Fall 2019

ENG 630 M001: Graduate Proseminar: Intro to Early Modern Studies

W 3:45-6:30 PM

Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan

This course provides a point of entry for students interested in early modern texts and the disciplinary history of early modern studies. We will begin with the modern disciplinary invention of the Renaissance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and will follow the rise and fall of formalisms, criticisms, materialisms and historicisms new and old through the early twenty-first century as we tackle the major generic forms of English Renaissance literature in a European, transatlantic, and global context. A chief concern of the course will be to examine the ways in which the early modern period has been both credited (and discredited) as the parent of modernity. Our discussions will trace the representation of raced, classed, and gendered identities and the concepts of privacy, sovereignty, embodiment, property, liberty, and ecology as these emerge out of the complex interplay between readers and writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries . We will read a selection of mainly canonical plays, poems and prose (including but not limited to drama, rhetorical theory, lyric and devotional poetry, spiritual autobiography, sermons) in order to give you a solid grounding and literacy in the field and establish a foundation necessary for evaluating its critical trends and histories.

ENG 630 M002: Graduate Proseminar: US Modernist Fiction

TH 12:30-3:15 PM

Instructor: Susan Edmonds

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to U.S. modernist fiction. We will read an array of texts associated with expatriate modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the proletarian literature movement, and the complex, sometimes fraught relationship between U.S. modernism and U.S. mass culture. Throughout the semester, we will also be examining both literary and nonliterary early twentieth-century attempts to define: a) the nature of individual and collective mental experience; and b) the relationship of mental experience to social and historical change.

Readings will include: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons; Jean Toomer’s Cane; Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest; Nella Larsen’s Passing; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night; and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.

ENG 631 M001: Critical Theory

TH 9:30-12:15 PM

Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

“Critical Theory” provides an introduction to a range of meta-critical concepts, debates and protocols—that is, the underwriting assumptions (varied and contradictory as these may be) -- on which the discipline of “English” currently relies.  We will read both influential texts from the past that are still referenced (implicitly or explicitly), as well as notable examples of current trends. We will also spend time considering professional structures, norms, genres and demands: the formation of the university, book reviews, bibliographies, conferences, journals, seminar papers, prizes and so on. In other words, we will explore ways of reading theoretical, critical and literary/cultural texts—including our profession as an institution--and examine how critical questions have been and are now generated in English, as well as why new critical practices emerge (or fail to do so). No matter how much (or little) “theory” you have already read, this professional orientation will direct your thinking toward “English” as a discipline in new ways, and prepare you to work within it self-consciously and critically.  

ENG 650 Forms M001: Success & Significance

TH 3:30-4:50 PM

Instructor: Arthur Flowers

What constitutes literary success. Using the works of SU MFA alums who have gotten works published we will explore the dynamics of literary success and significance. Is it just getting books published. Is getting published the necessary 1st step or can literary significance be judged more broadly. What is the procedure of getting your work out there. What are the behavior patterns that facilitate literary success and / or significance. Why do certain works engage the cultural zeitgeist of their times and that of generations to come. Why do some works hit the cultural nerve. How do literary mobs facilitate individual and collective achievement. What are the challenges of surviving as a writer post program when the prevailing pattern is long years laboring in the vineyards and the only thing fatal is giving up. These are questions I’d like to ask.

ENG 650 Forms M002: Novel Structure

T 12:30-3:15 PM

Instructor: Dana Spiotta

Randall Jarrell famously described the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”  With that as a starting point, we will engage with questions about what a novel is and how it works. We will read a number of novels and discuss how they work on both a macro and micro level while giving particular attention to the architecture of the novel.  The novels will be chosen for interesting approaches to form and for representing a diversity of narrative strategies.  We will discuss how to write a long-form fictional project and think about various approaches to structure, organizing principles/conceits, schemata, outlines, and revision.

ENG 650 Forms M003: TBA

T 3:30-6:15 PM

Instructor: Visiting Writer

ENG 650 Forms M005: Contemporary Poets Mostly of color or LGBTQ

TH 12:30-3:20 PM

Instructor: Mary Karr

Revolutions: New Poetry Taking Over. This class will explore new books not from white, male, hetero-normative humans. The new works seem to be returning poetry to realms of emotion (in reader, not necessarily writer) and away from the glib, clever, cool, obtuse, hermetic, intellectual and (often) unfelt lands of Symbolism/Surrealism that have (arguably) dominated poetry in English since Eliot. The class will start with two weeks studying that tradition and include readings from Eliot, Stevens, Yeats, Octavio Paz, and Jose Ortega y Gassett It’s my contention that the excitement of these new works isn’t sparked by need for social hygiene, but from aesthetic desperation—an emotional/spiritual need that has fortunate socio-political aspects.  The following twelve weeks will be drawn from Hanif Abddurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Chase Bergrrun, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Terrance Hayes, Christine Kitano, Ada Limon, Sally Wen Mao, Morgan Parker, Sam Sax, Nicole Sealey, Solmaz Sharif, Paul Tran, Ocean Vuong, Erin Williams (graphic novel) Jenny Xie, Kevin Young. Students will choose poets to present on, and we will watch video of the poets.

ENG 650 Forms M006: One City, Ten Years

TH 9:30-12:15 PM

Instructor: Christopher Kennedy

In the past twenty years or so, the prose poem and flash fiction (aka micro-fiction, sudden fiction, micro-story, etc.) have emerged as viable sub-genres. Though both forms have a long history, in recent years a number of print and on-line journals and anthologies have begun to feature work from these two sub-genres, and some new journals are devoted exclusively to the forms. Despite the proliferation of “pp/ff,” as one anthology characterizes the work, defining the difference between the two is often a difficult and perplexing task. Why is one piece of writing a prose poem and another of similar length a work of flash fiction?

This class will provide an opportunity to explore prose poetry and flash fiction with the goal of distinguishing the characteristics that make them separate forms while identifying their commonalities.

ENG 715 M001: First Graduate Poetry Workshop

W 12:45-3:30 PM

Instructor:  Brooks Haxton

Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis.  Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop.  Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.

ENG 716 M001: SECOND YEAR WORKSHOP

M 3:45-6:30 PM

Instructor: Bruce Smith

Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week.  The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each individual.  Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer.  This term I’ll begin class with what I call, an “exemplary” poet – avoiding the more proscriptive term “essential.”  Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717 M001: First Fiction Workshop

W 12:45-3:30 PM

Instructor: Dana Spiotta

This is a required fiction workshop for MFA students in their first year.

ENG 718 M001: Second Fiction Workshop

M 9:30-12:30 PM

Instructor: Jonathan Dee

This workshop will focus on fiction writing and the useful critique thereof.  We will read and discuss two or three student-submitted stories/novel excerpts each week.  Open to second-year fiction MFA students only.

ENG 719 M001: Third Poetry Workshop

W 12:45-3:35 PM

Instructor: Mary Karr

This is an advanced course, so I assume you’re all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to read a) write, b) critique each other’s work with utmost care and respect, c) rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. It’s a class based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each other’s poems should be detailed and serious. I’d also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. First and foremost, you must get along with each other, and anyone engaging in an ad hominem attack on anyone else in the group will be asked to leave the room. No violence, no threats of violence. You can be ironic about yourselves or me but not each other. Congeniality is a requirement for the class. You can disagree with each other, but I expect respectful comments and tone. Anyone unable to get along will not pass the class. Often people say, “We don’t have to love each other…” This class works best if we love each other. It’s part of my pedagogy.

If yall agree we’ll take turns reading one of yall’s work per week—6-12 poems per week depending on length.

ENG 720 M001: Third Year Fiction Workshop

TBA

Instructor: George Saunders

In this class (which is required of, and restricted to, third-year MFA fiction students) students will deepen their fictive practice by reading and critiquing the work of their peers.  Although we will go where this takes us, this class often concerns a refinement of the students’ practice of editing and revision, via close-reading.

ENG 730 M001: Novel in the Age of Austen

T 9:30-12:15 PM

Instructor: Mike Goode

The “age of Austen” in the course’s title refers both to the historical era in which Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived and wrote domestic novels and to the contemporary global media ecology in which these novels, their remixes, and their remediation’s have so thoroughly saturated culture that her name has become almost as recognizable as Shakespeare’s. About two-thirds of the course will be devoted to locating Austen’s corpus within the complexities of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century historical context in which it was produced, including the broader literary marketplace. In addition to reading about half of Austen’s complete literary output, we will be reading novels and poems by several of her contemporaries, including some combination of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, Byron, and Walter Scott. For the final third of the course, we will be thinking more about Austen’s novels as media by analyzing what has been made of them in and through various other new media, including film, theater, fanfiction, fan websites, mash-ups, and games. The course is part historicist cultural history, part media history, part reception study, part fan study, and part media theory. [Note: Any ETS Distinction students considering taking this course, please be aware that, by doing so, you would not be eligible in spring 2020 to participate in the “ETS 400: Jane Austen in Context,” short-term study-abroad program.]

ENG 730 M002: 19th Century American Literature

TH 3:30-6:20 PM

Instructor: Dorothy Beam

In this course we will survey the literature of slavery and social change across three broad and intertwined social movements: Abolition, Communitarianism, and Women’s Rights.

The Civil War is often considered a second (unfinished) American Revolution and the period surrounding it presents a particularly rich field for examining the ways that literary and social experiment intersect.  We will explore the range of imaginative ideas --inventive temporalities (millennialism, revolution, utopia), new models of social relation (the commune, racial equality, the abolition of marriage), and resistant practices and geographies (underground railroads, marronage, diaspora)— that gave expression to a variety of political and social aims.

Local historical contexts in CNY, such as the Underground Railroad, the Oneida Community, Seneca Falls, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, will provide important historical models and social ideas, while readings in critical race theory; queer theory; animal studies, ecocriticism, and other new materialisms; Afrofuturism/utopian studies; and the burgeoning field of African American print culture will invigorate our approach. The course will treat an array of writers, but foregrounds African American writing, especially fiction, and the Abolitionist movement.

Possible texts include: David Walker’s Appeal, Nat Turner’s Confessions, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Sojourner Truth’s narrative, Ralph W Emerson’s essays “Self-Reliance,” “Friendship,” and his Antislavery Address, Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom and The Heroic Slave, Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Martin Delany’s Blake; Or, The Huts of America, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Herman Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors” and “The Tartarus of Maids,” and “Benito Cereno,” Stowe’s Dred: Or, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp,” Frances Harper’s magazine fiction, Rebecca Harding Davis’s stories.  The course closes with a consideration of Reconstruction as an extension of the period’s radical social experiment in the memoirs of TW Higginson (Army Life in a Black Regiment) and Charlotte Forten Grimke (“Life on the Sea Islands”) and in retrospective fictional treatments from Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.

ENG 730 M003: Writing & Filming Photography

T 3:30-6:15 PM

Instructor: Roger Hallas

Although many theories of photography have sought to differentiate the medium’s unique and specific qualities, its relationship to language and writing has shaped its meaning and uses since its origins in the mid-nineteenth century (from the reliance on words to frame the presentation of photographs to the  attempts to conceive of photography as a language). The invention of cinema at the turn of the century further complicated its status since the new medium relied on a photographic basis for its technological apparatus, but it also reconstituted time and movement that had been stilled by the photograph. Thus photography has sustained a complex relationship to both writing and cinema since the end of the nineteenth century. This seminar will explore the diverse intermedial practices that have connected photography with cinema and writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. We shall begin with an examination of the conceptual foundations of photography and film within the historical context of industrial modernity, focused around ideas of indexicality, spatiotemporal relativity, motion/stillness and montage. The bulk of the semester will then be devoted to investigating how diverse forms of cinema and writing (literary fiction, critical essays, documentaries, experimental film and narrative cinema) have critically and creatively interrogated the photographic image, the photograph as object, the event of photography and photographic archives. We shall conclude by assessing contemporary transmedia practices that combine film, photography and writing through integrated photobooks, essay films and web documentaries. Some of the filmmakers, photographers and writers we will study include Eadweard Muybridge, Langston Hughes, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Julio Cortazar, Susan Sontag, Ariella Azoulay, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akram Zaatari, W.G. Sebald and Susan Meiselas. Film screening required.

Spring 2019

ENG 615 M003 Open Poetry Workshop
M 12:45-3:30 pm
Instructor: Bruce Smith
Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem per week to push back against the world with the imagination. I’ll make assignment suggestions for either form or content. [On some occasions students may override these assignments to write the poem that needs to be written.] The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each individual. Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer. In Open Workshop, I’ll be suggesting exercises and varieties of approaches. Discussion will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 617 M001 Open Fiction Workshop
Th 12:30-3:20 pm
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
This workshop will focus on fiction-writing and the useful critique thereof. This class is a less structured, more playful version of the fall workshops. In addition to discussing your fiction, we will discuss process, issues of practice, and avenues of inspiration in hopes that the classroom experience will be generative of new work. Writing exercises/prompts/constraints will also be a part of our work. Toward the end of the semester, we will be more closely focused on strategies of revision as well as the challenges of structuring longer form fiction.

ENG 630 M002 Graduate Proseminar: English in America: A History of the Profession
Th 12:30-3:20 pm
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will explore the history of academic literary and cultural studies in the United States from the early 19th century to the present in light of current problems facing the academic humanities and literary study in particular. Emphasis will be given to the relationship between the academy and society at large, but attention will also be paid to the internal developments and conflicts that have shaped the process of professionalization, including, among other things, early debates between specialists and generalists, the rise of the New Criticism, the turn toward structuralism and post-structuralist theory, corporate influences on the university, the current situation, and future directions. The latter portion of the course will be devoted to a consideration of the possibilities of the public humanities and civic engagement as they may affect the 21st century English department. Readings may include Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life; Morris Dickstein, Double Agent; Terry Eagleton, “The Rise of English”; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature; Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education; Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas; Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University; Joseph North, Literary History: A Concise Political History; Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance; and Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century.

