Undergraduate Course Descriptions Spring 2024

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Rotunda 152)
Jeb Livingood

This class introduces you to the techniques and craft involved in creative nonfiction writing. We’ll explore a number of creative nonfiction forms in short assignments during the first half of the semester, acquainting you with some of the major writing strategies that apply to each one. You will learn to conduct extensive research and incorporate it into a longer revision of one of those assignments. We’ll explore the ethical and professional constraints of using the terms “creative” and “nonfiction” in such rapid succession. When does creativity become fabrication and misrepresentation? And when does creativity help us get closer to the truth? This course also satisfies UVA’s Second Writing Requirement. Accordingly, you will need to generate more than twenty pages (4,000 words) of written material over the course of the semester. Most of you will exceed that page/word minimum significantly. So, expect lots of writing, and lots of revision.

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.

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.

R 02:00PM-04:30PM (Bryan 233)
Debra Nystrom

This creative writing workshop is for students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry, and it welcomes students working in the poetry/prose hybrid space as well. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of wide-ranging assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft. Students will be expected to write and revise six poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed commentary in response to other students’ work and assigned reading, to keep a poetry journal, to attend at least two poetry readings or craft talks, to participate in a group presentation on one of our assigned poets, and to turn in close-reading responses to three poems from reading material not discussed in class.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience and grade, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Nystrom at dln8u@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible. The instructor will let all applicants know of their acceptance status before spring classes begin.

M 02:00PM-04:30PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Lisa Spaar

This is a workshop for serious makers of poems.  Admission is by instructor permission only.  Students interested in the course should request permission to enroll through SIS and accompany their request with a brief note detailing prior writing experience/coursework/instructors and giving a good working e-mail address as well.   Students should also indicate whether or not they are submitting to other workshops.  In addition, applicants should send 5 pages of original poetry to Professor Lisa Russ Spaar at LRS9E@virginia.edu. 

In this generative workshop for advanced poets, the aim of our collective project will be to generate poems that dare to embody, explore, provoke, illuminate, refute, and manifest “large” traditional poetic themes--Eros, Thanatos, Truth, Beauty, God, & Time--in fresh, original ways.  In addition to writing about a poem a week, students will also be responsible for choosing a core poet to read closely throughout the semester.  We will be incorporating these readings into our assignments, poems, and class discussion.

T 09:30AM-12:00PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Anna Beecher

R 02:00PM-04:30PM (Dell 1 104)
Anna Beecher

W 02:00PM-04:30PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Kevin Moffett

W 11:00AM-01:30PM (Bryan 233)
Jane Alison

An advanced class for ambitious students who want to direct their senses toward the world around them and explore how minute, expansive, and complex their sensory perceptions can be. We’ll read theoretical texts about the (more than five!) senses and their intersections with language and examine how other writers have immersed themselves in capturing the sensory porosity that is the body and, via this, the world beyond; we’ll focus on texts that make interesting use of senses, more than simply deploying them to render a plausible physical world. You’ll cycle through studies of single subjects—a color or light effect, a smell, a tactile sensation, a sound, the passage of time, and so on—drawing upon close perception and your most associative mind to transform what you perceive into language. Working from these studies, you’ll develop a longer piece that will be a literary site of sensory exploration. Your projects might be several short essays, a series of linked fragments, a single extended work, an entirely new literary species . . . together with a five-page discussion of texts and tactics that have inspired you. 

M 11:00AM-01:30PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Jane Alison

In this studio-seminar we’ll look both at writing that follows some narrative convention beautifully and explore other writing that punctures “traditional” envelopes and ignores the expectations and illusionism of, say, classic realist prose. A memoir of unlinked sentences; a novel in a box whose chapters you read in any order; an essay in verse; a novella in numbered lines . . . How can windows open in what we write, whether working closer to the truthful or the imaginative end of the spectrum, whether creating literature that’s more like music or more like a painting? When are experiments unreadable or soulless? In addition to weekly reading, you’ll write-play with regular exercises (both in class and at home) and produce a final critical-creative project.

R 09:30AM-12:00PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Anna Beecher

F 02:30PM-05:00PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Micheline Marcom

W 02:00PM-04:30PM (Bryan 233)
Kiki Petrosino

In this seminar designed for students in the Area Program in Poetry Writing, we’ll compare the special attributes of "lyric" and "narrative" poetry, broadly (and vividly!) defined. We’ll read recent published works of poetry (+ a little prose) by poets whose work complicates and enriches our understanding of these seemingly disparate compositional modes. We’ll also explore our own relationships, as working poets, to these descriptors--how do lyric and narrative connect, overlap, or diverge in our writing?

Instructor permission required. Priority goes to APPW students, but other students may enroll, pending availability. Please contact Kiki Petrosino via e-mail (cmp2k@virginia.edu) AND via SIS to request permission. This is a small, discussion-based seminar. At semester’s end, you’ll compose a Final Chapbook (8-10 poems + a 2-3 pp introduction) on a theme of your choice. A working draft of the final will be due at Midterm. Regular writing prompts and assignments will be posted to CANVAS. The final grade will calculate Attendance, Participation, Written Assignments, and the Final Chapbook. This course satisfies a requirement for the Area Program in Poetry Writing and may fulfill requirements for other programs, as per individual advising at the Department level.

T 02:00PM-04:30PM (Bryan 233)
Rita Dove

This workshop is for advanced undergraduate students with prior experience in writing and revising poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to issues of craft. Students will be expected to write and revise six to eight poems, to participate in class discussion and offer detailed notes in response to other students’ work, to complete two assignments generated by writing prompts, to attend and provide a written response to one poetry reading (in person or virtual), to turn in close-reading reviews of two assigned poetry books, and to complete one “wild card” assignment.

