Graduate Seminars Fall 2012

6100.10           Introduction to Literary Theory                                          Alcorn

                          M        3:30-6 p.m.

Introduction to literary theory will study the major schools and theoretical methods that have influenced the study the literature. We will briefly survey major contribution from Plato to the formalists, give particular attention to French structuralist and post-structuralist claims, and finally conclude with a focus on key themes in New Historicism and Cultural Studies. Course requirements will be one presentation and a final paper.

6130.10           Selected Topics in Criticism                                                 Miller

                          T   3:30-6 p.m.

Taking Kenneth G. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? As its point of departure, this seminar will consider the changing status and definitions of African American literature and literary study. We will do so through careful interrogation of selected writers and critics on the subject; ‘case studies;’ selected works of fiction that indicate these shifts; readings in recent developments in the U.S. academy; and conversations with colleagues in the field, from  GWU and area institutions.

6220.10           Topics in Medieval and Early Modern Studies                  Harris

                          W   6:10-8:40 p.m.

THEATRICALIZING THE ORIENT: GLOBALIZATION AND THE EARLY MODERN STAGE

This seminar will consider the veritable obsession of the early modern London stage with the Orient -- a capacious yet imprecise term that demarcates not just a geographical place (North Africa and Asia) but also a set of over-the-top acting techniques (the histrionic excess of the medieval cycle-drama Herod and the early modern Tamburlaine) and a temporal relation (the Orient as that which precedes and is superseded by the present). We will consider how "theatricalizing the Orient" is less a process of representing a real-world referent than it is a theatrical mode of geo-poesis -- that is to say, it is literally globe-making (as the name of Shakespeare's playhouse suggests). The early modern theatre functioned as a laboratory for globalization, plotting modes of cultural and temporal relationality informed by various logics -- outsourcing, extraction of surplus value, capitalization, supersession, transnational accumulation -- that are now part and parcel of the modern global economy.

We will read a number of early modern plays (the Coventry Shearmen and Taylor's pageant of Herod the Great, Thomas Preston's Cambyses, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, George Peele's Selimus, Shakespeare's Second Henriad, Day Wilkins and Rowley's Travels of the Three English Brothers, Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turk, Philip Massinger's The Renegado, Shakespeare's Tempest, John Fletcher's Island Princess) as well as various other early modern writings engaged with or informed by theatre (the antitheatricalist tracts of Gosson, Rankins, Prynne et al, travel narratives about Persia and India by Thomas Roe and Thomas Coryate). We will also consider theoretical texts such as Edward Said's Orientalism, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, Alain Grosrichard's In The Sultan's Court, and Hegel's Philosophy of History.

6250.10           Transnational England: Translating Disability                  Hsy

                          T   6:10-8:40 p.m.

 This course seeks to put disability theory and translation studies in conversation through medieval literature. We will focus primarily on texts by medieval men and women who self-identified as disabled (i.e., blind or deaf). Since many of these writers were polyglots (writing across more than one language), we will ask how their work might open up new ways of thinking about literacy, language acquisition, authorial identity, and community.

6510.10           Writing, Race and Nation                                                    Sten

                           R   3:30-6 p.m.

This graduate seminar will look at representations of race and nation in nineteenth-century American writing, from David Walker’s Appeal (1829) to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and explore how issues of race complicate or contradict both popular and legal conceptions of the nation in this period. We will examine conflicts over land ownership between native Americans and white aristocrats, as seen in genealogical fictions by Melville (Pierre) and Hawthorne (House of the Seven Gables), and conflicts between slaves and slaveholders over questions of ownership of human capital, citizenship, and racial passing in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter, and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, and other narratives by African Americans. Featured theoretical writings include Robert S. Levine’s Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (rev. ed. 2006), and Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). Requirements include oral reports, a review of scholarship, and an 18-20 page essay modeled after the publishable article.

6720.10           Independent Research          Harris

6720.11           Independent Research          Harris                                                                                                                                                    

6810.10           Folger Institute Seminar        Harris    SEE DEPT                                                                                       

6998.10           Thesis Research

6999.10           Thesis Research

8998.10           Advanced Reading and Research      Harris

8999.10           Dissertation Research