DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

Course Description: This course surveys highlights of British literature from the Romantic Poets through the Victorian writers to the radical innovations of Modernism and beyond. We'll read some famous and popular works of English literature, such as Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice, John Keats's great Odes, R. L. Stevenson’s shocking Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and T. S. Eliot’s revolutionary poem The Waste Land, in light of surrounding developments, conflicts, and debates: rising industrialization, nationalism, and imperialism; emerging media, transportation, and warfare technologies; political resistance and revolution; language, art, and translation in an ever-"shrinking" world. This course fulfills a gateway requirement for the English Major and a WCAS distribution requirement (Area VI).

Teaching Method: Two weekly lectures and one weekly discussion section.

Requirements and evaluation: Weekly Canvas reading posts compiled as midterm (15%) and final (15%), short paper (20%), final paper (30%), quizzes and class participation (20%).

Required texts, available at Norris Bookstore: The Norton Anthology of English Literature:  The Major Authors 10^th ed., Vol. 2 ISBN 9780393603095; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 2002) ISBN 9780141439518.

NOTE: You must acquire the specific editions ordered for class because selections, chapters, and page numbers vary from edition to edition. A very few of the readings below are not included in these two texts; they will be posted as files in Canvas.

Course Description: This is part one of a two-quarter survey that covers writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century.

In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s.  We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature?  Who counts as an American?  Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf?  We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy.  We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom.

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Method:  Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required.

Some of the authors whose works we will read include: Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Powhatan.

Note: English 270-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

                                                                                                                                    —Toni Morrison

Course Description: Responding to the question posed by the “A Site of Struggle” exhibition at the Block Museum—How has art been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-black violence within the United States?—this course will focus on the reading and writing of poems that engage this difficult history. We will consider the function of poetry to document, bear witness, and to effect what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry. Along with reading poems that take up the subject, we will read several essays to undergird our discussion of the ethics of representation, positionality, and what it means to write about violence and trauma. In all of this, we will focus on the craft of writing poetry—metaphor, image, musicality, voice, etc.—with a focus on ekphrasis and intertextuality which will engage students in responding both to the works of art in the exhibition and the poems we will read in the course.

Teaching Methods: A mixture of workshop and discussion of assigned reading.

Evaluation Methods:

• Process Essay drafts/weekly poem assignments - 30%
• Ability to Critique/Class Participation - 20%
• Final Portfolio: journal, 6-8 poems, final essay - 50%
• (Reading Journal - 20%)
• (Poems and final craft/process essay - 30%)   

Note: This course is colisted with Humanities in conjunction with the Block Museum.

Course Description: In this course we will practice a cutting-edge form of nonfiction at the intersection of documentary, literature, experimental film and video art. We will apply literary techniques to the composition of short multimedia essays and explore the many ways in which writing with image and sound differs from writing for the page. Like its print counterpart, the video essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, but tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Rather, the video essay, writes Phillip Lopate, “wears confusion proudly as it gropes toward truth.” Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film writing, best described the promise of the form when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound—these, too, were part of that process. At its best, the video essay leverages the visceral power of sound and image, builds a sympathetic resonance with language, and enlivens the senses. The goal of this course is to better understand how the act of writing is shaped and, in best cases, furthered, by visual and sonic elements. We will author our own short video essays and will, in the process, learn to record and edit video, produce layered soundscapes, and use our voices as tools of performance.

Teaching Method: Students produce four multimedia sketches for this course (a soundscape, a still-image essay, a video portrait, and an object diary), write an audio/visual script, then produce a roughcut video essay or short documentary based on that script, to be followed by a complete, polished film. Readings, screenings and auditions of peer work comprise a substantial share of class sessions.

Texts include: Films by Laurie Anderson, John Akomfrah, William Burroughs, Raoul Peck, Slavjov Zizek, Ross McElwee and many more, all available via NU.

Course Description: The seventeenth century was a time when, in the words of John Donne, new ways of thinking “call[ed] all in doubt.… ’Tis all in pieces, all cohærence gone.”  It began with the crowning of a king of Scotland over England, and by mid-century his son and heir had been tried under laws and executed for crimes against the people whom he described as his subjects.  It was a time that saw itself as revolutionary, which predictably in the seventeenth century meant two opposing things: a return to an imagined point of departure, and an overturning of values and expectations.  Revolutionary writing across England reflected and developed these dividing tendencies in every field: politics, science, and even in new forms of writing.  New voices and opinions emerged and were heard more widely than ever, those of women, working people, people on all sides of debates trying to reimagine what held them together as a community.  In this class we will read a variety of writers who tried to reimagine what would come of revolution and a world that seemed to have turned upside down.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion; small group work; lecture.

