ENCW 5310 - 001: Advanced Poetry Writing II - Research for Poets

Sumita Chakraborty

The muses aren’t coming to save us, so we have to inspire ourselves. This course is a cross between a workshop and a craft or methodology class, and it is designed to help each participant cultivate a research practice to aid their creative work. Research can be an indispensable poetic skill for any subject matter from the deeply personal to the most conceptual; it’s often one of the surest-fire ways to encounter something that is unexpected or unlock a new avenue of imagination. It can help with something as small as enriching a metaphor or something as big as sparking an entire project. In addition to offering an opportunity to develop practical skills in ways that are organic to your writing practice, to learn how to use library and archival resources to your advantage, and to acquire habits around inquiry that stimulate your work, this course will serve as an opportunity to develop a substantial sequence of work, with the help of guided prompts, that enriches and complicates your existing poetry and your ongoing artistic or intellectual obsessions. Undergraduates and graduate students alike can expect to generate work that would well serve a capstone, thesis, or book manuscript, or to encounter a new area of interest heretofore unknown to you. Undergraduates, please do not be wary of “advanced”: the prerequisite is any 2000-level course. Graduate students, please do not fear redundancy: this course is designed to meet each participant where they are at in terms of what they yet need or wish to learn or discover. 

ENCW 5610 - 001: Advanced Fiction Writing II - Grimm Variations

Jesse Ball

The class is divided into two groups. Each week one group of students will compose variations on a particular folk tale chosen from BROTHERS GRIMM. The variations may be in any genre. 

ENCW 7310 - 001: MFA Poetry Workshop - poetrees & treasons:  genealogies | generation

Lisa Spaar

This is an advanced poetry workshop open to first- and second-year poetry students in the Master of Fine Arts Program of the Department of English.  In the first half of the semester, students will each present to the class a suite of their poems in constellation (new work, old work, problematic work), two poets per class, allowing time for deep questions and discussion.  The poets presenting in a given week will also preface discussion of their constellations by offering a context for their constellation:  three aesthetic, formal, or flood subject “ancestors” or antecedents for the poems under consideration: exemplary poems/poets or excerpts from other texts, but also non-literary influences: clips from film, details/images/texts from science or technology, music, cuisine, family history, particular geographies, manga, dance, hagiography, Buddhism, etc.  The second half of the semester will be intensely generative, with poets turning in work every other week, and peers introducing and leading discussion of the week’s poems. The idea is to think beyond the beads-on-a-string, linear structure of some typical workshops and to invite writers to think “across & beyond the poem” about the formal, thematic, and other obsessions, ticks, gestures, ruses, and preoccupations of their work in constellation.  What happens when your poems cluster?  Is a given poem domesticated?  Made wilder?  Brought into prismatic stereoscopy?  Perhaps most important, in addition to illuminating their own work, poets will illuminate and learn from other poets about their own work, poetics, praxis, and intention.

ENCW 7610 - 001: MFA Fiction Workshop

Jane Alison

ENGL 5101 - 001: "Beowulf and Its Monstrous Manuscript"

Stephen Hopkins

In this course, we will read about half of Beowulf in Old English, alongside samples from the other texts found in the same manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A XV. These other texts include Judith, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Wonders of the East, and the Life of St. Christopher (a dog-headed saint!). Alongside extensive translation work, we will also study the manuscript itself and the various arguments about its date and the date(s) of the texts it contains.

ENGL 5500 - 001: Blake and Yeats

Mark Edmundson

A close and careful reading of 2 visionary poets, with particular attention to Blake's influence on Yeats.

ENGL 5500 - 002: Transforming Desire: Medieval and Renaissance Erotic Poetics

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 and language 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; lyrics 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 discussion board postings, a short paper (6-7 pages); a long term paper (14 pages).

ENGL 5530 - 001: Literature of British Abolition

Michael Suarez

How did Great Britain come to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and what roles did literature play in enlightening readers to the barbarities of this human traffic? Reading works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and a variety of poems, both canonical and from relatively unknown voices, we will attempt to immerse ourselves in the literature of British abolition. Juxtaposing such writings with visual materials (viz., the slave ship Brooks), abolitionist political pamphlets, and letters in the C18 public press will give greater depth to our discussions. Finally, we will read Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

ENGL 5559 - 001: American Wild

Stephen Cushman

With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and elsewhere? Is weather the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, and violent storms? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?

This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on European colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we will move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, foremost among them Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth century, we’ll add important voices, such as Aldo Leopold’s and Rachel Carson’s, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. We’ll complete our tour in the twenty-first century by joining a conversation with Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan.