Instructor Permission is required for enrollment in this class: please apply for instructor permission through SIS. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: a writing sample of 4-5 poems with a cover sheet including your name, year, email address, major, prior workshop experience and grade, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Submit your application IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT to Prof. Dove at rfd4b@virginia.edu. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis once registration opens. For full consideration, email your application as soon as possible.

The instructor will let all applicants know of their acceptance status before spring classes begin

Brian Teare

The Capstone offers APPW students time and pedagogical space to think beyond the realization of single poems toward the realization of a book-length poetry manuscript. With support from the APPW Director, a graduate student mentor, and most importantly from our APPW colleagues, each of us will gather together a draft collection of our poems for a semester of intensive collaborative editorial work that will encourage us to become more deeply aware of our poetic ambitions and evolving aesthetics. In conversation with editorial feedback, each of us will organize and revise our existing poems and write new work in order to fully realize what poet and critic Natasha Sajé calls the “dynamic design” of our first manuscripts. The course schedule will begin with weekly discussion of assigned readings, followed by collaborative editorial sessions of our Capstone Project drafts. This means that, for the first three quarters of the semester, we will meet as a group, but the latter quarter of the semester will largely consist of independent work and one-on-one meetings. After mid-term, each of us will be assigned a graduate student mentor who will offer the Capstone Project draft a close reading. After this, each of us will meet with the Director to discuss the feedback and devise a final revision strategy. The course will culminate in our Capstone Projects – revised, polished manuscripts of the poetry only we could write – which we will celebrate together at the APPW graduation reading.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 068)
Victor Luftig

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.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Shannon 111)
Chip Tucker

Literary study that matters arises from close reading and, however wide the range of topics surveyed, never really outgrows it. This introduction to literary study will focus on works of poetry, fiction, and drama that foreground the act of reading, in its complex weave of decoding, construing, interpreting, and commenting on a text. As the semester unfolds, this focus will challenge us to reflect on what reading as such entails.

The course is primarily designed for new and prospective English majors; but anybody is welcome who has developed, and wants to deepen, habits of attention to language and the shapes it takes in written art. Numerous short exercises, several mid-length papers, and an exam or two will buttress our chief classroom business: to collaborate with one another in figuring out what imagined readers are depicted figuring out, and how, and why.

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

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (New Cabell 191)
Brad Pasanek

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.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Brooks 103)
Alison Hurley

Jane Austen is everywhere – at movie theaters, on coffee mugs, in myriad sequels, parodies, and re-imaginings of her novels. How is it that an author whose works are so deeply embedded in her own time remains a contemporary phenomenon? How is it that novels depicting a remarkably thin slice of a defunct society enjoy such broad appeal? In this course we will try to answer these questions by “putting Austen in her place.” We will carefully situate Austen’s novels within a number of specific but overlapping interpretive terrains – literary, political, intellectual, and gendered. By deeply contextualizing Austen, I believe we will be in a better position to assess her significance in both her world and in our own. In order to perform this work we will need to develop the skills necessary for reading and writing effectively about texts. Specifically, we will aspire to read closely, write precisely, argue persuasively, ask good questions, employ strong evidence, and take interpretive risks.

Our readings will most likely include: Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Sorry, no P&P!

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

TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (New Cabell 111)
Henrietta Hadley

In this class, we'll explore a range of poetry's sonic effects in a variety of historical eras, medieval to contemporary. We'll pose questions about how sound has been and can be thought about in poems (by critics and by poets, and as critics and poets ourselves). We'll read attempts by poets to write with, against, and towards music, and think about what those poems sound like. Students will write a series of critical and creative assignments, developing ways to describe what we hear, and to hear more closely as we read.

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

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (Cocke Hall 101)
Walter Jost

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

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 056)
Mark Edmundson

This is a class for students who want a basic introduction to poetry. The instructor will emphasize poetry’s capacity to teach and to give pleasure.  The class assumes no prior familiarity with poetry, just an eagerness to learn.  Students will do some poetry writing: imitations, parodies, works of their own, and write some short interpretive essays.

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

MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (New Cabell 407)
Jeddie Sophronius

What happens when poetry meets prose? This course invites students to explore the intriguing world of the lyric essay. We will explore various forms, from the braided to hermit crab essays, which combine narrative and poetic elements. Students will learn how using this hybrid medium can serve as a means of processing, introspection, and self-expression. By studying the methods of writers from Claudia Rankine to Shane McCrae, students will learn how to infuse their prose with the vivid imagery, metaphors, and rhythm typically found in poetry. In addition to composing analytical essays to demonstrate their knowledge of close reading and literary terms, students will also learn how to craft their own lyric essays.

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

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Bryan 233)
Peyton Davis

Queer American Poets is a course that will cover queer (gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, etc) poets from the United States from the 20th and 21st centuries. Poets covered in this course will include Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ocean Vuong.

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

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Kerchof 317)
Samantha Stephens

This course maps a tradition of innovative poetry and poetics from writers across the African Diaspora. We will examine the rich practice of experimentation by Black writers in the twentieth and twenty-first century. In this class, students will explore how poets who are often marginalized disrupt the literal margins of the page - playing with color, sound, space, typeface - to respond to issues of colonialism and neocolonialism, race, identity, gender politics and the politics of literary form. We will read Black poets and practitioners from the Caribbean, U.S. and U.K. including M. NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Bernardine Evaristo, and others.

