ELIT 5001 Honors Thesis Tutorial

For students writing a Senior Honors thesis. May be taken fall and spring semesters of the senior year. Prerequisite: E Lit 398.

Credit 1 unit.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5102 Medieval English Literature: Medieval Women's Writing

Topics course in Medieval English literature.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5110 Topics in English and American Literature

Comparing the literatures -- readings in the literature and theory of English and American Literature. Topics vary according to semester offerings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5111 Topics in American Literature: Popular Music and American Literature From Rag to Rap

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5116 Topics in African-American Literature

Hold for new hire

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5125 Topics in English and American Drama: 19th Century American Drama

Varies from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5156 Selected English Writers I: Virginia Woolf: Novelist and Feminist

Concentrated study of one or two major English writers, e.g., Spenser, Dickens, Blake, Yeats. Consult Course Listings.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5199 Milton

Major poems and prose works in relation to literary and intellectual currents of the 17th century.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5323 Reading in the Renaissance: Literature and Media in Early Modern England

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5410 Medieval English Literature I

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5422 American Literature II

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5423 Topics in American Literature

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5440 James Joyce's Ulysses

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5472 History of the English Language

Concepts and methods of linguistical study: comparative, historical, and descriptive. Application of methods to selected problems in the history of English. Contrastive analysis of excerpts from Old, Middle, and later English; sounds, meanings, syntax, and styles.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 549A Topics in Literature: Humanism

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

ELIT 5600 Literary Studies and Graduate Research

This course seeks to prepare students for successful doctoral study in literary studies. Rather than aiming to provide a comprehensive survey of the multifaceted discipline via coverage of literary periods or literary theory, this course invites us to grapple with the core questions and prominent debates surrounding its methods and objectives. Foregrounding the dis-orienting effects of the literary, the course begins by examining the history of the discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study; the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts; and, issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. Then, we will explore the methods of literary critique, thinking about what is at stake in the objects we study and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will engage with challenges to the traditional organizing principles of our field, including its geographies, periodization, and archives. In elucidating the multiple contexts and histories that condition our position within the university in the present moment, this course aspires to nuance the values and effects of pursuing an English Ph.D. for doing work both in and beyond academia.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5601 Seminar in Literature

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson first achieved national acclaim with "Housekeeping" (1980), a haunting coming-of-age novel about two sisters set in the beauty and grandeur of the west. That novel eventually established Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop where she taught for many years. What many noticed in her first book was a new sort of voice, a lyric prose, which returned over two decades later in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Gilead" (2004). Since then, she has written two more novels ("Home" and "Lila") set in the same town, but with radically different voices and perspectives. Between these novels and her collected essays, Robinson's work engages issues of race, gender, history, regionalism, and religion. Her later work has focused in particular on the role of the humanities and higher education. She has been a lecturer in high demand (appearing at Wash U in November 2018), and she has been interviewed many times-most noticeably by Barack Obama for "The New York Review of Books." In this class, we will read all her published books, asking questions of development, style, and voice. Meanwhile, as we see what critical engagements have been made with her writings, we will situate her within broader academic discourses (like feminist studies, critical race theory, or religion and literature), and ask how various approaches can open new insights into her writings. In this class students will write both a personal essay (responding to an essay of Robinson's) and a critical seminar paper engaging any topic raised by her work.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5602 Seminar in American Culture

Organized around the theme of "the trouble with normal," in this course we will reflect on the lives, works, and reputations of poets who engaged their own gendered anxieties and ambitions through their psychologically complex encounters with Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Beginning with Dickinson's first poem, a satiric valentine that mocks the imperative to marry, we will explore some of the ways in which the self-described "Queen of Calvary" and her critics influenced modernist poets such as Marianne Moore (1887-1972), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). There will be some attention to the electronic archives that enable twenty-first century literary editing; "troubling" theorists will include Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Susan Howe, Toni Morrison, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Peter Coviello, and Sianne Ngai.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5603 Seminar: The Middle Ages

