Winter 2023 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2023 Class Schedule

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

Click on a course title to view the description.

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Abraham	WF 9:30-10:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Curdy	MW 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. 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. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Webster	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. 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. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Betts	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. 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. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 11-12:20
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Richardson, M.	MW 2-3:20
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	TTh 11-12:20
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	MW 9:30-10:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction 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. 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. Prerequisites: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 210-2	English Literary Traditions, Part 2	Froula	TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 210-2 English Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This lecture-and-discussion course surveys landmark works of anglophone literature by major authors across two dynamic centuries, from the Romantic poets through the Modernist' radical innovations to Postcolonial writers. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, and Salman Rushdie. We'll study selected poems, fiction, plays, essays, letters, and journals of this turbulent and transformative period, in themselves and in light of historical developments: the industrial revolution, urbanization, scientific breakthroughs; the French revolution, democratization, rising literacy, transportation and media technologies; human, workers', and women's rights; imperialism, racialized slavery, colonialism, postcolonial conditions; and the global adventures of the English language. Teaching Method: lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation in discussion section (20%); weekly quizzes (potential extra credit); weekly posts (these count as midterm and final) (25%) ; a short analytic study (20%); a final paper and self-evaluation (35%). Steady work, heart, and improvement all count.
English 234	Introduction to Shakespeare (Pre-1830)	Phillips	TTh 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section
English 234 Introduction to Shakespeare (Pre-1830) Course Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and romances. During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical. We will focus centrally on matters of performance and of text. How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”— his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience? Similarly, how do the details of a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will read only our modern edition of Shakespeare but also examining some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and the Tempest. Teaching Method(s): Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section. Evaluation Method(s): Section attendance and participation, discussion board posts, a midterm, a scene performance and short papers Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3^rd ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. ISBN 978-0393934991 (approximate cost $95 new; $48 used; copies of the 1^st and 2^nd editions may also be used).
English 270-2	American Literary Traditions, Part 2	Stern	MW 1-1:50, plus discussion section
English 270-2 American Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This course is the second part of a survey of American literature covering the decade preceding the Civil War to 1900. In lectures and discussion sections, we shall explore the divergent textual voices--white and black, male and female, poor and rich, enslaved and free--that constitute important strands of the literary tradition of the United States in the nineteenth century. Central to our study will be the following questions: What does it mean to be an American in 1850, 1860, 1865, and beyond? Who speaks for the nation? How do the tragedy and the triumph of the Civil War inflect American poetry and narrative? And how do post-bellum writers represent the complexities of democracy, particularly the gains and losses of Reconstruction, the advent of and resistance to the "New Woman," and the class struggle in the newly reunited nation? 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. Texts may include: Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"; Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills"; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Emily Dickinson, selected poems; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” and other selected poems; Charles Chestnut, selected tales; Kate Chopin, The Awakening. Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Folk Horror's Tangled Roots: From Mephistopheles to Midsommar	Botz	MW 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Folk Horror's Tangled Roots: From Mephistopheles to Midsommar Course Description: What is folk horror, and why have witches, deals with the devil, and pagan cults gained such a hold on audiences today? Embracing the weird and the eerie, unsettling and uncanny, folk horror is at once a relatively new genre and as timeless as folklore itself, with origins in the superstitions and tales circulated long before the printed word. Working with plays, short stories, films, folk songs, and historical documents, this class will attempt to better define folk horror as a genre with storied, complex roots, and also account for its unmistakable modern renaissance. Our search for answers will take us back to the 17th century and its tempestuous transition into so-called modernity: how do plays about the perils of selling one’s soul like Doctor Faustus and The Late Lancashire Witches testify to distinct historical anxieties, as well as dramatize growing tensions between urban and rural, reason and superstition? And how do these texts anticipate viewers' tastes centuries later for films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar--movies which draw upon our modern fears and desires for rituals older than the capitalist clock, and a more communal, pastoral past? In addition to considering how folk horror has addressed anxieties around class, race, and gender over time, we will particularly attend to the relationship these texts and films explore between humans and the natural world--an environment in turn timeless and imperiled, comforting and terrifyingly unknowable. Teaching Method: Discussion-based. Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments and final essay/project. Texts may include: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1592); William Rowley & Thomas Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton (1621); Thomas Haywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634); short stories by Eleanor Scott, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R. James; Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962); Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (2020) Films may include: The Wicker Man (1973); The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971); Penda's Fen (1974); Candyman (1992); The Blair Witch Project (1999); A Field in England (2013); Midsommar (2019) Texts will be available at: Norris
