For graduate-level courses, click here.
For Summer 2023 courses, click here.
* indicates courses that count towards the Pre-1700 requirement for the English major.
** indicates courses that count towards the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.
Creative Writing
ENCW 2300 - Poetry Writing (9 sections)
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ENCW 2560-001 - Literary Science Fiction
Jeb Livingood
ENCW 2600 - Fiction Writing (7 sections)
TBA
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ENCW 3310-001 - Intermediate Poetry Writing
Amber McBride
A weekly 2.5-hour once-weekly class for students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2300. Emphasis is on workshop of students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Focus on revision and final poetry portfolio required.
Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class.
ENCW 3350-001 - Intermediate Nonfiction
Anna Beecher
Please apply in SIS and (unless you are in the APLP) email am2aw@virginia.edu with a 5 page sample of your creative writing and a few lines about why this course interests you.
Creative nonfiction invites us to activate our curiosity, examine the texture of our lives, uncover meaning in the chaos of experience, question reality, cultivate empathy and become braver thinkers. Expect to create original work in this class, to receive feedback and to read and discuss essays, memoir, literary journalism, imaginative biography and other forms.
This workshop is for students with some experience of creative writing who have already taken 2000 level ENCW classes.
ENCW 3559-001 - Story Telling and Performance Texts
Anna Beecher
This course is for students with experience of writing creatively, interested in writing fiction and other texts to be spoken aloud, embodied and shared with others in real time. Over the semester you will develop original stories, work on putting them ‘up on their feet’ in performance and explore how liveness and orality can challenge, shape and invigorate writing. We will also touch upon the oral roots of literature, reading works such as the 1001 Nights and the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm and the texts they have inspired. We will read, watch and discuss works of fiction, live-art, narrative comedy, spoken word and drama. You may be a fiction writer, interested in how spoken stories could attune your ear for language and narrative pattern, or writer and performer interested in marrying those two passions. Performance experience is not a requirement for this class, but a willingness to explore performance in a supportive atmosphere is essential.
Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (5-10 pages) and a brief statement (1 page max) about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu.
ENCW 3610-001 - Intermediate Fiction Writing
Anna Beecher
For students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2600. Involves workshop of student work, craft discussions, and relevant reading. May be repeated with different instructor.
Instructor permission required.
ENCW 3610-003 - Intermediate Fiction Writing
TBA
For students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2600. Involves workshop of student work, craft discussions, and relevant reading. May be repeated with different instructor.
Instructor permission required.
ENCW 4550-001 - Literary Prose Seminar: Novellas, Very Short Novels, Very Long stories
TBA
ENCW 4810-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing I
Jane Alison
INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED: please send a note and a brief writing sample to jas2ad@virginia.edu.
ENCW 4820-001 - Poetry Program Poetics: The Poetics of Ecstasy
Lisa Spaar
The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance—literally, “standing elsewhere.” In this seminar class designed for students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing (APPW), serious makers and readers of poems will explore the poetry of fervor—erotic, visionary, somatic, negative, social, religious, mystical. When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? We will read widely and deeply across cultures and time, including work by Dickinson, Carson, Hopkins, Sappho, Keats, Rilke, Mirabai, Rumi, Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Teare, Hwang, and other ancient, modern, and contemporary writers who have explored the experience of being beside one’s self in the transport of ecstasy. Key & related texts may include readings from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lost Notebooks, and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. Students not in the APPW may request permission to enroll and will be considered on a space-available basis.
All students, APPW and otherwise, should request enrollment through SIS and via email to Lisa Russ Spaar ( LRS9E@virginia.edu).
ENCW 4830-001 - Advanced Poetry Writing I
Debra Nystrom
This workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry, and it welcomes students working in the poetry/prose hybrid space as well. 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 keep a poetry journal, to attend several poetry readings, to turn in close-reading responses to three assigned readings, and to participate in a group presentation.
Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class. Please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including 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. Nystrom at dln8u@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis as soon as registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The final deadline will be noon, August 1. Classes do sometimes fill before the final submission deadline, but an effort will be made to hold space for transfer and study abroad students. The instructor will let all applicants know by late August.
ENCW 5610-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing II - VARIATIONS ON GRIMM'S TALES
T 02:00PM-04:30PM (BRN 233)
Jesse Ball (Kapnick Distinguished Visiting Writer)
English Literature
ENGL 2500-001 - Intro to Literary Studies
Victor Luftig
ENGL 2502-001 - Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
Elizabeth Fowler
ENGL 2506-001 - Studies in Poetry: Lyric Designs
Clare Kinney
“A poem freezes life, yanks a bit out of life's turbulent stream, and holds it up squirming for view, framed by the white margins of the page. Poetry is an art of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur” (Diane Ackerman). That’s just one poet’s definition of her own art, just one of many starting points students in this seminar will use in expanding their enjoyment and understanding of poetry. Readings will be varied and provocative and will range widely across many centuries as the class addresses the multifarious ways in which writers can create “infinite riches in a little room” (or, alternatively, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”). We’ll talk about poetic form, about the creation of voice and tone, about the audiences poems imagine for themselves, about the power of imagery, about the ways in which poetry can seduce, beguile, argue, deceive, protest, celebrate and console. We will, I hope, end up intoxicated by the possibilities of language. At the same time, class members will hone their analytical and critical skills and learn how to write thoughtfully and persuasively about literature.
Course requirements: ideally, wit, passion and intelligence. Regular attendance and enthusiastic participation in class discussion (non-negotiable); two 3 page papers; two 6 page papers; some informal e-mail “response postings”; an in-class presentation; final examination
ENGL 2506-002 - Contemporary Poetry
Jahan Ramazani
ENGL 2506-003 - Introduction to Poetry
Walter Jost
ENGL 2508-001 - Medical Narratives
Anna Brickhouse
ENGL 2508-002 - Virginia Woolf
Stephen Arata
ENGL 2508-003 - American Environmental Fiction
Mary Kuhn
ENGL 2508-005 - The Novel of Upbringing
James Kinney
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; Michael Malone, Handling Sin. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.
ENGL 2599-001 - Gothic Forms
Cynthia Wall
ENGL 2599-002 - Comedy and Character
Rebecca Rush
In this course, we will meditate on the craft of comic character-making from Chaucer to Dickens. Readings will include selected Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Dickens’s David Copperfield. We will consider how each writer approaches character from a distinctive angle and how each has a different vision of what kinds of details are needed to build a character piece by verbal piece. Which aspects of characters does each author consider worth representing or describing? How can an author use a small thing like a name (Malvolio), a piece of clothing (fine scarlet red hose), or a repeated phrase (“Barkis is willin’”) to hint at something so inward and complex as character? How do comic writers use exaggeration and caricature not only to entertain us but to reveal something about human habits we might otherwise be unable to see? How do they use ensemble casts of major and minor characters to depict an array of humors and habits? When and why do they withhold insights into character or cast doubt on our ability to understand the inner lives of others? No prior knowledge of literature is required; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read slowly, attentively, and with a dictionary at hand.
