Winter 2021 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2021 Class Schedule

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

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Richardson, N.	TTh 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	Shanahan	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	Schlesinger	TTh 5:30p-6:50p
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 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	Abani	W 6p-8:50p
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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 9:30-10:50
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 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 2-3:20
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: The Experience and Logic of Poetry	Gottlieb	TTh 11-12:20 plus discussion section
English 211 Introduction to Poetry: The Experience and Logic of 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. 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 (w)reading exercises; one 5-7 page paper; 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 234	Introduction to Shakespeare	Phillips & Wall	MW 12:30-1:50 plus discussion section
English 234 Introduction to Shakespeare Course Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedies, histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them. We will think about Shakespeare's contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600. We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves. What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare's plays? Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays? How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era? Teaching Method: Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section. Evaluation Method: Papers, midterm, final, discussion participation. Texts include: Folger Library paperback editions of the following plays (these editions only): A Midsummer Night's Dream (978-1-5011-4621-3); The Merchant of Venice (978-1-4391-9116-3); Henry V (978-0-7434-8487-9); As You Like It (978-0-7434-8486-2); Hamlet, Updated edition (978-1-4516-6941-1); The Tempest, Updated edition (978-1-5011-3001-4); The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-0-671-72296-8); additional critical readings on Canvas. Texts will be available at: Beck's Books Evanston.
English 270-1	American Literary Traditions , Part 1	Wisecup	MW 11-11:50 plus discussion section
English 270-1 American Literary Traditions , Part 1 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 275	Introduction to Asian American Literature (ICSP)	Huang	TTh 9:30-10:50 plus discussion section
English 275 Introduction to Asian American Literature (ICSP) Course Description: This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Class participation, 3 papers, quizzes, and writing assignments. Texts Include: Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN: 978-1573225311) All other material will be provided through the course’s Canvas site.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Two Thousand Years of Trans Fictions	Newman	MWF 10-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Two Thousand Years of Trans Fictions Course Description: Only recently has it become possible to “change sex” through gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy. But in another sense, that possibility has long intrigued the imagination. In this course we will survey two thousand years of trans fictions—in verse, prose, and drama; in Latin, French, and English; in tragic, comic, and epic form. Our protagonists will range from the famous mythic hero/ine Tiresias through medieval saints, cross-dressing lesbians, a female knight, an operatic castrato, a 300-year-old poet, and a Greek-American child of incest. While discussing a wide variety of texts, we will learn and practice the fundamentals of literary analysis. Evaluation Method: Class discussion, a short oral report, and three 5- to 7-page papers. Texts will include: Selections from Ovid, Metamorphoses (1st c.), and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (1261); Heldris of Cornwall, The Romance of Silence (13th c.); Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Mutability of Fortune (1403); Shakespeare, Sonnet 20; John Lyly, Galatea (1588); Honoré de Balzac Sarrasine (1830); Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928); and Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002).
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Theory of the Global South Novel	Nadiminti	MW 5-6:20p
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Theory of the Global South Novel Course Description: Emerging from the language of World Bank policy, the term “Global South” has gained currency in literary studies as an alternative to the outdated idea of the Third World. It has given rise to the curious case of the Global South novel, an exploration of uneven economic and political development under global capitalism. Reading contemporary novels, from the 1980s highwater mark of postcolonial fiction to an examination of globalization in the 2010s, this course turns to the bildungsroman or the novel of development to chart a paradigmatic shift from national underdevelopment to a global experience of dispossession. Thus, the course asks,how does Global South writing—particularly from South Asia, West and South Africa, and Central America—deploy the bildungsroman in new ways to highlight the intensification of global inequity and the failure of postcolonial political promises? The course simultaneously introduces students to aesthetic concepts like realism, global modernism, magical realism, and peripheral realism to thicken the stakes of contemporary literary innovation. Ultimately, we will look to both understand and question the viability of the “Global South novel” as a category of literary study. Texts: Salman Rushdie, Shame Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions Aravind Adiga, White Tiger Teju Cole, Open City Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth (in translation) Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Reading and Interpreting Poe	Erkkila	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Reading and Interpreting Poe Course Description: You will read Poe’s writings as a means of learning how to analyze and interpret 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. You will study and learn to apply a variety of critical approaches to reading and interpreting Poe’s writings, including formalist, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist, feminist, critical race, poststructuralist, postcolonial, cultural studies, disability studies, ecological criticism. You will also be encouraged to think about the continued relevance of Poe’s writings by looking at the ways Poe’s works have been translated and adapted in contemporary literature and film and other pop cultural forms. As your final project, you will edit and introduce your own collection of Poe’s works as a means of demonstrating what you have learned in this course about Poe, literary analysis, critical theory, and popular culture. Teaching Method(s): Some lecture; mostly discussion; final student presentations. Evaluation Method(s): 2 papers; final project; class participation Texts 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, Eleventh Edition); Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds.: Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, Third Edition, 2017). Texts will be available at: Norris Book Store.
