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Related Courses in Other Departments
ENGL 1500 - Masterworks of Literature
Section 001 - Sources of Shakespeare
MW 200-315 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: John Parker
Hardly any of Shakespeare's plays originate with him. He borrowed plotlines, characters, themes, and, often enough, verbatim wording from prior works in ways that, if you tried the same thing today, would probably constitute plagiarism. We'll read his work alongside these sources with the hope of developing a deeper understanding of terms like influence, imitation, allusion, quotation, renaissance, revival, and theft. We will have to ask what it means, if anything, to speak of Shakespeare's originality — was this, in fact, his primary talent or was his gift for remakes? What does it mean that earlier periods had such different ideas about attribution and copyright? And where do the conspiracy theories around his authorship fit into all this?
At the same time we'll need to look at our sources for Shakespeare's plays: some of the most famous — Hamlet, King Lear, Othello — exist in multiple, equally authentic versions, though they differ from one another substantially. How do editors decide between these competing sources when they produce contemporary editions? How do you know which version you're reading in a modern textbook?
We'll use this double focus — on the sources Shakespeare adapted to write his plays and on the earliest printed sources for modern editions of Shakespeare — as a way to investigate larger questions about authorship, textual authority, and the meaning of authenticity.
ENGL 2020 - History of European Literature II (4 Credits)
TR 200-315 (McLeod Hall 2005)
Instructor: Walter Jost
Cross-listed with CPLT 2020
Discussion Sections:
Section 102
R 500-615 (Clark Hall G054)
Instructor: Christian Howard
Section 103
R 330-445 (Dell 2 102)
Instructor: Christian Howard
ENGL 3559 - Global Development Studies (New Course in Misc. English)
MW 100-150 (Nau 101)
Instructors: Michael Levenson
Cross listed with GSGS 3030.
Global Humanities (Global Cultural Studies) offers an interdisciplinary approach to the varying conditions of world cultures during the decades just before and after the new millennium. Through encounters with work in a wide variety of media (including film, popular song, avant-garde art, memoir, political philosophy), the course emphasizes the recent cultural histories of North Africa and Southern Europe, China, South Asia, and the Middle East. Important regional events – such as the place of Gandhi in present-day Indian politics, the Chinese treatment of the artist Ai Wei Wei, the use of documentary film in the Arab spring – will be placed within a network of broad global exchange. At every stage, we consider the making of contemporary culture within the important contexts that surround it: the campaign for international human rights, the independence movements in Africa and Asia, the resurgence of religious faith around the world, the power of the dominant economic model. Throughout the semester, students will compose regular blogs on a regional topic that reflects their interests and convictions.
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
W 400-450 (Gibson 141)
Instructor: Anuj Kapoor
Section 102
W 500-550 (Gibson 141)
Instructor: Anuj Kapoor
Section 103
W 600-650 (Gibson 141)
Instructor: Anuj Kapoor
Section 104
R 400-450 (Shannon House 109)
Instructor: Jesse Bordwin
Section 105
R 500-550 (Shannon House 109)
Instructor: Jesse Bordwin
Section 106
R 600-650 (Shannon House 109)
Instructor: Jesse Bordwin
Section 107
W 200-250 (New Cabell 068)
Instructor: Claire Eager
Section 108
W 300-350 (Pavilion VIII 103)
Instructor: Claire Eager
Section 109
W 500-550 (New Cabell 303)
Instructor: Claire Eager
ENGL 3820 - History of Literatures in English II
MW 1100-1150 (Wilson 402)
Instructors: John O'Brien & Victoria Olwell
William Wordsworth, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, T. S. Eliot: 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 3810) 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.
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
R 330-445 (New Cabell 032)
Instructor: Alison Glassie
Section 102
W 500-615 (New Cabell 107)
Instructor: Karen Huang
Section 103
W 500-615 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Lara Musser
Section 104
R 500-615 (New Cabell 032)
Instructor: Alison Glassie
Section 105
R 500-615 (New Cabell 332)
Instructor: Sarah Storti
Section 107
W 500-615 (New Cabell 594)
Instructor: Peter Miller
Section 108
R 1100-1215 (New Cabell 207)
Instructor: Zachary Stone
Section 109
W 330-445 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Lara Musser
Section 110
W 330-445 (New Cabell 594)
Instructor: Peter Miller
Section 111
F 1000-1115 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Caleb Agnew
Section 112
R 330-445 (Dell 1 104)
Instructor: Zachary Stone
Section 113
W 630-745 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Adam Friedgen
Section 114
F 1200-115 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Caleb Agnew
Section 115
W 200-315 (Nau 142 )
Instructor: Karen Huang
Section 116
W 500-615 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Samantha Wallace
Section 117
R 330-445 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Sarah Storti
Section 118
W 630-745 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Samantha Wallace
Section 119
R 1100-1215 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Adam Friedgen
ENGL 4999 - Distinguished Majors Program
Time/Location TBA
Instructor: Caroline Rody
Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee. Both courses are required of honors candidates. Graded on a year-long basis. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/undergraduate/distinguishedmajors.
ENLT 2100 - Introduction to Literary Studies
Section 001 - Glossography
MWF 900-950 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: James Ascher
The prominence of digital remixing reminds us that all writing is inscribed on another text. A venerated text may be classically glossed--words inserted between lines or in the margins to explain passages--and these glosses may be collected into a separate glossary. These glossaries can detach from their original text; and, a later writer may lift the techniques from these free-floating glossaries into what may seem new, but is really a second-level glossary. Literature, in a certain sense, is a text we huddle around and gloss together in these chains of inscription. In practicing writing with, against, about and into literature, we are also studying glossography.
This course proposes to teach basic literary research methods, but to reimagine them as a form of glossing. We will come together around texts from several centuries and develop a glossography for humanities laboratories in literature.
The tasks will include substantial reading and writing, within a collaborative digital humanities laboratory environment. Students will learn basic literary methods and digital techniques that make old ways of looking at texts prominent once again. Each student will develop a portfolio of their work that they can use to demonstrate their literary and digital skills to potential teachers, employers, granting agencies, or anyone else.
Section 002
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 395)
Instructor: Stephen Hequembourg
Section 003
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Peter Baker
ENLT 2511 - Masterpieces of English Literature
Section 001 - Literature and the Nonhuman
MW 200-315 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Casey Ireland
Green knights, talking eagles, wastelands, and a whole lot of daffodils are some of the stock images of pre-1800 English literature. This course will examine the ways in which English prose and poetry from the 14th through the 18th centuries respond to nature as both a concept and a physical reality. From the wild men of Arthurian romance to Jefferson's quadruped obsession in "Notes on the State of Virginia," we will track the literary function of the "natural" as a constructed category and a place. The selected readings will also offer a mode of entry to discussing and evaluating current theoretical modes of approaching the nonhuman in literature, whether the moral panic of the 1960s or the apocalyptic bent of Dark Ecology. Close readings of shorter texts, whether excerpts or poetry, will take precedence over plot-driven summarizations of longer pieces.
ENLT 2513 - Major Authors of American Literature
Section 001 - Being Somebody
MWF 1000-1050 (New Cabell 303)
Instructor: Stephen Railton
An intensive reading of fiction and drama from the late 19th century to the present. The large goals of the class are the same as all ENLT's: to give you plenty of ways to practice and improve your reading, thinking, speaking and writing skills. The specific focus of our readings and discussion will be on the way various authors have explored the issue of identity in a democracy, on the ways in which "self" is a performance. In America, we say, you can be somebody -- but does that mean, for example, that you have to become somebody else? In America, you can make it -- but what is "it"?
Section 002 - Crossings: Race and Transatlantic American Literature
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Sarah Ingle
How do we determine the boundaries of a nation's literature? In particular, how do we determine the boundaries of what we call "American" literature in a world in which readers, writers, and texts are constantly in motion? In this course, we will read a variety of exciting texts that explore American literature from a transatlantic perspective, focusing on oceanic "crossings" both literal and metaphorical. We will read stories of travel and adventure on the high seas as well as texts that trace the lingering legacies of the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora. In doing so, we will also examine how American literature both reflects and responds to the historical construction and permeability of racial, cultural, and national boundaries. Assigned readings will include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by writers from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Class discussions will explore how the texts on our syllabus interrogate concepts such as race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and citizenship and how they represent the complex web of history, memory, and myth that ties the present to the past. Likely authors include Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano, Leonora Sansay, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Charles Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Edwidge Danticat. This course fulfills the second writing requirement.
