Fall 2021 Course Descriptions - Villanova University
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Fall 2021 Course Descriptions
ENG 8000 Theory Seminar
Dr. Heather Hicks
ENG 8106 Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Dr. Brooke Hunter
ENG 9530 How Sex Became Binary
Dr. Travis Foster
ENG 9720 Lives of the Undocumented
Dr. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
ENG 9730 T.S. Eliot Among the Novelists
Dr. Megan Quigley
ENG 8000: Theory Seminar
Dr. Heather Hicks
CRN 21881
Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm
What’s Hot? Introduction to Theory Across the
Discipline of English
This course will be run as a seminar in which each week,
a different graduate faculty member will introduce you
to a body of theory that is particularly important within
current discussions in their field of specialization. What
are some of the major theoretical approaches in
medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What
about 19th-century American literature and British
literature? Modernism? Postcolonial Studies? Irish
Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an
attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a
wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study
today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity
to meet most of the English faculty members who teach
at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and
analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory.
Assignments will include biweekly journals and a final
15-page seminar paper.ENG 8106: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Dr. Brooke Hunter
CRN 21884
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
This course will use Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales as an introduction to current debates in medieval
studies. Chaucer’s collection of stories and story tellers
offers a wide-ranging introduction to the genres, forms,
and interests of late-fourteenth century England. As we
read the Canterbury Tales in its entirety, we will also
consider current debates surrounding the Canterbury
Tales and its presentation of gender and sexuality,
medieval notions of race, religious devotion, and rank
and social order. We will consider manuscript studies,
medieval notions of authorship, and the special
concerns of medieval textuality. Our secondary readings
will be both theoretically informed and historical
grounded and we will address on-going debates aboutusing contemporary theory to read medieval texts. The course will function as a field survey for the material, historical, and theoretical concerns that shape medieval studies. This course will involve significant reading in Middle English and is designed to provide a solid grounding in the language. Prior experience with Middle English will be helpful but not necessary. *This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement
ENG 9530: How Sex Became Binary
Dr. Travis Foster
CRN 21888
Wednesday 5:20-7:20 pm
How Sex Became Binary
Combining queer studies,
trans studies, and critical
race studies with American
literature and history, this
multidisciplinary seminar
explores the processes that
made sex binary. We will
study white supremacy and
its apparatus of scientific
racism; biopolitical
liberalism and its fiction of
the autonomous, rational
individual; white feminism
Photograph included by Jennie June and its insistence on
in her 1918 Autobiography of an
Androgyne.
securing white womanhood
as a protected and secure
domain of belonging; and early gay rights rhetoric and
its attempts to normalize same-sex desire by casting
aside those with aberrant gender expressions. We’ll
explore all of these processes along two parallel paths:
on the one hand, reading the historical and theoretical
interrogations of race and binary sex that have recently
been so influential within humanities scholarship; on
the other hand, reading from an archive of nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century American literature thatalternately celebrates and resists the emergent binary sex model. Readings along the former path include C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Kyla Schuller’s Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Emma Heaney’s The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory, and Julien Gil-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child. Readings along the latter path will include Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (composed ~1846, published 2004), Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Walt Whitman’s Calamus (1860-061), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (composed 1890, published 1924), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Sui Sin Far’s “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1912), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “His Heart’s Desire” (1900), the anonymously published “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” (1857), Eliza Leslie’s pair of short stories “Lucy Nelson; or, The Boy-Girl” and “Billy Bedlow; or, The Girl-Boy” (1832), and Jennie June’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918). *This course will fulfill the pre-1900 American literature requirement (said requirement suspended for current students)
ENG 9720: Lives of the Undocumented
Dr. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
CRN 21889
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 pm
Lives of the Undocumented
What can we learn about citizenship and conceptions of
American national identity and belonging from the
perspectives of undocumented immigrants? Through the
genres of memoir, poetry, fiction, and critical essays, we
will pay attention to the diversity of experiences as
represented by those who were, or who remain without
legal documentation in the United States. In this course
we will think of the concept of noncitizenship to study
the historical, social, racial, and theoretical gaps between
citizenship and its absence. We will examine closely the
concepts of illegality and deportability and other modes
of excluding incorporation. Some of the questions we will
discuss include: Who is permitted to enter the United
States and who is forced to become a subordinated
presence, or to leave? How did immigrants become
“illegal”? We will examine the historical production of
political designations such as “refugee,” “citizen,” and
“noncitizen” and the differential access to rights,
services, and representation based on the categories.