Some of the greatest poems ever written in English   -- "Beowulf," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Piers Plowman" --  were composed in alliterative meter, which was the staple poetic form of Old English, was revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but ceased to be composed during the sixteenth century. This course will read alliterative poems: the three works listed in the title, and several others from Old and Middle English (including works of political and religious opposition). Students may use specific translations (Heaney's "Beowulf," Tolkien's and Armitage's "Gawain," Donaldson's "Piers") but are encouraged to become familiar with the original language, style and sound of these poems. We shall study alliterative poetry historically as well as critically: who wrote it, and who read it? Why was it revived in later medieval England, and from what sources? Given the quality of the later works, why did the form apparently die out? Did it really do so, or was its future history in poetry and prose masked by linguistic and cultural change, and by later scholarly misunderstanding? We shall think about historical memory and archive, reading communities and literary culture/s. So the course models questions about understanding (and imagining) the literary production of a distant past, offers the intense and often unexpected pleasures of reading it, and asks how in fact it might be more closely related to the present.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5604 Seminar: The Middle Ages

This course will investigate historical understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality in Western European culture from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. We will focus on questions of sexual difference, nature and nurture, the existence (or non-existence) of cultural "norms," the emergence of identity tied to erotic desire, sexual power dynamics and consent, and depictions of transgender and non-binary people. Our primary readings will emphasize literary works, but these will be continuous with texts emerging from medical, legal, and religious discourses.  How contingent or intractable are understandings of gender and sexuality in medieval culture, and how do they shift within contexts of class, race, and religion? We will read lives of saints, a romance about a transgender youth (Heldris of Cornwall's Silence), mystical visions of erotic union with Christ, and works by Hildegard of Bingen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and more.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5605 Seminar: The Renaissance:

As social, legal, and political systems scramble to come to terms with the degree to which our world is mediated by artificial intelligence and algorithmic logic, it is increasingly apparent that AI troubles and undermines certain fundamental post-enlightenment categories: subject and object, self and other, individual and collective. This course will trace the history of cultural representations of artificial intelligence in the West to ask how they might help us interrogate such structuring binaries. How might we understand the uncanny, inhuman, relentless instrumentality of artificial intelligence as the absurd limits of late capitalist logic? On the other hand, how might its destabilization of comfortable categories afford opportunities for truly radical reexamination and critique? Covering a wide range of texts from the early modern period to the present day - novels such as Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," Shelley's "Frankenstein," Butler's "Erewhon," films including "Metropolis," "Blade Runner," "Matrix," and philosophical works from Descartes and Leibniz, to Lyotard and DeLanda - this course will trace the ways in which AI, either conceived as machinic automata or as systemic or collective intelligence, has informed our thinking about what it means to be human. The class will prepare students to engage with various emergent strands of contemporary criticism including posthumanism and ecocriticism and to forge an independent research agenda.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5606 Seminar: Renaissance Race Theory and Early Modern Culture

This course will explore how literary and popular texts of the early modern period represent and produce racial identities.  We will consider the characteristic shapes of racial fictions in early modern England -- occasionally comparing literary examples with period scientific, visual, and material texts.  In addition, we will reflect on the methodology of reading race in cultures other than our own, with frequent recourse to critical race theory, using both work focused on the early modern period and work that engages race more generally (e.g., Kim Hall, Stephen Jay Gould, Anthony Appiah).  Readings will include poetry by Shakespeare, Sidney, and William Herbert; fiction by Aphra Behn; plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton; we will also compare early modern representations of race to a few later representations, likely including Wilkie Collins' "Poor Miss Finch" and "The Jazz Singer."

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5607 Seminar: The Renaissance

The Restoration of Stuart kingship in 1660 opened an era of remarkable cultural production and public scandal. Women took to the stage as the theater was restored; intrigues, political and amorous, became the very subject of both high culture and low gossip; the memory of civil war haunted the age, and riot and revolution repeatedly threatened the precarious life of the state. Public affairs-both civic and sexual-transfixed this age, and indeed shaped its most important cultural forms and modes: ballads and newspapers, satires and lampoons, heroic dramas and witty comedies, diaries and letters, translations, satires and epic poems. Amid the dangers and miscellany of public life, writers fashioned new modes of literature and negotiated new strategies of livelihood. We will look closely at a number of aspects of this culture, the commerce of personal and textual transactions, its great and scandalous careers, its important genres, its scintillating verse, prose, and plays. Our reading will range widely, compassing the most distinguished authors of the age-Aphra Behn, William Congreve, John Dryden, John Evelyn, Anne Killigrew, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Samuel Pepys, Katherine Philips, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester-as well as news-sheets, pamphlets, and other print ephemera.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 5608 Seminar: The 17th Century

