Spring 2021 Class Schedule: Department of English

Spring 2021 Class Schedule

**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Curdy	MW 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	Boyd	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 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Webster	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	Trethewey	W 3:30-5:50
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	Schlesinger	TTh 5:30-6:50
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	Seliy	MW 12:30-1:50
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. 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. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Kokernot	TTh 12:30-1:50
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. 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. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Note: English 207 is normally First Class Mandatory, however, this particular section is being taught asynchronously. In lieu of attending the first class, which is not possible in this format, there is a mandatory, short assignment due within 24 hours of the class opening online. Students who do not complete the assignment will be dropped from the class, forfeiting their seat to the next person on the wait list.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bouldrey	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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Staff	WF 12:30-1:50
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 210-2	English Literary Traditions, Part 2	Lane	MW 12-12:50, plus discussion section
English 210-2 English Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This course surveys outstanding representative British literature by major authors from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, putting literary texts in conversation with such historical developments as the French revolution and the rise of human rights; the industrial revolution and democratization; the growth of imperialism, anti-slavery, and new forms of Victorian racism; print and transportation technologies, rapidly increasing literacy rates, first-wave feminism, and a wealth of related cultural arguments attached to all. Teaching Methods: Lectures paired with seminar-style discussions, all focusing intensively on passages and background arguments, including with clips and slides. Evaluation Methods: 1 short analysis, final paper, periodic informal quizzes, and participation. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors (8th ed., Vol. B: ISBN 0393928314) (used copies only); Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Penguin; ISBN 0141439661); George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (Oxford; ISBN 0199555052); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (HBJ; ISBN 0156628708). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. Note: English 210-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 214	Introduction to Film and Its Literatures	Davis, N.	TTh 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section
English 214 Introduction to Film and Its Literatures Course Description: This course harbors two primary objectives: 1) to acquaint students with vocabularies and frameworks of argument required to analyze film in terms specific to that medium; and 2) to familiarize students with a broad range of written texts crucial to the study of cinema, enabling them to render persuasive interpretations of those texts, as well. The first half of the course will emphasize recent case studies of literature adapted into popular movies, tracking how not just the plots and characters but the perspectives, voices, structures, prose styles, and associated politics of written work get preserved but also transformed on screen, in blatant and subtle ways. In the second half, we will reverse course to examine plays, essays, and other literary works inspired by the movies. We will also explore some classic texts of popular film journalism and scholarly film theory, treating these as two literary and intellectual canons in their own right. Cultivating techniques of close analysis—whether breaking down a film sequence, parsing a scholar’s arguments, or negotiating between two versions of the “same” story—will be the paramount skill developed in the course, hopefully leading to deeper appreciations of several kinds of texts. Moreover, students will gain a valuable fluency in how to watch, dissect, and debate movies at a time when they still retain enormous cultural sway, both as entertainment vehicles and as venues for sustaining or contesting cultural and political narratives. Lectures, discussion sections, and assignments will presume no prior coursework in film studies, but they will require quick, studious absorption of terms and concepts that might be new. Moreover, the course requires a willingness to put movies and other assigned materials under close analytical pressure, while hopefully retaining the joy of watching, reading, and evaluating them. The syllabus has been streamlined somewhat from previous offerings and skews more heavily (though not exclusively) toward contemporary material, but the expectations of your writing, thinking, and conversation remain high. Movies are many things, but not a vacation! Teaching Method: Twice-weekly lectures as well as weekly discussion sessions. Evaluation Method: Graded writing assignments; lecture quizzes; section participation. Assignments: Writing assignments will include two conventional, argument-driven essays of 4 5pp. (around mid-quarter) and 6-7pp. (as a final), as well as two shorter, skill-building exercises of 1-2pp. (around Weeks 2 and 7). Students will also take three quizzes administered during lecture to ensure absorption of key concepts and details from viewings and readings. Readings: Most assigned readings will be available free on Canvas, with the exceptions of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (ISBN: 1973762196), Annie Baker’s The Flick (ISBN: 1559364580), Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman (ISBN: 1250299055), and Steve Erickson’s Zeroville (ISBN: 1933372397). The combined costs for these texts on Amazon total around $40. Films: Movies screened in whole or in part are likely to include Arrival (2016), Birdman (2014), BlacKkKlansman (2018), Brokeback Mountain (2005), A Place in the Sun (1951), Pulp Fiction (1994), and The Salesman (2016).
English 220	The Bible as Literature (Pre-1830/TTC)	Newman	MWF 10-10:50
English 220 The Bible as Literature (Pre-1830/TTC) Course Description: This course is intended to familiarize students of literature with the most influential text in Western culture. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. Teaching method: three interactive lectures and one discussion section per week. Evaluation methods: class participation, two lecture outlines, four in-class quizzes, eight online posts, one five-page paper. No midterm or final exam. Texts: Bible (must be either New Revised Standard Version or New International Version); course packet at Quartet Copies. Available at Norris or online. Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 211-0-2A.
