Fall 2021 Class Schedule
**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**| Course | Title | Instructor | Day/Time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Lombardo | WF 9:30-10:50 | |
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader. | ||||
| English 202 | Introduction to Creative Writing | Scanlon | WF 11-12:20 | |
English 202 Introduction to Creative WritingCourse 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 | Boyd | 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 | Curdy | 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 | Shanahan | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major. | ||||
| English 206 | Reading and Writing Poetry | 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 | MW 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 | Abani | T 3-5:50 | |
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 208 | Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction | Bresland | MW 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 210-1 | English Literary Traditions, Part 1 | Thompson | MW 10-10:50, plus discussion section | |
English 210-1 English Literary Traditions, Part 1Course Description: This class surveys major texts in the development of English literature from the epic Beowulf (c. 700) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1788). A central goal of the class is to develop tools for approaching literary texts as creative expressions as well as challenging reflections on society, power, knowledge, and difference. The millennium-long sweep of English 210 will help us appreciate literature not as leisure reading but as challenging, bold, funny, even utopian political thought articulated through new representational forms. The class is structured in units with key texts accompanied by corollary short documents aimed to illuminate the text’s historical and literary meanings. Central readings (some excerpted) include: Beowulf; Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; Thomas More, Utopia; William Shakespeare, The Tempest and sonnets; John Donne, Andrew Marvell, poems; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. | ||||
| English 211 | Introduction to Poetry | Gottlieb | MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section | |
English 211 Introduction to PoetryCourse 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 colisted with Comp Lit 211. | ||||
| English 273 | Introduction to 20th Century American Literature (TTC) | Nadiminti | MW 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section | |
English 273 Introduction to 20th Century American Literature (TTC)Course Description: After asserting its “manifest destiny” in the nineteenth century, the United States became an unprecedented global power in the twentieth century, especially after World War II. In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce went so far as to coin the phrase “the American century” to describe the new role of the emerging superpower in world affairs. For some, the US became the “indispensable nation,” “world leader,” and an exceptional international figure. For many others, such as the people of the Philippines or Vietnam or Iraq, it became a cruel and coercive imperial force. This course studies how the historical fact of US empire influenced literature and expressive culture. We will examine how both domestic and international writers most impacted by imperial violence—such as Filipino migrant laborers, the descendants of interned Japanese-Americans, or Afghani and Pakistani diaspora in the US—contest the language of empire that the U.S. used to define itself. What kinds of stories, prison memoirs, protest poems, graphic novels, and other aesthetic forms have emerged out of the desire for more truthful counter-narratives? How has the geography of United States empire shaped and informed the multiracial experience of both its populations and those abroad? While the course thinks through Asian American and postcolonial diaspora in South Asia and the so-called Middle East, it also encourages students to think about US imperial effects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Throughout the term, students will be introduced to and learn to grapple with complex theoretical and historical concepts like settler colonialism, Cold War militarism, post-9/11 counterinsurgency, extraterritorial internment, and neoliberal hegemony. Along the way, we will ask large questions about the function of literature such as: what makes a work of art political? What kinds of aesthetic strategies do writers and artists use in their presentation of the political? What does it mean for literature to be performing resistance? Assignments will include one close-reading paper, one theoretical reading paper, pop quizzes, robust sections participation, and a final exam. Required Texts:
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| English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Ideas of Justice | Schwartz | MW 9:30-10:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Ideas of JusticeCourse Description: This course will introduce you to literary studies with a focus on ideas of justice. Library works will include 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 Shakespeare, and modern works by Melville, Kafka, and the play, “Inherit the Wind” will be included. Reading closely, we will heed how literature offers elaborations and complications of theories of justice, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will also put literature in dialogue with strands of political thought, showing how literature both reflects and shapes ideas of justice. Teaching method: Seminar Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit. | ||||
