GRADUATE COURSES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

FALL 2008

 

These descriptions of graduate courses to be offered have been supplied by the faculty.  The information printed is intended to supplement the basic description printed in the UNR catalog.  LAST MINUTE CHANGES IN COURSE CONTENT AND COURSES TO BE OFFERED ARE ALWAYS POSSIBLE.

 

Admission to graduate standing in the Department of English is a prerequisite for all 700-level courses.  For more information about the individual courses listed below, please contact the instructor of the course.  New graduate students and graduate special students interested in applying to our graduate program should consult with the Director of graduate Studies, Dr. Michael Branch.

 

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SEMINARS

705.001

Seminar in Creative Writing

2:30-5:50 M

Palwick

 

Writing the Life Cycle

 

This will be a seminar in the autobiographical essay, with assignments ranging from family history before we were born to meditations upon our eventual deaths.  Students will share their work with the other writers in the class, and will draw inspiration from published models by a wide range of professional writers.

 

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711.001

Introduction to Graduate Study

6:30-9:15 R

Mardock

 

This course will focus on defining English literary studies as a field, giving a sense of current criticism in various sub-disciplines, practice in assessing research sources and deploying critical methods, and taking the mystery out of what we do as scholars of English language and literature.

The course will cover bibliography and modern research techniques in language and literature, methods of literary analysis, and the preparation of documented investigation.

 

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724.001

Topics in Literature

2:30-5:50 W

Glotfelty

 

Environmental Justice

 

The environmental justice movement argues that race, class, and gender are important factors largely ignored by the mainstream environmental movement, whose focus has been wilderness preservation and habitat protection.  While “environment” commonly refers to nature, advocates of environmental justice adopt a broad conception of environment that includes the urban and rural spaces where people live and work, and they protest the unequal distribution of environmental hazards and benefits in these spaces.  Similarly, while environmental literature has often been imagined as “stories that have trees in them,” the literature of environmental justice might lack trees, featuring instead factories, toxic spills, industrial pollution, contaminated water, nuclear fallout, pesticides, slums, and hazardous work sites.  This seminar studies the theory and literature associated with the environmental justice movement in the U.S.   Students will submit weekly written responses, actively participate in various ways, report on a scholarly work, and write and present a conference- or publication-length essay. 

 

Candidates for primary texts include Susanne Antonetta, Body Toxic; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Ana Castillo, So Far From God; Corbin Harney, The Way It Is; Linda Hogan, Solar Storms; Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up; Simon Ortiz, Woven Stone; Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead; Hubert Skidmore, Hawk’s Nest; Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams; Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Gerald Vizenor, Landfill Meditations; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Alison Deming and Lauret Savoy, eds., The Colors of Nature.

 

Secondary scholarship may include Joni Adamson, Murray Bookchin, Lawrence Buell, Robert Bullard, David Camacho, Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, Valerie Kuletz, Winona LaDuke, Jeffrey Myers, Devon Peña, Rachel Stein, Andrew Szasz.

 

Course readings are not finalized yet--your suggestions and preferences are invited.

 

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730.001

The Craft of Writing

6:30-950 W

Coake

 

In ENG 730 we will investigate a number of different genres of nonfiction writing, including but not limited to memoir, the essay, professional reviews, biography, and so on.  The seminar will be run as a workshop, with student-generated works occupying most of our time and attention--though we will of course read a number of published works in the appropriate genres.  Students

 

 

 

will be expected to write 2-3 works of nonfiction, which over the course of the semester should be revised into publishable quality.

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733.001

History and Principles of Rhetoric

2:30-5:50 M

Borrowman

 

This seminar focuses upon the development of rhetorical theory in the western tradition, with primary focus on the classical through medieval periods. 

 

 

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737.001

College Teaching in Language and Literature

6:30-9:15 T

Detweiler

 

This course focuses on the theory and practice of college reading and writing instruction, with an emphasis on the teaching of writing.  In the course, participants will be invited to

  • become aware of theories and research relevant to the teaching and learning of writing
  • develop strategies to help college students improve their writing, reading, and thinking
  • examine our teaching in light of our insights into learning and literacy
  • discuss issues that arise as we put our theories into practice.

 

The course will engage participants in discussion of philosophical and political issues in composition instruction, workshops on practice, including assignment and syllabus design, response to student writing, and discussion leadership techniques; and reflection on our experiences in our own classrooms and with our own writing.

