This course seeks to prepare students for successful doctoral study in English literature. We will examine the history of our discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study and the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts. We will also consider issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. We will survey critical methodologies and consider what is at stake in the objects we read and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will reflect on challenges to the traditional organizing frameworks of humanism and national literature. Focusing on the academic discipline of literary study, we will also consider the new ways in which the English Ph.D. prepares students for multiple roles and careers both in and beyond academia.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM
