Fall 2023 Class Schedule: Department of English

Fall 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 200	Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre-1830)	Phillips	MW 2-3:20
English 200 Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre-1830) Course Description: Beginning with the sonnet craze in the late sixteenth century and ending with twenty-first-century reinventions and deconstructions of the sonnet, this course will explore questions of literary history by taking up the relationship between poetry and popular culture, investigating the ways in which poets draw on the latest trends in popular and literary culture and in turn the ways in which that culture incorporates and transforms poetry—on the stage, in music, and on the screen. Thinking of literary history as a set of conversations in verse across the centuries, we will consider how poets borrow from and respond to one another, experimenting with traditional forms and familiar themes to make the old new. In order to recognize and interpret this experimentation, we will first study those traditional forms, learning to read and interpret poetry. While we will be reading a range of poems in modern editions, we will be situating them in their social, historical, literary and material contexts, analyzing the ways in which these contexts shape our interpretation. Readings may include poetry by Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Keats, Shelley, Williams, Stevens, and Eliot. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and an oral presentation. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $80 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental). Text will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore.
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Scanlon	TTh 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	Smith, K.	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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 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	Curdy	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 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	Seliy	MW 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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Kokernot	MW 12:30-1:50
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Scanlon	TTh 12:30-1:50
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Webster	TTh 2-3:20
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Webster	TTh 11-12:20
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: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 210-1	British Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre-1830)	Thompson	MW 11-12:20
English 210-1 British Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre-1830) Course Description: This class surveys major texts in the development of English literature from the epic Beowulf (c. 750 – 950) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1788). A central goal of the class is to develop tools for approaching literary texts as creative expressions as well as challenging reflections on society, power, knowledge, and difference. The millennium-long sweep of English 210 will help us approach literature not as escapism but as challenging social thought articulated by means of new representational forms. We will pay special attention to the role of transoceanic travel, exploitation, and mercantile capitalist trade in the development of English literary forms. Required Texts (at Norris Bookstore): Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. Ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 978-0393970142 Beowulf, A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. Second Norton Critical Edition (2019). ISBN: 978-0393938371 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. Third Norton Critical Edition (2018). ISBN: 978-1324000563 John Milton, Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. Norton Critical Edition (2005). ISBN: 978-0393924282 Thomas More, Utopia. Ed. George M. Logan. Third Norton Critical Edition (2011). ISBN: 978-0393932461 William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Second Norton Critical Edition (2019). ISBN: 978-0393265422 optional: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Ed. Werner Sollars. Norton Critical Edition (2000). ISBN: 978-0-393-97494-2 optional: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 978-0-393-95724-2 Note: Readings from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative will be available on Canvas. Note: For more affordable digital versions of these editions, please purchase from: https://wwnorton.com/norton-critical-edition-ebooks
English 215	Topics in Literature, Film and Media (Post 1830)	Davis, N.	TTh 9:30-10:50, plus discussion section
English 215 Topics in Literature, Film and Media (Post 1830) Course Description: In this course, we will apply techniques of close-reading and evidence-driven argumentation to a range of films produced over the last five years, including work from France, Senegal, South Korea, and the U.S. In so doing, we will blend “literary” interests in plot, theme, and character with artistic techniques specific to film, especially cinematography, editing, and sound. In movies written directly for the screen, such as Parasite, Atlantics, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Tár, we will highlight how such cinematic artistry adds crucial dimension to these films’ stories and concepts, without which any interpretation is inadequate. In adaptations from page to screen, such as If Beale Street Could Talk, Burning, and Nomadland, we will compare and contrast aspects of perspective and structure in the written and the filmed versions, taking stock of how meanings and stakes shift as a result. We will also read scholarship and public-facing reviews of these texts so as to understand, extend, and/or dispute the arguments advanced in these critiques. By the end, students should amass new levels of confidence, insight, clarity, and curiosity about cinema made around the world in our own historical moment, including films that go out of their way to challenge us with provocative premises, ambiguous stories, and enigmatic styles.
English 220	The Bible as Literature (Pre 1830)	Schwartz	TTh 11-12:20
English 220 The Bible as Literature (Pre 1830) Course Description: We will read excerpts from the Bible--both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament-- that include many genres: poetry, narrative, epic, prophecy, letters, and even law. Our emphasis is on the literary artistry of the texts we read, the characterizations of God, humans, and political organizations, the major themes and conflicts, and the variety of styles. You will be asked to write two short papers and to take a final exam. Participation in class is expected and will be counted toward your grade. You will also be asked to write questions about your reading assignments for the kinds of questions you ask of a text influence how you understand it.
