ENG 607: Graduate Writing Workshop

Non-Fiction
Instructor: Janet Eldred
001: T 4-6:30
This particular section will focus on Brevity-inspired pieces (< 750 words) that stress "poetic" style (e.g., pacing, juxtaposition, compression and expansion, balance, direction and indirection).

Poetry
Instructor: Frank Walker
002: W 4-6:30

Fiction
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
401: M 6-8:30
This course will focus almost exclusively on student writing and student critique as a tool for developing craft. Students will be expected to write and workshop three wholly new short stories over the course of the semester – four if time allows. The workshop will focus on the Short Story. All work will be written during the semester. No previously workshopped or previously written material will be accepted.

ENG 611: Literature Teaching Seminar
Instructor: Matthew Godbey
001: MWF 12-12:50
Eng 611 is the required course for graduate students wishing to teach classes in the UK literature curriculum. The seminar will take a theoretical and practical approach as we consider the ideas and ideals of literary education as well as the practical activities of teaching literature: course focus, text selection, syllabus design, assignments, teaching strategies, and myriad other issues related to the conceptual and day-to-day design of the course. Seminar participants will be required to read a variety of texts and articles dealing with issues such as but not limited to literary studies as a field, pedagogical theory, and professional issues. Additionally, and importantly, participants will participate in weekly discussions and exercises geared toward developing a teaching portfolio that will assist them as they develop and teach their own courses.


 

ENG 638: Studies in Victorian Literature
Instructor: Jill Rappoport
001: M 2-4:30
This course explores the ways in which Victorian poetic forms dealt with and deflected the challenges of modernity. The nineteenth century was a time of startling and dramatic changes: railroads and industry gave England a new pace; colonial projects expanded its sense of space; and scientific discovery gave it a new idea of its place in history. We will examine the roles that poetry played and the forms that it took as it sought to respond to these transformations. Poets borrowed, rejected, or sought to surpass the past by grappling with their individual, national, and poetic inheritance. In the process, they created a wealth of poetry that was both intimate and innovative, moving and remarkably modern.

Reading works by Barrett Browning, Tennyson, C. Rossetti, Arnold, D. G. Rossetti, R. Browning, Meredith, and others, we’ll explore ballads, dramatic monologues, and lyric and narrative verse, paying careful attention to the sounds as well as the sense of Victorian poetry. Contemporary literary criticism will inform and challenge our discussions of both genre and ideology in Victorian poetry. Our particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century “verse novel” should give all of you—whether poetry enthusiasts or die-hard novel readers—something to sink your critical teeth into. Course requirements include response papers, presentations, and a seminar paper.
 

ENG/AAS 656: Black Lives in the Archives
Instructor: Nazera Wright
001: R 2-4:30
This course explores an emerging field within U.S. literary studies: black print culture. In his 2010 article “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian,” Leon Jackson argues that there exists a “failure to communicate” or “cross-pollinate” between book historians and scholars of African American literature (Book History 13 (2010): 252). Book history includes the field of black print culture studies, defined as the network of contributors beyond a single author that participated in the production and transmission of a text.

In this course, we will explore the critical models and archival methods shaping the black print culture field, and examine the intersections between African American literature and print culture. We will review specific themes found within print culture studies—questions of materiality, production, dissemination and consumption of print forms—and what these themes can teach us about African American literature and our understanding of print culture.

To focus student learning, this course will review black newspapers and periodicals and examine them not only as a literary genre and cultural form, but also as a marketable commodity. We will also read an interdisciplinary range of poems, manifestos, speeches, short stories, novels and anti-lynching plays by black writers that were published in a variety of print sources—from black newspapers and magazines to advice columns and autograph books. In addition, we will discuss the format, layout patterns and function of these texts as informational sources produced to mobilize black communities to fight for full citizenship rights, protect families and abolish slavery.

