Spring 2019
Download the complete descriptions of the spring 2019 MA in Literature courses.
ENGL 676: Critical Approaches to Literature and Composition
Developing Professional Composure
- Dr. Mike Williamson
- T, 6:00-8:30
This MA-level course explores a variety of interpretative approaches to the study of literature and
composition. Our central focus this semester will be on composureespecially on finding an
equilibrium and a sense of self-command as a professional in the fields of literature and/or composition. Our main initiative will be to develop habits of mind, habits of reading, and habits of analysis that improve our research and presentation skills. Our main goal will be to present our disciplinary knowledge in public forums.
ENGL 762/862: Topics in American Literature After 1870
Realism and Resistance: Political Activism in Post-Bellum Literature and Culture
- Dr. Todd Thompson
- M, 6:00-8:00
Prevailing canons of American literary realism and regionalism written between the Civil War and
the turn of the century tend to privilege upper-class domestic dramas and quiet local color pieces.
But such a picture of postwar American literature elides a fervent of political activism during the incredibly tumultuous periods of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era. This course considers politically committed writingsfrom Rebecca Harding Davis's protest against industrialism to Hamlin Garland's agrarian populism to Frances Harper's alternative vision of Reconstruction to Mark Twain's anti-imperialism to Jose Marti's hemispheric visionin light of their late nineteenth-century historical contexts in order to rethink what it means to write, and to read, realism.
ENGL 765/865: Topics in Literature as Genre
Arab Film and Literature
- Dr. Tom Slater
- M, 3:00-5:30
Next semester, Syrian poet and fiction writer Osama Alomar, a resident at Pittsburgh's City of
Asylum, will visit campus to present his work at a Six O'Clock Series event on April 8. This class
will be structured around that event, Alomar's work, and the experiences and work of many other Middle East writers and filmmakers as well. These artists are presenting a first-hand perspective of their lives, one that American media rarely presents even a glimpse of. Yet, we have their marvelous stories and films to learn from. So that's what we'll do while also producing two or three short essays and a research paper.
ENGL 772/872: Topics in Women's Literature:
Time and Morality, Science and Religion in Writing by Women
- Dr. Mike Williamson
- M, 6:00-8:30
This course explores how a selection of 19th-century British women writers and one contemporary
woman writer (Tracy Chevalier) have changed the way we think about time, morality, science and
religion. We will begin by considering the changes in narrative time and morality occasioned by Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830). Written well before Charles Darwin's Origins of Species (1859), Lyell's work had a significant impact on ideas about determinism, moral action, and the afterlife. Women writers were particularly influenced by Lyell's argument that very slow an gradual change, rather than apocalyptic disaster, characterizes the history of the planet Earth. Lyell's work energized women to think about the world in new ways that were less dependent on prevailing ideas about sin and salvation than on the possibilities inherent in the imagination and apprehension of plenitude.
ENGL 773/873: Topics in Minority Literature
Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literature and Criticism
- Dr. Lingyan Yang
- T, 3:00-5:30
This course examines the dynamic multinational and multiethnic literary tradition of the 20th- and
21st-century Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, criticism, and culture in the global context. There is a rich array of literary forms and genres. We will interpret selected novel, autobiography, short story, poetry, drama, and criticism by East Asian, South East Asian, South Asian, West Asian and Asian diasporic male and female writers, artists, and critics. Mediation between form and content, Asia, Asian America, America and the world, our interpretations are situated in the heterogeneous Asian American and Asian diasporic historical, intellectual, cultural, social, and geographical contexts.
ENGL 764/864: Topics in British Literature after 1660
- Dr. Chris Orchard
- W, 3:00-5:30
This course will focus on the post-9/11 novel from a global perspective including British, Australian,
Pakistani, and Middle-Eastern perspectives. Drawing from a range of theoretical discourses including
Orientalism/Neo-Orientalism, Media Theory and Islamophobia studies, the course will consider how the novel responded to the events and aftermath of the events of 9/11. Consideration will be given to the writers' own ideologies as they confront the attack on American soil as well as the psychological impact on the characters. Students will write two papersa mid-term and a finaland a presentation on one of the novelists on the list.
ENGL 781/881: Special Topics: History of English for Teachers
- Dr. Christopher Kuipers
- TR, 12:30-1:45
Provides an introduction to both the history of the language, and the pedagogy thereof, for current
and future teachers of English. No previous study of linguistics or early languages is expected (but
will certainly be useful). In the course of reviewing the history of English per se, students will critique the various textbooks, etymological dictionaries, and online resources used for teaching this fascinating though intimidating subject (one sometimes derided for its acronym HEL's similarity to "hell"). Interconnections to literature, composition, rhetoric, TESOL, lexicography, and other
branches of English studies that are of interest to enrollees will be variously illuminated by the historical linguistics of English.