ENCW 2300 -- 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 -- 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 -- Introduction to Literature

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

One reads “literature” differently than one reads other written materials in part by raising questions about language and interpretation, questions that might be raised elsewhere but usually aren’t.  To become a better reader of fiction, and through fiction a better reader of ourselves and other situations and people, and through them a better reader of the life that you and others lead, one can attend closely to literary texts and ask: Why?  How?

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

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 satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, 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.

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

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?

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

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 generally understand monuments as commemorating people and events that are regarded as significant to shaping public knowledge, sense of identity, and social cohesion. We consider the processes by which monuments are proposed, promoted, funded, planned, designed, and erected as politically neutral and communal in their spirit. They are regarded as objects of beauty or even majesty--promoted as “works of art,” a notion that reinforces the perception that they unite and uplift individuals, communities, nations, and even empires. And yet the rupture associated with Confederate monuments that long had pride of place in landscapes North and South betrays the instability of the common perception of monuments as salutary and caused many to view them as apparatuses of ongoing warfare. We consider the role of monuments and memorials, whether public or private, in shaping collective ways of knowing, feeling, acting, and interacting as citizens in relation to state authority. To unearth this politics, we will explore the physical and historical contexts of monuments as well as their aesthetic qualities that are located on campus, 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 Charlottesville's Court Square Park; and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, 2011, on the U.S. National Mall. Is Carlos Simon’s 2022 “Requiem for the Enslaved” (which was commissioned by Georgetown University to reckon with the role of slavery in its development) a monument? We will explore how monuments are used to shape local and national landscapes to affect social hierarchies, imperialist ambitions, and struggles for liberation. There will be a midterm and final exam, each including identification items and a critical essay, and a final team research project.

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

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.

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

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, the AIP Disciplines requirement, and the prerequisite 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

We’ll read The Canterbury Tales and perhaps some shorter works looking for the author that the Scots poet Gavin Douglas praised as “evir all womanis frend.” One governing question will be how, for Geoffrey Chaucer and for us, do sexual politics guide political philosophy? This is a course in Middle English, in reading poetry, in considering how fiction shapes political thought, and in thinking alongside someone who lived before modernity and can shake our sense of the world to its roots while telling brilliant stories. We’ll meet under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it: bring your sunscreen and hats. Write to Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.

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

ENGL 3271-100 -- Shakespeare: Histories and Comedies

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

ENGL 3434-1 -- The American Renaissance

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

ENGL 3480-1 -- The English Novel II: The Realist Novel

(the instructor of this course, Victoria Baena, will be joining us in the fall; her name won’t appear in SIS until the summer. But you can still enroll in the course!)
TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

This course traces the development of and experiments in the 19th century novel. Our focus will be on the Victorian novel—Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881)—though we’ll also consider the genre in a comparative context, reading in translation one influential (indeed notorious) contemporary French example: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). There are many continuities to be traced across these texts, from the gendered expectations of their protagonists to the transnational and imperial underpinnings of their plots. In formal terms, we’ll focus on the question of realism—once defined by Henry James, in contrast to romance, as representing “the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another.” Through close reading and comparative analysis, we’ll examine how each of these writers exploited, grappled with, and sometimes even rejected realism’s expectations. Assignments will include short reading reflections, a midterm close reading essay, and a longer paper incorporating textual analysis as well as attention to critical discussions of literary realism.

This course can be used to fulfill the 1700-1900 period requirement for the English major.

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

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in the nation,” referring to church services. How, and to what extent, has racial separation changed since the height of the Jim Crow era, the 1890s through the 1950s? Despite some notable progress such as the military, why has Jim Crow persisted in various ways in so many areas of American life? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the 1830s, how it was influenced by the institution of slavery, was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated 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, housing, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have been used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Taking a place-specific approach to understanding the material practices and consequences 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, planning 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, as well as a comparison with South Africa’s apartheid system. Requirements include a midterm, final, a critical essay, and a term team project.

ENGL 3572-1 -- Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

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

Why has the impact of the Harlem Renaissance persisted for a hundred years? This course explores that question from a multimedia perspective in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, theater, dance, music, photography, film, audio recording, and politics. We’ll study the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a “Mecca of the New Negro” but also cultural centers like Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Chicago. Many of the debates of the time are still with us in different ways today. What are the most effective forms and venues for the promotion and production of African American arts and culture? How do African American migrations – both within the U.S. and between America and abroad – contribute to the idea of a cultural renaissance? Then and now, there is a debate about to what extent art should cater to propaganda. During the Renaissance, as now, artists debated elite versus vernacular approaches to artistic production. The prominence of women and queer artists at the center of the Renaissance is another connection with today’s cultural and social movements. Other matters to be examined include the Great Black Mass Migration, the national Negro newspaper, the birth of gospel music, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting and lynching, urban sociology, trade unionism, the Garveyite Black Pride movement, Negro bohemianism, blackface minstrelsy, and interracial romance and sex. In addition to examining artistic forms like the anthology, the manifesto, the literary periodical, the sonnet, the blues lyric, the stage musical, the problem play, the art mural, and the sketch, we’ll ask how Renaissance advocates exploited modern technologies like print publication, photography, film, audio recording, and radio to promote Negro culture as cosmopolitan and avant-garde. Among those studied are writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen; composers Duke Ellington, Thomas Dorsey, Harry Burleigh; artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; photographers James VanDerZee and Addison Scurlock; dramatists Angelina Grimké and Willis Richardson; actors Bert Williams and Paul Robeson; singers Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Roland Hayes; dancer-choreographers Katherine Dunham, Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers; filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, and many others.

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

(the instructor of this course, Victoria Baena, will be joining us in the fall; her name won’t appear in SIS until the summer. But you can still enroll in the course!)
TuTh 9:30am-10:45am

What kind of role might literature play in—and as—social protest? This seminar takes up the question by exploring the relationship between nineteenth-century British literature and social movements, especially abolition, feminism and the “woman question,” and campaigns for social reform. We’ll frame our initial discussions through theoretical works on literature, resistance, and commitment: both twentieth-century texts by Virginia Woolf, Theodor Adorno, Ghassan Kanafani, James Baldwin, Jacques Rancière, and Edward Said, as well as Victorian-era writers and critics like Sojourner Truth, Charles Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde.

In the main part of the term, we’ll look closely at a range of nineteenth-century writers who both sought to participate in contemporary social debates and, in doing so, reimagined literary and aesthetic forms. Authors will most likely include Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Prince, Flora Tristan, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Along the way, we’ll ask: in what ways does literature intervene in the world—and to what extent should it? What are the politics of literary autonomy and commitment? How, in turn, might we read the aesthetic, not just thematic strategies, of genres like the manifesto, petition, or speech? Course requirements will comprise an oral presentation, research paper, and several shorter writing assignments.

This course can be used to fulfill the 1700-1900 period requirement for the English major.

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

This course may be used to satisfy the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.

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 5500-2 -- 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 do we do this, 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 but wide-ranging 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. 

From Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 33 and 187: 

“Given the surge of interest in questions of reading . . . the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scandalous. Surely a correction of the record—and even some vigorous rebranding—is in order. Hermeneutics simply is the theory of interpretation . . . . The subject of this book, then, has been a specific genre of writing: the rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretative social sciences generally. Rather than being synonymous with disagreement, it is a specific kind of disagreement—one that is driven by the protocols of late-twentieth and twenty-first century academic argument. Critique, in this sense, is the hardening of disagreement into a given repertoire of argumentative moves and interpretative methods.”

ENGL 5510-1 -- Arthurian Romances

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

We'll dive into what is probably the most viral fan-fiction canon ever: stories about Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Merlin, the Ladies of the Lake, and their friends and enemies and magical stage props. What makes this kind of narrative work? How do different authors transform it? The late medieval Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory will be at the core of our inquiry, and we'll include texts from Marie de France and Chaucer to contemporary film. We'll be looking to describe how (and why) the romance genre offers us experiences of philosophy, emotion, political thought, spirituality, and wit. This is a graduate course with room for undergraduates who have some coursework in Middle English. We will meet outside under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it. Contact Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.

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 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.

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 5500-2 -- 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 do we do this, 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 but wide-ranging 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. 

From Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 33 and 187: 

“Given the surge of interest in questions of reading . . . the neglect of the hermeneutic tradition in Anglo-American literary theory is little short of scandalous. Surely a correction of the record—and even some vigorous rebranding—is in order. Hermeneutics simply is the theory of interpretation . . . . The subject of this book, then, has been a specific genre of writing: the rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretative social sciences generally. Rather than being synonymous with disagreement, it is a specific kind of disagreement—one that is driven by the protocols of late-twentieth and twenty-first century academic argument. Critique, in this sense, is the hardening of disagreement into a given repertoire of argumentative moves and interpretative methods.”

