Undergraduate Course Descriptions Fall 2024

For graduate course descriptions, see here.
 
More descriptions are forthcoming, check back soon!

Creative Writing

ENCW 2300 Poetry Writing (7 sections)

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 2600 Fiction Writing (6 sections)

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 3310-001: Intermediate Poetry Writing I - Virginia (For Poets)

Kiki Petrosino
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM

In this intermediate poetry workshop, we’ll explore our intellectual & artistic connections to place, specifically to UVA & the Commonwealth of Virginia. We’ll read recent published works of poetry (+ a little lyric prose!) by writers with ties to the University, Charlottesville, & the region. We’ll also think about & explore the physical space of Grounds as a site for reading, writing, researching, & sharing poems. Students in this course will engage in a regular writing practice and will take seriously the processes of composition, critique, and revision. We’ll spend a significant portion of each class “workshopping” student poems, but we also will devote time to discussing assigned reading and to performing in-class writing exercises. These activities, plus attendance, participation, & a final portfolio, will inform the grading policy.

To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner.

ENCW 3310-002: Intermediate Poetry Writing I

Instructor TBD
MW 12:30PM-01:45PM

ENCW 3350-001: Intermediate Nonfiction

Anna Beecher
T 02:00PM-04:30PM

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. 

Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students.

ENCW 3500-001: Storytelling and Performance Prose

 
Anna Beecher
R 11:00AM-01:30PM

This oral storytelling course is for students with experience of writing creatively who are 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 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, and 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 (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu. Writing sample not required for APLP and APPW students.

ENCW 3500-002: Screenwriting

Kevin Moffett
W 01:00PM-03:30PM

This course examines the art and craft of screenwriting, the short film in particular. You'll read short scripts and excerpts from longer ones and learn the conventions of the form--by the end of the semester, through drafting and revision and close analysis, we'll aim to take your work to new levels of dramatic force and visual and emotional complexity. 

To apply: email Kevin Moffett (sem9zn@virginia) a letter of interest and a list of previous writing classes taken.

 

ENCW 3559-001: New Mythologies

Jane Alison
F 11:00AM-01:30PM
 

A girl runs from a man who wants her, but she can’t run fast enough—and becomes a tree to escape. A young woman craves a boy so much she wraps herself around him and holds him so tightly she fuses her body with his. A boy hates his violent father, has to defend his mother, and cuts off his father’s most offensive member and throws it into the sea—and from it springs the spirits of both passion and rage. A woman grieves the loss of her children until she becomes a weeping stone. A man is so greedy that the spirit of hunger infests him, and he can’t stop eating until there’s nothing but his own flesh to eat. An old couple who adore each other can’t bear the idea of being parted, and just as they’re about to die, they turn into trees, entwined . . .

 

These are ancient stories about primary feelings, primal feelings, caught in the amber of literary myth: turned into beautiful, strange, small objects. In this workshop we’ll look at several such stories each week—drawing first upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then branching outward—and you will create your own new myths or fabulist stories inspired by what you’ve read, a tiny story that isn’t “fantasy” but springs from these myths’ secret truths. To apply, send me (jas2ad) a note saying what draws you to this course, and attach a brief sample of your creative writing. Be sure to apply via SIS, too.

 

ENCW 3610-001: Intermediate Fiction Writing

Micheline Marcom
F 02:00PM-04:30PM

ENCW 3610-002: Intermediate Fiction Writing

TBD
W 03:00PM-05:30PM

ENCW 4550-001: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives

Kevin Moffett
T 11:00AM-01:30PM
 
In this course we’ll look at novels and stories set in the aftermath of various cataclysms: nuclear, environmental, biological, spiritual. The post-apocalyptic narrative has long attracted satirists, sci-fi and fantasy writers, social critics, and, more and more of late, writers of mainstream literary fiction. We’ll examine how it borrows elements from other genres—pulp Westerns, the epic, fantasy, horror—and consider ideas of revelation, nostalgia, assimilation, and re-creation. Authors may include Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, Saramago, Malamud, Octavia Butler, Walter Miller, and others. You’ll respond to the texts critically and creatively.

ENCW 4810-001: Advanced Fiction Writing I

Anna Beecher
T 09:30AM-12:00PM
 
A class for writers committed to creating imaginative and ambitious literary prose. Together we will delve deeper into areas including: the manipulation of time, working actively with reader expectations, the uses of mystery, crafting rich characters and worlds and conveying quality of mind. We will use weekly readings of published work to inspire and provoke us and you will each write a great deal - expect to produce several short writing experiments and two workshop stories. As we explore, you’ll be invited to think rigorously about the shape of your work, from sentence to story.

Admission by Instructor Permission. Please send a sample of your prose writing (around 5 pages) and a brief statement about why this course interests you to am2aw@virginia.edu.

ENCW 4820-001: Poetry Program Poetics

Instructor TBD
W 02:00PM-04:30PM

ENCW 4830-001: Advanced Poetry Writing I

Camille Dungy
M 02:00PM-04:30PM
 
This workshop is for 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, form, and content. The course will be offered in a hybrid manner, with one in-person synchronous class per month and the rest of the synchronous classes on an online platform. We will work with a variety of workshop models as we explore ways of thinking about how poetry might be written and discussed. Students will be expected to attend class for each session both in-person or online, to write and revise six to nine poems in response to writing prompts, to regularly participate in class discussion, to offer detailed responses to other students’ work, to attend one poetry reading (in person or virtual) and submit a written response to, to turn in close-reading responses to two assigned readings, and to participate in a public presentation near the end of the term. Enrollment by instructor permission.

[To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any majors, minors, or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Professor Petrosino will consult with Professor Dungy on permissions. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer.] 

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

Kiki Petrosino
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

In this advanced course, we'll explore several published memoirs by contemporary poets, reading them alongside their books of poetry. Through discussion, workshop, writing exercises & other coursework, we'll attempt to imagine our way through several related questions: how do poets approach the forms & possibilities of memoir? How might a "poet's memoir" work within & against the constraints or expectations of autobiographical writing?  How does what we think of as a poet's "voice" shift & change when their writing encompasses both verse and prose? And what new connections--among emotions, narratives, mysteries, & astonishments--can we make in our own writing practice, once we witness how poets work across genres? This class will engage a combination of seminar & workshop-style techniques. For a final project, students will compose & revise a group of original poems alongside one or more works of original lyric prose (short essays, memoir, &c). This class is open to graduate & undergraduate students via instructor permission.      