ENGL 2599-003 - Protest Literature
Amber McBride
ENGL 2599-004 - Landscapes of Black Education
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Nau 241)
Ian Grandison
Field Trip: Sat. 10/14 - 11AM-3PM (Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in Charlottesville)
This course examines how seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us, “landscapes,” are involved in the struggle to democratize education in the United States. It uses the African American experience in this arena to anchor the exploration. We explore how landscape is implicated in the secret prehistory of Black education under enslavement; the promise of public education during Reconstruction; Booker T. Washington’s accommodation during early Jim Crow; black college campus rebellions of the 1920s; the impact of Brown v. Board of Education; the rise of black studies programs at majority campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the resonance of Jim Crow assumptions affecting education access in our current moment. We also touch on the experience of other marginalized groups. For example, women’s college campuses, such as those of Mount Holyoke and Smith College, were designed to discipline women to accept prescribed gender roles at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. Armed with this background, on Saturday 14 October, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET, there will be a required field trip to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and its setting in downtown Charlottesville. This was the site of Charlottesville’s first public elementary and later high school for African Americans. Some of the materials we study include excerpts from the following: Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Raymond Wolters’ The New Negro on Campus, and James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South. Films include Peter Gilbert's With All Deliberate Speed. We’ll explore interpreting historical and contemporary maps, plans, and other design- and planning-related materials to help develop the ability to interrogate landscapes critically. Graded assignments include two midterms, a team research project, a final team project symposium, and an individual critical reflection on the team project. There will be a number of informal in-class and take home exercises connected especially with developing skills in preparation for the midterms, field trip, and final project.
ENGL 2910-001 - Point of View Journalism
Lisa Goff
ENGL 3001-100 - History of Literature in English I
Bruce Holsinger
The past is another country: they do things differently there. Or do they? Be prepared for the shock of the old—and for its pleasures—as we explore examples of epic and romance, lyric poetry and drama, prose fiction and satire in a course whose range stretches from the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf to some variously revolutionary 17th and 18th century works of the imagination. The one sure thing connecting this huge variety of “makings,” these shapings of other people's experiences and beliefs and fantasies, is that someone (somewhere, sometime) felt them important enough to put down in writing and therefore created the possibility for their persistence beyond their own historical moment. Come and meet some heroic survivors!
Course requirements: attentive engagement with lectures; regular attendance at/lively participation in discussion sections; two 6 page papers, midterm examination; comprehensive final examination.
ENGL 3010-001 - History of English Language
Stephen Hopkins
Did you know that King Alfred the Great "axed" questions? And that in Old English, double and even triple negatives were the norm? Language is always changing, and English is no exception. This course will introduce basic linguistic concepts while we explore the history of the English language across a range of contexts. We will journey through the history of the language, learning about its linguistic nuts and bolts, as well as how language and culture interact with each other in the past and present by sampling literature from each era. Topics to be covered: what is grammatical gender? Is English harder or easier than other languages? Why did our pronouns change (then and now)? Why is English spelling such a mess? Why and how do words die? Where do new words come from? Is “bad English” really a thing? Our guides on this journey will be Seth Lerer, Inventing English and Smith and Kim, This Language, A River (supplemented with additional material posted on our course website). Words can shape the world, but the reverse is true, too. By the end of the semester, you will have a good grip on how our language got where it is now, but you will also understand why people have the attitudes toward language use that they do.
*ENGL 3162-001 - Chaucer II: Chaucerian Dream Poems
Elizabeth Fowler
*RELC 3181 - Medieval Christianity: Thomas Aquinas
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Brooks 103)
Kevin Hart
This lecture course offers a general introduction to the writings and thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), the pre-eminent Catholic theologian and one of the greatest thinkers of the middle ages. His influence is extensive; it embraces many Protestants as well as most Catholics. It’s simply impossible to understand many writers, from Dante to T. S. Eliot, without knowing Aquinas. Students will read a mixture of Aquinas’s treatises and his almost unknown popular writings. Among the popular writings will be Aquinas’s explanation of the Lord’s Prayer and his exposition of the Apostle’s Creed; and among the treatises will be readings in all three parts of the Summa theologiæ. Students will have the opportunity to compare Aquinas on the same topics (Trinity and sacraments) in the Summa theologiæ and in less well-known works. What did Aquinas say about aesthetics (especially his teachings about beauty, pleasure and play), about God, about the sacraments, and about love? How does he work rhetorically when preaching and commenting on Scripture? Are there ways in which Aquinas can help us be better readers of medieval literature? These are some of the questions we shall consider.
