Fall 2019 Class Schedule: Department of English

Fall 2019 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Staff	WF 9:30-10:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Staff	WF 12:30-1:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Mehigan	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Mehigan	TTh 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Curdy	MW 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Staff	WF 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Martinez	MW 3:30-4:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 11-12:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.
English 211	Introduction to Poetry	Gottlieb	MW 11-11:50
English 211 Introduction to Poetry Course Description: The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. The experience of poetry includes both of these models, and theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process. Teaching Method: Lectures and required weekly discussion sections. Evaluation Method: Weekly wreading exercises; two 5-7 page papers; final project; final exam. Required Texts: Course packet available at Quartet Copies and on Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 211-0.
English 270-1	American Literary Traditions	Wisecup	MW 12-12:50
English 270-1 American Literary Traditions Course Description: The question of who counts as “American” and why is not only a pressing issue of our own moment but a question with a long history. And while it might not be obvious, the question of what counts as “American literature” is deeply connected to questions of peoplehood and citizenship. People with varying forms of literacy in diverse languages—from Spanish to English to Cherokee—answered this question in early America in writing, and these debates shaped early American literatures while continuing to resonate in films, in contemporary literature, and in political debates. This course will survey American literatures before 1900, through a series of questions: Who counts as “American,” and why? What is literature? When is early? We’ll read well known texts that have long counted as American literature, Anne Bradstreet’s poetry and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, while also looking at texts that have defied these terms: narratives of Spanish conquest gone horribly wrong; Native American protest literatures; Frederick Douglass’s newspaper; and Edgar Allan Poe’s polar horror story. Teaching Method: 2 lectures per week and a discussion section Evaluation method: short essays and a final exam Texts include: Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Samson Occom, Autobiography Herman Melville, Benito Cereno Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Readings will be included in a course packet Texts will be available at*: Quartet copies
English 277	Introduction to Latina and Latino Literature	Cutler	TTh 11-12:20
English 277 Introduction to Latina and Latino Literature Course Description: What does it mean to be Latinx? This course will introduce students to major authors, genres, and movements in Latinx literary history. We will take a thematic approach, examining how Latinx writers from various communities (Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Cuban American, Dominican American, Central American) have characterized such concepts as language and assimilation, gender and sexuality, race and indigeneity, and borders and migration. We will also put some pressure on the category of Latinx. How do the experiences and histories of the various groups described under that label benefit from and/or resist identification as a single ethnicity? Most importantly, we will ask what literature has to offer as a way of understanding Latinx experiences. What kinds of knowledges and experiences do novels, poems, stories, and plays produce that are different from other kinds of discourses? Teaching Method(s): Lecture and discussion sections. Evaluation Method(s): Two short essays, group project, final exam. Texts: Will include Ernesto Quiñones, Bodega Dreams (978-0375705892), Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (978-0679734772), and Oscar Casares, Where We Come From (978-0525655435), available at Norris Bookstore. Other texts available via Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Latina/o Studies 277-0.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Psychoanalytic Theory, Gender, and Literature	Lane	MW 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Psychoanalytic Theory, Gender, and Literature Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to several schools of psychoanalytic literary theory. It puts literature, gender, and psychoanalysis into dialogue by focusing, among other things, on the question—and art—of interpretation. Taking as our primary interest the scope and force of fantasy, aesthetics and meaning, sexuality, gender, and the unconscious, we’ll study some of Freud’s most intriguing essays on these topics while considering how similar questions and issues arise in fascinating works by Victorian and modern writers also weighing the limits of subjectivity and meaning. Teaching Methods: Seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments, including with clips and slides. Evaluation method: Weekly discussion posts on Canvas, one response paper, final essay, and in-class participation. Texts Include: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (ISBN 9780141439761); Henry James, Turn of the Screw(ISBN 0312597061); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer (ISBN 0486275469); Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (ISBN 0140185704); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ISBN 0393925331); and H. D, Tribute to Freud(ISBN 0811220044). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. Various essays by Freud, Klein, and Lacan will circulate as pdfs on Canvas. Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Songs and Sonnets	Phillips	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Songs and Sonnets Course Description: Beginning with the sonnet craze in the late sixteenth century, this course will explore the relationship between poetry and popular culture, investigating the ways in which poets draw on the latest trends in popular and literary culture and in turn the ways in which that culture incorporates and transforms poetry—on the stage, in music, and on the screen. We will consider how poets borrow from and respond to one another, experimenting with traditional forms and familiar themes to make the old new. In order to recognize and interpret this experimentation, we will first study those traditional forms, learning to read and interpret poetry. While we will be reading a range of poems in modern editions, we will be situating them in their social, historical, literary and material contexts, analyzing the ways in which these contexts shape our interpretation. How for example might our reading of a poem change if we encountered it scribbled in the margins of a legal notebook or posted as an advertisement on the El rather than as part of an authoritative anthology? Readings may include poetry by Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Keats, Shelley, Williams, Stevens, and Eliot. Teaching Method(s): Discussion. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and an oral presentation. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $60-65 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental). Text will be available at: Beck’s Bookstore. Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Poe	Erkkilä	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Poe Course Description: Edgar Allan Poe invented the short story, the detective story, the science fiction story, and modern poetic theory. His stories and essays anticipate the Freudian unconscious and various forms of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and modern critical theory. Poe wrote an uncanny novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and several volumes of poetry and short stories. As editor or contributor to many popular nineteenth-century American magazines, he wrote sketches, reviews, essays, angelic dialogues, polemics, and hoaxes. This course will focus on Poe's writings as a means of learning how to read and analyze a variety of literary genres, including lyric and narrative poems, the novel, the short story, detective fiction, science fiction, the essay, the literary review, and critical theory. We will study poetic language, image, meter, and form as well as various story-telling techniques such as narrative point of view, plot, structure, language, character, repetition and recurrence, and implied audience. We will also engage with a variety of critical approaches to reading and interpreting Poe’s writings, including formalist, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist, feminist, queer, critical race, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory and criticism. We will conclude by looking at the ways Poe's works have been translated and adapted in a selection of contemporary films and other popular cultural forms. Teaching Method: Some lecture; mostly close-reading and discussion. Evaluation Method: 2 short essays (3-4 pages); and one longer essay (8-10 pages); in-class participation. Texts will include: Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America); M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham: A Glossary of Literary Terms (Thomson, 8^thEdition); Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds.: Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, rev. ed.) Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.
English 307	Advanced Creative Writing	Mun	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing Course Description: To paraphrase Grace Paley, a good story has two stories. To break it down a bit, a good story has at least two conflicts. In this workshop, we’ll uncover how chronic and acute conflicts ignite one another to create forward movement, and in some cases, how the acute conflict resolves the chronic. We’ll also delve into how plot and character revelations help answer those elusive but crucial questions: what is this story about and why is it being told? Students will read exemplar stories and submit a story of their own, which will be workshopped twice. This class is for serious writers who are unafraid of taking real risks, unafraid of true rewrites/revisions, unafraid of working hard toward turning a good story into a great one. Teaching Method: Workshop. Evaluation Method: Creative writing assignments on conflict, suspense and tension, voice, character and plot revelations, and dialogue, as well as peer-reviews, and responses to craft questions. Text Include: Coursepack of short stories and novel beginnings. Coursepack will be available at: Quartet Copies. Instructor Bio: Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21^st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist; Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon; and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Tales of Two Americas Anthology, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Postcolonial Noir: Crime Fiction, Empire, and the Postcolony (Post 1830/TTC)	Johnson	MW 2-3:20
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Postcolonial Noir: Crime Fiction, Empire, and the Postcolony (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved. This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, and then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method: Short paper, group presentation, final essay. Texts include: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Didier Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam; Sonallah Ibrahim, That Smell; Donia Maher/Ganzeer, The Apartment in Bab al-Louk Texts will be available at: Norris. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 301 and Humanities 370-6
English 323-1	Chaucer (Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 2-3:20
English 323-1 Chaucer (Pre 1830) Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories-both pious and irreverent-but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society: a noble knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales. Over the course of the quarter, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different, for example, when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? We will be reading Chaucer's poem in the original Middle English. At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales. Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lectures Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; an oral presentation; several short papers; quizzes and an exam. Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $18-23)(The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions). Textbooks available at: Beck’s Bookstore.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Newman	MWF 11-11:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/ICSP) Course Description: Medieval romance famously celebrated “courtly love”—the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite—or perhaps because of—the Church’s misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender phenomena. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women masquerade as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by the bonds of male affection. In Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, two girls (one passing as male) fall in love and marry, while in the life of the transgender saint Marina, a woman who becomes a monk is accused of fathering a child. In Silence, a stunningly postmodern French romance, the “silenced” hero/ine is born female but raised male; as a knight, s/he is charged with homosexuality after rejecting the queen’s advances. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we’ll turn to ambiguous desires, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amis and Amiloun, and The Romance of the Rose. We’ll end with Chaucer’s “other masterpiece,” the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the ambiguous, bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation. Evaluation Method: Class discussion, two expository essays, and a final creative project. There will also be in-class exercises in translation and reciting Middle English, which will not be graded but could make a difference if you're on the borderline. *Texts (at Norris):* Heldris of Cornwall, Silence, trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff; Amis and Amiloun, ed. Edward Foster; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R. A. Shoaf; course packet available at Quartet Copies.