English 281	Topics in Postcolonial Literature (Post 1830)	Mwangi	MW 12:30-1:50
English 281 Topics in Postcolonial Literature (Post 1830) Course Description: Introducing some of the major texts, concepts, terms, and debates in the study of texts about colonialism and its aftermath, this course explores the interface of postcolonialism and other liberatory initiatives (e.g., feminism, climate activism, animal studies etc.). How can we reconceive English studies to be more inclusive of non-western cultures and their depiction of problems that face the planet as a whole? How do we compare postcolonial texts with Western canons without reinforcing the current hierarchies that privilege Western culture as the standard against which the other cultures are judged? Indeed, in what ways are Western and East Asian literatures postcolonial? What are the differences, if any, among such terms as “anti-colonialism”, “postcolonialism”, and “decolonial” studies in relation to climate activism? As we read and write about these questions, we will examine how at the root of perennial postcolonial debates (e.g., the language debate) is the question of holistic liberation of the planet. Paying attention to the formal properties of postcolonial texts, our discussions will include the structural and thematic agency the writers give to other-than-human elements of the cosmos as a gesture of absolute inclusiveness, while depicting postcolonial societies’ struggle against colonial domination and the over-exploitation of the environment at the hands of global capitalism. We will read theorists and activists such as Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Fatema Mernissi, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Cajetan Iheka, Frantz Fanon, and Wangari Maathai. Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, library visits, guest lectures debates, role play, one-on-one meetings, and small group discussions. Evaluation Method: Two 7-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Readings (may change) Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Publisher: Random House; ISBN-10: 0812979656; ISBN-13: 978-0812979657 Farah, Nuruddin. Secrets. Publisher: Penguin Books; Reissue edition (December 1, 1999). ISBN-10: ISBN-13: 978-0140280456 Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider: Publisher: Graphia; 1-Simul edition (May 1, 2003) ISBN-10: 0152050167; ISBN-13: 978-0152050160 Mda, Zakes. The Whale Caller. Paperback: 230 pagesPublisher: Picador; Reprint edition (October 17, 2006 ISBN-10: 0312425872ISBN-13: 978-0312425876 Films Jean-Pierre Gallepe’s Po di Sangui (Tree of Blood) Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Jane Eyre and its Afterlives	Law	MW 9:30-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Jane Eyre and its Afterlives Course Description: In this course we will study one of the most famous and influential novels of the 19^th century, Jane Eyre, a novel of brilliant idealism and forbidden love whose sinister undertones have weighed increasingly on subsequent generations of readers. How do we read this novel now, and how have adaptations of it over the years addressed its problematic feminism and its subtly racialized romance? We will look at two novelistic adaptations of the novel, Jean Rhys’s post-colonial classic Wide Sargasso Sea and Patricia Park’s contemporary trans-Pacific novel Re Jane. We will also look at two film adaptations of the novel: the voodoo-inspired I Walked With a Zombie and Carey Fukunaga’s brooding Jane Eyre. Finally, we will look at some influential scholarly articles on the novel. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Methods: One short paper (15%), one midterm paper (25%), one final paper (40%), class participation (20%). Texts include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) (Penguin, 2006), ISBN 9780141441146 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (Norton), ISBN 9780393352566 Jane Park, Re Jane (2016) Penguin, ISBN 9780143107941 I Walked With a Zombie (1943, dir. Tourneur) Jane Eyre (2011, dir. Fukunaga) Gilbert and Gubar, selections from The Madwoman in the Attic (online) Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (online) Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Primal Jokes and Modern Memes—The Theory and Politics of Laughter	Cogswell	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Primal Jokes and Modern Memes—The Theory and Politics of Laughter Course Description: This seminar introduces students to several canonical theories of wit, starting with founding accounts of laughter as based on superiority, often called “punching down,” through recent work on psychoanalysis and embodiment. Ranging over a wide variety of texts—from Thomas Hobbes to Calvin & Hobbes, scathing satire of British imperialism to memes of the lost pandemic years, comic poems to comic strips—we will develop tools to analyze the aesthetic and political import of jokes and laughter. Drawing a long arc from the seventeenth century through the present day will allow us to appreciate, in rich historical context, the forms and social effects (not to mention the wit itself) of the texts we examine. Readings include Hobbes’s Leviathan, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, fiction by Zadie Smith, performances by Reggie Watts, and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. We will also analyze excerpts and episodes of contemporary comic media, including Beef. Please note that this class is not open to students who took an earlier version of this course. Teaching method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation method: Essays and class participation. Texts include: Smith, White Teeth (978-0375703867); Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For (978-0358424178); Swift, A Modest Proposal; Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes; short fiction by Lorrie Moore, Langston Hughes, and David Sedaris. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore
English 307	Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of the Tale	Bouldrey	MW 11-12:20
English 307 Advanced Creative Writing: The Art of the Tale Course Description: In 207, you have learned to apply the basic building blocks of fiction—character, plot, point of view, scene and summary—to write your own stories. We learn the great bromide "Show, don't tell!" In this advanced course we will buck the bromide, and learn how to tell. We will brush up some of that previous knowledge, and build on that material and experience while continuing and deepening the apprenticeship to great writers, both contemporary and classic. Students will read some examples of great taless both classic and contemporary, and will write several exercises and two stories during the quarter. In addition, good writers learn their craft through extensive critical reading. Through close study, critique, and imitation of many different kinds of writers, you can push the boundaries of your own abilities and discover new ways to create fiction. Each week, I will assign two or three stories that focus on some advanced topics in writing, including “What Makes a Tale Satisfying?”, “Using Objects in Fiction”, “Staying on the Surface”, “Villains”, “Using Jokes as a Way to Tell a Story”, and “Reading for Writers”. Teaching method: Lecture, discussion, workshop Evaluation methods: Creative Work (50%) Short Papers (30%) Class participation and attendance, including workshop (20%) Readings may include work by Jennifer Egan, Isak Dinesen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, the Gilgamesh poet, Chaucer, Rebecca Curtis, Charles and Mary Lamb, Julia Elliott, and Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, Rabindranath Tagore, and all will be made available as pdf files.
