ma american literature 2016-17 handbook

MA American Literature 2016-17 HANDBOOK

MA in American Literature 2016-17

Please check Blackboard and the MA notice-board for changes to the schedule.

Dr Nerys Williams (Co-ordinator MA in American Literature) email: [email protected]

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The MA in American Literature is a one-year postgraduate degree, which focuses on the literature of the United States of America. The aim of the MA is to enable students to engage with contemporary critical debates about the interpretation and contextualisation of American literature. The MA includes a module on Research Methods in which the skills required for postgraduate study will be addressed in detail. Modules 2-5 offer seminar-style classes, and students may be expected to present papers to the class and participate in discussions. In addition, students are required to develop an independent research project (5,000-word essay) for each module. These elements of the modules provide a framework of structured study in which students define and develop their areas of interest, and learn and apply the conceptual and methodological skills necessary for postgraduate study. Students will undertake a programme of five taught modules (10 credits each) and one research project (40-credit dissertation):

! Module 1: Research Methods is a series of lectures and workshops, and is assessed by a bibliography assignment and end-of-semester examination. This is a core requirement for all new postgraduate students in the School.

! Modules 2, 3, 4 and 5 will be assessed by essays (5,000 words in each case). ! Module 6: students develop a research project and write a dissertation on a

special topic of their own choice (subject to the agreement of the MA Co-ordinator), and under the supervision of a member of the supervisory panel (one supervisor per student).

! The average of the five grades for Modules 1-5 will account for 50 of the 90 credits required.

! The grade for the dissertation (15,000-20,000 words) will account for 40 of the 90 credits required.

!

IMPORTANT NOTICE: “Required Reading”: " All “Required Reading” should be available in the Campus Bookshop in UCD. " Students should seek the permission of individual module conveners if they

wish to purchase/make use of editions other than those listed for the modules.

GUEST LECTURES / RESEARCH SEMINARS / CONFERENCES: " During the year, we will seek to arrange additional classes led by guest

lecturers/seminar leaders. These will not be offered for credit. " The UCD School of English, Drama and Film schedules weekly research

seminars on a broad range of topics (Wednesdays, 4pm-6pm in J208). " Students are invited to become members the Irish Association for American

Studies. The IAAS organises conferences, sponsors an essay prize, offers support for travel to conferences, and publishes an online journal.




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SCHEDULE FOR MODULES

MA in American Literature: Introduction Wednesday 14th September 2016 Room J207 (4pm)

Modules (Semester One) Module 1: Literary Research Methods (ENG40760)

Module 1 begins: Thursday 22nd September Room A105 (12noon-2pm) Module 1 ends: Thursday 24th November Bibliography assignment: Thursday 10th November by 12pm (Dr Nerys Williams’s postbox and by email attachment) End-of-semester Examination: 1st December, 2016.

Module 2: American Theatre: Structure and Strategies (ENG 40900) (includes Clinton students)

Module 2 begins: Tuesday 4th October Room J207 (4pm to 6pm) Reading Week: 31st Oct-4th November Module 2 ends: Tuesday 22nd November Essay due: Friday 9th December by 12pm*

Module 3: American Lyric: Document and Memoir (ENG41840)

Module 3 begins: Thursday 6th October Room J207 (4pm to 6pm) Reading Week: 31st Oct-4th November Module 3 ends: Thursday 24h November Essay due: Friday 16th December

Modules (Semester Two)

Module 4: Contemporary American Writing (ENG 41670)

Module 5 begins: Tuesday 24th January Room J207 (4pm to 6pm) Module 5 ends: Tuesday 7th March Essay due: Tuesday 21st March by 12pm*

Module 5: Nineteenth-Century American Writing (ENG 40880) (includes Clinton students)

Module 5 begins: Thursday 26th January Room J207 (4pm to 6pm) Module 5 ends: Thursday 9th March Essay due: Thursday 6th April by 12pm*

*5,000-word Essays: Deliver to post-box (outside J201) and enter on Safe Assign on or before listed dates.