English 331	Renaissance Poetry: Love in the Age of Shakespeare (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Wall	MW 9:30-10:50
English 331 Renaissance Poetry: Love in the Age of Shakespeare (Pre 1830/ICSP) Course Description: Fantasy, confusion, seduction, despair, faith: these burning topics flourished in the famous love poetry of the English Renaissance. Why, we will explore, did people serving in the court of Queen Elizabeth become obsessed with writing sonnets about frustrated desire? How did poets link the confusion caused by tortuous love with other issues–– how to express feeling in writing, how to get ahead in the world, or how to “possess” others imaginatively? How were the “private” issues of love deeply intertwined with politics, religion, race, nationalism, and gender identities? When did love cement social bonds and when was it an unruly force that seemed to unravel the very fabric of the self or the community? We’ll tackle these questions by reading poems by Sidney, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Marvell, and Pulter in the context of religious controversies, court politics, colonialism, same-sex desire, feminism, and medical theory. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Papers, presentations, posts. Texts include: The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (ISBN: 9780199535798) Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Signet edition (ASIN: B004RCFXRC) Texts will be available: Online.
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Marriage Plots Before Austen (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Thompson	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Marriage Plots Before Austen (Pre 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This class will trace the surprising proliferation of plots that led to marriage—or not—in prose fictional forms before the consolidation of the modern realist novel. Jane Austen’s chaste representations of courtship were preceded by over 100 years of far less polite renditions of desire, economic need, frustration, rebellion, and amorous failure. Due to women’s historical exclusion from independent paid labor, girls were expected to turn into women who became wives. This social expectation was interrogated, re-imagined, and subverted in new ways across the developing form(s) of prose fiction in Britain in the “long” eighteenth century (roughly 1660 – 1820). As we will see, the marriage plot ascribed to Austen was far from the norm in the pre-realist novel: we’ll instead encounter extra-marital sexual autonomy, sapphic desire, incest, sex work, delusion, discipline, remarriage, and many other plot twists which show that the literary-historical road to the courtship plot was rocky, contested, and definitely not predictable. Tentative list of texts: Anonymous, The London Jilt; Penelope Aubin, The History of Charlotta DuPont; Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister; Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Henry Fielding, The Female Husband; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina; Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote; Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall; Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary or Maria.
English 359	Studies in Victorian Literature: Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Post 1830)	Lane	MW 3:30-4:50
English 359 Studies in Victorian Literature: Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Post 1830) Course Description: One of the first English writers to experiment with impressionist ideas and techniques, and a key contributor to naturalism, Hardy helped to fashion a distinctly “modern” narrative while advocating progressive social reform. We will study how his fiction challenged the limits of Victorian culture, voicing tensions that brought his novels to the brink of censorship. We will also pair those works with remarkable poems by him that make powerful claims about time, repetition, intimacy, doubt, and belief. In this way, we’ll follow how his fiction tried to educate late-Victorian readers in new ways of perceiving and thinking about themselves, their environment, their shared history, and the world. Teaching Methods: Seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments, including with clips and slides. Evaluation Methods: Weekly discussion posts on Canvas, one response paper, final essay, and in-class participation. Texts include (in order of use): Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (ISBN 0141439785), The Woodlanders (ISBN 0140435476), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (ISBN 0141439599), Jude the Obscure (ISBN 0140435387), and Selected Poems (ISBN 0460874586). Please follow the editions assigned (new and used available at the Norris Center Bookstore); comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Feeling Black / Black Feeling (Post 1830/ICSP)	Jackson	TTh 2-3:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Feeling Black / Black Feeling (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course introduces and investigates the matter of black feeling. Does blackness have a feeling? What emotional baggage accompanies racial difference? How do emotions inform, distort, and even precede our notions of race and culture? And how do all types of feelings, personal and public, shape or interrogate the project of racial representation? Drawing together seminal and lesser-known works in African American literature with secondary texts from affect theory, black studies, postcolonial theory, and Afro-pessimism, we will explore the messy entwinement of blackness and emotion and identify how this entwinement is variously represented across the African American literary tradition. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: 1 short oral presentation on an assigned reading; 2 short papers (4-5 pages); class participation. Texts include: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845) Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1902/3) Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980) Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015) Additional and secondary readings made available via course packet or online. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and Canvas.