Graduate Seminar on the Restoration: intensive readings of Restoration poetry, drama, and critical prose (Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Mulgrave, Sedley, Congreve) together with secondary literature and work on primary resources available through electronic sites.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5609 Seminar: The 17th Century

This seminar takes as its subject the writings of Andrew Marvell and the
literary culture from which and in relation to which those writings emerged. We shall ask, for example, what Marvell's 'Coy Mistress' has to do with the carpe diem poetry of his cavalier contemporaries and in what ways Marvell's mowers and virgins keep company with the shepherds and
maidens of contemporary pastoral and romance. And when Marvell turned his
attention to emergent heroes in the 1650s, we shall want to know how this poetry of public affairs, The Horatian Ode and The First Anniversary, fits together with contemporary verse on similar occasions: with Royalist traditions of praise and panegyric and with contemporary celebrations of an emergent Republican state. This seminar will be an occasion to read poetry and prose of the mid seventeenth century England, and especially of its greatest lyric poet, and to consider the sociality of that writing and
the meaning of literary intertextuality.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5610 Seminar: The 18th Century

We live in period of weakening boundaries and increasing mobilities. The objects that today we are willing to host in our bodies; the electronic mediation of intimacy, sociability, and political action, the restless circulation of commodities and capital around the globe, the splicing of corporations across multiple nations, and the increasing contact between people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds all contribute to this. This class sees our growing boundlessness as an opportunity to reexamine the scientific, theological, and literary representation of species in the period between 1660 and 1832. The concept of species is central to the construction of boundaries between different things, and its close relationship to notions of variety, identity, kind, essence, rank, and genre make it an especially rewarding focus of investigation. The class will introduce students to the construction of research agendas around a single concept and show how such a focus can open up and sustain interdisciplinary inquiry. Readings will range widely and likely include works by Aristotle, Boyle, Locke, Defoe, Fielding, Swift, Darwin, Deleuze/ Guattari, Agamben, and others

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5611 Seminar: The 18th Century

This course examines a period (1680-1750) when a remarkable range of world models were elaborated and debated-in religion, politics, and philosophy. Spurred in part by the rise of skepticism, atheism, and the tribalization of culture, these debates helped shape literary invention in the period and infused it with a utopian sense of possibility. We will study some of the world-makers in philosophy and theology and examine their influence on some canonical (Swift, Pope, Defoe) and less canonical writers (Cavendish, Lennox, Blackmore). Along the way, we will try out some tools to assist our thinking about these materials, from critiques of modernization narratives to the ontological turn and the hermeneutics of hope (Rita Felski, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ernst Bloch, Eduardo Kohn).

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 5612 Seminar: The 19th Century

This class begins with two seminal Modernist portraits of the artist, one a writer, the other a painter (Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"), and then returns to a more detailed reading of a fifty-year period from the 1840s to 1890s to ask how artists of all kinds became prominent characters in literary works. Primary texts to include poetry by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, as well as fictions by Wilkie Collins, Henry James, George Gissing, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and the only recently canonized Amy Levy. We will foreground the historical forces, events, and technological developments that allowed the artist to become, by various accounts, both a sacred figure with a substantial social agency as well as a new name for the outcast, alien, or social deviant. While engaging with the aesthetic as a category with an ancient lineage, we will also emphasize a more local context defined by global commercial modernity and unsettled gender norms.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5613 Spenser Lab

