Graduate Courses
Department of English
Spring 2010
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 seminars. New graduate students and graduate special students interested in applying to our graduate program courses may also count toward an English graduate degree. For more information or advice, please contact the individual faculty member or the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Don Hardy.
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Seminars
705.001
Seminar in Creative Writing
2:30-5:50 M
Palwick
Memoir Workshop
This will be a class in the autobiographical essay,
although I am happy to include students working on booklength projects. Each
student will write, workshop
and revise six essays or chapters, incorporating techniques adapted from
published models. If you have questions about the class, please e-mail
palwick@unr.edu.
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713.001
Problems in Language
2:30-5:50 M
Hardy
Problems in Language: Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis is the study of how the structure of both oral and written
texts is influenced by contextual considerations such as genre (e.g., narrative,
exposition, conversation, political oratory, religious oratory); intertextuality
(e.g., prior texts, repetition, cohesion); medium (e.g., orality, literacy,
secondary orality); interpersonal relationships (e.g., politeness, power,
solidarity); goals (e.g., speech acts, conversational strategy, aesthetics);
and identity (e.g., gender, dialect, self).
There are multiple intersections among all of these topics. Oral and
literary narrative, for example, has a recognizable structure; however, that
structure is motivated
by several intersecting discourse features, including solidarity, politeness,
aesthetics, and personal identity. Furthermore, in spite of the overlapping
structure of oral
and literary narratives, there are differences between them that are motivated
by medium, intertextuality, and goals. Participants in the seminar will have
opportunities
to examine both oral and written texts, in several different forms: recordings,
print, computer texts. Discourse analysis has applications in many fields:
literary criticism
and theory, child-language acquisition, language and computers, education,
journalism, psychology, business communication, anthropology. Participants in
the seminar
will have the opportunity to design their research projects around personal
and/or professional interest in any of these fields and more. Discourse
analysis has particular
relevance within English departments in literary analysis and rhetorical
analysis of classroom discourse, both written and spoken. Students
in linguistics, TESOL,
education, rhetoric, writing, journalism, and literary criticism would find this
course relevant to their own studies.
Probable texts:
The
Discourse Reader, 2nd edition
Investigating Media Discourse
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718.001
Beowulf
1:00-2:15 TR
Cronan
For details on this course, you may contact the instructor at djcronan@unr.nevada.edu
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724.001
Topics in Literature
6:30-9:50 R
Somerville
The Postcolonial Ecocritical Dialogue
In his
seminal essay ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,’ Rob Nixon outlines four
major differences between the discourses of postcolonialists and ecocritics: a
respective interest in hybridity and cross-culturalization over discourses of
purity, a focus on displacement over literature of place, the favoring of
cosmopolitanism and transnationalism over national frameworks and the excavation
and reimagining of a marginalized past over the erasure of the history of
colonized peoples through the myth of empty lands. While Nixon admits the
relationship between postcolonialism and ecocriticism “continues to be one of
reciprocal indifference or mistrust,” he does not think the obstacles to a
dialogue between the two are overwhelming.
This seminar will work to overcome the obstacles Nixon outlines to question what
such a dialogue looks like. Broken into three units, the course will closely
study postcolonial and ecocritical theory before considering how both might work
together to foster a new approach conscious of both place and history. Texts
studied include those by V.S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ken
Saro-Wiwa, Sam Selvon and Arundhati Roy.
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733.001
Classical/Medieval Rhetoric
2:30-5:50 T
Borrowman
A history of rhetoric from the
classical through medieval periods. Two foci of special note: (1) the teaching
of writing and speaking in Late Republican Rome and
(2) the transmission of Aristotle's _Rhetoric_ through Rhodes and Alexandria
into the Middle East--then back to medieval Europe through Byzantium and the
expansion of Islam. Significant reading required. Established knowledge of
history optional. Useful, but optional.
