Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Fall 2023

For graduate-level courses, click here.

For Summer 2023 courses, click here.

* indicates courses that count towards the Pre-1700 requirement for the English major.

** indicates courses that count towards the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

Creative Writing 

ENCW 2300 - Poetry Writing (9 sections)

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.
 
001 - MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (DR1 105)
TBA
 
002 - MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (DR1 105)
TBA
 
003 - MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
004 - MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 283)
TBA
 
005 - MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
006 - MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 233)
TBA
 
007 - TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (NAU 242)
TBA
 
008 - MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
009 - MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 233)
TBA

ENCW 2560-001 - Literary Science Fiction

MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 334)
Jeb Livingood
 
This class introduces you to the techniques and craft involved in fiction writing, but with a focus on the subgenre of science fiction. We’ll examine whether the labels “literary” and “science fiction” are mutually exclusive, or if they can overlap. By the end of the class, you will produce a short story or chapter of a science fiction novel and revise the writing extensively. You will also read a good deal of fiction, ideally becoming a more insightful consumer of stories and other narratives, and more aware of the various strategies and craft techniques authors use to create, as best they can, a piece of art—that is, a literary object that helps us understand what it is to be human—and also science fiction, an object that explores the tensions of our present time and our possible futures.

ENCW 2600 - Fiction Writing (7 sections)

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.
 
001 - MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (AST 265)
TBA
 
002 - MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
004 - MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 107)
TBA
 
005 - MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (CAB 064)
TBA
 
007 - MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (CAB 066)
TBA
 
008 - MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 203)
TBA
 
009 - MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 203)
TBA

ENCW 3310-001 - Intermediate Poetry Writing

R 03:30PM-06:00PM (DR1 105)
Amber McBride

A weekly 2.5-hour once-weekly class for students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2300. Emphasis is on workshop of students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Focus on revision and final poetry portfolio required.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class.

ENCW 3350-001 - Intermediate Nonfiction

T 09:30AM-12:00PM (BRN 233)
Anna Beecher

Please apply in SIS and (unless you are in the APLP) email am2aw@virginia.edu with a 5 page sample of your creative writing and a few lines about why this course interests you. 

Creative nonfiction invites us to activate our curiosity, examine the texture of our lives, uncover meaning in the chaos of experience, question reality, cultivate empathy and become braver thinkers. Expect to create original work in this class, to receive feedback and to read and discuss essays, memoir, literary journalism, imaginative biography and other forms.

This workshop is for students with some experience of creative writing who have already taken 2000 level ENCW classes.

ENCW 3559-001 - Story Telling and Performance Texts

R 02:00PM-04:30PM (BRN 233)
Anna Beecher

This course is for students with experience of writing creatively, interested in writing fiction and other texts to be spoken aloud, embodied and shared with others in real time. Over the semester you will develop original stories, work on putting them ‘up on their feet’ in performance and explore how liveness and orality can challenge, shape and invigorate writing. We will also touch upon the oral roots of literature, reading works such as the 1001 Nights and the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and the texts they have inspired. We will read, watch and discuss works of fiction, live-art, narrative comedy, spoken word and drama. You may be a fiction writer, interested in how spoken stories could attune your ear for language and narrative pattern, or writer and performer interested in marrying those two passions. Performance experience is not a requirement for this class, but a willingness to explore performance in a supportive atmosphere is essential. 

Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (5-10 pages) and a brief statement (1 page max) about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu.

ENCW 3559-002 - Adaptation

F 1:00-3:30 (Dawson's Row 1)
Kevin Moffett

In the course we'll explore the mutability of stories as they migrate across mediums and genres. We’ll read (and watch, and listen) briskly in a variety of forms—written, visual, and audio media—and you’ll make forays into them yourself, adapting your own original work, as well as the work of others, and then adapting your adaptations. We’ll consider questions of fidelity and how narrative techniques survive and mutate when stories are re-envisioned and rewritten.

ENCW 3610-001 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

R 09:30AM-12:00PM (BRN 233)
Anna Beecher

For students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2600. Involves workshop of student work, craft discussions, and relevant reading. May be repeated with different instructor.

Instructor permission required.

ENCW 3610-003 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (DR1 105)
TBA

For students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2600. Involves workshop of student work, craft discussions, and relevant reading. May be repeated with different instructor.

Instructor permission required.

ENCW 4550-001 - Literary Prose Seminar: Novellas, Very Short Novels, Very Long stories

W 05:00PM-07:30PM (DR1 105)
TBA
 
One of two required readings courses for students admitted to the Area Program in Literary Prose, also open to other qualified students.

ENCW 4810-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing I

W 11:00AM-01:30PM (DR1 105)
Jane Alison
 
 
An advanced class for ambitious and imaginative students who want to expand their skills in writing literary prose and experiment with some different manners it can take: realism, metafiction, autofiction, fabulism, faux nonfiction, and so on. We’ll begin with readings in those different manners (looking at texts that range in length from microfiction to novella). As you read you’ll cycle through a series of exercises to let you both play and develop—playing with scales of syntax; controlling time; sculpting a fictional world; manipulating readerly expectations; rendering thought. Ultimately you’ll compose and workshop two stories. 

INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED: please send a note and a brief writing sample to jas2ad@virginia.edu.

ENCW 4820-001 - Poetry Program Poetics: The Poetics of Ecstasy

T 11:00AM-01:30PM (DR1 105)
Lisa Spaar

The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance—literally, “standing elsewhere.” In this seminar class designed for students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing (APPW), serious makers and readers of poems will explore the poetry of fervor—erotic, visionary, somatic, negative, social, religious, mystical.  When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? We will read widely and deeply across cultures and time, including work by Dickinson, Carson, Hopkins, Sappho, Keats, Rilke, Mirabai, Rumi, Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Teare, Hwang, and other ancient, modern, and contemporary writers who have explored the experience of being beside one’s self in the transport of ecstasy.  Key & related texts may include readings from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lost Notebooks, and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. Students not in the APPW may request permission to enroll and will be considered on a space-available basis. 

All students, APPW and otherwise, should request enrollment through SIS and via email to Lisa Russ Spaar ( LRS9E@virginia.edu).

ENCW 4830-001 - Advanced Poetry Writing I

W 02:00PM-04:30PM (Hybrid)
Debra Nystrom

This workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry, and it welcomes students working in the poetry/prose hybrid space as well. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft. Students will be expected to write and revise six to eight poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed notes in response to other students’ work, to keep a poetry journal, to attend several poetry readings, to turn in close-reading responses to three assigned readings, and to participate in a group presentation.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class. Please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Nystrom at dln8u@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be noon, August 1. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold space for transfer and study abroad students. The instructor will let all applicants know by late August.

ENCW 5610-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing II - VARIATIONS ON GRIMM'S TALES

T 02:00PM-04:30PM (BRN 233)
Jesse Ball (Kapnick Distinguished Visiting Writer)

This is a multi-arts graduate workshop open to MFA students of fiction or poetry, as well as graduate students in literature, the visual arts, dance, drama, filmmaking, architecture . . . A kind of literary game involving the Brothers Grimm. Posit two groups, A & B. To one of these you belong. Once every fortnight, you & your group present variations on a chosen Household Tale, subverting, extending, or elaborating the original. These variations might elevate a minor character to prominence, or reapply the tale’s schema & shape to a different milieu or landscape. A variation might change the story’s point of perspective or extend it through time. The options are endless, and any imaginable variation is encouraged. We will discuss these variations using an inquiry method known as The Asking.
 
