Master of Arts in Literature Part-Time Program, Northwestern University School of Continuing Studies

Program Overview:

Literature

Through advanced literary study, students grapple with the thought and creative vision of the world’s most remarkable minds: rediscover and master classic texts while exploring exciting, contemporary works, diverse genres, and cutting-edge ideas in narrative form and interpretation. This broad and stimulating intellectual challenge improves the ability to analyze complex information, challenge assumptions, weigh competing considerations and reach effective conclusions. Graduates of the MALit program are well prepared for application to PhD programs and for success in diverse professional areas from advertising to law. Secondary-school teachers develop a competitive edge by deepening their subject-area knowledge — a key distinction between the MALit program and more general graduate programs in education. The MALit program recently hosted a lecture on the "Adventuresses: Women in Public, Vice and Art from 1893 World's Fair to the Jazz Age." — Read more.

Inside MALit

Bill Savage, PhD
MALit faculty member and distinguished senior lecturer in the Northwestern University English department. Savage teaches and conducts research in hermeneutics, 20th-century American fiction, popular culture, Chicago writers, and narratology. He co-edited the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm and Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated, and has written several essays about Algren for both mainstream and scholarly publications.

Program Goals

Exposes students to Northwestern University’s distinguished and world class instructors.
Provides students with countless opportunities to engage with others who are passionate to rediscover and master classic texts while exploring exciting, contemporary works, diverse genres and cutting-edge ideas in narrative form and interpretation.
Engages students in advanced literary study, which improves critical assessment and problem solving skills which translate to work, personal and intellectual life.
Sharpens analytical and writing abilities, which can help prepare students for application to PhD programs.

Areas of Specialization

Students who wish to lend more structure to their MALit experience can elect to complete a specialization in:

American Literature
British Literature
Comparative and World Literature
An individualized plan of study

A specialization may be especially beneficial to educators, students who are thinking of going on to a PhD program, or anyone who wants to focus their literary study more precisely. Students complete four thematically linked courses for a specialization.

Curriculum Requirements

Current students should refer to curriculum requirements in place at time of entry into the program.

Students must complete 9 courses to complete their Master of Arts in Literature degree. Students must complete 1 core course (LIT 410 Introduction to Graduate Study), 7 elective courses and a capstone project. Students can take elective courses that cover such topics as comparative literary studies, English, French and Italian, Slavic languages and literatures, and theatre.

Capstone Project

Students sign up for the final course in the program during the term in which they start their master's thesis. The capstone project for the MALit program is an essay of 45-75 double-spaced pages written under the supervision of an approved faculty member. The project presents an opportunity to research and explore a topic thoroughly. Students often elect to expand a seminar paper from a previous course. With the approval of the program director, students may create an interdisciplinary final project rather than a traditional thesis.

Core Courses:

LIT 410-0 Intro to Graduate Study
This course explores what it means to read literature and how to approach literary studies on a graduate level. We will examine the act of reading and literary interpretation, as well as ways of absorbing, producing, and documenting literary criticism. Selected works of fiction and poetry will provide us with the basis for different ways of approaching literary texts. The fiction represents European and American works of realism, modernism, and postmodernism in order to review the broad trajectory of Western literature. Examples of self-conscious narratives that stress the act of writing and play with readers' expectations will allow us to discuss important aspects of literary production and consumption.

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LIT 590-0 Thesis Research

This final project is meant to represent the culmination of students’ experience in the program and must demonstrate mastery of the curriculum and ability to conduct sustained independent research and analysis. The project may be applied or may be a traditional scholarly paper, in both cases a write-up following the paper’s program-specific guidelines is required. Students must submit a proposal and secure a first reader in order to register; for further details students are advised to review the student handbook and contact their academic advisor.

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Elective Courses:

LIT 405-0 Topics: 1890s British Lit
Many readers associate British literature of the 1890s with moral and aesthetic decadence, and the major literary output of the period confirms why. The most famous literary magazine of the period, The Yellow Book, set the tone with its devotion to naughty playfulness and rebellion. A great deal of the period's writing exhibits a not very subtle streak of transgressive writing and rejection of social and religious conformity, and it is fair to say that this attitude, glimpsed in a wide cross-section of poetry, novels, and plays, gives the whole period its glamor and frisson. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great Victorian novelists, ceased writing novels after critics lambasted Jude the Obscure (1895) as sexually immoral. William Butler Yeats began his career in the company of the Rhymers' Club, a group of aesthetes most of whose members are better remembered for their drug habits than their poetic output. Bram Stoker wrote his influential masterpiece, Dracula (1897), a melodramatic horror story that is equally paranoid about foreigners and that updated version of the succubus, the New Woman. Other writers, including George Gissing and George Bernard Shaw, dealt with the social unrest caused by the New Woman's challenge to reigning domestic hierarchies; Gissing's The Odd Women and Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession both appeared in 1893. And the man who towers over the decade like none other was of course Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the autobiographical De Profundis (written 1897; published 1905). Wilde's writings and life in many ways sum up a decade fraught with social and sexual upheaval; tried, found guilty, and imprisoned on charges of "gross indecency," Wilde was the man who ushered in a new age of truth-telling when he referred to "the love that dare not speak its name." Assignments for the course consist of one oral presentation; a prospectus and annotated bibliography; one long paper. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.