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Extended Deadlines for Essays and Dissertations: • Applications to Module Convener:

o on receipt of medical certificate or relevant documentation: no penalty; o late essay or dissertation without documentation: penalty of two grade

points per week SCHEDULE FOR MODULES (continued) Module 6 (ENG40920): Dissertation:

Proposals Due: Friday 10th March Dissertation Due: Tuesday 1st August

Dissertation (15,000-20,000 words)

Proposals for Dissertations: Friday 10th March: email to Dr Williams List of Supervisors: Friday 17th March: email notification to students

Supervisory Panel: Includes Dr Katherine Fama, Dr Clare Hayes-Brady, Dr Maria Stuart and Dr Nerys Williams. Dissertation Meetings (Supervision should follow the following schedule): First meeting with supervisor in the week beginning Monday 27th March

Chapter 1 draft: Monday 17th April Second Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning Monday 24th April

Chapter 2 draft: Friday 19th May Third Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning Monday 29th May

Chapter 3 draft: Friday 23rd June Fourth Meeting with supervisor in the week beginning Monday 3rd July Submission of dissertation: Tuesday 1st August




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MODULE DETAILS

MODULE 1 (Lectures and Workshops): ENG 40760 Introduction to Literary Research Methods Co-ordinator: Dr F. Dillane ([email protected])

Time and Place: Thursdays 12-1.30pm, A105 (ART) Start Date: Thursday 22nd September, 2016

This module introduces students to the advanced methods and skills required for your postgraduate studies. It is taught through a course of lectures and/or workshops which will address research resources, textual criticism, approaches to literature, methodology, critical writing and argumentation, methods of information retrieval and evaluation, evidence in literary scholarship, and practical issues of research and thesis writing. This module is core for the following programmes: MA American Literature, MA Anglo-Irish Literature, MA, Gender, Sexuality and Culture, MA Medieval Literature, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, and MA Renaissance Literature. It is also core for new doctoral students who have not had prior experience of literary research On completing this module, students will be able to: 1. Demonstrate a clear grasp of key issues in literary research methods including literary citation, bibliographical skills, proofreading, literary terminology, and the 2. Understand the theory and practical implications of literary editing. 3. Retrieve information about resources, methods, and skills necessary to their chosen specialised field of postgraduate studies in English. 4. Understand the skills and techniques required for the writing of research proposals, dissertations, and other career oriented applications. 5. Identify their own needs in terms of the pursuit of advanced literary research.

Course Schedule

22 Sept. Introduction to Postgraduate Research (Dr Anne Mulhall) 29 Sept. Defining Literary and Critical Methodologies (Dr Anne Mulhall) 6 October Editions and Anthologies (Dr Lucy Collins and Dr Naomi McAreavey) 13 October Electronic Resources (Jenny Collery) Note this session will take place in the Health Sciences Library. Meet at the Information Desk in the Health Sciences Library where you will be directed to the Information Skills Room (D111). 20 October UCD Library and Special Collections (Evelyn Flanagan) 27 October Preparing Your Topic and Proposal (Dr Sharae Deckard) 3 Nov Reading week – no classes 10 Nov. Digital Humanities I: Theories and Methodologies (Prof. Margaret Kelleher) 17 Nov. Digital Humanities 2: Projects in Practice (Prof. Margaret Kelleher) 24 Nov. Exam Advisory Session (Dr Fionnuala Dillane)




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1 December 2016: In-Class Exam Assessment: The module will be assessed by means of: 1. A bibliographical exercise (50%) specifically related to the programme students are taking, which must comply fully with MLA style, and explain what and how bibliographical sources were used, to be submitted on 10th November 2016 and 2. A two-hour examination on 1 December 2016 (50%) 3. Lecturers may also set pass/fail exercises as part of workshop sessions which you are required to pass in order to complete the module. MA IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION Wednesday 19th September Room: J207 (4pm) MODULE 2 (Seminars)

ENG 40900: American Theatre: Structure and Strategies (Professor Frank McGuinness)

This module will examine key texts from the history of twentieth-century American theatre. It will focus on the reading of plays as practical pieces of theatre craft, designed primarily for performance. Each play will be investigated for its possibilities of staging. (No previous experience of acting or directing is expected.) Seminar Schedule: Tuesdays 4-6pm Room: J207

Dates: 4th October to 22nd November Assessment:

The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course content. (Please list word-count at the end of your essay.) Additional shorter written pieces and presentations to the class may also be required.

Required Reading: Albee, Edward. The Goat or Who is Sylvia? Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Our Lady of 121st Street Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Jesus Hopped the “A” Train Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun (Methuen) Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross Miller, Arthur. All My Sons Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman Norman, Marsha. ’Night Mother Norris, Bruce. Clybourne Park O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night (London: Cape)




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O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire Wilson, August, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (London: Plume) Additional Reading will be listed in class. Module 4 (Seminars) ENG41840 American Lyric: Document and Memoir (Seminar Leader: Dr Nerys Williams) The American poet Juliana Spahr suggests that ‘poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so open right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry, that there might as well be not any at all.’ This module considers how ideas of the lyric poem has been adapted and reconfigured by American poets over a period of 60 years. It proposes that 21st Century experiments with ideas of document and memoir can be traced to a second generation of American modernist poetic experimentation. The module begins with Lorine Niedecker’s innovative sequences of lyric writing, which combines personal memoir with a representation of region. We will examine how subsequent generations of poets consider the relationship between the personal and public, language and politics in tandem with ethical responsibilities. Focusing primarily on the key ideas of document and memoir, the module considers the representation of war, race and the everyday through a diversity of lyric forms. We will reflect upon the influence of digital technologies upon ideas of form and community. Finally, the module examines how the reception and manipulation of data and found web material (particularly in conceptual writing procedures) challenges more established ideas of knowledge and poetic originality. Seminar Schedule: Thursdays 4-6pm Room: J207

