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The M.A. Program
This program of study is designed to give students
the opportunity to specialize in one of four areas of concentration
while requiring that they do approximately half of their course
work in other subject areas. The goal is to provide a broad overview
of the changing field of English studies and of the place that each
student's interest occupies within that field. The four concentrations
from which the students may choose are:
Literary Studies in English
Composition and Rhetoric
Creative Writing
Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific
Together, these four concentrations provide a rough
map of the terrain of contemporary English studies, and we therefore
begin the description of our M.A. program with a brief account of
their different aims and methods.
Literary Studies in English
Literary Studies in English includes all of the
department's graduate courses in periods, genres, and authors in
British and American literature, our offerings in literature in
English from other areas of the world, and our courses in language,
criticism, and theory. This wide range reflects the broadening of
the discipline that has taken place in the last twenty years and
the diversity of interests and scholarly commitments of both our
faculty and our students.
Because of the way in which the study of literature
has evolved, it is easier to describe some of its principal foci
than it is to identify its boundaries. One central concern is with
the reading and interpreting of texts. We usually think of literature
as a verbal medium, though it overlaps with such forms as dance
and film, and as primarily written, though it includes oral literature
as well. Since its object is verbal, the study of literature includes
a concern with language, both formally and historically, and with
the relationship between language and human social relationships
and institutions. The notion of a literary text presumes an aesthetic,
a tradition of form, and particular skills of reading, all of which
are culturally based, and which are themselves the proper objects
of our examination. Literary texts also shape and are shaped by
the contexts in which they arise, and can thus be examined with
relation to religion and philosophy, the sciences, the plastic,
visual, and musical arts, and political issues, social structures,
gender roles, and other ideological formations.
Each of these ways of viewing literature poses its
own challenges, and no single reading strategy will be equally appropriate
for all of the texts that claim our attention as "literary."
The courses that we offer engage with fundamental issues of literary
study while acknowledging the diversity of literary texts. The author,
period, and genre courses that make up the most traditional part
of our discipline remain the site for some of its most exciting
developments. Without neglecting the foundation provided by earlier
critics and scholars, we also address the ways in which recent theoretical
insights have changed how we read both well-studied and less familiar
texts. In addition, we offer a variety of courses that address formal,
political, linguistic and historical issues of particular relevance
to our location in Hawai'i and the Pacific, and also take up more
general debates in Asian American and post-colonial studies. Our
courses in language, film, performance, and oral literature consider
the methodologies of other disciplines that border on and contribute
to literary study.
With such a variety of texts and methods, no one
can expect to become an expert on everything that is included within
"literary studies" today. The department thus encourages
diversity and seeks to preserve an atmosphere that is congenial
for investigation and for debate. Both our course offerings and
the concentration requirements are designed so that M.A. students
will become familiar with a broader range of literary texts, will
deepen their understanding of the texts that interest them the most,
and will expand their familiarity with the scholarly tools and research
methods of our discipline so that they may actively participate
in the field's on-going critical and theoretical debates.
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to top Composition and Rhetoric
Specialists in composition and rhetoric study writers
and their writing--at home, in school (kindergarten through college,
across the disciplines), in the workplace, and in communities. They
examine the relationship among language, thought, and action. They
study historical and contemporary issues in literacy. They write
and teach writing, considering the ways in which literate behaviors
are nurtured and practiced. Generally speaking, they are interested
in the practical, in making as opposed to interpreting, in what
might be called a rhetoric of doing, or as Kenneth Burke wrote,
"language as symbolic action."
The fields of composition and rhetoric are interconnected.
Composition traces its roots to classical Greece and Rome, where
student-rhetors were taught to examine what we now call the rhetorical
situationthe contextual relationship among speakers, their audiences,
and their topicsas they prepared to present their cases in the legislature
or the court or to give effective speeches at ceremonial occasions.
Over the years, rhetoric's aims have ranged from the ideal ("the
art of influencing the soul through words," Plato) to the more
practical ("the study of misunderstanding and its remedies,"
I.A. Richards). In the medieval period, rhetoric, along with grammar
and logic, was the core of a liberal arts education. Today, scholars
are "reclaiming Rhetorica" and investigating how rhetoric's
concerns have manifested themselves in non-European societies. Rhetoric's
notions of agent and intention offer ways to address pressing problems
and to make intelligent choices, thus engaging with postmodernism's
questions about the autonomy and agency of individual writers.