To apply, send a note and brief sample of imaginative work to Jane Alison at jas2ad.

English Literature

ENGL 2500-001 - Intro to Literary Studies

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 111)
Victor Luftig
 
We will read poems, plays, fiction, and essays in ways meant to introduce the study of literature at the college level: we’ll focus on how these types of writing work, on what we get from reading them carefully, and on what good and harm they may do in the world. The texts will come from a wide range of times and places, including works by authors such as Sophocles, Hafez, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsburg, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Ntozake Shange, Alberto Rios, Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Sherman Alexie, Marjane Satrapi, and Chimamanda Adichie; we will also read works and attend readings by visiting writers and read and view a play performed on Grounds. The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason; those who seek an introductory humanities course; and those who may wish subsequently to major in English. We’ll discuss the works in class, and there will be three or four papers and a final exam.

ENGL 2500-008 - Literature as Equipment for Living

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 287)
Walter Jost

This course introduces the many indirect ways that fiction, drama, and poetry shape our character, beliefs, and attitudes toward the world. Reading literature as a mode of action attunes us both to its calculated designs on us and to our own needs for practical resources to lead our lives. We will read texts ranging from song lyrics to the allegorical novel, modern drama, and lyric poem. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

ENGL 2502-001 - Sir Gawain & the Green Knight

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (AST 265)
Elizabeth Fowler
 
We'll read the great medieval poem in both Modern and Middle English, encountering the young King Arthur's court and thrilling to Gawain's yuletide adventures. You'll learn to write about imagery, plot, and poetics; we'll savor some history of the language; and you'll be equipped to take any subsequent literature course in style.

ENGL 2506-002 - Contemporary Poetry

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
Jahan Ramazani
 
In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific genres, forms, or kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry.

ENGL 2506-003 - Introduction to Poetry

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (DR1 105)
Walter Jost
 
How does a written poem on a page—its lines now taken out of their historical contexts, its author no longer around to ask, its time past—manage to mean anything at all when spoken aloud? How do words work, anyway (because, after all, they do work)? This course centers on patient close reading of poems of the twentieth century, and what’s in them for us in the twenty-first century, by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and others. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

ENGL 2506-004 - Introduction to Poetry

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 209)
Hodges Adams
 
"I cut off my head and threw it into the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking." - Richard Siken. This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will seek to understand the meaning and impact of poetry both on an individual reader and on a broader society. Why do humans write poetry? What are poetic forms and elements? How do we understand poetry as a reflection of its cultural moment? Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods, as well as reading two short collections of contemporary American poetry. There will be three essays, one of which will be paired with an in-class presentation. We may take field trips to some places around Grounds such as the Fralin Art Museum and the Special Collections Library. Please come prepared to read with curiosity and enthusiasm!

ENGL 2508-001 - Medical Narratives

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 032)
Anna Brickhouse
 
This course is designed for prospective English majors as well as students who may one day enter a medical field—and should appeal to all students who love short stories. It explores the history of the American short story from the nineteenth century through our own by focusing specifically on medical themes: ailing and injured bodies and minds; doctors, nurses, and patients; the social construction of disease and madness as well as of health and sanity. It is widely acknowledged today in various fields of medical research and clinical training that the effective and humane practice of medicine requires what has been called “narrative competence”: the ability to recognize and interpret the stories people tell; to attend closely to the details that accumulate to make a larger meaning; to evaluate contradictory and competing hypotheses about meaning; to locate expression within cultural context; and finally to appreciate and respond to any given story for its insight into the human condition. But if these skills are in demand within the medical fields, they also shape the practice of the English major. We will discuss classic stories as well as the work of recent writers.

ENGL 2508-002 - Virginia Woolf

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 235)
Stephen Arata
 
The broad purposes of this course are to introduce you to ways of understanding texts within the discipline of literary studies and to improve your skills in critical thinking and writing. In addition to fulfilling the Second Writing Requirement, the course can be used complete the prerequisite to the English major. We will spend the semester reading widely in the work of Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest writers in the English language. In addition to three of her novels (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando), our reading list will include short fiction and essays as well as excerpts from her letters and journals. In addition to regular brief writing assignments, requirements will include three 5-6 page essays. The course is designed both for those who have read Woolf before and those who will be reading her for the first time.

ENGL 2508-003 - American Environmental Fiction

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (PV8 102)
Mary Kuhn
 
We’ll read fictional works that explicitly thematize environmental problems. How do these writers help us imagine, feel, and think about the world around us? We’ll investigate what kinds of fictional ideas about the environment permeate and guide our day to day lives. We’ll look at a number of genres and environmental issues ranging from the nineteenth century to present day, but we’ll focus on works written in the last fifty years.

ENGL 2508-005 - The Novel of Upbringing

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 038)
James Kinney

How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Michael Malone, Handling Sin. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

ENGL 2572 - History in Contemporary African American Literature

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Gilmer 245)
Marissa Kessenich

When reflecting on her groundbreaking 1987 novel Beloved, author Toni Morrison described a sense of historical loss as animating her writing process: “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act…to yield up a kind of truth.”

In this seminar, students will engage with history as a valuable discipline—but one that deserves our scrutiny. The course asks students to consider the ways that history highlights issues of representation, knowledge production, and power. We will discuss the ways Black American writers reimagine their relationship to the past through the mediums of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. We will consider how each writer approaches historical actors, events, and discourses. What narratives or national myths are they engaging with? How does each author approach constructing a counter-narrative? How do these writers use familiar forms, genres, and tropes in new and unfamiliar ways? Readings for the course will include authors like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Robert Hayden, Saidiya Hartman, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and many others.

While this seminar requires no prior familiarity with literary study, it will emphasize and help students cultivate a number of valuable skills, including close reading, critical thinking, and clear, knowledgeable writing.

ENGL 2599-002 - Comedy and Character

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (AST 265)
Rebecca Rush

In this course, we will meditate on the craft of comic character-making from Chaucer to Dickens. Readings will include selected Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Dickens’s David Copperfield. We will consider how each writer approaches character from a distinctive angle and how each has a different vision of what kinds of details are needed to build a character piece by verbal piece. Which aspects of characters does each author consider worth representing or describing? How can an author use a small thing like a name (Malvolio), a piece of clothing (fine scarlet red hose), or a repeated phrase (“Barkis is willin’”) to hint at something so inward and complex as character? How do comic writers use exaggeration and caricature not only to entertain us but to reveal something about human habits we might otherwise be unable to see? How do they use ensemble casts of major and minor characters to depict an array of humors and habits? When and why do they withhold insights into character or cast doubt on our ability to understand the inner lives of others? No prior knowledge of literature is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.

 
A study of literary characterization in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, Austen, and Dickens, among others.

ENGL 2599-003 - Protest Literature

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRK 103)
Amber McBride
 
This class focuses on literature and film about resistance; therefore, we will also ask: What is the language of protest? What constitutes protest film? How do our own biases factor into the way we view the world?