English 302	History of the English Language (Pre 1830/TTC)	Breen	TTh 11-12:20
English 302 History of the English Language (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: Have you noticed that, unlike many other languages, English has often has two different names for the same animal? These double names can be traced back to 1066, when the French-speaking Normans, led by William the Bastard, conquered England and installed their countrymen in almost every position of power. In the aftermath of this victory, William the Bastard became William the Conqueror and cow and pig and sheep became beef and pork and mutton – at least when they were served up to the Normans at their banquets. Like many other words associated with aristocratic life, these names for different kinds of meat all derive from French, while the names of the living animals, cared for by Anglo-Saxon peasants, can be traced back to the Old English cu, pigga, and scep. In this course we will investigate this and many other milestones in the history of the English language, focusing on the period from the end of the Roman Empire through the eighteenth century. We will pay particular attention to the relationships among “high” and “low” forms of language, including efforts to elevate the status of English and the dynamics of self-consciously “low” registers of language such as slang and obscenity, and to the relationship between language and gender. In addition to offering an introduction to the linguistic, literary, and social history of England, this course will help you to develop a more sensitive understanding of the varieties of English spoken today. Course Materials: David Crystal, The Stories of English, ISBN 978-1585677191; Tore Janson, The History of Languages, ISBN 978-019960429-6; readings and videos posted to Canvas. Note: This course can count towards either the Area IV (Historical Studies) or the Area VI (Literature & Fine Arts) distribution requirement.
English 307	Advanced Creative Writing	Donohue	T 6:15pm-9:15pm
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing Course Description: Some stories run uninterrupted from start to finish, like the exhalation of a single breath or—as George Saunders likes to say—a toy car zipping under the couch. Other stories seek to delay, linger, or meander using various devices, one of which is breaking the narrative into sections or parts. This class will explore some of the different ways that authors have used this strategy, why they did so, and how the strategy affects a story’s structure, pace, and ambition. Evaluation Methods: Students will draft two new stories using one method or another for dividing the narrative into parts. Other writing will include exercises and feedback for workshop stories. Published short stories and brief craft lessons will supplement our focus on student work. Teaching Method: Workshop and discussion. Notes: Enrollment is by permission number. Please contact Professor Donohue for inquiries. We’re scheduled to meet synchronously once a week for 3-hours, but since we’re on Zoom, we won’t use all of that time. Instead, students will meet separately a few times in pairs or groups for discussions or small workshops, scheduled as they prefer. Note that all stories should be either literary realism or magical realism; no fantasy or sci-fi.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Science Fiction (Post 1830/ICSP)	Andrews	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Science Fiction (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course provides a literary introduction to science fiction. Beginning with its 19th century origins in gothic fiction and adventure narratives, we will trace the development of science fiction through its early 20th century boom as a pulp form, its mid-century emergence as a recognizable literary genre, and its late 20th century adoption as a venue for exploring identity politics. How have longstanding genre themes like technological innovation and futuristic social progress endured or changed over time? How have explorations of race, gender, and sexuality been important to the genre’s development? How has sci-fi shaped the wider social world in realms like scientific research, political rhetoric, fan cultures, and popular media? We will consider these questions as we survey a selection of novels and short stories by major science fiction authors. Teaching Methods: short lectures, discussion, collaborative group work Evaluation Methods: participation, two analytical papers (6-7 pages each), experimental final paper (3-4 pages) Texts Include: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; Binti by Nedi Okorafor. Short fiction selections will include work by H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, James Tiptree Jr., and Octavia Butler. Texts Will Be Available At: All novels will be available at the Northwestern University Bookstore. All other readings will be posted on the course Canvas site.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th C English Novel (Post 1830)	Law	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th C English Novel (Post 1830) Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as class snobbery, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and vampirism! Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Early 3-pp. paper (15%); midterm project or presentation; final 5-7 pp. paper (40%); seminar presentations, brief assignments, and contribution to seminar discussion (20%). Texts include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 9780141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford, 9780199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin, 9780141439594), Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford, 9780199564095). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though students are encouraged to acquire their texts independently and beforehand. Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed or to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page."
