ENCW 7310 - MFA Poetry Workshop

Sumita Chakraborty
M 2:00-4:30

In lieu of a traditional course description, I’d like to tell you a brief story. My first published poem is a poem I consider very unsuccessful. I’ve revised it for years post- (and pre-!) publication; it’s never quite right. It is no longer a poem that I try to “perfect.” Instead, it’s become a room in which I go to think and experiment. When I find myself itching to open it again, that means that I want to try out something I do not yet understand or yet know how to do. Very often, particularly as we take steps to professionalize in a discipline or an art, our lives become pitched toward the dream of success: to perfect the poem; to perfect the thesis; to perfect the manuscript; to “perfect,” most insidiously of them all, ourselves. We won’t be able to undo this entirely: after all, this is a poetry workshop in an MFA program, which means that we’re gathering together in an academic context to work on our craft. But through our conversations, readings, and exercises, this workshop will foreground how to embrace the magic of the mistake—the pratfall, the banana peel under the heel, the wrong turn, the swing and a miss—as a cherished companion in your regular writing practice rather than shying away from it as something to be shunned or renounced. Your primary responsibilities will be to write poems, share them with one another, and give each other feedback.

ENCW 7610 - MFA Fiction Workshop

Kevin Moffett
M 2:00-4:30

ENGL 5100-1 -- Introduction to Old English

Stephen Hopkins
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

ENGL 5500-1 -- Stories of Teaching

James Seitz
MoWe 5:00pm - 6:15pm

This course will examine a variety of ways in which the classroom has been represented through narrative—sometimes by teachers and sometimes by students—in memoir, fiction, scholarship, and film. We’ll work on sharpening both our critical resistance to the shortcomings of these narratives and our critical appreciation of their accomplishments. All narratives of teaching or learning are inevitably partial: nobody can say it all, even when representing a single class, much less when describing what happened during the course of a semester or year. Yet writers do try to portray their experience as a teacher or student over long as well as brief periods of time, and we can learn from their struggle to do so convincingly.

ENGL 5510-1 -- Arthurian Romances

Elizabeth Fowler
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

A study of Arthurian romances from the earliest to now, with special emphasis on the medieval. Some attention to theories of genre, topoi, narrativity, kingship, feminist politics, and the phenomenon of the sequel. Quizzes, tracking projects, and creative translations.

ENGL 5559-1 --  Early Moderns & Throwbacks: Birth-Pangs of Modernity

James Kinney
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This course will examine the ways in which cultural precursors ancient and medieval can both stall and inspire Renaissance innovation. To make sense of this perplexed cultural legacy we will also explore how Renaissance innovators revise and select from traditional models, especially religious and mythic models. Old and New World traditions confronted complete our survey of how moderns emerge from antiquity.

ENGL 5560-1 -- Contemporary Poetry

Jahan Ramazani
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

In this seminar, we will read and discuss some of the most influential poetry of the second half of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first century, mostly by American writers from various backgrounds. To hone our attention to poetics, we will focus on several specific genres and forms of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, persona poems, and poems about the visual arts. How do contemporary poets repurpose, transform, and revitalize poetic traditions? What is the value of poetry for writers of diverse ethnicities, races, nations, movements, social classes, and genders? What is distinctive about poetry as a means for addressing preoccupations such as the self, the environment, race, art, nationality, gender, sexuality, grief, violence, and historical memory?

ENGL 5560-2 -- James Joyce's Ulysses

Victor Luftig
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

For first-time readers of Joyce's _Ulysses_: we will be attentive not just to Joyce's novel but also to the ancillary materials that are available for illuminating it.  The first paper will be about one of those resources and the second about possible contemporary applications of the book.

ENGL 5580-2 -- The Conflict of Interpretation in Literature, Law, and Religion

Walter Jost
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Ours is an age of communication, and one of its hallmarks is the “conflict of interpretations” among schools of criticism, theory, and cultural study. This course requires no specialized background in these matters, for in fact we all know how to talk, read, interpret, and argue. The question is, how well? with how much control and discipline? how do we develop our abilities? The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote that “Where, indeed, but to rhetoric should the theoretical examination of interpretation turn? Rhetoric from oldest tradition has been the only advocate of a claim to truth that defends the probable, the eikos (versimile), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason, against the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and tested.” Together we will develop a basic understanding of the arts of discourse called “hermeneutics” and “rhetoric,” through close reading and discussions of selected scholarly texts (chiefly essays and book chapters), testing our learning against literary, legal, and religious works (e.g., G. K. Chesterton’s allegorical The Man Who Was Thursday, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, cases in common law, and Biblical parables, among others).