English 311	Studies in Poetry: William Blake's Afterlives (Pre 1830)	Wolff	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 311 Studies in Poetry: William Blake's Afterlives (Pre 1830) Course Description: How did the poetry and visual art of William Blake (1757-1827) come to inspire later artistic misfits and countercultures? Where and how can we trace Blake’s visions in the formal experiments and political orientations of modern art and literature? How does his example prepare us to read poetry differently, today? This course explores the unique poetry of Blake alongside its experimental, politically committed, sometimes hallucinogenic afterlives. Blake — a deeply eccentric poet and engraver who was always an odd fit with his British Romantic contemporaries — might be seen as the prototype of the artistic genius outside their time: obscure while he lived, nearly two hundred years after his death he is ever more widely celebrated as a visionary iconoclast and outsider original. The course gives students a strong grounding in some of Blake’s own most famous “illuminated” works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and America: A Prophecy, reading these alongside 20^th & 21^st-century works across and between genres. Emphasis will be placed on the poetic inventiveness of Blake’s mixed-media forms, and his reinvention of the book, as we compare his illuminated poetry and innovative printing techniques with successors in poetry as well as across artistic media (including abstract expressionism, beat poetry, punk rock, and film media). Teaching Method: Brief lectures & seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: short writing assignments, final project. Learning Objectives To practice close reading, interpretation, and analysis of poetic texts; To introduce students to the poetry and art of one of English literature’s most notorious figures; To link the field of literary studies, through poetry, with other artistic forms and media; and to study forms of cultural influence, by treating ideas as historical “objects” that persist and change over time; To develop advanced oral presentation skills, including participating in and leading seminar-style discussions and making presentations supported by audio and/or visual media; To write advanced analytical papers, unfolding persuasive claims in lucid, well-structured prose; and to improve writing and speaking as cultural critics, using Blake and his afterlives to recognize how philosophical and political ideas are materialized in aesthetic form. Required Materials NB: available at Bookends & Beginnings (or online); other materials supplied Saree Makdisi, Reading William Blake (ISBN: 0521128412) William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (ISBN: 0192810898) William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ISBN: 0192811673) blank notebook, standard size, for journal entries and short writing assignments For most classes, you will be consulting the website, blakearchive.org. Additional or secondary texts will be made available as PDFs through our Canvas site as needed.
English 312	Studies in Drama: Dancing the Postwar Avant-Garde (Post 1830)	Manning	F 9:30-11:50
English 312 Studies in Drama: Dancing the Postwar Avant-Garde (Post 1830) Course Description: This course surveys experimental movement-based performance from the 1950s to the present in the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, and West Africa. Starting with the Happenings at Black Mountain College, the course looks at Butoh, Tanztheater, Judson Dance Theatre, conceptual dance, black postmodernism, and contemporary dance in Asia and Africa. After situating each movement within the time and place of its initial formation, we’ll follow its ideas and practices across national borders. Along the way, we’ll discover surprising alliances—Katherine Dunham’s impact on Tatsumi Hijikata, the interrelations between Judson and conceptual dance, and the mutual influences of Pina Bausch and Chandralekha. At issue is how to account for the power differentials between the Global North and Global South while also acknowledging the multidimensionality of global circulation. Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
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	TTh 2-3:20
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 perversity, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and drug addiction! Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method(s): early 4-pp. paper (15%); rewrite of first paper (15%); final 6-7 pp. paper (35%); two seminar presentations (10% each), and quality of contribution to seminar discussion (15%). 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 (Broadview, 9781551117515), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Broadview, 9781551116556). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though you are encouraged to acquire the 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." Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a special case. It was published in several conflicting editions during Hardy's lifetime. If you don't acquire the edition ordered for the class, there will be some important passages and episodes missing from your edition. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830)	Phillips	MW 9:30-10:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Seven Deadly Sins (Pre 1830) Course Description: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21^st century popular imagination? What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression: is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required. Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends. While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience. Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lecture. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation are required; two papers, short assignments and an oral presentation. Textbooks will be available at: Norris Center Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II: Purgatory. ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas].