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre-1830)	Phillips	MW 3:30-4:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre-1830) Course Description: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21^st century popular imagination? What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression: is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required. Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends. While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience. Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lecture. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation are required; an oral presentation; several short papers; and a midterm exam. Textbooks will be available at: Beck’s Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II: Purgatory. ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas].
English 331	Renaissance Poetry: Love in the Age of Shakespeare (Pre 1830/ICSP)	Wall	TTh 2-3:20
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 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Imaginary Homelands: South Asian Literatures in English (Post 1830/ICSP/TTC)	Nadiminti	MW 2-3:20
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Imaginary Homelands: South Asian Literatures in English (Post 1830/ICSP/TTC) Course Description: South Asian writers win prizes. Ever since Salman Rushdie catapulted to international fame with the Booker Prize in 1981, writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have become the mainstay of not only literary prize cultures and the festival circuit but also U.S. university campuses. What has made South Asian literature so popular, especially when it deals with somber questions of anticolonial resistance, postcolonial nation-building, violence, and loss? This course will introduce students to twentieth and twenty-first century South Asian Literatures in English characterized by exciting stylistic innovations in magical realism, modernist language games, lyrical prose, and biting satire. By examining novels, short stories, poems, political writing, and films, we will ask, how has literature shaped both the promise and failure of the postcolonial nation-state? What might South Asian writing teach us about the global project of democratic world-making? Topics of discussion will include gender, caste, empire, globalization, migrancy, and environmentalism. Texts: Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable Sa’adat Hassan Manto, “Boo” (Short story in translation) Ismat Chugtai, “Lihaaf” (Short story in translation) Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire (Film) Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses: Poetics & Politics of the Everyday (Post 1830/TTC)	Froula	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses: Poetics & Politics of the Everyday (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider Joyce’s transmutation of Homer’s Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters’ conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; resonances of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance--studied and unconscious--and theatricality; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life—and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce’s reported remark that women's emancipation is “the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is”; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the powers and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. Together we’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and we’ll seek revelation by engaging it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom. Teaching Method: Impromptu lectures, presentations, discussion. Evaluation: Prompt attendance, preparation, participation (20%); weekly posts (25%; these count as midterm and final); class presentation with 1-2-page handout (15%); course papers and projects: option of two shorter or one longer paper/project) (40%). Books: Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text), Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation. Other recommended and supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media.
English 371	American Novel: Race and Politics in Faulkner (Post 1830/ICSP)	Stern	MW 12:30-1:50
English 371 American Novel: Race and Politics in Faulkner (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course will involve the close reading of Faulkner's four great tragic novels of race and identity: The Sound and The Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light In August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Until very recently, these works have been considered central to the canon of modernist fiction and read as meditations on the tortured consciousness of the artist (TSATF, AILD, AA!) or the dilemma of the outsider adrift in an alienating world (LIA). Saturating Faulkner's novels are images of the anguished history of race relations in the American South from the 19th century to the Great Migration and Great Depression. Yet the tragic legacy of slavery, Faulkner's abiding subject, has been understood by critics as a figure for more abstract and universal moral predicaments. Our investigation seeks to localize Faulkner's representation of history, particularly his vision of slavery and the effects of the color line, as a specifically American crisis, embodied in the remarkable chorus of narrative voices and visions that constitute his fictive world. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: During the quarter, you will write two take-home close reading examinations of two pages each, as well as a final paper of 8-10 pages on a topic of your choice that you have discussed with me. All written exercises are due over email in the form of Microsoft Word attachments. One quarter of your grade will be based on your participation in class discussion. Anyone who misses a class will require the professor's permission to continue in the course. No late papers will be accepted. Conflicts with deadlines must be discussed with the professor and any extensions must be approved in advance.
