*English 293:  Exploring Careers in English.  2 credits.
Dr. Dabney Bankert
Tues. 5:00-7:00, Keezell G8
*Please note:  While this course is not officially open to graduate students, with instructor permission, graduate students may audit the entire course or selected portions of it.  Syllabus with detailed schedule will be posted in late summer.  For Description see undergraduate course offerings under English 293.

English 599:  Bibliography and Methods of Research
Dr. Dabney Bankert
M 6:00-8:45 pm, Keezell 307
Description:  Advanced Training in the use of scholarly materials, procedures and techniques, including scholarly writing and computer-based library and research technology, for graduate-level work.  (Required for all Master of Arts students in their first semester).  English 599 is an introduction to graduate studies in English, specifically to bibliographic research and methods, to academic writing, and to the various categories of scholarship in which literary scholars engage.  It is also an introduction to graduate school and to the fundamental and important distinctions between undergraduate- and graduate-level scholarly research and writing.  These distinctions are rather sharper than might feel initially comfortable, but intellectual progress is rarely comfortable and a certain sense of dislocation is inevitable.  Resist panic by accepting that these feelings are endemic to graduate study.  You will learn how to do research on a number of levels, how to locate and assess research sources for various types of scholarly problems, how to develop and refine such problems; in short, how to ask good questions and how to go about answering them productively, rigorously, and eloquently.   The course is designed to provide the tools essential to progressing in content courses.

English 508:  History of Literary Criticism (cross-listed with English 425)
Dr. Mark Facknitz
Tues. 7:00-9:30, Keezell 107
Description:  historical survey of critical and aesthetic principles from
Plato and Aristotle to the early 20th century, with special
emphasis on neo-classicism, romanticism, aestheticism, and
modernism.

English 510:  The Brontës (cross-listed with English 410)
Dr. Annette Federico
M/W 5:00-6:30, Keezell G3
Description:  In this course we will read Brontë fiction, poetry, and some juvenilia, and also explore the afterlife of the "Brontë myth"  in film, drama, and literature.
--Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth
--Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
--Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, Jane Eyre, and Villette
--Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights and poetry
--Polly Teale, Jane Eyre (this play will be staged in November by JMU theatre majors, directpr Roger Hall)
--Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
--Maryse Conde, Windward Heights

English 510:  Herman Melville (cross-listed with English 410)
Dr. Joan Frederick
M/W/F 12:20-1:10, Keezell 107
Description:

English 512:  European Romanticism (cross-listed with English 430)
Dr. Katey Castellano
W 7:00-9:30 pm, Keezell 310
Description:  This course will analyze and compare French, German, and British Romantic texts.  All texts will be taught in English translation, and readings will be supplemented with articles about Romanticism as an aesthetic and political phenomenon.   Readings may include:

--Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust
--Schiller, The Robbers
--Heine, Songs of Love and Grief  
--Holderlin, Hymns to the Night
--Hoffmann, Kleist, and Eichendorff’s short stories and fairy tales
--Rousseau, Reveries of Solitary Walker
--Chateaubriand, Atala and René
--George Sand, Indiana
--Wollstonecraft, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Women
--DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

*This class is intended for students with some familiarity with British Romanticism.* 

English 512E:  English Linguistics (section 2) (cross-listed with English 418)
Dr. Sharon Cote
Description:  Language is an essential part of who we are as human beings. It has been described as a biological imperative, as a communicative tool, and as an art. We all have very extensive and subtle language skills and, indeed, we all have opinions about what is good or bad language. Few of us, however, really understand what language is. This course is a broad survey of the theoretical, the historical, the psychological, and the sociocultural issues related to human language in general and English in particular. Objectives for this course include the following: for students to become aware of how important language is to understanding human cognition, behavior and society; for students to learn that knowing the "structure" or grammar of a language requires much more than just knowing a set of rules for good and bad sentences and to understand that the study of language is more than just the study of grammar; for students to recognize some general types of variation in different human languages; for students to recognize syntax, semantics, phonetics, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and other subfields of linguistics and to understand basic concepts and issues in these subfields; for students to gain some perpective both on how much has been learned about language and on how many more questions there still are to be answered; for students to be able to apply general linguistic concepts and vocabulary to particular examples and to related fields of research; and for students to have gained a novice ability to read additional linguistic sources and apply the information in these sources to language as they find it in the real world.

English 512E:  Traditional Grammar (section 3) (cross-listed with English 421)
Dr. Sharon Cote
Description: In this course, we will explore the shapes that English sentences may take and learn the traditional rules for building and identifying those shapes. In other words, we will work on developing the kind of conscious understanding of the structure of our language that permits us to edit and analyze our own grammar and the grammar of others. In doing so, we'll focus on lexical and syntactic structures with some attention to semantic and cultural issues that affect these structures. While the course focuses on understanding how English grammar works rather than on memorizing a large number of unexplained prescriptive rules for "proper" English, we will, in fact, discuss a number of prescriptive issues as we study the relevant aspects of English grammar. We will also practice using our knowledge of grammar to identify syntactic paraphrases and to remold ungrammatical or awkward sentences into acceptable or more elegant new shapes.

English 582:  Narrative Form (cross-listed with English 483)
Prof. Inman Majors
W 1:25-3:00, Location TBA
By instructor permission only
Description: 

English 630:  Studies in 17th Century Literature
Dr. Bruce Johnson
Tues. 7:00-9:30, Keezell 310
The class is a broad look at the many tumultuous cross-currents in the literature of the 17th century in Britain. The readings will give you an idea of the breadth of the study and the many genres involved and the host of difficult questions provoked by this most modern and yet estranged period of literature.

Overview of the Semester’s Reading
Seventeenth-century literary genres: emblems, diaries, characters, histories, aphorisms, essays, women’s defense, mother’s advice, court satire, ballads, songs, poems, plays, masques, political tracts and pamphlets, classical translations, psalm translations, meditations, scientific treatises, fictional prose narratives

English 658:  Studies in Southern Literature
Dr. Jean Cash
T/T 3:30-4:45, Keezell 307
Description: The Fall 2007course will focus on fiction and nonfiction by Southern Writers from the Southern Literary Renaissance forward.  We will read nonfiction from Faulkner, O’Connor, Styron, Percy, Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Chris Offutt, and Silas House as well as at least one novel by each.  We will explore correlations between writing about writing and writing fiction.

English 666:  American Drama
Dr. Matthew Rebhorn
W 5:00-7:30, Location TBA
Description:  This course offers students an introduction to and a intensive reflection on the shape of American Drama from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its most contemporary iterations.  To help guide the investigation, this course will be attending to three major genres—melodrama, realism and naturalism, and postmodernism—and to the ways these generic markers have been deployed and interrogated to make sense of issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationalism. For this reason, this course will not only tend to major works by dramatists like Boucicault, T.D. Rice, Stone, O’Neill, Miller, Albee, Kushner, Hwang, Parks, and Deveare Smith and more, but will also take up the critical perspectives offered by theorists like Brooks, Sollors, Savran, Brecht, Esslin, Worthen, Marinetti, Bentley, and others.  By highlighting the performative issues that drive American drama, this course will ultimately reveal the ways that the performance of American drama always highlights what is means for that drama—its authors, its producers, and its audiences—to be called “American.”

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

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

English 700.  Thesis.  6 credits.
Required for Master of Arts candidates in the creative writing concentration;  optional for others.  Students who write a thesis must register for 3 credit hours each of their final two semesters in the program, typically fall and spring of their second year.  This course is graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) basis.