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.*