This seminar is designed both for the prospective scholar of Romanticism (the student who will make it central to intensive study in the major fields of 18th or 19th century literature) and for the reluctant or even resistant reader of Romantic poetry. Reading the major texts of the field, primary and secondary, we will investigate a term that has always vexed even its enthusiasts-Romanticism- as it is defined, with particular focus on the so-called Big Six poets, in the second decade of the 21st century Indeed, this workshop will enable graduate students in other fields (whether their principle genre is poetry or fiction) to situate Romanticism within today's curriculum, which means within other fields dominated by those isms (modernism and post-modernism, strucuturalism and post-structuralism) provoked by a sometimes (for the Romanticist) maddening certainty as to what Romanticism means, or meant, or indeed could mean. Students of early modernism are most welcome, as we consider the burden of the past inherited by the sometimes begrudging heirs of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. You need not have encountered in previous graduate or undergraduate courses the major Romantic poets-William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats-in order to benefit from a workshop that will provide intensive instruction in the art and scholarship of reading the Romantic lyric, the Romantic narrative poem, and the hybrid forms of Blake's composite art or Byron's rollicking Don Juan as these forms emerged in Britain between 1770 and 1830. We will read together the definitive scholarship of the past century during the crescendo of the Romantic lyric poem as the definitive example of British literary achievement against which other periods and forms were measured, from Irving Babbitt's vitriolic attack to the field's anxious self-questioning, provoked by deconstruction, New Historicism, and cultural studies. Situating the still-canonical Romantic poet within a literary culture that openly embraced the oral forms of outsiders and the special contributions of women writers (who cultivated both sense and sensibility), a culture that was alert to the political debates undermining old certainties about sovereignty and the scientific developments of what Richard Holmes recently called in a celebrated work the Age of Wonder, we will enlarge (as has the dominant scholarship in the field of British Romanticism) the sources and audiences that shaped the canonical Romantic poet. Our guiding question throughout the semester will be how to study, and teach, with fresh insights poets whose stature may already be shrinking, eclipsed by the very debates they themselves first provoked. Can there be an exceptional work of art in a democritizing era whose states of exception-revolutions in tastes, ethics, and political states-bind to, even as they put distance between, the contexts of the British Romantic Age and those of today's reader? Final projects will be encouraged that explore this question, either through intensive study of a single Romantic poet or within Romanticism or by locating the British Romantic poem within other fields of study.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5614 Seminar: American Literature

This course examines two extraordinary, contemporaneous early American women poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). Through their lives and work, we explore contrasting cultures of colonialism in early America. Both were religious, both were brilliant, and both wrote into and out of imperial experiences in very different settings (New England and New Spain). Anne Bradstreet published the first American book of poetry in English (1650), and she has been a mainstay of American literature ever since. The class will focus on studies of gender and religion in her writings, understanding her work more fully with studies of puritanism and English settler colonialism. For broader context and understanding of colonial writings, the course moves from Anne Bradstreet to the life and writings of the Mexican poet, intellectual, and cloistered nun, Sor Juana. We will study her poetry, her dramatic works, as well as her autobiographical and other writings. Special emphasis will be given to the colonial society in which she lived and the impact it had on her intellectual production. We will examine seventeenth-century Mexican convent culture and its role within the Church hierarchy as well as how her gender inflected her writing, using this as a backdrop from which to study Sor Juana's polemical relationship with the ecclesiastical authorities. Together, the course will introduce broader understandings of colonialism through the comparison of these two poets, their works, and the very different early American contexts that gave shape to their lives and writings.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 5615 Seminar: American Literature

Duke Ellington playing the Cotton Club. Raccoon coats, Stutz Bearcats, and militant Garveyites parading down Lenox Avenue. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston exchanging quips at the Dark Tower salon. These are the some of the best-remembered scenes of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American artists--literary, musical, and visual--who personified the "New Negro" and transformed uptown Manhattan into an international headquarters of Black intellectual life from the late nineteen-teens to the early nineteen-thirties. This graduate seminar will reexamine Harlem's self-modernizing rebirth on the centennial of Jean Toomer's "Cane" (1923), the movement's most treasured text, exploring the intricate histories behind the iconic images. We'll study poems, stories, novels, essays, and memoirs by a varied group of writers (Hughes, Hurston, Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesse Fauset, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown) and their collective debt to pioneering jazz and blues musicians (Ellington, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller) and scene-setting visual artists (Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Bennett). We'll compare these figures' visions of the Great Migration and the Black Metropolis, racial pride and racial passing, Jazz Age sexuality and respectable secrecy, avant-garde experiments and modernist primitivisms. Finally, we'll sample some of the most important recent chapters in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, from studies of the movement's American cultural nationalism (David Levering Lewis and George Hutchinson), to theories of its channels to Black diasporan travel and translation (Brent Hayes Edwards and Michelle Stephens), to intimate archival histories of the everyday Afro-modernisms of "riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals" (Saidiya Hartman and Daphne Brooks). As a whole, the class aims to provide graduate students with an advanced introduction to African American aesthetic modernism as it was lived, represented, and conceived in the matrix and "Mecca of the New Negro."