ENLT 2514 - Modern American Authors
Section 001 - The Western & the West
TR 1230-145 (Room TBA)
Instructor: Ethan Reed
Posses, shootouts, and the frontier–loners, violence, and the law. Or is it family, legacy, and society–storytellers, safety, and a warm hearth? What is a western? What is the West, and why do we keep writing stories about it? This course explores where myth and reality meet on the horizon of the Amer. West, the staying power of the genre that was imagined out of it, and how modern writers adapt, challenge, and disrupt the legacies of both.
ENLT 2523 - Studies in Poetry
Section 002 - The Poetry of Exile
MWF 1200-1250 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Megan Haury
I am thinking of an exile farther than any country
~ Derek Walcott, "North and South"
Throughout the twentieth century, poets grappled with divided cultural, linguistic, and geographic origins in their work as radical changes took place in the countries and cultures around them. This class will take on the theme of "exile" as a means of exploring some of the great poetry and historical changes of the past century. Some artists grapple with exile from real or imagined cultural origins, while others examine the geographic distance from an ancestral homeland, and many turn to literary precursors as a means for questioning and comforting the experiences of exile. Using "exile" as a defining theme for our course, we will read authors starting with modernist poets in the early twentieth century progressing through postcolonial and immigrant poets of the late twentieth century to examine the different meanings and comforts of exile throughout the century. What does exile mean to different poets in different cultures? How do race and gender relate to the experiences of exile across the century? How and why do poets rely on tropes of exile in their work? We will study the way poets throughout the last century have represented the process of exile in their works, and what benefits and costs the types of exile and solutions to it they represent have for their development as artists. Likely authors we will read include William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Eunice de Souza, and Agha Shahid Ali.
Section 003 - Five Major Poets
1000-1050 (Pvilion VIII B002)
Instructor: Devan Ard
This course covers five major poets from the English lyric canon in order to hone class members' skills in interpretation and argument. We will read, in this order: John Donne, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Elizabeth Bishop. The readings will be varied and challenging, occasionally complemented by selections from contemporaneous poets for comparison and contrast. We'll talk about poetic form, the creation of voice and tone, imagery, and rhetoric – how poems praise, lament, or seduce. At the end of the course, class members will have become familiar with five important English poets and grown as writers, thinkers, and readers.
Requirements will include regular posts to Collab; lively participation in class discussion; two short papers (3-5 pp) and two longer (5-6); and a take-home final exam.
ENLT 2524 - Studies in Drama
Section 001 - Drama from Ibsen to Now
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Ann Mazur
Beginning with Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879), we will explore the rise of theatrical realism at the end of the nineteenth century, and trace the rise of Modern and contemporary theatre—including experimental and political forms—through the twentieth century to the present-day. We will pay careful consideration to the differences between reading and performing drama: what changes—from sound, to character, to power dynamics when a scene is brought to life? Our in-depth readings of the plays themselves will be complemented by discussions of the nature of performance, and the occasional staging of portions of the texts—no acting experience necessary!—to arrive at a more complex and socially real understanding of character, plot, and both narrative and stage space. Expect our readings and brief in-class stagings to include, among others: Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Tracey Letts' sequel play Clybourne Park (2010), other contemporary selections such as Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play and Lisa D'Amor's Detroit (2010), as well as works from Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, and more.
ENLT 2526 - Studies in Fiction
Section 001 - Migrant Fiction
TR 1230-145 (The Rotunda Room 150)
Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty
Salman Rushdie has written that, "Migration offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age." Taking Rushdie's claim as our starting point, this course explores the complexity of the metaphor of migration through the study of a diverse body of Anglophone novels that specifically fictionalize experiences of migration. Contemporary literary imaginings of migration are framed equally by the utopian possibilities as well as the dystopian material realities that define a uniquely migrant modernity. On the one hand, migrant cultures are seen to elide national boundaries, enable cultural encounters, and collapse fantasies of a homogeneously cohesive national narrative. In this sense, an emergent literary aesthetics of migrancy seems to celebrate flexible forms of belonging in the world: as hybrid, metro-sexual, transcultural, nomadic, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual etc. On the other, the migrant figure, liminal and ever shifting, also represents the collective phantasms of modernity working out their own scenes of inequity and exclusion. In this second sense, the migrant imaginary is also a political one concerned with those axes of belonging and non-belonging - as citizen or alien, patriot or traitor, legal or illegal, native or naturalized - that continue to stratify our societies.
Our study will take seriously these various historical, social, and literary figurations through which recent seminal texts of world literature represent migration. We will begin with the premise that the migrant perspective is an important one in the context of new English literatures because the metaphors of journey, unrootedness, mobility, dispossession, and exile that frame it are useful to understanding the complex situation of our present world. In order to have a sense of the global scope and relevance of the topic, we will read a range of novels that focus exclusively on stories of migration. Among others, we will read works by Desai, Lahiri, Aidoo, Kincaid, Selvadurai, Al-Shaykh, Ali, and Rushdie.
Section 003- Comparative Modern Fiction
MW 200-315 (Room TBA)
Instructor: Amanda Sigler
This course aims to situate Modernism in its properly international context, asking how it developed with varying nuances in selected European countries. Though we will be encountering foreign texts in translation, we will be asking how Modernist writers uniquely address the question of language as it relates to national and individual identity, increasing urbanization, cross-cultural encounters, and the clash of nations brought about by colonial wars and by World War I. In the course of the term we will explore how French, German, British, and Irish texts interact with each other—for example, how Flaubert's free indirect discourse connects to Joyce's "Uncle Charles Principle," how Joyce's multilingual puns reflect on the convergence of multiple cultures, how Woolf and Mann variously address the crises of identity that accompany modernity, and how narrative inconsistencies in Victorian adventure fiction influenced high Modernism across the continent.
We'll take a closer look at our own language as well, as we strengthen our critical vocabulary of literary terms and use it to describe our reactions to texts with eloquence and precision. Students taking this course should leave well-equipped to write persuasive academic essays that are supported by scholarly research and polished with critical discourse.
Section 004 - Multiethnic American Fiction
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Caroline Rody
This course will examine contemporary fiction by American authors of many backgrounds, observing the transformation of traditional literary form, discourse, plot, and character in an era of global migration; cultural and linguistic multiplicity; changing understandings of race, gender, and national affiliation; and rising interest in both ethnic histories and possibilities for cross-ethnic encounter. Secondary material will include critical and theoretical essays. Primary texts will include novels and stories by some of the following writers: Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Alfred Kazin, Lore Segal, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Edwidge Danticat, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz.
Requirements: active reading and participation, short response papers, 2 major papers, class leading (in groups).
Section 005 - The Devil in English Literature
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Britta Rowe
Section 008 - Ghost Stories and Spectral Tales
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Charles Sligh
This course will offer a semester-long engagement with Ghost Stories, Spectral Tales, and Weird Fiction.
Ghosts—as Prince Hamlet observes—are disruptive, insurgent agents. Ghosts play havoc with our most cherished assumptions about the world, overturning our preferences for seeing the universe as a familiar, neatly organized, rational, and "realistic" place. Immune to the talismans of modernity and unimpressed by the sceptic's "Bah! Humbug!", ghosts haunt us because their existence badly compromises our assumption that the Past is something different and remote from the Present, that the Dead should, finally, stay Dead, and that old crimes and inconvenient corpses are safely buried and forgotten. Ghosts badly mess with our temporal and spiritual comfort zones.
In our reading, we'll be exploring works written by some of the acknowledged masters of the Ghost Story form. Classic ghost stories will include Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (1843), Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), M. R. James's "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (1903), Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed" (1931), and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959). A clutch of Spectral Tales by less-familiar authors (Dunsany, Nesbit, Hodgson, Machen, Blackwood, &c.) will flit and caper alongside these better-known favorites. Near the semester's close, we'll chart the rise of the Weird Tale from within the longer tradition of supernatural fiction, reading works by Lovecraft and other 20th- and 21st-century writers.
ENLT 2530 - Studies in Global Literature
Section 001 - Framing the Civil Rights Movement: 1967
TR 330-445 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Deborah McDowell
**Listed under Studies in Global Literature in SIS**
Section 002 - Swallow the Air: The Universe of Black Fiction
TR 1230-145 (Room TBA)
Instructor: Jeffery Allen
In the course, we will read an assortment of texts by contemporary Black novelists, short story writers, and memoirists from around the world, including authors from Australia, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and various regions of the African continent. What bonds connect these writers other than a shared ethnicity? We seek a thoughtful and honest exploration of this question, one that, as we shall see, will require us to ponder such issues as language and culture, indigenous rights, Diaspora and immigration, and place as represented in the assigned texts. Might we find that many authors today seek to expand our way of thinking about what it means to be black, what it means to be of African descent.
