ENGL 505-01 Contemporary Literary Theory and Methods
Wednesday 5-7:30pm
Professor: Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
An introduction to scholarly methods necessary for graduate work in literature along with 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 will provide familiarity with major advocates of each framework and require application of theories to specific literary texts.
ENGL 597-01 Advanced Topics in English: Theories of Reading and Writing
Tuesday 5-7:30pm
Professor: Felicia Steele
Tuesday 5-7:30pm
Professor: Felicia Steele
Literary theory addresses a number of concerns about what and why we read or write, but this course will address theories of reading and writing themselves from the points of view of cognitive science and composition theory. This course will examine both historical and contemporary theories of literacy. Students will leave the course with a stronger understanding of the mechanisms, physical and cognitive, and social and cultural implications of reading and writing. We will also address questions having to do with machine reading and writing and the construction of LLMs.
ENGL 650-01 Early American Literature: The Witches of Salem 1692
Thursday5-7:30pm
Professor: Michele Tarter
Thursday5-7:30pm
Professor: Michele Tarter
This theory-intensive seminar will focus on the most notorious witch hunt of America: Salem 1692. Looking at a plethora of archival and literary sources/ranging from pamphlets of “Wonders” and “Strange Occurrences,” sermons and court trial records, accusations and confessions, and many perplexing, fascinating manuscript diaries and letters, we will explore the multiple meanings of witchcraft in this early American village. Our class will delve into the primary texts preserved from this cultural phenomenon, and then study the ever-growing interdisciplinary scholarship that theorizes and illuminates this colonial community’s hysteria, rooted in its own beliefs about gender, sexuality, race and class.
ENGL 670-01 Studies in LIT: Contemporary Poetry
Monday 5-7:30pm
Monday 5-7:30pm
In W. H. Auden’s famous words, “poetry makes nothing happen.” In this graduate seminar in contemporary poetry, we’ll look at poems and collections that stake lyric practice as an essential and rich part of civic life, reading closely for this “nothing”! Whether through engaging the archive, singing collective elegy, interrupting the office routine, mapping an imaginary city, calling our attention to the wonderful mundane, contemporary poets have reinvigorated the lyric form to put it to work. In our reading and discussions, we will listen for how this work is put into motion by the words on the page. Poems exist alongside and within our world and contexts. We will ask what comes before and after: what habits of reading does a poem disrupt? What reverberates, after the page is turned? Interdisciplinary scholarship in poetics, performance studies, and more will situate our texts within a rich, collective reading practice.