ENGL 5510-1 -- Arthurian Romances

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

We'll dive into what is probably the most viral fan-fiction canon ever: stories about Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Merlin, the Ladies of the Lake, and their friends and enemies and magical stage props. What makes this kind of narrative work? How do different authors transform it? The late medieval Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory will be at the core of our inquiry, and we'll include texts from Marie de France and Chaucer to contemporary film. We'll be looking to describe how (and why) the romance genre offers us experiences of philosophy, emotion, political thought, spirituality, and wit. This is a graduate course with room for undergraduates who have some coursework in Middle English. We will meet outside under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it. Contact Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.

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 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 Fiction: Vultures & Magpies

Jesse Ball
W 2:00-4:30

ENGL 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

ENCW 2300 - Poetry Writing (8 sections)

ENCW 2600 - Fiction Writing (8 sections)

ENCW 3310 - Intermediate Poetry Writing: Myths of Adolescence and the Literary Imagination

Our focus for this writing workshop will be the Crucible of Becoming: Myths of Adolescence & the Literary Imagination.   Human development across cultures and time inevitably involves some version or experience of adolescence, a liminal and archetypal territory between childhood and adulthood characterized by exploration, growth, intense feeling, conflict, becoming, power play, transgression, anxiety, and pain. No wonder, then, that writers have been drawn to this difficult, complex period, plundering its emotional dynamics and mythologizing its extremities in novels, short fiction, poems, and plays. In this course, we will plumb notions of adolescence and explore irs  versions of it in a variety of ways. The crucial question will not be “What is adolescence?” but rather, “How has adolescence been perceived, remembered, imagined?” As we attempt to articulate the significance of our own accountings of adolescence, we may hope to confront ways in which the young (ourselves) embody our most profound vulnerabilities and possibilities. As we explore this period in poetry, we will examine our own crucible of becoming, perhaps particularly as it relates to the adventure and journey of the University experience.  Admission is by permission.  Please contact Professor Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu to indicate your interest in the workshop.

ENCW 3310 - Intermediate Poetry Writing: Revolutionary Poetics

A revolutionary poetics involves two crucial gestures: turning away from, and turning toward. Poets engaged in individual and/or collective revolution tend to turn away from oppressive ideologies and dead forms and turn toward liberatory expression and living language. For such poets, liberatory forms are not prescribed but discovered, often shaped in response to historical context and personal identity and experience. But how does their work turn away from inherited harms and turn toward alternatives that acknowledge injustice without replicating it, fashioning instead new ways of relating to each other through poetic language and forms? This course will introduce us to contemporary poets whose revolutionary work addresses the collective and personal stakes of writing about climate crisis, religious trauma, war, migration, neurodiversity, gender transition, structural antiblackness, and addiction. The reading component of this course will include books by Oliver Baez Bendorf, H. G. Dierdorff,  Rea Visiting Poet Airea D. Matthews, Sahar Muradi, and Adam Wolfond. The workshop component of this course will begin with short poems written in response to prompts derived from our reading. These prompts will be designed to help us think about the flexible, powerful relationship between cultural critique and poetic form, between revolution and the literal letter. The long workshop portion of the course will offer each of us the chance to expand upon those poems in longer manuscripts. Throughout the semester, in both critical discussions and workshops, we’ll discuss the conceptual, political, and poetic aspirations of the work we read, and explore the possibilities of coming together as poets during a time of global flux. 

ENCW 3610 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

ENCW 3610 - Intermediate Fiction Writing

ENCW 4550 - Imagining • Remembering • Finding: Prose Between Fiction and “Non”

A seminar for reader-writers who want to explore narrative that blurs the so-called line between fiction and non: autofiction, historical fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, speculative essay . . . We’ll read specimens of assorted types and lengths—from micro-essay to novel—and see how writers have drawn both energy and form from history, memory, other lives, other stories, facts themselves. Works might include Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, Anna Garreta’s Not One Day, Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives, Justin Torres’s We the Animals or Blackouts, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion or Happening, Edna O’Brien’s Night, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay, as well as stories and essays by John Keene, Eliot Weinberger, Maria Gainza, and many others. In addition to weekly reading, you’ll play with regular exercises that let you draw upon history or memory or other found material, and you’ll produce a final critical-creative project.

Instructor permission required, but all eager readers are welcome to apply. If you’re not in the APLP, send me a note (jas2ad) saying what draws you to this class.

ENCW 4720 - Literary Prose Thesis

ENCW 4810 - Advanced Fiction Writing: WRITING FROM, TOWARD, INTO, AGAINST —

ENCW 4820 - Poetry Program Poetics: The Contemporary American Lyric Sequence

This seminar for practicing writers will focus on the lyric sequence in American poetry written since 1980.  We will begin by exploring pointed gatherings of poems by early American innovators of the lyric sequence—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jean Toomer—but the focus of the course will be on contemporary American poets working in series, both within and across embodiment as a book, including series and sequences by Tom Andrews, Lucie Brock-Broido, Suzanne Buffam, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Safiya Elhillo, Claudia Emerson, Shane McCrae, Harryette Mullen, Arthur Sze, Kevin Young, and others.  As we read, we will examine ways in which these contemporary sequences are in conversation with poets working in other cultures, traditions, and lyric modes, both mainstream and experimental.  What poems had to have been written in order for these late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century lyric sequences to exist?  How has the gestalt of the fragment in modernism and post-modernism contributed to the evolution/devolution of the contemporary lyric sequence?  What attracts poets to serial thinking?  Is there a poetics of the lyrical sequence?  What various formal ruses do poets working in series and sequences deploy and what might writers learn from them?   We may have the pleasure of hearing from visitors and make forays into the Fralin Museum of Art and Special collections from time to time, as well.  Course work will involve a creative project: the writing of a poetic sequence with accompanying poetics statement.  Preference is given to students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing, but others are most welcome to apply by contacting Professor Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu.

ENCW 4830 - Advanced Poetry Writing I

This workshop is for advanced undergraduate students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry. 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 complete two assignments generated by writing prompts, to attend and provide a written response to one poetry reading (in person or virtual), to turn in close-reading reviews of two assigned poetry books, and to complete one “wild card” assignment.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience and grade, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Dove at rfd4b@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once  registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible.

The instructor will let all applicants know of their acceptance status before spring classes begin.

ENCW 4920 - Poetry Program Capstone

The Capstone offers APPW students time and pedagogical space to think beyond the realization of single poems toward the realization of a book-length poetry manuscript. With support from the APPW Director, a graduate student mentor, and most importantly from our APPW colleagues, each of us will gather together a draft collection of our poems for a semester of intensive collaborative editorial work that will encourage us to become more deeply aware of our poetic ambitions and evolving aesthetics. In conversation with editorial feedback, each of us will organize and revise our existing poems and write new work in order to fully realize what poet and critic Natasha Sajé calls the “dynamic design” of our first manuscripts. The course schedule will begin with weekly discussion of assigned readings, followed by collaborative editorial sessions of our Capstone Project drafts. This means that, for the first three quarters of the semester, we will meet as a group, but the latter quarter of the semester will largely consist of independent work and one-on-one meetings. After mid-term, each of us will be assigned a graduate student mentor who will offer the Capstone Project draft a close reading. After this, each of us will meet with the Director to discuss the feedback and devise a final revision strategy. The course will culminate in our Capstone Projects – revised, polished manuscripts of the poetry only we could write – which we will celebrate together at the APPW graduation reading.

ENGL 1500 - Vikings: Myths and Sagas

This course introduces students to Old Norse mythology and cosmology, and their adaptation into later medieval prose sagas, such as Egil's Saga, Gunnlaug's Saga, and more. We will begin with Prose and Poetic Eddas, examining their mythic poems and learning essential historical and cultural contexts necessary to appreciate these bodies of myth and legend. We will then consider how the conversion to Christianity (in the summer of 999) changed Iceland’s literary landscape. Yet the heathen myths survived the advent of this new faith, and even thrived. In the back half of the course, we will focus on texts composed well within the Christian era to investigate the various ways in which medieval Icelanders reckoned with the heathen past of their ancestors while working out their own identity in verse and prose.

*This course fulfills the AIP requirement.*

ENGL 2500 - Intro to Literary Studies

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, TS Eliot, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hanbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Li-Young Lee, and Chimamanda Adichie; we will also attend a readings 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.

The course will fulfill the second writing requirement, the AIP Discipline, and the prerequisite for the English major.

