Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Spring 2023

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. 

001
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (New Cabell 068)
Henrietta Hadley

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.

W 02:00PM-04:30PM (Bryan 233)
Jane Alison

A class for ambitious students who want to explore ways of crafting longer literary fiction. We’ll examine how writers have worked within the long story’s more leisurely scope—contracting and expanding time, organizing structure, shifting among points of view, sculpting spaces, rendering thought, controlling tensions—so that you can develop your own long story. The class will revolve around your writing and published texts that will run from fabulist to realist to faux nonfiction, possibly including works of Alice Munro, William Gass, Gabriel García Márquez, Lydia Davis, Vikram Chandra, George Saunders.

Unless you are in the APLP, instructor permission is required. Please send to Jane Alison (jas2ad) a note saying who you are and why you’re interested in this class, together with a brief (10 page max) writing sample.

A course for writers exploring dialogue in plays, short stories and novels.

This course introduces the many indirect ways that fiction, drama, and poetry shape our character, beliefs, and attitudes toward the world. Reading literature as a mode of action attunes us both to its calculated designs on us and to our own needs for practical resources to lead our lives. We will read texts ranging from song lyrics to the allegorical novel, modern drama, and lyric poem. This course satisfies the second writing requirement.

This course is an introduction to poetry for students who have little or no previous experience reading poetry. We will read poets who wrote accentual-syllabic verse in English in the past 400 years. Some poets who might be studied include Phillip Larkin, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, and John Donne. We will focus on short lyric poems and sonnets. There won’t be many poems on the syllabus that are longer than sixty lines, but every poem will need to be read several times, with very close attention. Students will learn techniques for making sense of poetry and practice “scanning” poems (marking stressed and unstressed syllables) using the For Better for Verse website. They will also comment on poems online using Perusall (software that facilitates “asynchronous social annotation of texts”), write two essays, and memorize a sonnet.

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.

In this course we will analyze Asian-American, African-American, and Indigenous stories of displacement, (im)migration, and settlement. Through comparative analysis, we will discuss the various intersections between and divergences among these texts, paying particular attention to the shared histories the texts evidence. Our goal is to form interpretive arguments that address the ways in which the texts negotiate ideas about the nation, nation building, and national belonging.

Like to sink into a book that challenges the ways we think about ourselves by imagining other worlds, speculative futures, aliens, artificial intelligences, cyborgs, technology and society at their best and possible worst, and more? We will read several books that are classified loosely as science fiction, though there may be some overlap with other genres such as speculative fiction or climate fiction. Along the way, we will consider key conventions and aspects of the novel as a genre, questions of social relevance, and the past, present, and future of science fiction. 

We will also practice close reading strategies, reflect on acts of literary interpretation through brief references to critical essays, inquire into some of the functions and effects of fictional narratives, and practice constructing both reflective and argumentative essays. Students will write regular reading responses and exploratory pieces, lead seminar discussions in groups, write three short essays, and take a brief final exam. 

This course fulfills the second writing (or writing-enhanced) requirement. ENGL 2508 also prepares students interested in the English major for upper-level coursework in literature, though all majors are welcome.

In this seminar, we will examine an expansive selection—in terms of both historical and definitional breadth—of literature that engages with Jewish religious and scholarly traditions, cultures, and national identities. Starting with narratives from the Masoretic Biblical text, to mazelike Rabbinic micro-fictions, we will work our way through histories and diasporas to the contemporary Jewish novel in a variety of its iterations. No previous experience with Jewish literature, languages, or religious studies required; we will work from the ground up, often in translation, to place the stories we read in their typically multilayered Judaic contexts.  

This course will provide an introduction to the contemporary American novel. We will read some celebrated fiction published since 1960, probably including Roth’s Goodbye Columbus; Morrison’s Sula; Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Robinson’s Gilead; and McCarthy’s The Road. Focusing on whatever themes the novels raise, we’ll talk about narrative style, ethnicity and identity in America, and much more. Moreover, we’ll concentrate on developing analytical and writing skills, which should help students to succeed in other English and humanities classes. The course will fulfill the second writing requirement.

How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Michael Malone, Handling Sin. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

This course investigates the novel in US literary history. Beginning with works from the early republic and concluding with very recent novels, the syllabus set us up to explore a variety of ways that novels have been written, consumed, and understood to function in public life. So that we can study a wide array of styles and historical moments, the novels typically will be on the short side. Authors will likely include Hannah Webster Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Nella Larsen, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, and Ocean Vuong. Assignments will include biweekly short essays, along with two formal essays of 5-7 pages. This is a discussion-based course, so your class participation will be vital.

