UPCOMING COURSES
ARCHIVE OF COURSES
Graduate Seminars
6205 Study in Language/Linguistics: Language and Social Identity
101 MW 3:30-4:45 Professor Steve Keiser
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Course Number ENGL 6205
Course Title & Subtitle (if needed). Language with an attitude: Sociolinguistics in the USA
Course Description
We will examine language use and attitudes toward language in the USA past and present. In particular, we will investigate the relationship between language and such social parameters as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, and gender. Case studies will draw on language varieties in Wisconsin and Milwaukee such as Great Lakes English, African American Vernacular English, Spanish, Ojibwa, American Sign Language, and Pennsylvania German. We will develop a critical (self-)awareness of the myriad ways in which each of us uses and interprets language as a marker of personal and social identity, and we will explore the range of speakers’ motivations and agentivity in identity construction via language use. Finally, we will critically analyze the need for and cultural consequences of legislated language use
Readings. American English. Selected journal articles and other readings.
Assignments. Lead class discussions on readings. Written responses to readings. Class presentation. Research project on language attitudes and/or language data.
6220 Study in Shakespeare: Shakespeare, his Contemporaries and Greatness
101 MW 2:00-3:15 Professor John Curran
- Description:In this seminar we investigate the issue of greatness as it seems to be reflected in Shakespeare’s drama. The idea of individual human greatness has accounted for much of the attention Shakespeare’s characters have enjoyed, but more recently they have been deemed interesting to the extent he undermines or interrogates this concept. Does Shakespeare cast his characters as “great”? What is greatness? What theoretical, political, or theological implications does it carry? In considering these questions with regard to Shakespeare’s characters, we also consider his own greatness. What makes him stand apart in our minds from his fellow Renaissance dramatists? Does he capture greatness better than they? Or does he rise above them for complicating the idea in ways they cannot? We will concentrate on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, examining each play in tandem with an analogous selection from another dramatist. Selections will include plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Chapman, Massinger, and Webster.
6400 Study in 19th Century British Literature: Gothic Ideology
101 TTH 2:00-3:15 Professor Diane Hoeveler
- Course Description: This course will examine what I am calling the gothic ideology or a type of anti-Catholic propaganda that circulated in Britain since the Reformation period. Gothic literature can best be understood as part of the Western secularization process or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is cultural work that reveals the drive toward secularization on the part of the elites and middle classes throughout Europe, from roughly1780 to 1850. But in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an “other” against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. In gothic literature, a reactionary, demonized, and feudal Catholicism is created in order to stand in opposition to the modern Protestant individual who then alternately combats and flirts with this uncanny double in a series of cultural productions that we recognize as gothic novels. The lower-class gothic imaginary has remained consistently familiar, with an intense fear of a secularized devil-figure who has, since the sixteenth century, gone by the name of “Abbess” or Inquisitor or Monk. When the supernatural died its long and slow death in full public view, the lower-class imaginary sought to keep the demonic and the divine alive in all of their magnificent power. They created discourses that placed demonic nuns and mysterious monks in landscapes that were charged with the fallen grandeur of the Catholic Church: ruined abbeys, secret tribunals, and crumbling cathedrals. When the dust settled, the Protestant individual emerged, a bit worse for the wear but willing (it would seem) to face the daunting challenges and mixed opportunities that literacy, democracy, and liberalism presented. Specifically, we will read Matthew Lewis’s The Monk; Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian; William-Henry Ireland’s The Abbess; “Maria Monk”’s , Monks and Maidens: Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal; Victorine Germillan Subervic, The Mysteries of the Inquisition; and a variety of chapbook adaptations of these novels.
- An oral report, a book review, a digital project based on the chapbooks, and a research paper are the requirements for the course.
6700 Study in 20th Century American Literature: Revolutionizing 20/21st C Amer
Literary Studies
101 TTH 11:00-12:15 Professor Jodi Melamed
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Course Description:This seminar investigates new scholarship in American literary studies that self-consciously seeks to foster revolutionary thinking toward the generation of new rationalities, imaginaries, politics, socialities, and cultural practices. Such scholarship unites around dissatisfaction with the rubrics of ‘nationalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’, which previously inspired literary scholarship, revealing the hidden violences and pitfalls limiting these frameworks. We will follow five lines of inquiry emerging out of the challenge to revolutionize American literary studies: 1) interrogating professionalization and praxis within the university and beyond it; 2) intersecting queer theory and post-national American literary scholarship; 3) analyzing expressly neoliberal and racial capitalist modes of globalization and empire and their repertoires of signification;
4) using American Indian and Indigenous studies paradigms to rethink American literary studies; and 5) embedding literary, performative, aesthetic and scholarly modes of knowledge in contemporary social movements and activism. In addition, we will examine works of fiction, film, poetry, performance, and experimental writing that inspire the call to revolutionize American literary studies.
Readings might include selections from The ReOrder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Roderick Ferguson), A Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (Chandan Reddy), The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Jodi Byrd), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (Rosaura Sanchez et.al.) , “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Benh Zeitlan) and The Electronic Disturbance Theater (Ricardo Dominguez et.al.).
Requirements
Leading class discussion. Short critical reflection essays. Research paper. Class presentation. Active participation.
6840 Rhetoric Composition Theory
101 TTH 3:30-4:45 Professor Beth Godbee
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Thematic Title:
Teaching Writing: Theory, Research, and Practice
Description:
English 6840 is designed to help new teachers as well as teachers new to college-level writing instruction develop historically informed, theory-based, data-driven approaches to first-year English (FYE) and other writing-focused courses. Our twice-weekly meetings will emphasize discussion of readings, writing assignments, and teaching-related research. Everyone will have opportunities to complete scholarly projects that include (if desired) creative and/or digital components, and the class will host an end-semester pedagogy conference in collaboration with UWM graduate students and faculty.
8282 Literary Criticism (Ph.D)
101 TTH 12:30-1:50 Professor Heather Hathaway
- This course, designed for PhD students, examines selected modern literary theories and critical methods (e.g. Reception studies, Narratology, Marxism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, New Historicism, Gender and Cultural Studies) and their textual applications. We will study the history behind and central tenets of each theory, and practice applying these to texts in several short analytical essays. As a culminating project, students will select a school or method they are likely to use in their dissertations and employ it in the production of an article length textual analysis. The lucky ones may even get a dissertation chapter draft out of it!
English Department
