Department of English

Graduate Courses in Literature and Rhetoric/Composition

Spring 2025 Graduate Course Descriptions 

For the complete listing of graduate courses offered in the English Department, please see The University Catalog.

For course times and places, please see the University online schedule.

Seventeenth-Century Lyric: The Schools of Donne, Jonson, and Herbert
Eng 642-01: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literature
Chris Hodgkins,  Tuesdays, 6:30-9:20 pm

During the first decades of the seventeenth century, three poets remade the English lyric: John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert. Not only did each poet create enduringly fine work; each also, whether deliberately or not, produced a “school” of admiring emulators. In this seminar, we will examine these schools as examples of literary influence, hybridity, and descent, phenomena which always involve, to some extent, both development and misreading, homage and travesty. “The School of Donne” cultivated in varying degrees the sarcastic colloquial roughness, frank eroticism, “conceited” witty display, and violent paradox which they saw in both the “profane” and “holy” verse of their master. In contrast, “the Sons of Ben” sought to imitate their “Father’s” classicism: a poised, highly burnished, yet easy style that moved towards a poetry of statement, commenting with a learned sneer on aesthetic vice. “The School of Herbert” sought to redeem the full range of poetic devices for Christian devotion, sometimes reproducing Herbert’s verbal mannerisms with eerie accuracy, while often diverging from Herbert’s biblicism. In our discussions, we will trace these sometimes tangled lines of descent, reading poems closely while referring often to religious, political, and social contexts. In addition to Donne, Jonson, and Herbert, primary readings will include Anne Vaughan Lock, Mary Sidney Herbert, Robert Southwell, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell—with minor samplings of William Shakespeare and John Milton, lest they crowd out everyone else. Seminar members will present two brief written responses and one 15-minute oral report (with handout) during the semester, and one plan for and developed version of a critical-interpretive researched seminar paper of 15-20 pages for group workshop discussion during the last weeks of the course.

Community and Labor in British America and the United States before the Civil War
ENG 664-01: Topics in Post-1800 Literature
Karen Weyler, Thursdays, 3:30-6:20pm

This course explores how community and labor are imagined in British America and the early United States.  John Winthrop, for example, in “A Model of Christian Charity,” imagines a rigidly hierarchical British community bound together by a shared mission, in which some settlers act as the head and heart, while others are the feet and hands; by contrast, John Smith in his “Description of New England” imagines radically unsettling the social hierarchy of Britain, with individuals working as hard as they can to gain land and wealth.  Neither recognizes the moral challenges that unfree labor, both indentured and enslaved, and an indigenous population will pose to their utopian visions.  In addition to Winthrop and Smith, we will also read works by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Frederick Douglass, Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and others.  Students will be responsible for weekly response papers, leading class discussion, and a seminar paper.

Studies in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
ENG 704-01
Christian Moraru, Mondays 6:30-9:20pm

This is a graduate seminar that provides an advanced introduction to one of the most significant twenty-first-century developments in literary and cultural theory, namely, the rise of speculative materialism, in particular Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The context of this largely post-postmodern turn to “objectualism,” or to the “objective” reality and agency of surrounding objects, human and more-then-human, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the growing pressure various world-systems apply on us—critics, philosophers, artists, and people in general—to rethink the sentient as well as insentient nonhuman kingdoms in “non-correlative” terms. We are being asked, in other words, to picture objects as existing and mattering in and for themselves, not for “us,” serving as our tools, resources, commodities, and signifiers, bearing out our mental schemes and categories, and so forth. Whatever they are, objects are imagined by speculative and “new” materialists as being on the same level—in a “democracy of objects” (Levi R. Bryant) or in a “flat ontology” (Manuel DeLanda). More and more theorists of our time are remaking their arguments from this kind of ontology, which seems to indicate a turn away from phenomenology, phenomenology-based theoretical models such as poststructuralism, and postmodernism’s default explanation of things as cultural constructions, language games, “discourse formations,” and the like. This momentous shift that has sent shock waves across the arts, aesthetics, and a range of critical approaches. To get a sense of the changes underway, we will read theory by Jane Bennett, Sarah Ahmed, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, and other new materialists, queer phenomenologists, ecocritics, and speculative realists. This course has a strong professional development component, with emphasis on advanced research, graduate writing, and publication. Individual presentations; midterm (5-6-p.) and final (20+-p.) papers.

Rhetorics of Health & Medicine
ENG 742: Studies in Rhetorical Theory and Practice
Heather Adams, Wednesdays, 3:30-6:20pm
WGSS marker

Students are invited to enroll in ENG 742:RHM, which uses rhetorical theory and methodologies to explore health, medicine, and wellness. Framing “health” as an embodied, social, and discursive phenomenon, our study will explore individual, medical, and public health considerations. The course also centers questions of gender and power. No prior knowledge of rhetoric required! Students, please expect to engage in reading, writing, and discussion. Final projects invite you to explore your individual research interest. Our work will include, but is not limited to, interrogating framing terms such as “Risk,” “Wellness”, & “Care” considering shame and stigma as rhetorical phenomena accounting for historical/rhetorical change in health-related practice WGSS marker NB: visits from practitioners may be part of the course, allowing us to further ground our collective investigation.