 

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743.001

Problems in Later American Literature

2:30-5:50 R

Gifford

 

Race and Crime in American Literature

 

At the conclusion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” gentleman detective C. August Dupin solves the brutal murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter when he deduces the crime has been committed by none other that an escaped orangutan wielding a barber’s razor blade.  America’s first detective fiction story, “Murders” stages the secret terrors of a nation caught up in the paradoxes of slavery and democracy, urbanization and westward expansion, expanding public citizenship for white men and increasingly confining gender roles, “free” labor markets and racial insurrection.  “Race and Crime in American Literature” will trace the development of these themes through tradition of American crime fiction from the 1830s to the present.  Drawing upon the disciplinary practices and pioneering texts of American Studies, we will read a wide range of canonical and popular texts that constitute an American noir tradition.  We will read the architects of the American gothic Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain alongside the exemplars of the slave narrative Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.  We will also examine the hard-boiled school of American detective fiction, including Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler together with black crime writers Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines.  We will end the course by studying the emerging popularity of black female-authored crime novels by Sista Soulja, Noire, and Nikki Turner.  Drawing from an array of critical methodologies, including cultural Marxism, the critical study of whiteness, theories of space, psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory, students will be challenged to consider the various ways in which the crime story has been used to imaginarily resolve the racial and class-based cleavages of the nation.

 

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781.001

Problems in the Victorian Age

2:30-5:50 T

Hill

 

This course will look at Victorian geographies: public and private; social and literary; city and country; made and natural; regional, national, and imperial. Although the “terrain” of our discussions will be British Victorian poetry and prose, we will read and discuss theory and criticism of several disciplines, including literary studies, geography, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, and political science and use these lenses to further develop and refine graduate-level critical reading and writing skills. An interest in Victorian literature helps, but is not a prerequisite. Readings may include literature by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, the Brownings, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as prose by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. Criticism and theory may include work by Sharon Marcus, Elaine Freedgood, Mary Poovey, Alan Bewell, Timothy Morton, Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Richard Grove, Pamela Gilbert, and David Harvey.  

 

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600-LEVEL COURSES - (See 400-level course descriptions for further detail).

 

600A.001

Topics In Writing

2:30-3:45 MW

 

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600A.002

Topics in Writing

2:30-3:45 TR

Webb

 

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601B.001

Advanced Non-Fiction

4:00-5:15 MW

 

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601B.002

Advanced Non-Fiction

9:30-10:45 TR

Butler

 

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603A.001

Advanced Creative Writing Fiction I

4:00-5:15 MW

Coake

 

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603B.001

Advanced Creative Writing Fiction II

4:00-5:15 MW

Coake

 

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604A.001

Advanced Creative Writing Poetry I

5:30-8:15 T

Pahmeier

 

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604B.001

Advanced Creative Writing Poetry II

5:30-8:15 T

Pahmeier

 

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611B.001

Principles of Modern Grammar

2:30-3:45 TR

Donohue

 

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612A.001

Linguistics

5:30-8:15 M

Fridland

 

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612A.002

Linguistics

11:00-12:15 TR

Hardy

 

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612D.001

Introduction to Phonology

4:00-5:15 TR

Donohue

 

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613A.001

Sociolinguistics

1:00-2:15 MW

Fridland

 

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615D.001

Introduction to Old Norse

11:00-12:15 TR

Cronan

 

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625A.001

Study of Literary Themes

5:30-6:45 MW

 

 

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625B.001

Topics in Literature

4:00-5:15 MW

Pahmeier

 

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625B.002

Topics in Literature

5:30-8:15 M

Francis

 

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627A.001

Women and Literature

4:00-5:15 MW

Harvey

 

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628A.001

Children’s Literature

1:00-2:15 MW

Francis

 

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632A.001

Chaucer

9:30-10:45 TR

Cronan

 

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633A.001

Shakespeare: Tragedies and Histories

2:30-3:45 MW

Rasmussen

 

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666B.001

Modern Drama

11:00-12:15 TR

Grecu

 

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671C.001

Twentieth Century British Fiction

11:00-12:15 TR

Rudolf

 

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672A.001

The American Novel I

1:00-2:15 TR

Dupree

 

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675B.001

Literary Nonfiction

5:30-6:45 MW

Webb

 

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680A.001

Studies in Comparative Literature

2:30-3:45 TR

Attewell

 

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690A.001

Gender And Sexual Identity in Literature

1:00-2:15 TR

Butler

 

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694A.001

Native American Literature

9:30-10:45 TR

Slovic

 

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