Fall 2019

ENG 105 M001 Introduction to Creative Writing
M/W 2:15-3:35 PM
Instructor: Grzecki
This course is designed to introduce the student to three types of creative writing: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The course will focus on inspiration (why write a poem or a story or an essay?) as well as the techniques of evocative, compelling writing across all literary genres (e.g. point of view, concrete detail, lyricism, image, metaphor, simile, voice, tone, structure, dialogue, and characterization). Students will read and analyze work by authors from various traditions and produce creative work in each genre. ETS 105 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry.

ENG 107 M001 Living Writers
W 3:45-6:30 PM

ENG 107- M002 through M010
W 3:45-6:30 PM
Instructor: Staff
This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers’ work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers. The first class meets in Gifford Auditorium.

ENG 114 M001 British Literature, 1789-present
T/TH 2:00- 3:20 PM
Instructor: Michael Goode
Few nations in the world have changed more dramatically over the past 250 years than Great Britain, and these changes are evident throughout its literature. This course moves briskly through just over two centuries of Britain’s literary history, covering the art and culture of four distinct periods: Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-War/Postmodern/Postcolonial. Historical topics will include: slavery; political revolution; the industrial revolution; the Enlightenment; urbanization; evolution; religion; social reform movements; the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; nationalism; imperialism; colonialism and its aftermath; the World Wars; postmodernism; the politics of choosing to write in English; Brexit; and the history of literary forms. Readings will include novels, poems, plays, and song lyrics by writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Sam Selvon, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Johnny Rotten, Bob Marley, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith. Assignments will include three five-page papers and a final examination.

ENG 119 M002 US Fiction 1940-2015
T/TH 9:30- 10:50 AM
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
Course Description: This course offers a survey of U.S. fiction, poetry, literary journalism and autobiographical writing dating from the late 1940s through the early 2000s. We will interpret assigned literary texts through a sociohistorical lens, and place particular emphasis on investigating the interconnections between literary form and social change. After an initial survey of fiction and autobiographical prose written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read texts associated with or influenced by the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts Movements, Second Wave Feminism, and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Readings will include Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, as well as shorter texts by Bernard Malamud, Hisaye Yamamoto. James Baldwin, Michael Herr, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Cade Bambara, Grace Paley, Sergio Troncoso, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

ENG 119 M003 Topics in US Literature and History: Experimental & Emerging Genres 1980-Present
MW 3:45- 5:05 PM
Instructor: John Colasacco
Because all writing is experimental, and no work considered valuable and excellent fails to test, reconfigure, or broaden the language, a course devoted to the recent history of experimental and emerging genres will need to examine & seek new patterns of expression in a range of exemplary texts and cultural artifacts, with emphasis on close reading practices, attention to rhetorical/historical contexts, and strategies for effective response/critique. In particular, the past forty years will frame our study of the rapidly expanding diversity of voices and forms that lead to our current understandings of literary art. Historically, experimentalism sharpens under regressive regimes; in this class, student writers committed to the idea that the stories that need to be written are the ones that can’t be told will find a through-line to their ambitious forbears, and will better understand how to read and create the texts that define literary/American history.

ENG 121 M001 Introduction to Shakespeare
M/W 11:40-12:35 PM
Discussion Section M002 F 10:35am-11:30am
Discussion Section M003 F 10:35am-11:30am
Discussion Section M004 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Discussion Section M005 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
This course offers an introduction to Shakespeare’s worlds through attentive study of a selection of plays that will include examples of each of the dramatic genres: history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. These plays, and the approaches we will take to them, have been chosen to challenge the interpretive models by which you may have been introduced to Shakespeare in the past. We will move beyond the little world of man and the wheel of fortune to consider Shakespeare's unexpected representations of historical norms and enormities, cultural codes and cultural change, modes of governance, styles of comportment, and varieties of belief. Even while we consider the cultural import of reading Shakespeare in (and outside) of the Western canon, our discussions will constantly return to a central problem: What does it mean to read Shakespeare when Shakespeare wrote plays to be played upon a stage?