*ENGL 3271-100 - Shakespeare: Histories & Comedies
Katharine Maus
Discussion sections TBD.
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.
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.
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 3275-001 - History of Drama I
John Parker
The first third of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, then moving from there to the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence and Seneca. The next third of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) this pagan tradition after the Christianization of the Roman empire, including liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, biblical drama and farce. The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
A major goal of the course will be to answer some of the questions posed by historical period: what does it mean, in the context of this particular genre, to move from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Renaissance? How seriously should we take the differences between paganism and Christianity? What portion of early modern drama derives from classical antiquity, what portion from the Middle Ages, and what portion, if any, is new?
**ENGL 3380-001 - The English Novel I
Alison Hurley
Today classes like this one elevate novels to the status of serious literature. During the eighteenth century, however, the novel was not just a new and thus culturally illegitimate genre, it was a dangerous one as well: seductive, subversive, addictive, and unruly. No wonder it was so popular! But despite their reputation as merely popular and mostly valueless cultural productions, early novels grappled with serious questions about the experience of living in an increasingly secular, mobile, and literate society. How can, and why should, a book make the everyday lives of ordinary individuals matter? Does sympathizing with fictional characters lead to virtue or vice? What is the difference between fiction and fraud? Wonderfully contentious conversations developed among eighteenth-century novelists about how best to answer questions such as these. Our work will be to revive these conversations, and hopefully, come to a better understanding of how they propelled the novel towards becoming the dominant literary genre of the modern world.
Class requirements include a minimum of 15 discussion posts, frequent reading quizzes, two essays, and a final exam. Because our classes will be largely discussion based, keeping up with assigned readings will be crucial to your learning and enjoyment.
**ENGL 3480-001 - The English Novel II
Stephen Arata
ENGL 3500-002 - Climate Fiction
Mary Kuhn
ENGL 3500-003 - Faust
Jeffrey Grossman
Goethe's Faust has been called an “atlas of European modernity” and “one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history.” The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes: “As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not. Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice.”
Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age. Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and possibly one of the various other popular re-workings of the text. We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and II (part II, either in its entirety or in excerpts). Although now viewed as central to the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform the central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society. Beyond Goethe, we will study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality, and guilt. And we will venture into the twentieth- century, reading texts that re-worked the Faust legend in response to authoritarian politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which wrestles with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust. We will also consider F.W. Murnau's film version of Faust and may consider Faust works in other media (e.g., music, painting).
*ENGL 3520-001 - New Philosophy & Renaissance Literature
James Kinney
*ENGL 3520-002 - Metaphysical Poets
Rebecca Rush
**ENGL 3545-001 - US Lit and Social Justice
Victoria Olwell
ENGL 3559-001 - Memory Speaks
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 485)
Lorna Martens
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 3560-002 - James Joyce's Ulysses
Victor Luftig
If you are reading this, you’ve probably heard that Ulysses is great, influential, and way hard; you are less likely to have heard how funny it is, and how rewarding reading it can be. Difficult? Sure, maybe, but how difficult is up to each reader or group of readers: in this course, designed for first-time readers of the book, we’ll consider what the book makes challenging and why, and we’ll develop comfortable strategies for responding to those challenges. But our main focus will be on what Ulysses offers us as 21st century readers. In what ways can its styles, its engagement with the ‘real,’ its accounts of human experience, and its consideration of categories of people—by gender, nation, race, ethnicity, religion, age, body type, temperament, etc—provide us with particular insights, pleasures, and cautions? Prior to the first class session, please read as much as you can of an annotated edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (The Viking edition with notes by Anderson, which you can easily find used, would be fine.) There will be a couple of papers, a couple of tests, and a final exam; the final paper will ask you to think about what contemporary situation you think Ulysses might apply to most meaningfully. At the end of the course we’ll have a taste of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to prepare you for future explorations of that book—which too is challenging, rewarding, and “lovesoftfun.”