ENGL 2502 - Four Books, Four Centuries, Four Forms

In this course, we will read four different works produced between 1600 and 2000, each of which is in a radically different form: William Shakespeare’s play King Lear, Jane Austen’s novel Emma, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each of these works is a masterpiece of its kind, an influence to many who followed it, and a work about which many critics have had things to say. They’re all incredibly pleasurable and rewarding as well. We’ll use these masterpieces to explore the kinds of ways that you can approach literary and filmic texts. The course will fulfill the second writing requirement, the AIP Discipline, and the prerequisite for the English major.

ENGL 2502 - Locating Jane. Or, Putting Austen in her Place

Jane Austen is everywhere – at movie theaters, on coffee mugs, in myriad sequels, parodies, and re-imaginings of her novels. How is it that an author whose works are so deeply embedded in her own time remains a contemporary phenomenon? How is it that novels depicting a remarkably thin slice of a defunct society enjoy such broad appeal? In this course we will try to answer these questions by “putting Austen in her place.” We will carefully situate Austen’s novels within a number of specific but overlapping interpretive terrains – literary, political, intellectual, and gendered. By deeply contextualizing Austen, I believe we will be in a better position to assess her significance in both her world and in our own. In order to perform this work we will develop the skills necessary for reading and writing effectively about texts. Specifically, we will aspire to read closely, write precisely, argue persuasively, ask good questions, employ strong evidence, and take interpretive risks.

We will be reading Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

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

ENGL 2502 - Monsters and Marvels in Medieval Literature

In this course, we will see how medieval literature horrifies, thrills, and dazzles its readers from the medieval period to the present day. We'll read both poetry and prose (most in modern English translation, though we’ll try our hand at a few short passages in older forms of the English language) and find out how monsters and the sensations of fear and wonder helped medieval readers make sense of the world – and how they might do the same for us. 

Tentative list of readings: Excerpts from Beowulf, Andreas, the Morte Darthur, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; shorter works like the head-chopping Old English Judith, Marie de France’s werewolf story Bisclavret, and Sir Orfeo’s adventures in the fairy kingdom.

Requirements for this course: regular attendance and participation in discussion, occasional discussion board posts, four 3-4 page papers, and a 4-5 page revision of one of these shorter papers.

ENGL 2506 - Introduction to Poetry: Reading Poems

In this class we'll be reading and talking about poems of many kinds. Reading a poem, we'll ask: What makes it tick? What makes it stop? How does it move us, or not? In addition to individual poems, we'll read books of contemporary poetry by Carl Phillips, Don Mee Choi, Terrance Hayes, Ilya Kaminsky, and Mary Ruefle. For a prose guide through the various terrain of English-language poems we'll have Don't Read Poetry by Stephanie Burt. Over the course of the semester, students will draft, revise, and present a "reader's manual" for a poet of their choice. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2506 - Introduction to Poetry

You’re likely practiced at comprehending the meaning of any text that you read. But how does language create meaning in the first place? How can a single word generate multiple, even conflicting, significations? How do various arrangements of sounds move us to tears, open new worlds, instigate actions, and give us pleasure? This course offers an introduction to poetry, the only form of literature that requires us to confront these questions head on. Through learning how to engage carefully with the subtleties and formal elements of poetic language (including meter, rhyme, figure, diction, sound, and syntax), you’ll hone your skills of close reading and critical thinking and learn how to use them beyond the classroom. Plus, through assignments both analytical and creative, you’ll become a stronger writer. Our readings will span from the early modern period to the present, covering an array of poetic styles, forms, and genres as well as a wide range of authors, from William Shakespeare and John Keats to M. NourbeSe Philip and Layli Long Soldier. All students are welcome, and no prior knowledge is expected. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2506 - Hybrid Poetry

When an experience defies the confines of a single genre, it opens up a world of hybridity. In this course, we will examine hybrid poetry collections that blend verse, prose, drama, visual art, collage, and documentation to confront systemic oppression and the histories of war; poems whose forms challenge dominant narratives while also celebrating joy and kinship. From Tina Chang's Hybrida to Cynthia Dewi Oka's A Tinderbox in Three Acts, we will study the work of contemporary poets who employ cross-genre and interdisciplinary methods to transform their practices into acts of survival.

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

ENGL 2507 - Tragedy and Transgression

To transgress is literally to “step across”; at the core of tragic drama is somebody’s movement beyond and outside laws and cultural norms. This movement into the terrible unknown is what we’ll be focusing upon in this course—there’ll be passion, mayhem, and a very high body count. What new visions, what new experiences do tragic protagonists acquire as a result of going “beyond the pale”? What kind of language can claw significance from the extreme edge of suffering? What exactly is “tragic knowledge”? And why, for so many hundreds of years, have audiences (and actors!) been fascinated by the spectacle of other people’s agony? We’ll address all of these questions (and many more) as we read works spanning over two millennia. Tentative Reading List: (all non-English works will be read in translation!): Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone; Euripides, Medea; Shakespeare, Macbeth; Akira Kurosowa, Throne of Blood; Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler; Athol Fugard, The Island; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman; Caryl Churchill, A Number.

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in discussion; shorter and longer writing assignments together totaling 20 pages; a final exam.

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

ENGL 2508 - The Historical Novel

This course will explore the relationship between literature and history. Specifically, we will focus on the emergence of the historical novel in early nineteenth century Britain and trace its global evolution into the twenty-first century. Historical fiction and films have proliferated in recent years. Can any novel set against a recognizable historical backdrop be considered a historical novel? How factual and realistic do historical novels need to be, and how do they navigate the relationship between individual and collective destinies? What specific modes of characterization do such novels call for? How are ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ recalibrated in counter-factual historical novels?

The seminar will explore these questions by focusing on five novels that bring alive key revolutionary moments in modern history. They are Walter Scott’s Waverley (the Jacobite Revolution in Scotland in 1745), Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (the French Revolution in 1789), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (the British Opium Trade with China between 1791 to 1858), Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (the rise of fascism in the 1930s), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (the Nigerian Civil War from 1967-70). We will also read excerpts from the works of literary theorists who have helped us understand the historical novel and its subgenres. Requirements: two take home essays and an oral presentation. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508 - Science Fiction

Like to sink into a book that challenges the ways we think about ourselves by imagining other worlds, speculative futures, aliens, artificial intelligences, cyborgs, technology and society at its best and possible worst, and more? We will read several books or pieces of short fiction that are classified loosely as science fiction, though there may be some overlap with other genres such as speculative fiction or climate fiction.

We will also practice close reading strategies, reflect on acts of literary interpretation through brief references to critical essays, inquire into some of the functions and effects of fictional narratives, and practice constructing reflective, analytical, and argumentative essays. Generally, students can expect to write regular reading responses and exploratory pieces, participate in and lead seminar discussions, write three short essays, and take a brief final exam. The majority of our readings will be novels (entire books), with the occasional story, novella, or film. Texts might include (but are not limited to) the following: Parable of the Sower, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Bête, Arrival, The Left-Hand of Darkness, Frankenstein, or All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries.

This course fulfills the second writing (and writing-enhanced) requirement and the AIP requirement (artistic, interpretative, and philosophical inquiry). ENGL2508 also prepares students interested in the English major for upper-level coursework in literature, though all majors are welcome.

ENGL 2508 - Science Fiction

This survey of the science fiction genre is a seminar that will start with examining the genre's roots in 18th and 19th century “proto-science fiction.” We’ll then trace its development through the genre’s distinct temporal and cultural eras from the late-19th century to the present day. We’ll be reading a mix of novels and short stories and watching a few adaptations of these texts into movies and TV shows. Though we’ll touch on many themes and tropes, from space travel to AI, we’ll primarily focus on examining and writing about the social and cultural possibilities of the genre, along with the technological and scientific advancements it has inspired. 

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

ENGL 2508 - The Novel of Upbringing

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 - The Novel in US Literary History

In this course, you’ll investigate history of the novel in the U.S., examining genres and styles that emerged over the decades and centuries. I change the syllabus year to year, but in the past the course has included works by Hannah Webster Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Celeste Ng. The course will help you strengthen your writing by asking you to write a combination of informal and formal writing assignments. The informal writing assignments will give you a chance to work on your fluency as a writer while also expanding your ideas about the novels you’ll read. The formal assignments will guide you through the process of developing and revising polished essays. By completing this course, you’ll satisfy the Second Writing Requirement. Extra bonus: While the course is designed for students headed towards any major, it also serves as a prerequisite for the English major, for those who are interested.