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Romeo and Juliet, Before and After	West	TTh 11-12:20
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Romeo and Juliet, Before and After Course Description: Maybe everyone has heard of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, whether they know Shakespeare’s play or not. But their story did not start or end with Shakespeare. Almost three hundred years earlier, Dante mentions them in passing in the Divine Comedy. More than three hundred years later, they turn up in West Side Story as teenagers from different backgrounds in gentrifying Manhattan, and they appear in dozens of other versions in between. They owe much to traditions of both courtly love and bawdy country stories, and they in turn have given us many of our ways of understanding love. Idealized or criticized, Romeo and Juliet seem to slip free of the work in which they appear to lead many other lives. In this class we will explore some of the ways Shakespeare’s play and Romeo and Juliet’s story have appeared and reappeared, changed and persisted. We will use this body of writing to explore different ways of reading and interpreting literature. We will also learn how we use this story to think about values, about love, about violence, and about stories themselves. Teaching Method: Mostly discussion-based, with several hands-on projects. Evaluation Method: Several short writing assignments; final paper. Texts include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Weis (Arden/ Bloomsbury) ISBN 978-1903436912. Texts will be available at: Norris, or I will supply information for ordering books by mail. Films include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Shulman/ Bernstein/ Sondheim/ Robbins, West Side Story (1961 film); Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (1996 film); Madden, Shakespeare in Love (1998 film); other precursors and adaptations. Films and other texts will be available online or from the Library.
English 307	Advanced Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction Writing: What Happens Next? Structure, Plot, and Suspense in Short Fiction	Kokernot	MW 12:30-1:50
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction Writing: What Happens Next? Structure, Plot, and Suspense in Short Fiction Course Description: You can write a beautiful sentence, bust out of the gate with an enticing premise, and clairvoyantly reveal your character’s rich interior life to say something profound about the human condition---but at some point your story loses momentum and fizzles out. Answering the simple question of “What happens next?” is a powerful impulse that drives us as readers, and it should likewise, drive us as writers. Learn to grow your brilliant ideas into tense, invigorating stories. Put your beautiful sentences to work in the service of plot and character. And dive deep into a character during moments of conflict. Students will explore structure, plot, and suspense through a variety of interdisciplinary, playful writing exercises that employ visual media and also other texts, encouraging spontaneity while adhering to constraints of form. Be prepared to write at least one full-length story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Textbooks Will Include: Thrill Me by Benjamin Piercy. PDFs of short stories and excerpts from longer texts available on Canvas.
English 307-A	Advanced Reading and Writing Fiction I: Advanced Fiction Writing	Donohue	Th 6:15p-9:15p
English 307-A Advanced Reading and Writing Fiction I: Advanced Fiction Writing This course is offered through the School of Professional Studies and may count toward the Creative Writing Minor with DUS permission. To enroll, search CAESAR for the class with SPS set as the School. Course Description: So you’ve finished a messy first draft of a new story: now what? This class will focus on getting you from first draft through a substantial revision. Using prompts and other strategies, students will draft a new story, getting feedback from the class and professor along the way. You’ll then use expansion and layering techniques to deepen and further develop the story, taking it through a full, considered revision. Teaching Method: In-person. Workshop and discussion. Assignments: Students will draft and revise one new story and provide feedback to classmates on their stories. Reading and discussion of published stories and brief craft lessons will supplement our focus on student work. Pre-requisite: enrollment in a fiction writing class, such as 207. If CAESAR won’t let you enroll, email professor for a permission number. This course can count toward the undergraduate cross-genre minor with the director’s approval as well as the SPS writing certificate. Note that all story drafts should be either literary realism or magical realism; no fantasy, sci-fi, or other genre fiction.
English 309	Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writer as Witness	Hernández	MW 2-3:20
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Writer as Witness Course Description: At times, we write because we have witnessed an event or emotion that we want to capture in words. At other times, we write because we need to imagine a world that we have not yet witnessed. And then, at times, we find ourselves witnessing more than we could have ever anticipated. The author Michael Cunningham observed, "If you survive a war or epidemic, your sense of life and the world is changed…And you work with that.”Given the large-scale events that we are witnessing, from the pandemic and police brutality to the climate crisis, how do we negotiate with this material as writers? How, in our creative works, does language and narrative change in light of such circumstances? In this course, we will read fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry engaged with these questions of the writer as witness, including works by Edwidge Danticat, Alejandro Zambra, and Claudia Rankine among others. We will discuss experiments with point of view and structure, as well as the ways that writers use techniques like anaphora across genres. You will write three short works and a longer work in the genre of your choice. Writing exercises will support you in generating new works, and small group workshops, in addition to the traditional workshop, will provide you with feedback on your writing in a variety of ways.
