ENCW 2300-1 -- Poetry Writing

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.

ENCW 2600-7 -- Fiction Writing

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.

ENCW 3310-1 -- Intermediate Poetry Writing: Serious Play

Kiki Petrosino
MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm

In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll connect with playfulness as an approach to composition and revision, and as a key concept for expanding our toolbox of techniques. We’ll read published works of poetry by writers for whom formal experimentation is key. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, & sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of the semester “workshopping” student poems, but we also will devote time to discussing assigned reading and to performing independent & in-class writing challenges. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please request enrollment through SIS and email a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your 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. Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu). Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible.

ENCW 3310-2 -- The Poetics of Childhood:  An Intermediate Poetry Writing Workshop

Lisa Spaar
Tu 11:00am - 1:30pm

ENCW 3350-1 -- Intermediate Nonfiction Writing

Kevin Moffett
Tu 11:00am - 1:30pm

This is a course in personal narratives. You'll read from a wide swath of nonfiction forms—memoir, literary journalism, oral histories, meditations, screeds, etc.—and use your reading as a springboard for your writing. “Notice what you notice," Allen Ginsberg said. "Catch yourself thinking." You'll use this as a point of reference as you write about yourself and others, reflecting more deeply on what's familiar to you, while you explore knowledge, expertise, and vernaculars currently unknown to you, all in the service of sketching out your own inimitable story. 

Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing and a brief statement about why this course interests you to sem9zn@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for students in the area programs in prose and poetry.

ENCW 3500-1 -- Small Press Publishing

Brian Teare
MoWe 6:30pm - 7:45pm

Small press publishing is one of the major forms of literary labor undertaken by writers of all genres; it’s also one of the main means by which contemporary writers form community. As this course will show, a small press publisher has to possess and hone the skills that all writers need: as an editor, they have to be an excellent close reader; as a curator of a list of authors, they need to be an acute critic of their chosen genre; and as a bookmaker and/or typesetter, they have to pay attention to the details of book production. Through in-class tutorials in bookmaking, we’ll acquire some of the pragmatic skills of small press publishing. Through research into four small presses, selected readings from their lists, presentations on the aesthetics and politics of their editorial practices, and prompts for discussion of the day’s readings, we’ll hone our curatorial acumen and gain a sense of the role small presses play in literary community. Through secondary readings we’ll gain a sense of the history and politics of the small press and the handmade object. Through writing and workshopping our own chapbook-length manuscripts and designs, we’ll practice our writerly and editorial skills. And finally, through collaborative publishing ventures that solidify the literary community we’ve created over the semester, we’ll bring our own chapbooks to life!   

ENCW 3610-1 -- Intermediate Fiction Writing

Jesse Ball
We 2:00pm - 4:30pm

ENCW 4550 - Weird Books: The Strange, the Obscene, the Banned and the Incomprehensible in Literature

Micheline Marcom
W 3:00-5:30

ENCW 4820-1 -- Poetry Program Poetics -- Cutting Up: Collage, Play, Poetry, & Resistance

Brian Teare
Mo 2:00pm - 4:30pm

This seminar will present a capsule survey of Surrealist collage and its revolutionary inheritors. We’ll begin with modernist poets André Breton, Alice Paalen Rahon, Aimé Césaire, and César Moro, before moving on to three mid-century American poets associated with the New York School – Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), John Ashbery, and Barbara Guest – and then three contemporary poets – Douglas Kearney, Oli Hazzard, and Kathleen Fraser – whose work repurposes Surrealism’s dual legacy of revolt and artificial paradise for feminist, anticolonial, and aesthetic ends. Alongside the poetry of these ten poets, we’ll study manifestos, interviews, and statements of poetics in order to better understand the theories of making practiced by collage-based poets. Intertwined with this survey of the poetry and poetics of collage will be an experiential learning portion of the course, which will allow us to explore collage techniques literally – through poetics exercises with scissors and glue stick. Together we’ll explore the many iterations of collage over the past century, from Surrealist salvos to anticolonial visions to Camp cut-ups to feminist interventions, while slowly each of us will begin to develop and articulate our own personal version of collage poetics. The course will be capped off with a final portfolio containing a reflective poetics statement and a manuscript of collage-based creative work.