ENGL 2599-004 - Landscapes of Black Education

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Nau 241)
Ian Grandison

Field Trip: Sat. 10/14 - 11AM-3PM (Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in Charlottesville)

This course examines how seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us, “landscapes,” are involved in the struggle to democratize education in the United States. It uses the African American experience in this arena to anchor the exploration. We explore how landscape is implicated in the secret prehistory of Black education under enslavement; the promise of public education during Reconstruction; Booker T. Washington’s accommodation during early Jim Crow; black college campus rebellions of the 1920s; the impact of Brown v. Board of Education; the rise of black studies programs at majority campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the resonance of Jim Crow assumptions affecting education access in our current moment. We also touch on the experience of other marginalized groups. For example, women’s college campuses, such as those of Mount Holyoke and Smith College, were designed to discipline women to accept prescribed gender roles at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. Armed with this background, on Saturday 14 October, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET, there will be a required field trip to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and its setting in downtown Charlottesville. This was the site of Charlottesville’s first public elementary and later high school for African Americans. Some of the materials we study include excerpts from the following: Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Raymond Wolters’ The New Negro on Campus, and James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South. Films include Peter Gilbert's With All Deliberate Speed. We’ll explore interpreting historical and contemporary maps, plans, and other design- and planning-related materials to help develop the ability to interrogate landscapes critically. Graded assignments include two midterms, a team research project, a final team project symposium, and an individual critical reflection on the team project. There will be a number of informal in-class and take home exercises connected especially with developing skills in preparation for the midterms, field trip, and final project.

ENGL 2599-015 - American Refugees

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (New Cabell 132)
Joshua Miller

Despite generations of critique, the national narrative of the US as a land of and for refugees is still frequently retold. However, the history and literature of the past century and a half tells a different story. Many different stories, in fact. The history of migration turns out to be an ongoing crisis of representation itself. If we approach 21st-century US refugee fiction as an ongoing problem of narrative form (how to tell the stories of individuals who adopt a new culture and language), it emerges as a rich tradition of literary innovation, subtle social critique, and transracial alliance-building.

After considering US migrant fiction since the 19th century, we’ll focus on contemporary novels that complicate borders, documentation, rights, community, and language. We’ll consider recent narratives that complicate what the term refugee means, the status of undocumented and stateless people, how borders shape literary narrative, migrant time, and the perils of translation. This course is designed for all students, no prior coursework or knowledge needed. Requirements will include brief online discussion posts, three short essays (5-7p.) and a final exam.

ENGL 2599-016 - Literature of Black Childhood

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (New Cabell 415)
Vallaire Wallace

How do we think about and complicate our idea of the black child? How does race inflect our understandings of youth, and what that looks like through the past two centuries? What can literature teach us about practices of care, black radicalism, and the psychological effects of otherization in the here and now? These are the questions we will try to understand together in this course. Looking at novels by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jacqueline Woodson, and more, we interrogate and look towards the literature of the black past (and present) to present possibilities of a less precarious future.

Assignments include three formal essays, some weekly informal writing, and an in class presentation.

ENGL 2599-017 - Dreaming in Literature

MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (New Cabell 207)
Molly Nichols

This class explores how English writers have presented both the creative potential and futility of dreams in literature, from medieval poems to modern novels. We will begin with medieval dream visions, including the Old English anonymous poem “The Dream of the Rood,” Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, the Gawain-poet’s Pearl, and excerpts from William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Our second unit will be more eclectic as we unpack the various ways in which poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and others over the centuries have utilized dreams and dream-like states in order to speak about reality. Finally, in our third unit, we will turn to novels like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and wonder: How do these stories look back on the rich literary history of dream visions while also looking forward to the future humanity has been dreaming about for millennia? This class fulfills the Second Writing Requirement and thus requires 20+ pages of formal written work; assignments will include both essays and other writing activities.

ENGL 2599-018 - Literature and Celebrity Culture

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 283)
Ian Jayne

What is “celebrity”? How has this concept evolved over the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries? In this course, we will trace the history of notions of celebrity as emergent within certain material and cultural contexts, and think about the shifting social forms of fame and iconicity. But we’ll also use “celebrity” as a way to think through much bigger philosophical issues related to the Self and the Other; to class, gender, race, and sexuality; and to our own attachments to celebrity and celebrities. We will investigate the role that literature has played in both fostering and challenging what it means to be a person “of note”—and the attendant ethical, social, and relational questions that texts about celebrity raise for readers.

We will turn to several critical works throughout the semester, including Sharon Marcus’s The Drama of Celebrity and Emily Hund’s The Influencer Industry. We’ll engage the philosophies of Charles Taylor, as well as works by cultural critics such as Stuart Hall, Joan Didion, Lauren Michele Jackson, Lauren Berlant, and Naomi Fry. 

Tentative literary and filmic texts include Swing Time by Zadie Smith, poems by Frank O’Hara, The Comeback (Lisa Kudrow, Michael Patrick King), Miss Americana (dir. Lana Wilson) and a host of other documentary films, as well as A Bigger Splash (dir. Luca Guadagnino).

Course requirements: to fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, students will write 20+ pages over several assignments—one short personal reflection (four pages), a presentation with an accompanying three-page writeup, a keyword essay (five pages), and a final critical paper (eight pages). Participation will take the form of contributions to class discussion. There is no final exam.

ENGL 2599-019 - Literatures of the Nonhuman

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 415)
Adrienne Ghaly

This course explores the nonhuman world in all its richness through literature. How do modern and contemporary texts envision the nonhuman across different scales, from the strangeness of the nearest everyday objects like a pebble, piece of chalk or a soda can, to imagining what it’s like to be a fox or a school of fish, to representing vast planetary processes like climate change and habitat loss? The focus will be on developing strategies of close reading and introducing the basics of literary critical analysis through shorter forms in poetry and prose that examine the nonhuman across a range of genres from the later nineteenth century to the present. Several critical works and the questions they raise will guide our investigations of the capacious category of the nonhuman and the ideas it animates. Throughout we'll ask, what are the stories we tell about the nonhuman, and how can literature help us imagine them differently?

No prior knowledge required. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement of 20+ pages of written work, with assignments comprising several essays, shorter pieces of writing, and active participation in discussion.

ENGL 2910-001 - Point of View Journalism

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CMN 1110)
Lisa Goff
 
This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity” on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,” point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Hunter Thompson in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network) and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Jia Tolentino. We will also consider the rise of “fake news.” A term formerly used to indicate the work of entertainers such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who pilloried the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them, “fake news” is now an established practice of the far right, as well as a political slur used to denigrate the work of mainstream (center and left-of-center) news organizations.

ENGL 3001-100 - History of Literature in English I

MW 12:00PM-12:50PM (WNR 209)
Bruce Holsinger

The past is another country: they do things differently there.  Or do they? Be prepared for the shock of the old—and for its pleasures—as we explore examples of epic and romance, lyric poetry and drama, prose fiction and satire in a course whose range stretches from the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf to some variously revolutionary 17th and 18th century works of the imagination. The one sure thing connecting this huge variety of “makings,” these shapings of other people's experiences and beliefs and fantasies, is that someone (somewhere, sometime) felt them important enough to put down in writing and therefore created the possibility for their persistence beyond their own historical moment.  Come and meet some heroic survivors!

Course requirements: attentive engagement with lectures; regular attendance at/lively participation in discussion sections; two 6 page papers, midterm examination; comprehensive final examination.