English 312	Studies in Drama: Decolonizing the Repertoire (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Davis, T.	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 312 Studies in Drama: Decolonizing the Repertoire (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: This course introduces critical and practical approaches to decolonization strategies for performance. Students will closely investigate recent performance case studies from different cultures and nations then apply learning to develop concept statements for classic works from dramatic, operatic, or dance repertoires. Teaching Method: Seminar/discussion. Evaluation Method: writing and in-class presentation. Texts will include: TBD (a combination of on-line and a printed course pack, max. $40).
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Law	MW 9:30-10:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as class snobbery, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and vampirism! Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: Early 3-pp. paper (15%); midterm project or presentation; final 5-7 pp. paper (40%); seminar presentations, brief assignments, and contribution to seminar discussion (20%). Texts include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 9780141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford, 9780199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin, 9780141439594), Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford, 9780199564095). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though students are encouraged to acquire their texts independently and beforehand. Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed or to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page."
English 323-1	Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre-1830)	Phillips	TTh 2-3:20
English 323-1 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre-1830) Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories-both pious and irreverent-but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society: a noble knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales. Over the course of the quarter, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different, for example, when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? We will be reading Chaucer's poem in the original Middle English. At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales. Teaching Method: Discussion and some lectures. Evaluation Method: class attendance and participation required; an oral presentation; several short papers; quizzes and a midterm exam. Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $23) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions). Textbooks available at: Norris Center Bookstore.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: Blood and Bloodshed in the Middle Ages (Pre 1830)	Stewart	MW 11-12:20
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Blood and Bloodshed in the Middle Ages (Pre 1830) Course Description: Whether it causes fear or fascination, blood holds a mysterious sway on the modern imagination. From those who faint at the sight of it, to those who love vampire movies and gory thrillers, to those who study and analyze it in labs, this strange substance serves as a constant source of conflict, anxiety, and ideology. Representations of blood in medieval literature were just as fraught. Medieval people saw the substance as alternately miraculous and polluting, life-giving and death-bringing, a marker of difference and a symbol of unity. Blood had the capacity to reveal whether a person was sick or healthy, whether they were sexually active, what god they worshipped, and even whether they were guilty of murder. If it was shed on a battlefield it was considered valiant; if it was shed from the bodies of virgins or martyrs it was considered holy; if it was shed during childbirth or menstruation it was considered polluting; and if it was shed in pursuit of love it was considered romantic. In this class, we will explore these complex and often contradictory representations of blood and bloodshed in medieval literature. By approaching this topic from a range of genres and sources (chivalric romance, crusade chronicles, medical compendia, and vampire movies) and theoretical perspectives (queer theory, disability theory, race theory), we will use blood as a starting point for exploring broader questions about gender, religion, culture, and individuality. Moreover, we will consider how medieval assessments of blood value, purity, and pollution continue to shape constructions of identity today.
English 331	Renaissance Poetry: The Reinvention of Love in Renaissance Poetry (Pre-1830)	Wall	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 331 Renaissance Poetry: The Reinvention of Love in Renaissance Poetry (Pre-1830) Course Description: The love poetry of the English Renaissance invites the reader into worlds of fantasy, confusion, seduction, despair, and faith. In this seminar we will ask: how did poets explore the emotional chaos caused by love by delving into other issues–– how to express feeling in writing, how to get ahead in the world, how to believe in intangibles, and how to “possess” others imaginatively? How were the seemingly private issues of love deeply intertwined with power brokering, religious struggles, sexual politics, race, nationalism, and gender identity? When did love cement social bonds and when was it an unruly force that seemed to unravel the very fabric of the self or the nation? And how did poets investigate and express love by creating a mash-up of inherited conventions, philosophies, and beliefs? We’ll tackle these questions by reading poetry in the context of early modern religious controversies, court politics, colonialism, same-sex desire, feminism, medical theory, and science. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: In-class presentations, papers, projects. Texts include: The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems ISBN: 9780199535798 All other texts will be available at: Amazon and on the Canvas class site.