*Does not satisfy the prerequisite for the English major.

What is our relationship to the environment? Physical, chemical, or biological phenomena can be described by environmental scientists, but "problems" are defined by our response to them, contingent on culture, history, and values more than measurements. Solving environmental problems lies in the political sphere, but our debates draw on discourses from literature, philosophy, economics, and ethics. Explore the basis for environmental thought and practice. Crosslisted with ETP 2030 and PLAP 2030.

TR 09:30AM - 10:45AM (New Cabell 207)
Tarushi Sonthalia

We will begin this course by asking two questions which are both broad and fundamental: First—what, when, and where was modernism? Second—why do we care? The objective in asking these questions is not to arrive at definite answers; rather, we will survey the many scholarly interventions which engage these questions and let the provocation undergirding these questions inform our thinking as we move through the semester. In particular, we will focus on shifting notions of the self and the collective which were central to the social, cultural, and political milieu of the modernist moment. Crucially, by expanding the space of modernist cultural production beyond the conventional bounds of white European and North American modernisms, we will see the ways in which writings born of particular raced, gendered, sexed, classed, caste, and/or national experiences offer, both via their form and content, various and complex ideas of the self and collective.

An introduction to close reading and critical writing focused on recent works by women in a variety of genres and from a range of national contexts. Possible works (still to be determined) include stories by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative of growing up by U.S. cartoonist Lynda Barry; a film directed by Lebanese-American Rola Nashef; images by queer, South African photographer Zanele Muholi; a poetic work combining autobiography and anti-racist critique by Claudia Rankine. Our discussion of these texts will address basic formal issues: modes of narration; the difference between “story” and “plot”; the use of framing and other structural devices; the constraints of genre; the handling of images, tone, and diction. Likely thematic concerns include the effects of colonialism and migration on women; explorations by women of growing up, growing old, marriage, maternity, queer sexuality, work, and creativity; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of nation, generation, race, and class; the divergent meanings of feminism for women around the world.  We will work not only on becoming attentive readers but also on learning to conceive and organize effective critical essays.  This writing intensive course (three papers totaling 20 pages) satisfies the prerequisite for the English major as well as the second-writing requirement. This course is restricted to 1st- and 2nd-year students. 3rd- and 4th-years who have never taken a college-level literature course may contact the instructor to seek special permission.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (Rotunda 150)
Natalie Thompson

Surprisingly, today’s theories of gender and sexuality are often constructed and negotiated by looking back to the past. Many contemporary theorists use eighteenth-century literature and culture as a touchstone, a way to analyze and question our current conceptions of gender and sexuality. In this course, we will read (and watch) novels, memoirs, and cultural accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth century alongside current theories of gender and sexuality. This course requires no previous knowledge of feminist/sexuality theory or of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts. This is a writing-intensive course which will balance small weekly writing assignments with three larger essays. We’ll focus on how to grow and feel comfortable thinking and writing critically, as well as revising wisely. We’ll promote lively discussion of the ways we perceive and construct gender and sexuality today, as well as the ways current theories invoke or employ tropes and realities from the past. The course is also designed as an introduction to the study of literature at the college level. We’ll discuss foundational modes and methods of writing and thinking about literature and culture (what even is “close reading,” really?), explicitly talk about how to execute them, and try them out ourselves.

Primary texts will likely include The Woman of Colour, Sense and Sensibility, and excerpts from the television show Harlots. Critical readings include essays and theories from Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman.  This writing intensive course (three papers totaling 20 pages) satisfies the prerequisite for the English major as well as the second-writing requirement.

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, sexuality, 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, Heinrich Böll, and Irene Nemirovsky; memoirs by Vera Brittain and Elie Wiesel; and films by Jean Renoir and Louis Malle.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (Nau 241)
Katherine Churchill

If, as Shakespeare put in, during the Renaissance, "what's past is prologue"—where does that put the Middle Ages? As preface, prequel, to the main action? How do we situate or relegate the past, what does it mean to do so?

For us, the medieval conjures up images of crumbling castles or rusty suits of armor. But for medieval people in Western Europe, the past was Roman ruins, the fall of Troy, and Arthur's court. Using both medieval English literature (including Old English lyrics, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and prologues written by John Gower and William Caxton) and contemporary memory studies, historical, and archival theory, this class will show how medieval conceptions of the past can help us understand temporality and periodization as modes of powerbrokering and history-shaping. In doing so, we will consider how the past functions in the present—perhaps not so "past" after all.
 