ENGL 5560 - 001: Woolf, Eliot and the Culture of Modernism

Michael Levenson

A seminar on the fiction of Virginia Woolf, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the wider cultural context of Modernism (in painting, film, and philosophy).  Alongside the close reading of signature literary works, we address the conditions of intellectual modernity and political-technological modernization. The responsibility of students includes weekly comments, an oral report and a final essay.

ENGL 5580 - 001: Introduction to Textual Criticism & Scholarly Editing

David Vander Meulen

This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study:

● If a work exists in multiple forms and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"?
● How are such judgments made and standards determined?
● How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted?
● If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it?
● How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom?

● What difference does this all make?

The course will deal with such concerns and will include:

● A short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts.
● Study of the transmission of texts in different periods.
● Consideration of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials.

The course will build to the preparation of a scholarly edition by each student. The class on books as physical objects, ENGL 5810, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

*This course satisfies the Graduate English requirement for the history of criticism or literary theory.*

ENGL 5800 - 001: History of Literary Criticism

Walter Jost

Much if not all of what currently goes under the name of “cultural studies” and “critical theory,” not to mention concepts like genre, period, author, literature, imagination, poetry and so on, cannot go far without feeling the tug of the extensive root system in which they are grounded in the “history of literary criticism” (terms whose meanings are themselves multivalent and historical). One cannot study everything at once, to be sure; but judicious selection among the major critical texts of our changing traditions can serve both to make one feel at home in his or her culture, and to help de-mystify (as well as organize) large swatches of contemporary literary thinking. Along with a range of poems, we read a variety of short primary works, from a Platonic dialogue and Aristotle’s Poetics to Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” to Pater, Eliot, Greenblatt and Cavell; and selections from an extremely useful secondary volume, M. A. R. Habib’s A History of Literary Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, paperback). Our reading load is manageable, though it requires hard thinking; our reading list is exciting and varied; and our class discussions about our readings and how they might be applied take primary place in the design of the class. We will write papers, present research, gather examples, and learn to "go on" from others in new ways.

ENGL 8527 - 001: Shakespeare's History Plays

Katharine Maus

ENGL 8540 - 001: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Novel Theory

Victoria Baena

This course is an introduction to classic and contemporary theories of the novel through the lens of nineteenth-century fiction. As we make our way through five novels that have prompted a vast range of critical responses -  Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, Nana, and Middlemarch - we pair these with notable  twentieth- and twentieth-century critics who have sought to understand how narrative fiction works. What if anything, defines “the” novel as a genre? What kinds of worlds can it construct or imagine? To what extent can these worlds generate (or, conversely, prove resistant to) critiques of our own? Throughout, the course will focus on the novel as a mode of thinking in its own right. We’ll analyze each literary text on its own terms while also opening up a dialogue between prose fiction and its theories. Critics may include Lukács, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Schor, Armstrong, Gilbert and Gubar, Said, Jameson, Mazzoni, Bourdieu, Wynter, Barthes, Moretti, Brooks.

ENGL 8559 - 001: Reading AI

Matthew Kirschenbaum

This course starts from the premise that whatever it may mean technologically “artificial intelligence” is also a discursive formulation, which is to say an active signifier in the cultural imagination. To begin working towards some understandings of that signifier we will undertake readings of "AI" in multiple registers: current critical writing that allows us to consider not only how today’s generative AI technology works but what work—political, social, aesthetic—we are calling upon it to do; representations of AI in literary fiction, from the 18th century to the present; and writing actually written by AI in the form of creative and experimental texts whose provenance and agency is indeterminate. While the focus of the course will be critical and theoretical (with no technical background required or assumed) we will also engage in some hands-on experimentation of our own. And while pedagogy will not be our focus, the course will offer a conceptual grounding for those who plan to teach in a world where AI is prevalent. Requirements will include leading discussion, a short reflective paper, and a longer semester project which could be either critical or creative. 

ENGL 8559 - 002: Fashioning the Nation

Kelly Fleming

From its talking coins, tortuous chocolate pots, and trials of hoopskirts to its accounts of “the Calico Craze,” the boycott of sugar, and insurrections in the name of cockades, British and Irish literature between 1660 and 1832 records not only the invention of the modern fashion system and the rise of shopping as we know it but also the institutionalization of mercantile capitalism, colonialism, and liberalism through its attention to material culture. As the “consumer revolution” resulted in tariffs, technological developments, and debates about the positive and negative effects of luxurious commodities, property transformed from a simple legal concept to a complex political and philosophical ideology that justified, on the one hand, imperial expansion and slavery, and on the other, riots and revolution.  