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Pride, Prejudice, and the Passions: Jane Austen and Ugly Feelings (Pre 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Botz	MW 12:30-1:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Pride, Prejudice, and the Passions: Jane Austen and Ugly Feelings (Pre 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Jane Austen’s beloved classic novels are often characterized as sweeping romances—but are they? Sense and Sensibility notoriously pairs its fanciful young heroine with a solemn middle-aged man she admires, but perhaps does not love; Mansfield Park ends with a peaceable marriage between two cousins who received more exciting proposals elsewhere; and even the heroine of Pride and Prejudice—that seeming romance par excellence—only begins to consider the hero as a romantic possibility after seeing his extensive estate. Readers of Jane Austen, know that love—be it affection, admiration, or desire—is never not a complicated emotion. In this class, we will read Austen’s works with an eye to investigating how she uses narrative to capture the richness of what were known in the 18^th century as “the passions.” How do we recognize what we are feeling, and how are these feelings shared—between individuals, or in prose? We will particularly consider Austen’s gift for portraying what the critic Sianne Ngai deems “ugly feelings,” messy, negative affects like envy, irritation, disgust, and numbness that prove critical to Austen’s sharp social commentary. While this class will particularly focus on reading Austen’s six novels, as well as some of her juvenilia and her unfinished novel, Sanditon, we will also turn to selections by her contemporaries—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Collier, Phillis Wheatley, and Joanna Baillie—as well as recent film adaptations of her works to further contextualize Austen’s view of the passions in light of the period’s revolutionary discourse around gender, race, and class. Teaching Method: Discussion-based. Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments and final essay/project. Texts include: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and selected juvenilia. Films will include: Persuasion, dir. Carrie Cracknell (2022); Love and Friendship, dir. Whit Stillman (2016); Emma, dir. Autumn de Wilde (2020). Texts will be available at: Norris.
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Marriage Plots Before Jane Austen (Pre-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Thompson	TTh 11-12:20
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Marriage Plots Before Jane Austen (Pre-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This class will trace the surprising plots that led to marriage—or not—in prose fiction before the modern novel. Jane Austen’s chaste courtship plots were preceded by renditions of desire, frustration, rebellion, and amorous failure. Due to women’s exclusion from most forms of paid labor, girls were expected to become wives. This expectation was interrogated and subverted in British prose fiction across the “long” eighteenth century (1660 – 1820). We’ll encounter extra-marital sex, sapphic desire, incest, sex work, delusion, discipline, remarriage, and many other plot twists which show that the road to the courtship plot was rocky, contested, and definitely not predictable. Texts not purchased in hard copy will be available in a course pack (these are Penelope Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, An English Lady; Henry Fielding, The Female Husband). Texts Include: Anonymous, The London Jilt. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-737-1) Anonymous, The Woman of Colour. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-176-4) Daniel Defoe, Roxana. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-807-6) Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote. Penguin Random House (ISBN-13: 9780140439878) Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-015-6)
English 357	19th Century British Fiction: Madwomen in the Attic – Insanity, Gender, and Authorship in British Fiction (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Cogswell	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 357 19th Century British Fiction: Madwomen in the Attic – Insanity, Gender, and Authorship in British Fiction (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: The climax of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hinges on a shocking revelation that other writers have been rereading and even rewriting ever since. Brontë’s iconic Gothic tale of “madness,” and that concept’s inflection by gender, race, and nationality, has become central to our ideas about difference and power. Tracing the afterlives of Brontë’s confined madwoman through twentieth-century reimaginations of the trope, including Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and recent films such as Hereditary, this course will examine how “insanity” has been seen as a category useful for regaining (and sometimes blocking) political and literary agency. Putting these texts and films in dialogue with critical responses by Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and others, we will explore the knotty question of how madness shapes our culture’s narratives about gender and authority. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation method: Essays and class participation. Texts include: Brontë, Jane Eyre; Larsen, Quicksand; Jackson, Haunting of Hill House; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. Texts will be available at: Norris.