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5616 The 20th Century

Whether a video game adaptation of Walden or a digital map of London authors, digital tools increasingly shape how we study and represent literature. This course will expose students to scholarly conversations about critical making - the notion that making is a form of intellectual, scholarly praxis. Students will gain hands-on experience creating digital, scholarly objects. Students will learn about the Critical Making movement and how it engages significant theoretical movements in literary studies, including new media theory, affect theory, feminist theory, and archival studies. We will read texts by authors including Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression), Bill Endres ("A Literacy of Building"), and Sasha Costanza-Chock (Design Justice). Students will learn tools for creating scholarly objects that engage literature, such as digital maps, interactive visualizations, and videogames. We will think critically about the tools we are using and the objects we are making, situating them among a rich, interdisciplinary body of scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will have created a digital object and written an essay about how the process of creation informed their scholarly praxis. There are no prerequisites for this course; no prior experience with digital technology or the digital humanities is required.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5617 Seminar in American Literature

In her foundational 2007 book, Lose Your Mother, literary theorist Saidiya Hartman argues that "[i]f slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is . . . because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This," she continues, "is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment." As Hartman points out, even in the wake of emancipation, descendants of enslaved Africans have continued to navigate the perils of transatlantic slavery, and to shoulder its lingering effects upon the shape of black being. Motivated by these instructive observations, this course turns to a diverse archive of black artistic and cultural production to critically analyze the structural conditions that animate and enable the afterlives of slavery, whether juridical and legislative maneuvers or environmental and housing policies. At the same time, it also considers the broad range of aesthetic and political strategies that black people have mobilized to pressure and unsettle the vibrant legacies of transatlantic slavery. Moving across the long twentieth century, we will study works by artists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, Gayle Jones, Essex Hemphill, Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, and Kiese Laymon. We will pair these with recent scholarship in black studies, literary theory, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, environmental studies, and affect theory, for instance, in order to critically analyze the fabric of slavery's afterlives in the wake of U.S. emancipation.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 5618 Seminar: 20th Century

This course will investigate Anglophone Caribbean literature's relationship to U.S. empire, from 1898 to the present. Among other things, we will contemplate critical conceptions of transnational/hemispheric literature, iterations of postcolonial critique in both pre- and post-independence eras, the role of race and diaspora in Caribbean literary production, and the intertwined histories of Caribbean and U.S.-American literature. Primary texts will range across the century, touching on prominent moments of U.S.-Caribbean contact such as the Harlem Renaissance, the creation of U.S. bases on Trinidad during World War II, the rise of Black Power across the hemisphere, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and the contemporary placement of Caribbean-born authors in American academia. Primary texts are likely to include works by authors such as Eric Walrond, Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5619 Seminar: Modernism

Seminar topics vary according to semester offerings.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5620 Seminar: Modernism and Postmodernism in American Literature

Designed for future teachers preparing to offer survey courses in American Literature.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5621 Seminar in Minority Literary Traditions

Who were the Black intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries?  What were their prescriptions for freedom and self-governance?  How did they reflect on self and community, gender roles, and the African diaspora?  A variety of texts-from autobiographies and novels to manifestos and newspaper editorials-will illustrate how Black women and men before Reconstruction thought about the condition of their people, whether in the physical or in the psychic sense.  Some of the writers used their personal experiences to change the discourse by fostering empathy and sympathy; some took expressly political stands, sometimes advocating for violent self-defense.  The rhetorical styles differed, as African Americans were distinguished then as now by gender, social status, and region, but they shared a common goal:  an empowered, educated Black citizen.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5622 Readings in American Literature and Culture