Evaluation Method(s): Papers and shorter writing assignments; discussion.

Texts include: TBD, but will likely include works by John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, John Taylor, Gerard Winstanley, Abiezer Coppe, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Phillips, and Hester Pulter.

Course Description: The word “Victorian” exudes a certain stuffiness, a corseted and stiff-lipped repression characteristic of, and confined to, a distinct historical moment. Comparing modern sexual mores to those of the past, however, Michel Foucault notoriously deems us “other Victorians” in our erotic predilections and preoccupations, suggesting far less has changed since the nineteenth century than we might like to believe. By examining a number of nineteenth-century novels that particularly grapple with issues of desire, eroticism, and consent alongside queer and feminist scholarship, this course will investigate questions of sexual identity, desire, gender conformity, and fluidity, that remain provocative today. Melodramatic, sensational, sensual, and challenging, texts like Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm give us the opportunity to reconsider what the Victorians referred to as “the Woman Question”: a growing social conservatism in response to changing gender conventions in no way confined to a single sex. How do these narratives negotiate questions of consent and kinship in response to growing calls during the period for gender equality? And what does the Victorian novel have to tell us—“we other Victorians”—about ways of thinking about sexual difference, deviance, and desire?

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Class presentation, brief written responses, and final paper/project.

Texts Include: Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859); Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883); Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891); Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Available at: Norris; individual readings available through Canvas.

Course Description: Centered on the British Museum, the artists and intellectuals known as ‘Bloomsbury” formed, E. M. Forster claimed, "the only genuine movement in English civilization." Prewar political and social movements had made some think that Europe “might really be on the brink of becoming civilised” (L. Woolf). The Great War (1914-1918) shattered millions of lives, marked “the end of a civilization,” disrupted a racialized imperialist and patriarchal social order, and challenged Europeans to rebuild their civilization “on firmer ground” (Freud). The ensuing contest between liberal democracy and rising totalitarianisms led to – and  beyond – World War II. Bloomsbury’s network includes Virginia and Leonard Woolf, co-founders of the Hogarth Press (which made Woolf “the only woman in England free to write what I like”); writers Forster, T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West (who inspired Orlando), David Garnett; painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell; philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; composer Ethel Smyth; economist John Maynard Keynes; founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (a Hogarth author). These thinkers and artists grappled across disciplines with the challenges of a new century of rapid technological and social change.

We’ll study a selection of Virginia Woolf’s major novels and essays alongside works by contemporaries and later writers in light of key contexts: the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition; the women’s movement and suffrage campaign; pacifism, world war, the Versailles peace conference; racialized British imperialism at home and abroad; the Spanish Civil War; Nazism, fascism, the early years of WWII. A visionary, influential modernist novelist and essayist, Woolf is also a theorist in the spirit of the Greek theoria: a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, theory; a sight, a spectacle” (OED).  Her writings “look at” human beings--and human being—to capture everyday private and public life amid spectacular changes in London, England, Europe, the British Empire, the greater world, and the known and imagined cosmos.

Requirements and evaluation: Attendance and participation (20%); weekly Canvas posts collected as midterm and final (20%); class presentation with 1-2 page handout (15%); option of two shorter or one longer paper/project(s) (40%); self-evaluation (5%).

Books at Norris: Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (Dover 978-0486294537); Jacob's Room (Dover 978-0486401096 or: Oxford World Classic 978-0199536580); Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt; Mariner, ed. B. K. Scott 0156030357); To the Lighthouse (Harvest 978-0156907385 or Oxford World Classic B009OBTHCS); A Room of One's Own (Harvest 9780156787338), The Waves (Harvest 978-0156949606), Three Guineas (Harcourt; Mariner, ed. Marcus 0156031639), Between the Acts (Harvest, 978-0156118705). Recommended: V. Woolf, A Writer's Diary (978-0156027915), Moments of Being (ASIN: 0156619180); World War One British Poets, ed. Candace Ward (Dover Thrift 9780486295688).

Course Description: This course introduces students to a variety of works by Black women writers since Phillis Wheatley. At this moment, the notion of the “Black woman writer” may not seem anomalous or unusual. However, it was only a short time ago in history that to be a Black woman writer meant to be considered an aberration. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Phillis Wheatley’s poems were “beneath the dignity of criticism.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested that Jefferson and a panel of white men held an official trial to interrogate the authenticity of Wheatley’s work. These men would have never imagined that conference sessions, entire books, and countless critical articles would be dedicated to this foundational black woman writer: the very first black author to see their work published in the United States. We mark the beginning of Black published letters in the US with Wheatley; and it is within this tradition that we will consider the similarities and differences in content and forms by the women writers that we will read during this course.