English 371	American Novel: The Big Book: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830)	Grossman	TTh 11-12:20
English 371 American Novel: The Big Book: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830) Course Description: How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world? One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading a big book. But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel. Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages. Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville’s Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own. Teaching Method: Mostly Discussion. Possible student oral presentations. Evaluation method: It is essential to keep up with the reading and there may be occasional quizzes to gauge compliance. Possible short writing assignments. Two longer papers (8-10 pages each). Texts: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (first published in 1851), and a range of reviews and critical essays, including film adaptations. Everyone MUST purchase and read ONLY THIS Norton Critical third edition of the novel, edited by Hershel Parker; ISBN: 978-0-393-28500-0.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: US Literature and That ’70s Feeling (Post 1830)	Jackson	TTh 2-3:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: US Literature and That ’70s Feeling (Post 1830) Course Description: What was the Seventies, really? It seems the only consensus about the decade is that there isn’t one, aside for the noisy kaleidoscope of disco, drugs, and killer style known to popular culture. Politically, socially, and economically, however, the Seventies is seldom discussed for itself, instead conceived as the disastrous decade clearing the stage for Eighties corporatism, Reaganism, and nostalgia. This course reads deep and diversely to study this period of time as rendered and remembered. We will read and watch materials of the period as well as contemporary texts in order to ask, Why is the Seventies so difficult to summarize? How do narratives about race, class, and nation clash and diverge? What is the mood of the time and whose mood is it? What about our current period necessitates remembering the Seventies in a certain way and how does this rewrite the sense of the time for those who lived and wrote it? Possible authors and texts include Hunter S. Thompson, Jaws, Stephen King, The Salt Eaters, Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, the Carpenters, Toni Morrison, Inherent Vice, Mad Men, Judy Blume, Gwendolyn Brooks, American Hustle, Lana Del Rey, and The Muppets. Teaching Method: Seminar-style discussion. Evaluation Method: Brief weekly response posts (Chalk); two essays. Texts include: TBD Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore, Canvas
English 381	Studies in Literature & Medicine: Contagious Narratives (Post 1830/ICSP)	Mann	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 381 Studies in Literature & Medicine: Contagious Narratives (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: In her monograph Contagious, Priscilla Wald writes, “Disease emergence ineluctably evinces human interconnections on global scale, but the stories of disease emergence fashion the terms in which those connections make sense” (270). For Wald, and for others, understanding the narratives of contagion can help us understand the cultural and social work that diseases do in the world. In this independent study, we will investigate how authors imagine the lifeworlds of those in the grip of contagious outbreak. The course will move in three sections. Beginning with HIV/AIDS epidemic, we will examine Tony Kushner’s masterwork, Angels in America. In the second section, we will extracts from some of the most famous nonfiction writing on disease outbreak, including the work of John Barry, Laurie Garrett, and Richard Preston. In the final section of the course, we will examine fictions of virality unmoored from the real world, including Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, Francis Lawrence’s film I am Legend, and Junot Diaz’s “Monstro.” Throughout, we will engage with important secondary literature from scholars including Priscilla Wald, Ramzi Fawaz, Neel Ahuja, Adia Benton, and others. We will be especially attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality relate to notions of susceptibility to disease, how these categories organize government response, and how solidarity within and between these communities has reorganized political and cultural responses to contagion. Teaching method: Bi-weekly seminar meetings Evaluation Method: Three papers, discussion, Canvas posts Texts include: Kushner, Angels in America (Parts 1 and 2) 978-1559363846 Colson Whitehead, Zone One 978-0307455178 Priscilla Wald, 978-0822341536 Neel Ahuja, 978-0822360636