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735.001
Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition
2:30-5:50 W
Detweiler
The tradition of rhetoric's practical inquiry has always involved analysis of specific cases and texts. Recently, specialists in rhetorical and/or in literary studies have explored how various critical theories might also warrant specifically rhetorical modes of text interpretation. In this course, participants will examine a range of these theories and methods of rhetorical criticism, consider how these approaches might be applied to the study of literary or non-literary texts, then conduct studies that somehow involve rhetorical text interpretation. Although we will address a range of studies and topics, the primary focus of our investigations will be the study of environmental ethics, politics. and discourse. Course projects: practical discussion, in-class presentations, short critiques, short project proposal, journal review assignment, major project (participant-designed).
TENTATIVE COURSE READINGS
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Carson, Silent Spring
Mitchell, Cloud Atlas DeLuca, Image Politics
Harris, Landmark Essays: Rhetoric of Science Herndl and Brown, Green Culture
Hogan, Solar Storms Lucaites et al, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory
Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing Price, Flight Maps
Steingraber, Living Downstream Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk
Waddell, And No Birds Sing Waddell, Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment
Warren, Ecofeminism
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743.001
Problems in Later American Literature
6:30-9:50 T
Gifford
Race, Crime, and Popular Culture in 20th-Century American Literature
Over the course of the twentieth century, the novel has
been an important site for American artists to contest and transform hegemonic
discourses concerning
racial identity, popular culture, and literary politics. In this graduate
seminar, we will study a range of twentieth-century American literary texts,
including novels
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Raymond Chandler,
Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, and Toni Morrison in order to
explore
the complex relationships between and among American identity, literary poetics,
urbanization, and emerging mass markets. This graduate seminar will also
provide
students with a foundational knowledge of contemporary theories now prevalent in
American literary and cultural studies, including the critical study of race,
cultural
Marxism, feminism, queer theory, theories of space, vernacular criticism, and
whiteness studies. Some of the influential theorists we will encounter are
Judith Butler,
Henry Louis Gates, Eve Sedgwick, Stuart Hall, Franz Fanon, Walter Benn Michaels,
Mike Davis, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy. A course committed to rigorous
interdisciplinary approaches to both canonical and non-canonical
twentieth-century American texts, this seminar is designed to be professionally
relevant to students in
literary and cultural studies as well as those in history, political science,
sociology, and cultural anthropology.
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745.001
Ecocriticism and Theory
2:30-5:50 T
Slovic
This graduate seminar will provide students with a broad
foundation in one of the avant-garde movements in contemporary literary studies.
In addition to surveying
many varieties of current ecocriticism (from environmental justice ecocriticism
to “practical”/science-oriented ecocriticism), we will sample the work of proto-ecocritics
and develop critical strategies that indicate future directions for the field.
Major focuses of the course will be new theories of place (including globalist
and neo-bioregionalist
thinking); comparatist approaches (cross-cultural, cross-ethnic); new approaches
to gender and the body; and the relationship between ecocriticism and social
activism.
English Department faculty members working in the field of ecocriticism (or
neighboring fields) will be invited to visit the seminar and talk about their
work. Students
will explore interdisciplinary dimensions of ecocriticism and will develop and
articulate their own critical methodologies, using combinations of the models we
encounter
together in class and branching off in directions of their own choice.
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761.001
Problems Problems in Early Renaissance
2:30-5:50 R
Rasmussen
Materiality of the text in Renaissance England
This seminar will
focus on textual transmission and on the book as a physical object in the early
modern period. We will ask questions such as how, why and by whom
were texts produced? In what forms were they circulated? Who read them, when and
how? Using only primary materials – that is, books and manuscripts from the
period – we will explore the materiality of such central texts as Sidney’s
Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Holinshed’s Chronicles,
Lyly’s Euphues, A Mirror
for Magistrates, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Greene’s A Quip
for an Upstart Courtier, Jonson’s Sejanus, Braithwaite’s The
English Gentleman and
Gentlewoman, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Harington’s translation of
Orlando Furioso, and Florio’s translation of Montaigne.
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785.001
Problems in Contemporary American Literature
2:30-5:50 R
Keniston
In this seminar we will examine the poetry of American
women by considering two questions central to American literary criticism.
