COURSE DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE SPRING 2008 MA PROGRAM

ENGL 581 Graduate Seminar: Dirty Money in Medieval Literature

Instructor: Dr. Brantley Bryant

Wednesday, 5-8:40pm in Nichols 166

Advanced undergraduates admitted with instructor’s permission

Medieval theologians connected wealth with the demonic, with excrement, with perversity. At the same time, nobles used worldly goods and sumptuous display to assert their power. This course will examine medieval texts’ revulsion and fascination with wealth, beginning with an examination of Dante’s Inferno and continuing through canonical and lesser-known late-medieval works, including Mandeville’s Travels, Malory’s Morte Darthur, anonymous romances, social protest poetry, and manuscript illuminations. This course will conceive of the medieval not as an archive for antiquarian escape or nostalgic return, but as an occasion for surprising and enlightening connections with the present.

ENGL 582 Graduate Seminar: American Romanticism(s) and its Material Discontents

Instructor: Dr. Kim Hester-Williams

Monday, 1-4:40pm in Cars 10

Nineteenth-century Americans witnessed a marked rise in the production of goods and the parallel increase in consumerism and the fetishism of commodities, i.e. things. Indeed, it seemed every “thing”, including the continued trafficking and commodification of human beings, could be bought and sold. In response to this intense economic and cultural shift, American literature increasingly reflected a concern with modes of production and sought also to turn Americans away from a focus on exterior life to interiority through nature and a search for the sublime in lived (not merely heavenly) experience. Yet, the omnipresence of slavery and the “darker other” that was seen as both victim and the source of great anxiety, was often centrally figured in the American Romantic narrative. In this seminar, we will engage overarching questions concerning this aspect of American Romanticism such as:

• Who truly has access to the kind of "romantic” individualism that is rhetorically constructed in American literature and how do writers of the period portray these possibilities/limitations?
• How do marginal subjects such as people of color and women revise the narrow definitions of selfhood and independence engendered in the American romantic era?

ENGL 588 Graduate Seminar: Literatures and Languages of the Body

Instructor: Dr. Mira Katz

Thursday, 5-8:40pm in Salz 1051

This course will investigate multiple genres, media, cultures, modalities and perspectives through sign language poetry, oral storytelling, dance, gesture, metaphor, narratives of personal experience, fiction, non-fiction, the visual and body arts, audio recordings, and LOTS of engaging discussion!