Graduate Course Descriptions

This course is a revision of and replacement for ENG 502 Problems of Research in English. This course provides beginning graduate students an introduction to the history, traditions, issues, problems, and debates of English Studies. From the perspective of the outsider or newly initiated, the proliferation of areas of interest within English Studies can be confusing if not daunting. It is the goal of this course to familiarize new graduate students with the historical development of English Studies and the shape of English Studies today. Designed as one of the core courses for all English MA students, this course will include studies of the profession, experience in writing professional documents (such as conference proposals, abstracts, book reviews, thesis proposal), practical guidance in relevant research methods, and inquiry into the major theoretical and disciplinary issues and challenges of English Studies. This is a required course of all English MA students.

For ENG 503, students register through the department chairperson for three (3) semester hours in two (2) different semesters or six (6) semester hours in one (1) semester.

This course focuses on understanding historical and contemporary rhetorical conceptions of style in order to foster more sophisticated invention, analysis, and production of 21st century compositions. Specifically, the course examines the idea of style from its ancient understandings rooted in orality up to modern iterations rooted in multimodal composition and digital writing.

This course provides graduate students with an introduction to the field of Indigenous Rhetorics, including its rhetorical traditions and practices, issues, problems, history, and cultural contexts of various indigenous communities. The goal of this advanced course is to build on students’ existing knowledge about the rhetorical strategies, techniques, and tactics of contemporary indigenous peoples in several genres: creative nonfiction, academic scholarship, stand-up comedy, journalism, political and legal documents, and web presence. Specifically, students will engage with the works of writers, thinkers, performers, artists, and speakers in specific contemporary indigenous communities as these practitioners strive to carve space for their voices and perspectives in the crowded space of modern intellectual thought and practice. This course focuses primarily on Native American Rhetorics. This course is appropriate for those interested in Composition & Rhetoric, Literature and Media Studies. This class may also include the opportunity for digital storytelling, blogging, interviewing, and community engagement. This is an elective course for all English MA students.

A critical examination of the effectiveness and significance of symbol and myth in literature is undertaken.

This course is a detailed look into the biography and its aspects.

This course provides an overview of the leading currents, issues, and debates in feminist literary theory, including gendered voice, difference vs. equality feminism, essentialism, and queer theory. Students will read theoretical and literary selections from nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century feminists.

This course includes a comprehensive introduction to the phonology, morphology, syntax, and dialects of American English. The problems of language which arise in elementary and secondary education are discussed. This course is open to students taking linguistics for the first time.

One of the following topics:

(A) Descriptive Linguistics – a survey of linguistics, emphasizing the descriptive approach to the sound and grammatical systems of language;

(B) American Dialects – a study of the geographic and social varieties of spoken American English;

(C) History of the English Language – an investigation of selected topics in Old, Middle, and Modern English will be covered.

This course will delve into Old English authors and their works.

In generating broad familiarity with Chaucer’s backgrounds, sources, and achievement, this course seeks to provide understanding of his place in literature, together with some facility in reading Middle English texts.

This course features special studies in selected major works of Bacon, Burton, Browne, Hobbes, Taylor, Milton, Donne, and Jonson are given special attention.

This class focuses on some of the major voices in 20th Century American Drama: Miller, Williams, O’Neill, Inge, Shange, Wilson, Norman, Vogel, and Kushner among others. Both canonical and lesser known works will be studied, enriching students’ knowledge of the writer’s oeuvre. Experimentation in form and content will be explored as well as representations of race, gender, politics, and sexualities.

This course provides intensive study of selected authors, themes, and/or approaches in postmodern fiction, both American and international. Depending on the author or theme that is focused on, the time period of the work(s) covered may fall between from about 1960 to 1990.

This course will examine pieces of literature from seventeenth-century to eighteenth-century America.

This course is a critical study of American Romanticism together with its English and European antecedents. Works of Freneau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are examined for common literary elements. Romanticism is explored as a literary aesthetic, and as a social and moral philosophy.

This course provides an overview of the leading currents, issues, and debates in Postcolonial theory, including the definition of field, gender, political, and resistance issues and an in-depth look at Postcolonial literary texts.

This course provides graduate students with an introduction to the field of Literacy Studies, including its scientific and theoretical foundations, historical and current perspectives on literacy practices, research methods and curricular implications. Literacy has culturally specific, social, economic and political implications for all people, and yet the general public’s understanding of literacy is often marred by myths or overly simplified perspectives on the acquisition and uses of reading and writing, as well as less text-centric means of interpreting and composing. This course is aimed at deepening and complicating students’ understanding of literacies, as they learn to investigate personal and communal assumptions, conduct primary and secondary research, and consider the consequences of the Literacy Studies for learning, teaching and critically navigating politics and culture. This course is especially useful for those intending to teach on the secondary and post-secondary levels, as rhetoric of a “literacy crisis” has been a staple of education reforms in the United States since 1960s. The course is also appropriate for those with an interest in Composition & Rhetoric, Literature, Media Studies or Linguistics. This is an elective course for all English MA students.

This intensive graduate course provides a survey and a close analysis of a major tradition in literary studies, the black feminist tradition. This course will examine various genres of writing by black women, such as: short stories, poetry, drama, novels, creative nonfiction, and literary theory/criticism.