ENG 122 M001 Introduction to the Novel
M/W 3:45-5:05 PM
Instructor: Adam Kozaczka
It has been argued that we encounter the world and define ourselves according to the ways of knowing learned from reading novels: the characters we know develop, the plots we set into motion reach their climaxes, and we divide our lives into chapters. This course studies the development of the novel as a literary form and examines how its structures and functions organize lived experience along a range of formal and ideological paradigms. How do novels define crime and transgression? How do they script marriage and idealize love? How do they construct character according to identity metrics like gender, sexuality, class, or race? We will encounter genres such as the Gothic novel, the realist novel, the magical realist novel, the novel of manners, the historical novel, and the crime novel. In the process, we will read Anglophone novels by authors from Britain, the United States, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

ENG 145 M001 Reading Popular Culture
T/TH 5:00-6:20 PM
Instructor: Hillarie Curtis
What is mass culture and why did theorists fear its power over consumers? What is popular culture and how do fans interact with the texts they encounter? What are the differences between the two? In this course, we will explore both of these large questions by engaging with theories of mass culture and popular culture. Tracking themes of fantasy and fear, alongside various theoretical modes concerning identity, we will identify the dominant ideologies these texts communicate, the modes of resistance available to consumers, and the various forces within fan culture operating around popular culture texts. Specific case studies may include episodes of Russian Doll or Stranger Things, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, BBC’s Sherlock, Overwatch, Disney Cartoons, and other texts. Students are encouraged to bring their own knowledge and interests into class assignments and discussion. Participation during classroom discussions, several short critical essays, weekly Blackboard posts, possible quizzes, and a final creative project will all be vital components to the class. Since this course has no scheduled screening, students will be required to view film and television texts on their own time as part of the course study load.

ENG 145 M010 Reading Popular Culture
M/W 2:15-3:35 PM
Instructor: Simon Staples-Vangel
What place and value do mass forms of entertainment, literature, and art hold for our lives? How do these texts shape our communities and identities? In what ways do genres interact across different media forms? How do we interpret the self-referential style that is so common in contemporary popular texts? Throughout this course we will be exploring these and other questions. Potential texts may include literature, such as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and John Lewis’ March, as well as television shows or films, such as Jackass and Night of the Living Dead. Primary and secondary readings will sometimes be supplemented with episodes of TV shows or films, either screened in class or to watch on your own. Though we will certainly explore fiction and issues of genre and world-building, parts of the course will cover non-fiction and the more diverse forms of popular media that we are all familiar with. Students will become familiar with the major approaches in the field of cultural studies and develop a critical vocabulary to talk about the media that is interwoven with their everyday lives.

ENG 145 M011 Reading Popular Culture
T/TH 3:30- 4:50 PM
Instructor: Evan Hixon
This course will serve as an introduction to the critical examination of mass consumer culture, the industries which produce that culture and the communities which emerge around popular texts. In this course, students will explore what defines a text as being a part of ‘popular culture’ and in doing so, the course will attempt to articulate what these objects of mass consumption and the modes of their consumption might teach us about the culture that produced them and the individuals that consumed them. We will challenge the common assumption which places popular culture texts as disposable objects of consumption and we will interrogate both why we view mass consumption this way and why it is important to move past this dismissal of these texts. We will examine questions concerning what makes an object part of popular culture and what the function of delineations between various kinds of artistic consumption serve. Covering a wide range of pop culture texts, from early cinema exploitation films to contemporary television, the goal of this course will be to understand the relationship between text, industry and audience to understand popular culture and to produce a sustained interrogation of seemingly disposable cultural artifacts that permeate our culture.

ENG 151 M001 Interpretation of Poetry
M/W 2:15-3:35 PM
Instructor: Bruce Smith
The course will consist of discussions of poems from the various traditions of poetry: from anonymous ballads to spoken word poetry. I’m interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the intellect and the emotions, how it’s “the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart”. I’m interested too in what ways the poem provokes and challenges us, what gives the poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech.
Students will be asked to write 6 two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the text. Students may opt to write more papers (up to 8) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a poet and present the work of the poet in a 4 to 5-page paper. Emphasis in discussions is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.

