Graduate Progam Information:
Marnie Leonard (970) 491-2403 Marnie.Leonard@colostate.edu
Graduate Study
Master of Arts in Literature
Required Courses
E 600.1 Research Methods—Literature
This course, which is required for students earning an M.A. in literature, offers an intense immersion experience in the library and in on-line databases. By following trails blazed by your own curiosity and interests, you will grow proficient in advanced research techniques and become familiar with typical challenges, patterns, and rewards of this kind of intellectual exploration. You will learn about resources that are important to literary studies and experiment with various ways of formulating, broadening, narrowing, and developing research and writing projects. You will learn from class visitors about various jobs that may result from MA (and sometimes PhD) work. You will also take part in workshops on professional writing tasks like bibliographic annotations, proposals for conference papers and MA theses and projects, resumes and job application letters, and course proposals and syllabi.
The course is normally offered in the fall semester. We recommend that you take it in your first year, so that what you learn here can strengthen the work in the rest of your time here. If you take it in your second year, it will help you focus and begin your research for your thesis or final project.
E 615 Reading Literature: Recent Theories
This course is an introduction to contemporary literary and critical theory. Topics include recent and emerging varieties of feminism and gender theory, of Marxism and cultural materialism, of psychoanalysis, of deconstruction, of postcolonialism, and of new historicism and cultural studies. Such topics address, for example, literature's central function in shaping social identities of writers and readers.
E-615 prepares students to understand the study of literature (and cultural works generally) as a part of the larger study of language and culture from the perspectives of materialisms and antifoundationalisms ("materialist" and "antifoundationalist" approaches to language suggest that knowledges of whatever sort---of the arts, ethics, human nature, and any number of things---result from a particular history whose claims to universality are always open to critical scrutiny). The course theorizes language from within a largely European philosophical tradition that breaks in degree with approaches to language that cohere strictly with the human or social sciences. E-615 is thus important as a critical background to contemporary literary and cultural theory that understands the earlier work of figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, de Beauvoir, Fanon and others as the working foreground for critical inquiry today.
For information about course offerings and registration procedures for the upcoming semester or summer session, please view the Rambler, the Department's student newsletter.
This information is not intended to replace your advisor or the information in the CSU General Catalog, the Class Schedule, or the Department Checksheets.
Contact us: Attn: Stephanie Besser
- Through the mail at 1773 Campus Delivery, 359 Eddy Hall, Ft. Collins, CO
80523-1773. On the phone at (970) 491-2403.
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