ENGL 3010-001 - History of English Language

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 395)
Stephen Hopkins

Did you know that King Alfred the Great "axed" questions? And that in Old English, double and even triple negatives were the norm? Language is always changing, and English is no exception. This course will introduce basic linguistic concepts while we explore the history of the English language across a range of contexts. We will journey through the history of the language, learning about its linguistic nuts and bolts, as well as how language and culture interact with each other in the past and present by sampling literature from each era. Topics to be covered: what is grammatical gender? Is English harder or easier than other languages? Why did our pronouns change (then and now)? Why is English spelling such a mess? Why and how do words die? Where do new words come from? Is “bad English” really a thing? Our guides on this journey will be Seth Lerer, Inventing English and Smith and Kim, This Language, A River (supplemented with additional material posted on our course website). Words can shape the world, but the reverse is true, too. By the end of the semester, you will have a good grip on how our language got where it is now, but you will also understand why people have the attitudes toward language use that they do.

*ENGL 3162-001 - Chaucer II: Chaucerian Dream Poems

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 032)
Elizabeth Fowler
 
Together, we’ll read Geoffrey Chaucer’s four dream poems and investigate how the virtual reality we call art can produce intense and immersive human experience.  The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women are surreal, sweet, funny, philosophical, emotionally intense, and visually overstimulated poems which are even more interesting in our age of complex media tech; dreams and poetry seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking explicitly about what it is to have para-sensory, virtual experience. We'll be interested in how specific configurations of language (image, metaphor, tense, and so on) work to produce cognitive, emotional, and sensory effects. This is a “close reading” course that will sharpen your reading skills as well as provide an encounter with one of the most influential and beloved poets in world history. (We will also undoubtedly talk about Chaucer's other ambitions in these works — philosophical, political, theological, aesthetic, imagistic.)

*RELC 3181 - Medieval Christianity: Thomas Aquinas

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Brooks 103)
Kevin Hart

This lecture course offers a general introduction to the writings and thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), the pre-eminent Catholic theologian and one of the greatest thinkers of the middle ages. His influence is extensive; it embraces many Protestants as well as most Catholics. It’s simply impossible to understand many writers, from Dante to T. S. Eliot, without knowing Aquinas. Students will read a mixture of Aquinas’s treatises and his almost unknown popular writings. Among the popular writings will be Aquinas’s explanation of the Lord’s Prayer and his exposition of the Apostle’s Creed; and among the treatises will be readings in all three parts of the Summa theologiæ. Students will have the opportunity to compare Aquinas on the same topics (Trinity and sacraments) in the Summa theologiæ and in less well-known works. What did Aquinas say about aesthetics (especially his teachings about beauty, pleasure and play), about God, about the sacraments, and about love? How does he work rhetorically when preaching and commenting on Scripture? Are there ways in which Aquinas can help us be better readers of medieval literature? These are some of the questions we shall consider.

*ENGL 3271-100 - Shakespeare: Histories & Comedies

MW 11:00AM-11:50AM (CAM 160)
Katharine Maus

Discussion sections TBD.

This course deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies. ENGL 3272, in the Spring, deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.

2 50-minute lectures and 1 50-minute discussion section per week.

Requirements: 3 five-page papers, a final exam emphasizing material covered in lectures and section meetings, and regular short assignments made by section leaders.

This course does not automatically fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, but it may be tweaked to do so.  See me in the first few weeks of the semester if you are interested in this option.

*ENGL 3275-001 - History of Drama I

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 489)
John Parker

The first third of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, then moving from there to the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence and Seneca.  The next third of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) this pagan tradition after the Christianization of the Roman empire, including liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, biblical drama and farce.  The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.       

A major goal of the course will be to answer some of the questions posed by historical period: what does it mean, in the context of this particular genre, to move from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance?  How seriously should we take the differences between paganism and Christianity?  What portion of early modern drama derives from classical antiquity, what portion from the Middle Ages, and what portion, if any, is new?

**ENGL 3380-001 - The English Novel I

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 235)
Alison Hurley
 

Today classes like this one elevate novels to the status of serious literature. During the eighteenth century, however, the novel was not just a new and thus culturally illegitimate genre, it was a dangerous one as well: seductive, subversive, addictive, and unruly.  No wonder it was so popular!  But despite their reputation as merely popular and mostly valueless cultural productions, early novels grappled with serious questions about the experience of living in an increasingly secular, mobile, and literate society.  How can, and why should, a book make the everyday lives of ordinary individuals matter?  Does sympathizing with fictional characters lead to virtue or vice?  What is the difference between fiction and fraud?  Wonderfully contentious conversations developed among eighteenth-century novelists about how best to answer questions such as these.  Our work will be to revive these conversations, and hopefully, come to a better understanding of how they propelled the novel towards becoming the dominant literary genre of the modern world. 

Class requirements include a minimum of 15 discussion posts, frequent reading quizzes, two essays, and a final exam. Because our classes will be largely discussion based, keeping up with assigned readings will be crucial to your learning and enjoyment. 

**ENGL 3480-001 - The English Novel II

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 383)
Stephen Arata
 
“Novels are in the hands of us all,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870, “from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have become a novel-reading nation.” Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century the novel became the most popular—and profitable—literary genre in Great Britain. Its success was due to many factors, none perhaps more important than the extraordinary sophistication and emotional power with which novelists set out to portray (as the title of one of Trollope’s own novels puts it) “the way we live now.” More than ever before, novelists were committed to recording the visible world in all its abundant detail while also exploring the complex interior lives of individual women and men. They accomplished these feats, moreover, by way of gripping stories full of adventure, love (lust too), betrayal, mystery, and wonder. In this course we will immerse ourselves in a half-dozen or so of the finest examples of the genre, chosen from among such writers as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope himself. Requirements will likely include bi-weekly email responses, two essays, a midterm, and final exam.

ENGL 3500-002 - Climate Fiction

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 364)
Mary Kuhn
 
Climate change happens at such a large scale that it can be hard to interpret on an individual, day-to-day level in central Virginia. Climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” is a relatively new genre that invites readers to contemplate a rapidly changing climate—from realist portrayals of weird weather interrupting the everyday to post-apocalyptic scenarios set on fury roads and in distant galaxies. Assignments include short papers and an observational journal that will go into climate capsule at the end of the semester. 

ENGL 3500-003 - Faust

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 485)
Jeffrey Grossman

Goethe's Faust has been called an “atlas of European modernity” and “one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history.” The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: “As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice.”

Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and possibly one of the various other popular re-workings of the text. We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and II (part II, either in its entirety or in excerpts). Although now viewed as central to the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform the central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society. Beyond Goethe, we will study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality, and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth- century, reading texts that re-worked the Faust legend in response to authoritarian politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which wrestles with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust. We will also consider F.W. Murnau's film version of Faust and may consider Faust works in other media (e.g., music, painting).

*ENGL 3520-001 - New Philosophy & Renaissance Literature

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 132)
James Kinney
 
In this course we'll examine the strange mix of radicalism and caution that typifies Renaissance culture not only in England, looking at how daring Renaissance authors from More and Erasmus to Shakespeare and Donne reconceive the self, reinvent the tradition, and recast the state. One short, one longer paper, regular class participation, and a final exam.