ENG 630 M003 Graduate Proseminar: Early Modern Poetry
M 9:30-12:20 pm
Instructor Dympna Callaghan
This course will engage with the immensely rich verse of this period and with the social, cultural and historical phenomena that produced it. We will have two crucial goals: the first, to gain an understanding of the poems as poems, as very specifically literary acts of language; our second aim will be to determine the place and function of poetry in early modern English society. The poetry of this period is about love, (both homoerotic and heteroerotic, human and divine) but it is also about political aspiration, imperialism, liberty, and a range of other power relations that informed the fabric of the era's social and cultural life. We will look first at the way English poetry responds to classical precedent, especially the overwhelming influence of Ovid, and we will read, whole or in part, many of the era’s most famous--and, occasionally, most notorious-- works (Wyatt’s lyrics, Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Nashe’s Choise of Valentines, Shakespeare’s poems, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Chapman’s Homer, Milton’s Sonnets.) We will also pay particular attention to poetry composed by women, much of which you may not have encountered before.

ENG 630 M004 Graduate Proseminar: Introduction to Romantic Studies
Th 9:30-12:15 pm
Instructor Mike Goode
This course will examine some of the different ways that literary critics, historians, and theorists have engaged in recent years with the literature and media of Britain’s “Romantic” period (1789-1832). The course does not presuppose much familiarity with this literature and media or with how critics, historians, and theorists have engaged with it in the past. In fact, our survey of the current state of the critical field of Romantic Studies will necessarily entail reading many primary texts from the period and some “classic” critical texts, in addition to the more recent critical materials. Topical foci of the course include: ecology and environmentalism; media and mediation; the emergence of historicist thought; the history of the novel; human rights discourse; sympathy and affect; neuroscience and cognition; and identities, identity formations, and celebrity. Primary text reading will cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and media, including poetry, novels, drama, paintings, prints, gardens, political tracts, philosophical treatises, essays, sermons, and histories. In addition to completing a conference paper-length formal writing assignment and several 1-page Blackboard posts, students will also be asked to try out at least one other kind of academic research, writing, and labor, such as book reviewing, editing, encyclopedia-entry writing, blogging, curating, and data-mining.

ENG 650 M001 Forms: Life and Story
Th 9:30-12:15 am
Instructor: Sigrid Nunez
Most writers, especially in their early work, draw from personal experience. In this course, one of the main questions we explore is what happens when you use material from life as a source for stories. How do you transform real experience into imaginative writing? How do a writer’s memories become a work of fiction? What is the difference between the self who narrates an event from the past and the self who actually lived through it? What is the process involved in turning a real person into a fictional character? Authors may include Tobias Wolff, Lydia Davis, Edward St. Aubyn, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, Jamaica Kincaid, Kathleen Collins, Amitava Kumar, and Weike Wang.

Attendance is required. Class participation is required. The written assignment for the course will be in the form of a reader’s journal that includes the student’s responses to each text. Requirements for the journal will be discussed in detail at the first class meeting.

ENG 650 M002 Forms: Those Literary Hoodoo Blues
Tu 9:30-12:15 pm
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Magic and the oral tradition, magical realism and Afrofuturism. The metafictional use of magic and storytelling tropes of literature. An interrogation of the African American griotic literary tradition through the works of John Edgar Wideman, Gayle Jones, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Gloria Naylor, Larry Neal, el at.

ENG 650 M003 Forms: THE REAL
Tu 12:30-3:15 pm
Instructor: Johnathan Dee
What we talk about when we talk about “realism” in fiction is usually very narrowly defined; the history of the novel has always been furthered by formal innovations and disruptions that might best be appreciated not as avant-garde experiments but as attempts to update and refine the representation, on the page, of what it feels like to live. That feeling, of course, changes in many ways across eras and across cultures: as Milan Kundera wrote, “Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?” We will read a broad and evolving survey of such answers, up to the present day. Texts may include Flaubert, Dreiser, Chopin, Woolf, Dos Passos, Baldwin, Naylor, McCarthy, Heti, Zhang, Sally Rooney, et al.

ENG 650 M004 Forms: Art and Craft of Poetry
Th 3:30-6:15 pm
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
In response to weekly handouts, with selections of illustrative poems, definitions of key terms, and analysis of features of the art, students in this course will write a short exercise each week focusing on a particular challenge in poetry. We will spend several weeks on various rhythmic traditions for the organization of lines and stanzas, not with the idea that every poem must use these traditions, but with the belief that any writer who learns to feel the effect of these patterns will have a more deeply gratifying experience of most of the best poetry written in English (and in other languages), and that this experience brings greater freedom and skill in the act of composition, not only of verse, but also of prose. Other topics besides rhythm will include image, diction, tone, point of view, and argument. No prior study of poetic technique is necessary for students interested in exploring these techniques. Prose writers as well as poets of various aesthetic dispositions have found this course useful and engaging.

ENG 650 M005 Forms: Affects, Effects and The Feels: A Generative Class in How Poems Create, Sustain and Amplify Emotion
Tu 3:20-6:20 pm
Instructor: Sarah Harwell
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. -Brigit Pegeen Kelly

"Our studies converge in showing that poetry is a powerful emotional stimulus capable of engaging brain areas of primary reward. The fact that poetry-elicited chills differ from those evoked by music in terms of neural correlates points to the unique qualities of poetic language that could not be replaced by music and singing during the evolution of human forms of emotional expression." --Eugen Wassiliwizky et al.

Frost states that “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” William Wordsworth writes poems are "the spontaneous overflow of feelings" originating from "emotion recollected in tranquility." In this class we will give sustained attention to the intertwined, inextricable braid of a poem’s thought, feeling and sound by investigating all the various ways a poem can make us feel (and by feel, I mean literal physical sensations, chills, goosebumps, heart palpitations, and tears, as well as the usual abstractions of love, fear, anger, and transcendence) and the methods in which the poem conveys those feelings to the reader or listener. We will explore the links between content and sound, content and syntax, content and diction, content and image, content and narrative, content and lyric, content and the intellect, etc. What makes a poem manipulative vs. sentimental vs. heartwrenching? How does a poem transform the banality of feelings into art? How can a poem startle us into feeling despite our desire for numbness?

We will look at poems in form, “free” poems, poems that rhyme and poems that don’t. We will start from poems that we love, that have affected us deeply, and go from there.

As well we will devote several classes to the oral reading of poems. Utilizing guest speakers, youtube videos, and skype interviews, we will question working poets about their various approaches to reading their own work, and conduct experiments on how best to read our own poems out loud.

You will be required to present on a poem that makes you feel "physically as if the top of [your] head [was] taken off."" You will be required to write poems in response to the topics brought up in class. You will be required to participate in class critiques of oral renditions of both your own poems and your classmates’ poems. One on one conferences will be scheduled throughout the semester.

Possible poets to be studied include: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alice Oswald, Robert Hayden, Louis MacNeice, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Celan, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Seamus Heaney, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, Lorine Niedecker, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Laura Kasischke, Marina Tsvetayeva, Zbiegniew Herbert, Thom Gunn, Wallace Stevens, Li Po, Terrance Hayes, Robert Hass, Elizabeth Bishop…

ENG 730 M001 Graduate Seminar: Cinema and the Documentary Idea
Tu 3:30-6:15 pm
Screening Tu 7:00pm
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity’s demand for empiricism and rational, scientific evidence as well as its profound investment in visual spectacle. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for documenting the world, and for capturing the “real.” This seminar investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film, video and digital practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, travelogues, essay films, autoethnographies, mockumentaries, and docudrama. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary,” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological, and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, through the modernist estrangement of the world in Soviet and 1960s political cinema, to the inflammatory provocations of Surrealist filmmakers and contemporary fake documentaries, the course explores the relations between film, video, and digital practices from (often radically) different national, historical, and political contexts. This course has been conceived in an interdisciplinary vein, so we will also be examining documentary moving images in relation to other forms of documentary practice, both textual and visual. Student research projects may thus concentrate on moving image media or examine their relationship to other documentary forms.

ENG 730 M003 Graduate Seminar: Queer of Color Affects
Tu 12:30-3:15 pm
Instructor: Chris Eng
This course delves into the generative critical interventions of queer of color critique through a focus on its theorizations of affect. In exploring this intersection, it aims to thicken and complicate understandings about operations of power and resistance. In this regard, “queer of color affect” thus serves as not only our object of analysis, but also—more importantly—a method of analysis. On the one hand, the course will challenge students to reassess the ways in which historical and ongoing processes of racialization, gendering, sexualization, and corresponding modes of differentiation materialize through differential distributions of affective capacities. On the other, it attends to and proliferates the innovative ways that creative and theoretical practices by queers and women of color have mobilized affects of anger, shame, disgust, and melancholy as platforms for mobilizing toward visions of radical social justice. By centering queer of color critique and lessons learned from women of color feminisms, the class will explore the intimate entanglements between affect, aesthetics, difference, biopolitics, and performance through recent scholarship published in the interdisciplinary fields of American studies and critical ethnic studies.

ETS 730 M004 Graduate Seminar: Concept of the Common
M 3:45-6:30 pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This course explicitly responds to persistent requests from students for a dedicated follow-up “theory” class to 631. It will take up the concept-metaphor of the “Common” as it appears in various current sites, where it is widespread (as “Common,” “Commons,” “Undercommons,” “latent commons,” “common good,” “electronic commons” etc.). Critical race theory, feminism, Marxism, new materialism, historicism, queer theory, eco-criticism, etc., converge on a terrain in which the “Common” appears, variously, as an aspiration, site of struggle or lived transformative subjective experience. It is often (not always) deployed to reimagine “totality,” “communism,” “intersectionality,” “universality,” “collectivity” or similar concepts, while attempting to elude perceived deficits with these concepts. Overall it signals a dissatisfaction with previous attempts to figure or theorize affiliations or combinations inflected by dissent, difference, exclusion and inequality, while recognizing that such figurations or theorizations are needed. Some attention will be given to earlier debates in which the Common(s) has been crucial, especially “Primitive Accumulation” in Marxism. In all cases, we will be exploring the relation of theory, poiesis—making aesthetic forms—and praxis—that is, translating theory and creative work into practical, concrete struggles for social justice.

Because the need for attention to planetary ecological justice is particularly urgent, we will explore the “Common” and allied concepts concretely as they manifest in figural form in contemporary eco-fiction, including poems and novels by Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Vandermeer, Munif, Chamoiseau, Powers, Mieville, Octavia Butler, Indra Singh, Saro-wiwa, Piercy, Erdrich or Silko, as well as films such as Okja, Wall-E, or Avatar. We will evaluate the potential usefulness (or deficits) of their techniques and appeals by comparing and contrasting them with earlier eco-interventions such as The Jungle, The Whole Earth Catalogue and Silent Spring, as well as current non-fiction eco-interventions such as Sixth Extinction, Wangari Maathai’s “how to” eco-guides or “The Story of Stuff.”

Critical final projects (20-25 paged seminar papers) should identify a theoretical site, or sites, of the Common on which you will focus, but can involve engagement with cultural forms from any period, as approved by the instructor (I have to know something about your topic to evaluate it). I am also open to alternative projects as pitched by members of the seminar, and have some ideas myself about what shape alternative projects might take, including working with my “Reading Green” undergraduates in their collaborative groups, where they will be experimenting with integrating cultural forms into concrete ecological-justice initiatives on campus, or by designing and implementing a “Common” initiative of your own design.

ENG 799 Second Year MFA Essay Seminar
Fr 9:30-12:15 pm
Instructor: Jonathan Dee
Each student will write a critical essay of approximately five thousand words (20-30 pp.), addressing a specific aspect of a major writer’s formal technique. The essay will focus on craft elements in one work (or several short works) of one writer in your genre (fiction or poetry). Ideally, this should be an element or issue that ramifies in your own creative work. The essay is not a research paper; it is intended as a demonstration of your close-reading skills and of the utility of criticism as a way of clarifying some of your own beliefs and aspirations regarding your artistic practice.

Fall 2018

ENG 630 M001: Graduate Proseminar: Genres of Victorian Fiction
Th 9:30am-12:20pm
Instructor: Coran Klaver

This course will examine the wide array of types of popular and canonical fiction in Victorian period. It takes as it starting assumption that literary form, including genre, co-evolves in relation to the pressures and possibilities of particular historical formations. In nineteenth-century Britain, those historical formulations included “The Woman Question,” imperialism, urbanization, radical changes in the status and content of scientific theory—particularly the status of the human, and the diminishing status of religion, to name a few of the most prominent. In addition to realism, the most canonical of the genres that developed in relation to these social formations, this course will examine the wide array of less familiar genres that articulated different and competing visions of reality to that presented by domestic realism. These include genres such as the sensation novel, new woman fiction, fairy tales, and ghost stories. We will also look at genres that seem less to challenge realism’s version of reality, than to turn away from it, such as young adult adventure stories and science fiction. Finally, we will look several different kinds of children’s fiction—pedagogical, didactic, and escapist—often all at once. We will read both novels and short fiction. The course will begin with two canonical “realist” texts—texts that will both establish a foundation for the course and ask questions about that foundation. Texts for the course are still under consideration. Students will write weekly discussion questions, do one class discussion facilitation focused on genre and history, and write a 20-25 page seminar paper. For more information, students are encouraged to contact Prof. Klaver directly at ccklaver@syr.edu

ENG 630 M002: Proseminar: Genres Across Media Forms
Th 12:30-3:15pm
Screening: Tu 7:30-10:30pm
Instructor: Chris Hanson

What differentiates film, television, and game genres? The goal of this seminar is to provide an advanced introduction to the critical consideration of genre in film and screen studies. We will examine the ways in which conceptions of genre are complicated when examining them through and across time-based media forms. Our focus will be the ways in which genres are articulated and understood in film, television, analog and digital games, and virtual reality (VR) experiences. We will also investigate how genres and specific generic transmedia texts mutate and transform as they are expressed in differing forms, looking at the “same” genres or texts across multiple media forms. This will include exploring the ways in which genres have been theorized and analyzed in these different forms and looking at the complex relationships between texts, authors, audiences, industries, and institutions. Our consideration of genres will be somewhat historical as well, by examining the ways in which particular genres emerged at certain moments and in conjunction with industrial practices such as the development of narrative techniques in early cinema or gameplay mechanics as digital games have evolved.