ENCW 4830-1 -- The Big Themes.  An Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop

Lisa Spaar
We 12:30pm - 3:00pm

ENGL 2500-10 -- Introduction to Literary Studies

John O'Brien
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

We will read great works of literature and also work on the skills that need to read, describe, critique, and write well about literary texts.  But we will also be pursuing the question of what constitutes literature in the first place.  We will read texts in a variety of forms (poetry, fiction, drama, essay), and also read what a number of critical thinkers have had to say. Our readings will include works by authors such as William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, and Terrance Hayes. Some short in-class exercises; three written assignments, final examination. All students are welcome to join. This course fulfills the second writing requirement, the prerequisite or the English major, and the AIP disciplines requirement.

ENGL 2500-11 -- Introduction to Literary Studies

Victor Luftig
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

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, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Li-Young Lee, and Chimamanda Adichie; we will also attend a reading and two plays, one on Grounds and the other at the American Shakespeare Center. The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason, who seek an introductory humanities course, and/or who may wish subsequently to major in English.  We’ll discuss the works in class, and there will be in class-quizzes, three papers, and a final exam. This course satisfies the English major prerequisite, the second writing requirement, and the AIP disciplines requirement. 

ENGL 2506-1 -- Contemporary Poetry

Jahan Ramazani
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

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 American poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention to poetics, we will focus on several specific genres, forms, or kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, persona poems, 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 2506-2 -- Introduction to Poetry

Walter Jost
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

ENGL 2506-3 -- Introduction to Poetry

Hodges Adams
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will explore various poetic forms and movements and pay close attention to language. Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods, as well as reading one complete collection of contemporary American poetry. There will be three essays, one of which will be paired with an in-class presentation. Extensive revision of at least one essay is expected. We may take field trips to places around Grounds such as the Fralin Art Museum and the Special Collections Library.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-1 -- The Novel of Upbringing

James Kinney
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

The Novel of Upbringing -- 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; Tom Perrotta, Joe College; Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Perfectly Fine. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-2 -- Science Fiction

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

In this course we will read three Shakespeare plays and then see two or three film or live-theater versions of each one, considering various ways the directors and actors interpret the plays for a modern audience. Writing assignments are designed to help seminar participants consolidate the analytical and writing skills they need to succeed in college-level classes in English or other humanities fields. In addition to many short, informal writing assignments there will be two formal papers—one short, one longer.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2527-1 -- Text and Performance

Katharine Maus
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

In this course we will read three Shakespeare plays and then see two or three film or live-theater versions of each one, considering various ways the directors and actors interpret the plays for a modern audience. Writing assignments are designed to help seminar participants consolidate the analytical and writing skills they need to succeed in college-level classes in English or other humanities fields. In addition to many short, informal writing assignments there will be two formal papers—one short, one longer.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2560-1 -- American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

John Modica
TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm

ENGL 2592-1 -- Women of Letters: Epistolary Literature Written by Women

Alison Hurley
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

In eighteenth-century England young women were taught that their most desirable attribute was modesty and that their destiny lay in marriage. Such an education discouraged women from competing with men in the crowded, unruly, and potentially lucrative public sphere of commercial publishing. Or so one might think. In fact, women authors flourished at this time. By the early 1800s, some men even feared they had come to dominate popular literature. How did this come to be? One of the most effective vehicles by which women infiltrated the world of print was via the humble form of the letter. Letters could express all sorts of things, be addressed to diverse audiences, and be sent from myriad locations. But while letters proved themselves an adaptable form, they were also, at least theoretically, a private one. It was the letter’s association with privacy – with the merely personal – that allowed women to disguise their epistolary compositions as modest, slight, and unthreatening. The letter was the perfect secret weapon for making women’s voices heard.

In this class we will explore how British women living in the 1700’s wrote letters to do many different things: address injustice, report on fashionable society, titillate, mock, protest, and, sometimes, just tell a friend she was loved. Our readings will include private correspondence, verse epistles, epistolary novels, foreign correspondence, letters to the editor, and more.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-1 -- Gothic Forms

Cynthia Wall
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and fainting heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: from the classic novels, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886),  and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959); through the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of?

