Winter 2024 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2024 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	TBA	MW 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	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	Smith	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. 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	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: 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 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Scanlon	MW 3:30-4:50
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	TBA	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: 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 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: 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: No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 270-1	American Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre-1830)	Grossman	TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 270-1 American Literary Traditions, Part 1 (Historical Breadth Pre-1830) Course Description:This is part one of a two-quarter survey that covers writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century. In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s. We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature? Who counts as an American? Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf? We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy. We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section. Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required. Some of the authors whose works we will read include: Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Powhatan.
English 274	Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures (Historical Breadth Post-1830)	Wisecup	MW 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 274 Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures (Historical Breadth Post-1830) Course Description: Native American & Indigenous literatures are currently in the midst of what some scholars call a “second Native American Renaissance.” By this, they refer to the novels like Tommy Orange’s (Cheyenne and Arapaho) There There and Louise Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) The Round House, and the books of poetry, like Natalie Diaz’s (Mojave/Gila River) Postcolonial Love Poem, which have won national awards, as well as to TV shows like Reservation Dogs that are widely popular among Indigenous viewers and receiving much critical acclaim. But where did this “second Native American Renaissance” come from? What was the “first” Native American Renaissance? This course will offer an introduction to Native American & Indigenous literatures, with an eye both to the current flourishing of literatures and to their long histories. We will look at the variety of media and genres in which Native American & Indigenous literatures appear, including birchbark pages, pamphlets, pictographic texts and digital platforms, as well as autobiography, political petitions, novels, and short stories. And we will develop a vocabulary for reading, analyzing, and discussing these literatures using key terms and concepts from Native American and Indigenous Studies, including sovereignty, kinship, resurgence, decolonization, and land. Teaching Method(s): Lecture + discussion sections. Evaluation Method(s): Short papers; preparation for and participation in discussion. Texts include: Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter ISBN 9781771121767 Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, 978-1-64445-014-7 Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves, ISBN 978-1770864863 All additional texts will be available on Canvas. Texts will be available at: The University bookstore. If you’d like to purchase the book from a Native-owned or independent bookstore, see Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for Evanston/Chicago independent bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); and Unabridged (Lakeview).
English 277	Introduction to Latinx Literature	Rodriguez-Pliego	TTh 2-3:20
English 277 Introduction to Latinx Literature Course Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote, the Hispanic population, and the Latinx community. This course explores the nuances of these labels through the stories that Latinx authors have been narrating for the past six decades. As we follow characters through conflicts and inhabit their quotidian lives, we will navigate between the specificity of a story and the complexity of a Latinx identity. Class discussions will study emotional ties to places and languages, feminist thought, and the racial and ethnic diversity within the Latinx community. We will read well-established and emerging authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, and Kali Fajardo Anstine. A one-semester course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of authors from the 1970s onward and focuses on short stories, poetry, and essays. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature.
English 283	Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Historical Breadth Pre-1830)	Shannon and Wolff	MW 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section
English 283 Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Historical Breadth Pre-1830) Course Description: How is it that the natural world has seemed to writers across time as both comforting and terrifying, a pastoral refuge or a dark threat? How have literary myths of a “green world” spurred us to think about what precisely separates “the human” from other worlds around us? Are humans a part of nature or an exception to it? How do our ideas about nature impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules and rights, on humans, nonhumans, and the places we cross paths, sometimes without knowing it? Tracking these questions through literary forms ranging from Edenic stories and origin myths to Shakespearean drama, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and science fiction, students in this course will unearth the unexamined grounds of “green” thought as it appears in literary environments (as well as film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students an introduction to the “environmental humanities” and a deep dive into the storied concept of “nature,” while offering an unusual and broad background on classic literary themes of belonging, justice/ethics, freedom, wilderness, and the everyday. Teaching Method: Lecture & Seminar Discussion. Evaluation: Seminar-style participation, quizzes, short papers, and final essay. Learning Objectives: In this introductory course, students will Gain familiarity with key terms and concepts in the emerging interdisciplinary area of the environmental humanities. Seek to discover the blindspots and purposes of a given text’s version of what is “natural.” Learn to balance the study of rhetoric in literary texts with the study of natural environments in a variety of contexts. Work individually and in groups