English 331	Renaissance Poetry: Milton (Pre-1830)	Schwartz	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 331 Renaissance Poetry: Milton (Pre-1830) Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion, and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: based on class participation, an oral report, a short paper, and a longer paper.
English 344	18th-Century Fiction: Seduction, Sensation, and Passion in Early American Literature (Pre 1830)	Larkin	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 344 18th-Century Fiction: Seduction, Sensation, and Passion in Early American Literature (Pre 1830) Course Description: Despite the seeming rationality of the Enlightenment, early American literature was haunted by tales of seduction, sensation, and captivity. Early American writers redeployed gothic imagery to reflect on the unique anxieties of Puritanism, the frontier, the social instability of popular democracy, and the cultural guilt of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. How did early American writers’ tales of passion and captivity map onto questions of democracy, citizenship, and agency? In this class, we will study the sensational works of early American literature, from a tale of a fallen woman seduced by an unscrupulous British officer in Charlotte Temple to a novel about a man driven to murder after hearing supernatural voices in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Bringing to bear the critical lenses of ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, and race, to name only a few, we will examine how early American writers grappled with their relationships to the environment, meditated on the perils and failures of democracy, and tried to imagine new forms of political activism. We will also consider modern interpretations of early America, from the 2015 horror film The Witch to the Broadway smash hit Hamilton. Possible texts include: Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, selected poetry by Phillis Wheatley and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and screenings of Hamilton and The Witch
English 357	19th-Century British Fiction: Degenerate, Decadent, and Dark: Aesthetic Hedonism in Victorian Literature and Modern Culture (Post 1830)	Godfrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 357 19th-Century British Fiction: Degenerate, Decadent, and Dark: Aesthetic Hedonism in Victorian Literature and Modern Culture (Post 1830) Course Description: It’s hard to imagine modern alternative culture—the queer aesthetics of the goth 1980s, the drugged-up industrial 1990s, or even Matty Healy of The 1975’s swaggering claim that his style is “black and expensive”—without its roots in the fashionable decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. In 1891, four years before his trial for sodomy and indecency, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the Victorian public with its seductive exploration of queer sensuality, decadence, indulgence, and drug use. What is it about Wilde’s rallying cry of “art for art’s sake” that was so transgressive? As a survey of nineteenth-century decadent and aesthetic literature, this course unpacks the seedier, darker side of the stiffly corseted Victorians and their cultural afterlives. We will explore key canonical works by authors including Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and recover important aesthetic fantasies by lesser-known writers. Over the course of this class, students will build a foundational understanding of aesthetic theory and learn to interrogate texts through queer and postcolonial frameworks. In addition to reading key Victorian texts, students will unpack Romantic precedents and the ways that these distinctly nineteenth-century preoccupations with decay, degeneracy, and transgression influenced and shaped counterculture through the present day. Teaching Methods: seminar discussion, short lectures. Evaluation Methods: Participation, presentation on a selection from the decadent magazine The Yellow Book, one analytical essay, final project. Texts Include: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Suicide Club” (1878); Vernon Lee, “Oke of Okehurst” (1881); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); selected episodes of What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Interview with the Vampire (2022); selections from alternative music criticism, fashion magazines, and zines from the 1990s-present. Texts will be available at: The Picture of Dorian Gray (ISBN 978-0393696875) at Norris, all others on Canvas.