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Secrets, Silence and Lies in Postcolonial Literature and Media (Post-1830)	Hansen	TTh 2-3:20
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Secrets, Silence and Lies in Postcolonial Literature and Media (Post-1830) Course Description: Deadly betrayal, concealed murders, illicit love, double agents and ghost children: postcolonial fiction is filled with dark secrets and disturbing silences. Why are secrets so endemic in postcolonial culture in both the political and the personal realm, and how do they work? Colonial cultures have depended on secrets and lies to maintain order. But what are the implications for a society that remains silent about some of its darkest crimes and traumas? In this seminar, we will read three postcolonial novels set in three very distinct postcolonial cultures—Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (Northern Ireland), Arundati Roy’s The God of Small Things (India), and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Vietnam and Los Angeles)—in order to think about these questions. We will consider how a legacy of violence—physical, psychic, and sexual—manifests itself when it cannot be spoken out loud. We will discuss how secrets and lies are both specific to place and context, and fit into a pattern of control and silencing that is recognizable across cultures. How can a code of silence create the conditions for traitors, informants, and double agents? How can fiction help to reveal some of these hidden codes and give voice to the silenced? Why might the horror genre be well suited to raising some of these questions? In addition to a close reading of these three novels, we will look at a variety of recent memoirs, graphic novels, films and television episodes to enrich our reading, including: excerpts from Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do, selected episodes from the Netflix series The Crown (”Hyde Park Corner,” “Tywysog Cymru,” and “Hereditary Principles”), Apocalypse Now, the documentary Meet the Patels, and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Teaching Method: Class discussion, small-group discussion, peer response Evaluation Method: Class participation, weekly short writings, one longer paper (5-7 pages) Readings: Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (nonfiction) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (graphic novel) Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer Films/Video Include: Peter Morgan (dir), The Crown (selected episodes) Geeta Vasant Patel and Ravi Patel (dir), Meet the Patels (documentary) Francis Ford Coppola (dir), Apocalypse Now (film) Jordan Peele (dir), Get Out (film) Course pack: Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” and “Singing School” (poems) * Anna Burns, Milkman (short excerpt, novel) pp.21-33 (ISBN: 978-1644450000) Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature,” from Decolonising the Mind pp. 4-16 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0852555019) Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” from Interpreter of Maladies pp. 43-69 (short story) (ISBN: 9780358213260) Edward Said, “Chapter One: Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” from Culture and Imperialism pp. 3-19 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0679750543) Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, pp. 183-201 (essay) (ISBN: 978-0395901502) Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Just Memory,” from Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War pp 4-19 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0674979840) (CP) * The Heaney poems are easy to find online, but "Whatever You Say" is from Field Work (978-0374531393) and "Singing School" is from North (978-0571108138) Instructor Bio: Laura MacKay Hansen (BA, University of Michigan; PhD, New York University) specializes in twentieth-century literature with an interest in postcolonial fiction, border spaces, and translation. She has written and taught on the modern and postmodern novel, as well as producing study guides for the Great Books Foundation and Penguin Books on a wide range of writers. She has held teaching positions and fellowships at NYU, Brooklyn College, Beloit College (WI) and the Newberry Library, and has worked in academic publishing at the University of Chicago Press.
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Global Fictions of Terror and Insurgency (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Nadiminti	MW 2-3:20
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Global Fictions of Terror and Insurgency (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: What can literature tell us about the political language of revolution and insurgency? We might think that the state’s vocabulary of insurgency occupies a distinctly different domain from novels and poetry, but a great deal of ink has been spilt for centuries on dissidence, revolutionary movements, and the state’s attempts to quell rebellion. The events of 9/11 have returned us in the last twenty years to the intersections between literature and terror. This course explores how contemporary authors from the US, South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa offer varied accounts of insurgency in fiction. How might these texts either continue or critically challenge existing narrative tropes used to represent terrorism and literature? Moving from New York to Lahore, from Ground Zero to Baghdad, we will read American novels like Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the shadow of no towers alongside Pakistani novels like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim’s short stories, Assignments will include two short close-reading papers, a presentation, and a final annotated bibliography.
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation))	Froula	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Joyce's Ulysses (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation)) Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider Joyce’s transmutation of Homer’s Odyssey into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters’ conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; resonances of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress, and social power; performance--studied and unconscious--and theatricality; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life—and political bite--of jokes, comedy, satire, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce’s reported remark that women's emancipation is “the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is”; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the powers and pleasures of language; the play of voices: narrative voice, interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation; noises and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. Together we’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and we’ll seek revelation by engaging it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom. Teaching Method: Impromptu lectures, presentations, discussion. Evaluation: Prompt attendance, preparation, participation (20%); weekly posts (25%; these count as midterm and final); class presentation with 1-2-page handout (15%); course papers and projects: option of two shorter or one longer paper/project) (40%). Books: Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text), Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation. Other recommended and supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media.