ENGL 3560-003 - Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Mark Edmundson
The mid-twentieth century in America sees and explosion of excellent poetry. More different kinds of consequential poets, more different sorts of poems than the nation had seen before. We’ll start with the understated genius, Elizabeth Bishop, and move on to Robert Lowell, inspired early prophet of the sorrows of American empire. Then on to others: the daring, ever fertile Sylvia Plath; superb political and erotic poet, Adrienne Rich; Robert Hayden, poet of African American grief and hopes; Allen Ginsberg, author of the culture-shaking Howl. There will be encounters too with the hyper-perceptive Gwendolyn Brooks; visionary Amy Clampitt; Southern sage James Dickey; James Merrill, perhaps America’s most sophisticated poet; and gritty, tender James Wright. A mid-term quiz, a final quiz, and a paper at the end on the poet you care about most.
ENGL 3560-004 - Kafka and His Doubles
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 187)
Lorna Martens
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 3570-001 - Short Stories of the Americas
Anna Brickhouse
ENGL 3790-001 - Moving On: Migration in/to US
Lisa Goff
This course examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. It traces the paths of migrating groups and their impact on urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. Students will dig for cultural clues to changing attitudes about migration over time. While novels and memoirs make up the bulk of the assignments, we will also analyze photographs, videos, films, poems, paintings, and podcasts. We will also explore the growing body of digital humanities resources related to migration and mobility, including but not limited to resources collected by the DPLA on the Great Migration and the Exodusters; and Torn Apart volume one, “Separados,” about 2018 asylum seekers at the Mexican border.
Assignments will teach students to analyze literature and popular culture; express their ideas in written and visual form; and conduct historical and cultural analysis and interpretation. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class: please note the attendance policy. Other assessments include reading responses, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one test; no midterm or final exam. Students will be required to volunteer 10 hours with a migration-related project during the second half of the semester.
ENGL 3922-001 - Deafness in Literature & Film
Christopher Krentz
What does deafness signify, especially in a western civilization centered upon speech? In this course we will study some of the contradictory ways that deaf people have been depicted over the last three centuries. Our approach will be contrapuntal; canonical texts or mainstream films will be juxtaposed with relatively unknown works by deaf artists. We will read fiction, short and long, by authors like Defoe, de Musset, Turgenev, Melville, Maupassant, Twain, Bierce, McCullers, Welty, O'Connor, and Thon, along with prose by such deaf writers as Laurent Clerc, Adele Jewel, Bernard Bragg, and Sotonwa Opeoluwa. We will also view films like Johnny Belinda, Immortal Beloved, and Beyond Silence; documentaries such as Sound and Fury and Through Deaf Eyes; and movies by deaf filmmakers like Charles Krauel. Finally, we will explore selected poetry, drama, and storytelling in American Sign Language (in translation) by deaf performers. Requirements will include participation, team-teaching exercises, a short paper, a longer paper, and a final exam.
ENGL 3924-001 - Vietnam War in Literature & Film
Sylvia Chong
It has been over 40 years since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of a war that claimed the lives of an estimated 58,260 American troops and over 4 million Southeast Asians across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In the U.S. today, “Vietnam” signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from debates about foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What, in this moment of commemoration and reflection, are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War / American War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans and Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong) affected by the Vietnam War, spanning the entirety of this 40 year period. Texts may include Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds; Yusek Komunyakaa, Dien Cia Dau; Tiana Alexander, From Hollywood to Hanoi; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer; Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind; Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino; Socheata Poeuv, New Years Baby.
ENGL 4500-001 - The Frankenstein Circle
Cynthia Wall
*ENGL 4520-001 - Renaissance Drama
John Parker
To examine some of Shakespeare's greatest contemporaries and rivals, in particular Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, with special attention to the London theater's sub-genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy and tragi-comedy. Other authors may include Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, Elizabeth Cary, John Fletcher, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Ford and Philip Massinger. We will try to get a sense of what it means to speak of a "Renaissance" at this moment in English history and to understand how the London commercial stage relates to earlier forms of theater.