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

MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (Kerchof 317)
Christopher Krentz

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; Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home; Kingsolver's new Demon Copperhead, and Amna's recent debut American Fever. 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.

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

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Kerchof 317)
Caroline Rody

The great house of English literature is a house most everyone knows: pictured imposingly on the cover of English paperbacks, setting the magnificent scene from the summit of a green lawn in BBC and Hollywood frame shots, serving as stage for plots of romance and intrigue in countless novels. Though always a site of inequality—the affluent “upstairs” and the servants “downstairs”—and though recently treated with strong irony and critique, it is nevertheless embraced in English literary tradition as ours, indigenous, part of the landscape. 

In American literature, not so. Founded on the dream of breaking away from the house of the Old World, U.S. literature tends to treat the very fact of a big, impressive house as in and of itself an affront, an edifice built on exploitation, not our house at all, but an outrage on the American landscape. From this beginning developed a literary history of suspect, spooky, even downright evil American houses, from the enslaving plantation house to the haunted house that is itself a murderer, as well as a contemporary sub-genre that treats the great American house as a morally reclaimable fixer-upper.

This course will take up fiction and film that demonstrates the literary topos of the great house in transformation, a figure for nations changing in time. We will study, at length or briefly, short fiction, novels and novel excerpts, and four films by (or adapting) some of the following authors: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwen, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, Gish Jen, Mat Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joe Talbot/Jimmie Fails. Requirements include active reading and participation, multiple short papers, one of which is a revision, frequent short Canvas posts, and a group leading of one class.

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

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (Shannon 119)
Victoria Olwell

In this course you’ll read and discuss a selection of US novels written from the 18th century to just about yesterday, practicing literary analysis and learning about the history of the novel as you go. In addition to analyzing fiction, you’ll work on your skills as an essay writer. The course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement by asking you compose a series of very short essays exploring your ideas about the reading, along with several longer formal essays that you’ll develop and revise with feedback from me and your classmates. The course welcomes students from all disciplines while at the same time serving as a prerequisite for the English major.

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

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Cocke Hall 101)
Cristina Griffin

In this class, we will read (and watch) stories that engage with the long tradition of the gothic: stories that are pleasurably thrilling, that structure themselves around suspense, secrecy, romance, intrigue, and even sometimes fear. We will begin the term by focusing on some of the eighteenth-century texts that established and popularized the gothic conventions that novelists, filmmakers, and television writers still use today. We will then turn to more contemporary reactions to the gothic, investigating how twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms respond to the gothic genre. Our focus as we make our way across the centuries will be on how these stories open up questions about gender. How do gothic texts represent women’s bodies? What is the relationship between gender and violence? How do gendered portrayals of the gothic change over time or embody different political and cultural crises? How do popular contemporary forms—the television show, dystopian fiction—reimagine the gothic?

UVA is the ideal place to study gothic literature, since it houses the world’s largest collection of gothic fiction. We will immerse ourselves in this vast treasure trove with an archival project in which you will become an expert on a gothic novel, and contribute your findings to a digital companion to the archive. No library or research experience necessary: we will be working from the ground up as you learn to give these important gothic texts new lives in the twenty-first century.

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

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Brooks 103)
Dan Kinney

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

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

MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (Bryan 328)
Charity Fowler

This survey of the science fiction genre is a seminar that will start with examining the genre's roots in 18th and 19th century “proto-science fiction.” We’ll then trace its development through the genre’s distinct temporal and cultural eras from the late-19th century to the present day. We’ll be reading a mix of novels and short stories and watching a few adaptations of these texts into movies and TV shows. Though we’ll touch on many themes and tropes, from space travel to AI, we’ll primarily focus on examining and writing about the social and cultural possibilities of the genre, along with the technological and scientific advancements it has inspired. 

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

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Bryan 203)
Clare Kinney

This course will explore in detail four major works by Shakespeare across several genres and look at some of their cinematic adaptations. How does one translate a Shakespearean work from a highly verbal medium into a highly visual medium? How can the resources of film offer us new insights into the plays—and how do different film adaptations of the same play allow us to rethink the interpretive challenges and pleasures provoked by their original texts?

Tentative list of plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry V; Macbeth; The Tempest.

Requirements: regular attendance and lively participation in discussion, three 5-6 page papers, occasional e-mail responses to our readings, and a final take-home examination

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

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (Monroe 134)
Steve Cushman

*Does not satisfy the prerequisite for the English major.  Proposal to list course as ENGL 2030 is pending.

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.

MWF 1:00PM-1:50PM (Warner 110)
Austin Benson

The rightful King of Denmark is working as a scullery maid, and breathes fire in his sleep. Sir Orfeo’s wife has been kidnapped by the Fairy King, and the only way to win her back is to charm him with music on the harp. The King of Brittany has a new dog—or is it a werewolf?

When we think of medieval romance, we often think of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Quest for the Holy Grail. The stories encompassed by this genre, however, are much more wide-ranging, and much stranger. In this course, we will explore the wide and weird world of medieval romance beyond King Arthur. Our inquiry will begin with the genre’s origins, as we read the Lais of Marie de France and the Song of Roland. From there we will dive headfirst into the genre, exploring the romance as a means of engaging with a vast array of subjects. This includes everything from our relationship with the past (Octavian) to the ethics of political insurrection (Havelok the Dane) to the question of whether adultery is acceptable when it’s true love (Tristan).

Along the way, we will learn how to plan and execute a longer piece of writing, and how to read and understand Middle English.