To apply: send Professor Kiki Petrosino (cmp2k@virginia.edu) a sample of 4-5 original poems + a cover letter specifying whether you are in any programs or special concentrations for which this course may be needed/required. Please also specify any other creative writing workshops to which you may be applying. Make sure to send an official request for instructor permission on SIS along with any e-mail requests. Enrollment for returning students begins April 8 & will continue until the section is filled. For full consideration, please apply as soon as possible. Confirmation of your spot in the class may arrive in early summer, but hopefully much sooner.

ENCW 5610-001: Advanced Fiction Writing II - Looking & Writing: Ekphrastic Prose

Micheline Marcom
R 03:30PM-06:00PM

This class is open to graduate and undergraduate students via instructor permission.

An experimental prose-writing class where we will look at works of art, take walks and look closely at our world, contemplate the night-sky, read works of literature, and consider how we might write not merely about what we are looking at or reading, per se, but how to create something new from the experience. We will read an array of stories and essays by Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, William Blake, Clarice Lispector, and Walter Benjamin as well as writings by visual artists from the contemporary David Hockney to Kandinsky, Delacroix, Vasari and others. We will do a lot of looking! Students will do weekly creative responses. To apply: send a 1 page letter specifying your past experience in creative writing and interest in the course.

 

English Literature

ENGL 2500-001: Intro to Literary Studies

Walter Jost
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

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

ENGL 2500-002: Intro to Literary Studies

Victor Luftig
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

We will read poems, plays, fiction, and essays in ways meant to introduce the study of literature at the college level: the focus will be on writing from Ireland, where literature has been unusually important in the formation of the nation, the transformation of the nation into a multi-racial one, and the development of a culture more supportive of women and LGBTQ+ citizens than in the past. We’ll begin with nineteenth century texts supporting or resisting efforts against colonial rule, then read texts by WB Yeats, James Joyce, and women writers associated with the new early twentieth century Irish state; read mid-century writers who documented the failure of that state; read writers such as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland who contended with violence in Northern Ireland and misogyny in the Republic of Ireland; and conclude with contemporary writers associated with immigrant and other communities. Our readings will be complemented by viewing movies and TV shows such as The Crying Game, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and Derry Girls. We will ask throughout, What does literature do, and how? The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason; those who seek an introductory humanities course; those who may wish subsequently to major in English; and those who are interested in Ireland, colonialism, and/or immigration. We’ll discuss the works in class, and there will be three papers, two exams, and a final.

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

ENGL 2502-001: Four Centuries, Four Texts, Four Genres

John O'Brien
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM

We will read devote our time together to studying four great masterpieces, works produced over the last four centuries, each in a different genre: a play (William Shakespeare’s King Lear, first staged in 1606); a novel (Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1816); a poem (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922); and a film (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, issued in 1968). We will consider each of these works slowly and carefully. We will also use them as case studies for exploring the strategies that scholars in the disciplines of literature and film criticism have developed to achieve rich understandings of their objects of study. These will include (among other strategies) close reading, source study, comparison of variant editions, and historical contextualization. Our objective is to emerge at the end of the semester with expertise in these four works, and with experience in using different critical strategies to analyze other works in these genres. Requirements: four writing exercises, class participation, final examination

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

ENGL 2502-002: Jane Austen Jumps the Shark

Brad Pasanek
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

This study of Jane Austen’s afterlife finds the Regency author on water-skis. An introduction to the major, the course aims at formal analyses of the novel form, queries the concept of fiction, and presents the rudiments of literary theory. The student must be prepared to consume unpardonable adaptations of adaptations of adaptations. Beware: common side effects may include Darcymania, zombification, fandom, and queer theory. To be sure, we will be reading Austen meticulously; our other authors closely, but more quickly and in greater bulk. Of prevailing concern will be contemporary reworkings of Austen: her screen adaptations, her commodification, and the many parodic uses to which her fictions have been put, online and off. Readings will likely include Austen’s juvenilia, at least three of the six major novels, Bridget Jones’s Diary, a YA novel about Teen Jane (approximately), an offering from Quirk Press, Lost in Austen, a squat volume of mass-marketed pulpy filth, and several amateur slash efforts.

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

ENGL 2506-001: Introduction to Poetry

Walter Jost
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

How does a written poem on a page—its lines now taken out of their historical contexts, its author no longer around to ask, its time past—manage to mean anything at all when spoken aloud? How do words work, anyway (because, after all, they do work)? This course centers on patient, close reading of poems of the twentieth century, and what’s in them for us in the twenty-first century, by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and others. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

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

ENGL 2506-003: Contemporary Poetry

Jahan Ramazani
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential 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 genres, forms, or 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.

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

ENGL 2506-002: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry

Rebecca Rush
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
 

What is poetry? What sets it apart from other modes of writing, thinking, imagining, feeling? What are the distinctive tools at the poet’s disposal? How do these tools work, and how can we describe their workings? Should poetry be plain or intricate, delightful or didactic, passionate or rational, heavenly or human? In this course, we will explore the many Renaissance responses to these questions by reading a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. We will inspect a range of poetic styles and genres, beginning with sonnets by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Mary Wroth. Other poets will include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Katherine Philips, Richard Lovelace, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will move slowly at first, sometimes reading only one poem per class, and will work together to develop the interpretive skills to unpack a poem. This course also aims to help you sharpen your skills as a writer; we will focus in particular on close reading and on logical organization. The first written assignment will be a bulleted list of observations about a sonnet that you will then transform into a structured close reading paper. You will have the opportunity to revise the first paper based on feedback from your instructor and your classmates.

No prior knowledge of poetry, meter, or rhyme is expected. Lovers and despisers of poetry are equally welcome. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.