MW 03:30-04:45PM (Clark G004)
Courtney Watts

This survey would take up King Arthur texts starting with the earliest mentions in Middle Welsh through the 2021 film The Green Knight. Along the way the course would consider how writers use the Arthur mythos to respond to concerns of their day, as when Wace invents the Round Table at a time when the power of the English kingship was being curtailed, as well as the ways in which Arthuriana adapts across different genres and, perhaps, stays the same, carrying romance sensibilities into modern forms like the novel and film. 

MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (Bryan 233)
Michael VanHoose

How do works of literature resonate across time? What’s gained and lost by turning a Jane Austen novel into a film? How can popular culture teach us to be better literary critics? In this course we’ll investigate adaptations of many sorts across a long, multimedia history of Romanticism. We’ll set 18th and 19th century British novels and poems alongside their 19th, 20th, and 21st century re-imaginings in theater, science fiction, film, comics, heavy metal, &c. In the process, we’ll think about the role adaptation, broadly defined, played in the careers of Romantic authors, who transformed their historical sources into something new, experimented with form to make writing speak between and across media, revised their work mercilessly at different stages in their lives, and sought to carve their place in the canon by reinterpreting their literary forbears. 

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (Shannon 111)
Annie Persons

This course will bring together essays, fiction, and poems that attend to the social, cultural, and political challenges posed by environmental damage and destruction. As its title suggests, we will focus on a specific issue in relation to today’s environmental challenges: energy. In this course, “energy” refers to fossil fuels, but it also refers to creativity—the imaginative energy required to make and consume literature. With these two meanings in mind, we will ask questions such as: What is the relationship between energy and extraction? What forces dictate when, how, and by whom energy is used? How have authors across time theorized energy? And how, if at all, can literature help us tackle the environmental challenges we face today? 

English majors and nonmajors alike are welcome—the only requirement is an energy and enthusiasm for reading and talking about literature. Please write to me at alp6ef@virginia.edu if you have any questions! 

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, Joan Didion, and Hunter Thompson 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, Rebecca Solnit, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Jia Tolentino. We will also consider the rise of “fake news.” A term formerly used to indicate the work of entertainers such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who pilloried the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them, “fake news” is now an established practice of the far right, as well as a political slur used to denigrate the work of mainstream (center and left-of-center) news organizations.

William Wordsworth, Toni Morrison, Ocean Vuong, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, William Butler Yeats: these are some—but not all— of the authors we will be reading and studying together. This class will survey literature in English from around 1800 to the present moment. We will start with the emergence of Romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century and trace the emergence of English as a global language and literature in our post-colonial world. Our itinerary will include stops in Britain, the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and India. This course is part of the two-semester sequence of the history of literature in English (along with ENGL 3001) that is required of English majors, but is open to anyone interested in exploring some of the most significant works of literature of the last two-plus centuries. You do not need to have taken ENGL 3001 first; the courses can be completed in any order that works best for you.

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

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

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

We’ll read a handful of the unforgettable Tales, leading up to a month on the spectacular Knight’s Tale; the goal is to immerse you in medieval story-telling and help you see behind the curtain into the writer’s workshop. Some ingredients: Amazons under house arrest, fairies dancing in rings, living knights discovered under a heap of dead corpses, Queen Guinevere sentencing a rapist to find out what women actually desire, a girl who threatens her new husband with murder by an invisible angel if he so much as touches her, a tattle-tale crow, sex in a tree, very well educated chickens, the most infamous fart in literature.  The Middle Ages are a strange otherworld; we’ll investigate how things as apparently universal as love, faith, and death are different before the modern era. You'll learn to read Middle English and get skilled at “unpacking” short passages of text and describing how words and images work to produce the responses of readers.  Along the way, we will find out what you think about Chaucer’s ambitions — comic, philosophical, poetic. Commitment to real conversation, two short papers, and two exams required.  This transparent course is designed for beginners, but it’s also a lot of fun if you’re experienced.

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

This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances.  ENGL 3271, the fall semester course, deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies.  You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.
2 50-minute lectures and 1 50-minute discussion section per week.

Requirements: 3 five-page papers, a final exam emphasizing material covered in lectures and section meetings, and regular short assignments made by section leaders.

This course does not automatically fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, but it may be tweaked to do so.  See me in the first few weeks of the semester if you are interested in this option.