Requirements: Active participation, a very short paper (3 pages), an annotated bibliography (3 pages), a prospectus (3 pages), and a final paper (10-12 pages).

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

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (Monroe 114)
Sarah Cole

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.

T 11:00AM-01:30PM (Bryan 233)
Lisa Spaar

We live in an age of easy and ubiquitous self-portrayal. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Zoom, and other digital and cellular “galleries” allow a protean array of venues in which to post, curate, manipulate, and efface visual images and verbal profiles of “the self” with what seems like a faster than real-time alacrity. This proliferation of self-portraiture is so rampant that it’s possible for viewers and readers to become inured to its magic, craft, and power. Since antiquity, literary and visual artists have depicted themselves in their productions, a fascination that has continued unabated into the twenty-first century, spurred by advances in photography, imaging, digitalization, communication, information systems, and the widespread availability of the Internet. In this course we will look at the “selfie” from antiquity to the present, in poetry (from Sappho to Charles Wright and Kendrik Lamar) and visual art (from early cave paintings and Egyptian art through Rembrandt, Dűrer, Vigée-Lebrun, Kahlo, Van Gogh, Picasso, Abbassy, Sherman, Basquiat, Morimura, and others). We will visit the Fralin Museum of Art, make forays into the Studio Art department, be visited by poets, artists and others, and in general explore what we can learn from our human fascination with self-portrayal and our compulsion to turn it into art.  

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

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (Brooks 103)
Nasrin Olla

How do novels, poetry, and philosophical texts teach us to relate ethically toward the stranger, the foreigner, or the other? How do we understand different cultures and peoples without reducing them to our already established frames of reference? How do we imagine otherness? This course approaches these big questions by exploring representations of the stranger and the foreigner in African and African diasporic literature. We will look at texts by Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon alongside reflections on the relation between ‘ethics and aesthetics’ by Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and others.

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

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Shannon 111)
Amber McBride

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.

TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (Shannon 111)
Amber McBride

This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and think critically about middle grade/young adult literature and film—specifically literature and film by marginalized writers. Most of the books we will read in this class are banned in at least one state.

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

MW 12:00PM-12:50PM (Warner 209)
Andrew Stauffer

John Keats, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Ocean Vuong: these are some of the authors that we will be reading and studying together in this survey of literature in English from around 1750 to the present moment. Along the way, we will trace the emergence of English as a global language and literature in our post-colonial world. Literary movements to be covered include Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism. This course is part of the two-semester sequence of the history of literature in English (along with ENGL 3001) that is required of English majors, but is open to anyone interested in exploring some of the most significant works of literature of the last two-plus centuries. You do not need to have taken ENGL 3001 first; the courses can be completed in any order that works best for you.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Shannon 109)
C. Chic Smith

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 032)
Dan Kinney

In this course we will study the the interconnections between Milton's literary career and the culture wars of his own era, the pervasive political and cultural ferment of Civil War England. We will sample the dizzying range of generic innovations and experiments that inform Milton's work from short early lyrics and prose pamphlets through Paradise Lost. Class requirements, lively participation, one short and one longer paper, and a final exam.

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

MW 11:00AM-11:50AM (Monroe 130)
John Parker

Shakespeare arrived in London and started work as an actor and playwright sometime in his late twenties, around the year 1590.  Over the next decade he transformed himself into one of the city's most celebrated dramatists, primarily by writing history plays and comedies.  This course will concentrate on the tragedies and late comedies that he wrote, for the most part, in the following decade.  We will read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and A Winter's Tale.  There will be two papers (around 6pp. each), a midterm, and a final.  This course fulfills the English department's pre-1700 requirement and can be used, on request, to fulfill the college's second writing requirement.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (Warner 113)
Brad Pasanek

Co-Taught with Jason Bennett

This is a course in “extra-literary” criticism in which English majors and other students are tasked with investigating the ways in which video games are available for literary interpretation. We will read games studies and literary theory, play games, and--take note!--learn to build them. Students will be introduced to the Godot game engine and framework. (No prior experience with programming required.) Our main effort is to check and test literary theory in "defamiliarized" ludic contexts, designing sprites and worlds and complicating traditional intuitions about narrative, characters, and fiction by means of game experiences.

Course enrollment currently set to "Instructor Permission" so that we can build a balanced group of English majors and CS students (double majors to be enthusiastically welcomed). Contact Brad Pasanek and Jason Bennett with any questions!

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Pavillion 8 102)
Lorna Martens

Fictions of happiness pursued--and found!  Through the ages, people have sought happiness and formulated conceptions of what happiness means.  Happiness could be something we once had--then lost--but might find again; something we might achieve by acting wisely or performing meritorious deeds; something possible through escape; alternatively, something available in the here and now; bound up with love or recognition from others; or a byproduct of creativity, independent of others.  This course is not a self-help course.  Don’t take it expecting to find the key to happiness.  This is a literature course.  We’ll read fiction, poetry, theory.  But we will read some cheerful and uplifting (or at least moderately cheerful or uplifting) literature, to raise our spirits as the pandemic, with luck, recedes.  Texts by Hesiod, Ovid, Chrétien, Rousseau, Schiller, Novalis, Wordsworth, Emerson, Valéry, Hunt, Rilke, Hilton, Stevens, Cavafy, Thurber, Giono, Nabokov, I. Grekova.  Some theory of happiness and one or two films.  Lots of discussion, two short presentations, two short formal essays, and a final exam are envisaged.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Bryan 328)
Elizabeth Fowler