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

ENGL 2507-001: Identity, Race, and Religion in Renaissance Drama

Adriana Streifer
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM

How can Hamlet help us understand the sources of modern beliefs about identity and individuality? What can we learn from Othello and The Merchant of Venice about Renaissance understandings of race and religion? In this introduction to the study of dramatic literature, we will study the theater of the English Renaissance in order to help us understand where our modern ideas about identity come from. We live in an era marked by fierce debates about race, religion, nationalism, gender, and sexuality, but these topics were equally pressing (though in different ways) to authors such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, and to their audiences. Our goal is to step outside of ourselves and engage in imaginative time travel, so that we may understand how race, religion, and identity were and are culturally constructed, both in their time, and in our own. As we read, we will ask ourselves:  How do dramatic texts destabilize our understandings of identity categories such as race, religion, and gender? What makes drama distinct in this regard from poetry, or prose? How does theater enable competing interpretations, such that marginalized characters can question orthodoxies and push against dominant narratives? As values and social norms change over time, how have scholars, directors, actors, and other artists responded to, reclaimed, and reinterpreted dramatic texts that contain historical, context-specific manifestations of racism and other prejudices? Throughout the course, we will grapple with these questions and with many others that enable us to consider the value of turning to early modern dramatic texts to understand divergent, complex ideas about selfhood and identity. 

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

ENGL 2508-003: Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

Stephen Arata
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM

The nineteenth century was an age of lively experimentation in narrative fiction. In this course we will read a range of texts that depart from conventional realism: Gothic tales, science fiction, stories of ghosts and the supernatural. Likely authors include Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Like all ENGL 2500 classes, this course is designed to help you read closely, think creatively, and write lucidly about literary and other texts.

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

ENGL 2508-001: Medical Narratives

Anna Brickhouse
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
 

This course is designed for prospective English majors as well as students who may one day enter a medical field—and should appeal to all students who love short stories. It explores the history of the American short story from the nineteenth century through our own by focusing specifically on medical themes: ailing and injured bodies and minds; doctors, nurses, and patients; the social construction of disease and madness as well as of health and sanity. It is widely acknowledged today in various fields of medical research and clinical training that the effective and humane practice of medicine requires what has been called “narrative competence”: the ability to recognize and interpret the stories people tell; to attend closely to the details that accumulate to make a larger meaning; to evaluate contradictory and competing hypotheses about meaning; to locate expression within cultural context; and finally to appreciate and respond to any given story for its insight into the human condition. But if these skills are in demand within the medical fields, they also shape the practice of the English major. We will discuss classic stories as well as the work of recent writers.

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

ENGL 2508-002: The Dystopian Novel

Mrinalini Chakravorty
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM

“We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies,” Joseph Conrad writes, casting the modern era as a bleak one.  This course will survey the genre of dystopian novels.  Dystopias offer apocalyptic visions; they summon aesthetics of disease, speculation, pessimism, horror, and dysfunction to warn against seeing modern developments as benevolent.  In novels, dystopia often takes the form of political and science fiction.  A singular feature of this genre is its questioning of modern state forms, both totalitarian and democratic.  These works also ask us to think about how we live our increasingly technological lives. Do conditions of modern living such as of surveillance, conformity, comfort, militarism, mechanization, mobility, reproductive facticity, incarceration, medicalization, and scientificity lead to better futures? The dire worlds that dystopias imagine starkly suggest that they do not.  Instead, dystopian novels ask that readers contemplate, and even critique, the ethical cost of our acceptance of modern social conditions, the depletion of freedom, autonomy, and humanity.

The seminar will survey major works of dystopian fiction from the late-19thC onward.  Alongside such classics as Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, we may also read work by Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula LeGuin, Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, and others.  Given our experience of the pandemic, we will pay particular attention to the spread of disease and how it is narrated.  The syllabus includes brief readings on utopia, science, satire, feminism, race, capitalism, and modernity.  We will also view a few films and consider other literary genres when relevant. 

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

ENGL 2599-001: Nature and Romanticism

Jon D'Errico
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM
 
In this class we will read a selection of texts exploring the roots of contemporary attitudes toward nature. The readings range from the mid-14th century to the present, and the genres include poetry, short fiction, drama, and novels. Although we will, in passing, consider some literary theory, our focus in this class will be on your close analysis of the texts, via class discussions and your written assignments.
 
We will explore in broad terms some of the major literary traditions that contribute to modern understandings of nature. We will especially attend to three overlapping themes: the evolving understanding of nature, the relationship between nature and human nature, and the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural.
    
Along the way, we'll provide guided practice in managing key elements of argument and style.

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

ENGL 2599-002: Criticism in the First Person

Emily Ogden
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

In this course, we’ll discuss how we know what we know about aesthetic objects like literary texts. What are we claiming when we claim that a work is beautiful? To what extent is such a claim knowledge, and to what extent mere opinion? Our focus will be on the place of first-person experience—the I and what the I knows, sees, and feels--in our aesthetic judgments. We’ll spend about half our time learning to understand Stanley Cavell’s theory of what happens when we claim a work of art is beautiful, with a special focus on what role the first person has in such claims. We’ll spend the other half reading the work of various writers who use the first person prominently in their work. We’ll read critics practicing in the academy as well as critics working as reviewers in the periodical press. Writers we may read include Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Nathalie Léger, T. J. Clark, D. A. Miller, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cristina Rivera Garza, and others. Students should expect to do a lot of writing. Many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism as a form of creative nonfiction, in the first-person voice.

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

ENGL 2599-003: The World Wars in European Literature

Sarah Cole
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

The First and Second World Wars transformed European culture and challenged poets, novelists, and filmmakers. Why create art in a time a mass violence and upheaval? How could a film, poem, or literary narrative do justice to the raw experience of war? In this course, we will explore a diverse group of responses from authors in Britain, France, and Germany, ranging from the gritty realism of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to the elegant modernism of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We will pay equal attention to literary techniques and social identities, examining questions of gender, class, ethnicity, and disability in war literature. The seminar will emphasize close reading, active participation, and analytical writing. Requirements include three essays, an in-class presentation, and weekly discussion questions. Among our main texts will be poems by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Paul Celan; novels by Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, and Irène Némirovsky; memoirs by Vera Brittain and Elie Wiesel; and films by Jean Renoir and Louis Malle.

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

ENGL 2599-004: Routes, Writing, Reggae

Njelle Hamilton
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a marijuana spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with the song “One Love” and the album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? This course traces the history of reggae music and its influence on Jamaican literature. Framed by readings on Jamaican history, Marcus Garvey’s teachings, and Rastafari philosophy, at the heart of the course is an intensive study of Marley’s lyrics and the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae. Armed with these tools, we will apply the ‘reggae aesthetic’ to Jamaican poetry, fiction and film, including The Harder They Come and the Booker Prize novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Assignments such as album reviews, ‘diss’ tracks, and critical essays will allow you to engage topical and controversial issues such as: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and spirituality (and yes, marijuana) in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and reggaetón.