Discussions:

This course will range over the vast goodly fields of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama: tragedies, she-tragedies, heroic, gothic, and colonialist, along with samples of other popular stage entertainments such as operas, adaptations, pantomimes, farces. We’ll poke into contemporary biographies of the principal actors and managers, acting manuals, descriptions of theatres, sets, and costumes, accounts of the audiences, and the rise of Shakespeare as a national icon. Core playwrights will include William Wycherley, Thomas Shadwell, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Susanna Centlivre, George Lillo, Richard Cumberland, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney, and Matthew Lewis. Added fun will be found in Nahum Tate’s happy version of King Lear (1688), Henry Fielding’s truly wonderful The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731), and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) (yes, the one in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park).

An introduction to the British poets writing between 1832 and 1914, in the long envelope of Queen Victoria’s reign, with a preliminary glance at Romanticism (1780s-1820s) by way of background. Poetry by Tennyson, the two Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth, married), the two Rossettis (Dante and Christina, siblings), Hopkins, Emily Bronte, Housman, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and others, with a coda on poets of WWI. The goal of the course is a broad exposure to the kinds of poetry being written during the first century of general literacy and the mass distribution of print in Britain, in the wake and onrush of the political, philosophical, and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. This was a time when poetry mattered intensely to a wide swath of the British population, and when modern ideas of what poetry could be and do were being shaped. Course themes will include memory, the self, time, sexuality, language, art, the imagination, love, and death: something for everyone.

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

We’ll begin this course by reading one, maybe two of Jane Austen’s novels.  Then we’ll go on to compare her vision of life and writing with some Romantic visions. We’ll consider her in imaginary dialogues with Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley. And we’ll also discuss her in connection with Emerson, a writer who disliked Austen’s work and wasn’t reluctant to say so.  Cornel West, the writer and political activist, says that Emerson and Austen are his favorite writers, though he recognizes the tension between them. Is it possible to bring Austen and Emerson into some kind of harmony? This question, and others like it, will lie at the center of the course. A shortish paper, a longer one, and maybe a presentation or two.

The “long eighteenth century”—the period from about 1660 to about 1820-- was an age of great writing in the English language, but also an age of colonial expansion and imperial conquest. In this course, we will read works that reflect, celebrate, or (more often) critique these narratives. We will read treaties, essays, poems, and novels by authors such as Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Olaudah Equiano, and Phillis Wheatley Peters. Readings quizzes, two short-ish papers, and a final exam.

This class introduces students to the health humanities with a specific focus on literary and narrative approaches. The course explores the premise that 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; and to appreciate and respond to a given narrative as an expression of humanity. Narrative competence, it has been argued, leads to “radical listening” and to an enhanced focus on care (beyond simply cure). Reading the texts on this syllabus will help to hone narrative competence. But this course will also explore what literature can teach us about larger structural factors that shape health. Students are invited to approach the course according to their own specific educational agendas—whether they are English or American Studies majors, premed students, or students in other health fields.

Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to world cultures during the decades just before and after this new millennium. Engaging a wide variety of media (including film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy), the course addresses recent conditions of China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East. Important events – such as the global plight of refugees, the rise of China as super-power, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the aspirations and failures of the Arab spring, the war in UIkraine – will be some of our focal points. At every stage we consider the making of our present-day world since 1945 and the urgent issues that inform it: the campaign for international human rights, the independence movements in Africa and Asia, the resurgence of religious faith around the world, the crisis of the environment, the plague of Covid, the rise of authoritarian nationalism.

Discussions:

Global Cultural Studies offers an interdisciplinary approach to world cultures during the decades just before and after this new millennium. Engaging a wide variety of media (including film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy), the course addresses recent conditions of China, India, North and South Africa, and the Middle East. Important events – such as the global plight of refugees, the rise of China as super-power, the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the aspirations and failures of the Arab spring, the war in UIkraine – will be some of our focal points. At every stage we consider the making of our present-day world since 1945 and the urgent issues that inform it: the campaign for international human rights, the independence movements in Africa and Asia, the resurgence of religious faith around the world, the crisis of the environment, the plague of Covid, the rise of authoritarian nationalism.