| English 300 | Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Southern Food, Music, & Literature | Černe | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Southern Food, Music, & LiteratureCourse Description: “The South got something to say,” André 3000 declared at the 1995 Source Awards in New York City when OutKast won the best new rap group category, changing the course of hip hop. From Beyoncé to Lynyrd Skynyrd, soul food to new south cuisine, Flannery O’Connor to Natasha Trethewey, this course looks at the ways cultural production from the second half of the twentieth century to today has sought both to cling to a nostalgic sense of Southernness and to challenge that notion, imagining the region anew and (re)claiming it in the process. The course engages culturally diverse, multi-media and multi-genre texts about the U.S. South. We will read poems, short stories, Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division (2013), recipes, blog posts, and music videos through the theoretical lenses of sociology, black feminism, ecocriticism, and food studies, exploring different methodological approaches to the study of literature and popular culture. Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Methods: Participation, short papers, in-class presentation, paper proposal oriented around a chosen theoretical framework. Texts include: Flannery O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965); Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970); Natasha Trethewey, selected poems from Native Guard (2006); Kiese Laymon, Long Division (2013); Beyoncé, Lemonade (2016). Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and on Canvas. Note: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit. | ||||
| English 309 | Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of Obsession | Mun | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 309 Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of ObsessionCourse Description: Much of writing is made up of obsessions. We might use our obsession as catalyst and fuel, something that gets us writing and, if lucky, keeps us writing. And sometimes we write about our obsession directly, hoping (perhaps futilely) to be purged free of it, once and for all. Susan Sontag, while talking about writing and the writer’s life, said it simply: “You have to be obsessed. It’s not something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be.” In this course we’ll explore “obsession” from two main angles: personally and textually. On the personal level, and as a way to get us started, we’ll discuss and identify subjects we keep returning to—from harmless infatuations to downright obsessions. Is Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo or the soundtrack from Mama Mia playing nonstop on your headphones, for example? Is there a painting you keep seeing in your mind’s eye? What exactly is your relationship with a well-made cheeseburger? What is the chronic conflict of your life? On a textual level, we’ll read stories, essays, and books that deal with obsession in one form or another, or reveal the linguistic obsessions the author held while writing them. Students will have the option to write a creative non-fiction essay or a short story. This class is for serious writers who are unafraid of taking real risks, unafraid of true rewrites/revisions, unafraid of working hard toward turning a good story or an essay into a great one. Teaching Method: Workshop. Evaluation Method: Creative writing assignments, peer-reviews, and reading responses, workshop participation. Text Include: Coursepack and books. Coursepack will be available at: Quartet Copies Instructor Bio: Nami Mun was raised in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. She is the author of the novel Miles from Nowhere, which received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, a Hopwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Some of Nami’s honors include fellowships from University of Michigan, Northwestern University, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bread Loaf and Tin House. Miles from Nowhere went on to become a national bestseller. Nami’s work can be found in Granta, Tin House, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Iowa Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, among others. Previously, she has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. | ||||