English 270-2	American Literary Traditions, Part 2	Wilson	TTh 11-12:20
English 270-2 American Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This course is a survey of American literature from the aftermath of the Civil War to first decade of the twentieth century. The course will take as a cue how writers experimented with various styles and genres of literature to explore the idea, if not always the realities, of “America.” Our exploration of these writers and their texts will fold into the contexts of social histories about the U.S. and reunification, the rise of capital and the Gilded Age, imperialism, and immigration. Texts Include: Levine, Robert S. et al., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume C (978-0393264487). Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Global Ecologies	Mwangi	MW 2-3:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Global Ecologies Course Description: In this seminar, we practice close reading of novels, poems, and visual art from different parts of the globe in relation to their depiction of environmental issues. How, for example, do we interpret environmental symbols within specific cultural contexts while acknowledging their global significance? How do we read on a global scale but at the same time maintain the integrity of individual texts? How are works about the environment related to one another, and what strategies does a literary scholar use to compare individual texts without replicating the unequal social relations between the societies from which the works emerge and circulate? In what ways do environmental themes intersect with other social and political concerns (e.g., gender violence, colonialism, homophobia, etc.) in a text, and how should we treat this interface without losing track of our main focus? Furthermore, how do we integrate activist and political positions in literary criticism while retaining professional aesthetic distance? Emphasizing the primacy of close reading, the seminar is based on the premise that textual interpretation is the beginning of literary scholarship, not the end of it. Teaching Method(s): Mostly discussion-based. Evaluation Method(s): Several short writing assignments; final project. Texts include: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Welcome to Sodom (dir. Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes), Octavia Butler's Dawn.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Psychoanalytic Theory and Gender	Lane	MW 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Psychoanalytic Theory and Gender 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 method: 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.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Medieval Pop Culture	Breen	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Medieval Pop Culture Course Description: The earliest reference to the legend of Robin Hood occurs in the fourteenth-century religious poem Piers Plowman. There, a character named Sloth confesses to a character named Repentance that, instead of memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and other basics of the Christian faith as instructed by his parish priest, he has learned by heart numerous “rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolf Earl of Chester.” Taking Sloth’s comment as its starting point, this course will investigate a series of works that people in the Middle Ages read and listened to for fun rather than out of a sense of obligation. In addition to reading “rhymes of Robin Hood” and other outlaw tales, we will look at animal stories featuring the trickster-hero Reynard the Fox and scurrilous fabliaux in which adulterous couples are celebrated rather than punished. As we seek to come to grips with these stories, we will draw on a wide range of intellectual tools, from scholarly articles to modern analogues. In what ways, for instance, do the mid-twentieth-century Coyote-Road Runner cartoons shed light on the antics of Reynard the Fox? An important goal of this course is to develop the skills in writing and textual analysis that you will need for more advanced English courses. Course Materials: Reynard the Fox: A New Translation, by James Simpson, ISBN 978-0871407368; The Fabliaux, trans. Nathaniel Dubin, ISBN 978-0871403575; readings and videos posted to Canvas
English 309	Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writing Ancestry	Webster	TTh 2-3:20
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writing Ancestry Course Description: This course will examine ancestry as a vector of meaning that has both ancient roots and current relevance. We will develop a regular practice of meditative, imaginative writing, while doing research to connect our stories with wider historical and cultural contexts. We will frame the course with essays by thinkers including Marianne Hirsch (“The Generations of Postmemory”); Alondra Nelson (The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation After the Genome); Daniel Foor (Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing) and adrienne maree brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.) We will then read works of literature that cross genres and explore the author’s ancestry through fact, imagination and inventive genre-crossing. Most of the course will be spent in the dual symbiosis of close reading and creative writing. Students will be guided in how to write into the known and unknown chapters of their ancestry, and will write creatively in response to their readings. Participants will end the course with a suite of writing—poems, essays, short stories or cross-genre meditations—that combine the personal with the historical, the self with the ancestors. (People unsure of their ancestry are welcome in this course, and ancestry may be fluidly, openly defined.) Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion and some peer exchange and workshopping. Evaluation Method: Active participation in class; written responses to our readings; three creative assignments that may be fulfilled through poetry, creative non-fiction, fiction or cross-genre experiment. (Students will be given the same prompts, but may write in the genre of their choice.) Texts include: A course reader available through Quartet Copies Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje Kindred by Octavia Butler The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom Seam by Tarfia Faizullah Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available in a course reader available at Quartet Copies. Note: This course is combined with Humanities 395-0-20.
English 323-1	Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 2-3:20
English 323-1 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (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: $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: Speculative Fictions: Allegory from Rome to Star Trek (Pre 1830)	Breen	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Speculative Fictions: Allegory from Rome to Star Trek (Pre 1830) Course Description: When your high-school English teacher praised “rounded” literary characters at the expense of “flat” ones, he or she was prizing the novelistic over the allegorical, representing the latter as at best a sign of authorial laziness and at worst a vehicle for the heavy-handed transmission of doctrine. This course will approach allegory differently, considering it as a tool for thought. After an introductory unit that examines a number of competing definitions of allegory, we will read and view a variety of speculative fictions, pairing the medieval with the modern in order to highlight commonalities as well as differences. In order to explore the conventions of allegorical battle, we will thus read Prudentius' fifth-century Psychomachia, which recounts a series of gruesome battles between personified Virtues and Vices, in conjunction with selected episodes from Joss Whedon's teen-focused television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Within the category of allegorical journey, we will consider early episodes of Star Trek alongside the fourteenth-century “best-seller” Piers Plowman, and the medieval morality play Everyman alongside the classic 1957 western The 3:10 to Yuma. In engaging with these works, we will ask ourselves how their personifications are “good to think with.” What kinds of work do they do that mimetic characters do not? In what ways are they more or less “real” than the fictive persons and authorial personae with whom they interact? Finally, is personification itself a relatively homogenous category, or can we distinguish important subtypes? What different reading practices might these subtypes allow or encourage? Course Materials: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Relihan, ISBN 1619492431; Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen Shepherd, ISBN 978-0393975598; readings and videos on Canvas.