Readings will include Karla C. Villavicencio's The
Undocumented Americans (2020), Jose Antonio Vargaz’s
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018),
Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How it Ends (2017) and Reyna
Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2013). Other readings
include essays and poems by Mae Ngai, Jose Olivarez,
Javier Zamora, Nicholas De Genova, Armando Garcia,
Nick Estes, Leisy Abrego, Renya Ramirez and so on.ENG 9730: T.S. Eliot Among the Novelists
Dr. Megan Quigley
CRN 21890
Tuesday 5:20-7:20 pm
Eliot Among the Novelists
T. S. Eliot by Cecil Beaton (1956)
Near the centennial of The Waste Land (2022), which
shook the literary establishment at its time, this course
aims to shed fresh light on a literary reputation that has
been carefully guarded until now. T. S. Eliot once argued
that fiction nourished his own work more than poetry
did. In this seminar we will explore what Eliot might
have meant by examining the novelistic practices of The
Waste Land, such as narrative voice, character
formation, section breaks, plot, and dialogue. We will
also read novels and short stories by Eliot’s
contemporaries—E.M Forster, Joseph Conrad, JeanToomer, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes—and see how our understanding of Eliot’s poetry changes in light of these works and Eliot’s comments on them. We will also ask: Why are there so many fictionalized versions of Eliot’s life and what do make of Eliot biofiction and fanfic? Eliot’s archive has exploded in the last decade, as much of what was recently under lock and key at Houghton library at Harvard or Firestone library at Princeton is now open to anyone who has access to the digital editions. The long-awaited publication of his letters and the complete prose, topped by the revelations of the Hale papers, are leading to a rapidly transforming notion of “Eliot” in the digital age. How does “Eliot” (Anglo-Catholic, classicist, royalist, as he proclaimed) change when we have access to all his essays, even his early erotic verse? Is our vision of Eliot as Anti-Semite, misogynist, misanthropist, humanist, revolutionary, or queer confirmed or undermined by these new materials? We will ask questions about literary reputations and literary estates, access, and canon formation. In addition to the traditional seminar paper, students will complete a short digital humanities assignment aimed at assessing the modernist “Eliot” put forth in editions such as The Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land (2015) through resource to the new digital Eliot.
ENG 8090: Thesis Direction CRN 21882 Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a narrowly defined question, under supervision of an individual instructor. ENG 8092: Field Examination CRN 21883 A broader exploration of a theme or area of literature than a thesis. The examination comprises a comprehensive statement essay and an oral exam component. ENG 9031: Independent Study CRN 21885 A special project pursued under the direction of an individual professor. ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation CRN 21887 ENG : Field Exam Continuation CRN
ENG 9035 Dr. Evan Radcliffe CRN 21886 Professional Research Option (PRO) This option for second-year graduate students is a three-credit independent study in which students identify one or a cluster of jobs or professions in which an advanced degree in literature is of benefit. In the course of the semester, students will research the career options of interest, identifying one or two fields as the focus of their work. They must generate a research paper that explores the history and future prospects of the field of interest, as well as current information about the requirements of the work, geographical information about centers of activity for the profession, and desirable employers. This research should include at least two meetings with professionals who work in the field. The paper must also analyze how advanced study of literature serves to enhance the students' desirability in the profession in question. As part of their final project, students must develop a cover letter outlining the ways their particular training makes them suitable to work in this field. Students will make their research available to other students in the program by uploading their final project onto a special section of the Graduate English Program blog. Potential fields of research include the following: E-Book Industry Teaching Public relations Rare book broker Advertising Web design
College admissions Journalism University administration Testing industry Arts administration Tutoring industry Library science Technical writing Entertainment industry work
ENG 9800 CRN 21891 Internship in Teaching English Second-year graduate students have the option to serve as an intern for a graduate faculty member in an undergraduate English course. Interns will attend all class sessions, confer at least once with each student on their written work, lead two or three class sessions under the supervision of the faculty member, and complete a final project that is either (1) a substantial critical essay concerning the subject matter of the course or (2) a research project concerning trends and issues within college-level pedagogy. The aim of the program is to provide students with teaching and classroom experience. Students may apply to serve as interns by consulting with a faculty member who is teaching in an area of interest, and, if the faculty member is amenable, submitting a one-two page statement, outlining how this course addresses their larger intellectual goals, and what they hope to accomplish as an intern.
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