Discussions:

F 12:00PM-12:50PM (New Cabell 132)
F 01:00PM-01:50PM (New Cabell 111)
F 01:00PM-01:50PM (New Cabell 064)
F 02:00PM-02:50PM (New Cabell 066)
F 10:00AM-10:50AM (Bryan 332)
F 11:00AM-11:50AM (New Cabell 066)

How and why do we read? And what is the relationship between academic reading and the kind of reading we do for pleasure? This course is divided into two parts. The first part, on critical reading, surveys influential forms of literary theory, including structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory.  In the second half, we will explore everyday experiences of reading that are either ignored or treated with suspicion in literary theory:  identification and recognition; empathy; enchantment and self-loss; horror and shock; fandom and the pleasure of collective reading. The goal of the course is to explore the similarities and differences between reading inside and outside the classroom and to examine the emotional as well as intellectual dimensions of interpretation.

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

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

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?

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

Sally Hemings University: CONNECTING THREADS offers a space in which to re-frame “Mr. Jefferson’s University” as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property. Working in conjunction with Charlottesville artist Tobiah Mundt to examine the threads that connect UVA and the City. For many Black folks in Charlottesville, for example, the University is an extractive, dominating, and harmful institution. The work of Sally Hemings University: Connecting Threads relies upon de-centering UVA as savior or primary expert. This community-engaged course is neither service nor charity: it is solidarity.

Shakespeare was fascinated by history throughout his career—what was possibly his first play (Henry VI part 2, originally called The First Part of the Contention), was based on English history, and so was his second-to-last, Henry VIII, or All is True. In between he wrote a great many plays based on historical events in medieval England and Scotland, and in ancient Rome. Many of these plays are still frequently performed and their resonances in the modern world emphasized. In all his history plays Shakespeare asks fundamental questions about how political communities  are constituted, about what makes authority seems legitimate or illegitimate, about whether there is a connection between character and destiny, about how moral rules change in times of crisis, and about how and why the answers to these questions seem to vary depending on circumstances and cultural context. In this seminar we will read and discuss a number of Shakespeare’s history plays; I have not yet designed the syllabus but probable assignments include Henry VI, part 2, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV part 1, Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus. Where appropriate, we will also avail ourselves of live and film performances.  Writing assignments: 5-page midterm paper, 10 page final paper.

The aim of this course is to illuminate what is distinctive about the mental and poetic habits of two Renaissance poets by reading them side by side. If you have met these two poetic characters, you may have been struck by their differences rather than their similarities. Spenser’s intricately fashioned allegorical tales of love-lorn shepherds, wandering knights, and subtle sorcerers seem far removed from Donne’s metaphysical lyrics with their witty rants and far-flung conceits. In our close study of well-known and less-known works, we will consider the correspondences as well as the incongruities between these two poets, attending in particular to their ideas about the best way to body forth passions in poetic language, to their visions of excess and measure, to their understandings of the relation between religious and amorous devotion, and to their accounts of the reign of mutability in the world. No prior knowledge of Donne or Spenser is required or expected; the only prerequisite is a willingness to read with attention—and a dictionary.

W 03:30PM-06:00PM (New Cabell 168)
Janet Kong-Chow

What is the future of race and what will race be like in the future? This course brings into direct conversation two modes of speculative discourse(Afrofuturism & techno-Orientalism) which interrogate the interplay of race, technology, diaspora, and agency in future worlds.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (Bryan 334)
John Parker

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the New Testament; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 2: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman. 

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Bryan 334)
Susan Fraiman

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

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (New Cabell 411)
Debjani Ganguly

The course will explore the emergence of speculative fiction as a global literary form in our contemporary age. Broadly encompassing the genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror and alternative history, speculative fiction is any kind of fiction that creates a narrative world which may or may not resemble the world we live in. This kind of fiction embodies alternative ideas of reality including magic, space or time travel, alternative realities, or alternative histories. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of speculative fiction from Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific that figure alternative futures for peoples oppressed by centuries-long colonialism. The rapid proliferation of digital technology and the accelerating effects of anthropogenic climate change have given a new edge to this body of fiction. We will study the emergence of counter-factual utopian and dystopian narratives, Afrofuturism and animism, the specter of fossil futures, and apocalyptic fiction on environmental collapse through a range of exciting works. The goal of this course is to understand the rise of speculative fiction as a literary form and a mode of world-making that captures cataclysmic shifts in human and non-human worlds that can no longer be comprehended by social, political, and moral frameworks of our recent past and present.