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: LGBTQ Art and Activism in the United States (Post 1830/ICSP)	Chaskin	MW 3:30-4:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: LGBTQ Art and Activism in the United States (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: From the Civil Rights Movement to the AIDS crisis to the legalization of gay marriage, LGBT art and activism have been deeply intertwined. Queer writers in the U.S. have negotiated ever-shifting priorities and stigmas to represent queer life in literature and media. Yet stories have always been a way to have a voice, to account for oneself and one’s community, and to connect to others who share one’s experience. LGBTQ literature might be outward facing—representing queerness to a straight audience—or it might face inwards, speaking to a queer community of readers. This class will consider the relationship between sociopolitical movements and the art and literature that were produced from or around them. Focusing on flashpoints in the history of LGBTQ rights and culture in the United States, students will leave this course with a concrete sense of recent history, artistic diversity, and intersectional queer studies. In addition to a core set of literary and historical texts, students will give queer culture presentations on each of the primary periods this class covers. These presentations will provide the opportunity to bring in objects from outside of the class, which will supplement our understanding of queer art and activism. Teaching Methods: Discussion of assigned texts, as well as supplementary material presented in class. Evaluation Methods: Participation, short presentation, reflections, final paper or creative project. Texts Include: Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952); James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956); Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973); Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1991); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006). In addition, we will read a series of activist documents, short stories, and essays, and watch the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012). Texts Will Be Available At: Novels will be at Beck’s Bookstore; all other essays and films will be on Canvas.
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: 2001: A Cinematic Odyssey (Post 1830/TTC)	Davis, N.	MW 8-9:20p
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: 2001: A Cinematic Odyssey (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will introduce key terms and concepts for close reading a film, then lead students through applying those tools to an eclectic, ambitious range of global cinema, spanning scripted dramas, musicals, documentaries, short films, and animated features. As we hone our aesthetic sensibilities and capacities for rigorous argument, we will also pose historical questions about the year 2001, when all of these movies debuted on the world stage and/or arrived in U.S. theaters. This year, is significant for many reasons: most obviously the epochal events of September 11, but also the GOP’s reclaiming of the U.S. Presidency, the deepening of a global recession, advances in home computing and gaming, and major industrial shifts in how Hollywood produces and circulates movies. Throughout the course, we will confront what it means to unpack the complexities and even contradictions of a moment that still feels “recent” by the standards of most history classes, but is already measurably different from our own, and perhaps divergent from how we tend to commemorate the 9/11 period, the Bush years, or the new millennium in pop-cultural terms. Lectures will combine formal analyses of artistically and socially significant films, including work from six continents. Teaching Method: Twice-weekly lectures, with significant interaction and discussion. Evaluation Method: Graded writing assignments; lecture participation. Assignments: Writing assignments will include two traditional, thesis-driven essays as well as a series of shorter, skill-building exercises, some of them with individual research components. These assignments will also include opportunities to craft prose in different voices and for different audiences. Readings: None required for purchase. All assigned readings available on Canvas. Films: Movies screened in whole or in part are likely to include 11’09”01 (Miscellaneous), Amélie (France), Amores perros (Mexico), Beneath the Veil (UK/Afghanistan), By Hook and by Crook (USA), Donnie Darko (USA), Faat Kiné (Senegal), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (USA), In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong), Kandahar (Iran), Lagaan (India), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New Zealand), Memento (USA), Monster’s Ball (USA), Moulin Rouge (Australia), Mulholland Drive (USA), No Man’s Land (Bosnia-Herzegovina), The Pinochet Case (France/Chile), Southern Comfort (USA), Spirited Away (Japan), Startup.com (USA), and Training Day (USA). Note: This course satisfies the Transnationalism and Textual Circulation (TTC) requirement for the English major.