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Sexualities (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Mwangi	MW 9:30-10:50
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Sexualities (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: The course responds to shifts in paradigms of gender and sexuality in writing from the global south and in western writing about formerly colonized subjects. Should we use western terms (e.g., “gay” and “lesbian”) to describe sexual practices in the global south? What are the main theoretical issues in postcolonial studies, and how would the positions change if we factored in gender and sexuality? How does sexuality intersect with other expressions of identity (e.g., nationalism)? Is there a connection between gender and other conditions in the global south (e.g., ecology and economics)? How are sex relations used as an allegory of the national condition? What are the attitudes toward inter-species sex among postcolonial writers? Authors to be discussed include H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Jessica Hagedorn, Witi Ihimaera, K. Sello Duiker, Suniti Namjoshi, and Lawrence Scott. We will consider postcolonial theoretical statements by a wide range of scholars (e.g., Madhavi Menon, Gayatri Spivak, Anne McClintock, Keguro Macharia, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Gopinath, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe etc.) and respond to them in the context of gendered power relations. *Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role play, one-on-one meetings, and small-group discussions. Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Texts include: Cliff, Michelle, No Telephone to Heaven, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, Paradise.* New Press, 1994. Ihimaera, Witi. Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Auckland: Seeker and Warburg, 1995. Njau, Rebeka. Ripples in the Pool, Nairobi: TransAfrica, 1975. Obejas, Achy. Memory Mambo, Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1996. Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda, New York: Mariner Books, 1999.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist Worldmaking (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment))	Mann	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Feminist Worldmaking (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)) Course Description: What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment. *Teaching Method(s):* Seminar style discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, final project. Texts include: Toni Morrison, Sula Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf Course Reader Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Murder on the Bestseller List (Post 1830)	Cogswell	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Murder on the Bestseller List (Post 1830) Course Description: Recent bestsellers such as The Girl on the Train are part of a long legacy of wildly popular murder fiction. In the early nineteenth century, murder and other forms of gothic violence were often confined to remote castles or the wilds of the English moors. With the explosion of detective stories and crime fiction, however, these middle-class nightmares invaded both the supposedly blissful domestic scene and the modern city. Writers started to use murder as an occasion to pose radical questions about which deaths are considered “grievable.” Increasingly, authors depicted amateur detectives who were skeptical of the social and legal order they were reestablishing through their work. Beginning with founders of the genre Edgar Allen Poe and Pauline Hopkins (author of the first Black murder mystery), this course follows the transatlantic tradition forward through Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, Agatha Christie’s mysteries, mid-century psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith, and recent detective fiction by Walter Mosley. Paying particular attention to how gender and race shape the narration of these tales, we will conclude with a survey of twenty-first-century chart-toppers by Paula Hawkins and others. Readings will be supplemented with films, including excellent adaptations of The Girl on the Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Please note that this class is not open to students who took an earlier version of this course. Teaching method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation method: Essays and class participation. Texts include: Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (978-0062073563); Chandler, The Big Sleep (978-0394758282); Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (978-1594634024); Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (978-0393332148); Mosley, Little Scarlet (eBook: 978-0759511668). Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 377	Studies in Latina and Latino Literature: Latinx and Indigenous Literatures of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Rodriguez Pliego	MW 2-3:20
English 377 Studies in Latina and Latino Literature: Latinx and Indigenous Literatures of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) Course Description: The U.S.-Mexico border was first envisioned in writing when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) imagined the course that a new dividing line would run: from the Gulf of Mexico through the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande until the town called “Paso,” west toward the Gila River and onto the Pacific Ocean. This line would mark not only land and water but also racial and ethnic formations. Indigenous nations saw their territories split in half by a border that considered their homelands wilderness. Mexicans who found themselves north of the imagined line had to grapple with a new vocabulary to define themselves as they lost their lands to settlers. Those who ended up south of the border attempted to reconcile their recent independence from Spain with the loss of half of the country as they too tried to piece together a narrative for their new identity. This course will walk students through the text and maps of the 1848 treaty and the literary works that continue to process its aftershocks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Some of the authors we will read include Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, Mexican writer Yuri Herrera and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. We will learn about the discourse of Manifest Destiny, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary literature from Latinx, Indigenous and Mexican writers who continue to tell the stories about their ancestral lands, their migration journeys, and their encounters with a line that became both border and borderlands.