ENGL 4560-001 - Contemporary Poetry
Jahan Ramazani
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 poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry.
ENGL 4560-003 - Frost, Haydn, Bishop, Lowell
Mark Edmundson
We’ll read, interpret, and enjoy four remarkable twentieth century American poets. The class will spend about three weeks each on Robert Frost, poet of rural life and more; Elizabeth Bishop, consummate artist who writes memorably about solitude and loneliness; Robert Hayden, brave and candid poet of African American experience; and Robert Lowell, patrician poet who prophesies the decline and fall of America. Maybe we’ll shake things up with a visit from Allen Ginsberg.
Three Roberts and an Elizabeth (and maybe an Allen), a couple of essays, some quizzes, focused and wayward reflections on literature and the conduct of life.
ENGL 4560-004 - Modern Love and US Fiction
Victoria Jeanne Olwell
Maybe love is eternal, but it’s also historical and ideological. Love is shaped by custom, law, and narrative, and it plays a central role in the formation of private and public life alike. This course examines romantic love in U.S. fiction from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth-first centuries. Our primary texts will cross genres as well as centuries as we examine romance, realism, modernism, post-modernism, and documentary. In addition, we’ll read archival and scholarly non-fiction. We’ll interpret fiction in light of historical changes in conceptions of love, based in factors including shifting economic conditions and changing conceptions of marriage, citizenship, queer sexualities, and modern psychology. We’ll discern the connections between romantic love and ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and empire. Students will be graded on two short papers, class participation, a 10-12-page final paper, and a final exam.
ENGL 4561-001 - Literature and Trauma
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 056)
Mrinalini Chakravorty
How is trauma narrated? Does literature give wounds a voice that bears witness to injury? Can imaginative works convey intense personal and collective suffering? Or is language itself an impediment to the expression of hurt? Is our understanding of pain cultural? How do we make the torment of another legible? How does storytelling distinguish intimate traumas (such as accidents or rape) from vast social damage (war, colonialism)? This course grapples with such questions.
Our study of trauma’s relation to literature will consider psychoanalytic ideas of historical and personal trauma reflected in literary works of the modern period. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, considering how powerful concepts in the hermeneutic of psychoanalysis (repression; repetition compulsion; abjection; misrecognition; lack; affect etc.) have been generated by literary works, as well as challenged and absorbed into them. Insofar as traumatic experience produces a subjective breach, we will think about how certain forms and styles of literature are more (or less) suited to reflect the rupture. We will read formative texts of psychoanalysis (Freud; Lacan; Kristeva; Foucault and others) and trauma theory (Caruth; Silverman; Fanon; Scarry). Aside from Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight, our survey will mainly focus on contemporary global novels that depict trauma such as those by Teju Cole, Alison Bechdel, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang among others.
ENGL 4580-001 - Feminist Theory
Susan Fraiman
An introduction to US feminist criticism and theory. This course pairs novels and other works by women with critical and theoretical essays. Our goal is to encounter and contrast diverse feminist approaches to literary and cultural texts. The syllabus is also informed by queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. I expect to explore such themes as mobility and migration, mother-daughter relations, the “male gaze,” incarceration/escape, female masculinity, and conflicts/commonalities among women. Beginning with the emergence of feminist literary theory in the mid-1970s, we will consider the stages of its development, its influence on canon formation, and the way gender intersects with other axes of identity (race, sexuality, disability, class, etc.). Possible primary texts (still tentative) include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), The Well of Loneliness (1928), My Year of Meats (1998), a contemporary film, graphic narrative, and popular romance. Probable theorists include Laura Mulvey, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Chandra Mohanty, Judith Butler, and Jack Halberstam, among many others. Students should be prepared for some challenging materials and heavy reading load. Aimed at third- and fourth-years; exceptions may be made, with the permission of instructor, for those with strong backgrounds in theory and/or gender studies. 5-page paper, 10-page paper, and a final exam.