For the course, our reading will primarily focus on the following books:
Luiz Argentina Chiriboga, Drums Under My Skin
Paulo Lins, City of God
Marie Ndiaye, Three Strong Women
Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl
Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River
Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from A Leper Colony and Other Stories
Binyavanga Wainaina, Someday I Will Write about This Place
Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air
ENLT 2548 - Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - 21st-Century Novels
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Andrew Ferguson
Despite a continual stream of critics forecasting its "death" (a prediction first made more than 100 years ago), the novel remains one of our most important forms of aesthetic production—an importance underlined in the wake of the September 11 attacks, with many writers reflecting on a society that seemed to have changed overnight. A decade on, and the wounds from the attacks and ensuing conflicts were still felt, but increasingly pushed to the background amid a welter of other societal traumas, pressures, and concerns: in particular, a growing awareness of and resistance to varying forms of privilege, as well as increasing concern about the long-term effects of humanity upon the earth.
In this course we will read a number of novels published since 2010, with the primary aim of developing skills in close reading and familiarity with the tools of literary analysis, while considering also questions of gender, race, sexuality, and other cultural identities. We will seek an answer for the surprisingly difficult question, "What is a novel?" by examining how the elements, traditions, and subgenres developed by novelists in centuries past are remade by the writers of our own day.
We'll pursue these topics not only in class discussion and argumentative essays, but also through digital outlets: students can expect to blog reading responses, write GoodReads reviews, report on an author event, interview a novelist via Twitter, and record minisodes of a class podcast.
Section 002 - Before and After the End of the World: Apocalyptic Fiction and Film
TR 1230-145 (Dell 2 101)
Instructor: John Murphy
In this course, we will read, reflect on, write about and discuss a series of powerfully prophetic recent novels that imagine the end of the world and what comes before and after it: Walter J. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, John Crowley's Engine Summer, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, P. D. James's The Children of Men, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
These novels imagine the end of the world in two different but related ways: the end of the world as the conclusion of human history and civilization; and the end of the world as the meaning of the human story and the human condition more generally. These novels are apocalyptic, prophetic in their effort to divine the unknown and the unseen. They look into the future and try to imagine what's there or could be there. And they look into the human spirit – heart, mind, and soul - to see what's there already to help us shape our future in hopeful ways. They picture the worst that could happen, to inspire the very best we can be.
These novels mean serious business, but they're seriously fun, and deeply entertaining for those who entertain the deep questions they raise. This course should appeal to those with interests in subjects across the full range of the academic humanities – history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, etcetera - and also to those engaged by recent apocalyptic narratives from popular culture like The Walking Dead and The Hunger Games.
We will sample the film and television adaptations of The Walking Dead and The Hunger Games as starting points for the course. And, all along the way, we will sample mood music by this year's Nobel laureate in Literature, Bob Dylan, who's been writing prophetic songs in the apocalyptic mode for more than fifty years.
If all that sounds good to you, then you should enjoy the exploration of the end of the world on which this course will embark. The course should serve to help you to navigate your future journey through both the academic humanities and popular culture in beneficial ways.
ENLT 2550 - Shakespeare
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 383)
Instructor: Elizabeth Sutherland
Section 002
TR 200-315 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Elizabeth Sutherland
Section 003
TR 800-915 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Matthew Davis
This course will provide an introduction to Shakespeare for students with little or no previous exposure to the Bard. It is intended especially for students who suffer from that dread disease Shakes-fear. We will begin by reading Gary Blackwood's Shakespeare Stealer, a work of historical fiction, written for young readers, which provides a very accessible and surprisingly accurate introduction to the world of Elizabethan London and Shakespeare's acting company. After this introduction, we will read seven Shakespeare plays -- two of the "great" tragedies (probably Hamlet and Macbeth), two Roman tragedies (probably Coriolanus and Antony & Cleopatra), and three comedies (probably The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and The Tempest). During the course of the semester, we will go to see one or two of the plays we are reading performed live at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton. This means that, in addition to (moderate) textbook expenses, students should be prepared to pay for theater tickets and (if necessary) chartered bus transportation to and from Staunton – additional costs may range from $50 at the low end to $200 at the high end.
ENLT 2552 - Women in Literature
Section 001
TR 200-315 (New Cabell 111)
Instructor: Susan Fraiman
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 (final list still to be determined) include stories by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative of growing up by U.S. cartoonist Alison Bechdel; a film set in Turkey directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven; images of the United States by queer photographer Catherine Opie; Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi's memoir of a "harem girlhood." 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. There is also a final exam.
ENLT 2555 - Special Topics
Section 001 - Becoming Your True Self
TR 200-315 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Walter Jost
It may seem odd to learn that widely shared notions that most of us readily profess—like "freedom" and "being authentic," "doing your own thing," and "being your own person"—are historically pretty new. Rousseau's idea that man was "born free and is everywhere in chains" was a moral and political innovation largely unknown before the Romantic age. This course is designed to introduce thoughtful readers to questions about the ethics of reading literature from the Romantics to our own time, with a particular focus on what it might mean to become an autonomous "person," perhaps even a world-citizen (a "cosmopolitan") in the twenty-first century. We will study several works, among them G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Euripides' Bacchae, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Kingston's The Woman Warrior, along with a variety of scholarly essays, short stories, and poems. 2 papers and a final.
Section 002 - Literature and Culture of the American Frontier
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Eva Latterner
The borderland known as the "frontier" has occupied the American imagination since the first European settlements in the New World. This course will interrogate how the frontier has been imagined as a space of national desire, dread, enterprise and experimentation from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the contemporary Western. Considering US legal discourse, fiction, essays, films and Marlboro ads, we will examine the frontier as a cultural object.
Section 005 - The World Wars in European Literature
MW 330-445 (Monroe 111)
Instructor: Sarah Rose Cole
Restricted to first and second year students.
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.
ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch I
Section Locations Variable
Fall Semesters
The first half of the "stretch" (two-semester) option for meeting the First Writing Requirement—intended to be taken during the first semester of study—this course approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Students who take ENWR 1505 must subsequently take ENWR 1506 to complete the First Writing Requirement.
ENWR 1506 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch II
Section Locations Variable
Spring Semesters
The second half of the "stretch" (two-semester) option for meeting the First Writing Requirement—intended to be taken during the second semester of study—this course approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Students who take ENWR 1506 should have taken ENWR 1505 in the prior semester to complete the First Writing Requirement.
ENWR 1507 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch I for Multilingual Writers
Section Locations Variable
Fall Semesters
The first half of the "stretch" (two-semester) option for students still developing competency at writing in English, this course approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Intended to be taken during the first semester of study; graded A, B, C, or NC. Students who take ENWR 1507 must subsequently take ENWR 1508 to complete the First Writing Requirement.
ENWR 1508 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch II for Multilingual Writers
Section Locations Variable
Spring Semesters
The second half of the "stretch" (two-semester) option for students still developing competency at writing in English, this course approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Intended to be taken during the second semester of study; graded A, B, C, or NC. Students who take ENWR 1508 should have taken ENWR 1507 in the prior semester to complete the First Writing Requirement.
ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry
Section Locations Variable
Fall and Spring Semesters
The single-semester option for meeting the first writing requirement—intended to be taken during the first year of study—this course approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Students whose last names end in A-K must take ENWR 1510 in the fall; those with last names ending in L-Z take it in the spring.
ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing
Section 001 - Writing about Medicine
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Kiera Allison
This tutorial-style writing seminar will feature readings on current medical research and practice and will give students practice writing in the same mode.
Section 002 - Writing about Social Justice
MWF 100-150 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Lindgren Johnson
This course will consider the rhetorical role witnessing—so central in both a legal and a religious context--plays in the movement for racial justice. Who is an effective witness, and why—and what, exactly, must be witnessed? Texts we will consider include theoretical ones such as Susan Sontag's On Regarding the Pain of Others, in addition to primary written, visual, sonic, and cinematic ones.