ENG 153 M001 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 2:15-3:10pm
Discussion Section M003 F 10:35am-11:30am
Discussion Section M004 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Cultures tell many of their most profound truths in their fictions. We will look at the truths of fictions across a range of narrative forms, from the faery tale to the novel. As we read we will develop an awareness of the elements of fiction: plot, setting, character, point-of-view, style, and theme. We will pay attention not only to the story told but also to who is telling it and to whom, its narrator and its audience. And always, we will think about the values, or truths, promoted by the fiction and the ends it seeks to achieve in its telling.

ENG 154 M002 Interpretation of Film
M/W 9:30-10:25 AM
Screening M002 M 7pm-9:45pm
Discussion Section M003 TH 3:30pm-4:25pm
Discussion Section M004 TH 5pm-5:55pm
Discussion Section M005 F 9:30am-10:25am
Discussion Section M006 F 10:35am-11:30am
Instructor: Roger Hallas
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. Regarded as the quintessential medium of the last century, cinema has profoundly shaped the ways in which we see the world and understand our place within it. Focusing principally on classical and contemporary English-language cinema, we will investigate precisely how meaning is produced in cinema. The course integrates a close attention to the aesthetic elements of film with a wide-ranging exploration of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure in films. We shall also devote attention to the question of history: How may one interpret a film in relation to its historical context? Film history incorporates not only the films that have been produced over the past one hundred years, but also an understanding of how the practice of movie going has transformed over time. No prior film experience needed. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.

ENG 155 M002 Interpretation of Nonfiction
T/TH 3:30-4:50 PM
Instructor: Elizabeth Gleesing
This writing-intensive course introduces students to methods of interpreting nonfiction. While we often believe that nonfiction conveys truth and reality, in this course we will focus on how different texts construct their claims to truth and make arguments about reality. To do so, we will study and interrogate the rhetorical strategies authors employ, the relationship between form and content, the generic conventions of different nonfiction forms, and how texts construct both a speaking position and an audience. In addition to introducing students to ways to interpret nonfiction, this course aims to cover a wide variety of nonfiction media forms such as the essay, the graphic novel, autobiography, memoir, documentary video and digital documentary, reality television, photography, digital games, and digital nonfiction forms like listicles and memes. Potential course texts include Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, essays by Roxane Gay, Kiese Laymon, Errol Morris, George Orwell, and Susan Sontag, and visual and interactive works such as Cutthroat Capitalism, Do Not Track, and The Whiteness Project.

ENG 155 M003 Interpretation of Nonfiction
T/TH 5:00-6:20 PM
Instructor: Vicky Cheng
This course invites students to read and engage deeply with works of nonfiction through the practice of close reading, and a number of corresponding interpretive strategies. Throughout the semester, we will analyze various types of nonfiction, including genres such as the self-help text, investigative journalism, critical reviews, performance media, and multiple forms of online and audio-visual resources. Our textual materials will take shape around the following questions: how do we approach writing "based on the real" with such differing representations of what is, or can be considered real? How does the representation of "truth" take shape across different forms of media, and in specific social, cultural, and historic moments? Moreover, how do these understandings changed based on texts geared toward oneself, directed toward others, and toward understanding the world?

ENG 156 M001 Interpretation of Games
M/W 9:30-10:25 AM
Screening M001 W 7pm-9pm
Discussion Section M002 9:30am-10:25am
Discussion Section M003 10:35am-11:30am
Instructor: Chris Hanson
What are the roles of games and play in contemporary culture and how are these roles shifting? How do we “read” and interpret a game such as Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar, 2018) or Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)? How do we understand augmented reality games like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (Niantic, 2019) or virtual and mixed reality experiences made possible by technologies such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Microsoft HoloLens? How do games shape and change our interactions with the world and vice versa? This course will explore the evolving form of digital games, tracing their historical roots in traditional board games and other associated cultural modes of play to current and possible future iterations of video games such as esports. As we examine the development of games and their associated genres, we will investigate the historical, social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of individual games, and consider the relationship of games to other media forms and texts. We will explore the means by which we “read” and interpret games, linking these to the methods of reading and interpretation of other texts. This course serves as introduction to game studies and we will explore key critical frameworks and concepts for analyzing and understanding games and gameplay. In addition to games, we will also study screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies. Attendance at a weekly discussion sections and evening screenings is required.