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Queer Modernisms (Post 1830)	Nordgren	MW 12:30-1:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Queer Modernisms (Post 1830) Course Description: What was queer life like when terms such as “homosexuality,” “gay,” and “lesbian” were new, and few people used them or knew what they meant? What possibilities did queer people imagine for how their lives could turn out, with no firmly established vocabularies or role models available? To investigate the sexual and gendered contours of this period, in this course we will explore how authors in the early twentieth century tackled these and related questions in literature, grappling with the political and social challenges and possibilities of the time. The seminar is organized around key sites of literary production – London, New York, and Paris – and the writers who resided in them, thus taking part in new cross-cultural experiments and innovations in literature, art, and film during a period of political and social unrest not unlike our own. *Teaching Method(s):* Seminar Discussion *Evaluation Method(s):* participation, short reading responses, in-class presentation, and a final paper. *Texts include:* Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Also a selection of poetry, short stories, and other writing by authors including E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Marcel Proust, Federico García Lorca, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. *Texts will be available at:* Norris bookstore and through Canvas. Instructor Bio: Todd Nordgren specializes in British and American modernist literature and culture, queer and feminist theories, life writing, and genre studies. At Northwestern, he has designed and taught courses on poetry and poetics, modernist fiction, and life writing in minority communities. His recent work includes a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism on the intersections of autobiography and celebrity culture in the early 20th century. His current book project, “Taking Form: Writing Queer Lives in the Early Twentieth Century,” examines how modernist literature inaugurated a new optimism about expectations of what a queer life could entail. “Taking Form" explores the period between Oscar Wilde’s trials for “gross indecency” in 1895 and the formation of large-scale gay and lesbian movements after World War II, highlighting how authors challenged, eluded, and exceeded the sexual constraints and codes of the school story, the marriage plot, the imperial romance, and autobiography to make writing about queer life possible in an era of increasing medical and legal categorization.
English 374	Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literature: Native Chicago Literatures of Place and Protest (Post 1830/TTC)	Wisecup	MW 2-3:20
English 374 Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literature: Native Chicago Literatures of Place and Protest (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course focuses on Native American literatures from and about Chicago. We will complicate prevailing ideas of the city as a space of realist and modernist literatures by white writers, from Upton Sinclair to Ernest Hemingway, and examine how Native literatures position Chicago differently in literary and national geographies. To do so, we’ll also complicate views of Chicago as a Native place either before colonial settlement in the nineteenth century or after federal policies of relocation, which moved thousands of Native people from reservations to urban centers in the 1950s. We’ll investigate how Native writers use the form of the autobiography and sentimental literatures to envision connections between Indigenous people in Chicago and the Caribbean; make use of newspaper publication networks to criticize federal Indian policy; create poetry chapbooks; and take the city itself as a surface for inscription. Teaching method: Seminar. Evaluation methods: Weekly discussion posts; short papers; final paper. Texts include: Black Hawk, The Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk (1833) Simon Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (1893) Carlos Montezuma, “Wassaja” (1916) Susan Power, Roofwalker (2002) LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations (2019) Other readings, available on Canvas Texts available at: Norris Bookstore
English 377	Special Topics in Latina/o Literature: Latinx Modernism (Post 1830/ICSP)	Cutler	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 377 Special Topics in Latina/o Literature: Latinx Modernism (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: In this course we will investigate the rich archive of Latinx writing from the early twentieth century, from poems and crónicas published in Spanish-language newspapers to such landmark works as Facundo Bernal’s A Stab in the Dark (1923), Julia de Burgos’s Song of the Simple Truth (1938), and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez (1940). What experiences of modernity do their works describe, and how are those experiences linked to histories of colonization, migration, and exploitation? We will pay particular attention to the idea of latinoamericanismo (Latin Americanism) as a “spiritualized” critique of American materialism. How did latinoamericanismo respond to the increasing racialization of Latinx people in the early twentieth century? What possibilities for enchantment and abundance did Latinx modernism afford to communities in the face of difficult living and working conditions? Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Short writing assignments, group project, research paper. Texts: Will include Facundo Bernal, A Stab in the Dark (9781940660394), Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (9781558850125), Julia de Burgos, Song of the Simple Truth (9781880684245), Guillermo Cotto-Thorner, Manhattan Tropics (9781558858817), as well as selected poems, chronicles, essays, and stories. Texts will be available at Norris Bookstore and via Canvas.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: Founding Terrors (Pre 1830/TTC)	Erkkilä	TTh 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Founding Terrors (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will focus on the imagination of politics and the politics of the literary imagination in Revolutionary America as a means of rethinking traditional accounts of both literature and politics in insurrectionary America. Radically utopian in its desire and vision, the American Revolution was also driven by feelings of loss, betrayal, anger, and fear, and haunted by the specter of ghosts, insurrection, and apocalypse. We will examine the affective, sensational, and specifically literary shaping of various founding documents as a means of illuminating the more terroristic, contradictory, irrational, and socially and psychically devastating aspects of the American Revolution; and we will examine the ways the imaginative writings of the time—poems, novels, and other works of fiction—reveal aspects of the “real” American Revolution that were repressed, silenced, or written out of the more official writings of the Revolution. Teaching Method: Lecture; discussion Evaluation Method: Essay (3 pages); essay (5-6 pages); participation; final examination Texts: Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence Selections from Notes on the State of Virginia; Letters of John and Abigail Adams; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography; Phillis Wheatley, Poems; Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers; Hannah Foster, The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Royal Tyler, The Algerine Captive.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: The Horror Film (Post 1830)	Hodge	TTh 11-12:20
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: The Horror Film (Post 1830) Course Description: This course surveys the American horror film from its meteoric rise during the emergence of sound cinema in the 1930s to the present. The course will focus on one major feature-length film per week. Films likely to be discussed include Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Halloween, Alien, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and Get Out. Major themes and questions will include not only the question of why it's fun (or not) to be scared but also what social and philosophical themes the genre of horror opens up in surprising and provocative ways (from gender, violence, and technology to childhood, evil, and race). To catalyze our discussions we will read a variety of critical and philosophical texts on specific films, horror as a genre, and texts more broadly intersecting with course topics by authors from a wide range of disciplines.
English 387	Studies in Literature and Commerce: Risky Business and the American Dream in Modern Literature (Post 1830)	Caldwell	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 387 Studies in Literature and Commerce: Risky Business and the American Dream in Modern Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: They say it’s lonely at the top. This insight has inspired the creation of some of the 20^th and 21^st century’s most vivid, if counterintuitive, literary underdogs: CEOs and other rich and powerful business figures seemingly living the American Dream. Characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s illusory Gatsby, American Psycho’s murderous Patrick Batemen, or Lake Success’ hilariously narcissistic hedge fund manager, Barry Cohen, offer us complex meditations on the meaning of wealth, power, desire, and self-fulfilment. In this course we will consider how writers used the figure of the CEO behaving badly to investigate the meaning of success and happiness in 20^th and 21^st century America. At the same time, we will read about some of the most spectacular scandals of the last two centuries in American business, such as those created by the executives at Enron; a genius mathematician teamed up with a cabal of crafty bankers; or a hapless VP turned FBI double-agent. Pairing fact with fiction, we will ponder the lives of some of the most entertaining and disturbing figures at the top of the American business food chain. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Two short papers, long paper, group research paper, one discussion-leading assignment. Texts include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby; Martin Amis, Money; Bret Easton Elis, American Psycho (selections); Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic; Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success. Selections (provided by professor): Kurt Echeinwald, The Informant; David Enrich, Spider Network; Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room; James Stewart, Den of Thieves Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. Instructor Bio: Dr. William Casey Caldwell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University. His research focuses on early modern literature, monetary history, market culture, and history of sexuality. Caldwell is co-editor of The Hare: An Online Journal of Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theater, and has published on audience laughter and dramaturgy in reconstructed early modern playhouses. A former Franke Graduate Fellow in residence at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, he has worked as Senior Research Assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and recently co-taught Shakespeare at Stateville maximum security prison. Caldwell also gives preamble talks at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and volunteers with Northwestern’s Prison Education Program. He holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Partnership with the American Shakespeare Center; an MA in Philosophy from the University of Auckland; and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