| English 312 | Studies in Drama: State of the Nation Plays (Post-1830) | Davis, T. | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 312 Studies in Drama: State of the Nation Plays (Post-1830)Course Description: In post-1945 British theatre, successive generations of playwrights have written "state of the nation" plays to register national preoccupations and political realities. Essentially litmus tests of social feeling, these plays reflect on the slow dismantling of empire, demographic shifts, strained or nascent institutions, and political regime change in brilliant exposés of national character. More recently, this genre has also been used to register the project of cultural pluralism (and its discontents) and Britain's place in the world. Because the plays are staged, they provide outstanding ways to examine narrative and metaphor's reception in a constantly changing political landscape. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method(s): close reading assignments (including final paper) and participation. Texts include: Priestley, The Linden Tree; Osborne, Look Back in Anger; Wesker, The Kitchen; Behan, The Hostage; Beyond the Fringe; Storey, The Contractor; Edgar, Destiny; Brenton, The Romans in Britain; Churchill, Top Girls; Pinter, Party Time; Agbeje, Gone too Far!; Bartlett, King Charles III; Hickson, Oil; Kalnejais, This Beautiful Future. Note: This course is colisted with Theatre 340. | ||||
| English 312 | Studies in Drama: Katherine Dunham (Post-1830/ICSP) | Manning | F 10a-12:50p | |
English 312 Studies in Drama: Katherine Dunham (Post-1830/ICSP)Course Description: This seminar explores the life and work of Katherine Dunham, an African-American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, writer, and political activist. Dunham came of age in the milieu of the Chicago Renaissance, collaborating with Black and white artists to create a new style of dancing based on her ethnographic research in the Caribbean. During the years surrounding World War II she made a national reputation performing with her company on Broadway and on the Hollywood screen. Then in the decades following the war, she traveled internationally with her company, her work implicitly and explicitly engaging the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for decolonization. In 1965 Dunham settled in East St. Louis, where she trailblazed methods for using the arts to engage and uplift youth in the community. The class time will be split between movement and discussion. In addition to guest teachers in Dunham technique, students in this course will encounter the full range of primary sources for dance studies—film and video, oral history and memoir, unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, exhibitions of visual material, digital databases. There will also be several co-curricular outings integrated into this course—from an exhibit at the Newberry Library to a panel at the Modernist Studies Association. Previous dance training is not required, as long as students have a passion for this inquiry into embodiment and cultural history! Course costs: Joanna Dee Das, Katherine Dunham; Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2017) hardcover ($35) or ebook ($15) ISBN: 9780190264871, and KAISO! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham, eds. Veve Clark and Sara Johnson (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) ppbk $30 ISBN: 978-0299212742. Note: This course is colisted with Dance 335. | ||||
| English 324 | Studies in Medieval Literature: The Global Middle Ages (Pre 1830/TTC/ICSP) | Newman | MWF 2-2:50 | |
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Global Middle Ages (Pre 1830/TTC/ICSP)Course Description: The global turn in medieval studies affords new opportunities to go beyond the field’s traditional focus on Europe to explore its ties with the rest of the known world. This course will have three units. In the first, we will consider court ladies as authors of romance, comparing the fashionable Lais of Marie de France (12th century) with excerpts from the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11th century). The second unit will focus on travel literature. We’ll read the Itinerary of William of Rubruck (ca. 1250), one of the first Europeans to visit the court of the Great Khan in the Mongol Empire, along with the best-selling Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1360s), an armchair traveler whose open-minded curiosity makes him a model of premodern ethnography. Finally, we will explore the versatile genre of the framed story collection, reading portions of the Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Teaching method: Discussion, some lectures. Evaluation method: Class discussion, three papers; one may be a creative project. | ||||
| English 335 | Milton (Pre-1830) | Schwartz | MW 12:30-1:50 | |
English 335 Milton (Pre-1830)Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. Teaching Method: Class discussion and lecture. Evaluation Method: Papers, class presentation, class participation. Texts Include: Paradise Lost by John Milton. | ||||
| English 339 | Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Others (Pre 1830/ICSP) | West | TTh 11-12:20 | |
English 339 Special Topics in Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Others (Pre 1830/ICSP)Course Description: While many of them are set among courts and kings, Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly explore experiences and perspectives of those outside prevailing circles of power and social acceptance of his time: the poor, women, the young and the old, members of non-dominant racial and religious communities. Shakespeare himself fell into some of these categories of “otherness”; as actors without fixed social status, so did his colleagues; so for that matter did his Queen. Subsequent readers and interpreters of Shakespeare have found in his representations of other identities much to praise and much to question, but they have found common material to think with. Given Shakespeare’s unique status within anglophone and world literatures, Shakespeare’s writings are rich ground for posing questions of otherness, identity, and empathy, belonging, commonness, and difference. In this class we will take up some of the cues Shakespeare’s plays provide, their insights and oversights, and investigate how Shakespeare, and others, responded to them. Teaching Method(s): discussion; small group work; lecture. Evaluation Method(s): papers and other writing projects; discussion. Texts include: parts of Sir Thomas More, Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear. | ||||