*ENGL 3520-002 - Metaphysical Poets

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 328)
Rebecca Rush
 
In this course we will dig deep into the verse of the “metaphysical poets” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including John Donne, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will also consider poets who occasionally dabbled in the metaphysical style, including William Shakespeare, John Milton, Richard Lovelace, and Katherine Philips, among others. As we work through this peculiar, startling body of poetry, we will debate about the distinctive markers of metaphysical style—love of witty and intellectual play, intense concentration on a single idea, far-flung and ingenious metaphors, and a distinctively chatty and bossy voice—and ponder about how they fit the poetic and philosophical needs of these poets. Why and how did Donne develop such an idiosyncratic way of inspecting desire and love by putting them under the pressure of metaphor, analogy, and wit? What happens to Donne’s style when later poets turn away from human love and apply his poetic tools to meditations on divinity and nature? No prior knowledge of Renaissance poetry is required, only a willingness to unravel complex verse with the utmost care—and a dictionary.

**ENGL 3545-001 - US Lit and Social Justice

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 485)
Victoria Olwell
 
Exploring U.S. literature from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era, this course asks, what strategies did literary authors use to influence public debates about social, economic, and political justice? Beneath this question lie two more:  What underlying conceptions of justice did U.S. literature advance, and how might we assess them? Literature during the era we’ll consider spanned the full political spectrum, but our focus will be primarily on literature invested in the extension of rights, equality, and protections to dispossessed people, as well as in the amelioration of politically induced suffering. We’ll examine literary protests against slavery, Jim Crow law, Chinese exclusion, urban poverty, women’s status, and the conditions of industrial labor. Course requirements include several short papers, class participation, and a final exam.

ENGL 3559-001 - Memory Speaks

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 485)
Lorna Martens

Memory is a crucial human faculty. Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human. Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self. Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future. Remembering has its delights. Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate. Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium. Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control. It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes. Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive. It is demonstrably suggestible. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives). We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras. We will also study two films on the theme of memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out. Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory. Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well.

Two short papers, presentations, exam.

ENGL 3560-002 - James Joyce's Ulysses

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 328)
Victor Luftig

If you are reading this, you’ve probably heard that Ulysses is great, influential, and way hard; you are less likely to have heard how funny it is, and how rewarding reading it can be. Difficult? Sure, maybe, but how difficult is up to each reader or group of readers: in this course, designed for first-time readers of the book, we’ll consider what the book makes challenging and why, and we’ll develop comfortable strategies for responding to those challenges. But our main focus will be on what Ulysses offers us as 21st century readers. In what ways can its styles, its engagement with the ‘real,’ its accounts of human experience, and its consideration of categories of people—by gender, nation, race, ethnicity, religion, age, body type, temperament, etc—provide us with particular insights, pleasures, and cautions? Prior to the first class session, please read as much as you can of an annotated edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (The Viking edition with notes by Anderson, which you can easily find used, would be fine.) There will be a couple of papers, a couple of tests, and a final exam; the final paper will ask you to think about what contemporary situation you think Ulysses might apply to most meaningfully. At the end of the course we’ll have a taste of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to prepare you for future explorations of that book—which too is challenging, rewarding, and “lovesoftfun.”

ENGL 3560-003 - Modern and Contemporary Poetry

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 364)
Mark Edmundson

The mid-twentieth century in America sees and explosion of excellent poetry. More different kinds of consequential poets, more different sorts of poems than the nation had seen before. We’ll start with the understated genius, Elizabeth Bishop, and move on to Robert Lowell, inspired early prophet of the sorrows of American empire. Then on to others: the daring, ever fertile Sylvia Plath; superb political and erotic poet, Adrienne Rich; Robert Hayden, poet of African American grief and hopes;  Allen Ginsberg, author of the culture-shaking Howl. There will be encounters too with the hyper-perceptive Gwendolyn Brooks; visionary Amy Clampitt;  Southern sage James Dickey; James Merrill, perhaps America’s most sophisticated poet; and gritty, tender James Wright. A mid-term quiz, a final quiz, and a paper at the end on the poet you care about most.

ENGL 3560-004 - Kafka and His Doubles

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 187)
Lorna Martens

The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka: stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables. But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles": the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition. Thus: Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka: Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges. Readings will center on four principal themes: conflicts with others and the self (and Kafka's psychological vision); the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals. A seminar limited to 20 participants. Requirements include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages) and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).

ENGL 3570-001 - Short Stories of the Americas

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 032)
Anna Brickhouse
 
This course explores short stories from and about the Americas, from the nineteenth century through the contemporary period: Victor Séjour, Edgar Allan Poe, Elena Garro, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Junot Díaz, Jenny Zhang, Rebecca Roanhorse, Tommy Orange, among others.

ENGL 3790-001 - Moving On: Migration in/to US

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (MON 118)
Lisa Goff

This course examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. It traces the paths of migrating groups and their impact on urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. Students will dig for cultural clues to changing attitudes about migration over time. While novels and memoirs make up the bulk of the assignments, we will also analyze photographs, videos, films, poems, paintings, and podcasts. We will also explore the growing body of digital humanities resources related to migration and mobility, including but not limited to resources collected by the DPLA on the Great Migration and the Exodusters; and Torn Apart volume one, “Separados,” about 2018 asylum seekers at the Mexican border.   

Assignments will teach students to analyze literature and popular culture; express their ideas in written and visual form; and conduct historical and cultural analysis and interpretation. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class: please note the attendance policy. Other assessments include reading responses, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one test; no midterm or final exam. Students will be required to volunteer 10 hours with a migration-related project during the second half of the semester.

ENGL 3922-001 - Deafness in Literature & Film

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (CAB 338)
Christopher Krentz

What does deafness signify, especially in a western civilization centered upon speech? In this course we will study some of the contradictory ways that deaf people have been depicted over the last three centuries. Our approach will be contrapuntal; canonical texts or mainstream films will be juxtaposed with relatively unknown works by deaf artists. We will read fiction, short and long, by authors like Defoe, de Musset, Turgenev, Melville, Maupassant, Twain, Bierce, McCullers, Welty, O'Connor, and Thon, along with prose by such deaf writers as Laurent Clerc, Adele Jewel, Bernard Bragg, and Sotonwa Opeoluwa. We will also view films like Johnny Belinda, Immortal Beloved, and Beyond Silence; documentaries such as Sound and Fury and Through Deaf Eyes; and movies by deaf filmmakers like Charles Krauel. Finally, we will explore selected poetry, drama, and storytelling in American Sign Language (in translation) by deaf performers. Requirements will include participation, team-teaching exercises, a short paper, a longer paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 3924-001 - Vietnam War in Literature & Film

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (SHN 107)
Sylvia Chong

It has been over 40  years since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of a war that claimed the lives of an estimated 58,260 American troops and over 4 million Southeast Asians across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In the U.S. today, “Vietnam” signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from debates about foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What, in this moment of commemoration and reflection, are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War / American War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans and Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong) affected by the Vietnam War, spanning the entirety of this 40 year period. Texts may include Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds; Yusek Komunyakaa, Dien Cia Dau; Tiana Alexander, From Hollywood to Hanoi; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer; Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind; Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino; Socheata Poeuv, New Years Baby.