ENG 631 M001: Critical Theory
Tu 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Chris Forster

“Critical Theory” introduces some of the most influential and relevant modes of inquiry shared by criticism across fields. We will attempt to understand both the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches as well as how theory comes to inform literary critical practice. The result is a class that will be neither a totally coherent survey of critical theory nor a practical “methods” course, but an uneasy balance between these competing goals. Topics we may cover include the “New Criticism,” Marxist and feminist criticisms, deconstruction, the “new historicism,” a variety of materialisms, as well as debates about “distant reading” and “postcritical” reading. Likely theorists and critics include foundational figures like Frederic Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Donna Harraway, as well as recent accounts of criticism by Rita Felski and Joseph North. Ultimately the class serves to help bootstrap graduate-level research and inquiry in “English” (conceived as broadly as possible). Assignments will include short presentations to the seminar, shorter written assignments that provide interpretations of works based on theoretical readings in the class, and a final, longer essay.

ENG 650 M001: Forms: Dickinson/Whitman Seminar
M 3:45-6:35pm
Instructor: Bruce Smith

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” in “Song of Myself” counters Dickinson’s “stapled” songs (“The Soul has bandaged moments”) in the 1789 poems she wrote in her lifetime. Whitman is among the first to stake out forbidden territory (race, masculinity, morality, slavery) for American poetry and to find a form that persuasively enacts the poem's content. Dickinson, the scholar of the interior, torqued the language to create lyric cries and arresting moments. In her famous remark to Higginson, Dickinson said: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"

Students in this course will be asked to read the poems of Whitman and Dickinson and accompanying essays assigned by the instructor. The emphasis of discussions will be both on the language, the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each author. We’ll consider the continuances and the ruptures that each new style demands as well as what surrounds each work of art in the way of culture and biography. Students will be asked to lead discussion of three poems by each poet. And additional writing assignment for each poet will be a response in a poetic form.

ENG 650 M002: Forms: Contemporary American Poetry: Influence
Tu 9:30am-12:20pm
Instructor: Chris Kennedy

We will read the work of "contemporary" American poets and consider who their influences are and which poets they may have influenced. Students will be asked to discuss poets who have influenced them, as well as other writers, artists, musicians, directors, etc. who have influenced their work. There will be weekly writing assignments, consisting of brief response papers (creative and/or analytical).

ENG 650 M003: Forms: Fragmented/Fractured Narrative
F 10:30am-1:15pm
Instructor is Robert Lopez

One of Donald Barthelme’s narrators claimed “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” We will examine how writers use fragments to their advantage and how we can do likewise. We can think about fragmentation/fracturing in the same way visual artists do with collage, an assemblage that adds up to something greater than the parts alone. We will see how liberating it can be when we eliminate or alter the traditional elements of fiction like plot, linearity, scene depiction, etc. Fiction provides a unique opportunity to fracture both time and our perception of reality. The writers we will read and discuss might include David Markson, Mary Robison, Juan Rulfo, Renata Adler, Toni Morrison and others.

ENG 650 M005: Writing the Self: Memoir & Poetry
Th 12:30-3:20pm
Instructor: Mary Karr

We’ll read and discuss about ten memoirs. Here is a tentative reading list:

Richard Wright Black Boy
McCarthy Memories of Catholic Girlhood
Primo Levy Survival at Auschwitz
Nabokov Speak, Memory
Conroy Stop-Time
Michael Herr Dispatches
Hong Kingston Woman Warrior
Crews Childhood: Biography of a Place
Wolff, This Boy’s Life
Lockwood Priestdaddy

Topics will include mostly how good ones get written. A history of the form in the US from mid-twentieth-century to present. The lies of history versus the lies of memory. Voice development. Rewriting. Economy. Interior versus exterior writing. Management of information. Character development. Dealing with family. Reversals. Managing your own emotions with regards to difficult periods in your history. Making a physical world—your body as avatar for your past.

Work for the semester is mostly reading and discussion. I’ll give writing prompts every week, but you are free to work in any nonfiction form—memoir, history, reportage, critical thought, etc. Maybe we’ll have a few workshop classes if students feel bold? Otherwise, you might read from your work.

1. Discussion on books and fellow students’ writing: 40%
2. FIVE memoir pieces or critical papers (50%)
3. Commonplace books (10%)

ATTENDANCE REQUIRED

ENG 650 M006: Forms: One City, Ten Years
Th 9:30am-12:15pm
Instructor: George Saunders

In this course, each student will be asked to become an expert on the literature and culture of one city, anywhere in the world, during a ten-year period that she selects. The student will be expected to read novels, story collections, poems, plays, essays and criticism from this period and become acquainted, as well, with other artistic products (movies, dance, the visual arts, etc.) and attain a grasp of the essential political moment. The student will attempt to come to an understanding of that moment in time and space, especially as regards and benefits her own creative journey. The thinking is that deeply involving oneself in one such time/place will help the young writer understand any time/place, as well as the larger ways in which art comes out of a particular culture at a particular time. The course will require a great deal of individual initiative; the products of the course will include written documentation of research and classroom presentations.

ENG 715 M001: First Year Graduate Poetry Workshop
Th 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.

ENG 716 M002: Second Year Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35pm
Instructor: Chris Kennedy

Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week. The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each individual. Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer. This term I’ll begin class with what I call, an “exemplary” poet – avoiding the more proscriptive term “essential.” Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717 M001: First-Year Fiction Workshop
Tu 12:30-3:20pm
Instructor: Arthur Flowers

Workshop format. Craft. Vision. Production. Introduction to the Literary Life.

ENG 718 M001: Second-Year Fiction Workshop
Th 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Jonathan Dee

This workshop will focus on fiction writing and the useful critique thereof. We will read and discuss two or three student-submitted stories/novel excerpts each week.

ENG 719 M001: Third Year Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35pm
Instructor: Mary Karr

This is an advanced course, so I assume you’re all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to a) write, b) critique each other’s work with utmost care and respect, c) rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Your notes on each other’s poems should be detailed and serious. I’d also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. What I value first and foremost is a) clarity in communication, b) strong feeling (in the reader NOT the writer), and c) economy. I expect everyone to rewrite.

Attendance: Required
I suggest you turn in two packets of 6-10 poems each time (depending on length) and rewrite based on workshop and my comments. Facing your thesis semester, the goal for this class is also to begin to look at your work as a whole and see what themes and leitmotifs you can highlight and what repetitions you can pare back.

GRADING:
You’re graded 50% on your comments on other people’s work. Do not slack. 50% comes from your own poetry packets.

ENG 721 M002: Third-Year Graduate Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35pm
Instructor: George Saunders

This course is required of, and restricted to, third-year students in the graduate fiction program. Students will read and critique work by their peers, in an attempt to gain new insights into revising and editing. We’ll also occasionally read and discuss published work, with the same intention.

ENG 730 M001: Graduate Seminar: Shakespearean Ecologies
W 3:45-6:35pm
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan

While popular in earlier epochs, studies of the natural world in Shakespeare fell to the wayside of research deemed to be more urgent to the social struggles of the later twentieth century. The rise of early modern ecocriticism, born partly in effort to historicize modern environmental crises, has prompted scholars to recognize the centrality of ideas about nature to the history of race, gender, sexuality, national and religious identity, and empire. Our seminar will draw on recent developments in ecocritical scholarship to consider how these and related social and political constructs emerge out of ecological and epistemological entanglements between human and non-human bodies, agents, energies, and interests. We will consider what it avails us to think of these constructs as ecologies in their own right, informed by principles of ancient and neoteric natural philosophy and aesthetic theory and in relation to one another. How, we will ask, are the problems of interpretation and communication prominently featured in Shakespeare’s plots associated with the distributed ecology of cognition and affect that accounted for the play’s perception and consumption? How are unconventional sexual practices and gender performances in the plays presented as both unnatural and typical of nature’s irregularities – nature at play? How are themes of insularity and exploitation explored as features of island and/or colonial ecology in the Tempest and in depictions of Britain’s “sceptered isle(s)”? How might the purportedly ‘transcendent’ problems of youth and old age be complicated by consideration of the changing ecologies of age, family, and community under pressures of urbanization, emergent capitalism, globalism, and climate change? Our reading of Shakespeare’s plays and poems will be paired with historical documents and sources that students will take turns introducing from a class-curated research bibliography. Discussions will engage closely with new and established work in the fields of literary and philosophical ecocriticism, new materialism, object studies, and environmental activism, especially as these intersect with other activist criticisms. Time and supplementary resources will be provided to introduce students new to Shakespeare and early modern literature to historical terms and tools. We will, accordingly, limit the number of assigned plays and early primary documents to a number that will allow for their maximally engaged reading and discussion.

ENG 730 M002: Graduate Seminar: What Was Sex? Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality
Th 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Dorri Beam

Before the relatively recent invention of “sexuality” and “sexualities” in the late nineteenth-century, what was sex? What did it include and exclude? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? Did they have an idea of sexuality as an identity? As something stable belonging to them? How did people understand their intimate relations? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? How does sexuality, and the host of concerns we might gather under it, function as a lens when we examine the past?

Literature itself will be our laboratory for thinking about the history of sexuality and its import. That is, we will take literature seriously as a form that fashions characters, solicits responses, and organizes relationships, as well as exploring its involvement in the discursive production of sexualities. The course will be grounded in queer theory, gender studies, and critical race theory. Readings in queer temporality, kinship studies, new ontological and materialist theories, and debates on reading, form, and aesthetics will help us assemble our approaches to the sheer variety of relational arrangements and attachments to places, things, and people that occupy our texts. Many of our texts will strike us as legibly and productively “queer;” others confront us with questions about the plasticity of the term and its import for another era. Against the emerging institutionalization of marriage and romantic love, we will consider the challenge presented by African- and Native American resistant formations of family and community, and by same-sex love, polygamy, celibacy and pan-marriage (including a field trip to the nearby Oneida mansion house, the fascinating site of the longest-lived communal experiment of the nineteenth century!).

The texts are primarily from the second half of the nineteenth century and are likely to include short stories, novels, and poetry by Julia Ward Howe, Donald Grant Mitchell, Walt Whitman, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Bret Harte, Elizabeth Stoddard, Pauline Hopkins, Zitkala Sa, and Sui Sin Far.

ENG 730 M003: Graduate Seminar: History of the Book
Tu 12:20-3:20pm
Instructor: Patricia Roylance

This course is designed as an introduction to the field known most commonly as “the history of the book.” We will investigate what difference it makes to consider the materiality of a text when interpreting it. How do a text’s material form and the modes of its production, circulation and reception affect our sense of its content? Over the course of the term, this question will lead us to consider topics including: manuscript versus print culture; printing technologies; models of the book trade; writers, publishers and readers as key nodes in the circulation of print; illustration, serialization, copyright, censorship, bestsellers, marketing and the digital book.

We will explore these and other issues through content drawn from the medieval to the modern period, focusing primarily on Britain and the Americas, examining a series of exemplary moments, authors, texts and genres with relevance for book history studies. The typical pattern for our weekly reading will involve one focal primary text and one or more secondary readings that illuminate issues of materiality germane to the primary work, but also applicable more broadly. This course will make use of the resources available at Bird Library’s Special Collections, and you will be required to do some archival work there, on materials of your choosing, for a short mid-term paper. There will also be a seminar-length paper due at the end of the term, in which you will bring to bear the theory and methods of the history of the book on materials of your choosing. The course will therefore be appropriate for students specializing in any field within literary or media studies, because the critical lens of materiality can complement any given content. Due to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of book history, students from other disciplines are also welcome.

Spring 2018

ENG 615 M003: Open Poetry Workshop
Instructor: Sarah Harwell
Tu 3:30-6:15pm

“A water nymph made of bone / tries to summon a river out of limestone” – Alice Oswald.

How does one summon poetry out of the no-poetry of the world? While the focus of this course will be on your poems in progress, we will also explore, through poems and essays brought in by the workshop leader and students, the various ways of summoning poetry. All students will be expected to bring in their original poems, participate in class discussions, prepare in advance written comments on peers’ works-in progress and attend conferences with the workshop leader.

ENG 617 M001: Open Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Visiting Writer
Tu 9:30am-12:15pm

In this advanced workshop, students will be expected to submit 3 short stories/ novel excerpts, one of which will be a thorough revision incorporating feedback. In addition, students are expected to critique each other's work thoroughly, providing a full page letter addressed to the writer with each returned manuscript.

ENG630 M002: Graduate Proseminar: Film Theory
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Tu 3:30-6:15pm
Screening Tu 7:00-9:45pm

This seminar provides an advanced introduction to the field of film theory. The seminar involves four broad sections: (1) “classical” film theory and its focus on the question of defining the film medium and its specificity; (2) the “grand” or “apparatus” theory of the 1970s and 80s when film studies worked to establish its own disciplinary autonomy through its appropriation of semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism; (3) the historicizing and de-essentializing turn of film theory which both situates film within the larger frames of modern/postmodern culture and emphasizes questions of gender, sexuality and postcoloniality; (4) the implications of the digital for a post-cinematic era. Although we will read the texts of film theory in broadly chronological order, the seminar resists a teleological approach (i.e. one that generates a progressive model of “theoretical obsolescence”). While theories will be historicized within the intellectual and cinematic contexts from which they emerged, they will also be put into conversation with each other throughout the course. Weekly film screenings will provide opportunities to illuminate key concepts, generate discussion and enable close analysis of film. The aim of this seminar is to provide you with a firm grounding in the changing issues within film theory, to immerse you in classical and contemporary scholarly writings on film, and to enable you to develop a critical vocabulary for audio-visual analysis.

ENG 630 M003: Graduate Proseminar: The Early Modern Atlantic World
Instructor: Scott Stevens
M 3:45-6:35pm

This seminar in meant to help reorient our common-place notions of early modern English literature by placing the literary production of the metropole, London, in this case, within the broader context of the Atlantic world. Literature and history, as academic disciplines, have often divided the seventeenth-century between England and its American colonies as distinct areas of study. This gave rise to highly focused courses examining the Metaphysical poets and Jacobean drama on one side of the Atlantic and Early American literature on the other side. We will strive to consider various literary developments in the context of the Atlantic world as a whole – where travel, colonial conquests, and cultural exchanges made for an increasingly globalized perspective among those figures active in these arenas. We will read familiar early modern texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1613), along with less familiar texts such as George Best’s account of Frobisher’s voyages (1578), and William Wood’s New England’s Prospect (1634). By considering these works within the wider framework of the Atlantic world and early modern European imperialism we will in turn broaden our notions the colonial dynamic which shaped the societies in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

ENG 630 M004 Graduate Proseminar: Victorian Genders and Sexualities
Instructor: Claudia Klaver
Th 12:30-3:15pm

The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to a range of feminist and queer readings of nineteenth-century literary and cultural text. Although our reading will be heavily weighted toward the Victorian novel, we will also read a significant selection of Victorian poetry.