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

ENGL 2599-005: Literatures of the Nonhuman

Adrienne Ghaly
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
 

This course explores ideas of the ‘nonhuman’ in literature. From John Keats’s address to autumn and Franz Kafka’s giant bug, Gregor Samsa, to imagining yourself into another species, ‘alien’ forms of life, and experiments with artificial intelligence, are human and nonhuman distinct categories? Where and how do they overlap, or even merge? The focus will be on developing strategies of close reading and introducing the basics of literary critical analysis through shorter forms in poetry and prose that examine the nonhuman across a range of genres from the nineteenth century to the present. No prior knowledge required. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement of 20+ pages of written work. Active class participation, reading responses, shorter pieces of writing, and a final essay.

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

ENGL 2599-006: Reading Ecology Across Genres

Brian Teare
MW 06:00PM-07:15PM
 
How do literary works represent living ecosystems? How do literary genres -  nonfiction, fiction, poetry - attempt to do so by playing to specific strengths like factual reporting, character-based plot, or songfulness? What other species live and thrive inside the built environment of literary worlds? In this course, we’ll discuss how nonfiction writers, novelists, and poets situate words in ethical relation to the natural world. We'll spend some of our time learning about the relationship between what Aldo Leopold calls a "land ethic" and what Kimberly Ruffin calls "social ecology," thus allowing us to think about how the biological sciences and environmental politics inevitably intertwine in literature attempting to represent both ecological and social systems. Some of the worlds we'll inhabit together will include Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, Richard Powers's The Overstory, JJJJJerome Ellis' Aster of Ceremonies, Ann Pancake's Strange As This Weather Has Been, and Lauret Savoy's Trace. We should expect to do a lot of writing in this course, and many assignments will be opportunities to write criticism from an ecological standpoint, in the first-person voice.

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

ENGL 2599-007: Protest Literature

Amber McBride
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

It is often said that, resistance is power and this class focuses on protest literature and film. From Guillermo del Toro to Toni Morrison, we will investigate how literature and film often critique the world we live in.

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

ENGL 2599-008: Modern Literature and the Quest for Self

Kate Stephenson
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM

How does modern literature redefine subjectivity? What does it mean to perform the self? How do race, gender, and class complicate these questions? We will focus on short stories, poetry, and novels from the twentieth century. Authors will include Woolf, Plath, Sexton, Morrison, Heaney, and Berry among others.

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

ENGL 2599-009: Reading Toni Morrison

Deborah McDowell
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

This special topics course introduces students to selected works from the prodigious corpus of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, librettist and public intellectual. Her eleven novels encompassed the history of Black folk in the U. S., from colonial Virginia to slavery to the Korean War. We will explore the socio-historical, political and cultural contexts from which Morrison’s writings emerged, its dominant threads and aesthetic strategies, as well as its critical reception across the decades of her long and storied career.

Required texts will include Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy and Beloved, the film adaptation of Beloved, as well as selections from her nonfiction collections The Source of Self-Regard and What Moves at the Margins.

Topics will include the construction and politics of race, the power and ethics of language, ecologies of race and place, the place of literature in public life, philosophies of love and friendship, the persistence of the past in the present, and Morrison as the piercing, visionary analyst of world history, contemporary society, literature and language. The course will conclude with a consideration of censorship and book banning. Although Morrison was among the most influential authors of the 20th century, her books have been consistently banned from school curricula and purged from the shelves of libraries. In 2023, the public school system in Spotsylvania, Virginia banned both The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Current Virginia Governor, Glenn Youngkin made banning her novel, Beloved, a central aspect of an ad created for his successful gubernatorial race. In prisons across the country, Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon and Paradise are frequently banned. We will read selections from Morrison’s edited collection, Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement. While examining the realities and workings of censorship and challenges to free expression, especially in this contemporary moment, we will train our focus on Morrison’s sublime “word-work,” on the transformative power of language in the writings of this towering figure in world literature.

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

ENGL 2599-010: Diversity of Voices in Young Adult Narratives

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

This course will survey and explore a range of literature from the 20th and 21st centuries written for or marketed to an adolescent audience. Readings will consist of short stories and novel-length works from multiple genres which will be contextualized within literary history and by critical scholarship.

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

ENGL 2599-100: Landscapes of Black Education

Ian Grandison
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

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, Sept. 19, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., 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.

Downtown Charlottesville Field Trip, Saturday, Sept. 19, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

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

ENGL 3001-100: Hist of Lit in English I

Bruce Holsinger
MW 11:00AM-11:50AM
 

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 3220-001: The Seventeenth Century

Rebecca Rush
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

In this course we will study a period marked by two big-name revolutions—the scientific revolution and the political revolution known as the English Civil War—but our task will be to examine the subtler currents of thought that ran beneath these epochal changes. We will focus in particular on vigorous seventeenth-century debates about the origins of knowledge and the purpose of liberty. Seventeenth-century writers put pressure on all the received ways of explaining the human mind, the natural world, and the political regime. They asked whether we should trust political customs, intellectual authorities, or even our own eyes and minds. They wondered whether goodness, greatness, and honor are meaningful ideas or fictions that had long impeded progress toward certain knowledge and secure peace. They debated about the primary aim of political life and what kinds of freedom are desirable and achievable. As we study political and philosophical prose by Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes in conversation with poems and plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell (among others), we will practice reading with the utmost care—and a dictionary by our sides. Our aim will be not only to understand the complexities of these authors’ thought but also to draw out the rich particularities of their language.

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

ENGL 3271-100: Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories

Clare Kinney
MW 12:00PM-12:50PM
 

A survey of the first half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, focusing in particular on the comedies and history plays. Among the things we’ll be looking at: the intricate relations between desire, disguise and the transformation of identity in plays like The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It; the ways in which various kinds of drama can simultaneously question and reaffirm the status quo; the representation of gender and agency on the comic stage; suggestive connections between comedy and tragedy in Romeo and Juliet; comedy and history in Henry IV part I (and to a lesser extent in Henry V); tragedy and history in Richard II; the pressing of comedy to its limits in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. Lectures will remain attentive throughout to the power of the Shakespearean wordhoard and also to the relationship between play text and performance.