to develop college-level close readings of literary texts, with attention to the ways language, literature, and aesthetic production shape ideas about nature. Develop college-level literary arguments supported by textual evidence. Write college-level analytical papers, unfolding claims in clear, well-structured prose. Texts and films may include the following (some readings and all films will be directly supplied by the instructors; required texts will be available at Bookends & Beginnings, in Evanston): William Shakespeare, As You Like It and King Lear (any editions) Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (1798-1803; Oxford Classics, ISBN ‎0199536872) John Clare, selected poems (material to be supplied) Virginia Woolf, Flush (1933; Oxford Classics, ISBN 9780199539291) Ursula Le Guin, “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow”(1971; material to be supplied) Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed (2013; Graywolf Press, ISBN 1555976565) Grizzly Man (2005, dir. Werner Herzog) • WALL-E (2008, dir. Andrew Stanton)
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Realism	Thompson	MW 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Realism Course Description: TBA
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Time-traveling Heroes of the Multiverse!: History and Cultural Difference in Modern Fiction	Godfrey	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Time-traveling Heroes of the Multiverse!: History and Cultural Difference in Modern Fiction Course Description: Since H.G. Wells’s unnamed time-traveler first rocketed forward to the distant future, time travel has been a favorite thought exercise for writers, day-dreamers, and artists. In this course, we’ll the genre from its origins in the nineteenth-century. We’ll combine readings of literary classics like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), with selections from children’s literature like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), theory like Mark Fisher’s work on lost futures, and modern, mixed-media additions to the canon, including episodes of the anime Tatami Galaxy (2006) and the movies Interstellar (2014) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). How do traditional coming of age narratives change in non-linear time? Can and should history be preserved? Students will confront questions about cultural difference and blur the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future.” Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project Texts Include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843); Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928); Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962); Mamoru Hosada, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006); Christopher Nolan, Interstellar (2014); the Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Texts will be available at: Orlando (ISBN 9780241371961) and A Wrinkle in Time (ISBN 9780312367541) at Norris, all others on Canvas.
English 306	Advanced Poetry Writing	Shanahan	MW 12:30-1:50
English 306 Advanced Poetry Writing Course Description: TBA
English 308	Advanced Nonfiction Writing	Webster	TTh 2-3:20
English 308 Advanced Nonfiction Writing Course Description: TBA
English 310	Studies in Literary Genres: Satire (Pre 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Thompson	MW 12:30-1:50
English 310 Studies in Literary Genres: Satire (Pre 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: What do Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet A Modest Proposal and Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out have in common? This class examines the genre that Swift and Peele exploit to devastating effect: satire. We’ll devote special attention to satire’s key paradox: for those who get it (or think they do), satire signifies by not signifying what it literally says. We’ll explore satire with a focus on the “long” eighteenth century (1660 to c. 1825) to ponder its ethical concerns with social and political life; sexuality, sex work, and marriage; social class, corruption, and criminality; and empire and race. The class ends with one contemporary American satire (TBD) as well as contemporary film and TV, including Get Out and Black Mirror. Required Books Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1801). Broadview Literary Text. ISBN: 9781551111766 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818). Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114798 Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (1743). Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199549757 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Dover Thrift Editions. ISBN: 9780486408880 Abu Talib, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Broadview Literary Texts (1810). ISBN: 9781551116723 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199536849
English 311	Studies in Poetry: The Logic of Poetry (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity)	Gottlieb	MW 2-3:20
English 311 Studies in Poetry: The Logic of Poetry (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process. This class may not be taken by students who have previously enrolled in ENG/CLS 211 Teaching Method: Brief lectures, discussions, and co-labs Evaluation Method: Weekly (w)reading exercises; mid-term paper; final paper. Required Texts: All texts available on Canvas and by request at Quartet Copies
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Stories of the World: Short Fiction and Modernity (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation)	Cogswell	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Stories of the World: Short Fiction and Modernity (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation) Course Description: Students in this course will take a global tour of canonical and recent short fiction. Ranging over masters of the short story from Gogol to Kafka, Gordimer to Ngũgĩ, and Melville to Baldwin, we will conclude by turning to contemporary American authors Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Tananarive Due, and Dantiel Moniz. The class will analyze the richest responses from across different cultures to emerging problems of desire, subjectivity, national identity, and narrative form. Tales of alienation in the Russian caste system, intricate thought experiments from Argentina, investigations of perspective in a modernized Japan, and distillations of early American experience beguile us with their elegance and insight. Through theoretical accounts of economics, ethics, and national identity, as well as close readings of the techniques that give a story its resonance, students will gain broad familiarity with the global history and current state of short fiction. Readings will be supplemented with seminal film adaptations such as All About Eve and Brokeback Mountain. 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: Stories by Poe, Gogol, Melville, Baldwin, Kafka, Ngũgĩ, Munro, Link and Chiang. Texts will be available at: No required texts.