The course will be divided into three segments (though most of the literature that we read could fall into more than one segment). First, we will examine fictional, poetic, theoretical, and critical models of normative genders and heterosexualities in Victorian England. We will explore the domestic ideology that dominated the organization of such cultural norms, examining particularly the forms of masculinity and femininity that it naturalized, and the institutions of romantic love and bourgeois marriage that the ideology supported. Primary texts for this section will probably include Dickens’s David Copperfield, Eliot’s Adam Bede, and/or Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, as well a poetry by Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning.

In the second segment of the course, we will explore desires and practices that coexist with, are articulated in relation to, and/or present transgressive challenges to more normative Victorian desires and sexualities. The goal of this unit will be to think outside of the homo/hetero binary, examining instead sites such at the eroticized child, cross-class and interracial romances, and role-playing. We will look at Charles Dodson's relationship with Alice Liddell and John Ruskin's infatuation with Effie Gray, the textual and photographic self-documentation of life-long relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Walter Mumby, and perhaps Meadow’s Seeta.
Finally, in the third segment of the course we will examine the presence and “problem” of homoerotic or queer genders and sexualities in Victorian fiction and poetry. We will not only explore the role that “queer” characters and relationships play in a number of texts, but also the analytical and historical questions that accompany such perverse readings and re-readings of characters and texts. Primary texts will include Bronte’s Villette, Stoker’s Dracula, Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray, and poetry by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Michael Field.
Assignments will include weekly discussion questions, discussion facilitation, mid-term essay, a final paper prospectus, annotated bibliography, and seminar paper.

ENG 650 M001 Forms: Tribes of American Poetry
Instructor: Bruce Smith
M 3:45-6:35pm

The Fugitives, the Confessionals, The New York School, the Beats, and the Slam poets are not the only schools or movements that have found a common identity and practice. This course will examine groups that are defined aesthetically, geographically, racially, and politically, as well as determine new designations such as the “New Ellipticals” or “Neo-Formalists” or Affrilachian Poets or Kundiman.

The course will also examine pairing of older schools such as The Black Arts Movement where artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience with new manifestations such as The Dark Room Collective and Cave Canem where sustaining writing in community is as much a practice as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color. Older and newer models will be paired for reading and students will be asked to do weekly presentations as well as written responses to the reading.

ENG 650 M002: Forms: Teaching Creative Writing and Photography in the Community
Instructor: Michael Burkard
W 12:45-3:30pm

My role as a writer/instructor in this course is to facilitate discussion and share my experience working with many different community populations in Syracuse and elsewhere over the past two decades. My role is to prepare you for various writing exercises that could be used in visiting different community venues, often public schools in Syracuse, for 6-8 visits over the course of the University semester. I will provide you with reading materials that may suggest prompts. Our own writing assignments as a class will mostly consist of poems or short prose pieces which we could consider as possibilities for models or backgrounds at the different venues. The course is a collaborative experience in that 1) you will choose a site that fits your schedule and you will work with at least one other class member at the site, and 2) we work jointly with Stephen Mahan’s course (noted below). No previous photography experience is necessary. Our writing ideas and assignments will intersect with photographic ideas and assignments. There is a literary and photographic library in the Warehouse classroom we use. Final projects will involve creating an anthology of writing and photography (and often some drawing) done by students at the school sites, or from members of another site which might wind up on our list of venues. There is also a culminating gallery show of work produced at the venues at semester’s end, and some readings by the writers from the sites. These culminating events take place at the Warehouse. The site visits may replace a few of our class sessions, but both Stephen Mahan and myself are very available for conferences, group meetings, and we also visit the sites ourselves during the times the University students make their site visits.

Each student taking the course will complete assignments and also keep a journal for the semester. There will be weekly readings we will discuss as well. And we will also view some photography and films. If you are new to or not familiar with Photoshop, you are welcome to receive instruction from us.

Grading is determined by the quality of your participation in the class discussions and by the quality of your participation in the site/venue sessions in the community.

Undergraduates may enroll in this course with either instructor’s permission.

This course can be a stimulus for your own writing, and also offers a chance to meet with often young writers from very diverse settings and backgrounds.

Meets with TRM 610 M001: Literacy, Photography, and the Community—Stephen Mahan
Meets at the Warehouse on Fayette Street, a site on the Connective Corridor and Warehouse Bus Routes

ENG 650 M003 Forms: Directions in 21st-Century American Fiction
Instructor: Jonathan Dee
Tu 12:30-3:15pm

An exploration and critique of current American literary practice, as reflected in a survey of contemporary novels and short stories, and a frank, constructive discussion of one’s proposed voice within it. Requirements: extensive reading, weekly discussion questions in writing, one outside assignment. Authors may include Katie Kitamura, James Hannaham, Nell Zink, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Hanya Yanagihara, Junot Diaz, Jesmyn Ward, Alexandra Kleeman, Ottessa Mosfegh, Adam Johnson, Samantha Hunt, Garth Greenwell, Edward P. Jones, Catherine Lacey, Ben Lerner, and Karan Mahajan.

ENG 650 M004: Forms: Flash Fiction and Prose Poetry
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Th 3:30-6:15pm

Workings at the crossroads. Of craft. An exploration of. Fusions and such.

ENG 650 M006 Forms: Translation
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Th 12:30-3:15pm

This is a practicum in the art of translation. Each student is free to choose texts to translate. Assigned reading for this course will include essays on translation and translations of poetry and prose from various languages. We will discuss the aims and technical choices of translators. We will analyze the relative success of translations, with respect to semantic accuracy, tonal dynamics, stylistic similarity, musical effect, and so on (as far as this is possible, given the limits of our command of the source language, and the reference materials, or informants available). Fluency in another language is not prerequisite. The prerequisites are an interest in the process of translation and a willingness to engage the linguistic challenge at whatever level of skill the student is now working.

ENG 730 M001: Graduate Seminar: The Holocaust in American Literature
Instructor: Harvey Teres
Tu 12:30-3:15PM

This course will explore the representation of the Holocaust (or “Shoah”) in post-WWII American literature. We will begin by reading historical accounts of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews and others, and the postwar effects of the Holocaust on American society. We will then consider the formidable challenges facing any writer who wishes to represent such a shattering, cataclysmic event—an event some consider unrepresentable. This will include a range of theoretical texts that address trauma, witness, survival, representation, and the field of Holocaust Studies itself. We will then read a range of American literary texts that have represented the Holocaust in unique ways, including short fiction by Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander, and Rebecca Goldstein; novels by Philip Roth, Jerzy Kosinski, Art Spiegelman, and Jonathan Safran Foer; and poetry by Jacob Glatstein, Charles Reznikoff, Randall Jarrell, W.D. Snodgrass, Thom Gunn, Denise Levertov, Anthony Hecht, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Sherman Alexie. Some of the questions we will address include the following: What are the techniques and strategies available to writers who wish to represent what some consider incomprehensible? Are there more or less appropriate ways to write about the Holocaust? What are the moral pitfalls of Holocaust writing? Most American literary accounts of the Holocaust focus on survivors and their children—what are the family dynamics, and the obligations of the children in these accounts, and what are their limits of language and understanding?

ENG 730 M002: Graduate Seminar: Sonic Diaspora: Slavery, Sound, and Trauma in the Black Atlantic
Instructor: Meina Yates-Richard
Th 9:30am -12:15pm

This course explores the history and legacy of transatlantic slavery in literatures of the African diaspora. In our studies of black-authored literary and cultural texts, we will consider issues of collective memory and trauma, witnessing and testimony, and their relationship to textual production. Our critical readings will encompass sound studies, black studies, and trauma studies to guide our interrogations of the sonic elements of Black Atlantic textual and cultural production. In addition, we will consider issues of place, gender, class, and racial/cultural fluidity and hybridity in order to flesh out the contours of the Black Atlantic’s “sonic diaspora.” Class “listening sessions” are designed to immerse us in texts’ referential acoustics, and as a means of integrating affective experiences of social hearing into our critical practices in our analyses of the relationship between script, sound, testimony, subjectivity, culture, and politics. We will study a broad range of texts, beginning with the slave narrative and culminating in postcolonial and postmodern fiction, identifying the relationship between the traumas of enslavement and their textual-sonic representations. Critical texts will include the seminal works of Hortense Spillers, Frederick Moten, Theodor Adorno, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, and Saidiya Hartman among others. Literary texts may include the works of Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire, Michelle Cliff, Ralph Ellison, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesmyn Ward, M. NourbeSe Philip, Junot Diaz and others.

ENG 730 M003: Graduate Seminar: Shakespeare’s Poetry
Instructor: Dympna Callaghan
M 9:30am-12:20pm

In this seminar, we will pursue the idea that far from being marginal to the aesthetic achievement of Shakespeare’s plays, the poems constitute the foundation of his achievement across all genres. We will read all of Shakespeare’s poems, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, the Sonnets, and disputed poem, The Lover’s Complaint, as well as many of the lyrics from the plays.

This seminar will consider how an era in which art was “made tung-tied by authoritie” succeeded in producing some of the finest poetry ever written and how Shakespeare’s poetry is related to ideas about “freeness of speech.” We will analyse the technical achievements of Shakespeare’s verse and address the general question of what makes poetic language “poetic” in the context of Elizabethan and classical ideas of poetry, especially given the often parlous rather than exalted status of the poet and of poetry during this period. We will also examine the influence of his precursors and contemporaries on Shakespeare’s poetry, especially Ovid, Horace, Petrarch, Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney, as well as the question of poetic genre, the special status of lyric at the juncture of music and speech, and the nature of narrative verse. We will also discuss the huge transition in the nature and function of poetry that occurred with the increasing availability of print. Thus, the Sonnets, unlike say, so many of Wyatt’s Henrican lyrics that were actually sung to musical accompaniment, are definitively conceived as words on the page intended for a reader rather than words to be declaimed or sung to an audience. Another key thread throughout the semester will be the issue of post-Reformation religion, especially in terms of the pagan contexts of the narrative poems and, for example, the arguably Christian mysticism of The Phoenix and Turtle. Additionally, we will cover the purpose and function of poetry from both a literary and an historical perspective, including Shakespeare’s need for a wealthy patron, the complex relationships between both poetry and plague and poetry and prayer, the issue of manuscript circulation among Shakespeare’s “private friends” versus print publication (authorized or pirated), and the question of the reader/audience engagement with the poems, as well as the pervasive matters of literacy, gender, sexuality and social hierarchy.
No prior experience is required. The seminar aims to be valuable both to graduate students in English and to those in the Creative Writing Program.

ENG 799 M002: MFA Essay Seminar
Instructor: Michael Burkard
W 9:30-12:20pm

Each student will write an essay of approximately five thousand words. The essay will address a specific aspect of a major writer’s formal technique.

Fall 2017

ENG 630-4 Graduate Proseminar: Early America
W 3:45-6:35PM
Instructor: Patricia Roylance

Designed as an introduction to U.S. literary and cultural studies, this seminar will survey American language and writing from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and will provide a foundation for more advanced study of this period. Because this is a Pro-Seminar, the reading will be somewhat heavy, but you will need no prior knowledge of the period. For the final project, you will work on primary material from the course or closely related to it, but you will have conceptual and methodological freedom in choosing an approach.

Reflecting recent revisions in the critical conception of this field, Early America will be treated as a problematic rather than as a settled category. We will question the homogeneity and push the literal boundaries of America: what regional, racial, religious and linguistic subcultures exist within the space of America? what transatlantic and hemispheric contexts illuminate early American literary production? We will read Native American oral literature and writings from New Spain, New France and New Netherland alongside literature from the British colonies, and alongside European writings about the New World. The course will culminate with an examination of the rhetoric of the U.S. Revolutionary War, which attempted to present as unified and univocal a colonial period that had been anything but.

ENG 630-5 Graduate Proseminar: What was Modernism?
Tu 3:30-6:20PM
Instructor: Chris Forster

The art and literature of the first half of the twentieth century is frequently called modernist. It is a term that exists in awkward (and sometimes productive) tension with other key terms: realism, the avant-garde, or postmodernism, for instance. This class seeks to introduce and understand that term, and the debates which surround it, by reading a series of key texts from the period alongside important criticism. No prior familiarity with modernism is necessary. Course readings will include work across genres by figures including W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and others. Alongside these works we will read a diverse range of the major critics of the period, from a range of theoretical perspectives. Our goal will be to both understand the works we read, but also to understand the shifting contours and constructions of modernism as a key, but contested, term of literary history. Course work will include a seminar presentation, and a range of writing assignments (including a book review, a conference abstract, and a conference-length paper).

ENG 631-1 Critical Theory
M 12:45-3:35PM
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

Critical Theory provides an introduction to a range of meta-critical concepts, debates and protocolsthat is, the underwriting assumptions (varied and contradictory as these may be) -- on which the discipline of English currently relies.  We will read both influential texts from the past that are still referenced (implicitly or explicitly), as well as notable examples of current trends. We will also spend time considering professional structures, norms, genres and demands: the formation of the university, book reviews, bibliographies, conferences, journals, seminar papers, prizes and so on. In other words, we will explore ways of reading theoretical, critical and literary/cultural textsincluding our profession as an institution--and examine how critical questions have been and are now generated in English, as well as why new critical practices emerge (or fail to do so). No matter how much (or little) theory you have already read, this professional orientation will direct your thinking toward English as a discipline in new ways, and prepare you to work within it self-consciously and critically.  

ENG 650-1 Forms: Best Versions
M 3:45-6:35PM
Instructor: Chris Kennedy

One of the great mysteries of writing fiction and poetry is when and how to revise: How does a writer know when a story or a poem is finished? How much should a writer rely on other opinions to reshape his/her vision? In this class we will read different versions of several published stories and poems, as well as different drafts of student work, as a catalyst for discussion about how to edit and revise.