English 388	Studies in Literature and Religion: Radical Spirits (Post 1830/ICSP)	High	MW 11-12:20
English 388 Studies in Literature and Religion: Radical Spirits (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: Recent scholarship on the history of abolitionism has reframed the activist, religious, and literary history of the movement to end slavery, placing new emphasis on the critical importance of women, the organizing efforts of Black people, and religious dissent in shaping the movement. This course takes up the radical history of abolitionism, elaborating the importance of religious communities within the early antislavery movement and the contributions of Black activists. Reading across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, we will ask questions about how the shifting concerns of these various coalitions compete and collaborate. We will read from a broad selection of antislavery essays, poems, sermons, and personal narratives, while also looking toward Octavia Butler’s genre defying novel, Kindred (1979), as a lifeline to the present. Together we will explore abolition as a religiously inflected literary genre and will investigate how antislavery work inspired new forms of communication and literary style. Teaching Method: Discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Method: Participation and preparation; two essays (3-5 pages); and a final collaborative project with in-class presentation. Texts include: Voices include: Anthony Benezet, Octavia Butler, Paul Cuffee, Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Lemuel Haynes, Benjamin Lay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, Phyllis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and John Woolman. Note: This course fulfills the Area V (Ethics and Values) and Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirements. Instructor Bio: Ean High’s research and writing join ongoing efforts to revitalize critical knowledge of religious life and expression in the study of American literature. His work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and the Libraries of Haverford College. His commitment to the classroom has been recognized by a teaching award from the Northwestern English Department.
English 388	Studies in Literature and Religion: Science Fiction and Social Justice (Post 1830)	King	MW 3:30-4:50
English 388 Studies in Literature and Religion: Science Fiction and Social Justice (Post 1830) Course Description: This course will examine major utopian and dystopian texts and films in relation to social justice issues in the twentieth century and beyond, while following the stories of artists, organizers, and communities that have used speculative world-building to imagine livable, sustainable futures. We will focus on how feminist, anarchist, LGBTQ, and Afrofuturist art and activism have contributed to a substantial critical discourse on the intersections of science, technology, ecology, war, race, gender, sexuality, health, and ability. This course will further examine how artists and activists have understood religion as both impediment and partner to social justice work, while alternatively embracing, subverting, and defying religious authority. We will also attend to how religious myths and imagery are sampled and remixed by science fiction authors to plot an alternative course for world history. Counts towards the Religion, Law & Politics (RPL) and Religion, Sexuality & Gender (RSG) religious studies major concentration. Teaching Method: Discussion, presentations, readings, writing assignments. Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, writing assignments. Texts include: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (ISBN: 978-0061054884) Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (ISBN: 978-0446675505) Note: This course is combined with Religious Studies 379.
English 392	Situation of Writing	Bouldrey	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 392 Situation of Writing Course Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States starting with Melville, and moving quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by shaping it or walking away from it—Roxane Gay, Adrienne Rich, Richard Baldwin, and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with a service learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Our class will be enhanced by the annual Return Engagement series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern’s Writing Program. My intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, and will evolve into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. This course is part of the Hewlett Diversity Initiative, and as part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities.