ENGL 2508 - From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction

ENGL 2527 - Text and Performance

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 - Contemporary Global Literature

One could claim with some justification that the most inventive and important contemporary fiction in English comes from places other than Great Britain and the United States. In this class we will explore some of this Anglophone literature and consider whatever issues or concerns it raises, from the legacies of colonialism to ways that culture, race, class, gender, violence, and religion show up in diverse societies in the Global South.  Syllabus is still under construction, but we will likely study Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Nigeria), Narayan’s The Painter of Signs (India), Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (South Africa), Rushdie’s story collection East, West (India and the United Kingdom), and Danticat’s stories in Krik?  Krak! (Haiti).  Moreover, we’ll concentrate on developing analytical and writing skills, which should help students succeed in other English and humanities classes.

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

ENGL 2599 - Painting and Prose

Somebody once said, “Ut pictura poesis,” or, “Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.” But what does that mean, exactly, and how does it work? Humans have told stories about famous paintings, and painted famous stories, all in attempt to figure out ourselves and our world. This course explores the many ways that art has imagined literature, and literature art, from Ovid and the Bible, through Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Hogarth, Blake and Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson, to the fin de siècle and Oscar Wilde. This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599 - King Arthur in Time

King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table are a romanticized staple in nostalgic notions of the medieval past. But who is King Arthur, and where did his legend come from? This course will chart the history of King Arthur in literature, from his early Welsh origins through medieval chronicle and romance, modern poetry and novel, and contemporary film. Along the way, we will consider how the changing historical context and conventions of genre shape and transform the Arthurian mythos. Whenever they were written, texts about King Arthur are always set in the mythic past, shrouded by the mists of half-forgotten history. How does the past function in the world of literary imagination? And what are the political uses of the imagined past? As we read famous works of literature, whether from the twelfth century or the twentieth, we will explore not only medieval narrative but also narratives about the Middle Ages. As writers, we will step into the unfolding history of Arthurian narrative to speak back to these texts and the critics who read them.

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

ENGL 2599 - How Should a Person Be?

How does anyone become someone—and how does literature allow us to make sense of what it means to be a person in progress? How does the act of recognizing oneself take shape in language—or, rather, how does language’s precision—and flexibility—make visible the parts of becoming that seem otherwise unknowable? We’ll use these considerations to maneuver through the aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical capacities of literary forms, including novels, essays, and lyric poetry, down to examining the transformative potential of a single word. Less concerned with coming-of-age, this course asks how language conceptualizes—or complicates—the never-ending work of becoming someone.

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

ENGL 2599 - The Contemporary Essay

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 2599 - How to be Ethical?

How do novels, poetry, and philosophical texts teach us to relate ethically toward the stranger, the foreigner, or the other? How do we understand different cultures and peoples without reducing them to our already established frames of reference? How do we imagine otherness? This course approaches these big questions by exploring representations of the stranger and the foreigner in African and African diasporic literature. We will look at texts by Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon alongside reflections on the relation between ‘ethics and aesthetics’ by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and others.

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

ENGL 2599 - The Literature of Alienation

Why do we sometimes feel separated, cut off, or estranged from the world, other people, or our own selves? Are such feelings temporary aberrations or ‘normal’ symptoms of modern life? This intro-level course in literature* will tackle these and other questions by reading works of fiction, prose, and poetry from the long nineteenth century that represent alienation as both subjective and objective — both something felt internally and an effect of one’s external circumstances. In this course, we will pay attention to how writers like Alfred Tennyson, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and others used language and imagination to express conditions of alienation. We will examine how literary modes like myth, fantasy, gothicism and humor can animate alienated characters. And we will, through class discussion and writing assignments, think about the choices that open up to us when we identify and come to terms with alienation in our own lives.

Requirements: 1 short paper (3 pgs.), 2 long papers (5-6 pgs.), a final exam, class participation. 

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

ENGL 3002 - History of Literatures in English II

John Keats, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Ocean Vuong: these are some of the authors that we will be reading and studying together in this survey of literature in English from around 1750 to the present moment. Along the way, we will trace the emergence of English as a global language and literature in our post-colonial world. Literary movements to be covered include Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism. This course is part of the two-semester sequence of the history of literature in English (along with ENGL 3001) that is required of English majors, but is open to anyone interested in exploring some of the most significant works of literature of the last two-plus centuries. You do not need to have taken ENGL 3001 first; the courses can be completed in any order that works best for you.

ENGL 3025 - African American English

Black English, Negro dialect, Ebonics, Black slang, and African American English Vernacular (AAEV) are just a few of the names that have been used historically to describe the form of communication that occurs among and between many African Americans.  Rickford & Rickford (2000) define AAEV as the informal speech of many African Americans.

Yet, for as long as there have been Africans in America, this form of communication has been assigned the same designation given to individuals who create and have spoken it for generations; inferior and inappropriate.  The belief that AAEV is a derogatory or demeaning manner in which to speak has been ingrained in the psyche of America and Americans.  This ideology has remained intact until recently.

This course examines the communicative practices of AAEV to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse.  AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak.

ENGL 3162 - Chaucer II: Chaucerian Dream Poems

Poetry can produce real bodily experiences—including laughter, tears, heat, taste, a sense of being intensely present—by means of marks on a blank page, even if they were made by someone who’s been dead for hundreds of years. How does it do that? With that question in mind, we’ll read four poems Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about his dreams together with some poems he had read and some short essays on art, dreams, sensory experience, and virtual reality. 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, feminist, and visually overstimulated poems. Dreams seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking about “para-sensory,” virtual experience and its relation to grief, love, and the other passions (the word medieval writers used for “emotions”). We'll be interested in how specific forms of language (image, metaphor, verb tense, and so on) work to produce the cognitive, emotional, and sensory effects of virtual experience. We’ll go slowly, so you can learn to “close read” poetry, and so you’re OK if Chaucer’s Middle English is new to you. There are no pre-requisites except a joy in thinking and a love of language.  This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

ENGL 3260 - Milton

In this course, we will investigate the political, religious, and poetic debates of seventeenth-century England by focusing on a poet who had a habit of inserting himself into the major controversies of his age. In addition to tracing Milton’s career as a poet from his earliest attempts at lyric poetry to his completion of his major works Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, we will read selections from his prose, in which he advocated beheading the king, loosening divorce laws, and abandoning pre-publication censorship. We will debate about how to reconcile Milton’s radicalism with the more backward-looking aspects of his poetry and prose. (He consistently looked to ancient Greece and Rome as political and poetic models. He wrote in genres like the sonnet and the epic that were downright outmoded by the seventeenth century. And he often based his arguments for radical liberties on appeals to reason, truth, and temperance.) As we unravel the peculiar intellectual positions of a poet who stood at the crossroads of antiquity and modernity, we will also attend to what makes him distinctive as a poet, including his ear for the rhythms of verse and his dedication to producing lines that are thick with learned allusions, etymological puns, and interpretive ambiguities. No prior knowledge of Milton or the seventeenth century is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.

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

ENGL 3273 - Shakespeare: Tragedies & Romances

This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  ENGL 3271, the fall semester course, deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies.  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.

Satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the major.  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 3300 - English Literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

In this course, we will read important works in English from what scholars sometimes call “the long eighteenth century,” a period that begins in the middle of the 1600s, since so many things of lasting importance happened then and lasts until at least 1800. We will read works from the British Isles, but also colonial America, which was, after all, a part of Great Britain until the end of the American Revolutionary War. This was an extraordinary period, one that witnessed, among many other things:  a massive expansion of print media that resulted in the emergence of periodical literature and the novel; political revolutions in England, America, France, and Haiti; the intensification of the slave trade and the emergence of an international abolitionist movement. We will read works from authors such as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Olaudah Equiano, Anne Finch, Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Phillis Wheatley.

This course will fulfill the English major requirement for a course in literature between 1700 and 1900. This is also a low-cost course, as our readings will all be found in a digital “anthology” of literature in English that I am collaborating on with students here and faculty at other universities. Requirements: two essays, reading quizzes, midterm and final examinations.

ENGL 3500 - Literary Games

This is a course in “extra-literary” criticism in which English majors and other students are tasked with investigating the ways in which video games are available for literary interpretation. We will read games studies and literary theory, play games, and--take note!--learn to build them. Students will be introduced to the Godot game engine and framework. (No prior experience with programming required.) Our main effort is to check and test literary theory in "defamiliarized" ludic contexts, designing sprites and worlds and complicating traditional intuitions about narrative, characters, and fiction by means of game experiences.

Course enrollment currently set to "Instructor Permission" so that we can build a balanced group of English majors and CS students (double majors to be enthusiastically welcomed). Contact Brad Pasanek and Jason Bennett with any questions!