ENGL 2599-2 -- Beauty and Monstrosity

Jon D'Errico
MoWeFr 1:00pm - 1:50pm

ENGL 2599-3 -- Utopian and Dystopian Visions

Alison Cotti-Lowell
TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm

ENGL 2599-4 -- The Literature of Everyday Life

Taylor Schey
TuTh 5:00-6:15

What could be more monotonous than ordinary, everyday life? And yet, since at least the late eighteenth century, the realm of the quotidian has been an extraordinary source of interest and inspiration for many different writers, some of whom have followed William Wordsworth in “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us,” others of whom have been more drawn to what Joan Didion describes as “the peril, unspeakable peril, of the everyday.” This course will explore how everyday life has been mined and imagined in literary writing, from Jane Austen, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop to Ross Gay, Christina Sharpe, and Monica Huerta. As we learn to attend to language as students of literature, we’ll hone our skills of close reading and apply them to our own everyday milieus. Plus, through working on a variety of both analytical and creative assignments, we’ll become stronger writers. Readings will include some poems, a handful of essays, a couple of autotheoretical texts, a novel, and at least one film. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-5 -- Monuments and the Aesthetics of Power

Ian Grandison
TuTh 5:00pm - 6:15pm

We study how monuments have served as vehicles of power in different places -- in Charlottesville and beyond -- from ancient times to the present, from the Age of Exploration to colonial imperialism to modern nation-building. A few examples include: the Elmina Castle, built in the 1480s, which eventually became a "point of no return" for kidnapped captives in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Cleopatra's Needle, moved from Alexandria, Egypt to London's Victoria Embankment in 1878; the 1921 Stonewall Jackson Confederate Monument that once stood in 

ENGL 2599-6 -- Routes, Writing, Reggae

Njelle Hamilton
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the actual history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with the song “One Love” and the album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? In this course we will trace the history of reggae music and explore its influence on the development of Jamaican literature. We’ll listen closely to Marley’s entire discography to understand the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae songs. As you practice analyzing a variety of literary and cultural forms and craft a range of critical responses from album reviews, to response (‘diss’) tracks, to close reading essays, you will engage topical and controversial issues such as: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and spirituality (and yes, marijuana) in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, and reggaetón.

ENGL 2599-7 -- Literatures of the Nonhuman

Adrienne Ghaly
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

ENGL 2599-8 -- Jane Austen and Her Afterlives

Lydia Brown
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

Why are we so obsessed with Jane Austen? "Austenmania," if not a household term, is at least a household phenomenon: walk into the UVA Bookstore, for example, and peruse shelves of Austen bobbleheads, board games, and temporary tattoos. What about Austen is worth obsessing over—and what if we’re obsessing over the wrong things? This course will examine not only Austen’s oeuvre itself, but its legacy—its relationship with the novel, the 19th century, empire and whiteness, gender and sexuality, genre, and canon. We will ask what pop culture asks of Austen and why; what it is we remember about Austen and what else we willingly forget. This course examines a selection of Austen's major works and some of their contemporary adaptations across many media, and, in doing so, asks what adaptation attempts to do, what it creates, transforms, or transplants. We will work to complicate many assumed narratives about Austen’s work, applying queer, feminist, and decolonial lenses to the texts we examine, even producing short adaptations of our own.

This writing-intensive course satisfies the second writing requirement and requirements for the English major. Assignments include a midterm paper, a final research paper, and short writing exercises, including short responses.

ENGL 2599-9 -- The Contemporary Essay

John Casteen
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course will examine literary prose in contemporary literature, ranging from more topical nonfiction to the personal, lyric, and experimental essay; it will also include two essay-films.  The idea of the essay—the attempt—requires uncertainty and poise.  How do writers and artists use the expressive potential of this elastic form to navigate the situation of the present?  Students will explore critical approaches to the essay and compose new work of their own.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 3001-100 -- History of Literatures in English I

Rebecca Rush
MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm

This is an introductory survey: 1st-years and non-majors are encouraged to enroll.  

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the rich and strange body of English literature written before 1800 and to the rigorous but rewarding art of close, attentive reading. We begin our adventure with the Old English epic Beowulf, the tale of a Geatish warrior who sets out over the waves for a Danish mead hall, determined to perform a courageous deed or end his days trying. Along the way, we will meet a series of seekers, including Chaucer’s humorous pilgrims, Spenser’s wandering knights, Shakespeare’s bantering lovers, and Milton’s liberty-loving devil. Though we will be moving through nearly a millennium of English literature, we will take the time to linger over the distinctive language of each book and the distinctive image each author sketches of human habits and longings. Readings will include selections from Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Much Ado about Nothing, Milton’s “Lycidas” and Paradise Lost, and shorter poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Pope, Cowper, and Gray, among others.

