Program Fall 2013 Courses

To register, please contact Max Kupresanin (maxk@bgsu.edu, 419-372-6864) in 211 East Hall.

In-person courses:

ENG 6010     Introduction to English Studies
ENG 6750    American Literary Realisms
ENG 6800    Women, War, and Writing

Online only:

ENG 6070    Theory and Methods of Literary Criticism
ENG 6090    Teaching of Literature

Course descriptions are below.

ENG 6010    Introduction to English Studies

Dr. William Albertini
Mondays 2:30-5:20 PM

    This course serves as a comprehensive introduction to the field of English and the professional study of literature, rhetoric, and language, with special attention to and practice in using the reference and research tools available to the contemporary teacher, researcher, and theorist.

ENG 6750    American Literary Realisms

Dr. Jolie Sheffer
Thursdays 2:30-5:20 PM

ENG 6800    Women, War, and Writing

Dr. Kimberly Coates
Wednesdays 2:30-5:20 PM

    This graduate level seminar will be informed by what Donna Haraway refers to as a “feminist optics,” an optics that “produces not effects of distance, but effects of connection, of embodiment, and of responsibility for an imagined elsewhere we may yet learn to see and build here and now.” As advocated by Donna Haraway and other feminist and cultural theorists, this politics of perception foregrounds how what we see or fail to see is constantly being shaped by larger cultural frames and narratives that once made visible can be broken and reassembled so as to diffract rather than merely reflect hegemonic norms and values. The course will define war in broad social and historical terms. Meaning that while we will be examining texts by women produced in response to WWI and WWII, we will also be recovering British and American suffrage militancy (1903-1914) as central to feminist political and cultural theories of modernity and women’s modernist literature and performance.
    While there has been a fair amount of work by feminist historians engaged in reconstructing this period and by feminist cultural theorists and literary scholars of modernism analyzing the forms of the movement’s political activism as expressed in art, literature, and visual iconography, there has been no effort to theorize this early militancy and its affective resonance with a feminist political philosophy and activism as it develops in women’s literature, art, and performance before, during, and between the wars. We will explore a historical aesthetics of the female body—corporeal and textual—and that body’s performance of affect in texts ranging from Sophocles’ Antigone, the suffragette Constance Lytton’s memoir Prisons and Prisoners, Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War, Marguerite Duras’ memoir The War, Alaim Resnais’ film Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the dance writings and performances of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey. Our readings of literature, film, and the performing arts will be considered along side theoretical readings in feminism, cultural studies, affect studies, performance studies, dance studies, and trauma theory.

Online only:

ENG 6070    Theory and Methods of Literary Criticism

Dr. Erin Labbie
Web-based

ENG 6090    Teaching of Literature

Dr. Piya Lapinski
Web-based