Furthermore, this course will introduce students to archival research by exploring the design, distribution, promotion, circulation and reception of African American writing published in nineteenth- and twentieth-century print and material sources. To frame class discussions, we will engage a wide selection of recent critical scholarship on black print culture. Course requirements include thoughtful and engaged participation and a seminar paper of 20 pages, in which students will learn to access and incorporate materials from the archive to enrich their own research projects. Each seminar member will also be responsible for choosing a primary text and leading the discussion of that text in one class meeting. Graduate students in all areas and disciplines are welcome.

Required Primary Texts
Lucy Terry, “Bars Fight” (1746)
Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
Author unknown, The Tawny Girl (1823)
S, “Theresa, A Haytien Tale” (1828)
David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829)
Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” Autographs for Freedom (1852)
Maria W. Stewart, Speeches, Essays, and “The First Stage of Life” (1861)
Julia C. Collins, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865)
Frances E. W. Harper

•           “The Two Offers,” Anglo-African Magazine (1859)

•           “Fancy Sketches,” Anglo-African Magazine (1859-1860)

•           Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876 – 1877)

•           Trial and Triumph (1888-1889)

William Steward, “The Gem of the Alley,” The Christian Recorder (1878)
Gertrude Bustill Mossell, “Our Women’s Department,” The New York Freeman (1886-1887)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record (1895)
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899)
Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel: A Play in Three Acts (1920)
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel without A Moral (1928)
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953)

Articles from Black Newspapers and Magazines
Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829)
The Colored American (1837-1841)
The Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art (1858-1863)
The Christian Recorder (1854-1892)
The New York Freeman (1884-1887)
The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (1910 – present)
The Brownies’ Book (1920-1921)
Negro Digest/Black World (1942-1978)
Ebony (1945 – present)

Required Selections from Secondary Texts
State of the Field articles by Frances Smith Foster, P. Gabrielle Foreman, John Ernest, and Joycelyn Moody
Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (2012)
Eric Gardner, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2011)
Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015)
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2005)
Laura Cohen and Jordan Stein, Early African American Print Culture (2012)

Several required texts are PDFs that I will provide.

ENG 660/ST 500: Modern Critical Theory
Introduction to Social Theory
Instructor: Peter Kalliney
001: R 2-4:30
What is modernity, and when is modernity?  How have theorists from the social scientific and humanistic traditions defined the prevailing conditions of the modern world?  We will examine these questions from a variety of perspectives.  Enlightenment philosophers (including Kant and Marx) and critics of Enlightenment thinking (such as Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Freud) will help frame our discussions for the semester.  More recent theorists have described the condition of modernity as a manner of distributing power (Foucault), as a tool for understanding knowledge production (Giddens), as a system of organizing productive labor (Berman), as a particular way of imagining gender difference (Felski), and as a struggle between state violence and permanent revolution (Arendt).  What can debates about modernity contribute to a training in social theory today?

 

ENG 700: Tutorial Ph.D Candidates
Instructor: Matthew Giancarlo
001: T 5-7:30
This course allows Ph.D. candidates who have completed all course work requirements to work together under the direction of a senior faculty member in preparing for and taking the Qualifying Examination. Regular meetings and individual tutorials will focus on the pragmatics of exam preparation, as well as on constructing and working through a comprehensive reading list for research preparation and prospectus drafting.


 

ENG 722: Seminar Renaissance Studies
The Matter of Troy
Instructor: Joyce MacDonald
001: TR 12:30-1:45
The Matter of Troy—stories about the founding and collapse of Troy as it gave way to the beginnings of a greater civilization in Rome—provided a powerful imaginative framework for early modern Britons as they sought to understand their own nation’s place in history. Poised at the beginnings of their own global empire, sixteenth century Britons were inspired to look backward at stories that offered both glorious precedent and dire warnings about their way forward. What did it mean for so many Renaissance authors to imagine their country as “Troynovant,” a “new Troy”? This section of ENG 722 will look for some of the answers to that question as it studies the place of the Matter of Troy in the growth of a British sense of national identity, of national history, and of national destiny. Starting with accounts of the fall of Troy from Ovid and with some of Aeneas’ subsequent adventures in The Aeneid, the course will feature plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Peele as well as nondramatic selections from George Chapman, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Heywood, and others.