ENG 650-3 Forms: Poetry, Memoir, & Nonfiction
Th 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: Mary Karr

Well read and discuss eleven memoirs, plus excerpts of a few others.  Work for the semester will consist of reading and being engaged with the books.Assignments will include: small creative projects and in-class writing sprinkled through the semester; a presentation on one of the writers; and a final paper, memoir, or 10 poems. Readings may include (a) poems by Roger Fanning, Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyaaka, William Matthews, Heather McHugh, Pablo Neruda, Craig Raine, Charles Simic, and Dean Young; (b) fiction by George Saunders; (c) essays by James Wood, and (d) a memoir by Elif Batuman.

ENG 650-5 Forms: Poets and Collaborators
Th 12:30-3:20PM
Instructor: Michael Burkard

As writers/readers, we are the collaborators. In discussion and in writing we will respond to poets in translation. These poets would include Transtromer, Syzmborska, Vallejo, and a wide range of contemporary American poets, including Fanny Howe and Lucille Clifton. As a class, we will write some collaborative work amongst ourselves. We will explore various means of adapting to issues of translation, subject matter, and forms. Each class session will review poetry from our reading list, and a discussion of written assignments. Collaborations between writers and artists and writers and musicians will be reviewed, and we will incorporate a project of collaboration along these lines in a class assignment.

ENG 650-8: Forms: Creative Nonfiction: All Over The Page
Th 3:30-6:20PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers, Jr.

Exploration of the various forms of creative nonfiction with special emphasis on fusions of nonfiction, fiction and poetry  nonfiction works using the techs of other genres to enhance their impact. This process will be contexted with dialogues on the ever-evolving nature of text. Readings will consist of shorts and excerpts. Reader to be provided. Writing prompts likely.

ENG 650-9: Forms: Ghost Stories
M 6:45-9:35PM
Instructor: Kaitlyn Greenidge

In this class, we will explore the use of ghosts and ghost stories in literature. We will begin by establishing the elements in classic ghost stories of the nineteenth century and move on to modern interpretations in contemporary fiction. We will also explore ghosts in folklore. During this class, we will explore the symbolism of ghosts in literature and attempt to uncover why this genre of storytelling remains popular. Students will be required to write creative and/or critical response papers, make oral presentations, and produce either a final 10-page ghost story of their own or a critical essay, subject to the instructors approval.

ENG 715-2 First Poetry Workshop
Tu 12:30-3:20PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis.  Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop.  Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.

ENG 716-1 Second Poetry Workshop
M 12:45-3:35PM
Instructor: Bruce Smith

Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one free poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week.  The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each individual.  Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer.  This term Ill begin class with what I call, an exemplary poet  avoiding the more proscriptive term essential.  Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717-2 First Year Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta

Students will submit a minimum of three short stories/novel excerpts and will read and constructively critique the work of their peers. Development of the crucial skill and discipline of revision will be emphasized. Required of, and restricted to, first-year MFA fiction students.

ENG 718-2 Second Fiction Workshop
F 9:30-12:20PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta

This course is the required workshop for students in the second year of the MFA Program in Fiction.

ENG 719-1 Third Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35PM
Instructor: Mary Karr

This is an advanced course, so I assume youre all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to read, write, critique each others work with utmost care and respect, and rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.  Its a class based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each others poems should be detailed and serious. Id also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. What I value first and foremost is clarity in communication and strong feeling (in the reader, NOT the writer). I expect everyone to rewrite based on workshop comments. If your notes are sketchy, cartoony, or in any way haphazard, I will ask for typed notes for each class. 

First and foremost, you must be open to virtually any kind of speech, language, subject, and opinion. You must get along with each other, and anyone engaging in a personal attack on anyone else in the group will have a hard time completing the workshop. Free speech is seldom comfortable, and this workshop is a free-speech space.

ENG 721-1 Third Fiction Workshop - Prerequisite ENG 717 and ENG 718
Tu 12:30-3:20PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers Jr.

This course is required for students in the third year of the MFA Program in Fiction. In this class, students will deepen their fictive practice by reading and critiquing the works of their peers. Workshop format, craft, product, vision.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Postwar U.S. Fiction
Tu 9:30-12:20PM
Instructor: Susan Edmunds

In this seminar, we will read postwar U.S. novels and short stories from the late forties to the present. We will interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical lens, with particular emphasis placed on investigating the interconnections between literary form and social change. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read literary texts associated with or influenced by the counterculture , the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Second Wave Feminism, and  late twentieth-century U.S. consumerism. I am still working on the final booklist for this course. Authors are likely to include James Baldwin, Hisaye Yamamoto, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Herr, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Chang-Rae Lee, and Helena Maria Viramontes.

ENG 730-2 Graduate Seminar: American Film Melodrama
Th 9:30-12:20PM
Film Screening Th 6:30-9:15PM
Instructor: Will Scheibel

Film scholar Linda Williams calls melodrama the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures. Following her argument, this seminar suggests that to study American film melodrama is to deepen our understanding of American cinemas aesthetic and affective expressions. A cinema of heightened emotionalism based on excess and containment, fantasy and desire, and pathos and identification, melodrama has been theorized as a site of ideological critique and viewer pleasure. With origins in the blood and thunder spectacles of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theater, melodrama came to fruition on the screen in the action serials and passionate epics of the silent era. The term is perhaps most associated with family and womens pictures of Classical Hollywood, including sentimental weepies, stories of fallen women and mother/daughter relationships, and the Gothic romance. We will look at these different examples from Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches, as well as in the contexts of genre and American culture. Yet, as melodrama never disappeared, we will consider ways in which it persists in especially apparent casesart cinema, postmodern cinema, the male action films of Kathryn Bigelow, and the queer films of Todd Haynesthat have further expanded our definition of the term. Required Books: Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Womans Film (London: BFI Publishing, 1987); Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) [electronic version available through EBSCOhost/SU Libraries]; Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 

For a complete list of films and readings, please contact Will Scheibel at lscheibe@syr.edu.

ENG 730-5 Graduate Seminar: Gender and Sexualities in the War on Terror
Th 3:30-6:20PM
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey

In this seminar, we will focus on feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist engagements with and responses to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, looking closely at the role of gender and its intersections with race, sexuality, and religion in mobilizations of the US security state. Even though we will focus in our analysis on the period following the events of September 11, 2001, we will also be questioning the notion that 9/11 is an exceptional traumatic event that produces exclusive forms of US trauma and citizenship. We will pay close attention to the ways in which gender, religion, sexuality, and race have been deployed in constructions of national identities, war projects, and imperial agendas since 9/11, starting with depictions of some of the first responses to the attacks, and moving on to include the rhetoric informing much of the dominant narratives about the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the torture practices at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons. In analyzing the ascendency of violent, militaristic, and exclusionary US citizenships in light of intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and religion, this course evaluates some important theoretical concepts that have defined anti-hegemonic responses to the US security states practices. Such concepts include, for instance, Jacqui Alexanders the patriot-citizen, Mahmood Mamdanis good Muslim vs. bad Muslim, Amy Kaplans homeland insecurity, and Jaspir Puars homonationalisms. 

Other theoretical and cultural texts we will read include works by Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, Junaid Rana, Amy Kaplan, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Sunaina Maira, among others. We will also be reading fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including Laila Halaby, Yussef El Guindi, Art Spiegelman, and Wafaa Bilal.

Spring 2017

ENG 615-3 Open Poetry Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20 PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. There are no prerequisites, and those who want to explore a beginners interest in poetry are welcome to join with poetry graduate students in the MFA program. 

ENG 617-1 Open Fiction Workshop
Tu 9:30-12:20 PM
Instructor: Jonathan Dee
This workshop is open to all graduate students interested in writing fiction. Participants submit, read, and critique short stories or novel excerpts. Student work will be the focus of the class; outside reading, pertinent to discussion, may occasionally be assigned. ︉ 

ENG 630-2 Graduate Proseminar: Classical Hollywood Cinema
Tu 3:30-6:20 PM
Film Screening Tu 7:00-9:45 PM
Instructor: Will Scheibel
What was classical about Classical Hollywood cinema? This course offers an investigation into the aesthetic and industrial system of Hollywood during the era of studio production between 1929 and 1948, as well as the gradual demise of the system into the early 1960s. We will consider Classical Hollywood as a formal tradition of film art, a business practice of filmmaking, and a cultural institution of film experience that exceeds a single geographic site. As a graduate pro-seminar, this course not only concerns the history of Classical Hollywood, but also historiographic methods of interpretation and research, leading to a final paper of 25 pages. Topics will include: the relationship between American cinema and American modernity; the development of narrative, visual style, and point-of-view in the classical film text; the studio oligopoly and the effects of its breakup; product standardization and differentiation through genres and stars; technologies of spectacle; New Deal labor and politics in the studios; location shooting after World War II; changes in audiences and exhibition contexts over time; the regulation of onscreen content; and the shift to independent and overseas production. No background in film studies is necessary for this course, but evening screenings are required.

ENG 630-3 Graduate Proseminar: Introduction to Early Modern Studies
M 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
This course provides a point of entry for students interested in early modern texts and the disciplinary history of early modern studies. We will spend as much time with the literature of the period as the stories historiographers have come to tell about the Renaissance, the premodern and the early modern. We will begin with the modern invention of the Renaissance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, will continue by observing the psychoanalytic, philological and bibliographic/bibliophilic investments of the early twentieth century, and will follow the rise and fall of formalisms, criticisms, materialisms and historicisms new and old through the early twenty-first century. Our chief investigation will be to examine the ways in which the early modern period has been both credited and discredited as the parent of modernity. Our discussions will trace the representation of privacy, masculinity, sovereignty, embodiment, property, and liberty (among others) as these discourses emerge out of the complex interplay between readers and writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries especially. We will read a selection of mainly canonical plays, poems and prose in order to provide exposure to the major genres of the period (including but not limited to revenge drama, rhetorical theory, lyric and devotional poetry, spiritual autobiography, sermons) and to better trace the historiographical themes and trends, but will include samplings of texts that have more recently made their way into a canon whose relative fixity/fungibility will be a central motif of the course. 

ENG 630-4 Graduate Proseminar: Introduction to Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Th 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey
This proseminar offers a broad introduction to some of the major concepts and texts in the fields of race and ethnic studies. Examining some of the main issues defining these fields of study from their inception till the present so-called post-racial moment, we will familiarize ourselves with formative debates related to the establishment of ethnic studies programs in the 60s and 70s (as well as the continuance of such struggles in the present moment); ethnic studies during the culture wars of the 80s and 90s and beyond; as well as the histories and effects of US racial and ethnic formations, color-blindness, comparative racialization, and state violence against black and brown bodies, from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter.

Informed by intersectional, comparative, and transnational theoretical frameworks, the course readings will cover black feminist thought, critical race theory, queer critique, narratives of anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles, and critiques of settler-colonialism, among others. We will investigate the histories and implications of the turn to the critical practice of ethnic studies and race theory with an emphasis on how race and ethnicity are constructed in relation to concepts of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, indigeneity, citizenship, and immigration.

Covering a number of foundational texts in race and ethnic studies, as well as the specific fields of African American Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, and Arab American studies, course readings include works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Audra Simpson, Steven Salaita, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Palumbo-Liu, Claudia Rankine, and others.

ENG 650-2 Forms: Teaching Creative Writing and Photography in the Community
W 12:45-3:30 PM
Instructor: Michael Burkard
My role as a writer/instructor in this course is to facilitate discussion and share my experience working with many different community populations in Syracuse and elsewhere over the past two decades. My role is to prepare you for various writing exercises that could be used in visiting different community venues, often public schools in Syracuse, for 6-8 visits over the course of the University semester. I will provide you with reading materials that may suggest prompts. Our own writing assignments as a class will mostly consist of poems or short prose pieces which we could consider as possibilities for models or backgrounds at the different venues. The course is a collaborative experience in that 1) you will choose a site that fits your schedule and you will work with at least one other class member at the site, and 2) we work jointly with Stephen Mahans course (noted below). No previous photography experience is necessary. Our writing ideas and assignments will intersect with photographic ideas and assignments. There is a literary and photographic library in the Warehouse classroom we use. Final projects will involve creating an anthology of writing and photography (and often some drawing) done by students at the school sites, or from members of another site which might wind up on our list of venues. There is also a culminating gallery show of work produced at the venues at semesters end, and some readings by the writers from the sites. These culminating events take place at the Warehouse. The site visits may replace a few of our class sessions, but both Stephen Mahan and myself are very available for conferences, group meetings, and we also visit the sites ourselves during the times the University students make their site visits.

Each student taking the course will complete assignments and also keep a journal for the semester. There will be weekly readings we will discuss as well. And we will also view some photography and films. If you are new to or not familiar with Photoshop, you are welcome to receive instruction from us.

Grading is determined by the quality of your participation in the class discussions and by the quality of your participation in the site/venue sessions in the community.

Undergraduates may enroll in this course with either instructors permission.

This course can be a stimulus for your own writing, and also offers a chance to meet with often young writers from very diverse settings and backgrounds.
Meets with TRM 610 M002: Literacy, Photography, and the CommunityStephen Mahan
Meets at the Warehouse on Fayette Street, a site on the Connective Corridor and Warehouse Bus Routes

ENG 650-4 Forms: Ulysses for Writers
Th 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
When our list-obsessed culture makes its pronouncements about the best novels ever written, James Joyce's Ulysses usually lands at the top. This class will attempt to get beyond (underneath, behind) this novel's iconic status; we will inhabit this novel and make it ours. The class will consist of a very close reading of Ulysses. We will take it section by section while keeping close track of what accumulates. We will look at the architecture of the novel and talk about different ways of structuring a novel. We will examine how a novel sets up rules, and how it is possible to create a system without being overly schematic. We will be examining the narrative strategies and techniques and innovations employed by Joyce. We will read to understand the book, but also we will read with an eye toward developing our own work and our own ideas about what a novel can do.