First, why is Emily Dickinson
considered a major American poet? And, second, how have her poems influenced
subsequent women poets? Through a close study of Dickinson’s poems, the
poems of several twentieth-century women poets, and the critics who
have commented on Dickinson and her legacy, we will get a sense both of the
trajectory
of American women’s poetry and of the shifting assumptions driving both lyric
theory and feminist theory over the past fifty years.
We will spend the first half of the semester reading
Dickinson and her critics, evaluating her representation (among other things) of
gender and sexuality, the public
sphere, sentiment, faith, the body, and the reader, along with the many textual
challenges her writing presents. We will turn in the second half of the
semester to
more recent women poets (likely including H.D., Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath,
Adrienne Rich, and Louise Gluck) who have claimed—in highly varying
terms—that they are the heirs to a tradition that began with Dickinson.
Throughout the semester, we will focus on the skills
required to read both poetry and secondary works insightfully and to write clear
and well-structured
graduate-level essays that integrate analysis of primary, critical, and
theoretical texts.
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788.001
Problems in Modern Comparative Literature
6:30-9:50 W
Burton
Modernism/Modernity: Literature, Culture, and Theory
This seminar will examine the literature and culture of
modernity from the later nineteenth century to the Second World War, with
primary attention to the aesthetic
and sociopolitical contexts that shaped British, European, and American
modernism. Topics will include the manifesto and the avant-garde, cities and
technology,
war and fascism, empire and insularity. Students will read primary texts by
Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wilde, Mann, Woolf, Eliot, West, Stein, and other writers
(perhaps including Gide and Joyce) alongside critical work on modernism and
modernity from Lukács and Eliot to the present. Students will write a major
seminar paper, a few short papers, and give an oral presentation.
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600-LEVEL COURSES - (See
400-level course descriptions for further detail).
600A.001
Topics in Writing
5:30-8:15 T
Pahmeier
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601B.001
Advanced Non-Fiction
1:00-2:15 MW
Walsh
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601B.002
Advanced Non-Fiction
5:30-6:45 TR
Waldo
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603A/603B.001
Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction I & II
4:00-5:15 MW
Coake
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604A/604B.001
Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry I & II
11:00-12:15 TR
Keniston
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611B.001
(58441)
- NEW DAYS AND TIME
Principles of Modern Grammar
1:00-3:45 W
Fridland
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612A.001
Linguistics
4:00-6:45 M
Fridland
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612B.001
- CANCELLED
Applied Linguistics
1:00-3:45 W
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612D.001
- CANCELLED
Introduction to Phonology
1:00-3:45 R
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614A.001
History of English Language
9:30-10:45 R
Cronan
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625A.001
Study of Literary Themes
2:30-3:45 TR
Dorre'
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625B.001
Topics in Literature
1:00-2:15 MW
Grady
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625B.002
Topics in Literature
11:00-12:15 TR
Branch
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627A.001
Women and Literature
4:00-5:15 MW
Pahmeier
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627A.002
Women and Literature
4:00-5:15 TR
Dupree
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632A.001
Chaucer
11:00-12:15 TR
Cronan
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633B.001
Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances
1:00-2:15 MW
Mardock
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635A.001
Milton
9:00-9:50 MWF
Murphy
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642A.001
The 17th Century
2:30-3:45 MW
Mardock
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644A.001
The Romantic Movement
4:00-5:15 TR
Waldo
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645A.001
The Victorian Period
4:00-5:15 MW
Banville
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650A.001
Studies in 20th Century Literature
5:30-6:45 TR
Harvey
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651B.001
American Literature II
9:30-10:45 TR
Callan
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671C.001
20th Century British Literature
4:00-5:15 MW
Burton
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675B.001
Literary Nonfiction
2:30-3:45 TR
Webb
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680B.001
Topics Comparative Literature
1:00-2:15 TR
Slovic
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680B.002
Topics Comparative Literature
2:30-3:45 TR
Grecu
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680B.003
Topics in Comparative Literature
12:00-12:50 MWF
Reed
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691A.001
Major Texts of the Environmental Movement
2:30-3:45 TR
Branch
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693A.001
American Ideas
4:00-5:15 TR
Urie