| English 313 | Studies in 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars: Novels of Jane Austen in the Context of the French Revolution (Pre-1830) | Soni | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 313 Studies in 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars: Novels of Jane Austen in the Context of the French Revolution (Pre-1830)Course Description: The enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s novels is due in part to the fact that the historical and cultural debates in which she intervened are very much the same ones that confront us today: tradition v innovation, parental authority v filial obligation, customary social bonds v contractual relations, emotion v reason, the role of women in society, the value of the arts. This class will consider Jane Austen’s development as a writer, in the context of the “culture wars” in Britain in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. Is Austen a radical or conservative novelist? Does she defend the values of a dying aristocracy, or champion a new middle class sensibility? How does she respond to the jarring changes affecting her society? Does she assert the privileges of the governing classes or urge the rights of silenced groups (especially young women)? Does she offer a traditional or progressive view of marriage? Should children make their own choices in marriage or defer to parental authority? How do her novels cultivate good judgment? Do the arts have a progressive role in transforming society or a conservative one in maintaining traditional values? These are some of the questions we will examine as we read a range of her novels. Our goal will be to understand the experimental and fluid nature of Austen’s thought, as well as the way in which she transformed the history of the novel. Teaching Method(s): Seminar, Discussion, Lecture.
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| English 313 | Studies in 19th Century Fiction: British Children's Fantasy (Post-1830) | Botz | MW 11-12:20 | |
English 313 Studies in 19th Century Fiction: British Children's Fantasy (Post-1830)Course Description: It is said that the Victorians invented the idea of childhood: an idyllic state of wonder, play, imagination, and innocence. The orphans, adventurers, tricksters, and runaways in Victorian children’s novels befriend animals, outsmart pirates, soar through the London sky, and fall down rabbit holes. What made these stories so popular in the nineteenth century, and why do they continue to enchant readers today? This course will explore key works of the Victorian literature canon to consider how these various narratives reflect rapidly transforming conceptions of childhood during the nineteenth century. From Lewis Carroll’s playfully puzzling Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Rudyard Kipling’s novel of colonial espionage, Kim, Victorian children’s novels offer a unique perspective on a world in the grip of profound political, economic, and religious change. As we read, we will also reflect on the categories of the human and the animal, the nature of child sexuality, the distinctions drawn between innocence and maturity, as well as differences in gender, race, class, and disability. How does the constructed representation of “the child” speak to the desires, ambitions, and anxieties of a given historical moment? And what does the very category of children’s literature suggest about literature’s purpose and value? Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Class presentation, short writing exercises building to final paper/project . Texts Include: Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (1865/1871); George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind (1871); Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883); Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901); Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (1906); J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911); Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911). Available at: Norris; additional readings online available through Canvas. | ||||
| English 366 | Studies in African American Literature: Gender and Black Masculinity (Post-1830) | Bey | TTh 9:30-10:50 | |
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Gender and Black Masculinity (Post-1830)Course Description: This course will take as its focus not only discussing black men but, more rigorously, interrogating gender as a racialized regime and masculinity itself as a subtle form of violence. Students will be invited to think about race and gender as co-constitutive (rather than simply and innocently intersectional), and about what might be possible after the interrogation?and possibly dismantling?of masculinity even when affixed to blackness. To examine these topics, we will explore the writing of Richard Wright and Percival Everett, documentaries on manhood, black feminist critiques of masculinity, and transgender perspectives on gender. Note: This course is colisted with AF AM ST 334. | ||||