Course requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; regular attendance at (and lively participation in) discussion sections; two 6-7 page papers, midterm and final exams.

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

 

ENGL 3275-001: History of Drama I

John Parker
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

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) these pagan traditions after the Christianization of the Roman empire; we will likely read a liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, some vernacular Biblical drama and a secular farce.  The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.     

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?  What does it mean to say that drama by the time of Shakespeare had been secularized?

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

ENGL 3310-001: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers

Alison Hurley
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM

During the eighteenth century, social, economic, and technological developments in Britain converged to alter the ways in which texts were produced and consumed. The result of these innovations was a print culture that offered women the opportunity to step onto the public stage as professional authors for the first time. Female authors, nevertheless, remained intensely aware of their “delicate situation” within the literary public sphere. They responded to this situation by deploying a variety of authorial strategies that ingeniously combined self-promotion with self-protection in order to legitimize their appearance in print. This class will be particularly interested in examining the relationship between gender and genre in eighteenth-century Britain. Our readings will highlight a series of specific literary forms – drama, poetry, and the novel – each of which implicates gender in distinctive and compelling ways.

Class requirements include frequent discussion thread posts; in-class quizzes; two thesis-driven essays; a poetry annotation assignment; and a “blue book” essay-based final exam.

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

ENGL 3380-001: The English Novel I: Run Runaway

Cynthia Wall
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 
In 1775, the German physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg declared that England had the best novels because England had the best roads. Daughters could escape from their fathers; sons could strike out on adventures; young ladies could make Entrances into the World; criminals could flee their crimes; highwaymen could make their fortunes. This course will explore the ways that eighteenth-century British novels themselves explored time and space, country and city, roads and inns, carriages and ships, in the fiction of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Tobias Smollett, Jane Austen, and Anonymous. Requirements: Attendance, participation, weekly analytical commentaries, one short (5-7pp.) paper, a midterm, a small group project, and a final exam.
 
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3480-001: The Way We Live Now: The Novel in the Nineteenth Century

Stephen Arata
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM

“Novels are in the hands of us all,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870, “from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have become a novel-reading nation.” Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century the novel became the most popular—and profitable—literary genre in Great Britain. Its success was due to many factors, none perhaps more important than the extraordinary sophistication and emotional power with which novelists set out to portray (as the title of one of Trollope’s own novels puts it) “the way we live now.” More than ever before, novelists were committed to recording the visible world in all its abundant detail while also exploring the complex interior lives of individual women and men. They accomplished these feats, moreover, by way of gripping stories full of adventure, love (lust too), betrayal, mystery, and wonder. In this course we will immerse ourselves in a half-dozen or so of the finest examples of the genre, chosen from among such writers as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, and Trollope himself. Requirements will likely include bi-weekly email responses, two essays, a midterm, and final exam.

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

ENGL 3500-001:  Faust

Jeffrey Grossman
MW 2:00-3:15

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 and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, to which Goethe responded.  We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and parts II (either in its entirety or in excerpts), in part as a response to Rousseau’s  Although now a major work in the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society.  We will also study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to respond to part I of Goethe’s Faust create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality, and guilt.  And we will venture into the twentieth-century, viewing first F.W. Murnau's avant-garde Faust film (1926) as a response to contemporary European/German society and technology, and Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto (1981), which wrestled with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust.

Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social, and cultural problems of their own times.  Requirements:  one short paper (5 pages), one mid-term exam, long paper (10-12 pages), active class participation, including short written contributions to online discussion.

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

ENGL 3510-001: Feminist Chaucer

Elizabeth Fowler
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
 
Feminist Chaucer, some Canterbury Tales, Legend of Good Women, and more, in conjunction with theorists on feminist phenomenology and feminist Chaucer critics.
 
This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3540-001: Romantic Poetry

Mark Edmundson
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 
We’ll read and interpret the six major English Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. We’ll reflect on the pleasures of their work, and on what they might have to teach us about love, politics, nature, art, the self, society, and the imagination.  We may end with a Jane Austen novel for contrast, probably Pride and Prejudice. Two fact-based exams, one paper at the close.
 
This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3545-001: US Lit and Social Justice

Victoria Olwell
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

Exploring U.S. literature from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era, this course asks, what strategies did literary authors use to influence public debates about social, economic, and political justice? Beneath this question lie two more:  What underlying conceptions of justice did U.S. literature advance, and how might we assess them? Literature during the era we’ll consider spanned the full political spectrum, but our focus will be primarily on literature invested in the extension of rights, equality, and protections to dispossessed people, as well as in the amelioration of politically induced suffering. We’ll examine literary protests against slavery, Jim Crow law, Chinese exclusion, urban poverty, women’s status, and the conditions of industrial labor. Course requirements include several short papers, class participation, and a final exam.

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

ENGL 3560-001: Irish Plays, Movies, and TV

Victor Luftig
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

Plays were so prominent in Ireland’s resistance to colonial rule that WB Yeats could ask, reasonably, whether a play of his had started the 1916 uprising; throughout the twentieth century, versions of that resistance were central to Irish films.  By the 1990s television had become perhaps the most important vehicle for Ireland’s transitions in terms of not just national but also racial and gendered identities. We’ll begin with classic dramatic treatments of Irish nationalism (Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Spreading the News, Playboy of the Western World, and Juno and the Paycock), read some important early twentieth century fictions, including James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” that were later were importantly adapted to films we’ll view (The Crying Game for the latter), look at some essential documentary footage that chronicles the early development of an independent Ireland, study a couple of plays and films (Lieutenant of Inishmore, Hunger) engaged with late twentieth century sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and conclude with recent films (New Boy) and episodes from television shows (Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope; Derry Girls)  that recast these issues through the lens of newly foregrounded gendered, racial, and global identities. We will focus during the last part of the course particularly on representation and works by Irish women, immigrants, and LGBQT people. The goal throughout will be to use Irish test cases to consider what role literature and other media have had in shaping Irish political and social life.