English 392	Situation of Writing	Bouldrey	TTh 8-9:20p
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 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Shanahan	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 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 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Seliy	MW 4:20-5:40
English 394-2 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 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Biss	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 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: Landscape and Technology in 20th Century Literature	Froula	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: Landscape and Technology in 20th Century Literature Course Description: Conrad's Marlow piloting a rattletrap steamship carrying armed "pilgrims" up the Congo; Mansfield taking a French train to meet her lover at the front as industrial war machines shell tiny, fragile human bodies amid fields of poppies; Hemingway driving an ambulance on the Italian front; Chaplin's Tramp cast opposite a zeppelin in a censored wartime short film; Woolf's young men descending in a submarine to "suffocate uncomplainingly together"; Eliot's typist home at teatime, putting a record on her gramophone; the clanking newsroom presses and the printed newspapers, ads, posters, and "throwaways" that beckon, call, and cry to Dubliners in Joyce's river-threaded cityscapes; the train to the Caves and automobile accident on the Marabar Road in Forster's A Passage to India; the aeroplane writing on the sky above Mrs Dalloway's mesmerized Londoners; Giles Oliver's vision of Hitler bombing the church to smithereens on the festival day of the annual village pageant in Woolf's Between the Acts; Time Magazine bringing the world-shaking news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to the American Army prison camp in Pisa, where it reverberates in Pound's Pisan Cantos: twentieth-century literature abounds in depictions of emergent technologies shaping the landscapes, conditions, and events of human life and thought. In our research seminar, we'll read a selection of works alongside essays by Benjamin, McLuhan, Woolf, Kittler, Leopold, Hansen, and others. Working closely with the instructor and our Humanities Bibliographer, Josh Honn, each student will home in on a topic and design a juicy, imaginative, feasible project that combines scholarly research and literary interpretation. One for all and all for one, we'll learn to frame promising research questions; to navigate scholarly databases and archives; to evaluate sources; to explore readings in context while capturing and testing our own insights and ideas; to craft a sound, engaging, well-written essay; and to give and take constructive critique. Each student will produce a work notebook, a preliminary proposal, an annotated bibliography, a working proposal and bibliography, and a 12-15 page research paper. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussions, peer workshops, individual conferences. Evaluation Methods: Attendance, preparation, class participation; exercises, such as posts, peer review, and in-class workshops; a preliminary proposal and bibliography, annotated bibliography, working proposal and bibliography, drafts, and the 12-15 page research paper. Texts: Exemplary selected works, excerpts, essays, and research guides to be read in common; plus each student's particular bibliography. Everyone will learn from each other's projects while pursuing his or her own. Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students should successfully complete 4-6 300-level English courses before taking English 397.
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Soni	M 3-5:20
English 398-2 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: Art & Practice of Public Writing & Scholarship	Jackson	M 10a-12:50p
English 403 Writers' Studies in Literature: Art & Practice of Public Writing & Scholarship Course Description: This course will initiate students into the practice and performance of public scholarship along with the wider online and print market of creative non-fiction. We will read and discuss a range of genres, styles, and approaches to melding the academic with the accessible and artful and discuss the nitty-gritty of the professional side of actually getting work published. Readings includes short- and longform work by writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Foster Wallace, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Joan Didion, Emily Lordi, Daphne Brooks, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Hilton Als, among others. Teaching Method: This is a seminar-style course. Evaluation Method: Short writing assignments and a final project. Texts include: All readings will be available on Canvas.
English 422	Studies in Medieval Literature: Allegory and Gender	Newman	Th 2-4:50
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: Allegory and Gender Course Description: This seminar will explore the medieval personification allegory: perhaps the most supple, durable, and widely favored of all medieval genres, yet also the one whose modern critical history has been most checkered and riddled with misunderstandings. We will look at the rhetorical, philosophical, and emotional logic of personification, paying special attention to the role of gender. Latin and French works will be read in translation, but students with competence in those languages are richly encouraged to read the originals. Modernists may, if they wish, read Piers Plowman in translation. Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on class participation, weekly postings, an oral presentation accompanied by a brief (5-page) paper, and a research paper of about 15 pages. Texts: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; Prudentius, Psychomachia; Bernard Silvestris, Cosmographia; Hildegard of Bingen, The Play of Virtues; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose; Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls; Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowles; William Langland, excerpts from Piers Plowman; and a selection of works by Christine de Pizan.