In this class, we will survey a wide range of Anglophone Black Diaspora women authors and primarily concentrate on the United States. Our authors will include Toni Morrison and Phillis Wheatley, as well as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and others. We will read poetry, short stories, essays, and at least one novel by these and other authors. We will also read secondary critical works about the central literature and work together as a class towards our own literary criticisms.

Assignments will include at least regular online discussions, a group presentation, and an individual final project. Students will be evaluated on their performance in these assignments as well as class attendance and participation. This seminar depends on discussion and participation of every member of the class.

Note: This course is colisted with AF AM ST 379.

Course Description: Ill women are scattered across the pages of literature, from swooning ladies in sentimental novels to cancer patients in popular fiction. Illness acts as narrative momentum, as a metaphor for social “ills,” and as a signifier of tragic virtue in an individual character. From the 19th century to the present, this class will examine how the tropes of illness in popular literature pertains to our broader cultural assumptions about illness and gender. How do traits associated with femininity resemble literary representations of illness, and vice-versa? How have these associations changed over time? How has the construction of ill femininity been bound up in whiteness, and how has this contributed to systemic and medical racism? What is the relationship between the representation of ill femininity and contemporary “wellness culture”? How might we locate or analyze femininity in representations of ill men? What about mental illness? Our readings will be split between popular representations of illness in novels and writings by ill authors, and we will consider how literary tropes are or are not reappropriated by the latter.

Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, two short analytical essays, final project.

Readings Include: Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813); Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993); David Chariandy, Soucouyant (2007). We will also read personal essays, poetry, portions of memoirs, or short stories by authors including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Eula Biss, Anne Anlin Cheng, Suleika Jaouad, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michelle Zauner.

Texts will be available at: Novels will be available at the Norris bookstore; all other readings will be uploaded to Canvas as screen-reader-compatible PDFs.

Course Description: This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation and literary self-determination from across the world, we’ll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films.

This course will be taught in conjunction with parallel courses offered at the University of Chicago and the University of Kentucky. We anticipate building possibilities for cross-campus collaborative research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale research collaboration.

Teaching Method(s): Mini lectures, guest speakers, lively seminar discussions

Texts include: TBD

Texts will be available at: TBD

Note: This course is colisted with Comp Lit 306.

Course Description: When Mary Shelley released the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831, she referred to her groundbreaking and popular novel as her “hideous progeny” which she hoped would nonetheless “prosper” in the world. She could not have imagined the extent to which Frankenstein would persist in popular culture. This class will consider the retellings, adaptations, appropriations, and parodies of Frankenstein. We will consider what aspects of Shelley’s novel have survived in the popular imagination, and what we have changed. Why did the creature turn from a well-spoken, self-educated subject into a green, non-speaking monster? What lessons have we drawn from Dr. Frankenstein’s ill-fated experiment? When and how have marginalized writers (re)claimed the creature as a figure of the oppressed? Why has Shelley’s sentimental and atmospheric gothic novel inspired so much levity and humor? From the 1931 film adaptation to Susan Stryker’s expression of trans rage in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” (1994); from the beloved parody Young Frankenstein (1974) to Victor LaVelle’s graphic novella series Destroyer (2017-), there seems to be no bottom to the relevance of Shelley’s classic novel. This class will consider questions of authorship, originality, and novelty. In addition to reading Frankenstein and its progeny, students will learn how to analyze media on the basis of historical context and genre norms.

Teaching Methods: Short lectures; discussion

Evaluation Methods: Presentation, reflections, 2 short papers

Texts Include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994); Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014); Victor LaVelle, Destroyer #1 (2017); Films include Frankenstein (1931); Young Frankenstein (1974); The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); we may also watch individual episodes of television, look at visual representations of Frankenstein’s monster in comics and illustrations, and keep a running list of Frankenstein encounters in our day-to-day lives

Texts Will Be Available At: Texts will be available at the campus bookstore; films and articles will be available on Canvas.

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.

Texts include:

• Seam, Tarfiah Faizullah
• Engine Empire, Cathy Park Hong
• One Big Self, C. D. Wright
• A Wreath for Emmitt Till, Marilyn Nelson
• Native Guard, Natasha Tretheway
• Wild Grasses on the River Bank, Hitomi Ito
• Rift, Tess Taylor

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

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.

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.