English 371	American Novel: Big Books: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830)	Grossman	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 371 American Novel: Big Books: Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Post 1830) Course Description: How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world? One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick. In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading a big book. But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel. Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages. Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville’s Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own. Teaching Method: Mostly Discussion. Possible student oral presentations. Evaluation method: It is essential to keep up with the reading and there may be occasional quizzes to gauge compliance. Possible short writing assignments. Two longer papers (8-10 pages each). Texts: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (first published in 1851), and a range of reviews and critical essays, including film adaptations. Everyone MUST purchase and read ONLY THIS Norton Critical third edition of the novel, edited by Hershel Parker; ISBN: 978-0-393-28500-0.
English 374	Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literature: Indigenous Chicago (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race and Ethnicity)	Wisecup	MW 3:30-4:50
English 374 Topics in Native American and Indigenous Literature: Indigenous Chicago (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race and Ethnicity) Course Description: In the summer of 2021, the Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson mounted a huge public art exhibit along the Chicago River that read: “Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék/You are on Potawatomi Land.” The banners rebuked a nearby monument depicting “brave…pioneers” who were “defending” Chicago from Indigenous peoples. The banners might also have generated questions for tourists on river boat tours that purport to tell the city’s history but make no mention of Indigenous peoples. This course takes as its point of departure this tension between the city’s long and vibrant history of Indigenous literature and art and its pervasive erasure of Indigenous peoples. We’ll examine the city as a site for Indigenous literary creation and collaboration, as well as a place where public art, world’s fairs, and everyday things like street names encourage people to actively forget about Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and about settler colonialism. We’ll read Indigenous-authored short stories, pamphlets, poems, and plays from and about Chicago alongside Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship that will help us to examine how Native writers “remap” Chicago and the very idea of the city within Indigenous literary, artistic, and political histories. Readings/artworks include works by Simon Pokagon, Susan Power, Mark Turcotte, Leanne Howe, Carlos Montezuma, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Orange, X, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Andrea Carlson, and others. Teaching Method(s): discussion; short lectures; archive workshops; visits to place-based artwork Evaluation Method(s): papers; preparation for and participation in discussion Texts include: Please purchase the following texts. Additional readings will be available on Canvas. Susan Power, Roofwalker (2002), 9781571310415 Mark Turcotte, Exploding Chippewas (2002), 9780810151239 Black Hawk, Autobiography (first published 1833), 9780143105398 LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations (2019), 978-1566895316 Texts will be available at: Norris. Bookshop.org supports local bookstores and is a good alternative to Amazon, if you prefer to order online. Native-owned and independent bookstores also carry these books. See Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books from Minneapolis (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for independent Evanston/Chicago bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); or Unabridged (Lakeview).
English 375	Topics in Asian American Literature: Native Speakers: Identity and Representation in Asian America (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race and Ethnicity)	Gottlieb	MW 12:30-1:50
English 375 Topics in Asian American Literature: Native Speakers: Identity and Representation in Asian America (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race and Ethnicity) Course Description: Asian American literary and cinematic arts invite us to understand their achievements in terms of an ongoing interrogation of the nature and nativity of speech: From "model minority" to "enemy aliens," from fortune-cookie clichés to talk-stories, and from "FOB" to "crazy rich," the representation and self-representations of Asian Americans weave an ambivalent -- sometimes affirmative, sometimes monstrous -- and ever-changing story. In this class, we will explore works of fiction, film, and other media by which Asian American realities are created, disturbed, and otherwise transformed, with a concentration on the themes of speaking, silence, place, displacement, protest, deviance, and exile. Teaching Method: Discussion, collaboration, and peer-reviews. Evaluation Method: Weekly responses (posted to Canvas), in-class peer-reviews, mid-term paper, final project, active class participation. Required Texts: Texts may include novels, short stories, and graphic novels by Chang-Rae Lee, John Okada, Aimee Phan, Brian Ascalon Roley, and Mariko Tamaki. Films and television episodes may include Fresh Off the Boat, The Half of It, I’m the One That I Want, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Crazy Rich Asians. Note: Students who completed the First Year Seminar on Identity and Representation in Asian America with this same instructor may not enroll in this section of 375.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: American Girlhood (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Larkin	MW 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: American Girlhood (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: What does it mean to be an American Girl? The phrase itself has spawned a lucrative line of dolls and other merchandise, but long before the rise of American Girl dolls, authors used the figure of the ‘girl’ to make claims about the imagined future of the nation. What kinds of ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and class underpin these fantasies about who the American girl is? How does literature about the ‘American girl’ further white, colonial ideas of nation building or protest against these norms? In this class, we will study key texts about American girlhood from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to examine how the figure of the girl is deployed as a figure making and remaking claims about the nation. Beginning with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, we will move to contesting visions of girlhood from Black and Indigenous authors, including Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories. We will pair these texts alongside critical readings from scholars in childhood studies. *Teaching Method(s):* Seminar discussion. *Evaluation Method(s):* Participation, in-class presentation, papers. *Texts include:* Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories (1921), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accent (1991). *Texts will be available at:* Bookends and Beginnings (1712 Sherman Avenue); individual readings available through Canvas.