ENGL 3540 - Dangerous Women

When the phrase “nasty woman” rose to the forefront of our cultural discourse a decade ago, the label rested on a long-standing conception that women can be dangerous just by being women. In this class, we will look at the particular formations of dangerous women that materialized in the nineteenth century, an era in which women simultaneously remained held down by the law and yet unbound by newly possible social roles. Across texts by Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Hardy, among others, we will consider what precisely made women dangerous as well as the other side of the coin: what put women in danger? What forms of female agency, sexuality, or sociability generate power and which engender fear? And what do we make of men’s roles: what does it look like to be a dangerous man or a man in danger? How do nineteenth-century notions of danger reify a gender binary and what are the ways in which this binary breaks down or becomes fluid? By reading texts across genres—some novels, short stories, poems, essays, and a play—we will immerse ourselves in the particular history of gender, fear, and power articulated by nineteenth-century writers while also avidly seeking out points of connection between these Victorian conceptions of dangerous women and those of our own twenty-first century.

This course satisfies the 1700–1900 requirement for the English major, and is also open to non-majors. Students in this course are forewarned that they will be in danger of reading dangerously fascinating texts, and will be expected to generate dangerously fascinating ideas in response.

ENGL 3540 - Global Nineteenth-Century Fiction

In this course we will read novels and short stories (all superb examples of narrative art) drawn from a range of cultures and countries. The overarching goal is to engage with these works not from the perspective of their separate national traditions but with an awareness of the novel as a transnational literary form, bound up in networks of authors and readers stretching around the globe. Likely candidates for the syllabus include Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Vernon Lee (England), George Sand and Honoré de Balzac (France), Mikhail Lermentov (Russia), Multatuli (Denmark), Benito Pérez Galdós (Spain), Machado de Assiz (Brazil), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (India), and Mary Prince (Bermuda). Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English. This course can be used to fulfill the 1700-1900 period requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3559 - Placed and Displaced in America

The history of America is a history of place-making and displacement. Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity—as the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness attest. In this class we’ll critique the “iconic” American places, the ones we brag about, and study the displacement that has characterized our nation since the colonial era—the stories that were long buried, and are still coming to light. We’ll also pay special attention to the placemaking efforts of displaced or marginalized groups—such as Black Americans during the Great Migrations, lgbtq+ communities, immigrants, and survivors of natural disasters such as the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina—who continue to redefine American identity through place-making. To do this we will analyze fiction, journalism, and film, as well as paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture. We may also spend some time looking at archival sources at Special Collections and in online databases. By the end of the semester, you’ll know how to interpret space and place for insights into race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation in America.

ENGL 3559 - Diary Fiction

TR 11:00-12:15
Lorna Martens

Cross-listed with GETR 3559.

Diaries are for intimate secrets? Yes--but not just! People have kept journals for many reasons. There are travel journals and sea logs, records of everyday life, testimonials to alarming events, gossipy accounts of social interactions, notebooks for capturing one's momentary aperçus and ideas, and so forth. Fiction writers, however, have invented many more uses for the diary form than these! The diary's strict yet elastic form (first-person periodic narration) has offered creative writers many intriguing possibilities beyond imitating the styles of real diaries. An ideal outlet for sincere self-expression, for intimate confessions, the fictive diary is also as if made to order for creating an unreliable narrator, one whose views are undercut by the plot. If a second voice is introduced alongside the diarist's monologue, this can destabilize the diarist's account, whereas, conversely, a diarist's truthful account can overthrow a second narrator's misguided opinions. Writing from day to day, a diarist is ignorant of what the future holds. Such blindness toward the future has inspired many writers to use the diary form for suspense stories (e.g., Dracula). In this course we will focus on the ways in which writers have imaginatively exploited the diary's formal features. We will also consider how diary fiction evolved from the late eighteenth century, when the first fictive diaries were written, to the present. We will read several masterpieces of diary fiction--novels--including Sartre's Nausea and Frisch's I'm Not Stiller, and otherwise stories from a brand-new anthology of short diary fiction. Students will have an opportunity to try their hand at writing a diary (easy!) and/or diary fiction.

ENGL 3560 - Modern Poetry

The mid-twentieth century sees a surge in excellent poetry in the United States.  Much of the best of it deals with the question of America. Who are we? Where are we as a nation? Have we gone radically wrong? If so, what can we do (if anything) to right ourselves? Robert Lowell will set the tone for the course, with his reflections on the national condition, culminating in his masterpiece, “For the Union Dead.” We’ll also read Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amy Clampitt, Robert Hayden, and the Jameses: Dickey, Wright, and Merrill. We’ll connect the poets’ vision of America to our current state and see what we might learn from them. There will be a mid-term quiz, a final quiz, and a paper at the end on the poet you care about most.

ENGL 3560 - Fiction in the Age of Modernism

The time period covered in this course is roughly 1890-1960: the age of Modernism in the literatures of Europe and the Americas. We will read novels and short stories from across a range of cultures and countries that explore the question of what makes a work of fiction not just “Modern” but “Modernist.” Likely authors include Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Jean Toomer, Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, Haldor Laxness, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Andrade, Knut Hamsen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nella Larson. Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English

ENGL 3560 - The Literature of Extinction

How do works of modern and contemporary literature respond to species extinction and help us understand the sixth mass extinction the planet may be entering? How has the diminishment of species and biodiversity been thought about and written about in poems, novels, and essays? Where and how do we find evidence of extinctionary pressures in literary texts?

From dodos to whales to insects and de-extinction technologies, this course explores biodiversity loss and species extinctions across genres, time periods, and ecosystems to ask how literature thinks about, records, and represents violence against nonhuman life. We’ll read texts that imagine extinction, grapple with knowledge and feelings around biodiversity decline and species revival, and we'll reframe literature not explicitly ‘about’ extinction as records of widespread impacts on nonhuman life. Assignments are two essays, some shorter pieces of writing, and engaged participation in discussion.

ENGL 3560 - Being Human: Race, Technology, and the Arts

What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV, film, music, art, and literature. In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement, and invisibility. We will think about the various ways that black artists/writers/creators displace or “dimension-shift” the African Diaspora experience to grapple with contemporary and historical issues, and employ science/technology/sci-fi to invent places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, mashups, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. (No artistic talent of experience required)

ENGL 3610 - Global Cultural Studies

Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to our present-day world against the background of its recent past.  Engaging a wide variety of media (film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy, etc.), the course examines conditions and conflicts in China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East.  Urgent social-cultural issues – such as the global plight of refugees, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the campaign for international human rights, the resurgence of religious faith, the crisis of the environment, the rise of authoritarian nationalism, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza – will be nodal points of concern.  At every stage we consider the making of the world since 1945, the pressing difficulties that now confront it, and the fragile state of hope.

ENGL 3690 - Memory Speaks

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 3740 - Intro to Asian American Studies

An interdisciplinary introduction to the culture and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. Examines ethnic communities such as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Native Hawaiian, through themes such as immigration, labor, cultural production, war, assimilation, and politics. Texts are drawn from genres such as legal cases, short fiction, musicals, documentaries, visual art, and drama.

ENGL 3791 - American Cinema

his course provides an introduction to film studies through an examination of American film throughout the 20th & 21st centuries. We will learn basic film techniques for visual analysis, and consider the social, economic, and historical forces that have shaped the production, distribution & reception of film in the US Examples will be drawn from various genres: melodrama, horror, sci-fi, musical, Westerns, war films, documentary, animation, etc.

ENGL 3825 - Desktop Publishing

This course helps you learn how to edit and publish a contemporary book-length project—everything from proofreading manuscripts to graphic design and the publishing process—in both print and reflowable ePub formats. You will learn fundamentals of typesetting projects in Adobe InDesign, the main desktop publishing software used in the publishing industry. The class also gives you a firm grounding in the The Chicago Manual of Style, the dominant style manual used by literary publishers, by having you complete “gates” in an online system. This version of the class is online and asynchronous, which means you will progress through class lessons at your own pace, though you will need to meet class deadlines by uploading project drafts or completing online assignments by specified dates. This class will stress the typesetting and editing of textual projects. Photo collections and graphic-heavy projects are not usually acceptable.

ENGL 3840 - Contemporary Disability Theory

Over the last several decades, thinking about people with physical, cognitive, and sensory differences has moved from a mostly pathological medical-based understanding to a more rights-based framework, although both models persist and overlap.  In this course we will consider how conceptions of disability have (or have not) changed, considering such matters as how a disability is defined; disability in American history; autism and neurodivergence; deaf culture and medical interventions; disability and race, gender, class, and sexual orientation; technology; and much more.  The class will also consider how these theories relate to the depiction of disabled people in literature and film.  Possible texts include Goffman’s Stigma; Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”; Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians; Desai’s Fasting, Feasting; Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings; and the films Unrest and Crip Camp.

