Hold the degree of Licenciatura or B.A. in English or equivalent with an excellent academic record. Study of a classical or modern foreign language
Para qué te prepara
St. Louis University and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid offer the first Master?s degree in English recognized by both universities.
Engage students in a disciplined study of texts drawn from the full experience of English and American literature. Giving due recognition to the history of the English literary tradition as it has unfolded from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Dirigido a
The program is designed for holders of a B.A./Licenciatura in English or a related field, high school teachers, literary scholars and translators, and others who want to explore the masterpieces of literature in English.
The Master’s seminars are taught by European and American Ph.D. faculty from both institutions, providing a unique, international perspective on British, North American, and Anglophone literature.
The individualized course of study allows students to select ten graduate seminars from such areas as the traditional periods and genres of literature in English, literary theory, linguistics, the teaching of writing, and translation. Since enrollment is limited to twenty, students receive specialized attention in their study and research.
They also participate in an international community of writers and scholars who are invited to campus each year.
Two-year program (70 credit hours in the Spanish system, 30 in the American).
The program is accredited by the North Central Association (NCA).
Credits earned are also recognized as Formación Permanente del Profesorado (8º Apdo. de la Resolución de 27 de abril de 1997, B.O.E. de 25 de mayo).
II. Course Descriptions:
Graduate students may take up to two 400-level courses—which are offered during the day following the undergraduate calendar.
1. ENGL-500-M01 Methods of Literary Research
Staff.
Focuses on the aims and methods of literary research. The course introduces the practicalities of collecting material, weighing evidence, reaching conclusions, and writing scholarly articles. Critical articles are analyzed. The course includes an overview of methods of literary criticism as the theoretical background to literary research.
2. ENGL-501-M01 The Teaching of Writing
Anne McCabe, Ph.D. and Paul Rollinson, Ph.D.
Introduction to the practice of composition teaching and to its theoretical underpinnings. This course presents an overview of traditional and contemporary approaches to composition instruction in order to help novice and experienced teachers raise their awareness of the motives and purposes behind current practice. It includes analysis of the practical implications of the various approaches in terms of course design, classroom procedures, assignments, evaluation, and assessment. Concepts will be applied to writing instruction for both first and second language learners.
3. ENGL-511-M01 Introduction to Literary Theory
Staff.
An overview of major texts, concepts, and approaches of theoretical criticism, including current directions in literary studies. Topics considered include structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxist criticism, feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, queer studies, and cultural studies. This course provides basic terminology and critical practices; it enables students to read theory and write theoretically informed criticism.
4. ENGL-593-M01 Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis
Anne McCabe, Ph.D.
This course introduces participants to text and discourse analysis, focusing on a range of theories and models, including pragmatics, genre analysis, register analysis, speech act theory, and theories of relevance and politeness. This focus on how meaning is constructed through the wider textual, social, psychological, and cultural context of discourse will also be complemented by a unit on critical discourse analysis. Practical application will center on analysis of literary texts and their comparison to texts written for other types of contexts and purposes.
5. ENGL-599-M01 Master’s Thesis Research
Staff.
An opportunity to study material not offered in the regular course offerings and/or to pursue thesis research. Student should approach professor with a brief course proposal before the beginning of the semester in which s/he wishes to enroll. A student may count six credits of independent study toward the Master’s degree.
6. ENGL-615-M01 Prosody, Culture, and Politics
Georgia Johnston, Ph.D.
Prosody, Culture, and Politics is a class that has a technical base (learning how to scan meter, rhyme, sound variations) but an interpretive focus. We will be looking at British/North American prosody (the ways poetry is formed technically) as a reflection of cultural stability and cultural change. We will think about how prosody and politics connect, thinking through definitions of politics as they change through the centuries. In a general way, the class will proceed historically, starting with Wyatt, ending with Carson, but we will also occasionally swing back in time (to King Lear for example) in order to compare and contrast how prosodic elements remain the same or change. Throughout the course, we will be using critical and theoretical texts connecting with prosody and/or interpretation in order to stretch our interpretive faculties.
7. ENGL-639-M01 Discovery and Colonization in Renaissance Literature
To Be Announced.
This course will look at how the Spanish conquests of the Americas, the English conquest and settlement of Ireland, and the settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts figure in English Renaissance literature. We will pay attention to the way in which literary works and historical texts differentiate between these colonial contexts as well as to how Ireland was viewed by many English writers as a natural “jumping off” point into the New World. Works include More’s Utopia, Las Casas’ Una brevisima relación in the 1583 English trans. The Spanish Colonie, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter and Oroonoko.
8. ENGL-649-M01 Special Topics in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Elisabeth J. Heard, Ph.D.
After Shakespeare and before the Romantics, the writers during the Restoration and Eighteenth Century wrote about, worried about, and did it all—sex, science, slavery, religion, politics—no subject was too big, or too small, for them to tackle. The Restoration and Eighteenth Century was a time of bawdy plays, the emerging of the novel in English, and the beginning of England’s rise as a colonialist world power. Women were finding their voices in plays, poetry, novels and former slaves were as well. In this class, we will be reading a wide variety of texts from the Restoration and eighteenth century in an attempt to understand the complexities and changes that occurred during this 140 year period in England.
9. ENGL-653-M01 The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Britain
Paul Vita, Ph.D.
Studies in the genre and its transformations over the nineteenth century, with special attention to formal and generic developments, reading and writing as a social practice, the politics of class and empire, the representation of marriage and family life. Texts include works by Austen, Shelley, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, James, and others.
10. ENGL-660-M01 Gender and Literature during the British Inter-War Period, 1914-1939
Julia Salmerón, Ph.D.
