Spring 2021 Course Descriptions - Villanova University

Spring 2021 Course Descriptions

ENG 8260    Revenge Tragedy
            Dr. Alice Dailey
ENG 8560    Institutional Fictions
            Dr. Mary Mullen
ENG 9640    Alone Together: Literature &
            Social Distance
            Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
ENG 9730    British Literature & Medicine
            1700-1900
            Dr. Joseph Drury
     GWS Courses that Count for English
GWS 8000    Critical Perspectives on Gender
            Dr. Jean Lutes

ENG 8260: Revenge Tragedy
Dr. Alice Dailey
CRN 32463
Thursday 5:30-7:30 pm (hybrid)
Revengers, Murderers,          and     Malcontents      in
Renaissance Tragedy
One of the dominant features of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century drama is its preoccupation with
spectacular acts of murder and revenge and with the
psychological,     social,    familial,   and     political
circumstances that motivate and justify violence. This
course will study the formal traditions of revenge drama
and the genre’s place within Renaissance debates about
concepts of family, gender, honor, patriarchy, sexuality,
and individuality. Our discussions will focus on how
violence is used in the plays to construct notions of ideal
femininity and masculinity, often through the
dramatization of rape, necrophilia, and honor killings.
We will consider how revenge is imagined to reinforce
bonds between fathers and sons, delimiting manhood in
relation to homicidal violence. We will pay close
attention to the roles described for women in these
plays—witch, whore, murderess, madwoman, beautiful
suicide, corrupted corpse—and we will think about how
these categories function to police female sexual
autonomy. We will consider how various playwrights
make use of a shared vocabulary of revenge tragedy
conventions that include ghostly appearances,
supernatural intervention, real and feigned madness,
language of horror and darkness, plays-within-plays, and
counter-revenge. Our study will include the period’s
seminal revenge tragedies, such as Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Middleton’s The
Revenger’s Tragedy; tragedies that blend revenge

elements with political intrigue, such as Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The
Maid’s Tragedy; as well as so-called “sex tragedies”
focused on forbidden desire and jealousy, like Ford’s ’Tis
Pity She’s a Whore, Middleton’s The Changeling, and
Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Coursework includes a
presentation, annotated bibliography, and seminar
paper. My current plan is to meet in person as much as
possible with synchronous online meetings as necessary.
*This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish
literature requirement

ENG 8560: Institutional Fictions
Dr. Mary Mullen
CRN 32464
Wednesday 7:30-9:30 pm (online synchronous)
                 Institutional Fictions

This graduate seminar focuses on how institutions
produce fiction and how fiction represents institutions.
Beginning by reading theories of institutions, we will
identify the key fictions that institutions depend upon—
fictions of futurity, inclusion, agency, and enclosure—as
we consider the promises and pitfalls of institutions as a
mode of social and political organization. We will then
study a specific institution—the university—and learn
about critical university studies and abolitionist
university studies in order to reflect on our experience
within it. We will read nineteenth-century literature
and nineteenth-century theories of institutions as well
as contemporary literary theory and criticism covering
authors like Thomas Hardy, Amy Levy, John Henry
Newman, Cuthbert Bede and Virginia Woolf and
theorists like Sara Ahmed, Roderick Ferguson, Fred

Moten and Stefano Harney. This class will help you
become better critical readers of both literary and social
forms, aesthetics and politics.

ENG 9640: Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance
Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh
CRN 32468
Tuesday 7:40-9:40 pm (online synchronous)
Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance

How can we feel connected even when alone? This is a
problem that the pandemic has drawn to the surface for
many of us. The forms of social distancing that we’ve
adopted out of necessity have prompted feelings of
isolation and loneliness, even as they’ve also given us a
kind of shared experience on an unprecedented and
global scale. How do we live through times like these,
and how might we make sense of them?
This course explores how the activities of reading and
writing produce the strange and sustaining feeling of
being alone together. In most of their forms, reading
and writing might seem like solitary activities. Indeed,
the figures of the hermetic poet, scribbling notes that no
one will read, or of the absorptive reader, lost in a novel,
are deeply imprinted in our way of imagining the
production and reception of literature. And yet, despite
the physical distance that often accompanies and may
even be required for it, literature also makes it possible
for people to feel connected with one another over vast

spatial and temporal distances. How does literature
make such contact possible? And what does it have to
teach us about the distance it traverses?
In order to answer these questions, we’ll study literary
representations of solitude and contact. Authors will
include Virginia Woolf, Claudia Rankine, James
Schuyler, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, and
Brenda Shaughnessy. Assignments will include formal
and informal written exercises and at least one in-class
presentation.

ENG 9730: British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900
Dr. Joseph Drury
CRN 32469
Monday 5:20-7:20 pm (online synchronous)
British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900
The theory and practice of medicine underwent
dramatic changes in the course of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Medical knowledge was
transformed by the rise of the experimental method and
the discovery of the circulatory and nervous systems,
the introduction of new technologies, therapies, and
drugs, the success of smallpox inoculation, the
Mesmerism craze and the discovery of the
“unconscious,” Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the
emergence of public health and hygiene, anaesthesia,
and germ theory. At the same time, medical
practitioners raised their social status through the
establishment of teaching hospitals, medical schools,
and professional societies. Physicians began to present
themselves as public authorities capable of diagnosing
and treating the pathologies of modernity. Aetiological
theories pointed to luxury, industrialization,
urbanization, distraction, immigration, and empire as
causes of sexual deviance, nervous illness, and
degeneration. Diagnoses drew on cultural stereotypes
about race, gender, and class. This class will consider
how the literature of this period responded to these
developments. We will ask: what use did literary
authors make of new medical discourses? What did they
understand to be the potentially medicinal uses of
reading literature? How did new theories of the human
body and mind shape their portrayal of the human

subject and its environment? How did fiction writers
represent medical practitioners and how seriously did
they take their claims to have solutions to large-scale
social problems? Readings may include poetry by Anne
Finch, John Armstrong, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Smollett’s Expedition
of Humphry Clinker, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,
Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sick Room, and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.
*This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish
literature requirement

GWS 8000: Critical Perspectives on Gender (online)
Dr. Jean Lutes
CRN 32629
Tuesday 5:30-7:30 pm
Critical Perspectives on Gender

An interdisciplinary study of gender, women, and
sexuality, this course introduces you to some classic
texts and surveys contemporary developments in
feminist, gender, and queer theory. As you reckon
seriously with the feminist tradition of uniting theory
with praxis, you will consider both intellectual and
activist work. You will also apply theories to a variety of
historical and contemporary topics, such as gender
expression, girlhood, reproductive rights, the history of
sexuality, gender in the workplace, gender in the digital
age, and gender in the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout,
we will approach gender and sexuality as inextricably
bound to other vectors of identity, including but not
limited to race and class.

ENG 8090: Thesis Direction
CRN 32461
Direction of writing of the thesis, focused research on a
narrowly defined question, under supervision of an
individual instructor.

ENG 8092: Field Examination
CRN 32462
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 32465
A special project pursued under the direction of an
individual professor.

ENG 9080: Thesis Continuation
CRN 32467

ENG : Field Exam Continuation
CRN

ENG 9035
Dr. Evan Radcliffe
CRN 32466
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 broker         Rare book broker
 Advertising                     Web design

College admissions            Journalism

University administration     Testing industry
Arts administration           Tutoring industry
Library science writing       Technical writing
Entertainment industry work

ENG 9800
CRN 32470
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.