Primary Texts

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (New Cabell 415)
Sandhya Shukla

This course explores how imprisonment shapes the cultural imaginary.  It seeks to understand how forms of containment, internment, incarceration, and more, can, paradoxically, give rise to expansive ideas about democracy, freedom and inclusion.  Engaging in careful race and class analysis, we ask how, at various historical moments, the writings and other cultural works of political and non-political prisoners advance a rethinking of “America,” with abiding limits and possibilities.  Materials to be covered may include fictional and non-fictional texts by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Julie Otsuka, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Viet Mike Ngo, and others; secondary sources by Michelle Alexander, Michel Foucault, Dylan Rodriguez and Caleb Smith will also be consulted.  Though this is a mostly US-based course, we will also engage transnational and comparative perspectives, and students will be encouraged to pursue projects, if they so wish, on other parts of the world.  Inasmuch as imprisonment raises social, economic, political and cultural questions, adopting an interdisciplinary sensibility which spans the social sciences and expressive arts will be crucial for our inquiry.  Assignments include: regular weekly reading reflections, a 5-7 pp critical essay, and a 10-15 pp research paper.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Bryan 203)
Victoria Olwell

How do recent U.S. novels enter into contemporary political and social questions? As works of fiction, what particular expressive resources do novels bring public discourse? If novels seek to persuade readers to adopt a position, how do they do so? This course approaches such questions by considering novels alongside select contemporary non-fiction. The novels in the course address such issues as climate change, mass incarceration, immigration, women’s status, and modern Native American identity. Readings will include works by Toni Morrison, Rachel Kushner, Tommy Orange, Richard Powers, Naomi Alderman, Laila Lalami, Essi Edugyan, Tayari Jones, and Ocean Vuong. In addition to reading novels and sources related to contemporary issues, we’ll also study the history and aesthetics of the novel. Course requirements will include two 7-page papers, a final exam, and energetic class participation.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 056)
Mrinalini Chakravorty

What is “queer” about the novel?  Our course will grapple with this question by examining the rich legacy of non-normative sexual expressions and orientations in the literary arts.  The aim of the course is—

1. To understand what constitutes ‘queer literature’ as a meaningful genre or archive.  Is the queer novel unique in its expressivity, in terms of style and content?  Does the queer novel have its own canon?  Should this canon be more open to revision than others given the constant evolutions in how we understand gender?
2. To see how novels engage political ideas of sexuality germane to thinking about queerness, such as of ‘homophobia,’ the ‘closet,’ 'inversion’ ‘gender bending,’ ‘cis-acting,’ ‘coming out,’ ‘failure,’ ‘deviance,’ ‘camp,’ ‘cruising,’ ‘queer futurity,’ ‘queer feeling,’ ‘homonationalism,’ ‘disidentification,’ ‘performitivity,’ ‘flamboyance,’ etc.  
3. To confront radical questions about subjectivity and embodiment that the analytic of sexuality enables us to ask about the worlds we inhabit and the texts that represent these worlds.  

To accomplish these goals, we will read sweepingly across the whole breadth of the queer canon.  We will begin with early classics (by Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, E.M.Forster) of queer literature and then shift our attention to more contemporary transnational contexts concerned with representing queerness as a part of, and not apart from, affiliations of race, culture, religion, geography, class etc.  Our reading includes works by Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ali Smith, Leslie Feinberg, Michael Cunningham, Shyam Selvadurai, Alison Bechdel, Saleem Haddad, and Shaani Mootoo among others.  In other words, we will think of the important ways that the evolution of the queer novel involves a perpetual re-queering of the genre itself by the insistent heterogeneity of racial, transnational, and transgender contexts.  While most of the novels we read will come from the Anglophone tradition, some will be translated from other languages.

This course will require that students be prepared to engage directly and fearlessly with the field of queer theory.  Queer theory will inform how we contextualize the subcultures of queerness (from Bloomsbury or Stonewall to Queer-of-Color activisms), as well as understand why notions of reproductive normality, eroticism, pleasure, kinship, and indeed queer identity have been transformed in recent literary and aesthetic works.  Ultimately, we will ask how queer aesthetic works speak to, revise, and must be re-evaluated given the shifting dynamics of queer thought.  Here our reading includes work by Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Judith Butler Jasbir Puar, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Judith Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman, Jose Munoz,  Marlon Ross, and others.  Finally, a selection of salient films, poems, and short stories will allow us to see useful connections between the aesthetic and political charge—often one of transgression—that the sign of the “queer” carries.