Section 003 - Writing about the Environment
MWF 200-250 (Room TBA)
Instructor: Cory Shaman
This class examines the ethics and rhetoric of environmental writing in the age of the anthropocene (a contested term we'll investigate) to explore how we might engage more meaningfully with the natural world. We'll consider how current environmental discourse could be re-invigorated to address ecological conditions and human responsibilities more effectively while challenging seductive forms of "greenwashing" or pseudo-environmentalism.
Section 004 - Writing about Medicine
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Kiera Allison
This tutorial-style writing seminar will feature readings on current medical research and practice and will give students practice writing in the same mode.
Section 005 - Writing about Work
TR 330-445, (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Devin Donovan
In this course we will critically examine writing in and about the workplace. We'll start by looking at writing as its own type of work before moving into how language can help us see and define work differently. Building on this foundation, the second and third units will draw on students' unique interests and career goals to navigate and analyze the communications of the workplaces they one day hope to enter.
Section 006 - Project Based Writing
TR 1230-145 (New Cabell 415)
Instructor: Kate Kostelnik
This course will provide a foundation into the various kinds of writing students will learn and practice in the university. We will inquire into how writing works, how we grow as writers as we progress through college, as well as how writing is a distinct form of learning. Particular attention will be paid to rhetorical awareness and writing processes. Based on their disciplinary interterests and goals, students will design their own projects.
Section 007 - Travel Writing
TR 330-445 (New Cabell 209)
Instructor: Kate Stephenson
This course will explore travel writing using a variety of texts, including essays, memoirs, blogs, photo essays, and narratives. We will examine cultural representations of travel as well as the ethical implications of tourism that arise in the exploration of our modern world. Throughout the course, we will ponder questions like:
What is the relationship between travel writer, reader, inhabitant, and place? How can we use writing to navigate these relationships? What is the role of "outsider" in travel writing? How does travel writing encourage us to see ourselves differently? How can we use the best of travel writing—the sense of discovery, voice, narrative suspense—in other forms of writing, including academic essays? Can travel writing evoke political and social change?
Students will have the opportunity to write about their own travel experiences and to embark on their own "local travel" projects. As the semester unfolds, I hope we will revise and refine our views, paying close attention to how we put words together to write powerfully and engagingly about travel.
ENWR 2610 - Writing with Style
Section 001
MW 500-615 (New Cabell 283)
Instructor: Keith Driver
Develops an understanding of the wide range of stylistic moves in prose writing, their uses, and implications. Students build a rich vocabulary for describing stylistic decisions, imitate and analyze exemplary writing, and discuss each other¿s writing in a workshop setting.
Fullfills the second writing requirement.
ENWR 2640 - Composing Digital Stories and Essays
Section 001
TR 1230-145 (Shannon House 108)
Instructor: Patricia Sullivan
A workshop in which students produce stories and essays as both conventional print texts and multimodal electronic texts. Through a mix of theory and example students explore how emerging technologies changed the genres and modes of writing inside and outside the academy.
Fullfills the second writing requirement.
ENWR 2700 - News Writing
Section 001 (Combined with MDST 2700-001)
TR 800-915 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Charles Kelly
Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new media stories. Workshop setting. Readings from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, to use of narrative and on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.
Section 002 (Combined with MDST 2700-002)
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Charles Kelly
Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new media stories. Workshop setting. Readings from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, to use of narrative and on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.
ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Pavilion V)
Instructor: Steph Ceraso
This course trains students to become attuned, thoughtful listeners and sonic composers. In addition to discussing key works on sound from fields such as rhetoric and composition, sound studies, and journalism, we will experiment with the possibilities of sound as a valuable form of writing and storytelling. Students will learn how to use digital audio editing tools, platforms, and techniques for designing and producing sonic projects.
ENWR 3900 - Communicating with the Public
Section 001
MW 200-315 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: John T. Casteen IV
The lectures cover topics in effective public communication, including the cognitive effects of sentence syntax, core principles of document design, framing arguments in public documents, and developing effective visuals and presentations. The studios allow students to master those principles in the context of projects keyed to their specific interests, background, and career plans. Meets the second writing requirement.
Section 002
MWF 1000-1050 (New Cabell 389)
Instructor: Jon D'Errico
The lectures cover topics in effective public communication, including the cognitive effects of sentence syntax, core principles of document design, framing arguments in public documents, and developing effective visuals and presentations. The studios allow students to master those principles in the context of projects keyed to their specific interests, background, and career plans. Meets the second writing requirement.
ENCW 2300 - Poetry Writing
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. While first- and second-years are the primary audience for ENCW 2300 and should register for the course using SIS, third- and fourth-year students can request to be added manually. For the add procedure (as well as other creative writing policies) see this page.
Section 001
MW 500-615 (New Cabell 115)
Instructor: Valencia Grace
Section 002
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 066)
Instructor: Quinn Gilman-Forlini
Section 003
TR 500-615 (New Cabell 411)
Instructor: Michael Dhyne
Section 004
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Sara Brickman
Section 005
TR 500-615 (New Cabell 068)
Instructor: Landis Grenville
ENCW 2530 - Introduction to Poetry Writing - Themed
Section 001 - Writing the Animal
TR 500-615 (New Cabell 042)
Instructor: Courtney FlerlageIn this course, students will ask, how do poets depict and embody animals to better understand what is human? Students will explore the tame and the sublime, the house cat and the monster. A combination of lecture, discussion, and workshop, this course will teach the basics of poetry (including vocabulary and conventions of strong writing) as students produce original creative work about animal encounters and about living as the human-animal. Coursework will also involve close readings and critical analysis of assigned texts.
Section 002 - "Poetics of the Body: Sports and Illness"
MW 500-615 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Rob Shapiro
An introduction to the craft of poetry writing focused on the body and its portrayal in poems about sports and illness. How do we write the body and effectively portray ecstasy? How can poetry about these topics actively explore the self? How can we connect the body with the deeper emotions of our work? Class involves workshop of student work, craft discussion, and relevant reading of contemporary poets.
ENCW 2560 - Introduction to Fiction Writing - Themed
Section 002 - Fiction and the City
TR 500-615 (New Cabell 115)
Instructor: Helen ChandlerThis course aims to teach creative writing by focusing on urban spaces -- architectures, streetscapes and interiors. Students will read and produce writing that brings these city spaces to life. No fiction writing experience is required. We will read and discuss both classic and modern short stories concerned with cities, either in setting or subject matter. Students will write fiction of their own, and participate in 'workshop' - the practice of critiquing classmates' fiction in a supportive and rigorous way.
Section 003 - Fiction and Technology
MW 500-615 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Caitlin Fitzpatrick
ENCW 2600 - Fiction Writing
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. While first- and second-years are the primary audience for ENCW 2600 and should register for the course using SIS, third- and fourth-year students can request to be added manually.
For the add procedure (as well as other creative writing policies) see this page.
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Christopher Knapp
Section 002
MW 600-715 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Daniel Hamilton
Section 003
TR 500-615 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Jeremy Townley
In this intensive introduction to fiction writing, we'll develop skills to create vivid, surprising, and truthful short fiction. We'll read about and discuss the elements of narrative craft; study numerous short stories by masters of the form; and develop our short fiction through exercises, workshops, and one-on-one conferences. While first- and second-years are the primary audience for ENCW 2600 and should register for the course using SIS, third- and fourth-year students can request to be added manually.
For the add procedure (as well as other creative writing policies) see this page.
Section 004
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Nicole Lefebvre
Section 005
MWF 900-950 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Adam Roux
Section 006
MWF 100-150 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Ethan Feuer
ENCW 3310 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I
Section 001
T 1230-300 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Paul Guest
A weekly 2.5-hour class for students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2300. Emphasis is on workshop of students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry.
Instructor Permission Required, contact Prof. Paul Guest at firstname.lastname@example.com for application details.
Section 002
W 200-430 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Debra Nystrom
Restricted to Instructor Permission
A weekly 2.5-hour class for students advanced beyond the level of ENCW 2300. Emphasis is on workshop of students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Final poetry portfolio required. ADMISSION BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: Sample of student work (4-5 poems) to be submitted IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT (either electronically in MS Word, or a hard paper copy), to Professor Nystrom's email address at email@example.com or to her English Dept. faculty mailbox in Bryan Hall; submissions should include a cover sheet with name, year, email address, telephone number, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Every effort will be made to notify students of acceptance during the week prior to the beginning of classes, so that students may finalize their schedules in SIS.
ENCW 3610 - Intermediate Fiction Writing
Section 001
R 500-730 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Denton
Instructor Permission Required.