 

ENG 753: Seminar American Literature Since 1900
Very Recent Fiction
Instructor: Michael Trask
001: T 2-4:30
This class will read a series of novels published in the immediate past (from a few years back to just yesterday).  We’ll be guided by methodological questions occasioned by recent creative work.  Can such work submit readily to the historicist or formalist frameworks of literary studies?  Is it even useful to force such terms on very recent fiction?  What is the difference between academic criticism and (evaluative) reviewing—or a culture of argument and a culture of evaluation?  How is our reading practice shaped or modified by taking up as objects of analysis books that we might otherwise read for “pleasure”? Can we make plausible inferences about the “periodization” of books written in the last five years? Is it reasonable or wishful thinking to assume that very disparate texts have something in common other than their copyright dates? To approach these questions, we’ll look not only at some very recent fiction but also at some very recent criticism aimed at contemporary literature.  Readings include Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers; George Saunders, Tenth of December; Colson Whitehead, Zone One; Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son; Tao Lin, Tai Pei; Jumpa Lahiri, The Lowland; Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station; Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!!; Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe; Ernest Cline, Ready Player One. Assignments include a class presentation; an annotated bibliography; and a seminar paper (12-15 pages).

 

ENG 771: Seminar in Special Topics
Literacy Criticism Today
Instructor: Ellen Rosenman
001: R 5-7:30
This course explores a couple of key intellectual and professional issues. We’ll focus primarily on the question of interpretation. Put simply: how should we read? Critics argue about symptomatic reading, the hermeneutics of suspicion, distant reading, “just” reading, and the new formalism. What do these terms mean, what are their implications, what are their trade-offs? How do claims about how to read identify themselves as “interventions” – that is, how do critics attempt to change the procedures and assumptions of their field? I hope our discussions will be useful to you as you plan your own writing projects and enter the debates of our field. The course will also make time for more concrete, student-directed questions about how to navigate the profession.

This is primarily a reading class, with emphasis on critical articles and book chapters.

Here's an alternative: bring that narrative fluency of yours over here so we can consider the aspect of stories that will always prove surprising, entertaining and involving - the way the thing is told. We’ll be reading works that meet Italo Calvino’s requirements for good writing: lightness, swiftness, exactitude, multiplicity, and a mysterious and possibly indescribable fifth quality. Since I’ll be asking you to write fiction that responds to some of the pieces we read together, this will be a good series of evenings for anyone interested in clearing up some of the mystery around their own storytelling process. There may also be proper tea if I find appropriate teapots.


Instructor: Hannah Pittard
A&S 500-402: Form & Theory of Fiction
“Above all, I want to make you see.” – Joseph Conrad

“A short story must have a single mood…” – Edgar Allen Poe

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor

“[T]he human heart in conflict with itself…alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” – William Faulkner

“Never apologize. Never explain.” – Benjamin Jowett (ostensibly)

                                                            Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention (1995)

This course surveys key texts of African American literature and culture from 1900 to 2015. We will explore the modernist and postmodernist works of black fiction writers, essayists, filmmakers, visual artists and poets, and consider the strategies and rhetorical resonances that contribute to the formation of the Black Intellectual. Literary texts will include foundational essays on black intellectualism by Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Anna Julia Cooper, and W. E. B. Du Bois; award-winning fiction from Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; poems by Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks; texts from the Nobel Peace Prize winner Toni Morrison; and celebrated works by MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipients Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Alongside literary texts, students will examine a range of our nation’s most praised cultural productions. These include Jacob Lawrence’s panoramic paintings in The Migration Series, Kara Walker’s celebrated sculptures in A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and Steven McQueen’s Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave. For each text, students will consider gender, sexuality, migration, freedom and equality; interrogate ideological aims; and address placement within a sociohistorical and political era. Students will learn how black intellectuals offer corrective historical interventions that reveal the complexity of black humanity. We will examine the New Negro Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the tensions between U.S.-born and Caribbean black people, the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement, LGBTQ issues, and what some consider a post-racial moment in the age of Obama. To frame class discussions, we will engage a wide selection of recent, critical scholarship. Course requirements include thoughtful and engaged participation and a final seminar paper of 25 pages. Each seminar member is responsible for choosing a primary text and leading the discussion of that text in one class meeting.

