description: if you noticed them, you might be a good candidate for working on these projects.
5380.004 Advanced Problems in Literary Studies
Cristobal Silva
W 6:00-8:50
Transatlantic 18th-century Literature
From the colonization of Virginia in the 1580s to the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), the American colonies were a part of the British Empire; thus, to some degree, our separation of Early American and Eighteenth-Century British literatures is an arbitrary and anachronistic one. In order to explore the shared intellectual, cultural, and literary histories of England and the United States, ENGL 5307 and ENGL 5380 will be taught together during the Spring semester of 2007. One of our central aims will be to think about how this dual approach to literary history changes our understanding of both Early America and Eighteenth-century Britain.
The purpose of this course will be to theorize the concept of Transatlanticism: whether defined by geography, traffic, ideology, modernity, mercantile capitalism, print culture, etc. To that end, we will read a wide range of 16th–18th century texts as well as contemporary criticism, and interrogate the basic convergences and divergences between these closest of nations.
Primary texts may include: Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly. Secondary texts include Philip Round’s By Nature and By Custom Cursed, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Imaginary Puritan, and David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick’s The British Atlantic World 1500–1800.
*This course satisfies the requirement for British literature since 1700.
5392.001 Teaching College Literature
Madonne Miner
TR 9:30-10:50
Intended for graduate students in their final semester of course work who are interested in applying for a 2000-level literature teaching assignment, ENGL 5392 offers an introduction to the challenges of teaching college literature. We begin with an overview of theoretical issues associated with the teaching of college literature (What is college literature? Who gets a say in the answer to this question? To whom/what are college literature teachers responsible? What are their responsibilities? What kind of writing does/should occur in college literature classrooms? And so on) but move quickly to actual praxis. Students in 5392 will prepare reading/writing assignments, engage in grading of those assignments, and ‘teach’ selected texts to the rest of us in class. By the end of the semester, each student will prepare a sample syllabus and writing assignments for a 2000-level course at TTU, will be video-taped while doing a practice teaching session, and will have a start on a teaching philosophy statement and a teaching portfolio.
Readings for the class include a range of theoretical and practical essays, as well as sample works of literature. Assignments include a few personal meditations (“what values have you taken in/on during your education in literary studies?”), reports on classroom observations, responses to readings, and the production of classroom materials (syllabi, assignment descriptions, grading rubrics, power point presentations).