Read short fiction. Write your own. Students will write two stories and revise one. Creative responses to weekly reading assignments encourage students to focus on the most fundamental building block of the short story: scene making. Active classroom participation and love of reading and writing are essential.
To be considered for this class, please send a short story (up to 15 pages) to me at firstname.lastname@example.com no later than a week before classes begin. Attach a note telling me who and what year you are, your email address, what workshops you've taken and with whom, and whether you're applying to other workshops. I will alert you through SIS as soon as possible. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION means you must submit work to be considered—see above.
Section 002
W 300-530 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Christopher Tilghman
Instructor Permission Required.
Read short fiction. Write your own. Students will write two stories and revise one. Creative responses to weekly reading assignments encourage students to focus on the most fundamental aspect of the short story: scene making. Active classroom participation and love of reading and writing are essential.
To be considered for this class, please send a short story (up to 15 pages), no later than one week before classes begin, to me at firstname.lastname@example.com. Attach a note telling me who and what year you are, your email address, what workshops you've taken and with whom, and whether you're applying to other workshops. I will alert you through SIS as soon as possible.
Section 003
R 100-330 (New Cabell 066)
Instructor: Sydney Blair
Sharp focus on the reading and writing of short fiction. Students will write two stories and revise one. Written responses to weekly assignments, occasional in-class writing exercises. Active classroom participation, and love of reading and writing essential. In order to be considered for this class, you must submit a manuscript, preferably to my mailbox in 229 Bryan (up to 15 pp. is fine) at least 10 days before classes begin in January. If you are out of town, you may e-mail me. Please attach a note saying who and what year you are, your e-mail address, what workshops you've taken and with whom, other fiction workshops you're considering, and any other relevant information. I will alert you vis SIS a week or so before classes begin. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION.
ENCW 4350 - Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Section 001
T 230-500 (New Cabell 038)
Instructor: John Casey
Please note that this undergrad writing course is WITH PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR. I require a sample of the applicant's writing in my box in the faculty lounge on the second floor of Bryan Hall before Christmas break. Please include an email address so I can write to you whether you're in or not.
ENCW 4810 - Advanced Fiction Writing I
Section 001
R 230-500 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Jeffery Allen
Instructor Permission Required.
ENCW 4830 - Advanced Poetry Writing I
Section 001
W 200-430 (New Cabell 594
Instructor: Gregory Orr
We will meet once a week for a two and a half hour workshop which will focus on student production and revision of poems, craft topics, and exemplary poems which can help us become more aware of strategies and qualities of successful poems. Students will be writing poems on a regular basis in response to assignments and will be generating poems of their own according to their interests in particular styles or themes.
Class Limit: 12.
Admission by Instructor Permission Only. Interested students should submit 6 sample poems, their year, and poetry writing background in a SINGLE WORD DOCUMENT ATTACHMENT.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: DECEMBER 1. Early submissions encouraged as I will begin filling the class before the deadline with qualified applicants.
ENCW 5310 - Advanced Poetry Writing II
Section 001
R 1230-300 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Paul Guest
Instructor Permission Required, contact Paul Guest at email@example.com.
ENPW 4820 - Poetry Program Poetics
Section 001
M 200-430 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Gregory Orr
We'll consider some of the implications and excitements that come with the fundamental decision to turn world into words and then create the highly-patterned language event we know as a poem. We'll engage themes of disorder and order, both in life and in poetry, and we'll examine poetry's ability to dramatize disorder at the same time that it addresses our human need for order. We'll be considering some of the key ways that language is used in poetry. Words as singing, saying, naming and imagining.
What does "image" mean when we talk about poetry in English? When Paul Valery speaks of the "musicalization" of language in poetry, what might he mean? Story, symbol, incantation-- how do they intersect and interact in poems? What are the characteristic impulse of lyric as contrasted with narrative?
How is it we read poems? What motivates us personally to write them? We'll try to ponder some subjects so basic to poem-writing that we should feel challenged and engaged in a fundamental and enlivening way.
We'll consider poems and poets' statements about poetry and we'll see how they intersect with the enthusiasms, ambitions and understandings we have about our own poems.
CLASS LIMIT: 12. Permission of Instructor Required.
FINAL PROJECT: an essay and poems setting forth the student's individualized response to the question of what poetry is.
ENPW 4920 - Poetry Capstone
Section 001
Time & Location TBA
Instructor: Lisa Spaar
This is the second part of a two-semester project [The Capstone Course (ENPW 4910/4920)] designed for fourth-year students in the Department's Area Program in Poetry Writing. The Capstone project is a year-long investigation of faculty and student-directed, shared texts that allows advanced poetry writing students to read widely and across disciplines in areas of individual aesthetic interest, to begin to think beyond the single poem and into ways poetry manuscripts can be organized, to become more deeply aware of their own patterns and evolving aesthetic, and to create new work. The spring semester involves a combination of weekly discussion of individual student manuscripts and one-on-one conferring with the instructor. After mid-term, students are assigned a graduate student mentor, who also offers the poetry manuscript a close reading. The course culminates in the production by each student of a manuscript of original poetry.
ENLP 4550 - Topics in Literary Prose
Section 001 - The American Short Story
MW 100-215 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Sydney Blair
We will read selections of short fiction with an eye on craft – point of view, plot and character development, the significance of setting, management of time, use of dialogue, to name a few -- as they relate to the thematic concerns of the story. We will discuss the choices the writer makes to bring his or her initial vision to life on the page, and how those decisions influence and affect the way we read the story. Our focus will be modern American writers but we might stray into other countries and forms. Active classroom participation and a love of reading (obviously) is a must. Requirements: weekly response paper/craft exercise, brief oral presentation, final paper/project. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION.
ENLP 4720 - Area Program in Literary Prose Thesis Course
Section 001
R 400-630 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Denton
Instructor Permission Required.
Directed writing project for students in the English Department's Undergraduate Area Program in Literary Prose, leading to completion of an extended piece of creative prose writing.
ENMD 3250 - Chaucer I
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 383)
Instructor: Elizabeth Sutherland
ENMD 4500 - Advanced Studies in Medieval Literature
Section 001 - Lyric Poetry
TR 1100-1215 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler
Cross-listed with ENRN 4500.
So much of the most brilliant writing in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We'll study Middle English to Early Modern short poems (sexy, comic, elegaic, devotional, and more), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, grief-soaked, silly, and sweet moments. prayer from William Herebert's hymns to George Herbert's pattern poems; longing from "Western Wind" to Mary Wroth; medieval song to John Donne's sonnets: you'll have lots of choices and an opportunity to shape the syllabus. A series of evolving assignments will support you in becoming a brilliant literary critic, but no skills are required to join up – only an appetite for sound, thought, and emotion.
ENRN 3210 - Shakespeare II
MW 1200-1250 (Minor 125)
Instructor: Katharine Maus
This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances. English 3210, 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.
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
W 500-550 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Emelye Keyser
Section 102
F 1000-1050 (Gibson 141)
Instructor: Anuj Kapoor
Section 103
W 400-450 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Grace Vasington
Section 104
F 1100-1150 (Pavillion VIII 108)
Instructor: Anuj Kapoor
Section 105
W 300-350 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Grace Vasington
Section 106
R 330-420 (New Cabell 107)
Instructor: Emelye Keyser
ENRN 3250 - Milton: Classic Christian Iconoclast
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (Maury 110)
Instructor: Dan Kinney
In this course we will study the the interconnections between Milton's literary career and the general 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.
ENRN 4410 - Shakespeare in the Making
Section 001
TR 200-315 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Dan Kinney
Reading approximately one play a week, we will survey a sequence of formal and thematic experiments leading up to and finally beyond the four principal tragedies of state (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra).
How do these dramas revise or reflect on the patterns of Shakespeare's first histories? How are his main generic perspectives related throughout his career? Where do borrowed providential designs first begin to give way to self-conscious authorial reshaping, and how is the tension between these two elements of plotting reflected in each of the tragedies? A few major themes to consider together or singly: succession and ordering regimens, dynastic and cosmic; misrule whether inner or outer, both festive and blighting; the state and the scene of heroic performance; apt improvisation, rehearsal, and ripeness of purpose / apt timing. Class requirements: Lively participation including occasional email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.
ENRN 4500 - Advanced Studies in Renaissance Literature
Section 001 - Lyric Poetry
TR 1100-1215 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler
Cross-listed with ENMD 4500.