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: OK, Boomer (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)	Jackson	MW 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: OK, Boomer (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) Course Description: The products and pastimes young people have been accused of killing off are too numerous to name. Among them: bar soap, home ownership, casual dining, vacations, wine, napkins, diamonds, golf, football, and crude oil. In turn, baby boomers have left their own path of the destruction, causing affordable tuition, retirement, and the social safety net to pass right out of style. The eternal strife between millennials and their parents has quite overshadowed other sorts of inter-generational conflict: millennials and Zoomers have their own beef and boomers were once young people with their own gripes with The proverbial Man. And why has Gen X gotten to stay out of the fray? (Who is Gen X, anyway?) This course explores idea of generations: what defines them, what binds them, why we so strongly identify with them. How do generational labels and traits become accepted truths? When is it useful politically, socially, culturally, and rhetorically? How does generational thinking stand-up to the nuances of social and economic differences of race, gender, and class? We will ask these and other questions by studying a range of cultural texts (novels, news articles, television, and film) alongside critical readings from scholars. Possible texts: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (dir. Leslie Harris), Reality Bytes (dir. Ben Stiller), Office Space (dir. by Mike Judge), Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris, and Severance by Ling Ma.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: American Girlhood (Post 1830)	Larkin	TTh 11-12:20
English 378 Studies in American Literature: American Girlhood (Post 1830) 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 girl is deployed as a figure making and remaking claims about the nation. We will read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie–texts which fantasize about being universal texts of American girlhood while in reality putting forth a vision of whiteness–against contesting visions of girlhood found in texts such as Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, the first novel published by an African-American woman, 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): Presentation, midterm and final papers, participation. Texts include: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (ISBN: 9780140390698), Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (ISBN: 9780064400022), Our Nig by Harriet Wilson (ISBN: 0143105760), American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Ša (ISBN: 0142437093), How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (ISBN: 9781565129757), and Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera (ISBN: 0241433983). Texts will be available at: Norris
English 378	Studies in American Literature: 19th-c American Women Auteurs, Black and White (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Stern	MW 12:30-1:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: 19th-c American Women Auteurs, Black and White (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This course will begin and end with the two greatest sentimental novels written in American literary history: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Stowe’s work frames our conversation as we then explore the enslavement narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, and the fictionalized autobiographical novels of enslavement and Black child indentured servitude by Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson. Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons completes our reading list. Stoddard’s book is formally radical novel that pioneers a narrative voice close to the work of the modernists. She is the Emily Dickinson to write fiction, it would sound like Stoddard’s work.. Questions we will ponder involve the intersection of racial trauma and literary form, the novel as polemic, and the way that an African American women’s canon emerged in vigorous response to and critique of Stowe’s transformative novel. Mode of Evaluation: two take-home close reading exams (2 pages each) and a final project or essay that may involve the analysis of a classic Hollywood or contemporary film version of Little Women or a more recent depiction of enslavement and freedom such as 12 Years a Slave.
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Film Review as Genre (Post 1830)	Davis, N.	TTh 2-3:20
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Film Review as Genre (Post 1830) Course Description: How have film reviews and criticism evolved in the U.S. as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that analysis? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history. This means considering how strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the “critical” and “creative” facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Robin Wood, bell hooks, Roger Ebert, Wesley Morris, Justin Chang, and Angelica Jade Bastién) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects students who are committed and ambitious—but wit, style, and esteem for the “popular” are warmly welcomed. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussions, mini-lectures, occasional guests speakers or local site visits Evaluation Method(s): Written reviews and essays, course participation Texts include: Films up for collective discussion are likely to include Hollywood classics (Double Indemnity, The Misfits), midcentury prompts to influential reviews (Bonnie and Clyde, 2001, Lady Sings the Blues), cultural watersheds in late 90s and early 00s cinema (Pulp Fiction, The Fast and the Furious, Brokeback Mountain), and a sampling of recent films that dazzled or split reviewers. Students may also have an opportunity to visit a local film festival and test their skills against work most of the world hasn’t yet seen. Texts will be available at: All readings and screenings will be available on Canvas or on the internet. Aside from possible film festival tickets, there are no required purchases.
English 393-1	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Curdy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-1 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 394-1	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Kokernot	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-1 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 395-1	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-1 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: Divas of Classical Hollywood	Stern	MW 3:30-4:50
English 397 Research Seminar: Divas of Classical Hollywood Course Description: This course explores the life and work of five classical Hollywood Divas: Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Hattie McDaniel and argues for their ongoing cultural significance to American thinking about race, gender, embodiment, and class. Students will choose an actress to work on and view at least five of her major pictures. To introduce us to the methodology and vocabulary of film analysis, we will read David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson’s compendious Film Art: An Introduction; we will also examine works of feminist film theory, like Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” star studies work by Richard Dyer, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, and classic and recent essays on individual films. Students will write a 15-page research paper on the star and film of their choice, arguing for the ongoing cultural significance of their chosen figure and her oeuvre. Mode of evaluation: oral presentation, annotated bibliography, and fifteen-page final paper.
