Spring 2009 Graduate Literature Courses

ENGL 5013.001 Intro to Grad Studies
CID 12881 TR 12:30-1:45, Walker
Methods and materials of graduate research, a sleuthing process investigating where and how to find what fact, discovering how to extract and abstract an idea and to evaluate critical materials, and identifying and locating the authoritative text from which to begin a critical and scholarly narrative

ENGL 5410.001 Seminar in Brit Lit 16th-C: Spenser and the Pedagogy of Play
CID 18752 R 4:30-7:10, Greteman
Spenser said he wrote the Faerie Queene "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and in this course we'll take him at his word. "Gentle discipline" was a catch phrase of the humanist pedagogy sweeping across Europe. We'll read key works in this tradition alongside the Faerie Queene to explore the counterintuitive notion that the best way to educate a gentleman (or anyone else) is to give him a long, complex, and lovely allegorical poem.

ENGL 5460.351 Seminar in Brit Lit 19th-C: Victorian Cultural Documents
CID 18753 TR 12:30-1:45, Austin
The way to understand the Victorian period is through its invigorating and diverse intellectual prose. Readings from Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Huxley, Arnold, Pater, Morris, and Martineau will document the birth of cultural criticism, the revisionary history of aesthetics, the controversies between science and religion, the founding of the liberal arts, the reaction to advertising and capitalism, the cultural of the invalid, post-Romantic mysticism, and utopian and socialist schemes. Archival research in Victorian periodicals is required. One article-length essay, two reports, one final.

ENGL 6250.001 Seminar in Race/Region/Gender: Primitivism and the Modern--The Irish and Harlem Renaissances
CID 19003 MWF 2:30-3:20, Grubgeld
This course will explore how two nearly-contemporary movements in cultural nationalism responded to the troubled legacy of 19th century anthropology and racial theory. By providing two distinct case studies in modernism and the concept of primitivism, the Irish and Harlem Renaissances raise numerous questions about what happens when, in Yeats's words, the poetry of "the coteries" meets "the poetry of the people." We will read extensively in Yeats's plays, poems, and essays, as well as the plays and travel writings of John Synge, and short stories by a variety of writers; in the second half of the semester, we will focus on poetry, fiction, and essays by such writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book list is available on request.


ENGL 6260.001 Studies in Literary Criticism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida
CID 18967 T 6:45-9:30, Wallen
This course will examine the questions that, more than any other of the past century, have reoriented considerations of culture, art, and literature. For students with an interest in critical theory, this course will provide the conceptual context vital to formulating an independent, thoughtful stance toward the major aesthetic issues of our time. As none of the works we shall read is especially long, we shall have the chance to move through each one carefully enough to ensure general comprehension of each philosopher's ideas and their implications.

English Department
College of Arts & Sciences
Oklahoma State University
205 Morrill Hall
Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-9474
For Information about English Programs: english.information@okstate.edu
Webmaster: engweb@okstate.edu