English 323-1	Studies in Medieval Literature: Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 323-1 Studies in Medieval Literature: 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(s): Discussion and some lectures. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; language quizzes; an oral presentation; and three short papers. Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (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 332	Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare's Contemporaries (Pre 1830)	Masten	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 332 Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare's Contemporaries (Pre 1830) Course Description: We will read and analyze some of the extraordinary plays written by Shakespeare's prolific contemporaries between the beginnings of the professional London theatres around 1580 to their forced closing in 1642. We will approach these plays from literary, theatrical, cultural, and book-history perspectives; please be prepared to think across categories. We'll read: a revenge tragedy more popular in its time than Hamlet; a history play about a king and his lower-class, immigrant boyfriend; a shockingly incestuous rewrite of Romeo and Juliet); two very different tragedies with women at their center (one the first original play by an English woman); a marriage anti-comedy with multiple trans resonances; and a prematurely postmodern play where the audience seizes control of the script. These plays will help us think about theatrical genres, about how plays were written, performed and printed, about modes of social organization (marriage, family, sexuality, reproduction, social class, race and ethnicity, monarchy, dynasty, nation, to name a few), about periodization ("Renaissance" or "early modern"?), and about canonicity (for example, the distinction between Shakespeare and "his contemporaries" implied by our curriculum and this course description). Teaching Methods: Mini-lectures; guided analysis and discussion of the plays. Evaluation Method(s): Based on participation in discussion, weekly in-class writing, papers, and a final exam. Plays include The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd), Edward II (Christopher Marlowe), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (Ben Jonson), The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (Elizabeth Cary), The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont et al.), together with some historical and critical essays. Text: English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (W.W. Norton). ISBN: 0-393-97655-6. [This anthology contains all the plays we will read and is available new, used, for rent and will be on reserve.] All editions of Renaissance plays differ, often significantly; use this edition only. Text available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 339	Studies in Shakespeare: Green Worlds? Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Shannon	MW 3:30-4:50
English 339 Studies in Shakespeare: Green Worlds? Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This seminar will work across Shakespeare’s genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), focusing on representative plays that also show a preoccupation with humanity’s cosmic place and environmental situation. The course will explore Shakespeare’s persistently troubled sense that humankind, alone, does not quite “belong” to nature. We’ll assess how his understanding of “Nature” and our relation to it changes over his career and also how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe those retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. There, a removal to the “green world” serves to counteract one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up against a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human order of civil life defined and established, and from what threatening “laws of nature” is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure -- to hard weather and our own worst instincts, too? This inquiry into Shakespeare’s environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the history of what it has meant to be human. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Sustained and substantive class participation and two papers. Texts include: Readings will be chosen from among Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale; brief contextual readings in early modern natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor.
English 344	18th-Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830)	Soni	MW 2-3:20
English 344 18th-Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830) Course Description: The enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s novels is due in part to the fact that the historical and cultural debates in which she intervened are very much the same ones that confront us today: tradition v innovation, parental authority v filial obligation, customary social bonds v contractual relations, emotion v reason, the role of women in society, the value of the arts. This class will consider Jane Austen’s development as a writer, in the context of the “culture wars” in Britain in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. Is Austen a radical or conservative novelist? Does she defend the values of a dying aristocracy, or champion a new middle class sensibility? How does she respond to the jarring changes affecting her society? Does she assert the privileges of the governing classes or urge the rights of silenced groups (especially young women)? Does she offer a traditional or progressive view of marriage? Should children make their own choices in marriage or defer to parental authority? How do her novels cultivate good judgment? Do the arts have a progressive role in transforming society or a conservative one in maintaining traditional values? These are some of the questions we will examine as we read a range of her novels. Our goal will be to understand the experimental and fluid nature of Austen’s thought, as well as the way in which she transformed the history of the novel. Teaching Method(s): Seminar with discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Class participation, midterm paper (6-8 pp.), final paper (7-9 pp.). Texts include: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Oxford World Classics - ISBN-10: 019955546X; ISBN-13: 978-0199555468) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin - ISBN-10: 0140432043; ISBN-13: 978-0140432046) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford World Classics - ISBN-10: 019953554X; ISBN-13: 978-0199535545) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Norton Critical Edition - ISBN-10: 0393264882; ISBN-13: 978-0393264883) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Oxford World Classics - ISBN-10: 0199535531; ISBN-13: 978-0199535538) Jane Austen, Persuasion (Oxford World Classics - ISBN-10: 0199535558; ISBN-13: 978-0199535552) Texts will be available at: Norris University Bookstore.