| English 368 | Studies in 20th Century Literature: Imaginary Homelands: Intro to South Asian Lit in English (Post-1830/TTC) | Nadiminti | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Imaginary Homelands: Intro to South Asian Lit in English (Post-1830/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. Required Texts:
Note: This course is colisted with ASIAN AM 376. | ||||
| English 378 | Studies in American Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post-1830) | Savage | TTh 2-3:20 | |
English 378 Studies in American Literature: The Jazz Age: Love and Art in the 1920s (Post-1830)Course Description: In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. “ During the cultural crisis of Modernism, when a variety of intellectual revolutions and the unprecedented carnage of the Great War suggested that Western civilization was either a sham or doomed, writers and other artists created new literary forms. Their aesthetic innovation often depicted art and love (or sex) as parallel (or contradictory) ways to create meaning the wasteland of Modernity. In this class, we will read and discuss canonical, lesser-known, and popular texts of ‘20s in order to explore how these revolutionary writers saw love and art in their own time and, maybe, in the future. Teaching Method: Lecture & Discussion. Evaluation Method: Participation in class discussion; short one-page responses to each text; plus a variety of options for critical papers, ranging from several short argumentative essays to one long research paper. Texts include: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale and The First Lover and Other Stories, Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Dos Passo’s Manhattan Transfer, as well as Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. | ||||
| English 381 | Literature and Medicine: Intro to Disability Studies in Literature (Post-1830/ICSP) | Chaskin | TTh 12:30-1:50 | |
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Intro 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? This is a methods class, and 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, short writing exercises. Texts Include: Excerpts from early sources including Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1760) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). In addition, we will read from the theoretical work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Therí Alyce Pickens, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Jasbir Puar, and a selection of contemporary writing on illness and disability, including authors like Audre Lorde, Eula Biss, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Texts Will Be Available At: All texts will be available on Canvas. | ||||
| English 393-1 | Theory and Practice of Poetry | Gibbons | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 393-1 Theory and Practice of PoetryCourse Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
| English 394-1 | Theory and Practice of Fiction | Donohue | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 394-1 Theory and Practice of FictionTeaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only. | ||||
| English 395-1 | Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction | Bresland | MW 3:30-4:50 | |
English 395-1 Theory and Practice of Creative NonfictionTeaching 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: Retelling, Rewriting, and Resources: Imitation and Creativity between Literary Texts | West | TTh 3:30-4:50 | |
English 397 Research Seminar: Retelling, Rewriting, and Resources: Imitation and Creativity between Literary TextsCourse Description: “Good artists copy; great artists steal,” said Steve Jobs—quoting Picasso, who may have been paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, who was reworking something Vergil said of Homer. Writing—poetry, drama, narrative—is made of other writing, and all writers mine their predecessors for material to vary and to reconfigure. Sometimes readers are meant to recognize a source to see how it has been transformed or preserved; sometimes borrowings and responses are only for the writer. Literary theft can be homage or parody or both at once. Most practically, literary imitation allows a work to include more than is given on the page. In this research-oriented course, we will explore what it means to build a literary work from other works. We will consider examples of imitative and creative reworking at the level of word, form, and plot, from the Renaissance, one of the most eager and dynamic periods of literary imitation, and beyond. Students will design further readings based on their research. We will also develop research strategies for writing a longer paper, and students will undertake a significant research project on a text of their choice that draws some of its energies from other works. Teaching Method(s): Discussion; small group work; lecture. Evaluation Method(s): Research exercises; other research-based projects; group comment and review; seminar paper. Texts include: Assorted sonnets; versions of the Orpheus-Eurydice story (Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Rilke, Delany, Ruhl); Romeo and Juliet; West Side Story; Romeo + Juliet; Shakespeare in Love; Atwood, Possession; other texts and other retellings. | ||||