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (New Cabell 368)
Carmen Lamas

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

R 05:00PM-07:30PM (New Cabell 064)
Marlon Ross

What does race mean in the late 20th and early 21st century? Given the various ways in which race as a biological “fact” has been discredited, why and how does race continue to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, mass media, and everyday social realities? How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? This course surveys major trends in black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/ Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or women of color feminism), focused on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and the Steven Spielberg film adaptation; 3) the debate over the social construction of race (poststructuralist theory); 4) the debate over queer racial identities, focused on two films, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Asian-American, and Chicanx studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late- twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.

T 05:00PM-07:30PM (Bryan 233)
Ian Grandison

Required Site Visit I--Monticello 

Sunday, February 19, 12:45pm to 5:00pm ET. (Class meets at Monticello Visitor Center at 12:45pm ET sharp. We end at the African Cemetery at 5:00pm ET. There will be no class on Tuesday, April 25 to compensate for the time commitment for the Monticello visit.)

Required Site Visit II—Downtown Charlottesville 

Tuesday, March 28, 4:45pm to 8:00pm ET.  Class meets at the former Greyhound Bus Station at 310 West Main Street at 4:45pm ET sharp. We end at Friendship Court by 8:00pm ET.) Overlaps with regular class meeting.

Required Final Symposium on Zoom (exam period)

Saturday, May 6, 6:00pm to 9:00pm ET. 

This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest).  We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars.  With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy.  You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from  accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled.  We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region.  In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, a critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar.  Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of  universal standards for public restroom pictograms.  Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester.  Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.

John O'Brien

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

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Bryan 332)
Clare Kinney

Please note: this course may be used to satisfy the pre-1700 requirement (with a slight tweaking of the requirements: see instructor).

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

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

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (New Cabell 066)
Caroline Rody

In this course we will explore a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling, in the emotionally rich territory where Jewish people have lived a spirited, talkative, politically engaged, book-obsessed modernity in the face of violence and destruction. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as short videos clips and a film, surveying a diverse array of modern Jewish literary and popular cultural production. About the first third of the course examines early and mid-twentieth century Jewish American writers, some from the immigrant New York milieu like Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and immigrant Yiddish poets (in translation), and then heirs to Yiddish culture with bold American aspirations, such as Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. For the rest of the term we will read fiction from the booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, Joshua Cohen, Christophe Boltanski, David Bezmozgis, and Etgar Keret.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to Jewish religious practice and to traditional Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones, to humor as an imaginative force. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, multiple short reading responses, a short and a long paper

Great Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. Drama, fiction, autobiography, medical testimony, poetry, and even economic treatises all contributed to a marked shift in public sentiment and understanding of the moral enormity of Britain's 'abominable trade'. We will read and discuss a broad variety texts, some canonical and some relatively unexplored, in order to understand the various ways that the literature of abolition transformed hearts and minds to create what is effectively the world's first human rights campaign.

F 02:00PM-04:30PM (Bryan 233)
Jane Alison

In this workshop we’ll explore some arts of memoir, especially formally inventive memoir. How do memoirists find shapes in the flows of life? How do they choose the moments and images that reveal patterns that in turn give meaning to experience? How do they create the “I” that will see and translate what’s seen, and how do they know what is “true” and find ways to render it meaningfully? How, above all, do they transform the private to public, transmute life to art? These and other fundamental questions of persona, shape, time, and sense will engage us all term—as will some exciting refusals to craft memoir with such questions in mind. We’ll focus particularly on narratives that employ both reflection and deflection to find and create truths, and narratives that are formally inventive, in order both to look and look away. Readings might include works by Annie Ernaux, Jesse Ball, Maggie Nelson, Marie Ndiaye, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Kazim Ali. Alongside this reading, you will write and workshop your own memoir projects, which might be several essays, a series of linked fragments, or a single extended work. 

What is postcolonial critique? Is it a way of reading a text? Does it refer to the processes of historical decolonization in places like Africa, India, and the Caribbean? Or is it a practice of critical thought that can be used to think across multiple spaces and times? In this course, we will approach these questions by reading a wide range of writers including Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Susan Buck-Morss, and C. L. R. James. The final project invites students to reflect upon the themes of revolutionary thinking, the global and universal, and questions of ethics.

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

F 02:00PM-03:00PM (New Cabell 042)
Elizabeth Fowler

This one-credit, pass/fail seminar meets online most Fridays at 2 for an hour and brings together students from many departments and disciplines who are interested in the intersections between religion and literature in their work. All are welcome, MAs and PhDs; our syllabus is student-driven and often invites guests from around the university, offers a place to bring in objects of study (following our rule of fewer than 10 pages of reading per session), and is ongoing from semester to semester, giving a home to scholars who prize comparatism, lack of boundaries, and warm collegiality. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, French, Spanish, Arabic, English, more--it’s all in our purview.  Meets together with RELG 5821, its Religious Studies counterpart. This is home base for the master’s program in World Religions, World Literatures as well as for other graduate students whose work makes it a touchstone.