English 357	19th Century British Fiction: TBA	Finn	MW 2-3:20
English 357 19th Century British Fiction: TBA Course Description: TBA
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Secrets, Silence, and Lies in Postcolonial Literature (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Hansen	TTh 2-3:20
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Secrets, Silence, and Lies in Postcolonial Literature (Post 1830/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) 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 366	Studies in African American Literature: African American Writers of the 20th and 21st Century (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity)	Jackson	TTh 11-12:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: African American Writers of the 20th and 21st Century (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: This course introduces major authors and writers of the African American literary canon from the 1900s to the present. Among a diverse range of literary production—sci-fi stories to protest novels, sonnets, film criticism, and personal essay—we will think about what it has meant for black writers to work towards a literature to call their own and how the artistic and conceptual goals of African American literature have changed against the backdrop of evolving rights and attitudes across the 20th century and into our contemporary moment. Possible authors include: Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett.
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury and the Arts of Life (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Froula	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury and the Arts of Life (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: TBA
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Graphic Novels: Picturing History (Post 1830)	Larkin	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Graphic Novels: Picturing History (Post 1830) Course Description: Graphic novels have recently achieved a place in literature far from their origins in serials and superhero stories. From retellings of classic novels, to fantasy epics, to published compendiums of webcomics, the graphic novel is one of the fastest growing genres. In particular, graphic novels have become an important site through which to retell individual and collective histories, from coming-out memoirs to Indigenous retellings of historical events usually occluded from Western history books. This class will focus on the graphic novel as a form of life-writing that documents both personal and social histories. How does the graphic novel’s form make it particularly suited for this kind of work? What kinds of political visions of the past are graphic novels contesting and rewriting? And how does the graphic novel’s popularity influence our understanding of the digital age and its dissemination of information? Reading texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, both texts recently at the center of controversial school bans, we will investigate how these books aim to retell history and how their visual form influences the debate about their place in schools. What political possibilities do such texts offer us as they write their graphic lives? *Teaching Method(s):* seminar discussion. *Evaluation Method(s):* papers, presentation. *Texts include:* The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (ISBN: 0679406417), March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (ISBN: 1603093001), Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (ISBN: 037571457X), Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (ISBN: 0544709047), Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (ISBN: 1549304003), Stitches: A Memoir by David Small (ISBN: 9780393338966), They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott (ISBN: 1603094504), American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (ISBN: 1250811899). *Texts will be available at:* Norris.
English 371	American Novel: Defining America (Post 1830)	Savage	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 371 American Novel: Defining America (Post 1830) Course Description: In this class, we will examine the related ideas of the Great American Novel and “the American Dream” to explore the ongoing construction of American identity, values, and literature. We will operate from two basic points: America can be understood as a text, constantly being rewritten, revised, and contested; and American identity is relational, situated in culture, history, and the body. The questions we will examine include: In a racially and ethnically diverse (even divided) nation, what constitutes American identity, the quality of "Americanness"? Who, if anyone, speaks for all Americans? What sort of literary voice best expresses American realities and ideals? How does the dynamic of culture and counter-culture, dominant and marginal, get worked out aesthetically and ideologically? Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion. Evaluation Method: Brief written responses to each novel and several options for papers. Texts include: Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chopin, The Awakening; Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm; Kerouac, On the Road; Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Morrison, Song of Solomon.
