Course Descriptions
Class Numbers are included in parentheses following the course number.
ENGL 6310-001 (3091). ADVANCED LITERARY STUDIES. 11 TTh Dallas Hall 137 Dickson-Carr.
An introduction to advanced graduate work in literary studies. In three overlapping unites, our course will focus upon definitions of texts and the languages within them, standards and processes of careful literary scholarship, and the complexities of the profession, including current issues. The first unit will comprise a short survey of book and manuscript history, including how oral and written texts become books, with the attendant authority and problems contained therein. The second unit will focus on scholarly indexes and databases, both analog and digital; archival research; creation and use of bibliographies. The final unit will focus upon our profession: how the study of literature developed into a profession; the roles of critical theory; professional organizations; developing and presenting scholarly work in professional settings; the paths to publication; the means to enter different levels of the professoriat. In addition to readings that explore all of these subjects, our course will make use of the DeGolyer and Bridwell Libraries, an occasional guest speaker, and participants’ regular short writings and in-class presentations. We will surround a number of short literary texts—stories and poems--and one longer work with secondary readings that define and challenge the goals of literary scholarship. The longer text will be Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne.
>Texts: MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, Third Edition; Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, Third Edition; Handbook for Academic Authors, Fifth Edition, by Beth Luey; Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, ed. Robert Folkenflik.
ENGL 6311-001 (3259). SURVEY OF LITERARY CRITICISM. 2 TTh. Dallas Hall 137. Foster.
A survey of literary criticism and theory from some of the ancient roots of critical thought to contemporary literary practice: from Heraclitus to Badiou. The purpose of the course is to provide the theoretical background necessary to understand the discipline of literary study. The course will require regular critical responses and several essays analyzing both critical and literary texts.
Enrollment limit: Graduate Students only.
Texts: TBA.
ENGL 6312-001 (3260). TEACHING PRACTICUM. 2 F. Dallas Hall 137. Stephens.
English 6312 has two purposes: First, it serves as an introductory support structure for PhD candidates who are teaching their first first-year writing classes at SMU. Second, in a general way, it introduces graduate students to the field of composition studies that has emerged in North American English Departments in the last forty years. The course helps PhD students write syllabi for and plan their classes for the fall term; it also offers an ongoing conversation about grading, conferences, classroom management, etc. In addition, all students read three books that outline the development of the field of composition studies, and each student reads and reports on a fourth book that describes the field as it exists now.
Texts: TBA.
ENGL 7340-001 (3152). SEMINAR IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 2 M. Dallas Hall 138. Wheeler.
A study of Malory’s late fifteenth-century Arthuriad in relation to its chivalric predecessors; genres and styles; role in shaping the idea of ‘England’; editorial history and hot spots; liminal status on edge of script and print cultures; classic and contemporary interpretations. Expectations: weekly ‘focus’ responses; regular oral presentations; significant seminar paper.
>Texts: Vinaver’s Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1 vol OUP pb) and other editions from 1485 to present.
ENGL 7374-001 (5325). PROBLEMS IN LITERARY HISTORY. 2 W. Dallas Hall 137. Sudan.
This course examines the structures of British imperialism as they are reflected in literature, science, and technology. The premise for our examination, however, is that such structures were not necessarily European in origin. Resisting the self-image of the “Enlightenment” as it was developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe (and as it has been extended in academic and cultural work since), we will investigate how “Enlightenment” values and socio-political norms prized by modernity also had roots in cultures and geographies other than Europe. Our focus will be on the critical encounters between England and Asia (although we will also consider crucial connections with the New World as well), particularly India, with an eye to deconstructing legacies of Eurocentrism. Readings include selections from Hobbes’ De Corpore, Newton’s Opticks and Principia, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe triad, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest, Jane Austen’s Emma, Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Letters from Constantinople, and excerpts from 17th- and 18th-century correspondence of the British East India Company and selections from the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. We will also be reading the critical work of Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault in order to construct some theoretical paradigms with which we can work. The work of historians Richard Grove, Andre Gunder Frank, Joyce Chaplin, and Kavita Philip will help refine our historical understanding of the period. Ultimately, we will consider the implications of these histories in relation to our own (post)modern beliefs about imperial identity and assumptions about legacy, power, and control in the global marketplace.
ENGL 7376-001 (5327). SEMINAR: SPECIAL TOPICS. 3:30 TTh. Dallas Hall 137. Weisenburger.
This seminar in Anglophone literature of and about the Americas will focus on three problems: How English writers read New World human bodies as racial texts. How racial lore and knowledge formed an “American” textual corpus. And why, in the later period, writers typically braided those strands together in the figure of the noose—metonym for the pervasive, deathwards trajectory of many plots in this vast literature. Readings will span a long history—more than 300-plus years of writing after 1600—and will require a trans-Atlantic reach, historically grounded Americas studies approaches, and supplemental readings in recent theoretical texts on race and domination. We will want to think critically about the close ties between race and modernity, and to explore the ways that colonial relations with indigenous peoples—The Indian—were crucial to American racial formation and its dominant white/black binary. As prelude we first read Faulkner’s novel Light in August (1932), about a segregated Mississippi town working itself into a lynching panic over the illegible race of one man’s body. Then rewinding to circa 1600 we hit some prominent and some lesser known stepping-stones on the way back to that moment, as follows. I. Colonization: Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611); Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines(1682); and Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1689). II. Revolutions: Thomas. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia(1782); Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799); Mary Hassal, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808); David Walker, Appeal (1829); and Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855). III. Imperium: Thomas Dixon, Sins of the Father (1912); and George Schuyler, Black No More (1931). Course requirements: formal presentations and a seminar paper.