This course focuses on honing the analysis, production, and teaching of contemporary digital texts by going beyond longstanding academic conceptions rooted in the printed word alone. Specifically, the course examines why contemporary digital texts do not dovetail with previous Rhetorical and Composition frameworks and why emerging areas within Rhetoric and Composition such as visual rhetoric, digital writing, and multimodal style are vital in cultivating sophisticated, responsive methods of analysis and production. Students will familiarize themselves with issues surrounding creation, revision, and deployment of digital texts to better understand the complex rhetorics involved when arranging words, images, sounds, coding language, available designs, fonts, colors, and spaces to make new kinds of 21st century writing.

This course invites graduate students to examine writing as an essential tool for exploring, questioning, and creating intellectual knowledge in academic and public spaces. Students will develop a conceptual framework for critical writing through the study of rhetorical theory, genre theory and composition theory. Central to the course are writing workshops in which students share drafts of course assignments. In these workshops, students develop an understanding of themselves as writers, while exploring a variety of styles and rhetorical approaches for communicating with specific audiences both within and beyond the graduate classroom. As students explore the new genres and increased expectations that come with advanced scholarly writing, they will practice: choosing a point of inquiry, gathering research, developing a position, choosing style and voice, using readers’ feedback effectively, and editing and revising as a recursive process.

The Epic in the Modern Imagination has two complementary objectives: to study the nature and function of epic narrative in its classical and modern iterations, and to study major principles and innovations in theories of narrative as an aesthetic form and a tool for organizing information and experience. The seminar provides extended attention to especially significant epic narratives, which may include Homer’s The Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses, and at least one more contemporary exemplar. Additionally, the seminar focuses on influential texts on and evaluations of epic narrative. All instruction and reading of ancient epic narratives and texts will be conducted in English and/or critically authorized English translations.

The literary milieu that gave rise to the Age of Realism in American literature is studied. Close attention is paid to the works of Twain, James, and Crane.

Defining American Modernism as the cultural response to rapid changes in society brought on by new technologies and social patterns, this course introduces students to cultural studies/historicist approaches to the study of modernist American literature, inviting students to examine the interplay between literature, popular culture, and the controversies and events that shaped early twentieth-century Americans’ sense that they were both inhabiting and building a wholly new social world.

Major themes, genre, and resource works of British literature are examined, and against their background, class members present individual studies for general discussion.

Major themes, genre, and resource works of American literature are examined, and against their background, class members present individual studies for general discussion.

This course covers the development of literary theories in criticism to the present era and gives the opportunity for application of the major principles to representative pieces of writing.

This course covers the development of literary theories in criticism to the present era and gives the opportunity for application of the major principles to representative pieces of writing.

Students in this course will have the opportunity to explore basic and advanced issues in film history, theory and criticism. A wide range of films will be studied from both American and World Cinema. Student participation and independent research are required, along with completion of a final project or term paper.

Poetry written in English, published since the beginning of the modernist period, and major contributions to English poetics of the same period provide the principal foci for course materials and discussions. Individual iterations of the course will examine specific periods, movements, or thematics.

Literature at the height of the neoclassical period is studied, with attention to social, historical, and philosophical background for the Augustans: Pope, Swift, and selected writings of DeFoe, Addison and Steele, and Gray. Pre-romantic themes and modes in poetry, prose, and drama of the Johnson era are analyzed.

This course focuses on the two-fold achievement of the English Romantic Movement in effecting a break with the literary traditions of the past, and simultaneously anticipating the new attitudes current in our time.

Selected non-dramatic works written in England during the 16th century will be studied carefully: (1) for intellectual and cultural significance, and (2) for genre, techniques, styles, and aesthetic qualities.

This course is an examination of literature in the nineteenth century.

Since it may be assumed that students electing this study have some familiarity with the major works of Shakespeare, attention will be directed primarily to the lesser-known plays. Also, in different years emphasis will center upon such selected areas as: (a) the tragedies, (b) the comedies, (c) the histories, and (d) the text of Shakespeare.

This graduate class explores some of the major 20th Century British and Irish writers and their contributions to the human spirit. Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Iris Murdoch, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Paul Kingsnorth and A. S. Byatt (among others) forever changed the face of what and how we read. Students will examine experiments in narrative structure and voice, symbol and theme, archetype and myth, the shifting landscape of culture, class, gender, identity, and sexualities, all the while reading some astounding books. The semester will end in a reader friendly and engaging study of what is considered to be the most influential novel of the 20th century: James Joyce’s Ulysses.

This course covers the broad range of poetry that flourished during the period from approximately 1832 to 1900 in England, the era generally known as the Victorian Age.

Victorian literature is sexy, engaging, dynamic and exciting. It’s not the endless novel of pleasantries and polite conversations you may remember. Through an engaging study and reexamination of George Eliot, the Brontes, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, and Elizabeth Gaskell among others, students will examine the Victorians’ fascination with the supernatural, passion and obsession, the shifting values in class and identity, gender and the New Woman, romance as genre, the debate between canonical vs popular literature, and the anti-marriage novel. This course features dynamic discussions as students reignite the power inside the Victorian novel.​

This course allows individual pursuit in depth of a subject in English not covered within a regularly offered graduate course in English. Students in the M.A. program in English or the M.Ed. program in secondary education (English) may schedule this course for one to three (1-3) credits in a given semester. A maximum of six (6) credits of independent study is permitted in a student's program. Permission of the chairperson of the English Department is required.