ENGL 4998-001 - Distinguished Majors Program
Caroline Rody
Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee.
*ENGL 5100-001 - Introduction to Old English
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 183)
Stephen Hopkins
This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of early Medieval England (also called Anglo-Saxon England, roughly 500-1100 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old English language. Drawing upon Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old English grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating short bits of prose and poetry as supplied in the textbook and on the accompanying website. The course will also include basic readings from Magennis to orient us towards Old English genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field, with an emphasis on the history of the book and writing technologies. By the end, we will grapple with excerpts from Beowulf, gaining familiarity with Old English poetic diction, accentual-alliterative poetic form, style, syntax, and the basics of paleography by accessing Old English manuscripts via Parker Library on the Web.
ENGL 5559-001 - Transforming Desire: Medieval and Renaissance Erotic Poetics
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 203)
Clare Kinney
This seminar will focus upon lyric, narrative and dramatic works from the medieval and Renaissance periods which explore the striking metamorphoses and the various (and on occasion very queer) trajectories of earthly—and not so earthly--love. We'll be examining the ways in which desire is represented as transforming the identity and consciousness of the lover; we will also be examining (and attempting to historicize) strategies employed by our authors to variously transform, redefine, enlarge and contain the erotic impulse. We'll start with some selections from the Metamorphoses of Ovid; we will finish with two of Shakespeare’s most striking reinventions of love. Along the way we’ll be looking at the gendering of erotic representation and erotic speech, the intermittent entanglement of secular and sacred love, the role of genre in refiguring eros, and some intersections between the discourses of sexuality and the discourses of power.
Tentative reading list: selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses; the Lais (short romances) of Marie de France; Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde; sonnets by Petrarch, Philip Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth; Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia; Shakespeare's As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. (All non-English works will be read in translation.) And occasional critical/theoretical readings. Requirements: regular attendance, lively participation in discussion, a series of reflective e-mail responses to our readings, a short paper (6-7 pages); a long term paper (14+ pages).
ENGL 5559-002 - The Queer Novel
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 233)
Mrinalini Chakravorty
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—
- 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?
- 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.
- 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, Ali Smith, Michael Cunningham, Shyam Selvadurai, Alison Bechdel, Saleem Haddad, and Akwaeki Emezi 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, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz. Finally, a 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 is a graduate level course but it can also be taken to satisfy the Modern and Global Studies seminar requirement for undergraduates in that concentration.
ENGL 5559-003 - Contemporary Jewish Fiction
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 233)
Caroline Rody
This course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students 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, Joshua Cohen, Christophe Boltanski, David Bezmozgis, and Etgar Keret.
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 interpretation.
ENGL 5559-005 - Noetics, "Thinking the Poem"
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 287)
Walter Jost
In his book Colors of the Mind the literary theorist and critic Angus Fletcher identifies a relatively untilled field in literature study that he calls “noetics.” “Noetics names the field and the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem.” This must be a very large field indeed, so that a graduate course given to it needs some way of delimiting its interests, and specifically with respect to selected American and British poets. Of course, “thinking” has many possibilities, among them opining, believing, conceiving, inferring, imagining, reflecting, musing, meditating, and contemplating, as well as deliberating, speculating, reasoning, and arguing. In this course we will focus on select philosophical and religious/theological matters to give point to these various aspects of thinking the poem. In this iteration we will study several “long poems,” among them Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Basil Bunting’s “Briggflats,” A. R. Ammons’ “Sphere,” Gary Snyder’s “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” and possibly one or two others.
ENGL 5700-001 - Contemporary African-American Literature
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 042)
Lisa Woolfork
This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient. It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.
ENGL 5805-001 - What is Postcolonial Critique?
