Graduate Course Offerings – Fall 2013 *updated 3/27/13, 5/1/2013
Fall 2013 registration for continuing graduate students begins begins April 5, 2013. New student registration begins on May 8, 2013.
This information is subject to change. For the most up-to-date and comprehensive course schedule, including course additions, cancellations, and room assignments, visit the Registrar’s Schedules website.
Other helpful links:
ENGL 5103: Proseminar
Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
- CRN: 12876
- 3 semester hours
- Monday, 6:15-8:30 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: MA Core or Theories & Methods
For all first-year students in the Master’s and doctoral programs. This class introduces students to the historical arc and current scholarly practices of the discipline of English studies and to the nuts and bolts of graduate school and the academic profession of English. Texts may include writings by Gerald Graff, Gregory Semenza, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sharon Marcus, Alan Liu, Saidiya Hartman, Christopher Newfield, and John Guillory. Visits by members of the graduate faculty will introduce departmental strengths and foci, including theoretical and methodological approaches to literature, visual studies, digital humanities, rhetoric, and composition. The class will also offer opportunities for practice in fundamental scholarly tasks such as research methods, using research databases and archives, and drafting and revising short scholarly forms (conference proposals, oral presentations, book reviews, etc.).
ENGL 7211: Topics in American Literature: Color, Race, and Literary Tricksterism
Professor Bonnie TuSmith
- CRN: 16200
- 3 semester hours
- Wednesday, 6:15-8:30 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: 19th Century/20th Century
Trickster is the mythical figure that represents liminality, ambiguity, and change. Lewis Hyde defines the trickster principle as “the disruptive imagination” used to dismantle conventional notions and hierarchies, including those of color and race. Drawing upon contemporary trickster theory (e.g., “Signifyin(g),” “trickster discourse,” “trickster aesthetic”), the course studies selected prose narratives from mid-19th century to the present by authors such as Melville, Stowe, Morrison, and Diaz. Requirements include critical analyses posted on Blackboard, a class presentation, and a final analytical paper.
ENGL 7286: Topics in Victorian Literature: Gender and Victorian Literature
Professor Laura Green
- CRN: 16201
- 3 semester hours
- Thursday, 3:30-5:45 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: 19th Century/20th Century and WGSS
Gender is a foundational category of Victorian literature and culture—one that has been of interest to twentieth- and twenty-first century literary scholars since at least the 1970s, when second wave feminism drew attention to the representation of women within Victorian literature and the recovery of women authors of Victorian literature. The four decades since that moment have seen the development of gender studies and queer theory and brought into view a more expansive set of questions about how questions of gender and sexuality motivate, enable, and organize literary representation. We will read poetry by Tennyson and Barrett Browning and fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Olive Schreiner.
*CANCELLED 5/1/2013* ENGL 7351: Topics in Literary Studies: Opening the Archive
Professor Marina Leslie
- CRN: *CANCELLED*
- 3 semester hours
- Tuesday, 3:30-5:45 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: Theories & Methods or Medieval/Renaissance or 17th Century/18th Century
This seminar is designed to introduce graduate students to the rich archival holdings in the greater Boston area and to offer training in the materials, methods and theory of primary source research. We will visit the world-class collections of the Boston Public Library rare book room, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and other important local archives, where we will survey a rich array of materials, including books, manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, broadsides, journals, playbooks, scrapbooks, maps, illustrations, photographs, etc. dating from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. We will explore the theory and practice of archival research through a series of short guided assignments, culminating in an independent research project designed around your own research interests and period. The Tempest, its source documents, and its reimaginings across time, will serve as a shared template and point of departure for approaching “primary” documents. Theoretical readings will include Derrida, “Archive Fever”; Carolyn Steedman, Dust; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire; Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Digital Humanities Archive Fever,” among others which will help us interrogate the archive as a vexed and contested site of: cultural heritage, political regulation, radical exclusion, bureaucratic effluvium, provisional necromancy, preserved memory, and disciplinary incoherence. This perhaps overlong yet necessarily incomplete catalog will help us enter the Borgesian world of the archive. I can’t promise a clear map out again!