Yes, that Arthur! In this class, we explore Le Morte Darthur, the famous compendium of stories about King Arthur's round table, Lancelot’s vulnerable heroism, Guenevere’s diplomacy and passion, Tristram’s cluelessness, and the sorcery of Merlin, Lady Nynyve, and Morgan le Fay. It's the most influential early prose fiction in English, one that still produces imitations, sequels, and prequels in every medium known to art. Writing a century after Chaucer and a century before Shakespeare, Thomas Malory is spell-binding and curiously dry, full of terse, flat statements of shocking, magical, moving acts. We'll puzzle over what makes it tick: narrative patterns, imagery, style, characters. We’ll meet outside in camp chairs under a tree by Dawson’s Row whenever feasible. We’ll have quizzes and some flash writing sprees and two short (~5-page) creative projects or papers (creative writers, artists, and game developers: bring your skills!). Fulfills the major req for pre-1700, counts for the med/ren concentration and for Medieval Studies. Warning: may result in a compulsion to create.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Gibson 241)
Kevin Hart

This seminar focuses on the contemplative or “mystical” tradition that flourished in Western Europe, especially from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. After a brief introduction, in which we touch on foundational texts by Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, we begin with Richard of St. Victor’s long overlooked The Mystical Ark, which teaches how to contemplate God in nature as well as in ecstasy; we examine Aquinas’s objections to Richard in the Summa theologiæ and evaluate his notion of “intellective contemplation” proposed there. In contrast to Aquinas, we turn to affective mysticism, especially the ecstasy that comes from meditating on the suffering Jesus. We shall read The Cloud of Unknowing, most likely by an unknown Carthusian, and also Julian of Norwich’s Showings of Divine Love. What is contemplation? Is it always prayer or can it also be reading and study? How does it differ from meditation and thought? Must contemplation have only God as its object? Or can it have natural objects? What is the contemplative life, and how does it differ from the active life? Is contemplation a matter of the mind or of the heart or both? These are some of the questions we shall consider.

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

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Bryan 328)
Rebecca Rush

Beginning with the love poems of Queen Elizabeth I, this course will reflect on Renaissance images of longing. The authors we will read begin with the premise that the solitary self is plagued by what Donne calls the “defects of loneliness” — by a sense of individual imperfection and a thirst for another. In the plays and poems we will read, this overwhelming desire catalyzes heroic quests (a young noblewoman donning armor and setting off to find a knight she saw in a mirror, a young man swimming across the Hellespont). It also spurs futile chases and moral errors (knights running after a counterfeit woman made by a witch, Adam following Eve in eating the apple). Reading with the utmost attention to the subtleties of language, we will meditate on the varied ways these authors strive to produce images, metaphors, and stories that exemplify the fundamental nature of desire, that do justice to its extraordinary power over the heart, and that reckon with its relation to political and social obligations. Readings include selections from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and lyric poems by Wyatt, Donne, Wroth, Philips, Jonson, and Milton.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement for the English major and counts toward the Medieval and Renaissance Concentration in English.

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (Warner 110)
Stephen Arata

In this course we will read novels and short stories (all superb examples of narrative art) drawn from a range of cultures and countries. The overarching goal is to engage with these works not from the perspective of their separate national traditions but with an awareness of the novel as a transnational literary form, bound up in networks of authors and readers stretching around the globe. Likely candidates for the syllabus include Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Vernon Lee (England), Germaine de Staël and Honoré de Balzac (France), Mikhail Lermentov (Russia), Multatuli (Denmark), Benito Pérez Galdós (Spain), Machado de Assiz (Brazil), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (India), and Mary Prince (Bermuda). Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English.

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

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Dell 2 101)
Mary Kuhn

The course explores the role that plants have played in the development of empires, and the forms of knowledge about plants that corresponded with imperial control over the environment. But we’ll also explore how ideas about plants have shaped a range of social ideas and practices—like sex and gender, race, labor, citizenship, and more—from the 18th century to the 21st. To do that, we’ll look at literary and historical sources, everything ranging from seed catalogs to short stories, poems to travel narratives, as well as a number of secondary articles and book chapters. We’ll approach these through an interdisciplinary lens of literary analysis, environmental history, and the history of science. 

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

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Bryan 235)
Chip Tucker

Paulo maiora canamus: Virgil’s Latin exhortation to “sing of greater things” has resounded for millennia in the minds of English poets striving to outgo their forerunners and, more intimately, to outdo themselves. During the past four centuries this ambition has shaped versions of the greater lyric, transforming such elder genres as elegy and ode, epistle and soliloquy into major statements of the human prospect as encountered by their generation. Our course will center on greater lyrics from the tumultuous 19th century, Romantic and Victorian, in a sequence framed at either end by neoclassical and modernist exemplars starting with John Milton and ending with Elizabeth Bishop.

Appreciating major poetry takes time and focus. So we’ll read and re-read the comparatively few works on the syllabus – typically just one or two poems per class – with patient attention. To this end, students will practice metrical scansion, reading aloud, reciting from memory, teaming up for exercises in editorial scholarship, among other ways of interacting bodily as well as intellectually with the art on the page. All this for the sake of an imaginative encounter that will ground the essays students write, and induct them by semester’s end into their own majority as articulate readers of great poems.

The course will more than satisfy the English Department’s 1700-1900 requirement.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (Warner 110)
Stephen Arata

The time period covered in this course is roughly 1890-1950: the age of Modernism in the literatures of Europe and the Americas. We will read novels and short stories from across a range of cultures and countries that explore the question of what makes a work of fiction not just “Modern” but “Modernist.” Likely authors include Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Jean Toomer, Jean Rhys, Jean Giomo, Henry Green, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Andrade, Knut Hamsen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Nella Larson. Course requirements will include two 5-6 page essays, a final exam, and a handful of shorter writing assignments. All the readings will be in English.