English 374	Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: What is an Indigenous Book? (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity)	Wisecup	MW 3:30-4:50
English 374 Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: What is an Indigenous Book? (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity) Course Description: In 1893, the Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon circulated a birchbark book, The Red Man’s Rebuke (also titled The Red Man’s Greeting), which was printed to circulate at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Pokagon strongly criticized the Fair’s celebration of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas in the book’s text, but Pokagon’s words are not the only form this critique takes. The birchbark pages, the illustrations, the process by which the books were made and printed: these elements extend Pokagon’s critique to questions of environmental destruction, political sovereignty, and gendered experiences of colonialism. This class asks: What is an Indigenous book? We will learn and practice methods for reading materiality (what is paper made of?) and process (who printed the books? Prepared the pages? Circulated them for sale?). In doing so, we will examine how Indigenous writers and artists experiment with the materials of bookmaking to make the book form part of its meaning. We will examine how critically questioning the book form can decenter individual authors; raise questions about many people who participated in making, circulating, reading, and keeping books; and orient us to the trees and plants out of which books are made. This is an experimental, hands-on course where we will not only learn methods for making books but practice them as well. We will learn how to look at Indigenous books that take various forms: these include codices that open like accordions or fans; printed or sewn designs on birchbark; contemporary artist books that combine graphic arts with ancient book forms or that embed material objects like bullets on a page, or books that look like the thing they are about. We will understand processes of making and circulating books and how to connect those processes to the literary meanings on the page. We will consult these very cool and very special books during class sessions at NU’s Special Collections and at other libraries, and the class will also include engagement with letterpress printing, as well as discussions with Potawatomi scholars and artists about birchbark books and other objects. Teaching Method(s): Discussion, hands on workshops, conversations with visiting artists. Evaluation Method(s): Short reflections; annotated bibliography; preparation for and participation in discussion; final project designed by instructor and students. Texts include: As Sacred To US: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories In Their Contexts (9781611864625) All additional texts will be available on Canvas. Texts will be available at: The University bookstore. If you’d like to purchase the book from a Native-owned or independent bookstore, see Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for Evanston/Chicago independent bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); and Unabridged (Lakeview).
English 381	Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures)	Evans	MW 11-12:20
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures) Course Description: TBA
English 385	Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Godfrey	TTh 11-12:20
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: As cultural critic Ariana Grande once said, “I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it!” Some hundred years before, Karl Marx warned about consumerism and alienation: “Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” Taking the iconic makeover scene as its guiding trope, this course considers the preoccupation with gender, sex, and the performance of femininity that lies at the heart of modern consumer culture. How are racial and gender boundaries constructed and enforced through consumerism? Can one truly purchase empowerment? Are there, in fact, some ways in which consumerism offers key avenues for self-fashioning, and the subversion of heteronormative gender performance? While this course begins in 1725 with Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and a brief survey of antecedents, the majority of texts are literature, film, and pop culture ephemera from the 1990s through today. Texts include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Bong Joon-ho’s best picture winning Parasite, and Greta Gerwig’s latest satire Barbie. Students will engage with Marxism, feminism, gender theory, and sociological thought to construct a modern pop canon of consumption. According to interest, students will also be expected to track a vlogger/influencer of their choice in a pop culture journal. Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, pop culture journals, final project. Texts Include: Agnes Varda, Cleo from 5-7 (1961), Amy Heckerling, Clueless (1995), Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005), Sakaya Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016), Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019), Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers (2019), Channing Godfrey People, Miss Juneteenth (2020), and Greta Gerwig, Barbie (2023). Texts will be available at: Prep (ISBN 9780812972351) and Convenience Store Woman (ISBN 9780802129628) at Norris, all others on Canvas.
English 385	Studies in Literature and Culture: Writing Gay Men's Lives (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Grossman	TTh 2-3:20
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Writing Gay Men's Lives (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: In 1882, Oscar Wilde, on a triumphant American tour, met with Walt Whitman at his home in Camden, New Jersey. What can we learn from this meeting of the two most famous homosexuals the nineteenth century produced? But also: what might be lost by characterizing the meeting in these terms—as a meeting of two “homosexuals”? What if we were instead to imagine their meeting as a dizzying historical co-incidence of the last example of whatever-men-were-before-they-were-understood-to-be-“homosexual” (Whitman), and the first example of this new type (Wilde)? In this course we’ll study the terms in which “gay men” have written about themselves in diaries, novels, letters, poetry, and journals, as well as how they have been written about in various discourses of power—legal, medical, sociological, and theological—in the 128 years since Whitman’s death in 1892, which is also the year the word “homosexual” first appeared in English. Partly to answer the question how “we” came to be where “we” are today, we’ll consider writings on a range of topics and from a range of historical periods, including the HIV pandemic (AIDS as “a gay disease” and as the disease of gayness); the 1950’s and 1960’s (periods often seen, respectively, as those of normative heterosexuality, and of the sexual revolution); early twentieth-century characterizations of gender “inversion; and nineteenth-century versions of male-male amorous attachments. The course will be directed largely toward the texts and contexts out of which emerges the “sexual orientation” called “gay male,” but issues of “straightness,” “lesbianism,” “bisexuality,” “queerness,” and “trans” will necessarily arise as well. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: No exams. A shorter midterm paper expanded into a larger, research-oriented final paper. Students may be required to present an oral report. Readings will likely be drawn from: Walt Whitman's writings both in poetry and prose (1842-92); Henry Blake Fuller’s Evanston/Northwestern novel Bertram Cope’s Year (1919); Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney (1924-45); Tony Kushner's Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches (1992); Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me (1994). A number of films may also be screened: Pillow Talk (1959); Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989); Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004); Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016).
