Literature Courses Available for Graduate Credit
Fall 2012

ENGL 503 American Literature I 
Monday and Wednesday 12:30-1:45
Professor Engber

Writing Nature, Writing Community

Course Description:

“William Bartram’s botanical conquest of Florida is as notable an event of the American Revolutionary era as Patriot resistance to Britain.”
                                                     --  Lawrence Buell The Environmental Imagination

The course is motivated by Lawrence Buell’s contention that the New World is both a natural and political event and that much of American literature expresses an “environmental imagination.”.. We begin with the first best seller in America, a novel of seduction and travel published in 1794 by Susanna Rowson.  We will analyze the humorous and controversial narrative of Caroline Kirkland's domestic life on the Michigan frontier in the 1830s and Margaret Fuller's seemingly more Romantic 1843 narrative of her tour of the Great Lakes.  These popular women writers frame our reading of Henry David Thoreau's famous travel deep into the heart of Walden Pond, Herman Melville's South Pacific adventures, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  We will consider how these writers, among other early American authors, describe and define a new world—a new nature and a new community.

Reading List:
Susanna Rowson Charlotte Temple (US 1794)
Caroline Kirkland A New Home, Who'll Follow? (1839)
Margaret Fuller Summer on the Lakes in 1843
Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
Herman Melville Typee (1846)
Nathaniel Hawthorne Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
Louisa May Alcott Moods (1864)
Walt Whitman selections from Leaves of Grass (1892 edition)
Selections from: John, James Audubon, William Cullen Bryant, William Apess, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe)

Can be used to meet MA early American requirement or MA special topic requirement

ENGL 513 Studies in Poetry
Wednesday 7:05-9:45
Professor Taylor

PRACTICALLY SURREAL: SUR/REALISM AND IMAGINATION IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

By the end of the 20th century, “surreal”—a word that didn’t exist in 1900—had become a ubiquitous catch-all phrase for anything even slightly imaginative, weird, or unusual. Yet, this amorphous definition retains only the thinnest thread of connection to what the word originally meant to the surrealist poets and artists who first championed it. Similarly, the surrealist influence has become an indelible component of contemporary poetry, yet such poetry—though often described as “surreal”—differs considerably from the original ideas of the surrealist movement. In this course, we will explore the diaspora of surrealist influence in contemporary poetry and examine how it has been integrated into the practicality of American culture to form a poetics that is both empowered by surrealism and paradoxically at odds with some of surrealism’s core values (which were politically revolutionary and in revolt against practical exigencies). By “practically” surreal, we therefore mean both “reasonable/utilitarian” and “almost.” Meanwhile, we will also consider the possibility that many aspects of surrealism might simply be part of the zeitgeist of our era, and toward this end we will examine other cultural artifacts including advertising, animation, cinema, popular music, and music videos. Our main occupation, however, will be investigating the uses of imagination and the construction of the real in contemporary poetry, and we will use the practices and tenets of surrealism as a prism for this investigation. At times, poetics that might be considered decidedly “anti-surrealist” will be equally important to our purposes in establishing the boundaries of imaginative praxis.

Primary texts will likely include selections from the following: Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, James Wright, Bob Dylan, George Oppen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, James Tate, Charles Simic, Larry Levis, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, Carolyn Forche, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Anne Carson, C.D. Wright, Matthew Rohrer, Rita Dove, Russell Edson, Ben Lerner, Mary Ruefle, Dean Young, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Matthew Zapruder, Harryette Mullen, Lynn Heijinian, and Jim Harrison.

Can be used to meet MA genre requirement.

ENGL 522 Renaissance Literature
Monday and Wednesday 12:30-1:45
Professor Connor

Late Elizabethan Literature

Our course will focus on the late years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, specifically the remarkable decade of the 1590s, when the emergence of the professional theater and the ascendant literary celebrity of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and a certain ‘upstart crow’ from Stratford asserted England’s claim to a national literature that could rival those of the Ancients and Continental Europe.   We will read the works of these authors and many more as we investigate why the decade proved so accommodating to literary innovation.  In particular, we will focus how the impact of the first major wave(s) of “new media” generated by the public theaters, the printing press, and the rapidly expanding book trade became central to the literary cultures of the period.

If you have any questions about this class, feel free to email me at fconnor@iupui.edu.

ENGL 700 Introduction to Graduate Studies
Wednesday 4:30-6:50  OR  Thursday 4:30-6:50
Professor Griffith

English 700 introduces new graduate students to the process of conducting scholarly research in the humanities and the principles that currently govern its production. The course will also introduce you to key terms and concepts of literary and cultural theory as well as their practical application in criticism. Bridging the gap between your experiences as an undergraduate and what will be expected of you as a graduate student, this course will also acquaint you with the debates and believes that currently shape our profession and the issues and challenges we face in higher education in English.

ENGL 712A Detective Fiction
Monday 7:05-9:45
Professor Spilman

We will cover the detective novel from its roots in sensation fiction (Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone) to more postmodern forms, such as Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

We will read a lot of books, probably twelve, which means a significant investment of time in reading. Critical approaches will be various, from historical approaches to the ethereal Jacques Lacan’s take on “The Purloined Letter.” We will also talk about “film noir,” and I will screen at least one film in that genre. The course will interrogate the popular prejudice for and against such novels, which often leads to them being listed under the category “popular fiction.” Anyone willing to devote real energy to guilty pleasures (recognizing that one person’s guilty pleasure is another person’s bad novel) is encouraged to take the class. 

Can be used to meet MA genre requirement.

ENGL 730 Seminar in Victorian Literature
Tuesday  4:30-6:50
Professor Waters

Bourgeois Marriage in the Victorian Novel

As Victorian England envisioned the middle class home as a refuge from the harsh public world of politics and business, ideals of womanly virtue came to define the perfect marriage that formed the core of domestic happiness.  Yet the novels of the day often offered depictions not of marital bliss with an “angel of the house,” but rather of mundane dissatisfaction or even worse.  We will read four major Victorian novels, particularly attending to questions about the formation of gender ideals and their effects on middle-class marriage, private virtue, and domestic happiness.  Class texts will include the Penguin Classics editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, plus readings that will be distributed as handouts and/or through library course reserves. 

Can be used to meet MA early British literature requirement or genre requirement.

ENGL 733 Seminar in Contemporary Literature
Tuesday 7:05-9:45
Professor Zoller

Modern British Novelists

A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale
Magaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
D. M. Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
Lawrence Norfolk, The Pope’sRhinoceros
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

Assignments: 2 papers (one short, 6-7 pp., one long, an expansion of the first paper, 15-17 pp.), Midterm, Final, ppt. presentation (15-20 minutes on one of the authors)

ENGL 814 Graduate Studies in British & World Literature before 1900
Monday 4:30-6:50
Professor Brooks

English 814, British Literature before 1900, will focus on drama from the Elizabethans (excluding Shakespeare) through the early nineteenth century. Readings will sample the revenge tragedy, the witchcraft play, an early tragicomedy, comedy-of-manner plays from the Restoration, corrective comedies from the early eighteenth century, a melodrama, a “sentimental drama,” two “laughing comedies,” and a closet drama. Read in context, these plays will trace the changing moral climate and rise of political and ideological factions in British culture. The varied genres of these dramas also gesture to modern drama and even contemporary film and television as different audiences and different tastes are served. Class will proceed as a seminar with a full exchange of critical ideas the desired goal.

Can be used to meet MA early British literature requirement or genre requirement.