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (Dell 1 104)
Joshua Miller

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?

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Warner 110)
Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been per-petuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and eco-nomic exclusion. Taking a place-specific approach to understanding the material practices and conse-quences of the Jim Crow regime, we’ll examine in depth the overlapping dimensions of everyday life where Jim Crow has been especially prominent, including: 1) personal and collective mobility; 2) the struggle over public education; 3) planning and access to public facilities; 4) housing and employment; and 5) the justice (or injustice) system. Course materials from various disciplines will include maps, plan-ning documents, films, radio, and readings from literature, sociology, urban planning, history, political science, and journalism. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Charlottesville downtown and the Jefferson School Heritage Center scheduled for Saturday, March 30.

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

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (Pavillion 8 102)
Lorna Martens

Studies in the poetry and prose of these three modernist poets, with emphasis on their theories of artistic creation. The original as well as a translation will be made available for Rilke's and Valéry's poetry; their prose works will be read in English translation.

MW 10:00AM-10:50AM (Monroe 130)
Sylvia Chong

MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (New Cabell 389)
Sylvia Chong

(Online Asynchronous )
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.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Shannon 109)
Mark Edmundson

This course emerges from Jacques’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, on the seven ages of human life. We will use that speech to generate questions about how to live and what to do. We’ll consider childhood and education; erotic love; religion; warfare and courage in war; politics and the freedom of the individual; philosophical wisdom; and old age. There will be readings to send us on our way: Freud. Wordsworth, Marx, Beauvoir, Schopenhauer, and others. The idea will be to let them help us generate our own thoughts. This course is not for the faint of heart or the dogma prone: the classroom is a free speech zone. Probably short writing assignments and a long one to finish the course.

W 5:00PM-7:30PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Lisa Woolfork

This course is Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads. A community-engaged version of a previous incarnation, Sally Hemings University. The course explores questions generated by re-framing “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men. Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl, exercised the full extent of her limited agency to craft a legacy of liberation for her descendants. Taking Hemings’ role as an enslaved seamstress seriously, Sally Hemings University Connecting Threads interrogates the ways in which aesthetic practices (art, craft gestures) can operate within and alongside liberatory strategies.

Through probing analysis of texts, cultural practices, and vernacular artifacts alongside art actions and craft gestures, students in SHUCT will engage in a holistic course of study that continually asks questions about how modes of thought unfurl themselves to connect, build, and sever how we make meaning around education, art, learning, and liberation. We interrogate the boundaries between education and study, art and craft, cultural practices and cultural critique.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Brooks 103)
Elizabeth Fowler

This course is an experiment in bringing together a green environmentalist impulse with medieval and renaissance English poetry about built space: gardens, meadows, wells, and houses.  We’ll dig into the history and politics of actual gardens, meadows, and buildings, too.  With the help of medieval lyricists, the Wakefield Master, Spenser, Lanyer, Milton, Marvell, and others, we will cultivate Marvell's "green thought in a green shade." Some questions: what is “place” in fiction? How do we get there and move around in it? What is its relation to “place” in landscape architecture? How does the literary history of “pastoral” interact with the history of land use? How does poetry intervene in environmental longing and despair? We will meet outside under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row, whenever feasible, in camp chairs. A series of short assignments and revisions will culminate in a seminar essay on a poem or a historical landscape and its environmental engagements. N.B.: this course satisfies both the English major requirements for a pre-17th c. course and a seminar; it can satisfy the 2nd writing requirement (arrange with the professor); it welcomes architecture and ETP students; it fits the Med/Ren concentration in English as well as counting for Medieval Studies; open to all interested students—email fowler@virginia.edu with any questions.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (New Cabell 044)
Clare Kinney

Hamlet is the most celebrated Shakespearean play; it is also perhaps the most mysterious and elusive. It has a huge afterlife in both elite and popular culture; it has been reinterpreted, appropriated and adapted by commentators and creative artists to serve very different agendas at various historical moments. In this seminar we will first (re)read the play very carefully before exploring the resonance of its reshaping in a variety of media. We’ll look at dramatic reinventions (e.g. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead); novelistic reinventions (e.g. John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius), cinematic reinventions (e.g. the Hamlet movies of Almereyda and Olivier and Branagh); we’ll also pay attention to global Hamlet and to the critical reception of the play. Why does this particular play provoke so many creative reinventions? And what do its more subversive rewritings suggest about the cultural forces underlying the apparently unceasing need to revisit and/or “correct” and/or supplement Shakespeare’s project?  

Course requirements: regular attendance and lively participation in discussion, an oral presentation, one short and one long paper, a portfolio of e-mail responses.

Satisfies the pre-1700 requirement for the major.

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Dell 1 104)
Susan Fraiman

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

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Bryan 334)
Victoria Olwell

When novels are published, they enter the public sphere, joining in the whole buzzing cacophony of contemporary culture. Certainly not always, but frequently enough, novels step into ongoing public discussions about things that are not novels – political issues, contemporary developments in the social world, ideas about history, social inequality, scientific advances, and the like. Novels do this in a wide variety of ways, but, always, they operate through the specific formal characteristics of the novel (plot, character, narrative, the premise of fiction, etc.) and carry with them the distinctive history of the novel as a genre. In this course, we’ll consider contemporary U.S. novels that explicitly take up issues of interest in the public sphere. We’ll read these novels on their own terms, but also in the context of two other genres:  contemporary non-fiction on the same issues and literary criticism on the form and history of the novel. Throughout we’ll ask, how do novels add to public discussion? By the way, I’ve chosen novels that met two requirements. First, they received a great deal of critical attention and acclaim, meaning that we can consider them novels with a hearty public presence. Second, I chose only novels I found particularly compelling for one reason or another.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Cocke Hall 115)
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.