When the focus of academic study changed from oral
to written texts during the last century, the field now known as
composition studies emerged. Composition itself enjoyed a resurgence
in the 1970s, when case studies of writers helped better explain
writing processes and rhetorical situations. It continues to flourish
in conjunction with the recent call for a new literacy that prepares
students to engage critically with work, politics, social criticism,
and consumer culture. As a preparation for teaching, students in
composition courses study writing processes (inventing, drafting,
revising, editing, and publishing), genres, styles, collaboration,
response, assessment, and computers and the electronic media. To
learn more about writers and writing, they conduct both rhetorical
and empirical research--the former employing such approaches as
historical and critical analysis and the latter such approaches
as case studies and ethnographies.
Composition and rhetoric and have become increasingly
important to English departments and the academy in general as critical
methods have shifted to focus on language and its effects, and on
the interpretation of diverse texts within rhetorical and social
contexts. For example, scholars in literary studies use literary
rhetoric to examine the strategies of argument that authors weave
into imaginative works to confront literary, political, and social
issues. Composition and rhetoric specialists who study discourse
communities have been leaders in shaping writing-across-the-curriculum
programs in many schools, colleges, and universities, thus shaping
curriculum reform. This interest in curriculum extends to grades
kindergarten through 12; typically, specialists maintain close links
with teachers in those grades.
With its ethnic diversity, Hawai'i offers a productive
site for composition and rhetorical studies. For example, the subject
of language variation and its relationship to cultural diversity
introduces issues of class, age, race, ethnicity, and gender, thus
raising complex political and ethical questions. These issues, in
addition to those discussed above, invite exploration through the
M.A. project, the culmination of study in the program.
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Creative Writing
The Creative Writing concentration enables writers
to practice their art with the intelligence and skill that the study
of literature from a writer's point of view instills. This concentration
differs from the others in the Graduate Program in that students
are selected for their talent and their dedication to the craft
of writing. Faculty on the M.A. level, the Creative Writing faculty;
on the Ph.D. level, the Graduate Program Committee make these judgments
on the basis of manuscripts submitted by the applicants. The University
of Hawai'i confers the degrees of Master of Arts with a concentration
in Creative Writing out of the conviction that disciplined attention
to writing produces good writing and good teachers of writing. The
faculty is composed of writers who have published in different genres
prose fiction, poetry, the essay, creative non-fiction, the novel
and who range through science fiction, magical realism, autobiography,
nature writing, sudden fiction, language poetry, and the new formalism.
Instruction is grounded in writing workshops or
seminars which meet weekly and to which students bring poems, stories,
essays for criticism by their teacher and their writing peers. The
assumption underlying these workshops, begun at the University of
Iowa in the late thirties the first program in creative writing
at an American university is that writing benefits from the responses
of other writers. Biographies, the letters of writers, anecdote,
literary history tell us that Elizabethan sonneteers, for example,
circulated their sonnets to other poets presumably not only for
admiration but also for tough critique, that Hemingway sent his
first drafts to Gertrude Stein: Emily Dickinson to fellow poet and
editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson "Are you too deeply occupied
to say if my verse is alive?" Writers have always found someone
similarly driven by the craft to show their work to before embarking
on publication. The concentration in creative writing aims to provide
apprentice writers such a community.
In addition to writing workshops, there are seminars
in how to put a book together, in writing in Hawai'ian Creole English,
in the techniques of writing. Such techniques might include surrealism,
or a process such as moving from the blank page through the draft
to the completed work, or in writing imaginatively about scientific
subjects, the combined theory and practice of studying prosody and
writing formal poems. Students of creative writing also take courses
in literature and work individually with writers on the faculty
in directed reading and writing tutorials. They are also encouraged
to take into account both practically and theoretically the exceptional
situation of writing in Hawai'i. If Hawai'i is the place farther
from any land mass on earth, it is also a place where the difference
of cultures is immediate and close. Out of such differences of language,
ethnicity, race should come, as it is coming, extraordinary writing.
And there are journals here Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, Hawai'i Review,
Tinfish, Rainbird, Kaimana, Hawaii Pacific Review, Biography
that our students are encouraged to read and submit work to. They
are also urged to attend and to participate in the many readings,
colloquia, and conferences, local, national, and international in
our midst.
We require that our students write a thesis which
is a book-length collection of their writing so revised and finely
crafted that it is on the verge of publication. The writer who graduates
from our program should be, in the words of Henry James, "one
of the people on whom nothing is lost," one "with the
power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication
of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition
of feeling life in general so completely that they are well on the
way to knowing any particular corner of it."