ENG 650-5 Forms: Sonnets
Tu 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
The sonnet became a popular format for short poems in English in the 16th and 17th centuries, fell into disuse for two centuries, and came back with the Romantics. In this course we will read and analyze sonnets in English, to describe pitfalls of the form, as well as its continuing appeal to readers and writers. Half of the reading will begin with sonnets and sonnet-like poems from the very recent past (particularly poems by women poets). From this beginning we will move backward in time. The other half of the reading will begin with early sonnets in English (mostly by men) and move forward. We will consider the shape of poems, in their expressive, temporal, spatial, sonic, logical, dramatic, and other dimensions. Students will prepare presentations and write original works in response to the reading.

ENG 650-6 Forms: The Prose Poem
Th 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Chris Kennedy
According to Charles Simic, [t]he prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle. 
Despite Simics tongue in cheek notion that the prose poem cannot exist, it has a long history, with the modern prose poem emerging in France most famously in the work of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephen Mallarmé, and, in recent years in this country, a number of print and on-line journals and anthologies have begun to feature prose poems on a regular basis.
Despite the proliferation of prose poetry, defining what constitutes a prose poem is a difficult and perplexing task. What are the prose poems characteristics? What separates the prose poem from short fiction (flash fiction, micro-fiction, sudden fiction)?
This class will provide an opportunity to contemplate these questions and to explore prose poetry with the goal of distinguishing the elements unique to the form.

ENG 650-7 Forms: Adventures in Narrative
W 9:30-12:20 PM
Instructor: Fiona Maazel
One of our goals as writers is to keep a reader interested over the long haul. As Amy Hempel once put it, you start writing assuming a persons going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: Dont give them one. Dont give them a reason to put your work down and find something else to do. In fact, give them every reason to stay. In this class, well be looking at what techniques various authors deploy to keep us reading. We will pay close attention to craft matters like: rate of revelation, order of disclosure, pacing, tension, characterization, plot, point of view, and so forth. We will also be paying attention to the difference between how an author seizes our attention and how s/he keeps it (note how often you love the way a novel begins only to lose interest 50 pages later). To this end, well be reading texts that run from the conventional to the experimental to adduce some common tropes and techniques among them. It is worth mentioning that inclusion on a syllabus does not equal endorsement. The goal of the class is not to insist that the books we read are riveting so much as to generate involved discussion about what these authors tried to do and why. You will often find yourself thinking some of their techniques have failed. This is the point. Lets talk about it.

ENG 650-8 Forms: Distance
M 9:30-12:20 PM
Instructor: Eleanor Henderson
Manipulating point of view is more than a matter of choosing a pronoun. As Wayne C. Booth writes in The Rhetoric of Fiction, To say that a story is told in the first or the third person will tell us nothing of importance unless we describe how the particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific desired effects. In this course, we will seek to do just thatto explore the qualities of dynamic narration in fiction. When we look beyond the basic considerations of perspective to the various relationships between and among author, narrator, character, and reader, we uncover a universe of narrative effects, from objectivity to free indirect style to stream of consciousness. Through a study of a wide range of prose works and narrative theory, including Faulkner, Kafka, Moore, Morrison, Woolf, and Booth, well hope to gain more control over our own access to interior and exterior worlds.   

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Modernism and Its Media
Tu 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Chris Forster
Raymond Williams suggests that any explanation of modernist literature must start from the fact that the late nineteenth century was the occasion for the greatest changes ever seen in the media of cultural production. Photography, cinema, radio, television, reproduction and recording all make their decisive advance during the period identified as Modernist. This class takes this suggestion seriously, reading the broad and contested field of cultural production commonly called modernist as a response to, and engagement with, the changing media ecology of the early twentieth century. We will read key texts of modernist literature alongside media theory and some of the most provocative recent work in modernist studies, to try to understand the relationship between culture and the material forms which support it.

Likely primary texts include Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent (and Hitchcocks 1936 adaptation of the novel, Sabotage); Ezra Pounds translations from Chinese (and Ernest Fenollosas essay on the Chinese Written Character); T. S. Eliots The Waste Land; Henry Jamess The Beast in the Jungle; manifestoes by Wyndham Lewis, F. T. Marinetti, Mina Loy, and others; as well as work by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett. The critics well cover include Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Walter Benjamin, and Miriam Hansen, among others.

Course work includes short written responses, a book review, at least one presentation to the seminar of a relevant work of secondary literature, and a final essay that will be presented to the class in a final meeting modeled on the seminars of the Modernist Studies Associations annual meeting.

ENG 730-2 Graduate Seminar: Readings Before Race
Th 9:30-12:20 PM
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant

Surveying literature and thought from the Hammurabi Code (ca. 1750 BC) to the contemporary moment, this course explores the advent of race as a radical shift in the history of social relations. We start by recovering the memory of a time when dissimilarity of ancestry or phenotype did not constitute racial difference. We also dissect the now automatic equation between racism and slavery (slavery is our original sin, said Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to evoke the roots of racial troubles in Ferguson, Missouri). We seek to recover the memory of a time when the social superiority of slave masters (i.e., their material capacity to impose their will on others) did not necessarily lead to their claiming superior human caliber vis-à-vis their captives. An ancient Greek general might want slaves who displayed superior tact, skill, and courage in battle. A Roman nobleman might seek a bonded person who could teach his children geometry, rhetoric, or swordsmanship. One could be an Ethiopian slave named Aesop living in Hellas and achieve renown as an author of fables or a North African slave in Rome named Publius Terentius Afer and become the Empires foremost playwright. St. Augustine evokes his mothers elevated moral sense, an attribute for which he credits the slave woman who raised her. The Ottoman Janissaries, the elite force that protected the Sultans household, consisted of men enslaved in childhood and raised to perform that lofty task, for which they received the best education and the best military training. We survey dark-skinned Nubian Pharaohs, the blameless Ethiopians of Homer, the beautiful and exalted Ethiopians of Herodotus, and dark-skinned Sudanese Sultans. In Greek mythology we look at the famed beauty of the Ethiopian Princess Andromeda and the greatness of the Ethiopian king Memnon, son of Tithonous and Eos. For the Judeo-Christian texts we look at the flattering depiction of the dark-skinned inhabitants of the Kingdom of Kush in the Old Testament and the nobility of character the Ethiopian eunuch, a minister of Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of all her treasure in the New Testament.

After this background, the readings fast forward to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, for instance, we find the English poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge thinking himself into exhaustion in the effort to claim, against the textual evidence before him, that William Shakespeare could not have possibly intended for Othello to be a Negro. The elevated nobility of the character and the romantic attraction that a beautiful white Venetian young woman feels for him speak against that monstrous possibility. Ironically, there were enough African-descended Britons by the late eighteenth century for Coleridge to have heard about them, including a protégé of the Duchess of Queensbury named Julius Soubise who earned a reputation as a dandy much given to womanizing in his rapport with white ladies, who were the ones within reach in the elite circles that he frequented. The course will cover late sixteenth and through mid-seventeenth century English poetry that uses the recurring topos of black-white lovers wrestling with the challenge of racial difference (race then still in its early stages of development). Witness the ambiguity and complexity of Shakespeares own dark lady poems.

A third branch of readings will outline the historical events that created the conditions for the vilification of difference and the dehumanization of conquered and enslaved people to occur, for foreign civilizations to be deemed empty of knowledge and achievement (an inconceivable notion for the sages associated with the Alexandrian Library), and for the emergence of the Indian, the Negro, the Oriental, and the racial other in general as devalued identities. The disremembering of the glories of the regions that those populations hailed from followed, and a new knowledge of them emerged that construed them as regions of lesser humanity in dire need of elevation at the hand of European invaders. Here for the first time in the history of domination a discourse of justification emerges that previous chapters in the annals of conquests had simply done without. An important reading here will be Democrates Secundus, sive de iustis belli causis apud indios (ca. 1545), an Ur text in the history of racist discourse.

The course promises to provide students with the conceptual resources necessary for understanding racism as a way of knowing that shapes bodies of knowledge and incorporates tools of unknowing, a way of knowing that falls outside the structure of cognition which operates when percipients know other aspects of reality. Thinkers must abide by the rhetoric of disparagement to sustain a logic of maltreatment that becomes extreme othering. We will see, then, brilliant thinkers whose thought processes undergo a precipitous decline appear to decline when entertaining a racist thought. While engaging the Critical Race scholarship, the course locates its vision within the realm of intellectual history (which here differs from "history of ideas"). The course is designed to enable students to see racial thinking operating in a literary text even at times when an explicit racial remark is absent.

ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar: History and Theories of the Novel
W 12:45-3:30pm PM
Instructor: Erin Mackie
In the seminar we will examine various solutions to a set of questions relevant to the literary history of the novel: What can the historian of the novel take as the object of study? What relations does the novel bear to other fictional and non-fictional prose narratives and to other genres and modes such as drama and satire? Especially, how do novels distinguish themselves from and/or appropriate these other genres? What relations do novels bear to other characteristic developments of the modern age such as the sex/gender system, psychic interiority, class, nation, race and ethnicity and the reflexive temporal self-consciousness that characterizes this epoch? How has the genre, novel, changed with cultural-historical shifts? Alongside representative theorists of the novel we will read representative novels. I am very eager to hear the interests and thoughts of those who would like to join this seminar before I set the texts and the syllabus; please contact me at esmackie@syr.edu.

ENG 799-1 MFA Essay Seminar
F 9:30-12:20 PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
Each student will write an essay of approximately five thousand words. The essay will address a specific aspect of a major writers formal technique. 

Fall 2016

ENG 630-4 Graduate Pro-Seminar: Nineteenth-Century American Literature 1830-1870
Th 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Dorri Beam
In this survey, we will examine the urgent world-making project of American literature during the mid-nineteenth century, an age of utopian imaginings, radical politics, social upheaval, and national crisis. We will attend to the diversity and invention of the literary and material forms, social visions, and ontological modes that vied for legitimacy and contributed to the social ferment and literary experimentalism that typify the period. Such imaginings are also shot through with traversals of other geographies and temporalitiesthe world in American literaturethat belie the exclusions of the nation and its boundaries. The Civil War will serve as our pivot as we reflect on accreting tensions between new worlds and end worldstensions endemic to slavery and embodied in the war. Critical perspectives from the environmental humanities, new historiographies of abolitionism, the history of sexuality, material culture studies, and critical race theory will help us to flesh out the worlds of mid-nineteenth-century American literature.

Readings will be drawn from: Emersons and Fullers essays; Poes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Spoffords The Amber Gods; Nat Turners Confession; Thoreaus Walden, Melvilles The Piazza Tales; Stowes Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp; Delanys Blake, Or the Huts of Africa; Douglasss My Bondage and My Freedom; Whitmans 1860 Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinsons Civil War fascicles.

ENG 630-5 Graduate Pro-Seminar: U.S. Modernism
Th 9:30-12:15 PM
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to modernist fiction in the U.S. We will begin by contrasting two accounts of the modernist emphasis on difficult form. Lukacs condemns modernist investments in spatial organization and aesthetic experiment for refusing the writers political and ethical task of socio-historical engagement. But David Harvey has argued that the formal features of modernist texts confront as such a crisis of representation intrinsic to the experience of modernity, and thus engage the task of socio-historical engagement more fully and with more insight than writing in other genres. With these arguments in hand, we will read an array of texts associated with high modernism, the Harlem (and Chicago) Renaissance, the proletarian literature movement, and popular or middle-brow modernism. Areas of social change and social struggle that well be discussing in relation to these texts include: veteran disillusionment following World War I; the betrayed legacy of Emancipation and the fight for racial justice; the 1920s sexual revolution, gender emancipation and womens suffrage; capitalist expansion, labor radicalism, and the ethical role of the state; new animosities and cross-fertilizations between high art and mass culture; massive immigration, migration and the pro-nationalist bid to forge a distinctly American voice. Throughout, we will return to texts that depict wastelands and undergrounds, with an eye to understanding why these topoi became so important to twentieth-century writers as they grappled with the upheavals and inequities of U.S. modernity. Assigned texts are likely to include: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Stein, Tender Buttons; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Toomer, Cane; Larsen, Passing; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Olsen, Yonnondio; Wright, Native Son; and The Man Who Lived Underground; Hammett, Red Harvest; West, Miss Lonelyhearts; and Ellison, Invisible Man.

ENG 631-4: Critical Theory
MW 12:45-2:05 PM
Instructor: Don Morton
The course will be a rigorous inquiry into a range of contemporary theoretical discourses, drawing on texts from such zones (among others) as language and rhetorical analysis, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, performance theory, race theory, queer theory, historical materialism, postcolonial and globalization theory, . . . .   In addressing the fundamental question of what the term critical means in the phrase critical theory, the course will explore the significant differences between traditionalist criticism, deconstructive critique, Foucauldian genealogy as critique, and Marxist ideology critique. 

ENG 650-3 Forms: The Russian Short Story in Translation
Th 9:30-12:15 PM
Instructor: George Saunders
The Russian short story has had an indelible effect on the form, especially in America. In this class we will study stories from the great Russian masters (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Babel, Kharms, among others). Our emphasis will be on craft  the ways in which these writers attained their effects, approached via close readings of selected stories  but we will also look at the ways in which the politics and moral-ethical struggles of their times formed these writers and their works. We will also concern ourselves with the issues associated with translation itself:  What are we reading when we read a work in translation? Do translation issues affect some writers more than others, and why? The goal of the course is a heightened awareness of the role that language, form, structure, and narrative logic play in the creation of a work of literature.

ENG 650-5 Forms: Eastern European Poetry
Th 12:30-3:15 PM
Instructor: Chris Kennedy
We will read the work of "contemporary" Eastern European poets and consider their relationship to and influence on writers in this country. Writers we will read include Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa, and Zibigniew Herbert. There will be weekly writing assignments, consisting of brief response papers (creative or analytical).

ENG 650-6 Forms: Character
Tu 6:30-9:15 PM
Instructor: Jonathan Dee
A novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters, says Milan Kundera. So if character, as much as language, is the fiction writers medium, what is a character, exactly? How do you make one? How much raw, descriptive character-building material is enough, and how much is too much? Theyre supposed to be consistent and yet theyre supposed to change: how are you expected to pull that off? This course will look at various approaches across time, from the hyper-detailed to the minimal, including the practice of transforming actual historical figures into fictional characters (Nixon, Amelia Earhart, etc.) and the current vanguard of novelists who make little or no attempt to differentiate between their protagonists and themselves.