Proposed Novels

TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (Bryan 203)
Joshua Miller

Is it possible to write literary criticism about the fiction of our current moment? What does a cultural history of the present look like? How do we interpret the significance of current fiction? When did the literary 21st century begin? Which events and trends have informed the creative work published in the past two decades? How have changing media and technologies spurred new narrative forms? Have changing visual and digital artforms influenced the languages of contemporary literature? In an effort to develop a few rigorous, if provisional, answers to these many broad questions, this seminar will begin with questions of media/platform, reading methods, and cultural value (which novels will future historians will consider “important” or representative of our time?) and then generate interpretations of a wide range of genres in early 21st century prose fiction, including short (micro or flash) fiction, experimental and mixed-media novels, speculative fiction, graphic narratives, and digital fiction, among others.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (New Cabell 209)
Jahan Ramazani

In this seminar, we explore world poetry in English. To understand the global dimensions of modern and contemporary poetry, we closely read the vibrant anglophone poetries of India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, Ireland, Black and Asian Britain, and Indigenous and diasporic America, which bring new worlds, new idioms, and new literary possibilities into English. Postcolonial writers enrich poetry in English by hybridizing local traditions with the poetic inheritances of the global North. Issues to be discussed include the historical memory of colonization and enslavement, global challenges such as war and the climate crisis, and transformations of world-traveling poetic forms and strategies. Forged in response to an increasingly globalized world, the innovations of transnational modernist writers provide crucial tools that the poets of the global South repurpose. Featured writers include postcolonial poets such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, NourbeSe Philip, A. K. Ramanujan, Okot p’Bitek, Christopher Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra, and modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Claude McKay. Among requirements are active participation; reading quizzes; co-leading of discussion; and two substantial papers involving research and close reading.

T 05:00PM-07:30PM (New Cabell 191)
Ian Grandison

The seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us—“landscapes”—are deeply implicated in the negoti-ation of power among social groups. As records of ongoing struggle to democratize educational oppor-tunity in America, the campuses and neighborhoods of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their binary opposites Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs) are particu-larly revealing. We meld critical analysis of written and non-written (maps, plans, photographs, oral histo-ries, statistics, audio, video,…) materials and our direct experience of the landscape to understand how

identity politics, especially racial politics, operate in/through space to create/enforce the inequalities that have commanded the nation's attention recently. As crucial to the pedagogy of the seminar, there will be a required field trip to the Jefferson School Heritage Center in its setting of downtown Charlottesville. This is the site of Charlottesville’s historical Black elementary and high school during Constitutional Jim Crow. This will be held on from 11:00pm to 3:00pm ET on Saturday 30 March. The field trip and our other exploration in the seminar will provide necessary background and inspiration for you to study some issue of your choice that relates to the seminar’s topic and approach. The product of this capstone assign-ment will be a research paper and related contribution to a final symposium that will be held during the scheduled examination slot for the course.

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (Rotunda 152)
Rita Felski

How have art and politics been connected or opposed over the last two centuries? We'll approach this question via a survey of such key concepts as realism, modernism, the avant-garde, kitsch, camp, postmodernism, and the sublime. Other topics to be discussed include the museum, the role of race and gender in aesthetics, the sociology of literature and art, and the recent surge of interest in aesthetic experience.The approach is primarily theoretical, although combined with numerous examples from literature and painting, and to a lesser extent from film and music. 

T 02:00PM-04:30PM (Wilson 244)
Adrienne Ghaly

Varieties of the realist novel flourished in the twentieth century and dominated literary representations of complex social, historical and political realities. How are contemporary realisms responding to urgent crises now? This course explores hybrid forms of realism of the last few years that grapple with global warming, humanitarian crisis, and the resurgence of the extreme right. We will weigh these texts against how critics and theorists have assessed the realist novel’s enduring cultural power and its ability – or failure – to meet new and unfolding challenges. We’ll look at developments of realism’s fundamental components in (very) recent novels: character, the scale of literary worlds, mood and atmosphere, multiple voices and perspectives, and more, to address climate change, large-scale migration, and the re-emergence of authoritarianism. Above all, we’ll ask: what can the realist novel do now? Reading responses, engaged participation, a shorter paper and a longer paper.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (Bryan 330)
Caroline Rody

The great house of English literature is a house most everyone knows: pictured imposingly on the cover of English paperbacks, setting the magnificent scene from the summit of a green lawn in BBC and Hollywood frame shots, serving as stage for plots of romance and intrigue in countless novels. Though always a site of inequality—the affluent “upstairs” and the servants “downstairs”—and though treated recently with strong irony and critique, it is nevertheless embraced by English literary culture as ours, indigenous, part of the landscape.

In American literature, not so. Founded on the dream of breaking away from the house of the Old World, U.S. literature tends to treat the very fact of a big, impressive house as in and of itself an affront, an edifice built on exploitation, not our house at all, but an outrage on the American landscape. From this beginning developed a long literary history of suspect, spooky, even downright evil American houses, from the enslaving plantation house to the haunted house that is itself a murderer, as well as a contemporary sub-genre that treats the great American house as a morally reclaimable fixer-upper.