For Graduate Students Only. Readings in American Literature and Culture which will vary by semester.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5623 Seminar: Contemporary Irish Poetry: Literary Tradition, Postcolonial States, and Postmodern Subjects

In readings of poets, both the particular contexts that have shaped what is now called a second Irish literary renaissance and the larger questions of how Irish poems from both sides of the border that still partitions the island may be read in relation to the ideologies of nation, gender, and the global marketplace.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5624 Literary Pedagogy

Permission required by the Department.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5625 Seminar: Literary Forms and Modes

Graduate Seminar: Topics vary

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5626 Craft of Fiction

In her introduction to Halldor Laxness's novel Under the Glacier, Susan Sontag says, Narratives that deviate from [the] artificial norm of realist fiction and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all...still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre, suggesting they occupy the outlying preceints of the novel's main tradition, and it is with some of these Martian fictions that this class will be concerned. Deviants we'll be reading: Djuna Barnes, RikkiDucornet, Kate Bernheimer, Jaimy Gordon, Kathryn Davis, and other such lady heteroclites. You'll be asked to produce aberrant fictions of your own. Cross-dressers welcome. Craft class for Graduate Students only.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5627 Literary Criticism

Over the last twenty years or so, postcritique has become a momentous challenger to established ways of doing literary scholarship. To some, postcritique is the most significant reorientation of literary criticism since the 1980s, when the New Historicists chased deconstruction out of English departments. To others, postcritique represents a lamentable surrender to the de-politicizing agenda of the neoliberal university. In this class, students will have the opportunity to reexamine the tradition of critique and gain an understanding of how postcritique emerged from it. We will study major examples of critique and postcritique and trace the intellectual histories that animate these different practices of literary scholarship. Central figures are likely to include Marx, Freud, representatives of the Frankfurt School, Fredric Jameson, Paul Ricoeur, Rita Felski, Bruno Latour, Eve Sedgwick, and Heather Love.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Spring

ELIT 5628 Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry

One of the most contested subjects of analysis has been and continues to be the human body and its lived experience.   Bodies are cultural, political, economic, medical, literary, and historical; they are gendered, and sometimes even individual and personal. As the academy works to accommodate the body in its theoretical frameworks and is inspired by the body to ask new questions, real bodies continue to live out their experiences, resulting in a dynamic, exciting field of inquiry. This seminar is designed to explore the major themes and disciplinary areas concerned with understanding the human body as a lens for analyzing culture, society, and art-visual and literary-as well as science, religion, and politics.  Our primary focus will be on theories of the body and bodily experience from antiquity to the present in Europe and North America, but we will also investigate the tensions between theory and representation of the body in other parts of the world. The body is a hotly contested subject precisely because of its intensely personal importance, and this course will navigate the disputed body as much as the theorized body.  Our major source materials will include recent scholarly monographs from history, cultural studies, literary and feminist theory, as well as several works of fiction, art, and film.

Credit 4 units.

ELIT 5629 Science Studies Literary Studies

Graduate level Seminar for Graduate Students only

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5630 Theorizing the Multitude

Figures of multitude, mixture, and hybridity have gained increasing currency among politically-oriented critics over the last fifteen years or so. This class examines some of the recent theorizations of multitude and its allied concepts, mixture and hybridity, from the perspective of their origins in seventeenth-century philosophy. Readings are likely to include selections from Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Homi Bhaba, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben. Our goal is to gain a perspective on the paradigm that currently drives some of the most original research in literary and cultural studies.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5631 Literature Seminar

Graduate seminar for graduate students only. Varied Topics.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5632 Ethics of Literature

Graduate Seminar limited to Graduate Students on the ethics of literature.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5633 Topics in Advanced Theory- Theory of the Novel