ENGL 4500-001 - The Frankenstein Circle

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRK 103)
Cynthia Wall
 
“I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts. The tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.” So wrote young Mary Godwin; the two friends were the poets Lord Byron and her lover Percy Shelley. The tale was Frankenstein. (For the record, one Dr Polidori was there as well, and he did finish his tale, “The Vampyre”; it’s on the syllabus.) With Frankenstein as our central text, we will also read works by Percy, Byron, Polidori, and William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary’s parents), excerpts from Mary’s journals, and selections from Mary & Percy’s mammoth reading lists for 1814-1818 (Coleridge, Wordsworth, M. G. Lewis, Milton, Brockden Brown, Swift, Defoe, Thomson, Chatterton, Locke, Scott . . .)

*ENGL 4520-001 - Renaissance Drama

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 044)
John Parker

To examine some of Shakespeare's greatest contemporaries and rivals, in particular Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, with special attention to the London theater's sub-genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy and tragi-comedy.  Other authors may include Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, Elizabeth Cary, John Fletcher, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Ford and Philip Massinger.  We will try to get a sense of what it means to speak of a "Renaissance" at this moment in English history and to understand how the London commercial stage relates to earlier forms of theater.

 

ENGL 4560-001 - Contemporary Poetry

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 038)
Jahan Ramazani

In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry.

ENGL 4560-003 - Frost, Haydn, Bishop, Lowell

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 068)
Mark Edmundson

We’ll read, interpret, and enjoy four remarkable twentieth century American poets.  The class will spend about three weeks each on Robert Frost, poet of rural life and more; Elizabeth Bishop, consummate artist who writes memorably about solitude and loneliness; Robert Hayden, brave and candid poet of African American experience; and Robert Lowell, patrician poet who prophesies the decline and fall of America.  Maybe we’ll shake things up with a visit from Allen Ginsberg.

Three Roberts and an Elizabeth (and maybe an Allen), a couple of essays, some quizzes, focused and wayward reflections on literature and the conduct of life.

ENGL 4560-004 - Modern Love and US Fiction

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 115)
Victoria Jeanne Olwell

Maybe love is eternal, but it’s also historical and ideological. Love is shaped by custom, law, and narrative, and it plays a central role in the formation of private and public life alike. This course examines romantic love in U.S. fiction from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth-first centuries. Our primary texts will cross genres as well as centuries as we examine romance, realism, modernism, post-modernism, and documentary. In addition, we’ll read archival and scholarly non-fiction. We’ll interpret fiction in light of historical changes in conceptions of love, based in factors including shifting economic conditions and changing conceptions of marriage, citizenship, queer sexualities, and modern psychology. We’ll discern the connections between romantic love and ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and empire. Students will be graded on two short papers, class participation, a 10-12-page final paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 4561-001 - Literature and Trauma

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 056)
Mrinalini Chakravorty

How is trauma narrated?  Does literature give wounds a voice that bears witness to injury?  Can imaginative works convey intense personal and collective suffering?  Or is language itself an impediment to the expression of hurt?  Is our understanding of pain cultural?  How do we make the torment of another legible?  How does storytelling distinguish intimate traumas (such as accidents or rape) from vast social damage (war, colonialism)?  This course grapples with such questions.  

Our study of trauma’s relation to literature will consider psychoanalytic ideas of historical and personal trauma reflected in literary works of the modern period.  Our approach will be interdisciplinary, considering how powerful concepts in the hermeneutic of psychoanalysis (repression; repetition compulsion; abjection; misrecognition; lack; affect etc.) have been generated by literary works, as well as challenged and absorbed into them.  Insofar as traumatic experience produces a subjective breach, we will think about how certain forms and styles of literature are more (or less) suited to reflect the rupture.   We will read formative texts of psychoanalysis (Freud; Lacan; Kristeva; Foucault and others) and trauma theory (Caruth; Silverman; Fanon; Scarry).  Aside from Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight, our survey will mainly focus on contemporary global novels that depict trauma such as those by Teju Cole, Alison Bechdel, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang among others.

ENGL 4580-001 - Feminist Theory

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 068)
Susan Fraiman

An introduction to US feminist criticism and theory. This course pairs novels and other works by women with critical and theoretical essays. Our goal is to encounter and contrast diverse feminist approaches to literary and cultural texts. The syllabus is also informed by queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. I expect to explore such themes as mobility and migration, mother-daughter relations, the “male gaze,” incarceration/escape, female masculinity, and conflicts/commonalities among women. Beginning with the emergence of feminist literary theory in the mid-1970s, we will consider the stages of its development, its influence on canon formation, and the way gender intersects with other axes of identity (race, sexuality, disability, class, etc.). Possible primary texts (still tentative) include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), The Well of Loneliness (1928), My Year of Meats (1998), a contemporary film, graphic narrative, and popular romance. Probable theorists include Laura Mulvey, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Chandra Mohanty, Judith Butler, and Jack Halberstam, among many others.  Students should be prepared for some challenging materials and heavy reading load. Aimed at third- and fourth-years; exceptions may be made, with the permission of instructor, for those with strong backgrounds in theory and/or gender studies. 5-page paper, 10-page paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 4998-001 - Distinguished Majors Program 

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (BRN 332)
Caroline Rody

Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee.

*ENGL 5100-001 - Introduction to Old English

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 183)
Stephen Hopkins

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of early Medieval England (also called Anglo-Saxon England, roughly 500-1100 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old English language. Drawing upon Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old English grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating short bits of prose and poetry as supplied in the textbook and on the accompanying website. The course will also include basic readings from Magennis to orient us towards Old English genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field, with an emphasis on the history of the book and writing technologies. By the end, we will grapple with excerpts from Beowulf, gaining familiarity with Old English poetic diction, accentual-alliterative poetic form, style, syntax, and the basics of paleography by accessing Old English manuscripts via Parker Library on the Web. 

ENGL 5559-001 - Transforming Desire: Medieval and Renaissance Erotic Poetics

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 203)
Clare Kinney

This seminar will focus upon lyric, narrative and dramatic works from the medieval and Renaissance periods which explore the striking metamorphoses and the various (and on occasion very queer) trajectories of earthly—and not so earthly--love. We'll be examining the ways in which desire is represented as transforming the identity and consciousness of the lover; we will also be examining (and attempting to historicize) strategies employed by our authors to variously transform, redefine, enlarge and contain the erotic impulse. We'll start with some selections from the Metamorphoses of Ovid; we will finish with two of Shakespeare’s most striking reinventions of love. Along the way we’ll be looking at the gendering of erotic representation and erotic speech, the intermittent entanglement of secular and sacred love, the role of genre in refiguring eros, and some intersections between the discourses of sexuality and the discourses of power.

Tentative reading list: selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses; the Lais (short romances) of Marie de France; Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; sonnets by Petrarch, Philip Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth; Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia; Shakespeare's As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. (All non-English works will be read in translation.) And occasional critical/theoretical readings. Requirements: regular attendance, lively participation in discussion, a series of reflective e-mail responses to our readings, a short paper (6-7 pages); a long term paper (14+ pages).

ENGL 5559-002 - The Queer Novel

TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 233)
Mrinalini Chakravorty

What is “queer” about the novel? Our course will grapple with this question by examining the rich legacy of non-normative sexual expressions and orientations in the literary arts. The aim of the course is—

  1. To understand what constitutes ‘queer literature’ as a meaningful genre or archive. Is the queer novel unique in its expressivity, in terms of style and content? Does the queer novel have its own canon? Should this canon be more open to revision than others given the constant evolutions in how we understand gender?
  2. To see how novels engage political ideas of sexuality germane to thinking about queerness, such as of ‘homophobia,’ the ‘closet,’ 'inversion’ ‘gender bending,’ ‘cis-acting,’ ‘coming out,’ ‘failure,’ ‘deviance,’ ‘camp,’ ‘cruising,’ ‘queer futurity,’ ‘queer feeling,’ ‘homonationalism,’ ‘disidentification,’ ‘performativity,’ ‘flamboyance,’ etc.
  3. To confront radical questions about subjectivity and embodiment that the analytic of sexuality enables us to ask about the worlds we inhabit and the texts that represent these worlds.