English 393-1	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-1 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-1	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Donohue	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-1 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-1	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-1 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: 19th Century American Poetry (Post 1830)	Grossman	MW 3:30-4:50
English 397 Research Seminar: 19th Century American Poetry (Post 1830) Course Description: Nineteenth-century American poetry has frequently been reduced to the study of two poets--Whitman and Dickinson--who stand apart from the rest by virtue of their eccentricity and extraordinary ambition. This selective account of poetic inheritance has produced the unusual circumstance of a canon that needs to be opened not only to culturally marginal but also to culturally dominant poets and poetic forms. This course integrates the study of Whitman and Dickinson with the study of a vastly expanded canon of American poetry. The course also reads theoretical and critical texts that raise questions about canonization and the formation of literary historical narratives. In its attention to the historical and cultural contexts that poetry variously inscribes and defers, the course repeatedly returns to the oscillation that that word always-already enacts in relation to the texts that lie within it. Teaching Method: Mostly discussion. Evaluation Method: Mandatory attendance and active, informed participation. No exams, but possible quizzes. The major work of the course, as in all Research Seminars, is the research and writing of a 15-page research paper that takes as its subject a nineteenth-century book of poetry found in the NU Library stacks or in Special Collections. Texts Include: Poets may include Joel Barlow, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, William Cullen Bryant, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, Sarah Margaret Fuller. Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 5 300-level English courses before taking English 397.
English 398-1	Honors Seminar	Mwangi	W 3-5:20
English 398-1 Honors Seminar Course Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 403	Writers' Studies in Literature	Gibbons	T 2-4:50
English 403 Writers' Studies in Literature Course Description: This course, which is for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, focuses on the contexts and processes of creative writing. Our readings will be multi-genre texts of many sorts that enact or think or imply something about how what we are writing develops out of—and develops in various ways—our social formation, our intellectual curiosity, our psychic processes, our emotional investments, our sense of language, our artistic possibilities, and much more. Course readings will greatly broaden our sense of how other writers have used their materials and abilities. Some of our readings will also provide us with models of such use; with these, each student can advance his/her/their creative work and sense of what that work is and can be. Also, we’ll see in many of our readings how our complexity as individuals provides us with a great range of structures, stances, and processes of writing. From our discussions of the course readings, we’ll draw methods and stances that will allow students to think about (and perhaps sketch) new possible projects and new ways of working on present projects. Writing assignments will be unlike any that you have previously completed. (This is not a creative writing workshop.) Readings include Katherine Mansfield, Clarice Lispector, Grace Paley, Lucille Clifton, Richard Wright, Christopher Bollas, Lisel Mueller, Adrienne Rich, Lorine Neidecker, Helene Cixous, Adrienne Rich, Mahmoud Dharwish, Marga Minco, Isaac Babel.
English 422	Studies in Medieval Literature: Forging a Literary Career in the Fourteenth Century	Newman	Th 2-4:50
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: Forging a Literary Career in the Fourteenth Century Course Description: Although “professional writers” did not yet exist in fourteenth-century England, a wide range of factors determined the shape of literary careers. In this seminar we’ll examine some of them by looking at four canonical writers: the Pearl Poet, William Langland (a nom de plume), John Gower (ca. 1330-1408), and Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). As for the Pearl Poet, not only his name but also his dates and patronage remain obscure. Yet he exercised considerable control over the manuscript production of his works, which include Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, was a member of the gentry class, using a pen name for political reasons. Having devoted his entire career to successive revisions of a single masterpiece, he invites us to think about the reasons a controversial author might choose anonymity, as well as the difficulty of supporting oneself by writing and the significant roles of scribes. Gower and Chaucer, who were friends, nevertheless had very different career paths. Gower enables us to reflect on a writer’s choice of languages: he penned his three major poems first in French, then in Latin, finally in English. The civil servant Chaucer, displaying the greatest authorial self-awareness in the period, also allows us to consider the choice of audience. After a political and personal crisis, he deliberately turned from court patronage to produce the closest thing we have to a work “for the general public,” namely The Canterbury Tales. We will read all four poets selectively, along with critical and theoretical work on manuscripts, scribal culture, professional readers, underemployed clerics, multilingualism, and gendered readership. Texts: The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, trans. Casey Finch; William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman (B-Text), ed. A. V. C. Schmidt; John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck; The Riverside Chaucer, 2008 edition; Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury; Critical readings in course packet
English 441	Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Fictions of Judgment in the Eighteenth Century	Soni	M 2-4:50
