Each student in the Literary and Cultural Studies concentration of the Master of Arts is required to take a minimum of 24 credit hours (72 units) of required and elective course work. One of two core courses, Literary and Cultural Studies I: Foundations and Directions, or Literary and Cultural Studies II: History, Text, Culture, is required Also required are five additional courses which pose contemporary critical questions with regard to either historical or modern texts (for example, Postcolonial Critics and Early Modern Texts, Women in Media, The Emergence of Consumer Capitalism, Victorian Realism). One of the five required courses may be taken in the Rhetoric program or elsewhere in the college. Some of the Literary and Cultural Studies courses offered are described below:

Literary and Cultural Studies I: Foundations and Directions

This course offers a theoretical genealogy of cultural studies. As a genealogy, the course does not assume that cultural studies has an essence or an origin. The texts and topics reflect the heterogeneity of its emergence and development, from the literary criticism of Arnold and Eliot to the post-colonial studies of Said and Spivak. The course embodies several historical changes in cultural studies, from idealism to materialism, from mono to multiculturalism, and from high culture exclusiveness to democratic inclusivity. The course is not designed to teach "approaches," but to explore and interrogate the founding assumptions of the academic project that you are being trained to join. Students should, by the end of the class, have a sense of where cultural studies came from and of the problems and possibilities raised by the theories it continues to invoke.

Literary and Cultural Studies II: History, Text, Culture

The purpose of this class is to introduce students to the triad: History, Text, Culture. The emphasis is on “history” as a term that has served as the basis for thinking of texts in larger cultural frames. On the one hand, in includes readings that focus on history as an analytic category or possibility condition of all acts of interpretation and cultural production. On the other, the class uses case studies in order to examine how particular works and artifacts have been treated by critics who integrate those works into a historical and cultural frame. Since the class deals with historicity, case studies are normally drawn from pre-twentieth-century periods, and will not be drawn from the contemporary (post-1950) era.

Advanced Seminar: The 18th Century-The Stage and the Page: Drama and the Novel during the Walpole Years

This course focuses on novels and plays produced during the year of Robert Walpole's prime ministry in England, 1720-1742. Two genres have been chosen because both are crucial to contemporary debates over political and literary authority at this time in British history. The theater constituted a highly public forum (increasingly under government censorship after 1737) for thinking about changing models of political power in the wake of the 17th century English Civil War and subsequent debates over monarchial succession. Concurrently, the rapidly expanding market for printed texts in the first half of the century created conditions in which literary authority was examined and reassessed. The question of who should rule the nation and on what grounds that rule is justified resonates with the question of who should write and why. The newly emergent form of the novel brought home to the individual reader questions of both political and literary authority. We will read the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, and plays by the latter as well as works like John Lillo's The London Merchant, Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband, and John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

This is a particularly interesting time in history. The middle-class Whig Prime Minister, Walpole, was a lightning rod for such debates over political and literary authority, with all of literary London enthusiastically engaged in supporting and/or taking pot shots at English monarchy and her powerful but controversial prime minister. Concurrently, the question of who has literary authority was hotly contested between the aristocratic Fielding, the printer/author Samuel Richardson, and the actor/theater manager in prose fiction. What values and social institutions authorize the author during this period? More importantly, how does the image of authorship that emerges during this historical period affect how we currently think about writing for a public audience?

Modernism/Postmodernism

In this course we will read a number of texts, modernist and postmodernist, that concentrate on the concept of time and its relationship to narrative, history, memory, and authority. In constructing their fictional worlds, canonical modernist novelists were profoundly affected by the ideas of Henri Bergson, Einstein, and Heisenberg. Accordingly, novels like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Proust's In Search of Lost Time foreground the distinction between the public time similar to that in postmodernity. We'll read four very recent novels that deal explicitly with time. As scheduling permits, we will also look at a film or two (Antonioni's BLOW-UP) and perhaps listen to some music.

An anthology of critical theory will introduce us to some of the major debates about modernism/postmodernism, among them the following: modernism as elitist/postmodernism as multiculturalist and popular; modernism as a last defense against capitalism/postmodernism as surrender to commodification; modernism as reconstructing time/postmodernism as reconfiguring space; and postmodernism as, merely, modernism made new again, recycled and renamed.

Genealogies of Knowledge

This seminar will look at different ways that people have attempted to account for the development, truth, and history of knowledge or disciplines. Perhaps the most familiar of these projects is epistemology, the philosophical attempt to guarantee the identity of knowledge and truth. We will begin with a brief and necessarily inadequate discussion of this project, and then move on to look at alternatives including the sociology of knowledge, social epistemology, Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy, social-constructivism, feminism, rhetoric, and cultural studies. While science, as the most socially powerful kind of knowledge, has most often been the object of knowledge studies, we will look at studies of a variety of disciplines. Among the theorists we are likely to read are Aronowitz, Bourdieu, Foucault, Fuller, Harding, Hoskin, Keller, Klein, Latour and Woolgar, Lenoir, McCloskey, Pickering, Scheibinger, Trauweek.