Summer 2012 Graduate Course Descriptions

AML 6938.001: US Latino/a Literatures and Theory
Professor Machado

The goal of this summer graduate course is to delve into a literary tradition of the multiethnic American canon: US Latino/a literature. We will be engaging different genres of 20th and 21st Century Latino/a cultural production, such as poetry, novels, short stories, and drama, as well as addressing the representation of Latinos/as in mainstream film. The class will also explore the dominant conceptual approaches within US Latino/a Studies, including psychoanalytic, political, feminist, and cultural studies theoretical frameworks. The reading list will therefore bring into dialogue creative writers and theorists from a variety of Latino/a backgrounds, including Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American and Dominican-American authors. The assignments for the course will be geared towards providing writing models and building research skills for graduate work in general and the project of the MA thesis more specifically. Students will be asked to research and write about the trends of literary criticism on a particular writer or theorist and to apply the dominant conceptual frameworks to the creative works of US Latino authors.

[This course counts within the area of specialization in the American Literature and the Multicultural and World Literature concentrations.]

ENL 5937: The Victorian Sensation Novel
Professor Buckton

Dead bodies, femmes fatale, sexual scandals, secret letters, railway crashes, bigamous marriages...the Sensation novel embodied many of the fears of the late Victorian age, while providing page-turning entertainment for a vast readership. Pioneered by Wilkie Collins—who coined the term "a novel with a secret" to describe his work—and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the Sensation novel stirred controversy by its depictions of independent, sexualized women and debased aristocrats, both of which defied the middle-class norms of respectability. Yet the Sensation novel had a vast influence on Victorian fiction, changing the course of the novel and being read and imitated by authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Recently, there has been a revival of critical interest in Sensation novels and the insights they offer into changing class, gender, and sexual roles in Victorian society. This course will cover several major landmarks of Sensation fiction, including Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret; and Ellen Wood's bestselling East Lynne

[This course counts within the area of specialization in British Literature concentration.]