The class will feature a range of learning strategies, from whole-class discussion to smaller-group discussion to short lectures.  Requirements will include two papers, quizzes, and active informed participation. 

ENGL 4500 - The Frankenstein Circle

“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 Mary Shelley reminisced about the famous weekend at the Villa Diodati (when she was still 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 (John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, M. G. Lewis, Sir Humphry Davy, Captain James Cook). This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 4520 - Renaissance and Reformation

This course pursues the ramifications of the Reformation and the Renaissance in the poetry, prose, and drama of sixteenth-century England. We will read selections from seminal continental works by Petrarch, Machiavelli, Luther, Erasmus, and Calvin. We will then think about how English writers—including Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Richard Hooker—responded to these authors’ efforts to renovate understandings of politics, piety, and human nature. As we read each work with the utmost care, we will encounter questions such as how free is the will? Are faith and reason reconcilable? Is beauty an obstacle or a spur to higher things? What is the source of corruption (in the church, in the state, and in the individual) and can it be remedied? Is there a difference between a tyrant and a prince? What is the best way to read—does good reading require learning ancient languages or seeking out the original manuscripts? What are the limits of human knowledge, and is it possible to know too much? Readings will include selections from Luther and Erasmus’s debate on free will, Machiavelli’s Prince, Calvin’s Institutes, More’s Utopia, Wyatt’s lyrics and satires, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Defense of Poesy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. No prior knowledge of early modern literature or religion is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.

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

ENGL 4560 - Contemporary Women's Texts

This course takes up recent Anglophone works by women across multiple genres and referencing a range of cultural contexts. Primary texts include visual as well as literary forms. A selection of secondary materials will help to gloss their formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics while giving students a taste of contemporary theory in such areas as gender, queer, and postcolonial studies. Possible works (still to be determined) include fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative by Roz Chast; a play by Annie Baker; experimental, multi-genre works by Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, or Maggie Nelson; a neo-Western film by Kelly Reichardt; images by South African photographer Zanele Muholi. Among our likely concerns will be the juxtaposition of verbal and visual elements in a single text; depictions of queer, raced, immigrant, and transnational subjectivities; narratives that make “truth claims” and how such claims affect the reader; representations of growing up, aging, migration, maternity, violence, marriage, creativity, diverse sexualities, and work; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of place, generation, class, and race. One project of the course will be to explore its own premise that “women’s texts” is a useful and meaningful category. Two papers and a final exam. This course is intended for 3rd- and 4th-year English majors or other advanced students with a background in literary/cultural/gender studies.

ENGL 4560 - American Novels, American Controversies

When novels are published, they enter the public sphere, joining in the whole buzzing cacophony of contemporary culture. Often, novels step into ongoing public discussions about things that are not novels – political issues, contemporary developments in the social world, ideas about history, social inequality, scientific advances, and the like. Novels do this in a wide variety of ways, but, always, they operate through the specific formal characteristics of the novel (plot, character, narrative, the premise of fiction, etc.) and carry with them the distinctive history of the novel as a genre. In this course, we’ll consider contemporary U.S. novels that explicitly take up current issues in the public sphere. We’ll read these novels on their own terms, but also in the context of two other genres:  contemporary non-fiction on the same issues and literary criticism on the form and history of the novel. We’ll ask, what are the distinctive ways in which novels add to public discussion? By the way, I chose novels that meet two requirements. First, they have received a great deal of critical attention and acclaim, meaning that we can consider them to be novels with a hearty public presence. Second, I select only novels I find aesthetically compelling and intellectually enchanting, because one way that novels engage the public is by grabbing readers’ interest.

ENGL 4561 - Poetry in a Global Age

In this seminar, we explore world poetry in English. To understand the global dimensions of modern and contemporary poetry, we closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and Indigenous and diasporic America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic techniques of the global North. Issues to be discussed include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement; global challenges such as war and the climate crisis; and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.

ENGL 4561 - The Queer Novel

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, Alison Bechdel, Tove Jansson, Ocean Vuong, and Rabih Alemaddine, 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, and Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz.  An occasional 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 fulfills the Modern and Global Studies seminar requirement for English majors in that concentration.

ENGL 4570 - James Baldwin

This course focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discussions on race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Just Above My Head; plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie; selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man; essays from Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street; and the children’s book Little Man Little Man. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. We’ll also address a some of Baldwin’s most crucial intellectual dialogues, including with Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Lorraine Hansberry, William F. Buckley, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. We’ll also study films important to Baldwin’s legacy, including Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro and Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, academy award winner for best feature film. Assignments include: several short response essays, two critical essays, one team-led class discussion, and a term research paper

ENGL 4570 - Caribbean Latinx Literature

We will explore novels, plays, short stories and poems by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. While these writers’ genealogies emerge from these island countries, we will analyze how their lives in NYC, Jersey, Boston and Miami impact how they narrate the Latinx experience as situated between the US and their home countries in the Caribbean. All readings, discussions and assignments are in English.

ENGL 4590 - From Austen to Morrison: Great House Fiction

The great house of English literature is a house most everyone knows: pictured imposingly on the cover of English paperbacks, setting the magnificent scene from the summit of a green lawn in BBC and Hollywood frame shots, serving as stage for plots of romance and intrigue in countless novels. Though always a site of inequality—the affluent “upstairs” and the servants “downstairs”—and though treated recently with strong irony and critique, it is nevertheless embraced by English literary culture as ours, indigenous, part of the landscape.

In American literature, not so. Founded on the dream of breaking away from the house of the Old World, U.S. literature tends to treat the very fact of a big, impressive house as in and of itself an affront, an edifice built on exploitation, not our house at all, but an outrage on the American landscape. From this beginning developed a long literary history of suspect, spooky, even downright evil American houses, from the enslaving plantation house to the haunted house that is itself a murderer, as well as a contemporary sub-genre that treats the great American house as a morally reclaimable fixer-upper.

This course will take up fiction and film that demonstrates the literary topos of the great house in transformation, a figure for nations changing in time. We will study and write about short fiction, novels and novel excerpts, and four films by (or adapting) some of the following authors: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwen, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, Gish Jen, Maria Semple, Mat Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joe Talbot/Jimmie Fails. Requirements include active reading and participation, 20 pages of writing divided into two papers, frequent short Canvas posts, and a group leading of one class. This course meets the second writing requirement.

ENGL 4902 - The Bible Part 2: The New Testament

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the New Testament; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 1: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman.

Satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the major. 

ENGL 5060 - The Sonnet Revised & Revisited

“A chamber of sudden change”; “a meeting place of image and voice”; “a game with mortal stakes”; “the collision of music, desire and argument”: these are some of the ways that poets and critics have described the sonnet. Starting with the Petrarchan experiments of Renaissance Europe and extending our reach through the Romantics and the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Kiki Petrosino, Terrance Hayes, and others, we will consider the persistence and the many metamorphoses of the form. Sonnet writers construct a “a moment’s monument” for religious, political, philosophical and meta-poetical purposes as well as to anatomize desire, and when they present sonnets in sequence they make lyric do something of the work of narrative. Every time a sonnet is written, its author becomes part of a very long literary conversation and may make that intervention the occasion to set thought and feeling in a new dialogue, to reconsider “the contradictory impulses of being in the world,” to talk back to tradition, to make the dead speak again, to re-make and re-break the rules of form. Exploring the history, poetics (and the race and gender politics) of this tenacious short form, we will consider the craftiness of craft and the particular power of “bound language.” In addition to addressing a wide selection of sonnets written from the 16th century to yesterday, we will also read critical writings on the sonnet by a variety of scholars and poets.

Requirements: lively participation in discussion; a series of discussion board responses to readings, one 6-7 page paper; a presentation on a contemporary sonnet of your own choice; a substantial final project (critical or hybrid creative-critical).

This course can satisfy the pre-1700 requirement for PhD, MA and undergraduate students: contact instructor for more information.

ENGL 5190 - The Bible 

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Stephen Cushman

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 literature requirement.

ENGL 5500 - Milton & Whitman 

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Mark Edmundson

We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in English, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. (Though he is constantly challenging them.) His world at its best is firmly, yet flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in “Song of Myself.” We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where their allegiances lie. With any luck, we’ll all find ourselves, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.” A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments.

ENGL 5510 - Introduction to Old Norse

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, Viking Language, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating bits of prose and poetry (The Prose Edda, Egils Saga, et al.)  as supplied in the textbook. After midterms, we will translate The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field today, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

This course fulfills the pre-1700 literature requirement.