English 339	Special Topics in Shakespeare: Hamlet: That is the Question (Pre 1830)	Masten	MW 2-3:20
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Hamlet: That is the Question (Pre 1830) Course Description: We will spend the term delving deeply into the meaning and significance of a play often said to be at the heart of Shakespeare’s canon and of modern Western culture more generally. Devoting a full course to one play will allow us to read this enduringly important, exceptionally enigmatic tragedy intensively, scene by scene, sometimes line by line. At the same time, it will allow us to see the many and sometimes conflicting Hamlets that have existed since about 1600, when it was first written and performed. We will read the three early (and different) printed versions of the play from Shakespeare’s time. We will also encounter the play through the lenses and tools of several modern critical approaches that have sought to address the mystery of the play and its central character: psychoanalytic Hamlet, post-structuralist Hamlet, Marxist Hamlet, new historicist Hamlet, feminist and queer Hamlets, alongside the critical perspectives of some film versions and Tom Stoppard’s ingenious revision. “To be or not to be,” as we will see, is not the only question. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion and mini-lectures Evaluation Method(s): Thorough preparation of readings and participation in our discussions; essays. Texts include: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare (Third Series, Revised Edition). Bloomsbury. ISBN13: 9781472518385. Paperback. This edition only. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Publisher: Grove Press; 50th Anniv. edition (April 11, 2017). Paperback: 128 pages. ISBN13: 9780802126214. Additional packet: historical, critical, and theoretical readings; play facsimiles. Texts will be available at: Beck’s
English 361-1	20th-Century Poetry: Modern Poetry & Poetics (Post 1830)	Froula	TTh 11-12:20
English 361-1 20th-Century Poetry: Modern Poetry & Poetics (Post 1830) Course Description: "Make It New": Ezra Pound translated this famous slogan from an ancient Chinese inscription: "As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new." What is "it"? What designs guide poets' "making"? What makes a poem "new"? These questions open broad reaches on the vast river of poetic traditions, materials, techniques, and experiences that poets navigated during the long, turbulent twentieth-century, articulating poetic aims, theories, principles, and manifestos as they went. Thus Baudelaire sings the painter of modern life; Eliot urges poets to cultivate a "historical sense," a knowledge of past literature, so as to seize what is new in their own moment; while for William Carlos Williams, "So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." As readers of modern poetry and poetics, we'll aim to deepen our attunement to the multifarious workings of poetic traditions by studying poems and poetic manifestos in themselves, in dialogue with other poems/poetics, and in light of the cultural contexts and poetic resources that inspired them. As we listen to poems sing, speak, talk to each other, and engage resources of poetic language (voice, rhetoric, figurative language, versification, rhythm, music, visual arrangement, &c.), we'll seek to broaded and hone our analytic skills, deepen our understanding, and feel and appreciate their beauty. Teaching Method: Impromptu lectures, presentations, discussion. Evaluation Method: Prompt attendance, informed participation, weekly exercises, class presentation, option of two shorter essays or one longer course project. Texts: Poems and prose texts by Baudelaire, Mallarme, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, H. D., Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Hughes, Brooks, the war poets, and some post-WWII poets.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Feeling Black / Black Feeling (Post 1830/ICSP)	Jackson	TTh 11-12:20
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: Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method: Response posts on Canvas, midterm response, and final essay. Texts include: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1902/3) Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980) Alice Randall, Rebel Yell (2009) Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore, Canvas. Note: This course is combined with African American Studies 380-0-21.
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Writing Human Rights (Post 1830/ICSP/TTC)	Nadiminti	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Writing Human Rights (Post 1830/ICSP/TTC) Course Description: Over the last decade, posters announcing “Refugees Welcome Here” have appeared across the American landscape. What does the particular figure of the refugee tell us about the status of human rights in the twenty-first century? In other words, what are human rights and why do we care about them? Who gets to be a human and who doesn’t? This course examines the logic behind both the dispensation and withholding of human rights through literary texts across genres (novels, short stories, and graphic novels) and political theory across global sites like Kashmir, Palestine, Guantánamo, and Manus Island. The course queries the role of empathy, citizenship, the category of the human, and protection from torture, genocide, and extralegal violence in representation by studying key figures such as the refugee, the undocumented migrant, the prisoner, and the animal. Texts: Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, or The Pessoptimist (translated text) Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost Malik Sajad, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (graphic novel) Sanjay Kak, Jashn-e-Azadi (documentary) Indra Sinha, Animal’s People Behrouz Boochani, No Friend bu the Mountain (translated text) Jerôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc, Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani (graphic novel)
English 375	Topics in Asian American Literature: Memory + Identity in Asian American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP)	Huang	MW 2-3:20
English 375 Topics in Asian American Literature: Memory + Identity in Asian American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? How is this question multiply fraught for Asian American authors who contend with obstacles stemming from diaspora, linguistic difference, and minoritization? Are traumatic memories better forgotten? This quarter, we will explore contemporary Asian American literary production by reading a variety of texts focused on the concept of memory—as an individual subject’s capacity for recall (“I can/can’t remember”), as an act of commemoration (“in memory of”), and as a material device or receptacle for data (a hard drive’s “memory”). This framing will allow us to explore how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity (an imagined panethnic grouping that originated in the 1960s), our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America’s collective memory as by what is found within it. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of Asian American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and film. Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts; group presentation, midterm essay exam, final research paper (7-8 pages). Potential primary texts include: Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (comic); Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost; and poems by Craig Santos Perez and Emily Jungmin Yoon. Potential critical texts from Lisa Lowe, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Diana Taylor, Michael Davidson, and Rodrigo Lazo. Texts Will Be Available at: Books will be available at the Norris bookstore. All other readings will be provided through Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Asian American Studies 376-0-1.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: American Women Auteurs, Black and White: 1850-1870 (Post 1830/ICSP)	Stern	TTh 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: American Women Auteurs, Black and White: 1850-1870 (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course will explore the slave narratives, novels, and memoirs of 19^th-century America’s most imaginative and eloquent women writers, black and white, as they transform those genres in a series of literary works both aesthetically ground breaking and politically transformative. Selections from the following authors will include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hannah Crafts, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs (the Harriets), Julia Collins, Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Keckley (the Elizabeths), and Louisa May Alcott. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Two brief take-home close reading exams and a final paper or project.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: Environmental Justice in Black and Indigenous Women’s Literature (Post 1830/ICSP)	Černe	TTh 2-3:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Environmental Justice in Black and Indigenous Women’s Literature (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: While ecocriticism has not always considered the lived experience of women of color, literary texts by African American and Native American women have found ways of theorizing their own versions of environmental and spatial justice. Reading leading theorists like Rob Nixon and Edward Soja side by side with Jesmyn Ward’s post-Katrina novel Salvage the Bones (2011), Toni Jensen’s stories about oil and fracking on Indigenous lands, and poetry by Nikky Finney and Heid E. Erdrich, this class interrogates how literature can inform our understanding of environmental injustice and different types of violence. It grounds the discussion in a longer history of colonial extraction and Indigenous dispossession, racism, structural neglect, and ongoing residential segregation by discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 hurricane novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and looking at Zitkala-Ša’s influential 1924 report on the settler defrauding of Osage Indians for their oil-rich lands. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, collaborative group work Evaluation Methods: Participation, two short papers, one-time in-class presentation on the day’s readings, oral presentation on environmental activism Texts include: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker (2001); Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011); Nikky Finney, selected poems from Head Off & Split (2011); Toni Jensen, “Women in the Fracklands: On Water, Land, Bodies, and Standing Rock” Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and on Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Asian American Studies 376-0-1.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830)	Savage	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: "The Chicago Way": Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city. Teaching Method: Discussion, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour. Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths. Texts Include: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Neon Wilderness; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; journalism by Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, Call Northside 777, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Note: Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.
English 381	Studies in Literature and Medicine: Introduction to Disability Studies in Literature (Post 1830/ICSP)	Chaskin	MW 3:30-4:50
English 381 Studies in Literature and Medicine: Introduction to Disability Studies in Literature (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, “western” literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings. Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative reading. Evaluation Methods: Participation, collaborative course-building; final research paper (8-10 pages). Texts Include: Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817); Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). In addition, we will read from the theoretical work of Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Michael Bérubé, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Jasbir Puar, and a selection of short stories and personal essays. Texts Will Be Available At: Novels will be available at Beck’s Bookstore. All other readings will be provided through Canvas.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Writing Gay Men's Lives (Post 1830/ICSP)	Grossman	MW 12:30-1:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Writing Gay Men's Lives (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: In 1882, Oscar Wilde, on a triumphant American tour, met with Walt Whitman at his home in Camden, New Jersey. What can we learn from this meeting of the two most famous homosexuals the nineteenth century produced? But also: what might be lost by characterizing the meeting in these terms—as a meeting of two “homosexuals”? What if we were instead to imagine their meeting as a dizzying historical co-incidence of the last example of whatever-men-were-before-they-were-understood-to-be-“homosexual” (Whitman), and the first example of this new type (Wilde)? In this course we’ll study the terms in which “gay men” have written about themselves in diaries, novels, letters, poetry, and journals, as well as how they have been written about in various discourses of power—legal, medical, sociological, and theological—in the 128 years since Whitman’s death in 1892, which is also the year the word “homosexual” first appeared in English. Partly to answer the question how “we” came to be where “we” are today, we’ll consider writings on a range of topics and from a range of historical periods, including the HIV pandemic (AIDS as “a gay disease” and as the disease of gayness); the 1950’s and 1960’s (periods often seen, respectively, as those of normative heterosexuality, and of the sexual revolution); early twentieth-century characterizations of gender “inversion; and nineteenth-century versions of male-male amorous attachments. The course will be directed largely toward the texts and contexts out of which emerges the “sexual orientation” called “gay male,” but issues of “straightness,” “lesbianism,” “bisexuality,” “queerness,” and “trans” will necessarily arise as well. Teaching Method: Discussion Evaluation Method: No exams. A shorter midterm paper expanded into a larger, research-oriented final paper. Students may be required to present an oral report. Readings will likely be drawn from: Walt Whitman's writings both in poetry and prose (1842-92); Henry Blake Fuller’s Evanston/Northwestern novel Bertram Cope’s Year (1919); Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney (1924-45); Tony Kushner's Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches (1992); Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me (1994). A number of films may also be screened: Pillow Talk (1959); Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989); Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004); Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016). Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 361-0-20.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Law and Literature (Post 1830/TTC)	Schwartz	MW 9:30-10:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Law and Literature (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Teaching Methods: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Methods: Discussion and papers. Texts include: Excerpts from Plato and Aristotle; Aeschylus, The Eumenides; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; excerpts from Rawls; Kymlicka, Political Philosophy.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Information Overload! (Post 1830/TTC)	Ladd	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Information Overload! (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course explores the anxiety, exhaustion, and unease brought on by information technologies. We will trace emotional responses to technological change, from the shock of the printing press to the malaise of the present "information economy." How did new text technologies reshape language and society? Who is permitted access to certain kinds of information and why? We will take a hands-on approach to these questions by pairing literature that addresses the anxieties of technology, like the scifi linguistics of Arrival and the postapocalyptic Shakespeare of Station Eleven, with book history and digital humanities techniques designed to manage information. Students will learn how books are made, how search algorithms work, and how to analyze text with code. Teaching Method(s): Discussion Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, presentations, mid-term paper, final project. Texts include: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life (excerpt provided) Ben Jonson The Staple of News (ISBN 9780719059063) Emily Dickinson poetry (excerpts provided) Safiya Noble Algorithms of Oppression (ISBN 1479837245) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (excerpts provided) Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven (ISBN 0804172447). Note: This course is colisted with Humanities 325-6-20.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Animal Letters (Pre 1830)	Shannon	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Animal Letters (Pre 1830) Course Description: In 1614, Sir Walter Raleigh re-calculated the size of Noah’s Ark to insist it was feasible for it to hold representatives of all the existing kinds of creatures, asserting there were fewer kinds than had been previously imagined. Raleigh’s intervention combined new forms of early modern math and science with a continued reliance on traditional religious accounts. Before the rise of nineteenth-century ideas about extinction and evolution, early modern thinkers read the creation narrative in Genesis as natural history. This course will explore their accounts of the “creaturely kinds” before and during the time in which a more modern science was being launched. This perspective on animals will also allow us to speculate about what it has meant to be human – and when – and to assess how aptly a word like “progress” describes the human story. To end with two capstones that leap forward to look back once more, we will turn to Virginia Woolf’s 1933 biography of the spaniel, Flush, and Missouri Williams’ 2014 production, King Lear with Sheep (a staging of King Lear ... yes, with sheep). One course goal will be to think about the central place of animals in the history of what we call “human” knowledge. Another will be to understand the capacities of the now-obsolete term, “creature”: the term enshrines biological variation as a sign of plenty and also makes clear how sympathy, collaboration, and identification routinely occur across the differences of species. At the broadest level, the seminar will challenge the notion that all human thought has always been or must inevitably be “human-exceptionalist” thought. The course will also serve as a broad introduction to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature, including intellectual texts, dialogues, lyric poetry, prose essays, and Shakespeare. Teaching Method: lecture and discussion Evaluation Method: sustained and substantive class participation, a mid-term exam, and two papers. Texts Include: Readings will be selected from among the following texts: The Book of Genesis (selections); Pliny, Natural History (selections); Thomas More, “Comments of a Rabbit” (c. 1517); The legal case against the green weevils of St. Julien (1545-87); William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (1553); George Gascoigne, “The Otter’s Oration” (1575); Michel de Montaigne, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580-92); William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), As You Like It (1599), and King Lear (1606); Edward Topsell, The Historie of the Four-Footed Beasts (1607) (selections); Walter Raleigh, The Historie of the World (1624) (section on Noah’s Ark); René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637); Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare” (1653); Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (1933); and Missouri Williams, King Lear with Sheep (2014). (Many of these items, along with short contextualizing materials, will be supplied by the instructor).
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Interracial Encounters (Post 1830/ICSP)	Huang	MW 3:30-4:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Interracial Encounters (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: The United States is set to become a majority minority country by 2045. What are the many promises—and what are the many pitfalls—of interracial encounters, and what do they reveal about the country writ large? How do minority writers understand and narrate each other? This class brings contemporary African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. By examining complex topics from Black veterans of the Korean War to the shared border migrations of indigenous and Latinx subjects, we will develop an analytical framework attuned to how American racial identity has been differentially and unevenly constructed through history, culture, and politics. A central goal of the course is decentering whiteness as the primary locus of literary analysis, to allow for more nuanced interpretations of topics such as U.S. imperialism, mixed race identity, activism, labor history, and immigration. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of multiethnic American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and film. Evaluation Methods: Participation; discussion posts, group presentation, midterm essay exam, final research paper (7-8 pages). Potential primary texts include: Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves, Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Toni Morrison, Home; Cristina Garcia, Monkey Hunting; Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (film); short stories by Junot Díaz; and poetry by Natalie Diaz. Potential critical texts from W.E.B. Du Bois, Lisa Lowe, José Muñoz, Tiffany King, Kim TallBear, Vijay Prashad, and Ramón Saldívar. Texts Will Be Available At: Books will be available at the Norris bookstore. All other readings will be provided through Canvas. Note: This course is colisted with Asian American Studies 303-0-3.