Texts include: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte; Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac; The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford; Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; The Trial, Franz Kafka; The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead; Jealousy and For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark; Jernigan, David Gates; The Hours, Michael Cunningham; How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti.

ENG 650-8 Forms: Common? / Uncommon?
Tu 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Michael Burkard
The texts for the course will be Becoming Animal and Study of the Sensuous, both texts by anthropologist David Abram, Selected Poems of Tomas Transtromer, Robert Haas editor, Clemente (a book of interviews with artist Federico Clemente), and Neruda & Vallejo, Robert Bly editor.  The concerns of the course will be a poetry that is not essentially of the self.  Can Abrams studies turn us to a star, a spiders web, a tree in Indonesia?  I want us to attempt to make a bridge between our text readings and a poetry of politic  an elephant murdered for his tusks, a child hiding in a war-torn city, a landscape fracked to death, environmental carnage we wreak upon the planet  we will also view overtly political films such as Nostalgia for the Light.  Each week one or two students will do presentations on our readings for that week, and in some cases films will be previewed by one or two students before the films are introduced by these students the following week.  Each week each student will write a creative response to our readings.  I will expect each student to thoroughly engage in our weekly class discussions.  The classes will be the basis for our ongoing conversation

ENG 650-9 Forms: Literary Hoodoo and the Sacred Text
Th 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Magic and magical realism, afrofuturism and the oral tradition in African American literature through the works of Reed, Morrison, Wideman, Jones, Naylor, Chamoiseau, LaValle, Hairston, others.

ENG 715-2: First Year Poetry Workshop
Tu 12:30-3:15 PM
Instructor: Chris Kennedy
Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and critique one anothers poems in class with the ultimate goal of learning how to become better writers and readers of poetry. Admission is strictly limited to first year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.

ENG 716-2: Second Year Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:15 PM
Instructor: Bruce Smith
Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one free poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week.  The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to each individual.  Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer.  This term Ill begin class with what I call, an exemplary poet  avoiding the more proscriptive term essential.  Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717-2: First Year Fiction Workshop
Tu 9:30-12:15 PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers 
Workshop format. Craft. Production. Vision.

ENG 718-2: Second Year Fiction Workshop
F 9:30-12:15 PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
This course is the required workshop for students in the second year of the MFA Program in Fiction.

ENG 719-1: Third Year Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: Michael Burkard
We will meet in class and conferences to discuss your poems.  I can provide prompts if needed.  I imagine we would also have some discussion of directions of concern for thesis compilation in the spring semester of 2017.

ENG 721-1 Third-Year Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: George Saunders
In this class (which is required of, and restricted to, third-year MFA fiction students) students will deepen their fictive practice by reading and critiquing the work of their peers. Although we will go where this takes us, this class often concerns a refinement of the students practice of editing and revision, via close-reading.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Game Studies
Tu 9:30 AM-12:15 PM
Film Screening Tu 7:00-9:45 PM
Instructor: Chris Hanson
Johan Huizinga opens his influential work Homo Ludens with the claim that play is older than culture. Such a claim is certainly a contentious one, but it points to broader questions about the relationships between play, games, and culture. What are the roles of games and play in contemporary culture and how are these roles shifting? In late 2013, game designer and theorist Eric Zimmerman boldlyand problematicallydeclared that we now inhabit the dawn of the Ludic Century. He argues that while the moving image has become a dominant mode of present-day cultural expression, linear media will increasingly be replaced by modular and participatory experiences facilitated by customizable game-like systems in the coming century. In such a cultural environment, Zimmerman believes that being merely media- and systems-literate will no longer suffice as the ability to analyze, evaluate, and interpret these emergent game-like systems will be far more valuable.

While any number of critiques might be made of Zimmermans manifesto, his observations resonate with the recent and ongoing emergence of game studies within the academy and the industry. Just as digital games have grown profoundly more complex in the last fifty years, theoretical and critical approaches to digital games have proliferated and diversified, moving well past early debates between narratology and ludology. Of course, the study of games predates the digital age, and in this course we will engage with the foundational texts which serve as precursors to the contemporary critical approaches which we will also explore. We will trace the historical development of game studies as a discipline, while also examining both traditional and digital games as case studies for our critical consideration. In addition to ergodic texts, we will also study screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies. Attendance at weekly screenings is a required component of this course.

ENG 730-5 Graduate Seminar: History of the Book
M 9:30 AM-12:15 PM
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
This course is designed as an introduction to the field known most commonly as the history of the book. We will investigate what difference it makes to consider the materiality of a text when interpreting it. How do a texts material form and the modes of its production, circulation and reception affect our sense of its content? Over the course of the term, this question will lead us to consider topics including: manuscript versus print culture; printing technologies; models of the book trade; writers, publishers and readers as key nodes in the circulation of print; illustration, serialization, copyright, censorship, bestsellers, marketing and the digital book.

We will explore these and other issues through content drawn from the medieval to the modern period, focusing primarily on Britain and the Americas, examining a series of exemplary moments, authors, texts and genres with relevance for book history studies. The typical pattern for our weekly reading will involve one focal primary text and one or more secondary readings that illuminate issues of materiality germane to the primary work, but also applicable more broadly. This course will make use of the resources available at Bird Librarys Special Collections, and you will be required to do some archival work there, on materials of your choosing, for a short mid-term paper. There will also be a seminar-length paper due at the end of the term, in which you will bring to bear the theory and methods of the history of the book on materials of your choosing. The course will therefore be appropriate for students specializing in any field within literary or media studies, because the critical lens of materiality can complement any given content. Due to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of book history, students from other disciplines are also welcome.

ENG 730-6 Graduate Seminar: Affect and Emotion in Nineteenth-Century Literature
MW 2:15-3:35 PM
Instructor: Claudia Klaver

What is the affective work of different genres of nineteenth-century literature?  What are the dominant, residual, and emergent affective economies of Victorian culture?  How are major effects such as shame and happiness organized differently in the nineteenth-century than in the early twenty-first century? How do nineteenth and twentieth-century theorists think about literature as a vehicle for teaching and experiencing sympathy?  These are some of the questions that will organize this seminar.  The course will be divided into topical rather than historical sections in order to enable us to better pursue these lines of inquiry.

The first major section will examine the novel as a vehicle for the readers sympathetic identification with characters and situations portrayed in the novel.  Secondary readings will range from the cognitive scientific approaches of Lisa Zunshine and Blakey Vermeule, to the moral philosophical account of Martha Nussbaum, to the more literary historical analyses of Rae Greiner, Adela Pinch, Rachel Ablow, Audre Jaffe, and Rebecca Mitchell.   These texts will provide lens though which to analyze novels by Austen, Dickens, and Eliot as well as to test these different theorizations of feeling with and for fictional characters in realist fiction.

The second major section of the course will follow the line of affect theory threaded by Deleuze, Massumi, Sedgwick, Tompkins, Berlant, Ahmed, and Ngai to explore the ways texts exert their affective forces on readers through other mediums than sympathetic identification.  While many of these theorists focus the contemporary affective situations of twenty-first century neoliberalism rather than the imperial, liberal modernity of nineteenth-century Britain, this gap will provide an ideal space for the class to explore together how to adapt and rethink these models to gain insight into the affective world of Queen Victorias Britain. 

In the courses third section, we will turn to several specific sites of emotional and/or affective intensity in Victorian Britain, drawing from a range of literary historical and critical accounts and psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories to explore grief and mourning, shame and humiliation, romantic love, and perhaps hatred or sadness/melancholia.  In both this and the previous section, the readings will draw on a range of literary material.  For example, exploring grief and mourning, we will read sections of Tennysons In Memoriam and Margaret Oliphants Autobiography.  We will examine shame and humiliation through Dickenss Great Expectation and his autobiographical fragment on working in the blacking factory, the first chapter of Trollopes Autobiography, and probably sections from Tom Browns School Days.

Spring 2016

ENG 615-2 Open Poetry WorkshopM 3:45-6:30 PMInstructor: Michael Burkard

This course is open to students in the MFA Creative Writing Program. Students in other disciplines may apply after having a conference with me. In a few cases, undergraduates are admitted. I would require a conference before registration, and samples of writing in conference, and, possibly, a recommendation from a faculty member.

There will be weekly discussions of student writing. Outside reading will be assigned each week. A few films and/or art videos and/or poetry readings for view may also be presented. Experimentation and revision will be encouraged. This is a discussion course, and much emphasis will be placed upon prepared and cogent commentary from students on any writing we read or any of the viewings/readings we study.

ENG 617-1 Open Fiction WorkshopF 10:30-1:35 PMInstructor: STAFF

This workshop is open to all graduate students interested in writing fiction (students not matriculated in the MFA Program need my permission to register, and MFA students have priority). Participants submit, read, and critique short stories or novel excerpts. Student work will be the focus of the class; outside reading, pertinent to discussion, may occasionally be assigned.

ENG 630-1 Graduate Pro-Seminar: What Was Modernism?M 3:45-6:30 PMInstructor: Chris Forster

The art and literature of the first half of the twentieth century is frequently called modernist. It is a term that exists in awkward (and sometimes productive) tension with other key terms: the avant-garde, for instance, or postmodernism. This class seeks to introduce and understand that term, and the debates which surround it, by reading a series of key texts from the period alongside important criticism. No prior familiarity with modernism is necessary. Course readings will include work across genres by figures including W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Mina Loy, and others. Alongside these works we will read a diverse range of the major critics of the period, from a range of theoretical perspectives. Our goal will be to both understand the works we read, but also to understand the shifting contours and constructions of modernism as a key, but contested, term of literary history. Course work will include a seminar presentation, and a range of writing assignments (including a book review, a conference abstract, and a conference-length paper).

ENG 630-2 Graduate Pro-Seminar: Travel, Translation, and PilgrimageTu 3:30-6:15 PMInstructor: Ken Frieden

From the Crusades to contemporary tourism, travel has been a prominent motif in religious literature and in popular culture. We will look at accounts of exploration, mercantile travel, and pilgrimage narratives, primarily by Jewish travelers and authors. Most claim authenticity, although the line between fact and fiction is not always easy to determine. Travel narratives have played a central role in literary and religious history; traditionally, the pilgrimage and secular tourism challenge the Zion-centered worldview. In another genre and imaginative geography, folk tales present fantastic voyages that suggest meanings on an allegorical level.

As many of the narratives we will read were not written in English, for much of the semester we will work with translations. Consequently, the course will also refer to pertinent issues in translation studies. There is a natural connection between exploration and translation, because as George Steiner wrote, The translator invades, extracts, and brings home.

ENG 650-1 Forms: The RealTu 6:30-9:50 PMInstructor: Jonathan Dee

What we talk about when we talk about realism in fiction is usually very narrowly defined; the history of the novel has always been furthered by formal innovations and disruptions that might best be appreciated not as avant-garde experiments but as attempts to update and refine the representation, on the page, of what it feels like to live. That feeling, of course, changes in many ways across eras and across cultures: as Milan Kundera wrote, Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie? We will read a broad and evolving survey of such answers, up to the present day.

ENG 650-2 Forms: Teaching Creative Writing & Photography in the CommunityW 12:30-3:15 PMInstructor: Michael Burkard

My role as a writer/instructor in this course is to facilitate discussion and share my experience as a writer who has worked with many different community populations over the last two decades. My role is also to prepare you for various writing exercises that you could use in visiting these venues. I will provide you with material assignments each weekideally these will clarify approaches that could become successful exercises. The in-class writing assignments will imitate or prefigure what/how we might work with similar assignments at the community site.

The course is a collaborative experience. A course taught by Stephen Mahan, Literacy, Photography and the Community, will meet with this course. No previous photography experience is necessary. Our writing ideas and assignments will intersect with photographic ideas and assignments. Grading for the course will be determined by the quality of your participation in our class meetings and in the community venues. Undergraduates may enroll in this course with the instructor's permission. Meets with TRM 610

ENG 650-3 Forms: VisionTu 3:30-6:15 PMInstructor: Brooks Haxton

This course will explore poems regarded as visionary in their conception and poems preoccupied with the representation of visual perception.  Some of the poets whose work we will analyze will include: Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Marianne Moore, W.C. Williams, Eliot, H.D., Roethke, Bishop, Valentine, Simic, and Brigit Kelly, among others. Writing assignments will include imitations of these writers and pieces that use these writers as a springboard. Prose or verse will be fine for the assignments. We will read a few works in translation as well as writers of English.

ENG 650-4 Forms: The Unhinged NarratorTh 3:30-6:15 PMInstructor: STAFF

This course will focus on literature narrated by characters who have become unhinged from the norms of society. They may stand apart from the mainstream because of willful eccentricity, madness, prejudice, even social disgrace, but in each case their alienation provides them with a unique perspective, one that allows the reader to see the world they describe without the dulling lens of convention. We will explore what authors might gain from narrating their works from an "outsider" perspective, as well as study how the peculiar forms and structures of these books reflect the modernist impulse in literature. Over the course of the semester, students will use these texts as a springboard for creating their own creative and critical work. Texts will include works by Knut Hamsun, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Rhys, Donald Antrim, Joy Williams, Robert Walser, Claudia Rankine, Ben Lerner, Richard Yates, Denis Johnson, J.M. Coetzee and Octavia Butler.

ENG 650-5 Forms: Voice in Contemporary American PoetryTu 12:30-3:20 PMInstructor: Chris Kennedy

We will read the work of several poets to provide the basis for a discussion of voice in Contemporary American Poetry. Some poets we will read include Frank Stanford, Terrance Hayes, Russell Edson, Alice Fulton, Ben Mirov, and Jennifer Chang. Students will be required to turn in weekly response papers (creative or analytical) that address or are inspired by the voices in the poems read for that week.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Visual Cultures of WitnessingTu 12:30-3:15 PMFilm Screening Tu 7:00-9:45 PMInstructor: Roger Hallas

This seminar explores how 20th and 21st century visual cultures have engaged in various mediated acts of witnessing. The testimonial act of bearing witness to traumatic experience has become a privileged and omnipresent mode of communication over the last century. While the past hundred years have produced an incredible global proliferation of visual technologies, the same period also incorporated a catalog of historical traumas which have pushed the very limits of these representational technologies, from World War I to the Holocaust to climate change. Focusing on camera-based media (film, video, photography) from a variety of historical and geographical contexts (including the Holocaust, the AIDS pandemic, Israel/Palestine, Darfur and Nicaragua) this course will approach the task of conceptualizing the dynamics of witnessing within visual culture through the three interdisciplinary fields that have most shaped this concept: trauma theory, human rights discourse and visual studies. A number of fundamental questions shall guide us through this investigation:  What function should visual representation serve in the face of unbearable trauma and injustice?  How does the global circulation of images as witness shape the meanings they may produce?  How do individual testimonies mediate collective histories?  What forms of visual evidence count in producing the truth of an historical event?  What are the implications of ubiquitous visual surveillance on the very idea of the camera witness? The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.

