Graduate Courses

 

 

FALL 2023



ENG 518 001 ADV HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
W 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Matt Giancarlo

This course explores the development of English from its roots in Indo- European, through Old, Middle, and Early Modern English(es), culminating with a review of the English languages of today. It focuses on the phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes of the language, as well as on the social contexts of the rise and spread of English as a contemporary world language. Special emphasis is given to a linguistically informed understanding of how the language has changed in response to political and historical pressures. Fulfills the ENG Early Period requirement.


ENG 601 001 Essays and Creative Nonfiction
R 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Hannah Pittard

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 607 001 Graduate Writing Workshop: CNF
M 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Andrew Malan Milward

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 607 401 Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry
M 3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Julia Johnson

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 607 402Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction
T 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Crystal Wilkinson

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 608 001 Craft of Writing: Craft of the Senses
W 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Shauna Morgan

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 656 001 Black American Literature
R 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Shauna Morgan

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 700 001 Tutorial for Ph.d. Candidates
M 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Jill Naomi Rappoport

Course description forthcoming.


ENG 722 001 Seminar in Renaissance Studies
M 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Emily E Shortslef

Course description forthcoming.
 

ENG 780-005 Directed Studies: Old English Reading Group, Fall 2023

A weekly one-hour reading group for a basic introduction to Old English grammar and reading. Readings will include basic prose and some poetry. All textbooks optional; readings will be done via online texts and handouts. Grades based on attendance, participation, and one final simple open-book translation exercise. 1 credit-hour. Meets Wednesdays, 1:00-1:50 pm., location TBD. Open to Graduates via ENG 780-005 Directed Studies, and to Undergraduates via ENG 395 Independent Work. Contact the Instructor, Dr. Giancarlo, for direct enrollment: matthew.giancarlo@uky.edu.
 


 

 

 




 

SPRING 2023

ENG 607 001 Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction
W 3:30 PM-6:00 PM
Andrew Milward 

This is a graduate level course in fiction writing open only to MFA students. The class will follow the workshop model, and therefore student work, and the intensive discussion of same, will be our main focus; however, we will supplement this with careful study of professional writers and/or craft essays. Students will be required to share at least two new pieces, as well as a revision and a paper about the revision process.  

 
ENG 607 002 Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry
M 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Julia Johnson

Course description forthcoming.

 
ENG 607 003 Graduate Writing Workshop: CNF
F 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Erik Reece
 
The goal of this course is to make art out of experience. A successful piece of creative nonfiction should make the world appear a more intense and interesting place than its reader previously imagined. Anthropologists tell us that the very first stories were told by hunter-gatherers, sitting in a circle, around a fire. They were stories of the hunt, and they bound the tribe together with ties that were, I would argue along with the philosopher Richard Rorty, stronger than the laws that came much later. In other words, we are a storytelling species. Story is vital to who we are. In this class, we will replicate that early storytelling. We will sit in a circle and talk very thoroughly and helpfully about how to tell true stories and how to help each other tell the best stories possible. Story builds solidarity—that was Rorty’s notion. In this course, we will aim for solidarity among ourselves and with our readers.The excellent American nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit has said: “Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestoes to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists.” She goes on: “This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses.” The “fourth genre” of creative nonfiction, this redheaded step-child, is spacious, and in this class we will explore that varied terrain.  
 
 
ENG 608 001 The Craft of Writing: Digital Spaces
M 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
DaMaris Hill

This MFA Craft Writing Workshop: Creative Writing in Digital Spaces is an intensive craft writing workshop for MFA students to explore creative writing in digital spaces. Our focus will be on your own work.  In addition, we will consider a selection of contemporary twenty-first century literatures and explore strategies for imaging new possibilities for your own work. This course challenges you to take risks as a writer and encourages you to experiment wildly. This craft writing workshop and course will explore creative composition and literary arts in digital spaces. We will meet once a week to consider the ways technology influences our writing, considering both content and craft. This course will create and explore the different theories and mediums writers employ in digital spaces. Because some theorize that creative writing in digital spaces is a new genre, this course will explore how digital writing and electronic tools serve as a source of inspiration for a variety of twenty-first century literatures. The course will challenge students to critique and create writing in any genre and digital platform they choose (poetry, prose, or other).

 
ENG 611 001 Literature Teaching Seminar
R 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Emily Shortslef

ENG 611 is the required course for graduate students wishing to teach classes in the UK literature curriculum. The seminar focuses on designing introductory-level courses (specifically ENG 130 and ENG 180) that fulfill core requirements and that meet the needs of non-major undergraduates. It is a “working course” and focuses on the creation of materials directed related to your practice as teachers.