*UPDATED 5/1/2013* ENGL 7359: Topics in Comparative Literature: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Jewish Literature
Professor Lori Lefkovitz
- CRN: 16203
- 3 semester hours
- Monday, 3:30-5:45 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: Theories & Methods or 19th Century/20th Century
Using the example of Jewish literature from the late Modern (1880-1948) and contemporary (1948-present) periods, we will consider the significance of ethnicity in literary expression and analysis. Asking what features begin to define an international Jewish literary canon, we will bring theories of identity and canon formation to a representative selection of Yiddish poetry and plays, the work of Russian Jewish fabulists, Kafka, Roth, Malamud, Olsen, and Paley, Wiesel’s literary reflections on the Holocaust, Ginsberg’s poetry of the 60s, and contemporary writers such as Nathan Englander, Aryeh Stollman, Dara Horn, and Nicole Krauss. Alert to social and historical contexts, we will look at the intersection of Jewish and host civilizations and identify themes, concerns, anxieties, aspirations, technical strategies, and stylistic features of a distinctively Jewish—though multilingual and multicultural—literary tradition. Seminar presentations and two papers.
ENGL 7392: Writing and the Teaching of Writing for New Teaching Assistants
Professor Neal Lerner
- CRN: 12780 (For New TAs, only)
- 3 semester hours
- Wednesday, 3:30-5:45 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: Rhetoric & Composition
Writing and the Teaching of Writing is intended to provide new Northeastern English Dept. PhD students with disciplinary and professional preparation to teach composition and writing-intensive courses. Students will acquire a strong grounding in the theory and practice of composition-rhetoric at the university level. The course includes reading and writing on four key intellectual areas in the study and teaching of college writing (multilingual writers, multi-media composing, community engagement, writing across the curriculum), as well as extensive practical coverage of issues germane to our work in the College Writing classroom. Students will develop syllabi and assignments for College Writing, explore a range of teaching strategies, develop and articulate their teaching philosophy, and learn how to represent and document the intellectual work of teaching writing in a teaching portfolio (paper or electronic). Overall, course materials, discussion, and assignments are intended for students to deepen their understanding of composition-rhetoric theory and practice, and to develop the materials and intellectual framework they will need to teach College Writing at Northeastern.
*updated 3/27/13 ENGL 7395: Topics in Writing: Literacy in Crisis: The Politics and Practices of Writing
Professor Mya Poe
- CRN: 16523
- 3 semester hours
- Thursday, 6:15-8:30 pm
- Location: 400B Holmes Hall
- Fulfills: Rhetoric & Composition
“Middle-class anxieties about loss of status and downward mobility have repeatedly been displaced and refigured in the realm of language practices and literacy.” – John Trimbur, “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis”
This course provides a historical view of literacy in the U.S. to understand why we ask certain questions about writing. We will trace how debates about the “literacy crisis” can be found repeatedly throughout U.S. history and how these discourses about writing reflect various cultural tensions around immigration, national security, and economics. Contrasting these discourses of writing found in the public sphere to writing done in community and school contexts, we find that writing practices are actually complex and fluid, deeply shaped by literacy sponsors, and meaningful in specific ways to the people who use those practices. Readings will include literature and writing research, such as, Voices of the Self, Writing From These Roots as well as historical documents such as “Why Johnny Can’t Write” and “A Nation At Risk.”
________________________________________
Post-coursework Registration
- ENGL 8960: Exam Preparation – Doctoral, CRN: 11786
- ENGL 9986: Research, CRN: 11416
- ENGL 9990: Dissertation, CRN: 11669
- ENGL 9996: Dissertation Continuation, CRN: 11668
________________________________________
Spring 2014 Schedule (subject to change)
- ENGL 7215: Topics in 20th Century American Literature: Murder and Unbelonging (19th/20th), Professor Brown, Thurs.: 6:15-8:30 p.m.
- ENGL 7223: Major American Poet: Whitman and Dickinson (19th/20th), Professor Davis, Wed.: 3:30-5:45 p.m.
- ENGL 7274: Topics in Shakespeare (Medieval/Renaissance), Professor Boeckeler, Tues.: 3:30-5:45 p.m.
- ENGL 7370: Doing Digital Humanities (Theories & Methods), Professor Cordell, Thurs.: 3:30-5:45 p.m.
- ENGL 7395: Topics in Writing: Research Methods and Methodologies in Rhetoric and Composition (Theories & Methods, Rhet/Comp), Professor Gallagher, Tues.: 6:15-8:30 p.m.
- ENGL TBD: Cosmopolitanism and the Humanities, Professor Mullen, Mon.: 3:30-5:45 p.m.
- Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Certificate core: WMNS 6100: Theorizing Gender and Sexuality
Please visit the Past Course Offerings page for course lists from Spring 2013 and prior semesters.