This course is a prerequisite for the English major, but it assumes no prior knowledge of English literature. If you plan to major in economics or biology or computer science but want to enjoy some great literature along the way, please sign up. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.

ENGL 3161-1 -- Chaucer I

Elizabeth Fowler
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

ENGL 3271-100 -- Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies

Katharine Maus
MoWe 11:00am - 11:50am

ENGL 3275-1 -- History of Drama I: Ancient Greece to the Renaissance

John Parker
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

ENGL 3300-1 -- English Literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

John O'Brien
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

Social media existed long before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a lot of literature could be defined as social media, works initially intended to circulate within defined groups, or produced to constitute community. In this course, we will survey the literature of the period from 1650 to 1800 with an eye towards the way that writers used their works to build communities large and small. Authors will include Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Pepys, Katherine Philips, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, James Boswell, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Susanna Rowson. Our reading will also give us the opportunity to think about digital social media in our own time and its effects on culture and community. Students will write two papers (one short, one longer), take a midterm and final exam, and also collaborate on a digital project where we will edit works to contribute to an open-access digital anthology, a project that stands itself as a form of social media.

ENGL 3434-1 -- The American Renaissance

Christopher Krentz
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

ENGL 3480-1 -- The English Novel II

Victoria Baena
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

ENGL 3540-1 -- Romanticism

Taylor Schey
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

A time of revolution and reaction, the Romantic era (1784-1832) saw an explosion of literature that both witnessed and shaped new ideas about art, nature, politics, society, and the self, many of which are still with us today. This course explores some of the best works of this briefest and most momentous period in British literary history. We’ll defamiliarize ourselves with the strange lyrical ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, listen carefully to the odes and apostrophes of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, tarry with the darkly comic turns of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets and Lord Byron’s long poems, and examine the constitution—and the afterlife—or Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny,” Frankenstein. Of particular interest to us will be how Romantic literature not only registers different historical events and developments (e.g. the French, Haitian, and Industrial Revolutions; the emergence of abolitionist and feminist discourses; the Napoleonic Wars and the Peterloo Massacre) but offers its own form of knowledge and prompts a unique, portable way of thinking about the world. Assignments will include a midterm exam, a creative project, and a final paper.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 literature requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3545-1 -- U.S Literature and Social Justice

Victoria Olwell
TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

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.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3560-1 -- Contemporary Jewish Literature

Caroline Rody
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

In this course we 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, and David Bezmozgis.

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 interpretations. This course may be used to satisfy the second writing requirement.

ENGL 3560-2 -- US Modernisms in Word and Image

Joshua Miller
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

How does one write something that’s never been thought? Why do authors experiment radically with the shape and structure of a novel? How do visual images respond to written narratives (and vice-versa)? We’ll discuss a broad range of novels, short fiction, film, photography, and graphic arts composed between 1898 and 1945 and the historical, political, and cultural trends that they were responding to and participating in. This was an extraordinary and tumultuous period of demographic change, artistic invention, economic instability, racialized violence, and political contestation that witnessed mass immigration, migration, and emigration. In paying particular attention to trends of demographic displacement and change within and across national borders, we’ll consider the heady experiments in language and narrative that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The historical events of this period—framed by the wars of 1898 and World War II—will provide context for the novels we read. 

Some of the broad questions that we’ll track throughout the term include the following. How do these authors define the “modern”? What, for that matter, is a “novel” in twentieth-century U.S. literature?  How did these authors participate (and resist) the process of defining who counted as an “American”? What were the new languages of modernity? What role did expatriates and immigrants play in the “new” U.S. of the twentieth century? How did authors reconcile the modernist imperative to “make it new” with the histories of the U.S. and the Americas? 