ENGL 3560-002: U.S. Modernisms in Word & Image

Joshua Miller
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM

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

Some of the broad questions that we’ll track throughout the term include the following. How do these authors define the “modern”? What, for that matter, is a “novel” in twentieth-century U.S. literature?  How did these authors participate (and resist) the process of defining who counted as an “American”? What role did expatriates and immigrants play in the “new” United States of the twentieth century? How did modernists narrate the past? How did trends in technology (mass production, cinema, transportation), science (relativity), and politics influence novelists’ roles within U.S. modernity? How did these authors reconcile the modernist imperative to “make it new” with the histories of the U.S. and the Americas?  What were the new languages of modernity?

ENGL 3570-001: Hemispheric Latinx Literature

Carmen Lamas
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We explore how the histories of US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays, and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce Latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality impact Latinx literature, film and other artistic forms. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English.

ENGL 3570-002: American Wild

Stephen Cushman
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 

With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and throughout the west? Is climate the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, violent storms, and extreme weather? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?

This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on white colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we’ll move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, foremost among them Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth-century, we’ll add important voices, such as Aldo Leopold’s and Rachel Carson’s and Rebecca Solnit’s, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. We’ll complete our tour in the twenty-first century by joining the intensifying conversation, along with Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan, about whether the visions of Thoreau, Muir, et al. are exclusively white and male.

Open to all. Those in the Environmental Thought and Practice Program welcome.

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

ENGL 3570-003: Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction: Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities

Caroline Rody
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

Contemporary American fiction brims with surprises.  It’s not just that an unprecedent diversity of voices is generating a global literature centered upon U.S. territory, but also that this influx of the world’s energies has accelerated the modern and postmodern experimentation with new ways to tell a story.

In this course we will explore the possibilities generated by narrative innovation in a stunning group of contemporary fictions.  We’ll take up the booming genre of the graphic novel, in which the visual dimension bursts open the conventional boundaries of narrative fiction (in texts like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, Thuy Bui’s The Best We Can Do, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home).  We’ll read novels narrated by outrageous, elusive, sometimes magical voices (in texts like Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and Ruman Alaam’s Leave the World Behind). And we’ll consider novels that re-imagine ethnic American histories by means of inventive strategies: magical, multi-vocal, counterfactual, or speculative (in texts like Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “My Monticello”).

Requirements: devoted reading and active participation, multiple online postings, leading of class discussion (in pairs), a short and a long paper.

ENGL 3572-001: Black Protest Narrative

Marlon Ross
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
 

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? How do intersectional subjectivities like gender, sexuality, religion, class, immigrant status, and color factor into ideologies and strategies of protest? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker,

Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs, and William Melvin Kelley. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Written assignments include an in-class midterm, a take-home midterm, a final exam.

ENGL 3790-001: Moving On: Migration in/to US

Lisa Goff
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM

“Moving On: Migration In/To the U.S.” examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S. Students will trace changing attitudes about migration over time using a variety of cultural products, including videos, books, documentaries, poems, paintings, graphic novels, photographs, fashion, digital humanities, and academic scholarship. Class participation/contribution is the core of this class. Other assessments include reading responses, presentations, papers, and reflective essays. There will be one scheduled test. Students will be required to volunteer 5-10 hours with a migration-related project during the course of the semester.

ENGL 3825-001: Desktop Publishing

Jeb Livingood
...
 
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 3915-001: Point of View Journalism

Lisa Goff
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity” on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,” point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to "muckrakers" like Ida B. Wells Barnett and Ida Tarbell at the end of the nineteenth, and “New Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Barbara Ehrenreich in the twentieth. Twenty-first century point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, One America News Network) and left (Vice, Jacobin, MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino, and Roxane Gay. We will also consider the work of comedians such as Jon Stewart,  Steven Colbert, and John Oliver, who pillory the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them.

ENGL 3924-001: Vietnam War in Literature & Film

Sylvia Chong
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
 

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 4270-001: Shakespeare Seminar

Dan Kinney
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 
This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.

ENGL 4500-001: Seven Ages, Seven Questions or How to Live, What to Do

Mark Edmundson
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

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

ENGL 4500-002: Gothic Forms

Cynthia Wall
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and surprisingly sturdy heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: the classic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); 18thC German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, a presentation , weekly short commentaries, one short paper (5-7pp), and one longer research paper (10-12pp).

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

ENGL 4520-001: House & Garden: Lanyer, Jonson, Marvell Go Cottagecore

Elizabeth Fowler
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM
 
This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.
 
 

ENGL 4540-001: Jane Austen

Susan Fraiman
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM

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

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

ENGL 4560-001: Modern Love and US Fiction

Victoria Olwell
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

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 4560-002: Contemporary Poetry

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

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: Caribbean Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Njelle Hamilton
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will encounter Caribbean writers working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. Authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean might include: Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Karen Lord, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Marcia Douglas, Ernest Pepin, René Depestre, and Agustín de Rojas. We will also discuss supporting turns by Caribbean actors in mainstream works such as Star Trek and Black Panther. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. 

ENGL 4560-004: Visual Fictions: Photography and 20th/21st-Century US Literature

Joshua Miller
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

The emergence of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries participated in an extraordinary vitality in both visual and literary cultures of the time. The force of new kinds of images and icons was immediate and transformative. Photographs were used in a wide range of ways during this period, from multimedia art forms (collage) to new surveillance methods (mug shots and passport photos) to advertising, journalism, family and personal mementos, among others. This was also the era of mass movements of people (immigration and migration). This course will provide an introduction to the emergence of photography as a popular and artistic medium in the 20th century US, which we will put in dialogue with the literary and cultural movements of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and the as-yet unnamed contemporary. We’ll consider how word-based arts changed—primarily narrative prose and the novel form—in response to the visualities generated by photography.

ENGL 4561-001: Literature and Trauma

Mrinalini Chakravorty
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM
 

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 4561-002: Literature and Human Rights

Cristopher Krentz
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM
 
What does literature have to do with human rights, with the aspirational effort to ensure the protection of persons everywhere from persecution and deprivation?  In this course we will begin by considering the history of human rights, including debates over their legitimacy.  Then we will study recent theory on the relationship of rights to literature and read a variety of relevant contemporary fiction.  The syllabus is still under construction, but possibilities here include Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Sinha’s Animal’s People, Abani’s Song for Night, and Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis.  These works often deal with difficult, troubling topics, but they do so with grace and occasionally unexpected beauty.  Requirements include the usual careful preparation and participation, quizzes, a short presentation, a 5-page paper, and a 10-page research paper.