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Gender and Horror (Post 1830/ICSP)	Andrews	MW 9:30-10:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Gender and Horror (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: A longstanding source of fascination for feminist cultural critics, horror movies frequently highlight issues of gender and power. How is an audience affected by watching women’s bodies subjected to violence on screen? What forms of femininity and masculinity get depicted as dangerous or monstrous? Who do we perceive as expendable, and with whom do we identify? In our discussions, we will consider these questions as we analyze a selection of classic and contemporary horror movies. Alongside these films, our readings will introduce some of the major debates in feminist cultural studies. We will explore how feminists look at film in relation to issues of embodiment, desire, identity, and violence, and we’ll debate the particular possibilities and pitfalls horror brings to gendered representation. Teaching Methods: discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Methods: participation, two short analytical papers (5 pages each), final essay (8-10 pages). Texts Include: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), 28 Days Later (2002), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Get Out (2017). Texts Will Be Available At: All films and readings will be posted to the course Canvas site. Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 373-0-21.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Fake news: Journalists as Storytellers, Sinners, and Saints (Post 1830)	Blankenau	MW 12:30-1:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Fake news: Journalists as Storytellers, Sinners, and Saints (Post 1830) Course Description: What happens when chasing “the story” becomes the story? In this class, we will examine how stories about journalism reflect and shape perceptions of the fourth estate. How have journalistic ethics been depicted in film and television? How do films and literature create sinners and saints out of journalistic figures? How have racism and misogyny affected representations of journalism, and how do they continue to impact the news in reality? As we analyze representations of journalists, we will learn how to apply close-reading skills to films and literature as well as to works of journalism themselves. Students will study narrative style and the creation of journalistic personas in historical and contemporary media, and will apply ideas from journalism studies and feminist media studies to discuss fictional works. Rather than tracing a chronology, course materials will be divided into units that engage with the most popular themes of journalism stories, especially on film: journalism ethics, individualist journalist heroes/anti-heroes, and sex scandals. Additionally, we will explore critical issues in contemporary journalism, with units focusing on race in the newsroom and covering global catastrophes Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: In-class participation, 2 short essays (3-4 pages), one longer essay (8-10 pages). Texts include: TV and Films will include: Scandal (Season 1, 2012); All the President’s Men (1976); Absence of Malice (1981); Broadcast News (1987); Heat Wave (1990); Livin’ Large (1991); Good Night, and Good Luck (2005); Capote (2005); A Private War (2018) Novellas and Non-fiction will include: Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); Isaac Asimov, Nightfall ((1941); excerpts from Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (1892-4); excerpts from Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018). *Texts will be available at:* Canvas.
English 393-3	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-3 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 394-3	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Donohue	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-3 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 395-3	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-3 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: Nineteenth-century U.S. Poetry and the History of the Book	Grossman	MW 3:30-4:50
English 397 Research Seminar: Nineteenth-century U.S. Poetry and the History of the Book Course Description: Your mission: to recover a work of poetry published in the nineteenth-century United States from the NU Library’s open stacks or from Special Collections, and to make every aspect of it the object of intensive study—from the paper quality to the binding to the cover to the illustrations to the book design to the publisher to the author to the book’s circulation and reception, and including all of the words and poems inside it. By investigating every aspect of a book of poetry in this way, you will be demonstrating what can be learned by attending not simply to the form and content of the poems, but also to the poetic and printed forms in which these poems originally circulated. To do so is to engage in the interdisciplinary scholarly methods of what has come to be called Studies in the History of the Book, and by quarter’s end, each member of the class will have pursued unique questions and reached unique conclusions about a single book that provides a window on the cultural work performed by poetry in the nineteenth-century United States. You can read examples of what other students in past sections of this class have accomplished by checking out the website of their published essays: https://sites.northwestern.edu/eng397/ Alongside this independent work, we will spend class meetings reading selectively from the vast archive of U.S. nineteenth-century poetry—an archive much more varied, in terms of both form and content, than the two poets who have most frequently come to represent it: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In so doing, our classroom discussions will practice the same methodologies that each class member is undertaking with regard to a single book of poetry. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: No exams. As in all English 397 Research Seminars, the primary work of the course is the guided completion of a 15-page research paper, following the steps embedded in the syllabus. Readings will likely include these books and/or poets: William Cullen Bryant; Thomas Cole; Richard Henry Dana; Emily Dickinson; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Margaret Fuller; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Forest Leaves (c. 1848); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline (1847); Henry David Thoreau; Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855); William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798).
English 412	Studies in Drama: American Bodies in Motion	Manning	Th 2-4:50
English 412 Studies in Drama: American Bodies in Motion Course Description: Starting with the myriad of performances staged as part of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, this course surveys diverse genres of popular and theatrical dance in US culture from the late 19^th century to the early 21^st century. In so doing, the course also surveys varied methods and theories for performance research. Readings are drawn from several disciplines and are supplemented by feature films and documentaries. Taken together, the course materials historicize embodiment and corporeality in US culture. Graduate students with interests in American culture from any disciplinary perspective are welcome. For Ph.D. students in English, the course fulfills area 5. All readings and viewings accessible via Canvas. Note: This course is combined with Theatre & Drama 503-0-20.