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? This class focuses on the process of writing and revising. Students will consider a variety of mediums, from novels to poetry to essays to visual art, in an attempt to understand both how art is made and how it can teach them about their own capabilities and possibilities as writers. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during class. There will also be class trips to the Special Collections Library, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers and the Rotunda, Clemons Library, and the Fralin Museum of Art. 

What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? This class focuses on the process of writing and revising. Students will consider a variety of mediums, from novels to poetry to essays to visual art, in an attempt to understand both how art is made and how it can teach them about their own capabilities and possibilities as writers. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during class. There will also be class trips to the Special Collections Library, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers and the Rotunda, Clemons Library, and the Fralin Museum of Art. 

What does good writing actually look like? How is it made? This class focuses on the process of writing and revising. Students will consider a variety of mediums, from novels to poetry to essays to visual art, in an attempt to understand both how art is made and how it can teach them about their own capabilities and possibilities as writers. Student papers will be peer reviewed and revised multiple times during class. There will also be class trips to the Special Collections Library, the Memorial to the Enslaved Laborers and the Rotunda, Clemons Library, and the Fralin Museum of Art. 

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Bryan 203)
Kate Stephenson

In this writing course we’ll contribute to conversations of race and history at UVA through self-designed writing projects. The first part of the course will be an inquiry into the history of enslaved laborers at UVA and how the writers of the Declaration of Independence framed our country—particularly in terms of equality, individual liberty, and the institution of slavery— (texts: Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration, Sullivan’s Commission on Slavery and the University, excerpts from Nelson and Harold’s Charlottesville 2017, and excerpts from Nelson and McInnis’s Educated in Tyranny). Next, we will look at how writers speak back to silences and suppressed narratives (texts:  Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Petrosino’s White Blood, and Sharpe’s In the Wake). Throughout the course, we’ll look at current conversations about racial justice at UVA and beyond as well as community responses compiled by the Institute for Engagement and Negotiation[1] (IEN) in designing and executing the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers[2].

In this course, we will examine the role visual representations and image-making technologies play in the development and communication of scientific and medical knowledge. Beginning with medieval European illustrations and ending with contemporary data visualizations, we will explore the ways scientific, technical, and medical images present phenomena, count as evidence, construct new forms of knowledge, and shape our conceptions of the world.

Every culture has its own way of making meaning and communicating through persuasive means. Native American groups, for instance, have retained ceremonial customs and spirituality practices despite the conquests that have shaped this country. Queer communities, for example, have strategic ways that they use to make sense of the world and joy for themselves in relation to heteronormativity. African-Americans, LatinX, and Asian Americans all have strategic language practices and social customs they use to fortify their collective identities and advocate for themselves amid historical hostility. Differently abled people have developed strategic ways of making their needs met despite design choices that disadvantage them. Individuals in this country’s working-class employ strategic techniques to advocate for themselves in challenging environments. This course will explore how these various cultural locations (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality) impact how people generate rhetorical practices to maintain community and resist social division. Our work will involve exploring a variety of contexts wherein these practices are made; learning methodologies for studying rhetorical production across media and modality; and tracking these practices and their historical developments. Ideally, this work will enrich how you understand and participate in real-world cross-cultural and intercultural communications in professional and public spheres as well as personal encounters. Projects are likely to include: a language and culture autobiography; a discussion leading presentation; an annotated bibliography and introduction; and a final project presentation.

This course will explore travel writing using a variety of texts, including essays, memoirs, blogs, photo essays, and narratives. We will examine cultural representations of travel as well as the ethical implications of tourism. Students will have the opportunity to write about their own travel experiences, and we will also embark on "local travel" of our own.

This course offers students a survey of the persuasive communication and writing strategies Black women have used towards the project of empowerment. We will explore how they use rhetoric as techne, or an art, to meet their needs, and to understand how rhetoric can be used as a tool of discernment to critique literature, communication, discourse, and evaluate arguments directed to them. Texts may include: Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream: Literacy as Social Change Among African American Women, Brittany Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women a Movement Forgot, and others. Projects are likely to include: a discussion leading presentation; an analytical essay, and a final project.