ENG 730-2 Graduate Seminar: Postwar U.S. FictionTh 9:30-12:15 AMInstructor: Susan Edmunds

In this seminar, we will read postwar U.S. novels and short stories from the late forties to the present. We will interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical lens, with particular emphasis placed on investigating the interconnections between literary form and social change. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read literary texts associated with or influenced by the counterculture , the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Second Wave Feminism, and the late twentieth-century triumph of U.S. consumerism. I am still working on the final booklist for this course. Authors are likely to include James Baldwin, Hisaye Yamamoto, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Herr, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Chang-Rae Lee, David Foster Wallace, and Junot Diaz.

ENG 730-3 Graduate Seminar: HamletTu 9:30-12:15 PMInstructor: Dympna Callaghan

There are three extant versions of Hamlet: the First Quarto (known as Q1) the Second Quarto (known as Q 2) and the Folio text (known as F), and this fact arguably constitutes the most perplexing mystery in all of English Literature.  Q1 is the earliest version of the play, and yet some (though not all) of its language is far from anything we associate with Shakespeare: To be or not to be.  Aye theres the point. Q1, however, when read in tandem with the other texts, reveals a great deal about both Shakespeares language and his writing practices.  In this course, we will read the three extant versions of Hamlet with a focus on the plays languageboth its poetry and its prose.  We will pay minute attention to the text even as we consider some of the overarching issues of the play, including Hamlets relationship to other writing, especially to the prose of Thomas Nashe, to the poetry of Christopher Marlowe, as well as to early modern translations of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid.  

The course will be of particular interest to those working on poetry or on prose in any period.

ENG 799-1 MFA Essay SeminarM 9:30-12:15 PMInstructor: Arthur Flowers JrEach student will write an essay of approximately five thousand words.  The essay will address a specific aspect of a major writers formal technique. 

Fall 2015

ENG 630-1 Graduate Pro-Seminar: Twentieth-Century American Poetry
M 9:30 AM-12:20 PM
Instructor: Harvey Teres

This course will survey some of the most accomplished and influential poets of the past century, including Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank OHara, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Alan Dugan, Amiri Baraka, Charles Simic, Anthony Hecht, and Louise Gluck.  Attention will be paid to the craft of poetry, to the private and public voices in American poetry, to American poetrys effect on readers individually and collectively, and to poetrys role within American society as a whole.  Theodor Adornos  Lyric Poetry and Society, Robert Pinskys Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry, Joan Rubins Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, Scholes and Wulfmans Modernism in the Magazines, and James Longenbachs The Resistance to Poetry will help frame the courses broader concerns. 

ENG 630-3 Graduate Pro-Seminar: Theories of New Media
Tu 12:30-3:15 PM
Film Screening: Tu 6:30-9:15 PM
Instructor: Chris Hanson

As digital technologies play an increasingly central role in the production and experience of media texts, historical separations between individual media forms and practices are ever more prone to slippage and redefinition. If we watch a film on a tablet or phone, is it still truly cinema if it is not light projected through a celluloid print watched in a darkened theater?  While we may still claim that we watched a film on a digital device, it is evident that our conception of cinema has been historically defined, the product of a constellation of social, industrial, political, and cultural practices. As we will examine in this seminar, traditional theoretical approaches to media forms are often heavily invested in the role of medium specificitythat is, articulating the precise material properties and the associated practices which separate one medium from another. The shift to the digital has challenged such theoretical modes, and a consideration of the convergent properties of digital media will inform our examination of theoretical approaches to new media. We will examine emergent media forms and practices in conjunction with their associated conceptions and considerations, tracing their historical lineages while simultaneously charting their theoretical implications.

Film screenings are required.

ENG 631-3 Critical Theory
Tu 3:30-6:20 PM
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

Critical Theory offers a shared experience for all first year MA and PhD students in English and is intended to provide an introduction to a range of metacritical concepts, debates, and protocolsthat is, the underwriting assumptions (varied and contradictory as these may be)on which the discipline currently relies.  Given this extravagant goal, it is worth noting what this course will not do so that you can adjust your expectations accordingly: it will not answer every question you have about theory; it will not tell you everything you need to know to succeed in the profession; indeed, it will not give you any pat solutions at all.  What it will do is introduce you to the modes of questioning that are necessary to any critical practice.  No matter how much (or little) theory you have already read, this professional orientation will direct your thinking toward English as a discipline, and how to work within it self-consciously and critically.   In other words, we will explore ways of reading theoretical and critical texts, examine how critical questions have been and are now generated in English, and consider why new critical practices emerge (or fail to do so). 

ENG 650-1 Forms: History, Research, and Imagination
Tu 9:30 AM-12:20 PM
Instructor: Dana Spiotta

We will be reading novels and fiction that use history as part of their construct.  We will read some (so-called) historical fiction,  and examine the challenges, strategies, and pitfalls of writing about past time periods.  We also will read fiction that employs real-life historical figures as characters, and we will explore what works and what doesn't.  What is the negotiation between what you can imagine and what you must research? We will examine how various writers have approached the ethical, technical, and formal concerns of such fictions.

ENG 650-3 Forms: The Short Novel
Th 9:30 AM- 12:20 PM
Instructor: George Saunders

Well be reading short novels (i.e., under 150 pages) from a variety of writers (Tolstoy, Bolano, Kerouac) from a craft perspective, but especially with the idea of using the short novel as a way of understanding the longer novel.  What can we learn about plot, pacing, and character development by close study of this form?  Is it valid to think of the short novel as a bridge between the short story and the novel proper?  By focusing on this relatively modest length, can we avoid some common novel-writing errors, and come closer to understanding the essence of storytelling? 

ENG 650-5 Forms: Art of Memoir: Revelations from Your Dang Life
Th 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Mary Karr

Well read and discuss eleven memoirs, plus excerpts of a few others.  Work for the semester will consist of reading and being engaged with the books.

Assignments will include:  small creative projects or research exercises(one to two pages)  sprinkled through the semester; a presentation on one of the writers; and a paper. The paper may be a critical review, which would be excellent practice for the second-year paper, or a personal memoir.  The purpose of the class is to have a revelation: prepare.  Readings may include: St. Augustine, Confessions; Richard Wright American Hunger; McCarthy, Memories of  Catholic Girlhood; Primo Levy, Survival at Auschwitz; Nabokov, Speak, Memory; Conroy Stop-Time; Michael Herr Dispatches; Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior; Crews, Childhood: Biography of a Place; Wolff, This Boys Life; Batuman, The Possessed

ENG 650-6 Forms: Dime Store Alchemy
W 9:30 AM - 12:20 PM
Instructor: Michael Burkard

Charles Simics Dime Store Alchemy is a text devoted to American artist Joseph Cornell.  We will us his text as a model for discussion for creating a similar homage to an artist each student will choose to give written tribute to.  The other aspect of the course will focus on creating musical relationships to poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and a few other poets.  These latter studies may be in the form of creating melodies or working in collaboration to set pieces to music.

ENG 650-7 Forms: Art and Craft of Poetry
Tu 6:30-9:15 PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

The premise of this course is that a piece of writing is a deliberate construction that uses what the writer has learned from others to generate an intense experience in the reader.  We will spend several weeks on various rhythmic traditions and stanza patterns, not because everyone should use these, but because any writer who gets the feel for these patterns has better access to most of the best poetry written in English, and greater freedom in the act of composition. Other topics will include image, diction, tone, point of view, and argument.  Weekly handouts will describe principles to be studied in poems assigned as reading, and in that week's writing assignment.  Prose writers as well as poets will find this course useful.

ENG 715-2 First Year Poetry Workshop
Tu 12:30-3:15 PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis.  Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop.  Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.

ENG 716-2 Second Year Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:20 PM
Instructor: Bruce Smith

Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one free poem per week to push back against the world with the imagination.  The emphasis will be both on the craftthe   language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imaginationthe vision that is unique to each individual.  Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop-style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as models or targets for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer.  This term Ill begin class with what I call, an exemplary poetavoiding the more prescriptive term essential.  Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717-2 First Year Fiction Workshop
F 9:30 AM-12:20 PM
Instructor: TBA

This course is the workshop for students in the first year of the MFA Program in Fiction.

ENG 718-2 Second Year Fiction Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20 PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers

2nd Year Fiction.  Craft.  Production.  Vision.

ENG 719-1 Third Year Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: Mary Karr

This is an advanced course, so I assume youre all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to read, write, critique each others work with utmost care and respect, and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.  Its a class based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each others poems should be detailed and serious. Id also like for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. What I value first and foremost is clarity in communication and strong feeling (in the reader, NOT the writer).  If your notes are sketchy, cartoony, or in any way haphazard, I will ask for typed notes for each class.

Your citizenship in this class also demands kindness and courtesy to everyone in the room. Anyone unable to maintain civility wont finish the class.

ENG 721-1 Third Year Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: George Saunders

This course is restricted to, and required of, third-year students in the graduate fiction program.  We will be reading and critiquing student work, and examining published work for certain craft principles.  Each student will produce three or four original works of fiction, which will be distributed to and discussed by the class; each student is also expected to provide rigorous and detailed critiques and edits of the work of his or her peers.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Participatory Romanticism
Tu 9:30 AM-12:20 PM
Instructor: Mike Goode

This course will consist of case studies of the distinctive afterlives of four major Romantic-era cultural productions: William Blakes poetry, Walter Scotts Waverley Novels, Jane Austens novels, and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein.  We will be taking seriously the Deleuzean charge to study what texts do rather than what they mean, even as we challenge ourselves to try to understand the conditions of possibility (textual, cultural, economic, intellectual, technological) whereby they came to do the things they do.  In each case we will be concentrating on a different mode of textual doing, or, less opaquely, a different kind of remediation or audience participation in the life of the text to which the text seems somehow to have made itself distinctly available.  Thus, in the case of Blakes poetry, we will be thinking about viral dissemination, or going viral, as a form of remediation that his poetry both theorizes and enacts; with Scotts historical novels, reenacting and living history as forms of initiatory knowing that his novels both theorize and enact; with Austens novels, rewriting as a fan practice that the novels anticipate and encourage; and with Shelleys Frankenstein, theatrical adaptation as a mode of remediation that the novel simultaneously lends itself to and is actually about.  As we look at texts as sets of meaningful potential that get unlocked or even created with use, we will be asking ourselves to what extent it makes sense to look at what a text does in one time and place in order to think about what it did or could have been doing in another.  To the extent that we can credit any of these texts with being responsible for some of the distinctive modes whereby people have participated in making them do things, we will also try to read them as texts that in fact theorize participating and doing.

ENG 730-3 Graduate Seminar: Victorian Politics and Literature
W 5:15-8:00 PM
Instructor: Kevin Morrison

This seminar will explore the ideological assumptions of the liberal political and literary tradition in Victorian England. Beginning with a brief introduction to liberal forebears such as the philosophers John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, we will concentrate on the political fiction of the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout the semester, we will attempt to differentiate among liberalism as a theory that construes human subjectivity as rationally motivated; as a worldview, dating back to the Tudor era, that places emphasis on individual property rights and religious toleration; and as a political party, formed in the 1850s, that supported laissez-faire economic policies, social reforms, and minimizing the authority and influence of the monarchy and the Church of England. Our readings may include several novels by Anthony Trollope (Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Dukes Children), whose Palliser series takes parliamentary politics as its focus; George Eliots Felix Holt, the Radical, written just after a major extension of the franchise in 1867 but looking back to the Great Reform Act of 1832; and George Merediths Beauchamps Career, which has been called one of the finest political novels in English. To contextualize these works, we will also read Matthew Arnolds Culture and Anarchy; Walter Bagehots The English Constitution; selections from J. S. Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen, and John Morley; speeches by William Gladstone; and modern theorizations of liberal practice in this era (by Elaine Hadley, Uday Mehta, and Catherine Gallagher, among others).

ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar: Comparative U.S. Minority Literatures and Cultures
Th 12:30-3:20 PM
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey

This course will offer an introduction to the study of minority experiences within U.S. national as well as transnational contexts. We will focus on key questions that interrogate the ways in which U.S. minority formations, extending to the ethnic, racial, gendered, sexual, and religious, intersect with and inform performances of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. In addressing these questions, we will situate such formations across a long historical continuum including, for example, constructions of minority citizenships in the nineteenth century up until post-9/11 Islamophobic imaginings of the terrorist body. Such intersections will be examined through theoretical, critical, and literary lenses, which will help us unpack some of the confluences and divergences among various minority experiences in the U.S.

The framework of our analysis will not be restricted to a comparative model entrenched in the constructs of similarity and difference, however, but will integrate a focus on the relational by looking at the ways in which histories of racism, sexism, religious bias, and national exceptionalism draw on each other, particularly as they are shaped by dominant racist, imperialist, patriarchal, and colonialist logics. In doing so, it becomes important to investigate these minority positionalities not only within the specific context of the U.S. nation-state but also within a transnational framework to examine how decolonization, neocolonialism, and military conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have shaped and continue to shape our understanding of racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, and national identity formations.

In questioning such formations, we will be looking at alternative anti-hegemonic narratives that defy the rigid monitoring and categorization of U.S. identities. Such narratives emanate, for instance, from cross-ethnic and cross-racial coalitions, including for instance feminist critiques of hegemonic constructions of race, sexuality, and ethnicity, as well as narratives that explore the role that political activism and artistic expression play in altering dominant modes of knowledge production about national, racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered identities.