English 441 Studies in 18th-Century Literature: Fictions of Judgment in the Eighteenth Century Course Description: The eighteenth century witnesses a far-reaching “crisis of judgment,” to which we are still heirs. In the period, the crisis plays itself out in the discourses of empiricism, aesthetics and the novel, as it does today in humanistic interpretation, political theory and the implementation of scientific research to improve our lives. This class will explore the many dimensions of the crisis of judgment in the eighteenth century, with particular attention to the role of fiction in the crisis. Fictions are essential to enable judgment, whether in the perception of three-dimensional objects, the discernment of character or the discovery of purpose in a world stripped of ends. But at the same time, a worry emerges in a number of discourses that fiction corrupts our judgment or leads it astray. Attempts are made to purge judgment of its fictive underpinnings. How do we make sense of these contradictory impulses, and what effects do they have on the prevailing accounts of judgment? Why are fictions perceived to be so threatening to our capacity for judgment? How effective are the efforts to conceal the role of fiction in judgment? Can we admit the agency of fiction in judgment without conceding that judgment is always errant or deceived? In particular, how does the emergence of the novel as a form in the eighteenth century (the rise of the novel) respond to the crisis? In this class, we will explore the problem from many angles, including accounts of perception and experience in empiricism and the novel (Aristotle, Locke, Sterne, Benjamin), aesthetic discourse as an attempt to restore final causes in the wake of empiricism (Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele, Kant), the prevalence of Quixotic narratives in the early novel (Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, Female Quixote, Emma) and the discernment of novelistic character (Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, Pride and Prejudice). Alongside this literature from the period, we will read secondary criticism on the rise of the novel (Georg Lukacs, Ian Watt, Michael McKeon), secularization (Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pfau, Iris Murdoch), final causes (Aristotle and the new science), and the status of fiction in the period (Luiz Costa Lima, John Bender, Helen Thompson). Our goal will be to understand the emergence of the novel in relation to the eighteenth century crisis of judgment.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics, and Thought	Gottlieb	W 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics, and Thought Course Description: This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.” Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions? Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized. This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.
English 493	Elements of Craft	Martinez	M 10am-12:50pm
English 493 Elements of Craft Course Description: By the end of his life, Yeats rarely revised his poems, except, he said, in favor of a “more passionate syntax.” In the hands of certain writers, such as Joan Didion, the shape of a sentence becomes an instrument for discovery and moral inquiry. For other writers—Hemingway and Henry James come most immediately to mind—their characteristic sentence-making reveals attitudes towards human relationships, experience, and consciousness. This course is dedicated to the pleasures and rewards of syntax, of sentence-making, as an essential, and often over-looked, element of craft in the development of a writer’s voice and originality. Class time will be divided evenly between close and creative reading of weekly assigned texts and the writing workshop, in which students attend to the work-in-process of their peers (poetry, non-fiction, or fiction). As this is a graduate seminar vigorous participation in class discussion and workshop is assumed.
English 494	The Long Form	Gibbons	Th 6-8:50
English 494 The Long Form Course Description: This course engages second-year students in beginning to research and plan a writing project that will lead to the MFA thesis (which will be completed by the end of their third year). In order to begin the long-term project of the MFA thesis, students will develop during this quarter a project plan that will outline the sequencing of research and writing, and initiate the first stages. Students will be expected to continue work on this project plan during this academic year (2019-20), while generating new writing in workshops, taking seminar courses, and teaching. The project plan is the final work product of this quarter. During the quarter, students will first identify core pieces of their creative work already drafted or (perhaps) finished that they see, at this point, as possible seeds of the larger work that will later become the MFA thesis. Since everyone in this Litowitz cohort is working in the home genres of creative nonfiction and poetry, this early core of work might be 15 to 20 pages of poetry or a group of short essays, or a single long essay, or (if the student is intending to write a cross-genre MFA thesis) work in more than one genre. Students will meet as a class four times during the quarter, will meet and work together in other weeks in small groups and/or with one other student in the course, and will also meet three or four times individually with the instructor. Class discussion will be about, and will support, students’ work process, use of research and creative materials, readings suggested by the instructor and students, and drafts of new work. The goal is to generate and develop a first plan for the larger work; the goal is not to try to determine definitively what the shape, genre, and focus of the MFA thesis will be. That project should be continuously developed, drafted, and revised until its due date. Teaching Method: Class discussion, peer-to-peer learning in small-group and partner meetings, individual meetings with instructor. Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on the end-of-quarter project plan, the amount and quality of writing, drafting, and assembling of research materials and artistic models during the quarter, and on engaged and constructive discussion during meetings both large and small. Texts include: TBD based on the six individual projects. Texts will be available at: TBD