| English 398-1 | Honors Seminar | Soni | M 3-5:20 | |
English 398-1 Honors SeminarCourse 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: How to Work | Gibbons | M 10a-12:50p | |
English 403 Writers' Studies in Literature: How to WorkCourse Description: This course for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction focuses on the contexts and processes of creative writing. Our multi-genre readings enact or exemplify or think or imply something about how what we write develops out of our social, intellectual and artistic formation, intellectual curiosity, psychic processes, emotional investments, sense of language, and artistic goals. Readings will broaden our sense of how writers discover and develop their materials, techniques, and reshape their artistic goals as they work—in the way that the work of writing itself can shift the writer’s sense of the work and of the writer’s purposes. We’ll examine how the complexity of writing from one body of experience and thought may lead not to a “style” but to a range of possible structures, stances, and processes of writing. We’ll draw examples, methods and artistic positions from our readings in order to expand our ability to think about (and perhaps begin) new possible projects and—just as important—new ways of working on existing projects. Writing assignments will be unlike those you may have previously completed. This is not a creative writing workshop. Readings (many of these are brief) will be late 20th and early 21st century writers, including some of the following: Julia Álvarez, James Baldwin, Christopher Bollas, Julia de Burgos, Helene Cixous, Lucille Clifton, Víctor Hernández Cruz, Mahmoud Darwish, Robert Duncan, William Goyen, Kimiko Hahn, Amy Hempel, Danilo Kiš, Clarice Lispector, Ed Roberson, Katherine Mansfield, Linda McCarriston, Leonard Michaels, Marga Minco, Toni Morrison, Lorine Neidecker, Grace Paley, Sterling Plumpp, Adrienne Rich, Yannis Ritsos, Angela Jackson, Richard Wright, Jenny Xie or others. | ||||
| English 410 | Introduction to Graduate Studies: Historicism Uses and Abuses | Feinsod | M 2-4:50 | |
English 410 Introduction to Graduate Studies: Historicism Uses and AbusesCourse Description: This course adapts its title from Friedrich Nietzsche’s untimely meditation “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” (1874). Beginning with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about historical materialism and the uses of history and literary history as disciplines, we will survey the development and invocations of historicism as an approach to literary study across colonial, imperial, modernist, postcolonial, and environmental episodes in literary history. How does historicism fare in addressing diverse periods? For example, while British Victorian studies recently faced critiques of dominant tendencies toward “positivist historicism,” some of the most energizing work in postcolonial literary studies has been deeply historicist in inclination. How has climate change provoked new visions of historical time crossing the traditional periods? Must we continue to follow Jameson’s famous injunction to “always historicize!” or do we rather find ourselves in a “weak” theoretical state of affairs by which “we cannot not historicize?” How do we understand Roland Barthes’s claim that “a little formalism turns one away from History, but … a lot brings one back to it?” What is historicism good for? What are its varieties? Where does it fall short? Readings may include works by G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hayden White, Susan Buck-Morss, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Saidiya Hartman, Reinhart Koselleck, Sianne Ngai, Michael Denning, Sylvia Wynter, Lisa Lowe, Michel-Rolph Troiullot, and/or Dipesh Chakrabarty. We will also watch a film TBD and look at a novel or poems to be selected by the class. This course serves as a required pro-seminar for students in Comparative Literary Studies and English, and we will therefore emphasize a common project of the “literary humanities.” In addition to the usual weekly seminar session, students should plan for biweekly Friday noon sections in which guest faculty introduce University resources and professional topics. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion. Texts will be available at: Electronic copies of texts will be made available. Note: This course is colisted with Comp Lit 410. | ||||
| English 455 | Studies in Poetry: Poetics of Dissolution | Wilson | W 2-4:50 | |
English 455 Studies in Poetry: Poetics of DissolutionCourse Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey and Harriet Mullen; turntablists DJ Spooky, Jazzy Jeff, and Premier; songs by musicians from Ella Fitzgerald to MF Doom; and pieces by visual artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. Theoretical texts may include work by Barthes, Baudrillard, Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists. Texts include:
Note: This course is colisted with ART 425. | ||||
| English 441 | Studies in 18th Century Literature: Realism/Antirealism | Thompson | T 2-4:50 | |