English 398-1	Honors Seminar	Newman	Th 3-4:50
English 398-1 Honors Seminar Course Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 403	Writers Studies in Literature: A Whole Mood	Martinez	T 2-4:50
English 403 Writers Studies in Literature: A Whole Mood Course Description: We can safely assume a familiarity with most aspects of craft. We know how point of view works, for example, or how revision can dramatically alter our sense of a short story or an essay--I mean, we know, sort of, and to a point, and beyond that point we all do our best. The purpose of this course is two-fold: to bolster our understanding of the building elements of prose, and to push those elements further by focusing on affect, on figuring out the various ways in which a kind of intentionality in navigating tone--when we draft and revise--can allow our creative work to flourish. While we’ll focus on “comic” and “horrific” approaches, the understanding is that most work is never fully working in just one mode, and we’ll figure out the advantages of each, and of modulating one into the other. We’ll work through a considerable deal of material together, and we’ll help each other find ways to explore the possibilities of that material. But I’ll also ask each of you to bring in a short published piece that you love that we’ll all read; it should be a piece---a short story or a poem or an essay---that you feel best exploits a particular affect (something “funny” or “scary” or “sad”), and we’ll all read novels and story collections where this intent is front and center, including Mona Awad’s Bunny and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.
English 410	Introduction to Graduate Study: Literary Studies Now	Mann	Th 2-4:50
English 410 Introduction to Graduate Study: Literary Studies Now Course Description: This course will prepare students for a successful career in graduate studies. Surveying both foundational and cutting-edge methods and theories in literary studies, this course asks students to grapple with the key questions and debates at play in the field(s) and discipline. The course begins with an inquiry into the history of the institution, the field(s) of literary studies, broadly conceived, and the questions of center and periphery that remain central to our work. We will then shift to an investigation of contemporary keywords guiding literary studies in the present. Foregrounding the disorienting effects of the literary, the course begins by examining the history of the discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study; the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts; and, issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. Then, we will explore the methods of literary critique, thinking about what is at stake in the objects we study and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will engage with challenges to the traditional organizing principles of our field, including its archives, geographies, periodization, theoretical interventions, and political stakes. In addition to our seminar session, we will have sessions that address the professional stakes of postgraduate life, including workshops in pedagogy, publishing, and navigating graduate studies. Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, papers. Texts include: Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living Erica R. Edwards, “The Other Side of Terror” Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms Steven Swarbrick, The Environmental Unconscious Course Reader Texts will be available at: TBA
English 441	Studies in 18th Century Literature: Antirealism	Thompson	T 2-4:50
English 441 Studies in 18th Century Literature: Antirealism Course Description: This seminar will reexamine two commonplaces in the history of the British novel: that early prose narrative was driven by the rise of empiricism and observational science; and that Restoration and eighteenth-century prose forms led straight to the representational mode known as realism. We begin the seminar by querying accounts of the rise of the New Science based on its strict privileging of sensory data and refusal of imperceptible or “occult” causes. Along with alternative accounts of embodied artisanal knowledge and micromatter, we will also ponder environmental determinism (which antedates the concept of biological race) and the structuring mandates of mercantile capitalism, extraction, and exploitation. The seminar will confront the constitutive repression of the history of the slave trade in the long eighteenth-century archive, which will enable us critically to appraise dominant conceptions of the eighteenth-century “real” and attune us to speculative and/ or recuperative interventions in that reality’s textual consolidation through the present day. We will read prose narratives to ponder the strategies through which they claim to represent the real, with special attention to empirical perception and its limits. Are these texts’ representational, formal, and political claims based solely on phenomenal experience, plenitude of naturalistic detail, or verisimilitude? Can we locate other, even anti-realist modes through which eighteenth-century prose forms transmit meaning? Primary texts include (list subject to revision): Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665); Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667); Nicole Aljoe, Early Caribbean Digital Archive; [anonymous,] The London Jilt (1683); [anonymous,] Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688); William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1721) and defense of the Royal African Company monopoly; Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Eovaai (1736); [anonymous,] The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814). Scholars and theorists include (list subject to revision): Nicole Aljoe; Srinivas Aravamudan; Franz Fanon; Simon Gikandi; Lynn Festa; Saidiya Hartman; Fredric Jameson; Bruno Latour; Georg Lukács; Michael McKeon; Edward Said; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer; Pamela H. Smith; Hortense Spillers; Ian Watt; Roxann Wheeler.
