Spring 2025
ENG 570-001 Sel Topics for Adv Stds in Lit: Anticolonial Writing and Thought
R 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Peter Kalliney
This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we’ll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro’s fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claims of anticolonial political thought take shape in literary writing? This course will be taught in conjunction with a parallel course offered by Professor Harris Feinsod at Johns Hopkins University. We anticipate building opportunities for cross-campus research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale collaboration.
ENG 570- 002 Sel Topics for Adv Stds in Lit: Literary Theory
MW 3:00 PM-4:15 PM
Matthew Giancarlo
Since the 1940's "literary theory" has emerged as a vibrant and vital aspect of literary studies. The term covers a wide range of formal, historical, and critical approaches to literature and culture that have changed the ways we read. This course investigates selected trends and schools of modern literary theory in diverse texts and contexts. These can include formalism, Practical Criticism, and the New Criticism; French Structuralism and the various modes of post-structuralism (Semiotics, Deconstruction, Reader-response, Speech-act theory); historicism and the New Historicism; as well as broader modes of cultural critique such as Feminism, Marxism, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, Post-colonialism, Critical Race Theory, and more. For the graduate section, students will additionally complete a project on a contemporary theory text as well as an extended seminar paper.
ENG 607-001 Graduate Writing Workshop: Poetry
W 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
Frank X Walker
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 607- 002 Graduate Writing Workshop: Fiction
M 5:00 PM-7:30 PM
DaMaris Hill
This MFA Fiction Workshop is a creative writing workshop and course that explores fiction writing and literary craft. Our class meetings will consider how craft and content collide to influence our writing. This course will introduce/reintroduce many writers to some of the various elements of fiction writing. This class will explore the different narrative theories that are evident in traditional and contemporary fiction. Therefore, many twenty-first century writers and narrative arts associated with contemporary literary writing will be discussed. The course will also challenge students to critique and create fiction and prose writings. The course will emphasize the some of the future considerations and freedoms associated with writing fiction and contemporary literary practices. We will learn the rules of fiction and how to break them. Experimentation is welcome.
ENG 607-004 Graduate Writing Workshop: CNF
R 5:00 PM 7:30 PM
Erik Reece
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 608-001 The Craft of Writing: Short Narrative Forms in Prose and Poetry
T 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Andrew Milward
This is a graduate-level course that is only open to students currently enrolled in the MFA creative writing program. In it we will be looking at short forms of fiction (flash fiction, micro-fiction), creative nonfiction (flash/micro-essays), and poetry (prose poems) with a focus on narrative. We will read many professional examples and students will compose their own original creative works.
ENG 611-001 Literature Teaching Seminar
T 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Matt Godbey
Course description forthcoming.
ENG 622-001 Stds Renais Lit: 1500-1660: Early Modern Women's Writing
R 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Joyce MacDonald
Almost a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf told us that it was impossible for women to write in Shakespeare’s England, and that women writers only came into their own when they started writing novels (and earning money from them) in the nineteenth century. She was wrong. This section of ENG 622 will not only study some of the range and richness of women’s writing from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also observe the ways in which our understanding of the histories of Englishwomen’s writing has changed since Woolf’s remarks, and is still changing. Early women writers’ engagements with literary form will be one important throughline in our course: how do they write with and against received understandings of what lyric or drama was, and how did they innovate? Another will be to observe the critical and methodological histories of this body of work as it has developed into an academic subject, and what the study and teaching of Renaissance women’s writing looks like now.
ENG 681-001 Studies in Film: Teaching Film
T 5:00 PM-7:30 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, The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
ENG 690-001 Stds in Lit & Gender: African American Women's Literature
M 2:00 PM-4:30 PM Regina Hamilton
In ENG 690: Studies in Lit and Gender, we will focus on the study of gender within African American literature. In her seminal essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar book, Hortense Spillers argues that in the “violent” process of destroying subjectivity and creating slaves, Black Americans “lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender specific.” Spillers goes on to argue not for the inclusion of black women in “gendered femaleness,” but claiming “insurgent ground as a female social subject.” What this insurgent ground looks like is complicated by time period and by the conflict-laden assemblage of race, gender, sexuality, and humanness. From slave narratives to contemporary afrofuturist texts, the tensions between the elements of this assemblage are often at the center of African American women’s literature. Using historical context and Black theoretical studies we will read and analyze texts written by African American women, hoping to ask new questions about the ways that gender and race meet, and to interrogate what African American women have had to say about gender, race, and sexuality in the texts they have been writing for a century and a half. In this course we will be covering fictional works by Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and N.K. Jemisin, along with films by Kasi Lemmons, Julie Dash, and Dee Rees.
ENG 752-001 Sem Amer Lit: 1860-1900
W 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
Jeff Clymer
In his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James famously wrote that his task in that novel was to answer this question about his precocious heroine: “Well, what will she do?” In this seminar, we will study significant fiction by men and women from the late 19th and early 20th century (and perhaps one novel from 2022) that center the experiences of young women as they decide just what to do with their lives in a context of changing and intersecting social expectations around sex, desire, gender norms, classed identity, and racial difference. Reading list is likely to include: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland; and Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?