To accomplish these goals, we will read sweepingly across the whole breadth of the queer canon. We will begin with early classics of queer literature and then shift our attention to more contemporary transnational contexts concerned with representing queerness as a part of, and not apart from, affiliations of race, culture, religion, geography, class etc. Our reading includes works by Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ali Smith, Michael Cunningham, Shyam Selvadurai, Alison Bechdel, Saleem Haddad, and Akwaeki Emezi among

others. In other words, we will think of the important ways that the evolution of the queer novel involves a perpetual re-queering of the genre itself by the insistent heterogeneity of racial, transnational, and transgender contexts. While most of the novels we read will come from the Anglophone tradition, some will be translated from other languages.

This course will require that students be prepared to engage directly and fearlessly with the field of queer theory. Queer theory will inform how we contextualize the subcultures of queerness (from Bloomsbury or Stonewall to Queer-of-Color activisms), as well as understand why notions of reproductive normality, eroticism, pleasure, kinship, and indeed queer identity have been transformed in recent literary and aesthetic works. Ultimately, we will ask how queer aesthetic works speak to, revise, and must be re-evaluated given the shifting dynamics of queer thought. Here our reading includes, among others, work by Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz. Finally, a selection of salient films, poems, and short stories will allow us to see useful connections between the aesthetic and political charge—often one of transgression—that the sign of the “queer” carries.

This course is a graduate level course but it can also be taken to satisfy the Modern and Global Studies seminar requirement for undergraduates in that concentration.

ENGL 5559-003 - Contemporary Jewish Fiction

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 233)
Caroline Rody

This course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students will explore a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling, in the emotionally rich territory where Jewish people have lived a spirited, talkative, politically engaged, book-obsessed modernity in the face of violence and destruction. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as short videos clips and a film, surveying a diverse array of modern Jewish literary and popular cultural production. About the first third of the course examines mid-twentieth century Jewish American writers, some from the immigrant New York milieu like Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then heirs to Yiddish culture with bold American aspirations, such as, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Delmore Schwartz, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. For the rest of the term we will read fiction from the booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, Joshua Cohen, Christophe Boltanski, David Bezmozgis, and Etgar Keret.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to traditional and sacred Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to humor as a social practice and imaginative force; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, multiple short reading responses, a short paper, and a longer paper with a creative, Talmud-inspired option: a “scroll” of interlaced interpretation.

ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 042)
Lisa Woolfork

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.

ENGL 5805-001 - What is Postcolonial Critique?

MW 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 233)
Nasrin Olla

What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C. L. R. James. The final project invites students to reflect upon the themes of revolutionary thinking, the global and universal, and questions of ethics.

ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects

MW 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 233)
David Vander Meulen

We know the past chiefly through artifacts that survive, and books are among the most common of these objects. Besides conveying a text, each book also contains evidence of the circumstances of its manufacture.  In considering what questions to ask of these mute objects, this course might be considered the "archaeology of printing"—that is, the identification, description, and interpretation of printed artifacts surviving from the past five centuries, as well as exploration of the critical theory that lies behind such an approach to texts. With attention to production processes, including the operation of the hand press, it will investigate ways of analyzing elements such as paper, typography, illustrations, binding, and organization of the constituent sections of a book.  The course will explore how a text is inevitably affected by the material conditions of its production and how an understanding of the physical processes by which it was formed can aid historical research in a variety of disciplines, not only those that treat verbal texts but also those that deal with printed music and works of visual art.  The class will draw on the holdings of the University Library's Special Collections Department, as well as on its Hinman Collator (an early version of the one at the CIA).  Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

ENGL 5900-001 - Counterpoint Seminar

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 183)
Cristina Griffin

The “Counterpoint Seminar” is a hands-on, practical seminar designed to help you think like a teacher. In this course we juxtapose two sometimes dissonant fields of study: literary studies and pedagogy. During the semester you will consider how to combine your skills developed in previous literature classes with your emerging knowledge about pedagogy. I recognize that seminar members come to this course with different levels of familiarity with literary theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, and antiracist literature instruction. Our seminar will enable each member to increase fluency with these critical teaching skills. We will read literary texts that are frequently taught in the high school English classroom and practice applying pedagogical strategies that reflect best practices in English education. We will also read selections from pedagogical and theoretical texts to improve your ability to help students of different reading levels access rich, difficult texts and achieve depth and complexity in their textual interpretations. There will be time in this course to deepen your knowledge and reflect on your assumptions about education and yourself as an educator.

Writing and Rhetoric

ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence (10 sections)

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Work
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 066)
Claire A Chantell
 
002 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Work
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 042)
Claire Chantell
 
003 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
004 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
005 -- Writing about Identities - Literacy Narratives
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
006 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Popular Culture
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 066)
David Coyoca
 
007 -- Writing about Identities - Literacy Narratives
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
008 -- Writing about Culture/Society - The Art of Protest
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 042)
Amber McBride
 
009 -- Writing about Identities - Identity Politics
MWF 02:00PM-02:50PM (CAB 066)
Rhiannon Goad
 
010 -- Writing about Identities - Identity Politics
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (CAB 056)
Rhiannon Goad

ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry (70+ sections)

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
003 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Definitions and Boundaries
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Lucas Martínez
 
005 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
006 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing Material: A Scientific Approach to Artful Communication
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 330)
Heidi Nobles
 
007 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Bodies
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 334)
Rynx Schulz
 
008 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 064)
TBA
 
009 -- Writing about Identities
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 044)
Devin Donovan
 
010 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Citizen Science
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 332)
Cory Shaman
 
011 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
012 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (CAB 594)
Jon D'Errico
 
014 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Humor as Culture
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 312)
Regan Schadl
 
015 -- TBA
MWF 03:30PM-04:20PM (CAB 042)
TBA
 
016 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens & Identity
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 334)
Charity Fowler
 
017 -- Writing about Identities
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
Devin Donovan
 
018 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
019 -- Writing about Culture/Society - The Rhetoric of Empathy
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
Tochi Eze
 
020 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Technology & Social Change
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 330)
Eric Rawson
 
022 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 312)
Davy Tran
 
024 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
026 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Beyond Doom
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Sophia Zaklikowski
 
027 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Beyond Doom
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
Sophia Zaklikowski
 
028 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Rewriting UVA: Race, Sex, and Public History
TR 05:00PM-6:15PM (CAB 211)
John Modica
 
029 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Mental Health
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Abigail Puckett
 
031 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Landscape
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 332)
Shalmi Barman
 
032 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Language, Policy, and Politics
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 312)
Kate Natishan
 
033 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Folk Culture, Identity and Society
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 312)
Aindrila Choudhury
 
034 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 310)
Davy Tran
 
035 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (CAB 594)
Jon D'Errico
 
036 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 330)
Dana Little
 
037 -- Writing about the Arts - Writing about/as Adaptation
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 312)
Sam Pfander
 