So much of the most brilliant writing in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We'll study Middle English to Early Modern short poems (sexy, comic, elegaic, devotional, and more), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, grief-soaked, silly, and sweet moments. prayer from William Herebert's hymns to George Herbert's pattern poems; longing from "Western Wind" to Mary Wroth; medieval song to John Donne's sonnets: you'll have lots of choices and an opportunity to shape the syllabus. A series of evolving assignments will support you in becoming a brilliant literary critic, but no skills are required to join up – only an appetite for sound, thought, and emotion.
ENEC 3600 - The English Novel I
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 309)
Instructor: Alison Hurley
Today classes like this one elevate novels to the status of serious literature. During the eighteenth century, however, the novel was not just a new and thus culturally illegitimate genre, it was a dangerous one as well: seductive, subversive, addictive, and unruly. No wonder it was so popular! But despite their reputation as merely popular and mostly valueless cultural productions, early novels grappled with serious questions about the experience of living in an increasingly secular, mobile, and literate society. How can, and why should, a book make the everyday lives of ordinary individuals matter? Does sympathizing with fictional characters lead to virtue or vice? How can we tell "true" stories while essentially telling lies? Wonderfully contentious conversations developed among eighteenth-century novelists about how best to answer questions such as these. Our work will be to revive these conversations, and hopefully, come to a better understanding of how they propelled the novel towards its current status as the dominant literary genre of the modern world.
Our readings will include novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Austen. Class requirements will include weekly reading-response papers, frequent reading quizzes, two essays, and a final exam. Our classes will be largely discussion based.
ENEC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature I
Section 001 - Close reading of English poems 1660-1789
T 300-530 (Alderman Library 114)
Instructor: Michael Suarez
We'll read the principal English poems 1660-1789, studying major authors – Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Collins, Smart, Goldsmith, Blake – as well as themes: London, the poem of rural retreat, the religious sublime, personal & political satire, the poetry of landscape and nation, courtship and marriage, etc. Special attention will be given to women poets, and to working-class and other non-canonical writers.
ENNC 3210 - Major British Authors of the Earlier Nineteenth Century
Section 001 - Byron and the Shelleys
TR 1230-145 (Nau 341)
Instructor: Andrew Stauffer
An examination of the lives, works and collaborations among Romantic writers Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, with particular reference to the year 1816 and its current bicentennial. Works to be studied include Frankenstein, Manfred, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Alastor, "Julian and Maddalo," and Prometheus Unbound. 2 papers, a mid-term, and a final exam.
ENNC 3500 - Nineteenth Century Topics
Section 001 - Women Writers
TR 200-315 (Maury 110)
Instructor: Alison Booth
This course focuses on some celebrated works by well-known Anglophone women writers, exploring methods of reading and research. The shorter or longer fictions dramatize changing social roles (of class and race as well as gender) and genre conventions (such as the marriage plot), as economic relations and outlooks on self-development transform across more than a century. The careers and lives of these writers have been represented in various ways, and we will explore digital as well as print media in this circulation of lives and works. There will be research assignments, two papers, reading quizzes and an exam.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Nella Larsen, Quicksand
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Selected essays by Eliot, Woolf, and more recent critics
ENNC 3850 - The Fiction of Empire
Section 001
MW 330-445 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
This course deals with the interplay between literature and British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Topics covered include orientalism and the representation of the foreign, the ideology of imperialism, literary critiques of imperialism, the impact of imperialism on domestic life in Britain, the problem of heroism on the imperial frontier, the intersection between fiction of empire and other genres (such as science fiction, horror stories, and detective fiction), as well as the relationship between late Victorian popular culture and serious fiction, especially the emergence of literary modernism out of fiction of empire. Author studied include Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad. Course requirements include two papers and a final examination.
ENNC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature I
Section 001 - Poetry and New Media: 1780-1900
TR 330-445 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Andrew Stauffer
How did the rise of new media technologies in the long nineteenth century affect the writing and reading of poetry? In this class, we will be investigating the history of printing, books, and textual circulation in relationship to Romantic and Victorian poetry (Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Landon, Hemans, Longfellow, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others). Spending significant time with original materials from the era, we will consider the physical aspects of books (bindings, paper, illustration and decoration, typography, etc.) in relationship to poetry and its audiences. And we will also think about the implications of digital technology for our present-day encounters with books from the past. 2 papers, a bibliographic project, and a final exam.
Section 002 - The Brontë Sisters
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Cristina Griffin
This course delves into the works of the three Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Brontë enthusiasts and those new to their works are welcome to join. In total, these sisters wrote seven of the most important novels of the nineteenth century—novels that have spawned spin-offs and adaptations, plays and films, homages and parodies. Their lives, too, have become the stuff of myth: to this day, readers frequently wonder how three of the most influential novelists could emerge from the same family in a remote Yorkshire village. In addition to diving into some of the Brontës' major novels, we will also reach out to their poetry, juvenilia, letters, and afterlives. How did the social, historical, and artistic contexts of the mid-nineteenth century influence their work? How did their novels shape the future of fictional forms? How do more recent adaptations write and rewrite the myth of the Brontë sisters?
ENMC 3500 - Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Monsters and Monstrosity
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 485)
Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty
Literature is rife with portraits of monsters and monstrosity. From Homer's The Odyssey, and Grimm's fairytales, to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Salman Rushdie's Shame, monsters challenge our everyday ideas about normality. Situated between the animal and the human, monstrous creatures are ciphers for difference that force us to consider what we regard as culturally abject or grotesque, as well as alluring. That these mythical figures continue to fascinate, even as they frighten, suggests their symbolic power in embodying both our latent desires and prohibitions. This course will explore the emergence of the monstrous aesthetic across several genres (epic, drama, novel, poetry, film), and periods (renaissance to contemporary) to probe the shifting terrains of sexual, racial, and cultural otherness that monsters represent. Along the way, we will ask critical questions that arise from the study of monstrosity. What, for instance, separates monsters from humans? How does monstrosity define our notions about beauty and ugliness, desire and disgust? Does the monster appear each time under a different guise? If so, to what extent does it reshape our sensibility about what is socially abnormal? What can monsters teach us about the hopes and apprehensions of the cultures and times to which they belong? Ultimately, we will seek to understand how and why these ferocious figures also elicit sympathy in us toward those markedly unlike ourselves. Our reading list includes works by William Shakespeare, R.L. Stevenson, Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Patricia Highsmith, among others.
This course is designed for advancing students in the major. Papers, short responses, and presentations will emphasize skills in argumentation, close reading, literary analysis, and critical thinking. Enthusiastic class participation is mandatory.
Section 002 - Currents in African Literature
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Njelle Hamilton
Combined section with AAS 3500-001.
In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new novels by Africa's young and established writers, from countries as varied as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that women writers such as Adichie, Bulawayo, Selasie, and Mengiste use to narrate issues affecting the continent. These topics include: dictatorship; the lingering effects of colonization; the postcolonial nation state; the traumas of war and geo-politics; gender and sexuality; and migration; among others. These central questions will guide our readings: What themes, concerns, and literary strategies animate, unite, or differentiate the literature by women writers from different African countries? How applicable are Western feminist and womanist theories to African fiction? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Assignments include a weekly African News Forum, a historical group presentation, intermittent novel reviews, and a final essay.
Section 003 - Being Human: Race/Technology/Arts
MW 200-315 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Njelle Hamilton
An introduction to the concepts in Afrofuturism, exploring race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through futuristic representations of blackness in TV ("Almost Human"); film (Last Angel of History); music (Janelle Monáe), and literature (Butler/Okorafor). Assignments include literary essays, short films, mashups, and web-content that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and technology in contemporary media.
Section 004 - South Asian Diasporas: Literature and Culture of the Globe
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 338)
Instructor: Sandhya Shukla
This course will explore the cultural production – literature, film, music, art, critical discourses, and political projects – of South Asian migrants around the world. We begin with the idea that diasporic processes of nationalism, citizenship and identity have made South Asian subjects. How, where and why that occurs are important questions for this course. Though we may be accustomed to thinking about Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, and others from the subcontinent as separate communities with enduring identities, we also ask how globalization produces exchanges and encounters that need new scripts. Does being "in diaspora" enable a construction of the self or the group that is impossible within the confines of nation? And might nation be understood flexibly, perhaps, to encompass more liberating forms of imagination? We will examine the complexities attendant to representation – the desire for visibility, the consolations of subjectivity. We consider whether loss – the affect central to all forms of dislocation – can ever be fully addressed by recourse to nation, and we also seek to understand how different cultural forms (of the novel, the autobiography, the film) might be reshaped in diaspora.