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: TBA	TBA	MW 9:30-10:50
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: TBA Course Description: TBA
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Robots Real and Imagined (Post 1830)	Larkin	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Robots Real and Imagined (Post 1830) Course Description: Will you support our future robot overlords? Robots have long played a significant role in our cultural imagination, from the earliest science fiction to dozens of recent shows and movies. And with recent advancements in robotics and AI, they are playing an ever-greater role in our everyday life. This course will delve into the cultural history of the robot, beginning with the coining of the term in the 1920 play R.U.R. and moving to contemporary depictions from Blade Runner to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. How do robots serve as mirrors reflecting our own concerns about our humanity? How do cultural depictions of robots as Others—both monstrous and salvific—meditate on questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? The course will explore cultural anxieties around AI and robotics, their increasing indistinguishability from humans, our ever-greater reliance on them, and the inevitability of robot world domination. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Presentation, midterm and final papers, participation. Texts include: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (ISBN-13: 9780345404473), Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (ISBN: 9780593311295), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott), Star Trek: The Next Generation (selected episodes), Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii), Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe, and selected fiction by Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury (available on Canvas) Texts will be available at: Norris.
English 392	Situation of Writing	Bouldrey	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 392 Situation of Writing Course Description: TBA
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Shanahan	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Seliy	MW 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	Bresland	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: Cultures of Play	Soni	MW 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: Cultures of Play Course Description: From video games and board games to game shows and sports, games saturate our culture and shape who we are. Some scholars have even argued that games are replacing novels and film as the dominant form of cultural expression. Others view games as a frivolous and unproductive activity, not worthy of serious study. In this seminar, we will explore some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between games and human culture. Why do people play games? What kinds of meanings, cultural values and political agendas do games encode? Do games function differently than other cultural objects, such as films, novels or works of art? What might it mean to think of all culture and works of art as arising from a “play impulse”? And if this is the case, why do we trivialize game-playing? Is the ubiquity of games in our lives a specifically modern phenomenon? Is the advent of the digital age producing a gamification of everyday life? To investigate these questions, we will read a wide range of critical writing about the importance of play and games in human culture, by philosophers, novelists, literary critics, social scientists, historians and game designers. The class will give you an opportunity to develop a 12-15 page research paper that studies one particular game or aspect of game culture in-depth. In the process, you will learn how to frame a significant research question; articulate a research proposal; navigate scholarly databases and archives; evaluate sources; and, produce an annotated bibliography. Teaching Method(s): Seminar, discussion, workshop. Evaluation Method(s): Topic Statement: 5% One paragraph proposal: 5% List of 15 sources developed in consultation with Charlotte Cubbage: 5% First five annotations: 5% Second five annotations: 5% State of the field analysis: 10% Paper abstract and outline: 10% 6 page draft and presentation: 15% Final research paper 12-15pp.: 30% Participation, peer review etc.: 10% Texts include: Booth et al., Craft of Research (ISBN-10: 022623973X; ISBN-13: 978-0226239736) Texts will be available at: Norris University Bookstore
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Newman	Th 3-4:50
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 422	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Canterbury Tales	Phillips	T 2-4:50
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Canterbury Tales Course Description: From the fifteenth-century glossators to twenty-first century critics, readers of the Canterbury Tales have sought to interpret and contain Chaucer’s constantly shifting, experimental poem. The text poses numerous interpretative puzzles—the myriad objects of the poem’s irony, the cultural politics of its author, the “identities” of its characters, and the demographics and ideologies of its intended audiences, to name a few—puzzles that have been “solved” in strikingly different ways at different historical moments. This course takes as its subject the Canterbury Tales and its reception history, exploring of both the poem’s multiple interpretative contexts and the hermeneutic conundrums it poses to them. As we read the Tales, we will consider the narratives (and narrative conventions) that Chaucer translates and transforms and the contemporary voices with whom he is in dialogue—both in the fourteenth century and the twenty-first. We will investigate the ways in which the tales circulated both individually and as a collection (which tales were the most popular? how and by whom were they published? with which other texts did they travel?) and analyze the various paratexts that accompanied them (glosses, prologues, illustrations, and “spurious” links and tales). Alongside this early publication context, we will explore current conversations in Chaucer criticism and the scholarly history and contemporary publics debates to which it responds. Analyzing the Tales through a wide array of methodological lenses, we will use Chaucer’s experimental poem as methodological and interpretative testing ground, placing its multivalent narratives in dialogue with feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies, and the Global Middle Ages, in addition to new and old materialities and historicisms. Seminar members are encouraged to treat the course as an interpretative lab, bringing their own methodological interests and questions to bear on the Tales in both seminar discussion and their final projects.