The novel has received a sizable share of critical energy. What is it? Where did it come from? How did it develop? What are its ideological tendencies? What are its characteristic preoccupations? In this course we will read a range of influential writings on the novel's origins and development, its defining form and content. These writings will be considered within their own critical contexts (feminist, Marxist, structuralist, etc.) and within the specific historical contexts out of which the novel emerged (shifts in class and gender formation, the development of modern conceptions of the self, the material production of the book). Several novels from the 18th and 19th century will form the basis of our application of theory to text, from methodological abstraction to reading experience, among them, PAMELA, WAVERLEY, and JANE EYRE.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5634 Seminar: Old English: Beowulf, Gawain, and Piers Plowman: Alliterative Poetry in Medieval Britain

Some of the greatest poems ever written in English Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman were composed in alliterative meter, which was the staple poetic form of Old English, was revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but became obsolete during the sixteenth century. This course will read alliterative poems: the three works listed in the title, and several others from Old and Middle English (and Middle Scots too); students may use specific translations (Heaney's Beowulf, Tolkien's Gawain, Donaldson's Piers) but are encouraged and expected to become familiar with the original language, style and sound of these poems. We shall study alliterative poetry historically as well as critically: who wrote it, and who read it? Why was it revived in later medieval England, and from what sources? Given the quality of the later works, why did the form die out? We shall think about historical memory and archive, reading communities and literary culture/s. So the course models questions about understanding (and imagining) the literary production of a distant past, and offers the intense and often unexpected pleasures of reading it.

Credit 3 units.

ELIT 5637 Modern Poetry I: Modernisms

American and British poetry before, during, and after World War I. Readings include Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Stein, Eliot, Williams, Moore, Johnson, Pound, H.D. and Stevens, as well as selections from Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson. First half of two-course sequence; second half optional

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

Typical periods offered: Fall

ELIT 5638 Topics in Literature: Queer Youth: LGBTQ Narratives of Coming-Of-Age and Coming Out in North America

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H UColl: ENL

ELIT 5800 Research

This is a research course.

Credit 9 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5850 Mellon Dissertation Seminar

The present seminar is organized around a sequence of overlapping
historical units: in the first instance, a broad overview of a key decade
of inquiry, the 1950s; in the second, recent autobiographies by major
practitioners of neuroscientific inquiry (all trained in the '50s) who possess vastly different understandings of the field; and, third, a casen study of ongoing theoretical and experimental claims stemming from a single institution-the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla-across several generations of practitioners. In the seminar's concluding unit, the humanistic frame becomes less historical and more problem-oriented as we focus on recent neuroscientific work in a pair of paradigmatically humanistic domains: the problem of consciousness and experience of reading.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 5900 Directed Reading

Permission required by the department.

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 5999 Independent Study

Prerequisite: junior or senior standing. (First-year students or sophomores may apply for independent study under General Studies 200. ) A detailed prospectus approved by a faculty member who has agreed to supervise the student's work must be approved by the director of undergraduate studies.

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

ELIT 7000 Master's Continuing Student Status

This course is for continuing Master's students.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 7010 Master's Non-Resident

This course is for continuing non resident Master's students.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 7020 Masters Resident

This course is for continuing resident Master's students.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 8000 Doctoral Continuing Student Status

This course is for continuing Doctoral students.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 8010 Doctoral Non-Resident

This course is for Doctoral non resident students.

Credit 0 units.

ELIT 8020 Doctoral Resident

This course is for Doctoral resident students.

Credit 0 units.

WRITING 5210 Craft of Fiction

A literature/creative writing hybrid course; students will read a number of contemporary historical fictions-an increasingly important and innovative genre-and then write one of their own.

Credit 3 units. Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H

WRITING 5310 The Craft of Poetry: The Prose Poem

This course is for writers who wish to study long-form poetic composition and book arrangement. The major assignment will be to compose a poem or poetic sequence of considerable length. Gwendolyn Brooks (The Anniad) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee) will be chief among our guides. We will study how poets arrange their books, and we will also make a brief foray into the material history of the book. Texts by Rosa Alcalá, John Ashbery, Daniel Borzutzky, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, George Oppen, Ed Roberson, Brian Teare, and Simone White will also be included. This course counts toward the creative writing concentration. Prerequisite: L13 322.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 5400 Topics: Craft of the Literary Magazine

Composition topics course -- offerings will vary from semester to semester.

Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H

WRITING 5600 Creative Nonfiction Workshop

Open only to nonfiction students in the MFA Writing Program.

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5610 Seminar

Seminar in Writing

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5611 Craft of the Novella

An endeavor to define what a novella might be (longer than a short story and shorter than a novel), how the form has evolved, and what problems and authority might be particular to it.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 5612 First Books, Inside and Out

Literary publishing is in a period of rapid change. It's hard to say where the future of the book itself-much less your own first book-lies. And first books do present a unique set of challenges. In this class, we'll read recent first books-of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction-talking not only about what each is doing, but also, via an interview with its author, the book's journey from inception through publication. To complement the authors' perspectives, we'll also have several visits or interviews with different literary editors. This is not a class on how to get published per se; we will be as interested in the publisher's challenges as the writer's. To that end, we'll ask why books get written and published the way they do; we'll attend to the diversity of interests and priorities each writer, book, and publishing alternative presents. In talking about different literary communities and the idea of community in general, we will also consider the state of book reviewing; each of you will write short reviews of the books we read and, then, a final review of an additional recent first book of your choosing (the hope being that you might submit this review for publication). You'll also be asked to give a presentation on a publisher (or aspect of publishing) and, in the final weeks, to present your own writing to the class. We'll discuss your work in terms of what's there on the page and also where it might go, how it might grow, how and why it might become your own first book.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 5613 Craft of Fiction: The Novel

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5620 Poetry Workshop

Poetry Workshop

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5622 Craft of Nonfiction

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5700 Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5701 Fiction Workshop

Open only to students in The Writing Program, and to other graduate students in English with submission and approval of writing samples.

Credit 3 units.

WRITING 5702 Craft of Poetry

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5900 Directed Writing: Thesis: Creative Nonfiction

Open only to students in the Writing Program. A tutorial for students writing a creative nonfiction thesis.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5901 Directed Writing: Thesis: Fiction

Open only to students in the Writing Program. A tutorial for students writing a fiction thesis.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5902 Directed Writing: Thesis: Poetry

Open only to students in the Writing Program. A tutorial for students writing a poetry thesis.

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5910 Publishing Internship -- Dorothy, a Publishing Project

Dorothy, a publishing project -- a nationally acclaimed independent press publishing works of innovative fiction -- offers a one-year internship for an MFA student in creative writing. Students can apply in the spring of their first year to begin the internship the following fall. The intern chosen will work directly with Danielle Dutton, the press's editor, on mutually agreed upon projects that take into account the intern's interests and strengths. In general, however, the internship is designed to give students a wide range of experience with literary publishing and so will likely involve a mix of editorial tasks (e.g., reviewing submissions, writing reader's reports, copyediting manuscripts in layout), marketing, design, and book production and distribution. The intern will also have opportunities to represent the press publicly, including at the annual AWP conference (travel and hotel expenses will be covered), and the intern's name will appear on the press's masthead. Interested students should submit a letter of application and CV to Professor Dutton (ddutton@wustl.edu) and Program Director David Schuman (dschuman@wustl.edu) no later than March 15 of the spring semester of their first year. Prerequisite: Completion in good standing of the first year of the MFA in Creative Writing program and accepted application.

Credit 1 unit.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 5990 Seminar: Teaching Freshman Composition

Credit 3 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall

WRITING 5999 Independent Study

Independent study in creative or expository writing. Prerequisites: junior standing and permission of the department. Students proposing projects in fiction or poetry must submit writing samples for approval of the faculty members directing the work. Projects in expository writing must be described in detailed prospectuses and approved by the faculty members directing the work and by the director of undergraduate studies. Credit/No Credit only.

Credit 6 units.

Typical periods offered: Fall, Spring

WRITING 7990 Masters Non-Resident

Credit 0 units.

WRITING 7999 Masters Continuing Student Status

Credit 0 units.

WRITING 8990 Doctoral Non-Resident

Credit 0 units.

WRITING 8999 Doctoral Continuing Student Status

Credit 0 units.