Required Texts

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)
Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen (1949)
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975)
Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Sonia Sanchez, et al., eds. S.O.S—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Mvt Reader (2014)
Toni Morrison, Home (2013)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Viewings and Screenings

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (1940)
Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014)
Steven McQueen, 12 Years a Slave (2013)


Instructor: Alan Nadel
ENG 681-001: Studies in Film: American Cold War Film T 5-7:30pm
In the context of American Cold War culture, this course will explore the cultural narratives reflected by approximately twenty American films made between 1947 and 1961. Reading extensive selections from major non-fiction works of the period (including The Lonely Crowd, The Hidden Persuaders, Brainwashing, The Organization Man, The United Nations Charter, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Brown v. Board of Ed. decision, and Europe on $5 Dollars a Day), we will examine how the films’ stylistic and thematic characteristics reflect their historical moment of production.  The films we will discuss include: Singin’ in the Rain, Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Searchers, West Side Story, The Manchurian Candidate, Blackboard Jungle, Niagara, Lady and the Tramp, Roman Holiday. Requirements include two short papers and a research paper.


Instructor: Michelle Sizemore
ENG 700-001: Tutorial Ph.D. Candidates F 2-4:30pm
The goal of ENG 700 (Spring Semester) is to prepare students for their Qualifying Examinations and for making the transition to independent research in graduate study and their post-graduate careers. This course will be discussion-focused and include visits from several faculty and graduate students. Students in 700 are required to complete short writing assignments and workshops designed to make the transitional period from taking courses-to preparing for exams-to writing the dissertation seem less opaque. Just as importantly, ENG 700 provides a regular opportunity for students to convene with their cohort, a group of colleagues that will serve as a valuable intellectual resource and network of support in the stages to come: oral exams, prospectus writing, publishing, conference participation, fellowship applications, dissertation writing, going on the job market, and transitioning to the first job.


Instructor: Emily Shortslef
ENG 722-001: Seminar in Renaissance Studies: What is Early Modern? M 5:00-7:30pm
An introduction to early modern literature as well as an inquiry into what we mean by the term “early modern,” this seminar will approach the question its subtitle poses from the perspective of literary and intellectual history. We’ll read a wide range of primary texts—both canonical and less familiar, both traditionally “literary” and not—from the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. Critical readings will suggest conceptual frameworks for our inquiry and provide insight into how scholars of literature have drawn upon other discourses (e.g. art history, philosophy, the history of science, critical theory) to define the temporal boundaries and characteristics of the early modern in relation to the medieval and the modern. We’ll also engage with critical debates about historical periodization and interdisciplinarity. Topics of discussion are likely to include: conceptions of the self, the history of the passions and the body, temporality, sovereignty, and aesthetics. Requirements: weekly discussion board posts, conference-length paper, critical glossary.


Instructor: Michael Genovese
ENG 730-001: Seminar in 18^th Century Literature: Value in Novel R 2-4:30pm
How did the rise of prose fiction alter the values of readers?  What adaptations were made for the mass public, and what demands were put on a society by the new stories it was telling itself?  In this seminar we will study the eighteenth-century novel with an eye on what changes it pressed upon its readers with regard to how to construct value.  Was the value of gender and sexuality altered as writers constructed new and various stories for a hungry public? Was money itself changed as novels put it front and center, making coins and credit visible in a way that everyday life might not have?  How were people to be valued, now that characterization allowed one to study over time a particular person and then take that evaluative technique back to the world at large?  We will be reading across the century as we explore the shifting value of value itself, a topic sure to take us in a variety of directions.  Grading will consist of papers and oral presentations based upon individual research.