English 381	Literature and Medicine: Intro to Disability Studies in Literature (Post-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Chaskin	TTh 11-12:20
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Intro to Disability Studies in Literature (Post-1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, “western” literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings. Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative reading. Evaluation Methods: Participation, short assignments that apply course methodology. Texts Include: excerpts from Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1760) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771); essays by Audre Lorde, Eula Biss, and Esmé Weijun Wang; popular television, including Black Mirror and Doctor Who; theory from Tom Shakespeare, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Therí Alyce Pickens, Susan Wendell, Alyson Patsavas, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Stuart Murray, Alison Kafer, and Jasbir Puar. Texts Will Be Available At: All texts will be available on Canvas.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Detective Fiction and the Search for Truth (Post-1830)	O'Hara	MW 2-3:20
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Detective Fiction and the Search for Truth (Post-1830) Course Description: Political corruption, murderous conspiracies, adulterous affairs, and deceptions of all kinds plague the realms of detective fiction. If only a knight in shining armor would arrive on the scene to untangle the web of lies, or rescue the damsel in distress, or solve the puzzle of “whodunit?” And that’s exactly how fictional detectives are often characterized. Indeed, the very first fictional detective, Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, had the title Le Chevalier, the French word for a knight. This figure of the knight invites us to consider the detective’s investigation as a lonely, but noble and heroic, quest for the truth. It also invites us to assume that the quest is undertaken by a gentleman for the sake of a lady’s honor, and that the grail-like truth is something that only he will be able to discover. What happens, however, when the truth-seeker is no longer a man of honor, or a man at all? Or, when the lady in question is no longer in distress, but the cause of the distress? Or, when the social order on whose behalf the detective-knight supposedly works is no longer committed to seeking the truth but to covering it up? That’s when things get interesting. We’ll begin our class with Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which raises in pointed fashion the question of human culpability and bestial violence, and end with Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, which transforms the detective’s traditional powers of “deduction” based on empirical evidence into something like its opposite, pure “intuition.” Along the way, we will examine who comes to occupy the position of the detective, and how the identity of the detective affects both the search for truth and its relationship to power. And, just for fun, we’ll explore how reading a novel or viewing a film is like the work of detection. Likely texts: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (ISBN 978-0394758282), Katherine Forrest’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar (ISBN 978-1935226673), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (ISBN 978-0385493000). Likely films: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Third Man (1958), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Knives Out (2019). Instructor Bio: Doug O’Hara received his Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught classes at Berkeley and Northwestern, while studying widely in history, philosophy, and some film. Currently, he is most interested in genre fiction, because it offers more opportunities for better conversation.
English 386	Studies in Literature & Film: Modern Monsters: Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Horror (Post 1830)	Cogswell	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 386 Studies in Literature & Film: Modern Monsters: Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Horror (Post 1830) Course Description: Monstrosity is ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. The ghosts, zombies, vampires, poltergeists, and extra-terrestrials that populate this course’s syllabus register that modern fascination. From classic horror by H. P. Lovecraft, probing at the margins of civilization, through Angela Carter’s monstrous fables, to recent novels and movie adaptations such as Let the Right One In and Coraline, this course grapples with the taboo forms of subjectivity, filiation, and national identity that monsters embody. Analyzing fiction by Shirley Jackson and Neil Gaiman, blockbuster films such as The Shining and Alien, as well as parodies like What We Do in the Shadows, students will explore what representations of monstrosity reveal about our understandings of self, family, and nation. In addition to classic and contemporary examples of cinematic and literary horror, we will explore the genre through multiple scholarly frameworks, including psychoanalysis and disability studies.