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to top Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific
Since one of the hallmarks of cultural studies is
its concern with location and its commitment to situated scholarship,
the Concentration in Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific focuses upon
Asia/Pacific as a place of cultural struggle, discursive contestation,
and literary creativity. Thus this concentration will offer courses
that account for our distinctive history and location in Hawai'ithat
is to say, cultural studies that are situated simultaneously among
the United States and the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia. From
our location in Hawai'i, we will attend to the mixtures, contradictions,
and overlapping of histories and trajectories that comprise the
term "Asia/Pacific" as site of identity and location.
While some courses will concentrate exclusively on Asia/Pacific,
other classes will provide students with an historical context for
Western representations of Hawai'i and the greater Pacific region.
Courses also may consider the long tradition of orientalist and
other colonialist discourses against which many writers, filmmakers,
critics, and others position their work. In this concentration,
we will work to understand "location" in its fullest historical
and cultural sense.
Because a cultural studies approach is often explicitly
politicaleither in the sense that it engages marxist thought and
elaborates its ongoing questions, or in the sense that it recognizes
that "culture" inevitably has a political dimensiona concern
with power, its causes and effects, is integral to most cultural
studies analyses. Therefore, this concentration includes courses
that centrally engage theories of minority discourse, race and ethnicity,
pedagogy, nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, popular
culture, gender, and sexuality. The attention in cultural studies
to power relationsand to the interrelations between theory and practicemeans
that cultural studies scholars often reflect upon the purposes and
scope of cultural studies, and ask questions about and attempt to
pose challenges to its institutionalization in the academy. Courses
in the concentration, then, will engage debates about the ways cultural
studies is being practicedin this department, and in other institutions
and locations as well. Some courses also might allow students the
opportunity to initiate, or think and write about ways to initiate,
cultural studies projects that are activist in scope and purpose,
that move beyond the realm of the strictly academic.
Cultural studies courses will often emphasize texts
that have not traditionally been considered within the domain of
the literary: letters, court documents, oral histories, official
forms, diaries, travel narratives, music videos, and TV commercials,
as well as non-verbal "texts" such as portraits, ads,
maps, and murals. Given the range of materials and approaches cultural
studies encompasses, this work transgresses disciplinary boundaries:
a cultural studies approach both recognizes the boundaries to the
various domains of knowledge and moves across them. In fact, in
its crossings of disciplines, at times it can be described more
aptly as anti-disciplinary than inter-disciplinary. A cultural studies
approach is open to the full array of a culture's signifying practices.
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M.A. Program Requirements
The M.A. in English requires 33 credit hours of
course work towards the degree, at least 27 of which must be at
the 600 level or higher. In other words, students may count no more
than 6 credits of 400-level courses towards their degree. Students
in English must also meet the Graduate Division's residency requirement
of at least two semesters of full-time work or the equivalent in
credit hours.
Students who choose the Creative Writing concentration
are required to write a thesis and hence to do what is known at
the University of Hawai‘i as a "Plan A" master's
degree. They are asked to complete 6 credit hours of thesis work,
12 credit hours in Creative Writing courses, and 15 credit hours
outside of that concentration. Students in all other concentra-tions
write an M.A. project instead and do a "Plan B" master's
degree, to which they apply 3 credit hours of work on their Master's
project. They take at least 12 credit hours of work within their
concentration, 15 credit hours outside of it, and an additional
3 credit hours which can be applied to work either within or outside
of their concentra-tion. Students in Literary Studies in English
are exempt from the requirement that they do course work outside
of their concentration.
All students take English 620, "The Profession
of English," in their first semes-ter. This course includes
an introduction to the four concentrations provided by members of
the faculty associated with those different areas. Students are
required to select a concentration by the end of their first term,
and in their second semester, to take one of the four courses taught
under English 625, "Theories and Methods." These courses
provide the theoretical foundations for further study in the student's
concentration.
All M.A. candidates must also meet the foreign language
requirement, the English language requirement, and the pre-1900/pre-1700
requirement.
Program Requirements for Plan B Students
(C&R, CSAP, and LSE)
Course work in concentration:
4 courses, including 625 B, C, or E = 12 credit
hours
M.A. Project (English 691) = 3 credit hours
= 15 credit hours
Other course work:
English 620 = 3 credit hours
4 courses outside concentration = 12 credit hours
1 more course in or out of concentration = 3 credit
hours
= 18 credit hours
Total course work = 33 credit hours
Composition and Rhetoric students
are required to take four specific courses to meet the requirements
within their concentration: English 625C, 605, 705 and 709.
Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific students
are required to devote 3 credit hours to the study of Hawai‘i’s
local literature, Asian American literature, or Pacific literature.
They are allowed to meet 3 credit hours of work in their concentra-tion
with a course outside of the English Department with the permission
of their concentration advisor.
Literary Studies in English students
are not required to take four courses outside of that concentration.
Though they may do so, external work is not required as it is in
the other areas because the scope of the field of literary studies
is so broad. Those in this concentration are also required to take
a course before 1700 rather than before 1900.
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The M.A. Project
Plan B students are required to complete an M.A.
Project which has both written and oral components. Students devote
3 credit hours to the project in their last semester by registering
for English 691. Full-time students may also register for an optional
2 credit hours of 699 for the oral component of the exam. These
two credits do not count towards the 33 credits required for the
degree.
For the project, students may either undertake a
new piece of writing or choose to revise and develop a course paper.
The essay should be a finished piece of work of substantial length
(approximately 25-50 pages) demonstrating an ability to synthesize
and make profitable use of the material or the theoretical perspec-tives
of more than a single course. This work should engage scholarly
concerns within the discipline and, in particular, the debates within
their chosen concentration. Likelihood for publication will not
be the criterion for judgment of the essay; however, members of
the M.A. project committee may encourage the author to revise it
for publication or for submission as a writing sample in application
for a Ph.D. program, and they may suggest appropriate strategies
for doing so.
During the oral component of the project, which
is 90 minutes long, students should be prepared to discuss their
essay and to answer questions concerning the critical discourses
and literary traditions or conventions engaged, their method-ological
choices, and the sources cited. In assessing this work, the committee
will consider both the essay and the oral portion of the project,
with greater emphasis being placed on the written component. If
the committee finds the work unacceptable, the M.A. project committee
will inform the student about what sections of the essay, if any,
must be revised and/or whether the student will need to retake the
oral portion of the exam. The project will be graded Credit/No credit,
with "Credit" being understood to be equivalent to a B
or better in graduate level work.
The M.A. project committee consists of three members,
at least two of whom are identified with the appropriate concentration.
The student may invite a faculty member to serve as chair and, if
he or she consents, the student and the chair will propose two other
members to serve on the committee. These members must be approved
by the graduate director, who will consider both their appropriateness
to the project and the number of other project committees to which
those faculty are already assigned.
Typical Timetable for Full-time Students
First Semester
English 620, "The Profession of English"
2 additional courses
Second Semester
English 625 B, C or E, "Theories and Methods" in the
student's selected area of concentration
2 additional courses
Third Semester
3 courses
Fourth Semester
1 course and 3 credits hours of English 691 on M.A. Project
Optional 2 credits for oral component of M.A. Project
Program Requirements for Plan A Students (Creative
Writing)
Students who wish to work in Creative Writing are
admitted by the creative writing faculty during the regular admissions
process or late in their first semester in the program after submitting
a writing sample to the Director of Creative Writing. Those students
admitted to the concentra-tion in Creative Writing do a Plan A master's
degree that includes a thesis for which the student receives 6 credits
of English 700.
Course work in concentration:
4 courses, including English 625D = 12 credit hours
M.A. Thesis (English 700) = 6 credit hours
= 18 credit hours
Other course work:
English 620 = 3 credit hours
4 courses outside concentration = 12 credit hours
= 15 credit hours
Total course work = 33 credit hours
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The M.A. Thesis
If possible, students in Creative Writing should
develop ideas for a thesis and identify one or more faculty members
in the department with whom they would like to work sometime during
their first year of graduate work. Students receive six credits
of English 700 for their thesis. They may take all six credits during
their final semester, or three credits each semester during their
final year. English 700 can only be taken by students who have already
formed a thesis committee. Students in their second to last semester
who do not yet have a committee but who wish to spread their work
over two semesters may register for three credits of English 699
with the faculty member whom they expect to have as their committee
chair, and these credits can be converted to English 700 upon the
completion of the thesis. Students must have their committee formed
and their topic approved before they register for their final semester,
when they are required to be enrolled in English 700.