ENGL 5700-1 -- Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

ENGL 5810-1 -- Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen
MoWe 9:30am - 10:45am

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

ENGL 5900-1 -- Literature Pedagogy Seminar

Cristina Griffin
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

“Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature”

This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote inclusive excellence through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.

This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this variety of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms.

ENGL 8380 -- Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Cynthia Wall
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Other than that they are (mostly) long to very long prose fiction narratives, eighteenth-century

British novels have little in common, formally speaking. From the dreamlike (or nightmarish)

landscape that is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, through Haywood’s shrewd amatory fiction, Defoe’s circling first-person narratives, the suffocating epistolarity of Richardson (that’s a compliment, btw), the self-reflexive irony of Fielding, the agonies of sensibility (not to mention punctuation) in Radcliffe, the psychological labyrinths of gothic, and the innovative interiorities of Austen, each new instance defines and patterns itself anew, and none bears much similarity to nineteenth-century descendants. We will look at a variety of historical and cultural contexts, such as emerging genres; changes in perceptions of space, time, things, narrative, typography; and literary criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.

ENGL 8540 -- US Literature and the Politics of Justice

Victoria Olwell
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

ENGL 8560 -- Literature in the Modern Period: Comparative Approaches to Long Modernisms

Joshua Miller
Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Both modernist studies and American studies staked claims to having been made “new” in recent decades, thus participating in the discourse of exceptionality that has led these domains of thought and cultural production to produce both fascinating and, at times, troubling results. The inclusionary expansions of “New Modernisms” and the “New American Studies” fall under several rubrics: comparative studies, global/planetary cultures, new & mixed media, multiethnic literatures, and long modernisms, among others.

We’ll examine key trends shaping multiethnic modernist fiction in a broad historical context, starting with emergent U.S. imperial and racialist modernity, from 1890s views of U.S. immigration and territorial expansion to 1930s and 40s depictions of migration and racialized labor. Then we’ll pursue similar aspects of late-20th and early-21st narrative and transmedia experiments with the novel form to ask if modernisms endure not only in the postmodern period, but also in contemporary Information Age cultures.

We won’t be able to cover comprehensively the full range of methodologies and theoretical formulations that have emerged as exciting directions for modernist studies, so the variety of our readings will reflect the generative (and maddening) instability of this field. The goal of this course is not to develop a particular conception of either modernism or comparativism, but to work collaboratively to formulate original and compelling analytic questions and interpretive strategies.

ENGL 8596 -- Form & Theory of Poetry: Memory & Document

Kiki Petrosino
W 2:00-4:30

In this graduate seminar, we’ll examine what it means to compose poetry responsive to real places, times, events, and experiences. We'll read several works of contemporary poetry that take a variety of approaches to the concepts of "memory" and "archive," broadly (and capaciously!) defined. Readings will include craft texts and critical inquiry on documentary poetics and other compositional modalities. Coursework, including group learning experiences (one self-guided), will give students the opportunity to produce a critical or creative project engaging themes inspired by the course material. Though this is a readings-based course, students should be prepared and willing to participate in writing exercises, to exchange works-in-progress, and to offer constructive critique. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & the final project, will inform the grading policy.

This course is designed for first- and second-year MFA students in Creative Writing. Graduate students from other departments and programs are welcome, pending availability and instructor permission. If you would like to enroll in this course, but are not in the MFA Program, please contact Prof. Petrosino via e-mail (cmp2k@virginia.edu) with a message detailing your interest.

ENGL 8598 -- Form & Theory of FictionENGL 8800 -- Introduction to Literary Research

Andrew Stauffer
We 9:30am - 12:00pm or Fr 9:30am - 12:00pm

ENGL 8900-1 -- Writing Pedagogy Seminar

James Livingood
Mo 12:30pm - 1:45pm