English 441 Studies in 18th Century Literature: Realism/AntirealismCourse Description: This seminar will reexamine two commonplaces in the history of the British novel: that early prose narrative was driven by the rise of empiricism and observational science; and that Restoration and eighteenth-century prose forms led straight to the representational mode known as realism. We begin the seminar by querying accounts of the rise of the New Science based on its strict privileging of sensory data and refusal of imperceptible or “occult” causes. Along with alternative accounts of embodied artisanal knowledge and micromatter, we will also ponder environmental determinism (which antedates the concept of biological race) and the structuring mandates of empire, extraction, and exploitation. The seminar will then confront the constitutive near-repression of the history of the slave trade in the long eighteenth-century archive, which will enable us critically to appraise dominant conceptions of the eighteenth-century “real” and attune us to speculative and/ or recuperative interventions in that reality’s textual consolidation through the present day. For the rest of the seminar, we will read prose narratives to ponder the strategies through which they claim to represent the real, with special attention to empirical perception and its limits. Are these texts’ representational, formal, and political claims based solely on phenomenal experience, plenitude of naturalistic detail, or verisimilitude? Can we locate other, even anti-realist modes through which eighteenth-century prose forms transmit meaning? Primary texts include (list subject to revision): Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air (1660); Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665); Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667); John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690); John Woodward, Some Thoughts and Experiments Concerning Vegetation (1699); John Arbuthnot, Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733); Nicole Aljoe, Early Caribbean Digital Archive; Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines (1668); [anonymous,] The London Jilt (1683); [anonymous,] Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1721); Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Eovaai (1736); Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (1748); [anonymous,] The Woman of Colour (1808). Scholars and theorists include (list subject to revision): Sara Ahmed; Nicole Aljoe; Srinivas Aravamudan; Mikhail Bahktin; Roland Barthes; James Delbourgo; Franz Fanon; Simon Gikandi; Lynn Festa; Saidiya Hartman; Fredric Jameson; Jayne Elizabeth Lewis; Bruno Latour; Georg Lukács; Michael McKeon; Tobias Menely; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer; Stephanie Smallwood; Pamela H. Smith; Ian Watt; Roxann Wheeler. | ||||
| English 465 | Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Ecology and Postcolonial Forms | Mwangi | Th 2-4:50 | |
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Ecology and Postcolonial FormsCourse Description: This course examines the interface of ecology and literary form in colonial/postcolonial literatures. These literatures are rarely examined from either ecocritical or stylistic/narratological perspectives. Yet legacies of and globalization continue to alter local environments, and literary artists have used unique formal techniques to capture these changes and activate political consciousness toward ecological conservation. Avoiding the general assumption that a fixed set of techniques (e.g., hybridity) are exclusive to postcolonial writing, we will study and comment on the various techniques individual colonial/postcolonial texts (or sets of such texts) use to represent postcolonial ecologies. We will also discuss the invocation of ecological metaphors in the various texts of postcolonial theory (e.g., the comparison of the preservation of indigenous languages and cultures with conservation of biodiversity). The course’s primary premise is that formalist analysis of texts, as Robert Langbaum expressed it in his critique of New Criticism, “is where criticism begins, not where it ends.” While avoiding the shortfalls of purely functionalist/instrumentalist approaches to literature that drive much of postcolonial criticism by attending to the literary techniques that artists use, we will discuss the interventionist imperatives in postcolonial writing and criticism about the environment. Building on Rosi Braidotti, we will try to be non-hierarchical in our readings, abandoning any “hierarchical comparisons in deciding the operative potential of humanity or a plant or a fly (for example), since these life forms inhabit or comprise, mutually affective ‘inter-kingdoms.’” Students are encouraged to read for the ecocritical potential in texts, both literary and theoretical—including those that are not (e.g., Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, or Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed) primarily about ecology or transspecies formations. Evaluation Method: Active participation in class; regular self-assessment; peer critiques, a 15-page paper or a 10-week undergraduate syllabus. [Students are welcome to propose alternative writing/professionalization assignments]. Teaching Method(s): short lectures, class discussions. Texts (may change):
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| English 481 | Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Racial Ecologies | Huang | Th 2-4:50 | |