ENGL 5530 - The Literature of British Abolition c. 1750-1810

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 - TASTE: Textual, Accessible, Sustainable, Teachable, Experimental 

TR 9:30AM-10:45AM
Alison Booth

This seminar is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in any humanities area or major. No prior experience in digital studies or coding is expected; the tech-adverse need not fear. Our focus is textual studies of post-1800 literature in English. Students may design their coursework to fulfill the course requirement “from 1700 to 1900,” while some of our texts will be post-1900. TASTE fulfills an elective for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH), but the course will be accessible or teachable to anyone who likes to read or edit closely and who is curious to experiment. Sustainable, like accessible, has several meanings: in the environment as well as in DH (will it last?). Some literature is sustained (canonical) because taste (then or now) tells us to reread it and help make it more accessible. Something that we cannot dispute (personal taste) is deeply political and changeable.

With a cue from our acronym, we will read selected sources about taste: as aesthetic concept; as class and gender code; as racial/ethnographic/international divide; as connection between the body and cultural history; as related to property/propriety of sexuality. Among our aims is to cultivate our taste for written descriptions of interior decoration, fashion, food and dining, as well as people, buildings, and landscapes. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis; selected poetry from different contexts (prospects; country houses; beloveds), including African American and from former British colonies; short stories (some classics like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carver’s “Cathedral”); a unit on consumer culture including foodways. One short, one longer essay; frequent short assignments on texts; a class presentation; participation in a joint project on passages in the ~400 analyzed short biographies of women in Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women as they reveal biographers’ evaluations of historic women related to taste.

Texts have not been ordered at the bookstore; part of our project will be identifying and working with library and online sources and comparing editions.

ENGL 5559 - Latinx Literature & the Americas

In this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in its Americas context. Such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry will be read. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding literature, language, departmental/field placement, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Fourth-years welcome with permission. All readings, writings, and discussions are in English.

ENGL 5580 - Material Culture: Theories and Methods

ENGL 5580 - Intro to Textual Criticism & Scholarly Editing

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

The course will deal with such concerns and will include:

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.*

ENCW 7310 - MFA Poetry Workshop

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Rita Dove

In this graduate-level workshop, designed for MFA poets in the first two years of the program, students will continue developing their own writing practices while exploring other compositional and critical techniques. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated poetry, but we’ll also discuss published works by established writers and other aspects of the creative process. In addition, we will examine what it means to “manage” a writer’s life, with particular emphasis on writing routines as well as exploring ways to probe, massage and coax poems into revealing their secrets. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions in addition to polishing their own writing. All students will be required to complete one “wild card” assignment; both first and second-year MFA students will assemble a portfolio of poetry at semester's end.

ENCW 7610 - MFA Fiction Workshop

M 02:00PM-04:30PM
Jesse Ball

This advanced workshop is designed for first- and second-year graduate students in the Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction program.  Enrollment is by instructor permission only. 

ENGL 5060 - The Sonnet Revised & Revisited

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Clare Kinney

“A chamber of sudden change”; “a meeting place of image and voice”; “a game with mortal stakes”; “the collision of music, desire and argument”: these are some of the ways that poets and critics have described the sonnet. Starting with the Petrarchan experiments of Renaissance Europe and extending our reach through the Romantics and the modernists to Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Kiki Petrosino, Terrance Hayes, and others, we will consider the persistence and the many metamorphoses of the form. Sonnet writers construct a “a moment’s monument” for religious, political, philosophical and meta-poetical purposes as well as to anatomize desire, and when they present sonnets in sequence they make lyric do something of the work of narrative. Every time a sonnet is written, its author becomes part of a very long literary conversation and may make that intervention the occasion to set thought and feeling in a new dialogue, to reconsider “the contradictory impulses of being in the world,” to talk back to tradition, to make the dead speak again, to re-make and re-break the rules of form. Exploring the history, poetics (and the race and gender politics) of this tenacious short form, we will consider the craftiness of craft and the particular power of “bound language.” In addition to addressing a wide selection of sonnets written from the 16th century to yesterday, we will also read critical writings on the sonnet by a variety of scholars and poets.

Requirements: lively participation in discussion; a series of discussion board responses to readings, one 6-7 page paper; a presentation on a contemporary sonnet of your own choice; a substantial final project (critical or hybrid creative-critical).

This course can satisfy the pre-1700 requirement for PhD, MA and undergraduate students: contact instructor for more information.

ENGL 5190 - The Bible

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Stephen Cushman

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through selections from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the Bible; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible needed or assumed.

ENGL 5500 - Milton & Whitman 

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
Mark Edmundson

We’ll read with care and imagination what are perhaps the two greatest long poems in English, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Both are works of palpable genius, but of very different kinds. Milton’s poem is committed to hierarchy, order and degree. In his cosmos, justified subordination and command are the highest ideals. (Though he is constantly challenging them.) His world at its best is firmly, yet flexibly ordered. He is a brilliant exemplar of true conservatism. Whitman is much different. “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams,” Walt chants. Whitman wants to dissolve all needless boundaries in the interest of perfect democratic equality. He wants to undo the barriers between old and young, rich and poor, women and men. And he does so, at least imaginatively, in “Song of Myself.” We’ll read the poems for what they are in themselves. But we’ll also consider them as brilliant exemplars of the progressive mind and its conservative counterpart. Students may be surprised as to where their allegiances lie. With any luck, we’ll all find ourselves, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “more truly and more strange.” A mid-term paper, a final essay, and some short writing assignments.

ENGL 5510 - Introduction to Old Norse

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Stephen Hopkins

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, Viking Language, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating bits of prose and poetry (The Prose Edda, Egils Saga, et al.)  as supplied in the textbook. After midterms, we will translate The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field today, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

ENGL 5530 - The Literature of British Abolition c. 1750-1810

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
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 - TASTE: Textual, Accessible, Sustainable, Teachable, Experimental 

TR 9:30AM-10:45AM
Alison Booth

This seminar is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in any humanities area or major. No prior experience in digital studies or coding is expected; the tech-adverse need not fear. Our focus is textual studies of post-1800 literature in English. Students may design their coursework to fulfill the course requirement “from 1700 to 1900,” while some of our texts will be post-1900. TASTE fulfills an elective for the graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities (DH), but the course will be accessible or teachable to anyone who likes to read or edit closely and who is curious to experiment. Sustainable, like accessible, has several meanings: in the environment as well as in DH (will it last?). Some literature is sustained (canonical) because taste (then or now) tells us to reread it and help make it more accessible. Something that we cannot dispute (personal taste) is deeply political and changeable.

With a cue from our acronym, we will read selected sources about taste: as aesthetic concept; as class and gender code; as racial/ethnographic/international divide; as connection between the body and cultural history; as related to property/propriety of sexuality. Among our aims is to cultivate our taste for written descriptions of interior decoration, fashion, food and dining, as well as people, buildings, and landscapes. Readings will include Jane Austen’s Persuasion; Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis; selected poetry from different contexts (prospects; country houses; beloveds), including African American and from former British colonies; short stories (some classics like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Carver’s “Cathedral”); a unit on consumer culture including foodways. One short, one longer essay; frequent short assignments on texts; a class presentation; participation in a joint project on passages in the ~400 analyzed short biographies of women in Alison Booth’s Collective Biographies of Women as they reveal biographers’ evaluations of historic women related to taste.

Texts have not been ordered at the bookstore; part of our project will be identifying and working with library and online sources and comparing editions.

ENGL 5559 - Latinx Literature & the Americas

M 03:30PM-06:00PM
Carmen Lamas

In this course we will read works that situate the Latinx experience in its Americas context. Such genres as the memoir, speculative fiction, romance, YA, graphic novels, historical fiction and poetry will be read. Issues such as border crossing, immigration, and deportation will serve to approach and query Latinidad in/from its many historical, geographic, generic, aesthetic, and political manifestations. We will locate these works in the wider debates regarding literature, language, departmental/field placement, and the interdisciplinary nature of Latinx studies. No prior experience reading Latinx literature is necessary. Fourth-years welcome with permission. All readings, writings, and discussions are in English.

ENGL 5580 - Material Culture: Theories and Methods

R 05:00PM-07:30PM
Lisa Goff

“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, and political theorist Jane Bennett. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.

ENGL 5580 - Intro to Textual Criticism & Scholarly Editing

F 09:30AM-12:00PM
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 8005 - Intro to Environmental Humanities

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
Adrienne Ghaly

How do the arts and the humanities contribute to conversations about the environment and the fate of our planet? How are they responding to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans (some more than others) shape Earth systems? This course introduces the questions, methods, and arguments that organize work in the environmental humanities (EH). The seminar’s primary objective to is to advance graduate student capacities to use skills, knowledges, tools, and archives of the humanities to advance pluralist, integrated understandings of environmental issues. In support of that purpose, the seminar develops critical reflection on conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions in EH about disciplinarity, collaboration, innovation, and public engagement. The course materials draw from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, history, anthropology, and religion. This graduate seminar is open to MA and PhD students from any discipline, including the sciences and social sciences. 