 
ENG 722 001 Seminar in Renaissance Studies: Shakespeare's Rome
TR 12:30 PM-1:45 PM
Joyce MacDonald

The section of ENG 722 is subtitled “Shakespeare’s Rome”. Shakespeare sustains his fascination with Rome—its history, its heroes, its founding myths, its implications for his own time—from the 1590s through nearly the end of his career. He didn’t necessarily read widely about Rome, tending to stick to a small handful of favorite sources, but he thought deeply about what he did read, and freely jumped genres from romance to narrative poetry to tragedy as he sought to express the significance of moments in its movement from republic to empire. His Roman plays and poems are highly rhetorically conscious, marked by a concern with the powers and effects and styles of public speech. They consider how individuals rise to meet the political moments that can define them, and repeatedly return to the relationship between his characters’ private natures and the unpredictable demands of public life. Besides the five Roman plays and both narrative poems (because Venus and Adonis is profoundly Roman, too, although in a different way from the other works), we will read from Shakespeare’s sources in Livy, Ovid, Virgil, and Plutarch, as well as relevant secondary material. 

 
ENG 738 001 Seminar in Victorian Literature
R 2:00-PM 4:30 PM
Jill Rappoport
 
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. 

 
ENG 751 001 Seminar in Amer Lit: 1800-1860: Indian Removals and Futurities
R 1:00 PM-3:30 PM
Andy Doolen

This seminar focuses on Native American writing at a time when Native peoples were being forcibly removed from the eastern half of the United States.  We will examine the comprehensive efforts by the United States to eliminate Native peoples, such as the “trails of tears” of the 1830s, alongside Native strategies of accommodation and resistance. It was from within this context of elimination and survival that Native peoples produced a wide range of autobiographies, speeches, poetry, journalism, sermons, manifestos, and other forms of literature. In addition to exploring how nineteenth-century Native writers argued for the sovereignty of their people and contested the widespread belief in their impending extinction, this course looks ahead to the visions of “Indigenous futurity” in contemporary Native American Literature. During the final 4-6 weeks of the course, we will consider the different ways in which contemporary literature continues to provide a means of resisting assumptions of irrelevance and absence, of fostering awareness of ancestral lands and communities, and of claiming possible futures. Some of the authors will probably include William Apess, Black Hawk, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge, George Copway, Zitkala-Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, and N. Scott Momaday. 

 
ENG 753 001 Seminar in Amer Lit Since 1900: What Was Postmodernism?
T 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Michael Trask

For some critics, postmodernism names an aesthetic movement that either refuses or extends the modernist project (or does both). For other critics, it names a historical period, from about 1960 to the moment in which we now find ourselves (an era that, according to the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, marks “the end of history”). For yet other critics, it names a philosophical position that favors relativism and pluralism over universals (or what the the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard calls “master narratives”). Some critics use the word “postmodernism” with approval (since its blending of high and low culture appears to capture a democratic spirit and to overthrow the despotism of elite taste). Other critics use the word to voice despair (since it appears to herald the absorption of all positions of critique or defiance into market society and to afford no alternative to capitalist domination). The overlap between these connotations of postmodernism will be the subject of our course. Ours will be a multimedia approach to the topic, with the aim of canvassing theories of postmodernism as well as literary, visual, and cinematic practices by postmodern artists.  We shall also look at some critics who ask whether we are “still” in postmodernism.  Texts will include excerpts from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, Fred Moten's Undercommons, Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories, Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas, and Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. In addition we shall take up Andy Warhol’s Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger’s Remote Control, Octavia Butler's Dawn, Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and works by Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Frank O’Hara, and other writers and artists.

 

ENG 780 005 INDEPENDENT WORK: Old English Reading Group
W 1:00 - 1:50 (1 credit hour)
Matt Giancarlo

Course description forthcoming.

 
ENG 781 001 Seminar in Film: Teaching Film
M 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Alan Nadel

This course will review the fundamental components of cinema, survey the major critical approaches to talking about them, discuss ways of creating lessons and devising assignments to help students grasp the fundamentals of film as an art form and to recognize the conventions of cinematic representation. We will also evaluate the pros and cons of a sampling of film textbooks. Our texts will include the MLA Publication Approaches to Teaching Film, and Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger's The Classical Hollywood Cinema.