Literature, PhD

Share in the poet's search for wisdom.

The University of Dallas grants all PhDs through the Institute of Philosophic Studies. The philosophic character of literary study within the Institute is reflected in a concentration upon major authors whose works can claim philosophic scope and penetration. Students inquire into the issues treated by great writers, considering the literary treatment as one voice in a conversation in which philosophers, theologians and political thinkers also participate. 

Enter into the Western tradition. 

The poet seeks to supplant opinion with knowledge by constructing a coherent vision of reality; philosophers seek the same end through dialectic. The aim of study therefore is to share in the poet's wisdom concerning a reality already constituted before imagination sets to work on it, but imperfectly irreducible to other modes of knowledge. The poetic vision of reality cannot easily be translated into other kinds of knowledge, yet is best studied in their company, because it explores the same reality.

Institute students join teachers dedicated to grasping how, and what, verse can teach us about reality.

Students learn to apprehend the form of literary art by attending to the qualities of poetic speech and by studying the kinds of poetry. They investigate such constants of the art as myth, symbol, analogy and figure, image, prosody, and style. In the process they come to appreciate the notable congruence of particularity with generality that characterizes the poetic mode of being and that has led thinkers to define a poem as a "concrete universal."

The kinds of poetry, the perennial genres, need not be taken as prescriptions arbitrarily imposed, for they can be understood as the natural shapes literature displays when it envisions different human actions.

Neither the constants of poetic speech nor the continuities of genre sufficiently specify the particular purchase upon human issues offered by any great poem. To bring this meaning into sharper resolution requires the final act of literary understanding, interpretation of individual poems, an undertaking in which the comparison of poem with poem has its instructive part.

Critical interpretation entails the most careful and sustained attentiveness to elucidating meaning and culminates in critical judgment of the contribution of that meaning to one's grasp of the truth.

The interpretive dimension of the program is reflected in courses that find their formal object sometimes in a genre (Epic, Lyric, Tragedy/Comedy, Menippean Satire or Russian Novel), sometimes in a literary movement (Renaissance Drama, Romantic/Victorian Literature, Augustan Literature, American Literature, Southern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature), sometimes in major authors (Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville, or James).

Students confront the claims of classical, Christian, and modern poets. They thereby enter into the issues that cause the Western tradition to be a tradition of controversies.

 

Related Programs

The Institute of Philosophic Studies offers three doctoral concentrations: literature, philosophy and politics.

Man reading Plato's Republic

Philosophy

Students discussing

Politics

English Department Faculty

Debra Romanick Baldwin, Ph.D.

Debra Romanick Baldwin Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Chair, English Department

Phone: (972) 721-4051

Email: dbaldwin@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #364

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Sarah Berry Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Literature

Phone: (972) 721-5246

Email: sberry@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #120

Brett Bourbon, Ph.D.

Brett Bourbon Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English

Phone: (972) 265-5829

Email: bourbon@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #368

David Davies, Ph.D.

David Davies Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Classics, English

Phone: (972) 721-5213

Email: davies@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff Graduate Building #366

Kathryn Davis, Ph.D.

Kathryn Davis Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English

Phone: (972) 265-5845

Email: kedavis@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff Graduate Building #362

Robert Scott Dupree, Ph.D.

Robert Dupree (Scott) Ph.D.

Professor, English

Phone: (972) 721-5311

Email: rdupree@udallas.edu

Office: Catherine Hall #225

Eileen Gregory, Ph.D.

Eileen Gregory Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor Emerita, English

Fr. Robert Maguire, O.Cist.

Fr. Robert Maguire O.Cist.

Affiliated Assistant Professor, English

Phone: (972) 721-5343

Email: bluehawk@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #318

Andrew Moran, Ph.D.

Andrew Moran Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English

Phone: (972) 721-4115

Email: amoran@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #236

Andrew Osborn, Ph.D.

Andrew Osborn Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English; Director of Master’s Programs in English; Director of Literature, IPS Doctoral Program; incoming Chief Editor of The Wallace Steven’s Journal

Phone: (972) 721-4087

Email: aosborn@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff #314

Gregory Roper, Ph.D.

Gregory Roper (Greg) Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English and Dean of Students

Phone: (972) 265-5747

Email: roper@udallas.edu

Office: Haggar University Center, 2nd Floor

Steven Stryer, D.Phil.

Steven Stryer Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English

Phone: (972) 721-4080

Email: stryer@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff Graduate Building #316

Bernadette Waterman Ward, Ph.D.

Bernadette Waterman Ward Ph.D.

Professor of English, Undergraduate Director of English

Phone: (972) 721-5339

Email: bward@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff Graduate Building Third Floor

Gerard Wegemer, Ph.D.

Gerard Wegemer Ph.D.

Professor of English

Phone: (972) 721-5327

Email: wegemer@udallas.edu

Office: Braniff Graduate Building #310