ENGL 3560-3 -- The Literature of Extinction

Adrienne Ghaly
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

ENGL 3560-4 -- Kafka and His Doubles

Lorna Martens
TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

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 3570-1 -- American Civil Wars

Stephen Cushman, Caroline Janney
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

No moment in United States history has received more recent scrutiny than the American Civil War. Nearly half the respondents to a 2022 poll believe another such war “at least somewhat likely” to break out in the next decade. Comparing the events of 1861-1865 to the divisive politics of the 2020s has become commonplace. Against this fraught backdrop, our course will focus on the conflicting voices and perspectives behind the coming, fighting, and aftermath of war. Among those we may read are Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Kate Stone, Phoebe Yates Pember, James Henry Gooding, Ulysses S. Grant, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Chesnut, Susie King Taylor, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Gould Shaw, Mathew Brady, and Alexander Gardner. While wartime figures will absorb much of our attention, we will also turn to later representations, such as a new graphic novel of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, a short story by Eudora Welty, a movie or two, and recent AI animations of famous Civil War photographs. Finally, we will sample recent discussions of prospects for another civil war, with examples drawn from mainstream journalism, online alternatives, and creative media. Assignments will include short papers and at least one exam. Professors Caroline Janney (History) and Stephen Cushman (English) will teach this course together.

ENGL 3570-100 -- Jim Crow America

Ian Grandison, Marlon Ross
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been per-petuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and eco-nomic exclusion. Taking a place-specific approach to understanding the material practices and conse-quences of the Jim Crow regime, we’ll examine in depth the overlapping dimensions of everyday life where Jim Crow has been especially prominent, including: 1) personal and collective mobility; 2) the struggle over public education; 3) planning and access to public facilities; 4) housing and employment; and 5) the justice (or injustice) system. Course materials from various disciplines will include maps, plan-ning documents, films, radio, and readings from literature, sociology, urban planning, history, political science, and journalism. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Charlottesville downtown and the Jefferson School Heritage Center scheduled for Saturday, March 30.

ENGL 3572-1 -- Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

Marlon Ross
TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

This course explores the 1920s Jazz Age, or New Negro movement, from a multimedia perspective of the Harlem Renaissance in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, dance, music, photography, film, and politics. We’ll consider the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a “Mecca of the New Negro” but also of Chicago, D.C., Richmond, and Lynchburg as instances of places contributing to the idea of the New Negro Renaissance. We’ll examine some of the hot debates and combustible movements of the time, including: the Great Black Migration, art as uplift and propaganda, elite versus vernacular approaches, the Negro newspaper, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting, urban sociology, the Garveyite movement, Negro bohemianism, the gendering of the Renaissance idea, queer subcultures, radical activism, and interraciality. We’ll sample a wide range of works: essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Willis Richardson and Zora Neale Hurston; art by Aaron  Douglas and Augusta Savage; dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham, the Nicholas brothers, and Josephine Baker; musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Harry Burleigh, and Roland Hayes; photographers Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee; and the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We’ll conclude with some contemporary revisualizations of the Harlem Renaissance in fiction and film. Assignments include several short papers, a midterm and final exam, and a final “revisioning” project where you’ll be required to offer your own re-imagining of the New Negro era.

ENGL 3635-1 -- Currents in African Literature

Njelle Hamilton
MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This undergraduate seminar on contemporary African Literature takes the form of an in-depth study of the literary works of two brilliant, prolific young Nigerian women writers: feminist and social realist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and African-futurist Nnedi Okorafor, two of the most globally well-known authors the continent has produced. Through close analysis of their novels we will consider broad questions such as: How applicable are Western feminist theories to non-Western experiences? How are traditional literary forms such as the bildungsroman subverted by race, gender, and postcoloniality? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How does trauma affect narrative? How is Nigeria depicted in international news in contrast to how locals perceive and narrate their own reality? And how can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Beyond the ultimate goal of affording you a deeper appreciation for African and Nigerian literature, history, and current events, this course aims to lead you through the process of crafting a sophisticated argument and writing about literary texts in their cultural and historical contexts.

ENGL 3660-1 -- Modern Poetry

Mark Edmundson
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course will introduce students to some of the best poets of the Anglo-American 20th century. We’ll spend a good deal of time on Robert Frost. A brilliant artist in himself, he’s perfect for teaching people how to read poetry. After Frost, we’ll have many fine poets to choose from: Elizabeth Bishop, T.S, Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and more. Two quizzes and a final paper.

