ENG 600: Research Methods
Dr. Allison Fagan
Mondays 5:00-8:00 

Introduction to research and writing in the discipline for beginning graduate students. Advanced training in research methods and citation, in critical analysis and scholarly writing, and in disciplinary history and the workings of the academy. Required for all Master of Arts students in their first semester.

ENG 612: THE TIME SIGNATURES OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL
Dr. Matthew Rebhorn
Tuesday, 5:00-8:00PM, Keezell 307 

At the exact moment when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, its backers sent out a celebratory telegraph announcing this achievement.  Yet, for all of the attempts to memorialize just this moment, the actual time it occurred seems to have varied: in Virginia City, Nevada, it occurred at 12:45pm; in San Francisco, it occurred at 11:46am; and in Washington, DC, this event occurred at precisely 2:47pm.  What these discordant times register is not the faulty technology used to convey this event, but rather, the way temporality itself was unfixed as the United States became a modern nation.  While “standard time” would become the norm by the end of the century, for most of the nineteenth century, there were competing ways that citizens were invested in temporality and understood the passage of time.  This course takes up this fascinating moment by exploring the way the American novel represented these dissonant “time signatures” both thematically (representations of time) and formally (representations in time).  Against the backdrop of industrialization, the first part of this course takes up novels by Hawthorne, Melville, Northrup, and Douglass to explore the way these authors represented time and disrupted how we make sense of time in narrative.  In the latter part of the course, we will zero in on how the post-industrial moment we are living in now has been represented temporally by contemporary authors, such as Don Delillo and Colson Whitehead.  From South Seas adventure tales to slave narratives to novels of the zombie apocalypse, the texts of this course will be guided by theoretical arguments and critical interventions.

English 630: Women Novelists of the British 18^th-Century: Writing Gender, Writing Genre
Dr. Dawn Goode
Wednesdays (5:00-8:00pm)

This course will focus on the origins and development of the English novel through the works of 18^th-century female novelists.  As 18^th-century Britain experienced profound social, economic, and political change, so too did the form and purpose of the period’s fiction, culminating in the rise of the novel genre. We will chart this rise and the genre developments subsequent to it by reading some of the period’s major works by women.  Along with some of the key critical scholarship on the novel, we will examine various novel genres, such as the romance, the amatory, the sentimental, the domestic, the Gothic, and the political novel.  We will look also at the period’s socio-cultural landscape that impacted the evolution of these disparate forms of the novel as well as the lives of the women creating them.  Finally, we will consider the limitations placed upon female writers in terms of subject matter and how they maneuvered around these limitations.

Possible authors for this course may include: Frances Burney, Eliza Fenwick, Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lenox, Ann Radcliffe, Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Maria Edgeworth.

Alongside these primary texts we will read critical scholarship on the development of the novel, including McKeon’s Theory of the Novel, Armstrong’s Desire and the Domestic Novel, Ballaster’s Seductive Forms, and Nixon’s Novel Definitions, and Hunter’s Before Novels

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ENG 675: Reading and Research. 3 credits. Supervised reading and research in a particular topic or field. Admission by permission of the Director of Graduate studies; may not be repeated.

ENG 698: Comprehensive Continuance. 1 credit. Continued preparation for the comprehensive examinations. May be repeated as needed.

ENG 699: Thesis Continuance. 2 credits. Continued study, research and writing for the thesis. May be repeated as needed.

ENG 700: Thesis. 6 credits.Six credits taken over two consecutive semesters. Graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) basis.