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Racial EcologiesCourse Description: How does contemporary Ethnic American literature contend with environmental crises such as rising sea levels, desertification, and loss of biodiversity? How do minority writers represent the asymmetrical effects of toxic exposure, crumbling infrastructure, and resource extraction? How might we think of race itself as ecologically constituted? To begin answering these questions, this graduate seminar will survey African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx novels, short stories, poetry, and film that explore the differential effects of what Anna Tsing calls “blasted landscapes” on minoritized populations. Concurrently, we will articulate an ecological approach to race, i.e., an interdisciplinary methodology drawing from critical race theory, Ethnic Studies, environmental studies, and posthumanism. Rather than seeing racial justice as a secondary concern to environmental crises, our discussions will highlight how race is always fundamentally imbricated in ecology. This unorthodox approach to racial representation will also push us towards formulations of comparative racialization, as we consider, for example, ecological entanglements of U.S. imperialism in Asia and Latin America. Finally, we will examine how art and literature imagine possibilities for minority resilience and flourishing. The class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, ethics, ecology, environment, risk, nature, and infrastructure. Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions. Evaluation Method: graded participation; presentation; shorter writing assignments including reading responses; final essay (12-15 pages). Texts: Assigned primary texts will likely include texts such as, Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Daniel Borzutsky’s Lake Michigan, Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems, Nnedi Okorafor’s “Poison Fish,” Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, Percival Everett’s Watershed, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, Ada Limón’s The Carrying, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars, Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium, among others. Please verify final list before purchasing. Assigned scholarship will likely include: work by Katherine McKittrick, Mel Y. Chen, Jennifer James, Kyle Whyte, Julie Sze, Sarah Wald, Patricia Solis Ybarra, Donna Haraway, Devon Peña, William Cronon, Laura Pulido, Camille Dungy, Rob Nixon, Stacy Alaimo, John Gamber, Jina Kim, Zoe Todd, Anna Tsing, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, Nayan Shah, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Britt Rusert, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others. Primary texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available on Canvas. | ||||
| English 493 | Elements of Craft | Abani | W 2-4:50 | |
English 493 Elements of CraftCourse Description: There are so many approaches to craft, to the process of writing. So many conflicting terminologies and unhelpful aphorisms. So many assumptions are made about what knowledge writers share in common. This class is designed to reset things in a manner of speaking. It aims to re-introduce the student to as many different elements of craft as possible. We will revisit the mechanical /structural parts of craft, examine other elements like style, content, sub-text and layering to mention just a few. We will explore, uncover and come to accept our process. This is a seminar/lecture class, with discussion and exercises built in. We will engage and struggle with the conceptual, the body, the political and ethical elements. It will be challenging, restrictive, but ultimately rewarding. As a cohort you will have a common language for feedback and craft and develop the confidence to be free of workshops by the time you graduate. | ||||
| English 494 | The Long Form | Curdy | T 2-4:50 | |
English 494 The Long FormCourse Description: TBA | ||||
| English 496 | MFA Poetry Workshop | Shanahan | Th 2-4:50 | |
English 496 MFA Poetry WorkshopCourse Description: In this two-quarter workshop, students will focus on creative research as a mode of poetic production. In the fall, we will read several research-based collections, as well as interviews, reviews, and other secondary media, discussing the formal and thematic composition of the books and investigating how the poet metabolized her research into the making of poems. We will also write to prompts generated from the collections and workshop those poems. Before the end of fall quarter, students will select a topic of their own and submit a proposal as well as a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, in service of generating a small sample of poems based on this research, due at the beginning of spring quarter. In the spring, we will focus on workshopping the poems generated in fall and winter quarters. We will workshop poems as discrete objects and part of a group, considering how the organization of poems can generate new possibilities for thematic, narrative, and affective meaning. By the end of spring, students will have drafted and revised a long, thematically unified sequence of poems (20-35 pages), which will provide the basis for their eventual thesis. Sample Reading List:
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