Spring 2025 Course Offerings | English Graduate Program

ENGL 505 Contemporary Literary Theory and Methods
Professor: Steele
Meetings: Monday 5-7:30pm

ENGL 505 provides introduction to the scholarly methods necessary for graduate work in literature and to the study of theoretical frameworks important to contemporary literary criticism, including formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, new historicism, and psychoanalysis. The course exposes students to the primary texts from which those theoretical frameworks are derived and requires students to critique and construct applications of those theories to specific literary texts.

ENGL 597 Advanced Topics in English
Professor: McMann
Meetings: Tuesday 5-7:30pm

This graduate seminar explores the role partition in the postcolonial world has played in nation-building, focusing on literature from India, Pakistan, Palestine, Israel, and Northern Ireland. Protracted conflicts tied to ethnic nationalism and religious sectarianism have often followed in the wake of partition. The consequences of this violence can be seen in literature. Building on a theoretical foundation of partition studies, postcolonialism, and cosmopolitanism, this course will examine how literature shapes our understanding of partition, the violence it often inspires, and the attempts, often failed, at reconciliation. We will consider the ways in which literature supplements and/or challenges the accepted narratives of partition and reconciliation that have emerged in the wake of decolonization.

ENGL 670-01 Studies in LIT: Asian American LIT
Professor: Hustis
Meetings: Online Asynchronous

This course examines how issues of identity (class, race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity) have intersected with debates about literary history and tradition (aesthetics, canonicity, and questions of cultural “value”) in Asian-American literature.

ENGL 670-02 Studies in LIT: Latin American Literature as History
Professor: Ortiz-Vilarelle
Meetings: Wednesday 5-7:30pm

This course offers an opportunity for critical and theoretical analysis of the diverse historical and literary development of Latin America and the Caribbean. Selected texts direct our focus on 20^th century representations of the aftermath of conquest and slavery, the rise of democracy and dictatorship, race, ethnicity and migration. We will read works by authors who have defined and popularized various literary periods and genres of the Latin American Boom. This study will also include attention to Latinos writing in the US about histories in their countries of origin.