This class is collaborative by design, with guest speakers from across UVA presenting over the course of the semester. It also fulfills one of the requirements for the graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities (info can be found here).  

ENGL 8262 - Edmund Spenser in Faery Land

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
Elizabeth Fowler

The extreme art of the settler-colonial frontier—stringent, searching, terrifying, ambitious, violent, feminist, fantastic, surreal, comic—Spenser's poetry and prose, almost all written in Ireland, has provoked much of the best work by early modernists over the last three decades. We'll attempt immersive reading, make forays into the work of the in-progress Oxford Spenser edition, and grapple with problems poetic, editorial, theoretical, ecological, aesthetic, moral, historical, and jurisprudential. Spenser is soaked in Malory, Chaucer, Vergil, Homer, Aristotle—and English-language authors in all the ensuing centuries are soaked in him, Shakespeare to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Yet where else can you get a dominant female knight, an elusive queen of faerie, queer sex scenes of many variations, a dragon who vomits books, joyous rivers in hats getting married, the invention of the words “self” and “emotion,” cannibals singing Petrarchan blazons, and a sex-positive, anatomically correct Mound of Venus? (BTW, Milton says Spenser is a better teacher than Aquinas, and was he ever wrong?) Our goals will be to collaborate on a working sense of Spenser’s poetry and its bibliography, to get good at immersion in lots of material while keeping what’s important to you above the waterline, to become articulate about poetry and able to move around within it while developing interesting trains of thought, and to hone all those skills both in seminar conversation and in your prose.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

ENGL 8500 - Oceanic Connections: Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds

T 03:30PM-06:00PM
Debjani Ganguly

The course will explore the emergence of the ‘ocean’ as a powerful rubric in global and hemispheric literary studies. The fluidity of the ocean as against terrestrial borders gives new meaning to categories like empire, diaspora, postcolonial, slave, settler, and indentured labor.

Through novels, philosophical tracts, and theories of history, we will study the import of the transatlantic slave trade and its traumatic entanglement with global histories of modern maritime colonialism including those of Indian Ocean worlds. Specifically, we will trace connections across the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds through the novels of Barry Unsworth, Fred D’Aguiar, and Amitav Ghosh, and the narrative non-fiction of Paul Gilroy. The course will include excerpts from the work of Edouard Glissant, the famous exponent of Caribbean Creolite, from an anthology of black narratives that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade, and from Ian Baucom’s philosophical history of the Zong massacre of 1781.

Primary Texts

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic

Readings available on Canvas

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic  

Vincent Caretta ed. Unchained Voices 

ENGL 8500 - Black Women's Rhetorics

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Tamika Carey

This seminar explores Black women’s rhetorical practices as a critical tradition. Through an interdisciplinary lens grounded in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies scholarship and informed by work in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and literary criticism, we will work to identify the techne, the praxis, and the implications of Black women’s choice to use written, visual, and aural strategies to shape and reshape themselves and their worlds. By necessity, we will consider questions such as: how do Black women define and name conditions of their subjectivity and the constraints to their public participation and livelihood? What is the connection between Black feminist thought and Black women’s literacies? Which genres, arguments, and strategies do they rely upon to address personal or sociopolitical concerns? And what might Black feminist/womanist rhetorical criticism or pedagogy involve? Ideally, this work will enable us to outline how Black women’s rhetorics operate as interpretive, interventionist, and instructional resources. Our readings will involve a combination of primary texts and critical writings. The scholars and public intellectuals we are likely to engage include: Jacqueline Jones Royster, Marcyliena Morgan, Elaine Richardson, Gwendolyn Pough, Carmen Kynard, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, and Moya Bailey. Assignments may include: a discussion leading and course presentation activity, short weekly writing assignments, a brief annotated bibliography, and a seminar-length essay.

ENGL 8540 - Race-Making and Romanticism

R 03:30PM-06:00PM
Taylor Schey

This course explores how British literature of the Romantic era (1780s – 1820s) registers and participates in processes of race-making that have shaped the modern world. Taking our cue from theoretical readings in Black studies, we’ll investigate how the racial order of chattel slavery was insidiously strengthened during the historical period in which its economic infrastructure began to be dismantled. While we’ll study some poems and novels that directly address the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (e.g. abolitionist poetry; The Woman of Colour; Mansfield Park) and a couple that reflect the popularization of racial science (e.g. Frankenstein), we’ll be especially interested in interrogating how the development of seemingly unrelated political movements (e.g. white feminism; popular radicalism), literary conventions (e.g. the ballad revival; the aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque), and Romantic ideals (e.g. community, liberty, the power of poetry, the human) are connected to the broader consolidation of antiblackness and white-supremacist logics in the nineteenth century. This seminar satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement. It also introduces students to an influential tradition of theoretical work in Black studies.

Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth; theorists include Rizvana Bradley, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Rei Terada, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson, and Sylvia Wynter.

ENGL 8560 - Poetry in a Global Age

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
Jahan Ramazani

How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar, we consider modern and contemporary poetry in English in relation to transnational, global, world literary, and postcolonial theory and history. Issues to be explored include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement, global challenges such as war and the climate crisis, and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. We closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and diasporic and Indigenous America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic inheritances of the global North. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay.

ENGL 8560 - Caribbean Sci-Fi and Fantasy

M 05:00PM-07:30PM
Njelle Hamilton

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, or imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this seminar, however, you will encounter authors and auteurs (Indiana, Hopkinson, Ross, Diaz, et al) from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels and stories that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. We’ll read these novels and stories alongside important Caribbean and SF theory and criticism (expect roughly 300-500pp/wk of reading) to generate critical discussion around the limits of mainstream terms and discourses in SFF and formulate region-specific language and frameworks.

In addition to exposing you to Caribbean literary studies, critical debates and methods, this course encourages you to deepen as well as experiment with modes of academic scholarship. In tandem with the ways these Caribbean SFF texts interrogate form and narrative—especially in response to colonization and the hegemony of Western epistemologies—I’ll challenge/inspire you to think about un-disciplining academic writing. What projects might you imagine that match the level of #joysparking that reading these novels bring you, and that demonstrate Caribbean study as praxis? For whom will you write? What platforms, technologies and formats do those readers/listeners/thinkers frequent? How can scholarly writing (or other formats of disseminating research) become an act of radical speculation in its own right?

ENGL 8596 - Form and Theory of Poetry: What is Lyric? 

W 02:00PM-04:30PM
Sumita Chakraborty

Lyric poem, lyric voice, lyric speaker, lyric reading: these and other similar terms share one strange, variously theorized, and often-contested word at their core. This course will explore a range of theories of the lyric from Aristotle and Horace to more contemporary figures like Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and the scholars who make up the recent turn to “New Lyric Studies.” We will also explore how poetic schools that critique the lyric—such as conceptual poetry and language poetry—define and contest it. MA, MFA, and PhD students are all most welcome, as the assignments for this course will include both creative and critical options.

ENGL 8598 - Form and Theory of Fiction: The Short Story 

T 02:00PM-04:30PM
Kevin Moffett

A foray into the short story as a discrete form, its constraints and possibilities. We’ll consider how story writers distill time and compress language to generate volatility and produce resonant echoes in a confined space. We’ll discuss Poe’s single effect and other apparent truisms and entertain, examine, revise, and perhaps debunk them. We’ll read minimalists, maximalists, and mediumalists, the formulaic and the formally inventive. Texts will be chosen with the aim of showing the plasticity and playfulness of the form: possibly Chekhov, Angela Carter, Barthelme, Murakami, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams. From week to week students will read and write briskly in a variety of modes, culminating in a story project in the second half of the semester.

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

T 06:00PM-08:30PM
Heidi Nobles

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

W 10:00AM-12:30PM
Steph Ceraso

ENGL 8900 - Writing Pedagogy Seminar

Jeb Livingood

ENGL 9580 - Queer Theory

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
Mrinalini Chakravorty

This graduate course is a survey of queer studies as a discipline. It situates the emergence of sexuality as an analytic of study for the humanities through a survey of influential foundational texts of the field. The course also engages the most important contemporary debates that is shaping our understanding of the history of sexuality.

ENGL 9995 - Dissertation Seminar

M 09:30AM-12:00PM
Bruce Holsinger

ENCW 5310-001: Advanced Poetry Writing II - Poets' Memoirs

ENCW 7310-001: MFA Poetry Workshop

ENCW 7610-001: MFA Fiction Workshop