Fall 2024
ENG 570-001 Selected Topics: Affrilachian Literature
W 6:00 PM-8:30 PM
Crystal Wilkinson and Frank X Walker
This course focuses on the rich cultural traditions of Black people and culture in the Appalachian region and engages students in developing an understanding of the Black experience in Appalachia through literature, visual art, film, theatre, guest lectures, interviews, and/or enslaved narratives, oral tradition and music. The course will intimately examine issues of invisibility, silence, identity, class, isolation, and gender and raise questions of how the dominant narrative intersects and often differs from the lived experience of African American people and how that manifests across various art forms. Additional topics may include: rural vs urban experience; connection to the land; racism and segregation; religion; family life; and distinctive dialect. Authors and artists studied may include Bill Withers, Nina Simone, August Wilson, bell hooks, Jacinda Townsend, Alena Hairston, William Demby and many others. The coursework will include: discussion, presentations, essays, creative projects, quizzes and exams.
ENG 607-001 Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction
F 2:00 PM-4:30 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 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Shauna Morgan
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 607-003 Graduate Writing Workshop: CNF
T 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Erik Reece
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 608-001 The Craft of Writing: Poetic Forms
R 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Julia Johnson
This course will provide a study of the elements of craft necessary to the construction of various forms of poetry and will investigate major poetic forms from a range of historical periods as well as the evolution of formal poetic structures. It will explore the nature and complexities of meter, techniques of scansion, metrical variations, and allow for readings that will demonstrate diverse patterns of rhyme, line integrity, syllabic context, and stanzaic structure (their principles and critical implications) in free and formal verse. The latter will include the Petrarchan, Elizabethan, and “curtal” sonnet, a variety of Welsh syllabic forms, and repeating structures such as the pantoum, the villanelle, and the sestina. Other forms we will examine include the cinquain, contrapuntal, ghazal, tanka, triolet, among many others. We will also look at experimental poetry as well, as it pushes the boundaries of poetic conventions. Readings will also include lyric forms from France such as the rondeau and the triolet. We will reflect collectively on how the range of forms may be pertinent or not to contemporary poetry. In addition to the research component, the course will also examine poetic craft, and will allow students to practice craft and technique as they work in both familiar and unfamiliar territory. At its conclusion, students in the course will invent their own "nonce" forms or other forms of poetry, including collage and mixed media forms, as a part of the final project. The overarching goal of this study is to deepen sensitivity to the formal and rhythmical patterns of poetry and thus to heighten understanding, awareness, and pleasure in the creation and consumption of contemporary verse.
ENG 609-001 Composition for Teachers
W 3:00 PM-5:30 PM
TBD
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 656-001 BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE
T 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz
In this course we will read the work of different Black poets across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose approach to poetics is marked by experimentation. We will think about questions of aesthetic form in relation to Blackness, diaspora, historical experience, and belonging. We will reflect on the expanded possibilities that some of these poets seek for the medium of poetry, even as they test the limits of that label. In this regard, the term “experimental,” although contested by some of the scholars and practitioners we will consider, serves as a placeholder—at times substituted by adjectives such as “innovative” or “radical”—to describe an approach to poetry that tests the given norms and expectations placed upon it. We will learn about different Black poets from North America whose poetics invite us to reassess poetic language as a form of engagement with the political, social, and cultural. Some of the poets and scholars we will read are Fred Moten, M. Nourbese Philip, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, Harmony Holiday, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
ENG 681 -001 STUDIES IN FILM: Contemporary Hollywood
M 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Jordan Brower
An introduction to the relations between art and industry in American film and television in the twenty-first century. We will assess the analytical value of the concept of the “studio system” before undertaking our main work of investigating the system’s resilience, (partial?) decomposition, and possible reconstitution. Stressors will include the digitalization of all phases of the industry; macroeconomic shocks; financialization; and the emergence of new social movements (e.g. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo). Special attention will be paid to artists—directors, actors, studios—who have navigated the tumult especially successfully, including Denis Villeneuve, Margot Robbie, Steve McQueen, and A24. Work for the final weeks of the semester will be determined by student interest en route to their final papers.
ENG 690-001 Studies in Lit & Gender: Studying the Right
R 3:30 PM-6:00 PM
Carol Mason
Right-wing studies is a bourgeoning transnational endeavor across disciplines inspired by the recent global rise in authoritarian populism. However, analyzing the right has history that graduate students need to know. This class will provide students with: current discussions and definitions of key terms; a historical background to studying the right by focusing on important centers and the archives they’ve created in the United States; and a survey of methodological approaches and the kinds of analyses they produce. Assignments will emphasize understanding arguments and methods rather than producing original research and analysis. Readings are likely to include books by Daniel Martinez Hosang, Joseph Lowndes, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Kathleen Blee, Carlos De La Torre, Pete Simi, Robert Futrell, Matthew Lyon, Chip Berlet, Agnieszka Graff, Luke Mogelson, Larry Rosenthal, Jeff Sharlet, Kathleen Belew, Ramon Gutierrez, Oscar Mazzoleni, Emily Carian, Alex DiBranco, Chelsea Ebin, Judith Butler, Angela Davis.
ENG 740-001 SEMINAR IN 20th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
R 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Jonathan Allison
A course on poetry of the modernist period including work by W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot (from The Waste Land to Four Quartets), Hilda Doolittle (Trilogy), and Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues and later poems). Emphasis will be on the poetry and on the relationship between poetry, politics, and life writing including autobiography, memoir, and personal correspondence. We may also read later work by second generation modernists such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, and several postwar authors such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Students will present several oral presentations on critical and theoretical work, and written requirements include two papers including a longer research paper.