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-2 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Webster	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: An Empire of Islands	Law	MW 2-3:20
English 397 Research Seminar: An Empire of Islands Course Description: This course will examine a series of novels that look at the relationship between empires and islands. We will approach islands through the lens of various theoretical paradigms, and we will ask questions about sovereignty, imperialism, slavery, piracy, race, origins, language and memory. Students will develop their own independent research projects revolving around a single island. Evaluation Method: Students will be responsible for two short seminar presentations, one short paper and one long paper. Literary readings will be drawn from: Shakespeare, The Tempest (978-0393265422), Césaire, Une Tempête (on Canvas), Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island (978-1-101-87236-9), Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (978-1-55111-935-9), Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (978-0393352566), Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty (978-0316611688), Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (978-1-59463-394-2) and Wu He, Remains of Life (978-0-231-16601-0). Critical readings (provided on Canvas) will be drawn from: Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Modern History; Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology; Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”; Hegel, “Of Lordship and Bondage”; Samuel, Theaters of Memory (Vol, 2: Island Stories); texts from the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; James, The Black Jacobins; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Santos-Perez, from unincorporated territory.
English 397	Research Seminar: American Literature After Obama	Jackson	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: American Literature After Obama Course Description: This course takes as its primary focus on the most contemporary of contemporary American literature. If the election and administration of the 44th President of the United States was enabled by and facilitated hope and change of a kind, how then has this event been anticipated and archived by writers and artists? We will read poetry, essays, and novels of the past two decades along with relevant theory and criticism. In preparation for the final research project, students will submit reading responses and an annotated bibliography. Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion. Evaluation Method: Reading responses, annotated bibliography, final paper/project.
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Thompson	Th 3-5:20
English 398-2 Honors Seminar Course Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 455	Studies in 19th Century Literature: Before Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Contours of African American Studies	Wilson	M 2-4:50
English 455 Studies in 19th Century Literature: Before Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Contours of African American Studies Course Description: This course is conceptualized as a history of African American studies through, and against, the field of literary studies. Rather than take the literature as its central object, this course foregrounds the ways in some of the most important architects of African American Studies have engaged literature of the long nineteenth-century to re-animate critical theory. Works include Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent, Ken Warren’s Black and White Strangers, Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s La Isla que se Repite, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, and Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood.
English 465	Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Terror in the Postcolony	Nadiminti	Th 2-4:50
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Terror in the Postcolony Course Description: From British mutiny novels to contemporary US fiction, terrorism has had a long literary history. Imperial sedition laws marking colonized subjects as insurgents continue to operate in South Asia well into the twenty-first century; the rhetoric of the US-led “Global War on Terror” has sparked a new method of postcolonial securitization. This course will embark on a comparative expedition that follows the affordances and differences between colonial/postcolonial South Asia and contemporary US empire through literature, history, and theory. We will grapple with political concepts like mutiny, Naxalism, separatism, counterinsurgency and securitization by reading contemporary novels, poetry, prison memoirs, and graphic novels from South Asia, Middle East, and the US. “Terror in the Postcolony” will explore colonial, postcolonial and US imperial representations of anti-state violence that complicate the ideology of terrorism by turning to literary resistance. Works may include Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of the Towers, Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Aria Aber’s Hard Damage. Theoretical works will be drawn from Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, Simone Browne, Erica Edwards, Stuart Schrader, and Darryl Li.
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Black Criticism	Jackson	T 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Black Criticism Course Description: The goal of this course will be to read and examine the various means of thinking and modes of doing what we might provisionally call “black criticism.” How have black writers and thinkers adopted prose-forms such as the jeremiad, the editorial, the essay, and the monograph in the context of their political, social, and economic situations over the past three centuries? What styles have emerged to meet the unique demands of race writing? And what, ultimately, puts the ”black” in black criticism? And where does, and ought, the discipline reside with respect to institutions such as publishing and the press and academia? Teaching Method: Lecture and seminar style discussion. Evaluation Method: Weekly responses, annotated bibliography, and final project.
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Media Theory	Hodge	W 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Media Theory Course Description: How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, time and space, and social life? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century western cultures. The course will be divided roughly into two halves: one portion devoted to foundational texts (Benjamin, McLuhan, Haraway) and to key terms (media, mediation, cyborg, digital, networks, etc.); and a second portion attentive to more contemporary work. Throughout our task will be to grasp these texts on their own terms, to put them into conversation with other texts and contexts, and to trace their relation to other texts in media theory and beyond. Requirements will include a short presentation, a shorter paper, and a longer one. Textbooks may include: Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie Armond Towns, On Black Media Philosophy. Note: This course is combined with COMM_ST 525 and ART HIST 4XX.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Abani	M 10a-12:50p
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Schulman	Th 2-4:50
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: Students will start the first class with 10-20 page double spaced and paginated excerpt from a work-in-progress (# of copies TBA). The class will take this as a starting point to develop your manuscript from within. Focus will be on narrative drive, building tropes, activating scenes, nonfiction as the "story of an idea," durational issues in unfolding the reading experience, and place. Text: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.