ENGL 4570-001: Reading Toni Morrison in the Round

Deborah McDowell
W 03:30PM-06:00PM
 

“Word-work is sublime . . . because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures

our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other.”

Toni Morrison, from the Nobel Lecture

This advanced seminar focuses on varied selections from the prodigious corpus of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison—novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, librettist and public intellectual. Her eleven novels encompassed the history of Black folk in the U. S., from colonial Virginia to slavery to the Korean War. We will explore the socio-historical, theoretical, political and cultural contexts from which Morrison’s writings emerged, its dominant threads and aesthetic strategies, as well as its critical reception across the decades of her long and storied career.

Required texts will include Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy and Beloved, the film adaptation of Beloved, selections from The Source of Self-Regard and What Moves at the Margins, as well as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. We will also examine Morrison’s work as a book editor, who nurtured and developed the craft of such writers as Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, June Jordan among others. These were the writers who, along with Morrison herself, constituted what she termed a “renaissance” of African American women writing during the 1980s and 90s. We will read Jones’s Corregidora, Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and selected poems from Jordan’s Things that I Do in the Dark.

Topics will include the construction and politics of race, the power and ethics of language, ecologies of race and place, the place of literature in public life, philosophies of love and friendship, the persistence of the past in the present, and Morrison as the piercing, visionary analyst of world history, contemporary society, literature and language. The course will conclude with a consideration of censorship and book banning. Although Morrison was among the most influential authors of the 20th century, her books have been consistently banned from school curricula and purged from the shelves of libraries. In 2023, the public school system in Spotsylvania, Virginia banned both The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Current Virginia Governor, Glenn Youngkin made banning her novel, Beloved, a central aspect of an ad created for his successful gubernatorial race. In prisons across the country, Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon and Paradise are frequently banned. We will read selections from Morrison’s edited collection, Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement. While examining the realities and workings of censorship and challenges to free expression, especially in this contemporary moment, we will train our focus on Morrison’s sublime “word-work,” on the transformative power of language in the writings of this towering figure in world literature.

ENGL 4580-001: Race, Space, Culture

Ian Grandison & Marlon Ross
T 05:00PM-07:30PM
 

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Newman, Mindy Fullilove); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through two mandatory local site visits: to Monticello on Sunday, Sept. 22, from 1 to 5 p.m.; and to downtown Charlottesville on Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Requirements include a take-home midterm, a final critical reflection paper, and a major team research project and symposium presentation.

Final Symposium schedule: Tuesday, Dec. 10, 6:00-9:00 p.m.

Monticello Field Trip, Sunday, Sept. 22, 12:45 - 5:00 p.m.

Downtown Charlottesville Field Trip, Tuesday, Nov. 12, from 5:00 - 8:30 p.m., meets at 333 W. Main Street (former Inge Grocery Store

ENGL 4901-001: The Bible Part 1 - Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

Stephen Cushman
MW 11:00AM-12:15PM
 
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 / Old Testament, from Genesis through the prophets, 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.

PLEASE NOTE: Professor John Parker will teach a course focusing on the New Testament in spring 2023. Both courses will read the New Testament gospel of Mark, connecting the semesters, but you do not have to take the fall course as a prerequisite for the spring one.

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

ENGL 4998-001: Distinguished Majors Program

Caroline Rody
T 03:30PM-06:00PM

ENGL 5559-001: Anne Spencer & the Harlem Renaissance

Alison Booth
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM
 

This discussion-based seminar will focus on the celebrated woman poet Anne Spencer (1882-1975), part of the Harlem Renaissance while living in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia. Spencer’s lasting presence in 30 published poems, a preserved house and garden museum, and the papers at UVA as well as in Lynchburg inspire a planned exhibition in Harrison-Small Library September 2024, along with a slowly expanding body of critical studies. We can advance Spencer studies together in light of reading her work in relation to some other writers she interacted with and our theoretical questions about race, gender, place, environment, and cultural heritage, with some consideration of digital humanities. Our work will include exploring unpublished archives (Special Collections), taking a field trip to the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum, attending the exhibit and associated events, reading biographies and criticism, practicing skills of reading and interpreting poetry, writing two essays, experimenting with digital tools. The Library hopes to generate support for digitizing images and manuscripts in the UVA collection of many of her papers, as well as examination of her books also archived here. There is no scholarly edition of her works, and our studies will advance scholarship on the evolution of her multi-faceted writing practice (in used notebooks, on walls; prose segueing into poetry and back again).

ENGL 5810-001: Books as Physical Objects

David Vander Meulen
MW 11:00AM-12:15PM
 

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 in Teaching Modern Literature - “Teaching Literature with Equity and Justice”

Cristina Griffin
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM
 

This seminar is about how and why teaching literature matters today. How do secondary school and college instructors teach literature in challenging times? How do teachers make tough decisions about what to teach and why? What responsibility do teachers have to promote equity and justice through the literature they teach and the methods they use? In this course, we will tackle these big questions together as we explore what it means to pursue a career in teaching literature to middle school, high school, or college students. Each week, we will weave together your existing knowledge of literature and your emerging knowledge of pedagogy. You will be introduced to theories of learning-focused, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive pedagogy, and you will put your newfound knowledge into practice as we work step by step through designing your own teaching philosophy and materials.

This course will bring together students who already have experience as classroom instructors, students who are in the process of teaching for the very first time, and students who have yet to step up to the front of a classroom in the role of teacher. We will build on this diversity of experiences, learning together how to bring transformative pedagogies into our present and future classrooms.

 

Writing and Rhetoric

ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence (8 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.

001 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MW 01:00PM-01:50PM (CAB 042)
Claire A Chantell
 
002 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 042)
Claire Chantell
 
003 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
004 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
005 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Literacy Narratives
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
006 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 066)
Kate Natishan
 
007 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Literacy Narratives
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
008 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 066)
Kate Natishan

 

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.