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Global Modernisms	Froula	W 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Global Modernisms Course Description: TBA
English 461	Studies in Contemporary Literature: Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form	Huang	Th 2-4:50
English 461 Studies in Contemporary Literature: Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form Course Description: TBA
English 481	Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Queer Theory and Queer Cinema	Davis, N.	TBA TBA
English 481 Studies in Literary Theory & Criticism: Queer Theory and Queer Cinema Course Description: “Queer theory” and “New Queer Cinema” were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia and public film culture. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like “gay and lesbian studies” or “LGBT film.” These new and spreading discourses stoked each other's productive advances, as scholars developed new axioms by reference to the movies, and filmmakers rooted styles and images in changing notions of gender performativity and counter-historiography. Still, queer theory and queer cinema faced similar skepticisms: did their ornate language and conceptual novelty endow dissident sexualities with newfound political and cultural stature, or did they retreat too far from popular accessibility and ongoing public emergencies? Was the lack of fixed definitions, communal appeals, uniting goals, or shared aesthetic practices a boon or a harm in sustaining a long-term movement of art, action, or thought? And how many thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, and activists were erased or marginalized by a “queer turn” that purported to elevate them? This class honors but also decenters this peak period in the reclaiming of “queer.” We will recover scholarly and cinematic trends that laid fertile grounds for that work and will also track subsequent trajectories and debates around “queer” in the way we perform readings, perceive bodies, record histories, spin narratives, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, gender identity, nation, class, and political project will inflect our understandings of “queer” and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as its key referent. Meanwhile, participants will develop skills of close-reading films and engage nimbly with the overarching claims but also the nuances, anomalies, and paradoxes in the scholarship we read. Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion Evaluation Method(s): Practice exercises in short academic genres (the conference proposal, the abstract, the peer review of a journal article) as well as a final paper or project Texts include: Readings are likely to include work by Scott Bravmann, Cathy Cohen, Teresa de Lauretis, Lee Edelman, David Eng, Elizabeth Freeman, Richard Fung, Rosalind Galt, Lindsey Green-Simms, Jack Halberstam, Michael Hames-García, Cáel Keegan, Kara Keeling, Keguro Macharia, José Esteban Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, B. Ruby Rich, Gayle Rubin, Vito Russo, Gayle Salomon, Karl Schoonover, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and C. Riley Snorton Texts will be available at: All readings and screenings will be available on Canvas, with the possible exception of films that can be streamed on major public sites
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Martinez	T 2-4:50
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Schulman	W 2-4:50
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: The focus of my nonfiction workshop is Manuscript Development. We will be looking at each colleague's current manuscript, whether it is all In pieces or a completed first draft. We will read together - carefully - to consider issues of the book as a whole alongside line readings. Topics include Structural Questions:How does the work unfold? Are tropes dynamic? Is the structure consequential + Content Questions: What is the piece saying? What are the revelations of the work? What is this book grappling with? Class discussion will be organized to ensure that everyone has time and space to share cohered and succinct ideas.
English 5XX	TBA	Manning	W 9:30-12:20
English 5XX TBA Course Description: TBA