MW 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 233)
Nasrin Olla
What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C. L. R. James. The final project invites students to reflect upon the themes of revolutionary thinking, the global and universal, and questions of ethics.
ENGL 5810-001 - Books as Physical Objects
MW 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 233)
David Vander Meulen
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.
ENGL 5900-001 - Counterpoint Seminar
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 183)
Cristina Griffin
The “Counterpoint Seminar” is a hands-on, practical seminar designed to help you think like a teacher. In this course we juxtapose two sometimes dissonant fields of study: literary studies and pedagogy. During the semester you will consider how to combine your skills developed in previous literature classes with your emerging knowledge about pedagogy. I recognize that seminar members come to this course with different levels of familiarity with literary theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, and antiracist literature instruction. Our seminar will enable each member to increase fluency with these critical teaching skills. We will read literary texts that are frequently taught in the high school English classroom and practice applying pedagogical strategies that reflect best practices in English education. We will also read selections from pedagogical and theoretical texts to improve your ability to help students of different reading levels access rich, difficult texts and achieve depth and complexity in their textual interpretations. There will be time in this course to deepen your knowledge and reflect on your assumptions about education and yourself as an educator.
Writing and Rhetoric
ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence (10 sections)
Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others. Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression. Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers. Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.
Claire A Chantell
Claire Chantell
Patricia Sullivan
Patricia Sullivan
Kate Kostelnik
David Coyoca
Kate Kostelnik
Amber McBride
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ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry (70+ sections)
Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others. Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression. Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers. Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.
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Heidi Nobles
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Devin Donovan
Cory Shaman
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Jon D'Errico
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Charity Fowler
Devin Donovan
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Eric Rawson
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Kate Natishan
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Jon D'Errico
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Charity Fowler
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Eric Rawson
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Keith Driver
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Kate Natishan
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Cory Shaman
Keith Driver
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Steph Ceraso
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Anastatia Curley
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ENWR 1520-001 - Writing about Food Justice
Kate Stephenson
ENWR 1520-002 - Writing about Housing Equity
Kate Stephenson
ENWR 1530-100 - Risk, Reward, & Performance
Jon D'Errico
ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (5 sections)
Tamika Carey
TBA
Devin Donovan
Charity Fowler
Eric Rawson
ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (3 sections)
Stephen Parks
Stephen Parks
Kate Natishan
ENWR 2610-001 - Writing with Style
Keith Driver
ENWR 2640-001 - Writing as Technology
Patricia Sullivan
This course explores historical, theoretical, and practical conceptions of writing as technology. We will study various writing systems, the relation of writing to speaking and visual media, and the development of writing technologies (manuscript, printing presses, typewriters, hypertext, text messaging, and artificial intelligence). Students will produce written academic and personal essays, but will also experiment with multimedia electronic texts, such as web sites, digital essays/stories, and AI generated texts.
ENWR 2700-001 - News Writing
Kate Sweeney
ENWR 3500-001 - Book Editing & Publishing
Heidi Nobles
ENWR 3500-002 - Studies in Cultural Rhetorics
Tamika Carey
ENWR 3620-001 - Tutoring Across Cultures
Kate Kostelnik
In this course, we'll look at a variety of texts from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures. Topics will include contrastive rhetorics, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers. A service learning component will require students to volunteer weekly in the community.
ENWR 3640-001 - Writing with Sound
Steph Ceraso
ENWR 3660-001 - Travel Writing
Kate Stephenson
This course will explore travel writing using a variety of texts, including essays, memoirs, blogs, photo essays, and narratives. We will examine cultural representations of travel as well as the ethical implications of tourism. Students will have the opportunity to write about their own travel experiences, and we will also embark on "local travel" of our own.
ENWR 3665-001 - Writing about the Environment
Cory Shaman
ENWR 3900-001 - Career-Based Writing/Rhetoric
John T. Casteen IV
Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design.