038 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
039 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 068)
TBA
 
040 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens & Identity
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 334)
Charity Fowler
 
042 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Into Ethics
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 330)
Derek Cavens
 
043 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 594)
Sethunya Gall
 
044 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
045 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Technology & Social Change
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 310)
Eric Rawson
 
046 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 334)
Dana Little
 
047 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Money
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (PV8 108)
Katherine Cart 

050 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 330)
Sethunya Gall
 
051 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 310)
Keith Driver
 
052 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Definitions and Boundaries
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 330)
Lucas Martínez
 
053 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
054 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Language, Policy, and Politics
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 312)
Kate Natishan
 
056 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
057 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (WIL 244)
TBA
 
058 -- Writing about the Arts - Writing about Disney
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 330)
Jared Willden
 
059 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing Into Ethics
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 334)
Derek Cavens
 
060 -- Writing about Culture/Society - The Rhetorics of Apocalypse
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
Coby-Dillon English
 
061 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Citizen Science
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
062 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 334)
Keith Driver
 
063 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
064 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Money
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 332)
Katherine Cart
 
066 -- Writing about the Arts - Writing about Horror
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 312)
Olivia Barrett
 
067 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Slowing Down
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 203)
Christian Carlson
 
068 -- Writing about Identities - Poetic Fragments: Pushing the Boundary of Genre
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 107)
Kaitlyn Airy
 
070 -- TBA
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
071 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Film
MW 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 312)
Tanner Eckstein
 
072 -- Writing about Culture/Society - The Personal Essay
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 203)
Xiwen Wang
 
073 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Imagining Academia
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 332)
Kathryn Webb-Destefano
 
074 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Quiet Soundings: Rhetorics of Curiosity
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 036)
Makshya Tolbert
 
075 -- Writing about the Arts - Writing about Sound
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 332)
Kathryn Holmstrom
 
076 -- Writing about the Arts - Encountering the Self
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 107)
Nial Buford
 
077 -- Writing about Identities - Writing about Change
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Jack Bradford
 
078 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Queering the Narrative
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 312)
Reese Arbini
 
080 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing about Writing
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
Alex Buckley
 
081 -- Writing about Digital Media - Writing About Video Games
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 312)
Caroline Ford
 
082 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Public Memory
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (CAB 064)
Sarah Richardson
 
083 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
084 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
085 -- Writing about the Arts - Encountering the Self
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 310)
Nial Buford
 
086 -- Writing about the Arts - Writing about Sound
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 310)
Kathryn Holmstrom
 
087 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
088 -- Writing about the Arts - Public Memory
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (CAB 111)
Sarah Richardson
 
089 -- Writing about Culture/Society - The Archive and Me: Writing Through the Archive
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
Lauren Parker
 
090 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Love
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
Allison Gish

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (2 sections)

001 -- TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 334) - Writing about Housing Equity
Kate Stephenson

Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at the UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, or the PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like food insecurity, food production, hunger stereotypes, privilege, urban gardening, and community engagement.  

Community engagement courses depend on creating pathways between different kinds of knowledge that enable us to learn with our minds, hearts, and bodies. The classroom is not a place where we find the answer; instead, it is a space for inquiry where process rather than product prevails. We will explore first-hand the ways in which academic conversations—and civic conversations—emphasize questions rather than answers. We will redefine knowledge—where it originates, who creates it, and how it circulates—by seeing the community outside the classroom as a site of knowledge production. 

002 -- TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 330) - Writing about Food Justice
Kate Stephenson

Why do we live where we do? How does housing impact our access to education, food, medical care, and other resources? What can the local built environment tell us about access to housing? Why are some people homeless? What is affordable housing and why is there so little of it? By working at The Haven and/or The Eviction Helpline as well as using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like homelessness, affordable housing, privilege, food insecurity, the eviction crisis, systems of power, and community engagement.  

Community engagement courses depend on creating pathways between different kinds of knowledge that enable us to learn with our minds, hearts, and bodies. The classroom is not a place where we find the answer; instead, it is a space for inquiry where process rather than product prevails. We will explore first-hand the ways in which academic conversations—and civic conversations—emphasize questions rather than answers. We will redefine knowledge—where it originates, who creates it, and how it circulates—by seeing the community outside the classroom as a site of knowledge production. 

ENWR 1530 - Writing About the Imagination

MW 01:00PM-01:50PM (MON 130)
Kenny Fountain
 
Discussion Sections: F 9:00AM, 10:00AM, 11:00AM, 12:00PM

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (5 sections)

001 -- Writing about Identities
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (AST 265)
Tamika Carey
 
002 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 332)
Jon D'Errico
 
003 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (CAB 056)
Devin Donovan
 
004 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
Charity Fowler
 
06 -- Writing about Science & Technology
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (CAB 364)
Eric Rawson

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (6 sections)

003 -- Writing Democratic Rights
T 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 332)
Stephen Parks

004 -- Writing Human Rights
M 06:00PM-08:30PM (KER 317)
Stephen Parks

007 -- Writing and Games
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 312)
Kate Natishan

07 -- Rhetoric of Drugs
MWF 05:00PM-05:50PM (KER 317)
Rhiannon Goad

009 -- Rhetorics of Personhood: Legality and Ethics  
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 334)
Sarah Richardson

010 -- Writing in a Global World: Issues of Global Media
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (KER 317)
Dana Little

011 -- Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 330)
Sethunya Gall

ENWR 2610 - Writing with Style

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
Keith Driver

ENWR 2640 - Writing as Technology

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (FHL 215)
Patricia Sullivan

This course explores historical, theoretical, and practical conceptions of writing as technology. We will study various writing systems, the relation of writing to speaking and visual media, and the development of writing technologies (manuscript, printing presses, typewriters, hypertext, text messaging, and artificial intelligence). Students will produce written academic and personal essays, but will also experiment with multimedia electronic texts, such as web sites, digital essays/stories, and AI generated texts

ENWR 2700 - News Writing

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (FHL 206)
Kate Sweeney

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing & Rhetoric

001 -- Book Editing and Publishing
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (CAB 332)
Heidi Nobles

002 -- Studies in Cultural Rhetorics
M 06:00PM-08:30PM (CAB 332)
Tamika Carey

ENWR 3620 - Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
Kate Kostelnik

In this course, we'll look at a variety of texts from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures. Topics will include contrastive rhetorics, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers. A service learning component will require students to volunteer weekly in the community.

ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 064)
Steph Ceraso

In this collaborative, project-based course, students will learn to script, design, edit, and produce an original podcast series. In addition to reading about and practicing professional audio storytelling techniques (e.g. interviewing, writing for the ear, sound design), each student will get to work with a team to produce an episode for the podcast series. No experience with digital audio editing is necessary. Beginners welcome!

ENWR 3660 - Travel Writing

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 203)
Kate Stephenson

Why is everyone suddenly going to Portugal? Why do we travel? What is the difference between a traveler and a tourist?  Using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore the world of travel writing.  Since we all write best about ideas we are passionate about, we will work together to generate engaging questions about the role of travel in our culture, as well as about specific books and essays. We will also investigate the world of tourism and consider the many ethical issues that arise in the exploration of our modern world. Essays will focus on students' own travel experiences

ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
Cory Shaman

ENWR 3900 - Career Based Writing and Rhetoric

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
John T. Casteen IV

Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design.