ENGL 3690-1 -- Memory Speaks

Lorna Martens
TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

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 3922-1 -- Deafness in Literature and Film

Christopher Krentz
MoWeFr 12:00pm - 12:50pm

ENGL 4270-1 -- Shakespeare Seminar

John Parker
MoWe 3:30pm - 4:45pm

A broad survey of Shakespeare's plays, likely to include  The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.  We will explore Shakespeare's relation to his sources, inquire into the earliest printed versions of the plays, and consider how practices of the print shop and playhouse shaped the texts that we have.  We'll read one play per week, for the most part letting its particular concerns dictate the course of our conversation.  There will be two papers (around 6pp. each), a midterm and final.

ENGL 4500-1 -- Metamorphosing Myth

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

This seminar will explore the appropriation and transformation of some of the influential narratives of pagan antiquity: the myths that are kidnapped and remade as artists pursue their own aesthetic, cultural and political agendas. We will start by reading (in translation) Virgil’s great epic of empire, the Aeneid, as well as Ovid’s influential and bewitching tapestry of mythic narratives, the Metamorphoses. We’ll then move on to discuss the ways in which some medieval, Renaissance and contemporary authors metamorphose these powerful archetypes. Our post-classical readings will include works by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, as well as Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses and Ursula K Le Guin’s Lavinia. With luck, we’ll also hear from some of our own creative writing faculty about the afterlives of myth within their own work.

Course requirements: regular attendance and energetic participation in discussion. A series of discussion board postings. A 6-7 page paper, an oral presentation, a longer term paper.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 4500-2 -- Seven Ages, Seven Questions

Mark Edmundson
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

The course emerges from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” on the seven ages of human life. We’ll consider childhood and education, erotic love, religion, warfare and courage in war, politics, the quest for wisdom, and old age.  Readings from, among others, Plato, Beauvoir, Freud, Wordsworth, Seven Ages Schopenhauer, and Marx.  Regular writing assignments and a long essay at the end.

ENGL 4500-3 -- Faust

Jeffery Grossman
MW 2:00-3:15

In depth study of the Faust legend in European literature and culture. Readings will include the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Byron's Manfred, Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Goethe's Faust, parts I and II, and other materials; films will include: F. W. Murnau's Faust (1926) and István Szábo's Mephisto (1981).

ENGL 4540-1 -- Jane Austen in Her Time and Ours

Susan Fraiman
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

An intensive study of the work of Jane Austen. Take this course if you’re new to Austen or already a fan. Take it for Austen’s epigrammatic sentences and love stories, but also for her biting social commentary and (beneath the light, bright surface) her probing of the darker emotions. How do the novels treat such topics as family conflict, first impressions, sexual jealousy, women’s property rights, New World slavery, and the Napoleonic Wars? Why have Austen’s happy endings been accused of haste? In addition to exploring Austen’s formal strategies, thematic concerns, and engagement with the issues of her time, we will touch on her reception in subsequent eras, including a cinematic interpretation or two. Students read all six of the completed novels plus Sanditon, left unfinished at Austen’s death. Two papers and a final exam. 

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

ENGL 4540-2 -- Literature and Social Movements

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

ENGL 4559-1 -- Reading Archives: Gaps, Margins, Erasures

Sumita Chakraborty
We 2:00pm - 4:30pm

How do we tell stories that have been rendered impossible to tell? While no one is voiceless, institutions of power and privilege—including archives—often exclude or marginalize many voices, and philosophers, critics, literary artists, and other artists have long tackled the question of how to responsibly tell those elided stories. In this course, we will explore a range of such methodologies and practices. Our reading list will be comprised of theoretical and critical texts by Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, and Ann Cvetkovich, among others, as well as literary artists like M. NourbeSe Philip, Don Mee Choi, Rick Barot, Solmaz Sharif, Robin Coste Lewis, Tyehimba Jess, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Nicole Sealey, and Victoria Chang. Major assignments will include reading presentations, a brief mid-term take-home written exam, and an imaginative final project that accords with students’ individual intellectual, artistic, and personal interests. The final projects will be developed in consultation with me and with archivists from Special Collections and the Rare Book School on a case-by-case basis; at several key points throughout the semester, we will meet in Special Collections or the Rare Book School to brainstorm and research your projects.

ENGL 4901-1 -- The Bible Part 1: Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

Stephen Cushman
MoWe 11:00am - 12:15pm

ENGL 4998-1 -- Distinguished Majors Program

Caroline Rody
Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

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.