Materials over the term will illuminate local frameworks for race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality that are necessarily trans-local, with a set of reference points "outside" the specific geographies in which they are made apparent. Finally, as much as we are concerned with South Asian diaspora, we will also consider questions related to African, Latino and other Asian diasporas, so that we might begin to produce new meanings for race, ethnicity and "America." Texts to be considered may include: Rahul Bhattacharya's The Sly Company of People Who Care; Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table; V.S. Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival; and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India.
Section 005 - Modern Poetry
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 338)
Instructor: Mark Edmundson
The early and middle twentieth century gave birth to some wonderful poetry in England and America. We will read and discuss some of the best of it. We'll begin with W.B Yeats and from his rather astonishing work, the work of "the last Romantic," we'll move on. Possible authors: Robert Frost, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop. Short papers and quizzes, a longer essay at the close.
Section 006 - Epic and Modern American Poetry
MW 500-615 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Marvin Campbell
At the same time as much of twentieth century American poetry heeded Ezra Pound's call to "make it new"—some of the same poetry also, at the same time, looked backward to an ancient literary past: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Cantos, and H.D.'s Trilogy all, for example, drew on Homer and an extensive range of classical sources. In a postwar world with deep-seated anxieties about cultural decline and outright collapse, returning to the ancient world at once provided a stark reminder of "great civilizations" that had fallen before—i.e. cautionary tales—and promised an antidote to an unromantic modernity where the heroism of the past no longer seemed available in the face of weakened religious belief and increasing industrialization.
This course will examine how American and English-speaking poets in the American hemisphere have moved beyond mere allusions in the later twentieth and twenty first centuries to build on one of the ancient literary tradition's key genres: the epic. Defined by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as "a lengthy poem recounting in elevated style the exploits of a legendary hero or heroes, especially in battles or voyages," poets throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada we will carefully examine have innovated epic form by introducing disparate voices, urban landscapes, histories of oppression, formal experiment, and questions of race, gender, and sexuality. They fight battles of identity, rewrite the histories of their nations and regions, and re-imagine the function of literature itself.
Texts may include: The Bridge, Hart Crane; Omeros, Derek Walcott; Paterson, William Carlos Williams; Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks; Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson; Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis; The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill
ENMC 3559 - New Course in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Fictions of Global Development
TR 1230-145 (Clark 101)
Instructor: Victor Luftig
The practices and consequences of efforts to improve economic, educational, and cultural conditions internationally are notoriously difficult to document. The authors of "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge" (2008) argue that "certain works of fiction [are] 'better' than academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development." This course will test that claim—without a predisposition to either confirming or refuting it—by studying a series of works (mainly novels and short stories but also examples from film, television, and graphic fiction) that represent development work. We will also read, for comparison and information, some non-fiction. Among the authors included will be Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, Helen Fielding, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Hoagland, and John Le Carre. The course is also listed under Global Development Studies and is intended for students in that program, English majors, and others interested in the intersection of questions about literature's "use" and problems in development. The course will combine discussion and short lectures, exams and papers.
ENMC 3800 - Concepts of the Modern
Section 001
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Jessica Feldman
In order to understand notions of modernity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we'll study the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who wrote in literary ways—dramatic, poetic, fictional. We'll also read works by Franz Kafka, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov, considering them in light of Nietzsche's methods and ideas. Nietzsche and these writers wondered about such questions as: What is an ethical life? How does religion function? How do we know what we know? How do people communicate with one another? In a world filled with what we might summarize as "bad behavior," what are the roles of art and beauty? This is a lecture and discussion course, and there will be a take-home midterm and final, along with a paper.
ENMC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Contemporary Women's Texts
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: 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. 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 Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Doris Lessing, and Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative by Alison Bechdel; a film by French-Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven; images by photographer Catherine Opie; Fatima Mernissi's memoir about girlhood in a Moroccan harem; and scholarship by Chinua Achebe, Laura Mulvey, Hillary Chute, and Judith Halberstam. 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.
Section 002 - Ulysses and Infinite Jest
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 207)
Instructor: Michael Levenson
Restricted to Instructor Permission.
Our task in the seminar is set by two immense, important and influential works of twentieth-century fiction, which stand at opposite ends of the period, offering strong contrast as well as mutual illumination. For each of the fourteen weeks of the semester, we will read the novels side by side, with no shrinking from their difficulty and no shyness before the pleasure they offer. James Joyce's Ulysses can be seen as the summit of Modernism. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest forces the question of Postmodernism and beyond. Questions of character and form, of ethics and love, of the power of art and social hope, are central to the workings of both novels, are central to both works, but they will be no more central than specific phrases, sentences, and parts of words. There are no prerequisites for the course, but it will be essential for students to bring their curiosity, obsession, and openness. Requirements include a presentation, weekly comments, and a final essay.
Section 003 - Poetry in a Global Age
MW 200-315 (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Jahan Ramazani
How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar on modern and contemporary global poetry in English, we will explore the world in poetry and poetry in the world. The writers we will read range from modernist poets like Eliot, Yeats, H.D., and Claude McKay to contemporary poets of Ireland, India, Africa, Britain, and the Caribbean, such as Heaney, Walcott, Arjun Kolatkar, Karen Press, and Daljit Nagra. Among requirements are active participation; reading quizzes; your framing of discussion questions to help lead discussion; and two 8-10 page papers. Our texts will be from volumes 1 and 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, as supplemented by other poems and critical texts.
Section 004 - Contemporary American Drama
MW 200-315 (New Cabell 303)
Instructor: Stephen Railton
We'll look closely at about a dozen of the best American plays from the period between World War II and the present. It's a seminar, so it will be up to all of us as an intellectual community to define the discussions. But one of my abiding interests will be in the way that plays are both written and embodied in performance, in recovering what we can of the performance history of the texts we'll read. Authors will include O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Wilson, Albee, Shange, Henley, Guare, Kushner and Letts.
ENMC 4530 - Seminar in Modern Literature and Culture
Section 001 - Multiethnic American Fiction
TR 200-315 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Caroline Rody
This course will examine contemporary fiction by American authors of many backgrounds, observing the transformation of traditional literary form, discourse, plot, and character in an era of global migration; cultural and linguistic multiplicity; changing understandings of race, gender, and national affiliation; and rising interest in both ethnic histories and possibilities for cross-ethnic encounter. Secondary material will include critical and theoretical essays. Primary texts will include novels and stories by some of the following writers: Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Alfred Kazin, Lore Segal, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Edwidge Danticat, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz.
Requirements: active reading and participation, short response papers, 2 major papers, class leading (in groups).
ENMC 5559 - Global English
Section 001
MW 200-315 (Nau 242)
Instructor: Stephen Arata
The themes of this course are migration, exile, displacement, and (sometimes) return. Our primary readings will consist of 21st century anglophone fiction drawn from around the globe. Likely candidates include Helen Oyiyemi, Nell Zink, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Teju Cole, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, NoViolet Bulawayo, Monica Ali, Amitav Ghosh, Aleksandar Hemon, and Dinaw Mengestu. We will also engage with the lively critical debates on the status of world literatureas a field of study and of "global English" as an aesthetic medium. Course requirements include a substantial (12-18 pp) research essay.
ENAM 3140 - African-American Literature II
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Julius Fleming
Cross-listed with AAS 3500-005.
ENAM 3180 - Introduction to Asian American Studies
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 323)
Instructor: Sylvia Chong
Cross-listed with AMST 3180.
ENAM 3500 - Studies in American Literature
Section 001 - The Multi-Media Harlem Renaissance
TR 200-315 (Dell 2 103)
Instructor: Marlon Ross
Combined secton with AMST 3559-003.
This course explores the 1920s Jazz Age from a multimedia perspective of the Harlem Renaissance in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, dance, music, photography, film, and politics. We'll consider the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a "Mecca of the New Negro" but also of Chicago, D.C., Richmond, and Lynchburg as instances of places contributing to the idea of the New Negro Renaissance. We'll examine some of the hot debates and combustible movements of the time, including: the Great Black Migration, art as uplift and propaganda, elite versus vernacular approaches, the Negro newspaper, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting, urban sociology, the Garveyite movement, Negro bohemianism, the gendering of the Renaissance idea, queer subcultures, radical activism, and interraciality. We'll sample a wide range of works: essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Willis Richardson and Zora Neale Hurston; art by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham, the Nicholas brothers, and Josephine Baker; musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Harry Burleigh, and Roland Hayes; photographers Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee; and the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We'll conclude with some contemporary revisualizations of the Harlem Renaissance in fiction and film. Assignments include several short papers, a midterm, and final exam.