World War II and its propaganda sharpened the gender divide in Britain, leading many writers to explore the theme of sexuality. This course studies the different treatments by men and women of grief and the elegy, the act of remembering the past, crime, fantasy and madness, and the classic romance narrative of love and marriage. Readings include works by Wilfred Owen, Jean Rhys, Emily Holmes Coleman, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Leonora Carrington.
11. ENGL-663-M01 Contemporary Anglo-American Drama
Antonia Rodríguez Gago, Ph.D.
A comparative study of the last two generations of playwrights in the United States and Great Britain. The course analyzes both the influence of the earlier generation (Pinter, Stoppard, Mamet, Shepard) on the later (Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Nzotake Shange, Suzan-Lori Park) and interesting relations between national traditions (e.g. Beckett and Albee). Particular attention is given to the uses of different theoretical perspectives in the interpretation of these plays.
12. ENGL-667-M01 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Esteban Pujals, Ph.D.
Study of the most significant stages in the radical transformation by twentieth-century U.S. poets of the methods and techniques constituting the art of poetry. The course focuses on texts that illustrate the profound nature of this transformation, involving a complete reconceptualization of language that happened in a surprisingly short period of time.
13. ENGL-669-M01 American Literature 1940-70
Anne Dewey, Ph.D.
An interdisciplinary area studies approach to the sometimes neglected period "between" classic modernism and the postmodernism of the 70s and 80s. We will explore how crucial events such as the Holocaust and atomic bomb, the Cold War, and the 60s protest movements (Civil Rights, Women's Movement, Gay Liberation) shape American literature and whether the theoretical terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" are useful for understanding the century's literature. Readings from nonfiction (sociology, philosophy, political literature) as well as fiction and poetry, including works by authors such as Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Alice Walker.
14. ENGL-674-M01 The Epic Tradition in the American Twentieth Century
Anne Dewey, Ph.D.
Does the epic tradition exist in modern and postmodern culture? How does the explosion of new forms in twentieth-century long poems reflect and challenge traditional epic representations of national identity? express their authors' conceptions of world order (or disorder)? To explore these questions, we will study various theories of epic as well as the historical context to which each poet responds. Authors to be studied include T. S. Eliot, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
15. ENGL-679-M01 Special Topics in Twentieth-Century American Literature:Narratives of Resistance - Asian-American Literature
Eulalia Piñero Gil, Ph.D.
In the last decades, the presence of Asian American literature on the cultural scene has contributed to the current debate concerning ethnicity and multiculturalism in the U.S. This course analyzes in what way(s) Asian American writers of prose, poetry, and drama (re)construct a common history of fissures, dispersion, diasporas, alienation and marginalized niches which need to be joined to redefine the complex negotiation of cultures. The course focuses on the discovery or creation of a new hybrid self and worldview, the construction of an ethnopoetics, the definition of an Asian American female identity and Asian American literature as theory.
16. ENGL-685-M01 Studies in Comparative Literature: African Americans in Europe – From Paris to Harlem
Stephen Casmier, Ph.D.
This course will explore the experience of African Americans in Europe through novels, essays and autobiography. The grade in this course will be based on several oral reports, one short paper (written version of the oral report) and a final research paper. The oral reports will be presentations and reactions to the readings, which will include one academic article. Students will be given guidelines for the research project. Students will also be expected to present the findings of their research throughout the semester.
17. ENGL-685-M02 Studies in Comparative Literature: Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature
Pilar Somacarrera, Ph.D.
Study of Canadian literature from the 1960s to the end of the century. The authors span the multicultural range characteristic of Canadian literature in its diverse genres—poetry, narrative, and drama—and include Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Tomson Highway, Michael Ondaatje and Robertson Davies.
18. ENGL-693-M01: A Cultural (Hi)story of the English Language(s)
Clara Molina, Ph.D.
An introduction to the cultural (hi)stor(i)es of the English language(s) through critical readings and discussions as well as the survey of selected texts against the relevant historical, cultural and literary background. The course aims at familiarizing the student with the complex crucible of crucial developments in the history of English and the processes leading to the emergence of a standard.
19. ENGL-693-M01 Ethnic American Literature: Writing Themselves into the Land
Fred Arroyo, Ph.D.
In this course we will explore why ethnic American writers tell and write valuable stories that remember communities, traditions, families, and generations in order to create continuation and change. Throughout our readings we’ll trace the relations among individuality, family, and society. Moreover, we’ll analyze the shape of culture: how ethnic American writers are shaping culture by "writing themselves into the land" of what American is and what it can become (Raymond Williams, "Culture is Ordinary"). We will read carefully, judiciously, so as not to conflate the particularity of individual experiences (Native American, African American, Latino, Asian American) into some formal or essential ideas of what "ethnic" and "American" mean. Instead, our intention will be to discover how ethnic and American are in tension, interrelated, and connected; how they are defining elements still in process and emerging; and how this process locates literary and social experiences we need to carry into the future. To this end, we will begin to acknowledge how far along we are in the story of what America is and what it can become. This course will serve as an introductory seminar to ethnic American literature, as well as an introduction to the various discourses that can help us to locate our textual practices theoretically and culturally.
20. ENGL-693-M01 European Modernism
Matthew Kineen, Ph.D.
Make it new” – the American expatriate Ezra Pound’s imperative to his contemporaries captures the energy and complexity of the cultural period known as “modernism.” Pound insisted, in the spirit of the age, that writers re-create the tradition, making literature something it had never been before. This modernist attitude emerged throughout Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, influencing the experimental and often radical work of various avant-garde writers and movements. This course examines several major authors in the context of European Modernism and focuses on coming to terms with the aesthetic, philosophical and cultural importance of their writing. Students will read primary texts and selected critical essays. The course requires thoughtful preparation of all assigned reading materials, one research presentation per student on a specific author or text, a series short writing assignments, and a final research paper.