001 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 064)
TBA

002 -- TBA 
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
003 – Writing & Community Engagement - Walking Charlottesville
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
Kate Stephenson

This seminar will explore the connections between walking, writing, social justice, and activism. There is a long history of walking as a means of igniting thought, creativity, and dialogue that dates back to the meanderings of Socrates and Aristotle and continues through the strolls of the Romantic poets, the city wanderings of the fictional J. Alfred Prufrock and Clarissa Dalloway, and the outdoor hikes of Wendell Berry. But walking isn’t just linked to creativity and conversation; it’s also clearly connected to social justice. Walking to freedom, as depicted in myriad slave narratives and immigration stories, as well as walking for freedom in the form of protest marches, both past and present, are important reminders that our footsteps matter.   In this class, we will consider how walking can be both a solo activity and a means of creating community. By walking together, we will learn about the places and histories around us.  The course will be structured around biweekly walks themed around social justice. All walks and place-based visits will include time for reflective writing.

004 – TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 211)
TBA
 
005 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
006 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing and Critical Inquiry at UVA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 330)
Heidi Nobles
 
007 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
008 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
009 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
010 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Citizen Science
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
011 -- TBA 
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA 
 
012 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 334)
Jon D'Errico
 
014 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Sports
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 064)
Rhiannon Goad
 
015 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
016 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens and Identities
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 594)
Charity Fowler
 
017 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
018 -- TBA 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
019 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
020 -- Writing about Science & Tech 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 330)
Eric Rawson
 
022 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 332)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)
 
024 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing and Critical Inquiry at UVA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 334)
Heidi Nobles
 
026 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Ideas of Home
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
John Casteen
 
027 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Ideas of Home
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 044)
John Casteen
 
028 -- TBA 
TR 05:00PM-6:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA 
 
029 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 036)
TBA
 
031 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
032 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
033 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
034 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 310)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)
 
035 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 334)
Jon D'Errico
 
036 -- Writing about Digital Media - The Art of the Post: Performance in Public Places
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 332)
Dana Little
 
037 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
040 -- Writing about Digital Media
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 334)
Kevin Smith
 
042 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
043 -- Writing about Culture/Society 
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 187)
Sethunya Mokoko
 
044 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
045 -- Writing about Science & Tech 
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 330)
Eric Rawson
 
046 -- Writing about Digital Media - The Art of the Post: Performance in Public Places
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 332)
Dana Little
 
047 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Sports
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 330)
Rhiannon Goad 

050 -- Writing about Culture/Society 
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 056)
Sethunya Mokoko
 
051 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 411)
Keith Driver
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
052 -- TBA 
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
053 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
054 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (KER 317)
TBA
 
056 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
057 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 064)
TBA
 
058 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
059 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
060 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
061 -- Writing about Science & Tech
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
062 -- TBA
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
063 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
064 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 036)
TBA
 
066 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
TVA
 
067 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
068 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens and Identities
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 183)
Charity Fowler
 
071 -- TBA
MW 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
072 -- Writing about Digital Media 
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 334)
Kevin Smith
 
073 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
074 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
075 -- TBA
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
076 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
077 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
078 -- TBA
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
080 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
081 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
082 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Indigenous Rhetorics
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 312)
Sarah Richardson
 
083 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
085 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
086 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 115)
TBA
 
087 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
088 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Indigenous Rhetorics
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 312)
Sarah Richardson
 
089 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
090 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA

091 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 064)
TBA

092 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15AM (KER 317)
TBA

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (1 section)

001 -- TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 312) - Writing about Food Justice
Kate Stephenson

Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at the UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, or the PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like food insecurity, food production, hunger stereotypes, privilege, urban gardening, and community engagement.  

Community engagement courses depend on creating pathways between different kinds of knowledge that enable us to learn with our minds, hearts, and bodies. The classroom is not a place where we find the answer; instead, it is a space for inquiry where process rather than product prevails. We will explore first-hand the ways in which academic conversations—and civic conversations—emphasize questions rather than answers. We will redefine knowledge—where it originates, who creates it, and how it circulates—by seeing the community outside the classroom as a site of knowledge production. 

ENWR 1530 - Writing About the Imagination

MW 01:00PM-01:50PM (MON 130)
Kenny Fountain

Discussion Sections: F 9:00AM, 10:00AM, 11:00AM, and 12:00PM.

Imagining and visualizing are key components of perceiving the world, remembering the part, and envisioning new futures. And words play an important role in how we imagine. That is, words make absence things present, bring to mind people, objects, and events remote in time or space, and allow us to conceive of possibilities that do not yet exist.
In this First Writing Requirement (FWR) course, we will explore how writers and researchers have investigated the imagination. To do this, we will read work from across several disciplines, from rhetoric and philosophy to cognitive science, history, and literature. As we do this, we will examine how these writers use verbal description, visual imagery, lively storytelling, compelling evidence, and persuasive argument. 

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (4 sections)

001 -- Writing about Identities - Writing Regret and Repair
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Tamika Carey
  
003 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 332)
Devin Donovan
 
004 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 594)
TBA
 
006 -- Writing about Science & Technology
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 310)
Eric Rawson

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (4 sections)

003 -- Writing Democratic Rights
T 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 310)
Stephen Parks

Students will study theories of democracy and work with global democratic advocates, as well as students located in internatioanal contexts.

004 -- Writing Human Rights
M 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 330)
Stephen Parks

Students will study theories of human rights and work with global human rights advocates, as well as students located in internatioanal contexts.

008 -- Writing about Medicine
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 310)
Rhiannon Goad

009 -- Community Engagement  
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Sarah Richardson

010 -- Writing and Games
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 330)
Kate Natishan

ENWR 2640 - Writing as Technology

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 203)
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 - News Writing

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 203)
Kate Sweeney

ENWR 2800 - Public Speaking

001 - The Power of Performance: From TED Talks to TikTok
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Dana Little

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing & Rhetoric

003 - Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 036)
Sethunya Mokoko

ENWR 3620 - Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
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 - Writing with Sound

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (RTN 152)
Steph Ceraso

In this collaborative, project-based course, students will learn to script, design, edit, and produce an original podcast series. In addition to reading about and practicing professional audio storytelling techniques (e.g. interviewing, writing for the ear, sound design), each student will get to work with a team to produce an episode for the podcast series. No experience with digital audio editing is necessary. Beginners welcome!

ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 334)
Cory Shaman

ENWR 3760 - Studies in Cultural Rhetoric

M 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 312)
Tamika Carey

ENWR 3900 - Career Based Writing and Rhetoric

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 068)
John T. Casteen IV