With this history in mind, this course will explore how material culture fashioned the British nation. It will offer an interdisciplinary overview of the different methodological approaches to analyzing material culture, including learning to identify the basic components of men’s and women’s dress. As we examine the things themselves and their significance in works of art, economics, literature, law, and philosophy over the course of the semester, we will think through the following questions. How did people understand their things as things? How did things inform their understanding of persons?  How did things engineer our ideas of gender, race, class, and ability? How did things influence literature’s form and content? How did small things result in big political change? And finally, have you ever felt personally victimized by a fabric? 

ENGL 8559 - 003: Approaches to Culture in its Many Forms

Sandhya Shukla

This graduate seminar critically considers culture as the dream life of society and a space of struggle.  Works to be discussed may include those by: Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lauren Berlant, Caroline Levine, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams.  In engaging interdisciplinary debates about reading and interpretation across fields like literary studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy, students will be encouraged to develop their own practices of relating to texts, events, phenomena and performance in original research and writing projects.  

ENGL 8560 - 001: Narrating the Caribbean

Njelle Hamilton

In this seminar we will trace the key concerns and texts that have shaped postcolonial Caribbean literary aesthetics, through reading a range of historical documents from Columbus to Lady Nugent; literary manifestos from Brathwaite to Glissant; and seminal contemporary Caribbean poetry, drama, and fiction by Maryse Condé, NourbeSe Philip, Marlon James, Nalo Hopkinson, and Derek Walcott, among others. Topics include: interrogating the canon; narrating an often traumatic history; the politics of language; narrative form (magical realism, sci-fi, créolité); postcolonial, anti-colonial, and postmodern narration; the place of music, orality, and folk forms in literary narration; and depicting the hybrid and shifting identities that define the region.

ENGL 8580 - 001: Introduction to Critical Theory

Nasrin Olla

This course introduces students to a broad range of 20th- and 21st-century theoretical paradigms that have reshaped the ways we think about culture, power, and identity. Topics include structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonial thought, African diasporic thought, feminist thought, and gender and queer theory. Readings will feature works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. This course will appeal to students interested in continental philosophy, traditions of critique, feminist thought, and postcolonial worlds.

ENGL 8596 - 001: Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics

Brian Teare

“How can we listen across species,” asks Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “across extinction, across harm?” How can the practice of poetry extend our attention, aid us in listening and speaking to, touching, and moving in ethical relation to an imperiled world? Much contemporary ecofeminist poetry focuses on fostering ethical relations to the more-than-human, and it often does so by situating these relationships in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch sometimes reframed by ecocritics as the Plantationocene or the Colonialocene. Ecofeminist poets often makes visible how chattel slavery, imperialism, industrialization, and settler colonialism take advantage of and thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species, ecosystems, humans, and human systems. Thus this interdisciplinary course will interweave brief readings from ecofeminist theory, ecopoetics, and Black and indigenous environmental theories with books of contemporary ecofeminist poetry. This curriculum will encourage each of us to see what happens when we “rethink and re-feel,” writes Gumbs, our own “relations, possibilities, and practices” in conversation with the more-than-human world. Assignments will range from the creative to the critical, with an emphasis on process-led ecofeminist research that culminates in a final project.

ENGL 8598 - 001: Potential Literature

Micheline Marcom

We will read Rabelais, Borges, Cervantes, Calvino, Perec, and other writers of the OuLiPo: Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle as we explore potentiality and constraint in literature.

ENGL 8900 - 001: Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Kenny Fountain

This course prepares graduate students in English for the teaching they will do here at UVA, specifically first-year writing and other writing-enhanced courses. Covers topics such as classroom management, leading discussion, writing assignment design, incorporating writing instruction, responding to student writing.

ENGL 8900 - 002: Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Devin Donovan

This course prepares graduate students in English for the teaching they will do here at UVA, specifically first-year writing and other writing-enhanced courses. Covers topics such as classroom management, leading discussion, writing assignment design, incorporating writing instruction, responding to student writing.

ENGL 9530 - 001: The Prepostmodern Novel

Brad Pasanek

In this course we move back and forth between eighteenth-century and more contemporary literatures in order to gauge how texts are written and rewritten, one against another. Fiction and meta-fiction are two red threads; our reading, a braid or knot. We'll start by sampling theoretical accounts of modernity, pre and post: say, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno, Bruno Latour, and Fredric Jameson. Cervantes’ rewritings (by means of Tobias Smollett’s translation) and later quixotisms follow. Complications ensue as we layer on readings and consider reenactment: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Michael Winterbottom’s Shandean adaptation of the aforementioned, and the minute particulars of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. We’ll read Robinson and Foe and Concrete Island. Another constellation assembles Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and those latter-day dunces, Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith. We’ll ask, was ist Aufklärung? And whither parody? We’ll ask also, as recent critics have, why literary periods mattered and if now is the time to militate against periodization.