Dates: October 6th-24th November Assessment: The module is assessed by essay (5,000 words) on a topic related to the course content. Poetry, Document and Archive Lorine Niedecker Lake Superior (originally published 1966, republished with archive documentation 2013). AND from Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1965) and Holocaust (1975) Inscribing Autobiography – Rejecting Closure Lyn Hejinian My Life (1987) Further versions published 2002/ 2013. Tradition, the Individual Talent and War Yusef Komunyakaa poems from Neon Vernacular (1993)




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‘Nobody’s Voice’: Writing with Nothing at its Centre Michael Palmer from The Lion Bridge: Poems 1972-1995 (1999) Found Document and Cross-Genre Writing Claudia Rankine Please Don’t Let me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) AND excerpts from Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary (2009) Representing the Maternal Everyday Laynie Brown Daily Sonnets (2007)

Collectivity, Data and Document Juliana Spahr this connection of everybody with lungs (2005) AND excerpts from Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) The Body of Michael Brown (2015). Additional Reading will be listed in class.

MODULE 4 (ENG 41670) Contemporary American Writing (Seminar Leader: Dr Katherine Fama) Seminar Schedule: Tuesdays 4-6pm Room: J207 Dates: 24th January to 7th March Assessment:


Our understanding of the “contemporary” is informed by academic narratives of globalization, neoliberalism, and late capitalism; as well as the events of 9/11 and the escalation of racial, economic, and environmental crises and protests. This module focuses on related developments in the American novel around the turn of the twenty-first century. Within our set of contemporary texts, we will encounter a diverse group of writers and their experiments with popular forms, images, and expectations. The course will employ primary and critical texts to build a collaborative discussion of the American literary and social moment. We will concentrate on novels by canonical contemporary authors that employ the images and structures of what is conventionally considered to be “genre” or “popular” fiction, from science fictions to dystopian narratives and graphic novels. Together, we will consider the ways in which contemporary novels forge narrative acts of historical transgression, speculative remaking, disaster, and renewal.




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For better and worse, we will encounter texts that are rarely fully critically digested or contextualized. Thus, the module will ask you for flexibility and creativity in pursuing the new, changing, and uncertain definitions of the present period. Required Reading Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) Amy Waldman, The Submission (2011) Kiese Laymon, Long Division (2013) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013) Additional primary and critical readings will be listed in class. They will include shorter pieces and excerpts from Chris Ware, Sherman Alexie, Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Annie Proulx, Gish Jen, Lydia Millet, and others. MODULE 5 (Seminars) ENG 40880: Nineteenth-Century American Writing (Dr Maria Stuart and Dr Clare Hayes-Brady)

Beginning with texts emerging during what F.O. Matthiessan has dubbed “The American Renaissance,” this module explores key themes in American literature from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will look at the ways in which American writers imagine and fashion an American subject position, against a backdrop of Western expansion, slavery, the threat of civil war, and the emergence of women as a literary and political constituency. We will look at writers’ engagement with freedom and creativity in their literal and literary forms. As well as the thematic issues that hold centre stage–for example, the relationships between art, race and gender; the formulation of the democratic social contract; the relationship with romanticism and the gothic; violence and citizenship; regionalism, exoticism and difference–we will also be examining the degree and kind of formal innovation to be found in nineteenth-century American poetry and prose. Seminar Schedule: Thursdays 4-6pm Room: J207 Dates: 26th January to 9th March Assessment:


Required texts: Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, 1899 (any edition)




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Dickinson, Emily. A handout of selected poems from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R.W. Franklin (The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1998), will be circulated in advance of this class.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845 (any edition).

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 1892 (any edition) Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance, 1852 (any edition) Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861 (any edition) Melville, Herman. ‘Benito Cereno’, 1855 (any edition) Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852 (any edition) Whitman, Walt. Collected Poems (Wordsworth) Secondary Reading: to be announced in advance of seminars. Additional Reading will be listed in class. MODULE 6 (ENG40920): DISSERTATION (15,000-20,000 words)

Proposals Due: Friday 10th March Dissertation Due: Tuesday 1st August

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ma american literature 2016-17 handbook

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