English 441	Studies in 18th Century Literature: Theories of Language	Soni	W 2-4:50
English 441 Studies in 18th Century Literature: Theories of Language Course Description: The “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the humanities – the attention to the constitutive function of representation in human knowledge and culture – is usually thought to be a twentieth-century phenomenon (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida), but its origins can be traced back to eighteenth-century accounts of language (Vico, Rousseau, Herder). In this class, we will explore the developing understanding of language in the eighteenth-century alongside twentieth-century philosophies that have been decisive for articulating the constitutive function of language. Through these seminal texts, we will address a wide range of questions important in the study of language: what is the relation between language and thought? Does a language embody a specific form of rationality? Does language merely reflect reality or shape our perception of it? What role do emotion and embodiment play in the development of language? Is a culture bound to a particular language, or can it transcend its linguistic embedding? How are we to understand literary features of language (metaphor, narrative) in relation to its representational and truth-telling aspects? Although it will not be our only focus, one particular nexus of questions will be especially important to us. What are the differences between natural and formal language? Are there particular things that each is able to articulate that the other cannot? Can the difference between natural and formal language be mapped onto different models of explanation and causation (final v efficient causation)? Are there different modes of rationality specific to these different forms of language (algorithmic v discursive rationality)? In particular, can we make the case for judgment as a distinct cognitive operation, irreducible to knowledge, by distinguishing these two forms of language and their underlying modes of explanation and rationality? Our primary readings in the eighteenth century will be Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 3), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Book 3), Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy, Vico’s New Science, Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language and Herder’s Essay on the Origin of Language, with other possibilities including Hobbes, Leibniz, Diderot, Condillac, Burke and Hamann. Readings after the eighteenth century will include at least Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Charles Taylor’s Language Animal, Cavell’s Claim of Reason and McIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Other readings may be drawn from Heidegger, Anscombe, Foucault, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Habermas, Jameson, as needed.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: GIFs, Selfies, Memes: New Networked Genres	Hodge	M 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: GIFs, Selfies, Memes: New Networked Genres Course Description: The early twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of always-on computing, a distinctive digital media ecology defined by smartphones, social media, and the tacit assumption of life lived on the basis of ubiquitous wireless networks. This same moment has also witnessed an incredible explosion of new networked genres. These genres include animated GIFs, memes, selfies, supercuts, podcasts, vaporwave, ASMR videos, likes, comments, and much else. This seminar is devoted to studying these new forms collectively and individually as aesthetics symptoms of a rapidly changing historical present in the overdeveloped west. While not framed as an introduction to digital media studies or digital aesthetics, this seminar will be taught with the consideration that it will function most likely in this way for most students. Our approach will be to privilege artistic negotiations with new networked genres. Our guiding principle will be that artistic texts offer especially rich reflexive occasions for studying the overwhelmingly non-reflexive aesthetics of always-on computing. We will often pair theoretical texts and work in digital media studies that will grant us a working vocabulary for gaining traction on a number of feelings and ideas: from creepiness and A E S T H E T I C to ambivalence, lethargy, boredom, mindfulness, and touch, as well as things like big data, post-internet art, fake news and the decline of symbolic efficiency, and vulnerability. Authors to be read will likely include Berlant, Ngai, Butler, Richmond, Dean, Cohen, Frosh, and Hu among others. Artists will likely include Dennis Cooper, Allie Brosh, Mary Bond, Jennifer Proctor, Elisa Giardina Papa, Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, Frances Stark, Faith Holland, Miranda July, and others. Teaching Method: discussion, short lecture Evaluation Method: participation, analytical essays, experimental editing projects Textbooks: Course Reader Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half ISBN: 978-1451666175 Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (Duke) ISBN: 978-0822369400 Paul Frosh, Digital Poetics (Polity) ISBN: 978-0745651316 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories ISBN: 978-0674088122 Texts should be ordered in advance online