Section 002
Black Power and the Bildungsroman: From Richard Wright's Black Boy to Marvel's Luke Cage
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 132)
Instructor: Marvin Campbell
Soon after its appearance in eighteenth-century Germany, the Bildungsroman—or "novel of education"—developed into a major literary form, migrating to England a century later, when Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Bronte, among others, focused on the individual's psychological and moral development from youth to adulthood. In this course, we will explore how black authors in the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean have taken this European literary tradition and adapted it to define their own growth into selfhood and maturity, examining how colonialism, race, class, and gender, has shaped black protagonists from the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment.
From frauds to murderers; from renegades to artists; from prisoners, literal and figurative, to superheroes; from figures ostracized by their own communities, to those seeking the ties that bind in the wider world; growth for black individuals means contending with, summoning, and negotiating the rigors of power, for a voice that can surmount—if not totally free itself from—oppression. To paraphrase what Rowan Pope says to his daughter Olivia in the hit television program Scandal: no one is ever in charge, power is in charge.
Texts will include: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Black Boy, Richard Wright; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid; Sula, Toni Morrison; Luke Cage, Marvel
ENAM 3559 - New Course in American Literature
Section 001 - America and the Global South
TR 200-315 (Dell 2 100)
Instructor: Lisa Goff
Students in this course will examine and interpret conceptions of America from the point of view of novelists, filmmakers, journalists, and scholars in the Global South. American and Global South landscapes will be a focus of the class, as will images, artifacts, and material culture that reveal Global South views of the United States.
Section 002 - Race and Ethnicity in Latina/o Literature
TR 1230-145 (The Rotunda Room 152)
Instructor: Carmen Lamas
Combined section with AMST 3559-002.
In this course we will examine the construction of race and ethnicity in Latina/o literature by examining key texts by individuals from varying Latina/o groups who live in the United States. This course will examine both how US-American identity shapes Latina/o notions and constructions of race and how the authors' connections with Latin American and the Caribbean do the same. In the end, we will explore race and ethnicity from a hemispheric perspective in order to inquire as to its specific manifestation in Latina/o literature and culture. All readings, discussions and assignments are in English.
ENAM 3870 - Literature of the West
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: John Papovich
ENGN 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Genres
Section 001 - Tragedy
TR 330-445 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
Cross-listed with CPLT 4990.
This course studies the theory and practice of tragedy across the centuries in different cultures and different media. It is open to all students; it is NOT restricted to comparative literature majors or to fourth-year students. We begin with the three major philosopher-theorists of tragedy: Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. We then look at the two greatest eras of tragic drama: Ancient Athens (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and Renaissance England (Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John Ford). We continue with later tragic dramatists (Schiller, Pushkin), as we examine how tragedy develops in a variety of countries. We then analyze how tragedy migrates to another medium (the novel) in George Eliot and Tolstoy. Finally we discuss Eugene O'Neill's effort to recreate Greek tragedy in his Mourning Becomes Electra. All foreign language works are read in English translation. Requirements include a seminar presentation and a seminar paper.
ENGN 5559 - New Course in Genre Studies
Section 001 - The Sonnet: Revised and Revisited
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Clare Kinney
Instructor consent required.
"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 & the modernists to Ted Berrigan, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Harryette Mullen 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 poet writes a sonnet he or she 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).
ENCR 3400 - Theories of Reading
Section 001
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 383)
Instructor: Rita Felski
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.
ENCR 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism
Section 001 - Race in American Places
T 530-800 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Kenrick Grandison
Combined section with AMST 4559-001.
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, 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.
ENSP 3300 - Literary Editing
Section 001
MW 330-445 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: James Livingood
This course provides an opportunity to learn how to edit and publish a book-length project—everything from screening manuscripts to graphic design—in both print and reflowable ePub formats. The course teaches you the fundamentals of creating projects in Adobe InDesign, the dominant desktop publishing software in the publishing industry. Due to time constraints, some class content is flipped, which means you will watch instructional videos outside of class, and then try to implement those techniques during class time with your peers and the instructor in lab sessions. There will also be in-class exercises designed to stimulate class discussion and guide you through your final projects (one print; one electronic), as well as homework assignments on The Chicago Manual of Style. Students must bring their own PC or Mac laptop computers (not Chromebooks) to class, and rent InDesign software from Adobe for most of the term. Students will also pay for a print-on-demand version of their project, which typically runs from $7 to $21.
ENSP 5559 - New Course in Special Topics in Literature
Section 001 - Creative Writing / Memoir: Self and Other
F 100-330 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Jane Alison
In this studio-seminar we will examine several inventive memoiristic narratives that revolve around relations between selves and specific others, working especially with reflection and deflection to find and create truths. Texts will include Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Anne Carson's NOX, Marie Ndiaye's Self-Portrait in Green, Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and David Shields's Takes and Mistakes, among others. Students will write and workshop their own memoir projects, which might be several essays, linked fragments, or a single extended work.
Open to graduate students and to advanced undergraduates BY PERMISSION ONLY. Please send a brief note and a sample of your inventive prose to firstname.lastname@example.com.
Section 002 - The Idea of Venice
TR 200-315 (Campbell 220C)
Instructor: John Casteen
Venice has engaged the English (and Americans) since the earliest known travel narratives. Venetian civic life, social hierarchies and rituals, commercialism, and even militarism influence us. The city's isolation on its 118 islands; its exotic physicality; its urban plan and buildings; its Moorishness and Gothicism; and its commercial and political pursuits inform our daily lives. We will read samples of English and American literature reflecting this engagement with Venice, view films and related texts as well as works of art and architecture, including urban designs, and seek to build theses about what Venice has come to be in our common imaginations and how Venetian images and ideas work in the world around us.
ENSP 5820 - The Culture of London Past and Present
Location and Time TBA
Instructors: Clare Kinney, Michael Levenson
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Contact firstname.lastname@example.com or email@example.com. The Culture of London: Past and Present" offers an interdisciplinary approach to metropolitan culture, as an historically embedded object of inquiry. Located in London, it runs for a month each year from early June to early July. Faculty members from the University direct, teach and lead the class; they are complemented by London-based specialists in architecture, art history, religious studies and contemporary politics.
CPLT 2020 - History of European Literature II (4 Credits)
TR 200-315 (McLeod Hall 2005)
Instructor: Walter Jost
Cross-listed with ENGL 2020
Surveys European literature from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, with emphasis on recurring themes, the texts themselves, and the meaning of literature in broader historical contexts.
Discussion Sections:
Section 102
R 500-615 (Clark Hall G054)
Instructor: Christian Howard
Section 103
R 330-445 (Dell 2 102)
Instructor: Christian Howard
CPLT 3720 - Freud and Literature
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Lorna Martens
Cross listed with GETR 3720.
In formulating his model of the psyche and his theory of psychoanalysis, Freud availed himself of analogies drawn from different disciplines, including literature. Frued's ideas were then taken up by many twentieth-century literary writers. After introducing Freud's theories through a reading fo his major works, the course will turn to literary works that engage with Freud.
CPLT 3780 - Memory Speaks
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Lorna Martens
Cross-listed with GETR 3780.
Interdisciplinary course on memory. Readings from literature, philosophy, history, psychology, and neuroscience.
CPLT 4990 - Comparative Literature Seminar
Section 001
TR 330-445 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
Cross-listed with ENGN 4500.
This course studies the theory and practice of tragedy across the centuries in different cultures and different media. It is open to all students; it is NOT restricted to comparative literature majors or to fourth-year students. We begin with the three major philosopher-theorists of tragedy: Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. We then look at the two greatest eras of tragic drama: Ancient Athens (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) and Renaissance England (Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John Ford). We continue with later tragic dramatists (Schiller, Pushkin), as we examine how tragedy develops in a variety of countries. We then analyze how tragedy migrates to another medium (the novel) in George Eliot and Tolstoy. Finally we discuss Eugene O'Neill's effort to recreate Greek tragedy in his Mourning Becomes Electra. All foreign language works are read in English translation. Requirements include a seminar presentation and a seminar paper.
CPLT 4999 - Fourth Year Thesis
Location and Time TBA
Instructor: Paul Cantor