This course will take up fiction and film that demonstrates the literary topos of the great house in transformation, a figure for nations changing in time. We will study, at length or briefly, short fiction, novels and novel excerpts, and four films by (or adapting) many of the following authors: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwen, Louise Erdrich, Alison Bechdel, Gish Jen, Maria Semple, Mat Johnson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joe Talbot/Jimmie Fails. Requirements include active reading and participation, 20 pages of writing divided into two papers, frequent short Canvas posts, and a group leading of one class.

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (Gibson 142)
Kevin Hart

This seminar focuses on the writings of two important poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. The one is Catholic, and the other questions religion at every level while also remaining open to the possibility of faith. Each poet raises major theological issues: belief, doubt, ecstasy, martyrdom, revelation, transcendence, and theodicy, among them. We will read, as closely as possible, some poems and prose writings by each poet, consider their theological contexts, and examine the ways in which theological issues are folded in their poems. Students will write two essays, one on each poet.

T 03:30PM-06:00PM (New Cabell 415)
Michael Suarez

How did Great Britain come to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and what roles did literature play in enlightening readers to the barbarities of this human traffic? Reading works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and a variety of poems, both canonical and from relatively unknown voices, we will attempt to immerse ourselves in the literature of British abolition. Juxtaposing such writings with visual materials (viz., the slave ship Brooks), abolitionist political pamphlets, and letters in the C18 public press will give greater depth to our discussions. Finally, we will read Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge and reflect on how a literature of abolition might function in our own time.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement.

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (New Cabell 066)
Rebecca Rush

The ode has long been a place for poets to test their own mettle—and the meaning of greatness. Starting with Pindar and Horace, this course will explore how generations of poets reinterpreted the ode and its traditional celebration of athletic beauty and valor. We will look closely at poems that praise (or blame) particular people such as Cleopatra, Brutus, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Freud; call upon abstractions such as wit, solitude, and liberty; and address such non-human listeners as nightingales, Greek urns, and western winds. We will ask how each ode reckons with the idea of heroism and the purpose of praise. How do they imagine and depict greatness, fame, knowledge, beauty, good fortune, and strength? Do they see these as consistent with goodness, justice, and delicacy? How do poets ironize and critique—both their objects of praise and bygone views of greatness? When and why do odes shift to meditating rather than praising, and do these meditative odes still respond to the heroic tradition? What do odes have to say about the distinctive tools and aims of poetry and about poetry’s role in immortalizing? We will approach the thought of each ode with seriousness and its language with rigor, but we will also enjoy the unique sonic pleasures of poets like Keats, Spenser, Cowley, Wordsworth, Marvell, Gray, Byron, and Auden.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement for the English major and counts toward the Medieval and Renaissance Concentration in English.

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (Cocke Hall 101)
Walter Jost

In his book Colors of the Mind, the literary theorist and critic Angus Fletcher identifies a relatively untilled field in literary study that he calls “noetics”: “Noetics names the field and the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem.” Noetics must be a very large field indeed, so that a university course wishing to include aspects of it needs some way of delimiting its interests to deal with our American poets. Of course, “thinking” has many possibilities—among them opining, believing, conceiving, inferring, imagining, reflecting, musing, meditating, as well as deliberating, speculating, reasoning, and arguing. In this course we will focus on select matters of “thinking” to give point to various aspects of what Fletcher calls “thinking the poem.” This semester we will feature modern British and American “long” poems, including G. M. Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” A.R. Ammons’ Sphere, and Gary Snyder’s book-length “Mountains and Rivers Without End.”

M 03:30PM-06:00PM (Kerchof 317)
Lisa Goff

“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown, but also folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; anthropologists such as Elizabeth Chin and Daniel Miller; and political theorist Jane Bennet. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.

This class fulfills the theory requirement for the English MA/PhD.

F 09:30AM-12:00PM (Bryan 233)
David Vander Meulen

This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study and of reading in general: if a work exists in multiple forms, and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"?  How are such judgments made and standards determined?  How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted?  If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it? How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom?  What difference does this all make? The course will deal with such concerns and will include: a short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts; study of the transmission of texts in different periods; and considerations of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials.  The course "Books as Physical Objects," ENGL 5810, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

This course fulfills the Criticism and Theory requirement for English graduate students and the seminar requirement for English undergraduates.

W 10:00AM-12:30PM (Dawson's Row 1 105)
Steve Cushman

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

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (Gibson 142)
Kevin Hart

This seminar focuses on the writings of two important poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill. The one is Catholic, and the other questions religion at every level while also remaining open to the possibility of faith. Each poet raises major theological issues: belief, doubt, ecstasy, martyrdom, revelation, transcendence, and theodicy, among them. We will read, as closely as possible, some poems and prose writings by each poet, consider their theological contexts, and examine the ways in which theological issues are folded in their poems. Students will write two essays, one on each poet.

F 10:00AM-10:50AM (Kerchof 317)
Elizabeth Fowler

The Proseminar in World Religions, World Literatures is a one-credit, pass/fail forum that welcomes all graduate students whose work brings together literature in any language with study of any religion, and it is open to interested undergraduates by permission of the instructor. It supports the concentration called WRWL that is offered within both the English MA and the Religious Studies MA, a concentration students may join as part of the terminal degree but also, if doctoral candidates, en route to the PhD. We meet most weeks of the semester for a single hour, under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row, weather permitting. We read short texts together, perform thought experiments, write manifesti, invite guests we admire from the UVA faculty to be interviewed on their own work, mull over the challenges we face, and brainstorm about how we can best support one another’s work. Please email fowler@virginia.edu with questions.