Human Subjects: Students doing research
for an M.A. thesis or Ph.D. dissertation that involves the use of
human subjects, including the use of interviews, pictures, or surveys
of living persons, must report their plans for research to the Committee
on Human Studies (CHS) prior to the involvement of human subjects
in the research project. This Committee is mandated to insure ethical
treatment of the human subjects of research. Most research in our
department will be “exempt” from full review by the Committee,
but it must still be reviewed and approved. To receive “exempt”
status, researchers must report their research using a form called
the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects—University
of Hawai‘i—Declaration of Exemption. Categories for exemption
include “educational practices,” “educational tests,”
“surveying or interviewing,” “public observations,”
“public officials,” and “existing data.” Note
that research on “minor children,” i.e., those under eighteen,
may not be exempt. Filling out this form at the beginning of any
research for a thesis or dissertation is essential. Later applications
may be refused and the CHS has the power to disallow unapproved
research and forbid its use in the thesis or dissertation. You may
get copies of the application for an exemption from the Graduate
Program Office in Kuykendall 416 or from the CHS office in Spalding
252. Also, you may consult the CHS website at http://www.hawaii.edu/irb/.
The CHS Compliance Officer, Mr. William H. Dendle, may be reached
at 539-3945; his e-mail is dendle@hawaii.edu.
All students planning research involving human subjects should consult
Mr. Dendle at the beginning of their project.
The thesis committee consists of three graduate
faculty members, at least one of whom must teach courses outside
of creative writing, and must be approved by both the Director of
the Creative Writing Program and the Graduate Director. The thesis
should be a manuscript of acceptable length and quality, ordinarily
75 pages or more of prose or 50 or more pages of poetry. Upon completion
of the thesis, students are required to defend it orally before
their thesis committee. This defense will include a discussion of
at least three significant writers in the genre of the student's
thesis and on significant issues concerning the genre, all selected
in consultation with the committee well beforehand. Full-time students
may register for an optional 2 credits of 699 for the preparation
of their oral defense during their final semester. These two credits
do not count towards the 33 required for the degree.
Students are advised that the university deadlines
for completion of the thesis and the defense usually occur about
four weeks before the end of each semester. Those planning to graduate
should consult the Graduate Program Secretary for these deadlines
in the semester before the one in which they hope to receive their
degrees.
Typical Timetable for Full-time Students:
First Semester
English 620, "The Profession of English"
2 additional courses
Second Semester
English 625D, "Foundations of Creative Writing"
2 additional courses
Third Semester
3 courses or
2 courses and 3 credit hours of English 699/700
on Thesis
Fourth Semester
6 credit hours of English 700 on M.A. Thesis or
1 course and 3 credits hours of English 700 on
Thesis
Optional 2 credits of 699 for preparation of oral
defense
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Other Program Requirements for All M.A. Students
Foreign Language Requirement: Proficiency
in a foreign language is required of all students whose native language
is English. This requirement can be met in one of three ways:
1. Foreign Language 202 or its equivalent (at the
intermediate level of study) in which the student receives a grade
of A or B. Students may count their B.A. work in a foreign language
towards meeting this requirement.
2. A 300 or 400-level course in the foreign language
which is taught in that language in which the student receives a
grade of C or better.
3. A reading proficiency examination administered
by the appropriate university department. Exams are given three
times per year. Students must sign up to take the exam in the Graduate
Records Office, Spalding Hall 352, by the posted deadline.
Native speakers of a language other than English
will be considered to have fulfilled the foreign language requirement.
English Language Requirement: Upon
entrance to the M.A. program, all students are expected to have
taken an advanced course focusing on language as a subject of study.
Our own courses in the History of the English Language (402), Modern
English Grammar (403), English in Hawai‘i (404), Old English
(601), and courses equivalent to these at other institutions may
satisfy this requirement, as may courses from other language and
literature departments (at this university and elsewhere), upon
approval of the Graduate Director.
If the student does not have such a course upon
entering the program, he or she may satisfy the deficiency by taking
an appropriate undergraduate course in addition to the 33 credit
hours required for the M.A., or by taking an appropriate graduate
course which will count towards the M.A. but which may not also
be used to fulfill the pre-1700/pre-1900 course requirement.
Pre-1900 Course Requirement: Students
who choose the Creative Writing, Composition and Rhetoric, or Cultural
Studies in Asia/Pacific concentrations must take at least one graduate
course that covers materials (texts, documents, events) that were
written or occurred before the twentieth century. When there is
a compelling justification, the Graduate Director may approve the
use of a 400-level course to meet this requirement.
Pre-1700 Course Requirement for Those in Literary
Studies in English: Students who select the Literary Studies
in English concentration must take a graduate course that covers
materials (texts, documents, events) that were written or occurred
before the eighteenth century. When there is a compelling justification,
the Graduate Director may approve the use of a 400-level course
to meet this requirement.
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