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature	Spigner	T 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature Course Description: In his book of essays, Turning the Wheel, author Charles Johnson says that Jean Toomer’s “Blue Meridian”: “offers us a bridge between the black experience and the profound reflections on selfhood long a part of Vedic literature.” Johnson identifies Toomer’s work as a key text within a longer tradition of Black letters that intersect with Vedic and Buddhist philosophies and practices. Considering the buzz word “mindfulness,” this synchronous graduate course explores the extended tradition of spiritual, contemplative, and ancient practices influencing Black letters since the 18th century. Alluding clear and consistent definition, "mindfulness" is an umbrella term that includes contemplative practices, embodiment, transcendentalism, and many other lines of spiritual and secular strategies for survival and more. In this and at a time when the US negotiates tensions born from the forced fixity of Covid-19 health practices and the various political movements driving particularly young Black people into the streets, this course will consider how stillness, concentration, and focus on interiority provide alternative and complementary strategies for Black survival and thriving. We will read works by Johnson and Toomer, as well as Phillis Wheatley, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Toni Morrison, and Lorraine Hansberry. Additionally, we will consider the theory and criticism of Howard Thurman, Kevin Quashie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others along with Buddhist, Vedic, and West African religious texts and studies to consider the many sides of a Black mindfulness literary tradition. We will contemplate the theory and praxis of meditation, transcendence, tantra, Dharma, ritual, and possession. Additionally, we will create and execute our own mindfulness exercises and consider how they may or may not support various politics of Blackness in our current moment. This course will require active and enthusiastic participation by everyone in the class. A Zoom class, together, we will also devise ways to build and stay engaged within our classroom environment. There will be weekly response papers/discussion board writing, group presentations, journaling, and ongoing experimentation with mindfulness. There will also be a final project due at the end of the course.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop: The Art of Research, or Toward the 25th Poem	Trethewey	W 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	Abani	T 6p-8:50p
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: Dear Writer, Welcome to this fiction workshop. There are many ways to approach a fiction workshop, but whatever the approach is, it is important to keep in the foreground the idea that we are making literature. What do I mean by this? We have to move beyond the limitation of making a small piece of art that is competent and sufficient to pass a class, and to impress our peers in a classroom (virtual or otherwise), to being able (aspirationally at least) to place the work we make within the larger context of tradition, genre and aesthetic considerations. Remember literature is a frame applied to story at a remove, concerned more with cultural and field/canon making, than with production itself. In this workshop we should focus on all our reading of each other, and perhaps in the supplied readings, on 2 main approaches. Mastering of these two approaches opens up possibilities in writing in very unique ways and will move our craft forward exponentially. In this class we will look at the idea of story and narrative separately and then blend. All story, it seems, arises from, and carries a deeply emotional drive; whereas narrative is more about organizing or the organizational drives that bring clarity and focus to story. You will submit a three-to-five-page aesthetic statement about your approach to fiction and story, editing and writing, and what you’re hoping to develop or achieve by the end of this class, while locating yourself in a tradition (not vaguely but with concrete examples). You will also submit a 15-to-20-page story or first novel chapter. Both of these are due on the first day of class, no exceptions. There will be supplemental and secondary readings and videos to help illustrate a pathway into deeper conversations. We will be flexible and adapt these additional resources as the quarter unfolds its own unique opportunities and challenges. I look forward to seeing you soon. Warmly, Chris Abani
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Biss	W 6p-8:50p
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 505	Research Development Seminar	Erkkila	Th 3-4:50
English 505 Research Development Seminar Course Description: English 505 will guide students through the preparation of a first draft of the dissertation prospectus and at least one draft of a grant or fellowship proposal. While students should remain engaged with their proposed dissertation committees as they draft the prospectus and grant proposal, English 505 will explain and model best practices for research and grant proposals in the field while also providing structure to keep students on track with their research plans. Teaching Method: Seminar, discussion, and exchange. Evaluation: Discussion and exchange. Draft cv, proposal, and prospectus. Texts: Various readings relevant to writing the dissertation prospectus and a grant proposal.