English 451	Studies in Romantic Literature: Lyric Environments	Wolff	M 2-4:50
English 451 Studies in Romantic Literature: Lyric Environments Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to the "greater romantic lyric," as well as an abbreviated survey of lyric theory. While tracking the sequence and dialogue of a handful of key critical paradigms from the last half century (and more), we will investigate how lyric poetry situates its reader in a universe of discourse through rhetorical address, affective cues, and social disposition. The "environments" in question do connote familiar romantic scholarship on "nature poetry," and the relations of language to nature; but we’ll be thinking about “nature” here bearing in mind that for the romantics and their newer interlocutors, natural “environments” implicate social space and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from romantic studies, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminist standpoint theory, affect studies, critical geography, and linguistic anthropology. Alongside the romantics, we’ll read a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure conventions for lyric space and scenes of address laid down in the romantic era. Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar discussion. Poetry includes readings by Wheatley, Coleridge, Robinson, Wordsworth, Clare, Smith, Barbauld, Keats, Hemans, Shelley, Yearsley. Theory and criticism includes readings by G. W. F. Hegel, J. S. Mill, Frantz Fanon, Roman Jakobson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Williams, V. N. Voloshinov, Denise Riley, Lauren Berlant, Stanley Cavell, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Doreen Massey, Bakary Diaby, Susan Stewart, Nate Mackey, Camille Dungy, Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, William Wimsatt, Rei Terada, Paul de Man, Virginia Jackson, M Ty. Required Texts (please note, this list is tentative for now): Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House 2017; ISBN 1941040632) Maureen McLane, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes (FSG 2016; ISBN 0374537054) Erica Hunt, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura 2019; ISBN 0990945332) Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts 2016; ISBN 0990945332)
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics and Thought	Gottlieb	W 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics and Thought Course Description: This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.” Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions? Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized. This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where Arendt re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics. Required texts: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (any edition) Arendt, The Human Condition (any edition) Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (any edition) Additional texts available on Canvas
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: The History of Media Technologies and English	Hodge	Th 2-4:50
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: The History of Media Technologies and English Course Description: This seminar examines the late twentieth- and twenty-first century emergence and saturation of contemporary culture by personalized electronic and computational technologies, primarily in the Anglophone West. The increasing cultural prominence of portable devices such as the Sony Walkman and the newly domestic character of "personal" computing -- from the Apple Macintosh to laptops to smartphones and networked applications -- through Michel Foucault's late career idea of "techniques of the self." For Foucault, such practices "permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." While Foucault had a much longer historical perspective in mind, we will consider the novel prominence of technologies of the self and selfhood within the context of neoliberalism where the task of entrepreneurial self-management comes to define the ideology of personhood. Central to our inquiry, then, will be not only the literal technologies of the historical present but also the ways in which media technologies as well as aesthetics newly conjugate subject and environment in terms of a felt pressure to manage that relation. Notions of ambience and the ambient will be central to our investigations as well as the role of technological aesthetics in providing not only beauty or entertainment but rather moment-to-moment tactics of mood management. Topics may include ambient music, ASMR, self-care, and habit. Aesthetic texts may include works by Brian Eno, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Tsai Ming-Ling. Scholarly texts may include work by Nikolas Rose, Ian Hacking, Alan Liu, John Cheney-Lippold, Lauren Berlant, Paul Preciado, Hannah Zeavin, Scott Richmond, Paul Roquet, Melissa Gregg, Mack Hagood, and others. Students will also be required to attend the symposium on Lauren Berlant to be held in late October. Required Print Texts: Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People Heike Geissler, Seasonal Associate Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely Course Reader
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Trethewey	W 2-4:50
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: This course aims to further the development of a student’s craft in the writing of poetry with a focus on poems that seek to engage and document public histories, allowing us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. Through reading several collections of poetry and essays on poetry and historical memory, we will explore the intersections and rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories—as well as the gaps in these histories, the willed forgetting and cultural amnesia often surrounding them. We will discuss and analyze the ways in which some poets have used history in their work as well as the particular formal strategies of their poems, conduct research for writing new poems, define strategies for using information gathered from our research, and produce portfolios of poems that engage public history and/or the intersections between public and personal history. Selected essays on poetry and history—as well as a few collections of poems—will serve as texts for the course.
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop: Refresh, Refresh	Martinez	Th 10a-12:50p
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop: Refresh, Refresh Course Description: The goal of this workshop is twofold: (1) to help ourselves and our peers with work we're currently engaged in and (2) to refresh our practice. It’s easy to fall into a rut, to think we’re only capable of working in certain modes, and it’s not true. We can do a lot more. We’ll work through a series of exercises to generate material drawn from two seemingly disparate sources: the fantastical and our own lives. We will, of course, also discuss and help each other work through the material we're submitting; be prepared to read and annotate closely. But we’ll also come out with fresh stories as well as new approaches to our creative output, and we’ll find constructive and supportive ways to sustain ourselves and our literary community. Writing can be hard, it can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be---not all the time, at least---and there is real joy involved. Let’s get back to that joy.
English 572	Manuscript Development	Trethewey	T 2-4:50
English 572 Manuscript Development Course Description: Guides advanced students toward the development of a book-length, publication-ready manuscript of poetry, prose, or creative nonfiction.