ENG 700: Introduction to Graduate Literary Studies

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August 29: Introduction

Choose research topics.

Toni Morrison obituary

The 1619 Project

HW: Letter to the Professor

September 12: CLose reading—Poetry & Scansion

Poetry Packet (here)

Leaves of Grass

For Better or for Verse: https://prosody.lib.virginia.edu

SEptember 13 (Friday): Morgan Library trip

Free Fridays at The Morgan Library: Walt Whitman Exhibit

See also The Walt Whitman Initiative online

The Morgan Library: 225 Madison Avenue between 36th and 37th Streets

(4 train to 42nd Street or 6 train to 33rd Street)

september 19: close reading

Study poetic devices and scansion terms from last week.

Please bring back all the poems from last week’s packet and get through all of Leaves of Grass so we can finish up our poetry unit.

Field Report due. (This counts as a weekly response)

Read Frankenstein, Volume 1. Select a passage you’d like to focus on. We will close read this together in class.

Extra readings for those interested:

  1. Stanley Fish, "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" (here)

  2. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" (here)

  3. Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (here)

September 26: Critical sources

Read Frankenstein, Volume 2. Be sure you bring the Longman Culture Edition (edited by Susan Wolfson) to class.

Class activity: Frankenstein Historical Contexts

October 3: leonard lief library

Class meets at the entrance of Leonard Lief Library. Please be sure to bring your Lehman ID for entry.

Start preliminary research on your presentation topic. Map out several critical sources to procure during the library session. Topics are linked here.

Please read through the foreword, introduction, and first chapter of Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction for background.

Library session: database research, abstracts, book reviews, annotated bibliographies, critical editions, companions, collections, anthologies, scholarly articles

HW: (1) Finish Frankenstein. (2) Search, download, print, and annotate the following article: Buurma and Heffernan, “The Classroom in the Canon: T. S. Eliot’s Modern English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The Sacred Wood” PMLA 133, no. 2 (Mar 2018): 264-281.

October 10: how to read a scholarly article

Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan, “The Classroom in the Canon: T. S. Eliot’s Modern English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The Sacred Wood” PMLA 133, no. 2 (March 2018): 264–281.

Search, download, print, and annotate. (Article also linked here.)

Work on your Annotated Bibliography.

october 17: how to read a scholarly book

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)

Read Chapters 1-4

October 31: Critical Race Theory research

Annotated Bibliographies due based on your hours(!) of database research and reading.

Send in your reading selections and PDFs for your class presentation by Friday 10 pm.

Link to Cecil Taylor Celebration program

Directed Readings & Critical Race Theory presentations begin.

Read your compiled annotated bibliographies here!

November 7: Black optimism (IAN)

We will take the beginning of class time to create the rest of the syllabus for this unit! Please read Hartman and Moten (below) for this session.

Fred Moten,“the salve trade”; “Black Op”; “The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a Criminal One”; Shapiro, book review of Black and Blur

*Found poems & blackout poems inspired by Fred Moten & Black Op

november 28: no class—thanksgiving

Final Paper due via email December 18.

Please send it as an attachment in PDF or Word format, not a link to a Google Doc or Outlook One Drive file.