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LIT 405-0 Virtues/Vice - Renaissance Lit

The European Renaissance produced works of art and literature that are venerated as treasures of Western culture. Along with those artifacts, the Renaissance bequeathed ethical and moral priorities that continue to inform contemporary values. In analyzing a broad range of Renaissance texts--including poetry, drama, sermons, and paintings--this course will afford insight into Renaissance morality and its legacy. We will consider, in sequence, each of the seven deadly sins alongside each sin’s remediating virtue: pride/humility, envy/kindness, gluttony/temperance, lust/chastity, wrath/patience, greed/liberality, sloth/diligence. Authors/artists will include Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Skelton, Giotto, Lorenzetti, and Bruegel.

Counts toward the the British Literature specialization for MALit students.

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LIT 405-0 20th C Lit: Joyce and Woolf

In this seminar we will study two landmark novelists whose works still reverberate around the globe: the Irish expatriate James Joyce and the English writer and critic Virginia Woolf (each 1882-1941). Living and writing in a period of accelerating scientific, technological, social, political, and economic change as well as civil and world war, each created radically new narrative forms to register modern time and modern times from the antithetical vantage points, respectively, of colonial Dublin and the imperial London metropolis. Through a selection of each author’s major works, we’ll explore their creative interventions in literary genres (e.g., short story, autobiographical fiction, epic, elegy, the novel) in light of a host of influences; among others, theories of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life”; scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; relations among bodies, desire, gender, representational strategies; performance (studied and unconscious) and theatricality; loss and elegy; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life of comedy and humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as keys to political authority; the powers and pleasures of language in their modernist medleys of voices and styles: interior monologue, dialogue, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, non-English words, silence. We will approach these challenging, exhilarating, deeply rewarding books in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, each of us seeking singular revelations with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Requirements: Active, informed participation; short weekly analytic and interpretive exercises; oral presentation; proposal and seminar project.

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LIT 480-0 Liberty in Western Drama

Whether the idea of liberty is a universal constant or something conditioned by historical circumstances and whether or not it can arise in the context of traditionally authoritarian political structures is an important issue in the history of ideas. Are human beings at all times and places capable of conceiving the idea of liberty, or is this idea possible only in particular circumstances and not an intrinsic part of human nature? And if humans after all are capable of conceiving the idea of liberty at all times and places, how are the expression of this idea, its consequences and preconditions affected by changing historical, social, and political circumstances that may favor or even demand authority rather than liberty? What role does religion play in all these issues? And how can even tentative answers to these questions be of help in understanding our present day situation, in the kind of historical "location" where we now exist? As in the case of other issues, literary works can illuminate directly and indirectly important philosophical and political questions. The open-ended quality of literary works offers the opportunity to explore philosophical and political issues in less precise but also less restricted ways than philosophical and political treatises because literature by its very nature is more open to the interpretive imagination and can be related to many more aspects of human existence; and also because the study of artistic form can illuminate these issues, since form and content are not separable in the best literary works. Since drama is a particularly "social" form of literature, this colloquium will examine a number of dramatic works from different times and places in order to throw light on the questions of liberty and authority from a comparative literary and historical viewpoint. Among the plays read will be Sophocles' Antigone, Everyman, Shakespeare's Richard II, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream, and Addison's Cato. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.

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LIT 480-0 Feminism as Cultural Critique

As sci-fi, as manifesto, as memoir, and as eco-apocalypse and horror, second-wave feminism links domestic change and transformative utopia. We’ll read second-wave utopian novels, mostly from the 1970s and 80s, with short second-wave manifestos for context. We will ponder the following questions: How are the personal and the political connected? What challenges do these fictional worlds pose to our own? What critical methods or tools does this movement offer us? How do we evaluate second-wave utopian fiction as literary and/ or theoretical form?

We will also read several anti-utopian depictions, as well as some texts written outside of the US (Canada, France), and, if time permits, one contemporary dystopia. Tentative reading list includes: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (1969; French or English); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973); Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Octavia Butler, Lillith’s Brood [Dawn] (1987). Short texts: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political”; Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework”; Alix Kates Shuman, “Shulman’s Marriage Agreement”; Judy Syfers, “I Want a Wife”; Shere Hite, The Hite Report; Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation; Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will; Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto.

Counts toward the American literature specialization as well as the world and comparative literature specialization.

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Northwestern University SCHOOL OF CONTINUING STUDIES

Literature

Inside MALit

Demands of Writing in the MALit Program

Literary Criticism

Chicago Literature

Program Goals

Areas of Specialization

Curriculum Requirements

Capstone Project

Core Courses:

Elective Courses:

Literature

Graduate Options