Course Description: How can we practice the history and analysis of sexuality in early modern Europe? Is sexuality best described by a continuity of models, or alterity and historical difference? To what extent can we discuss “sexuality” in relation to “identity” in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, gender, etc., in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will centrally engage recent critical controversies in the field over the utility of historicism in sexuality studies. We will interrogate sex/gender's intersections with categories such as race, religion, social class, and nation, and we will engage the emerging scholarship in early modern trans* studies.

Teaching method: Graduate seminar.

Evaluation method: Participation in seminar; papers.

Texts (tentative as of June 2021): Plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Fletcher; erotic-narrative poetry by Beaumont, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ovid; sodomy trial of the Earl of Castlehaven; selected essays of Montaigne; sonnets by various writers; theory and historical work by Bray, Butler, Edelman, Foucault, Goldberg, Gordon/Fisher/Chess, Halperin, Loomba, Masten, Menon, Rambuss, Shannon, Traub, others.

Note: This course is combined with Gender Studies 490.

Course Description: In this graduate course, students will engage the archive of contemporary black speculative fiction, including works by Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin, to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing—narrative fiction and theoretical writing—gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world. Our study will concern texts written in the contemporary, but students will be invited to consider how contemporary manifestations of the speculative and radical necessarily speak across time and space into both past and future manifestations/imaginaries of black experiences, embodiments, and identities. Teaching Method(s): Graduate Seminar

Evaluation Method(s): presentation, seminar participation, weekly writing, final conference paper.

Texts include: Delany, Tales of Neveryon, Butler, Dawn, Morrison, Beloved, Jemisin, The Fifth Season, Victor LaValle, Destroyer and others.

Texts will be available at: TBA

Note: This course is colisted with AF AM ST 480.

Course Description: This course uses an archive of films produced and/or released between 1998 and 2002 to construct a specifically cinematic and more broadly cultural history of the shift into a new millennium. Some conversations will focus on global preoccupations: apocalyptic apprehensions about Y2K, increasing proliferations and paranoias regarding networked technology, previsions of a world less organized by gender binaries, and public climates immediately before and after 9/11. At other times, we will take stock of trends within the U.S. as reflected on silver screens, including changing debates over African American representations and rising crescendos of white male insecurity and neofascist rhetoric. Alongside and amid those discussions, we will assess how film was evolving as a material practice and cultural form, with particular attention to digital advances, web-based writing, and shifting relations with television. Participants in the course will experiment with different genres of writing and practice different research skills in relation to texts and themes that interest them most. Films screened in full or in part may include 11'09"01 (2002), Amélie (2001), American Beauty (1999), Amores perros (2000), Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Bamboozled (2000), Beau travail (1999), Blackboards (2000), La Ciénaga (2001), Compensation (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), By Hook or By Crook (2001), Election (1999), Faat Kine (2000), Fight Club (1999), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), The Hole (1998), Kandahar (2001), Lagaan (2001), Life on Earth (1998), The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999), Lola and Billy the Kid (1999), The Matrix (1999), Rosetta (1999), Les Sanguinaires (1998), Southern Comfort (2001), Spirited Away (2001), Training Day (2001), and Y tu mamá también (2001).This course uses an archive of films produced and/or released between 1998 and 2002 to construct a specifically cinematic and more broadly cultural history of the shift into a new millennium. Some conversations will focus on global preoccupations: apocalyptic apprehensions about Y2K, increasing proliferations and paranoias regarding networked technology, previsions of a world less organized by gender binaries, and public climates immediately before and after 9/11. At other times, we will take stock of trends within the U.S. as reflected on silver screens, including changing debates over African American representations and rising crescendos of white male insecurity and neofascist rhetoric. Alongside and amid those discussions, we will assess how film was evolving as a material practice and cultural form, with particular attention to digital advances, web-based writing, and shifting relations with television. Participants in the course will experiment with different genres of writing and practice different research skills in relation to texts and themes that interest them most. Films screened in full or in part may include 11'09"01 (2002), Amélie (2001), American Beauty (1999), Amores perros (2000), Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Bamboozled (2000), Beau travail (1999), Blackboards (2000), La Ciénaga (2001), Compensation (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), By Hook or By Crook (2001), Election (1999), Faat Kine (2000), Fight Club (1999), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), The Hole (1998), Kandahar (2001), Lagaan (2001), Life on Earth (1998), The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999), Lola and Billy the Kid (1999), The Matrix (1999), Rosetta (1999), Les Sanguinaires (1998), Southern Comfort (2001), Spirited Away (2001), Training Day (2001), and Y tu mamá también (2001).