English 431	Studies in 16th Century Literature: Creaturely Life before Descartes	Shannon	W 2-4:50
English 431 Studies in 16th Century Literature: Creaturely Life before Descartes Course Description: This course traverses the long sixteenth-century (and surveys key representative texts from the period), while also suggesting longer arcs of intellectual context for our topical concern: creaturely life. We will approach the question of “creatures” by examining texts that call on species difference or variety and that use cross-species comparisons to make sense of embodiment. We’ll stress encounters and engagement across species, rather than trace the grounds for a “human/animal divide.” We’ll explore the problem of how we have imagined an objective standard for “the human,” against which the endless variety of all other animated things might be made homogeneous and compressed together as a lesser order of life within a conception of “the animal.” One goal will be to think about the central place of animals in the history of what we call "human" knowledge. Another goal will be to understand the capacities of the now-obsolete term, “creature,” as a name for all living things -- the term enshrines biological variation as a sign of plenty and also makes clear how sympathy, collaboration, and identification routinely occur across the differences of species. At the broadest level, the seminar will challenge the notion that all human thought has always been or must inevitably be "human-exceptionalist" thought. To the contrary: animals are not just "good to think with" (as Levi-Strauss famously put it); it might be more accurate to say that has been impossible to “think” without them. Readings will be selected from the following texts: PRIMARY The Book of Genesis (selections); Pliny, Natural History (English trans. Philemon Holland, 1601) (selections) Thomas More, “Comments of a Rabbit” (from the Latin poems, c. 1517) Thomas Wyatt, “Lux, My Fair Falcon” and “Whoso list to hunt” (c. 1540) The law case of the green weevils of St. Julien (1545-87) Giovanni Battista Gelli, Circe (1549) William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (1553) George Gascoigne, “The Otter’s Oration” (1575) Michel de Montaigne, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580-92) Philip Sidney, “On Ister Bank” (1580/90) William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) _____. As You Like It (1599) _____. King Lear (1606) Edward Topsell, The Historie of the Four-Footed Beasts (1607) (selections) Walter Raleigh, The Historie of the World (1624) (section on Noah’s Ark) René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637) _____. Letter to William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle (23 Nov 1646) _____. Correspondence with Henry More (1649) Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare” (1653) SECONDARY Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (selections) (1871) Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (The Philosophical Review, 1974) Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of the Dog” (1975) John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” (1980) Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Creature Caliban” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 2000) Giorgio Agamben, “Umwelt” and “Tick” (2002) Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Critical Inquiry, 2002) Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations” (differences, 2004) Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare” (PMLA, 2009) AFTERWORDS Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (1933) J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip (1956) Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (2014)
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and the Invention of Modernist Realism	Froula	M 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and the Invention of Modernist Realism Course Description: "Modernity--the transient, the fleeting, the contingent--is one half of art," writes Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life", "of which the other is the eternal and immutable." Taking this manifesto as a point of departure, we'll read works by Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and other painters of modern life--e. g., Ibsen, Conrad, Strachey, Mansfield, Williams, Pound, Colette, Eliot, Beckett, Toomer--alongside writings in autobiographical, historical, theoretical, and critical genres to explore the aesthetics of the everyday by which these artists transmute lived experience into works of art. In the first part of the seminar we'll work through a flexible syllabus of readings and critical approaches. Then each seminar member will design a project, grounded in these or related texts, methods, and questions, that furthers both our class conversation and his/her/their intellectual goals. Teaching Method: Discussion. Requirements: Attendance and active, informed participation in discussion (20%), weekly reading-for-discussion notes and questions (15%), presentation with 1-2 page handout (20 min.; 15%), seminar project(s) totaling 15-20 pages, e. g.: research project, critical paper, review essay; or an equivalent combination of shorter projects, e.g.: a book review, annotated bibliography, shorter critical note or essay, edited text, digital project, critique of existing digital projects, research project, conference paper, course syllabus, or (for creative writers), creative projects (45%); discursive self-evaluation, open to rethinking and/or re-weighting of requirements, and recommended grade (1-3 pp., 5%).
English 471	Studies in American Literature: American Women Auteurs, Black and White: 1850-1870	Stern	T 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: American Women Auteurs, Black and White: 1850-1870 Course Description: This course will explore the slave narratives, novels, and memoirs of 19^th-century America’s most imaginative and eloquent women writers, black and white, as they transform those genres in a series of literary works both aesthetically ground breaking and politically transformative. Selections from the following authors will include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hannah Crafts, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs (the Harriets), Julia Collins, Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Keckley (the Elizabeths), Louisa May Alcott, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her recently published Barracoon, written in the late 1920s, tells the story of the last surviving former slave numbered among the human cargo on the U.S. ship Clotilde, which was illegally landed in Alabama in 1862. Theoretical readings will include selections from black feminists such as Hortense Spillers, Jennifer Nash, Christina Sharpe, and others.
