Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Fall 2023

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 5610-001 - Advanced Fiction Writing II - VARIATIONS ON GRIMM'S TALES

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee.

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. 

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).

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—

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, 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.

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.

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.    

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.