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Queer Theory and Queer Cinema	Davis, N.	Th 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Queer Theory and Queer Cinema Course Description: "Queer theory" and "queer cinema" were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia, artistry, and activism. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like "gay and lesbian studies" or "LGBT film." These new and spreading discourses stoked each other's productive advances. Scholars developed and illustrated new axioms through the medium of the movies, while filmmakers rooted their stories and images in changing notions of gender performativity, counter-historiography, and coalitional politics. Still, queer theory and queer cinema faced similar skepticisms: did their ornate language and conceptual novelty endow dissident sexualities with newfound political, cultural, and philosophical stature, or did they retreat too far from daily lives, mainstream tastes, and ongoing public emergencies? Did "queer" enable elastic identification and coalition among subjects with a wide range of sexual and gendered identities, or did the term reproduce the demographic and discursive hierarchies it claimed to deconstruct? Was the lack of fixed definitions, consensus ideals, or shared aesthetic practices a boon or a harm in sustaining a long-term movement of art, action, or thought? This class will explore some decisive shifts as critical theory and narrative film reclaimed "queer" as a boundary-breaking paradigm, in the pivotal era of Gender Trouble, Epistemology of the Closet, Tongues Untied, and Paris Is Burning, though we will also complicate the “foundational” or “canonical” status often applied to such texts. We will recover scholarly and cinematic trends that laid indispensable groundwork for these queer turns and will also track the subsequent careers of "queer" in the ways we perform readings, perceive bodies, record histories, reimagine genders, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, class, and gender identity will constantly inflect our understandings of "queer" and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as the key referent for that term. Participants will engage nimbly with the overarching claims but also the curious nuances, anomalies, and paradoxes in the scholarship we read. We will also develop skills of close-reading films as films, and note when the granular details of image, sound, script, editing, and performance are advancing and complicating their own implied arguments. This course satisfies a core requirement toward the Gender & Sexuality Studies Certificate as well as the Area 7 rubric of “Genres, Topics, and Theories” toward the English Ph.D. Assignments: Writing assignments will include a simulated peer-review of an assigned article or chapter; a 500-word proposal for a hypothetical conference paper; and a 12-15pp. final paper. Shorter, skill-building exercises in writing and research may also be added. Readings: All assigned readings will be available free on Canvas and are likely to include work by Combahee River Collective, Teresa de Lauretis, Richard Fung, Michael Hames-García, Cáel M. Keegan, Kara Keeling, Heather Love, Jay Prosser, Gayle Salamon. Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Céline Parreñas Shimizu, Eliza Steinbock, and Patricia White, among others. Films: Movies screened in whole or in part are likely to include Born in Flames (1983), Looking for Langston (1989), Paris Is Burning (1990), Tropical Malady (2004), Pariah (2007 and 2011), Under the Skin (2013), Kiki (2016), Spa Night (2016), and They (2017).
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop: The Art of Research, or Toward the 25th Poem	Trethewey	T 2-4:50
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop: The Art of Research, or Toward the 25th Poem Course Description: In what is most likely an apocryphal story, Robert Frost referred to an entire collection of poetry as the 25^th poem—the way a book holds together, an elegant cohesion that renders the whole more than just compilation or the sum of its parts. Indeed, there are many potential scaffoldings for the architecture of successful collections; this course will consider the art of research. Thus, the objective is the further development of the craft of poetry with a focus on researching and writing a long sequence of poems. Beginning with an abstract and proposal, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a list of other primary sources, students will develop a research plan—which can be carried out over one or two quarters—into some aspect of history, science, law, art, language, geography, etc. Furthermore, by analyzing and discussing the formal and thematic elements of several collections of poems—such as Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood, Robin Costa Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, Davis McCombs’s Dismal Rock, Nadine Meyer’s The Anatomy Theater, and Ellen Bryant Voight’s Kyrie—we will identify and define strategies and formal techniques for using information gathered from our research, and produce a long sequence of poems that can serve as the spine of an entire collection, the 25^th poem. Selected essays on poetry, as well as various collections of poems, will serve as texts for the course.
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Mun	W 6p-8:50p
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: The primary text for English 497, the Fiction Workshop, will be the work written by you. As a way to properly unearth and address your story’s needs, we’ll discuss several key craft elements, such as: chronic and acute conflicts, codes of suspense, narrative transportation theory, rate of revelations, dialogue and the dialectic, fabula and syuzhet, character obsessions, immediate and super objectives, voice, dialogue, language, and much more. We’ll also discuss ways in which we can read the work surgically, holistically, and optimistically—so as to inspire meaningful revisions. This class is for students who are unafraid of taking real risks, unafraid of discipline, unafraid of writing stories that actually move the reader.
English 520	Writing for Publication	Masten	T 3-4:50
English 520 Writing for Publication Course Description: This workshop (offered P/N) is open to all students in candidacy with the consent of their advisers. Students will work on either expanding a strong seminar paper or abridging a dissertation chapter to publish in article form. Topics will include selecting the right journal; adapting the framing, argument, and rhetoric to the intended audience; deciding where to cut and where to expand; following a style sheet; identifying and addressing weaknesses in research, argument, and style; writing a strong, attention-catching lead; meticulously checking references; making the initial submission; and responding to readers’ reports. We will also discuss other issues around publishing scholarship, including the pros and cons of publishing in edited volumes and other venues, as well publishing materials also intended for a future monograph. Students will begin by workshopping each other’s submissions and getting initial “readers’ reports” from the instructor and, ideally, a colleague in the field. Each student will work closely with the instructor and other workshop members on successive drafts. The goal will be to have an article ready for submission by the end of the quarter. If demand is high, enrollment preference will be given to students in the English Department who are nearing the job market. Teaching Method(s): Seminar and workshop Evaluation Method(s): P/NP Texts include: N/A Texts will be available at: N/A
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	M 6p-8:50p
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: In this course, we will engage with a wide range of possible approaches to the instruction of creative writing. To begin, we will look at the history of Creative Writing programs and the models of teaching that have traditionally guided MFA programs. We will then move on to discuss theories of learning as they apply to fine-arts courses. We will take into consideration intersectional challenges (race, gender, class, disability, etc). And we will think about the differences between teaching undergraduates and graduate students. In the second half of the course we will move into the practical work of designing creative writing courses that have a beginning, middle, and end, and also a clear set of achievable learning objectives. You will do the practical work of drafting syllabi, generating exercises, and selecting reading material for introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.