ENG 174 M001 World Literature--Beginnings to 1000 C.E.
T/TH 11:00-12:20 PM
Instructor: Harvey Teres
Interested in becoming a more informed global citizen? This course will introduce you to global cultures as you read and discuss some of the greatest hits of literature from African, Asian, and western traditions. You will also strengthen your awareness of contexts for understanding English and American literature and culture. We will begin with some of the oldest literature in the world (Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems), and go on to read sections from the Hebrew Bible (the “Old” Testament), Sanskrit and Greek epics (The Ramayana and The Iliad), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucius and Zhuangzi), Greek and Roman lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus, Horace, and others), The New Testament, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Chinese Tang and Song dynasty poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and others), excerpts from the Qur’an, stories from 1001 Nights, and excerpts from The Tale of Genji by the Japanese woman writer Murasaki Shikibu, arguably the first novel ever written. Classes will alternate between lectures and discussions. You will have the option of either producing shorter response papers or traditional midterm and final interpretive essays.

ENG 181 M001 Class and Literary Texts
M/W 2:15-3:35 PM
Instructor: Sean M. Conrey
From William Blake’s descriptions of living conditions in early industrialized England, James Agee’s stories of tenant farmers during the Depression, to Ursula LeGuin’s’s speculative fiction focused on labor exploitation, questions of social class have long been a focus of novelists’, poets’ and essayists’ work. Parallel to the ways that writers affect and engage social class, critical readers can engage with the concepts of social class as they read. Concerned with the social divisions of privilege, wealth, power and status, class, like race and gender, is a social construction that is imposed on, and performed by, all of us as a way of stratifying and defining who we are. Though the restraints of social class readily subject us to the power of others, these restraints may also, when well understood, provide a springboard for advocacy and direct social action. This course provides an introduction to these concepts and exposes students to key texts in literature, film and other media as a way of fostering critical engagement and developing richer social responsibility through textual interpretation.

ENG 181 M002 Class and Literary Texts
M/W 3:45-5:05 PM
Instructor: Alexandra O’Connell
Representations of social class and its intimate entanglement with race, gender, and sexuality have long been expressed in American literature and film. Looking across a wide range of texts and forms, from novels to music videos, fairy tales to film, this course will examine the relationship between texts and the construction and experience of class as a historical, theoretical, and lived experience. We will consider a few central questions throughout the course: how do these texts reflect, mediate, and challenge the ways that class serves to create stratifications, identities, and affects revolving around power, privilege, and wealth? How do these different texts (dis)engage with the idea of the American dream? How does class intersect with ideas about masculinity, queerness, utopia or dystopia, spatiality, temporality, and genre? In what ways can we catch glimpses or modes of resistance or coalition building in these texts? Potential texts and authors may include Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Justin Torres, Alice Walker, The Florida Project, Paris is Burning, and Minding the Gap.

ENG 182 M001 Race and Literary Texts
M/W 3:45- 5:05 PM
Instructor: William Marple
What does it mean to say that race is a “social construct?” While it seems easy to recognize that the concept of race is largely a social category lacking a biological basis, it is not always quite so simple to account for the very real impact that race has on lived experience or the complex ways in which American culture and society have been largely defined by an obsession with phenotypical difference that dates back to the earliest days of the nation. The goal of this course is to explore literary and other cultural representations of race in the United States from the Revolution to the present. Through our engagement with these texts, we will attempt to interrogate the ways in which representations of racial categories emerge and re-emerge in particular cultural contexts, and to examine the ways in which these categories intersect with other categories like gender and sexuality. To address these questions, we will engage with a range of essays, short stories, poetry, and novels from such authors as Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Naylor.

ENG 182 M002 Race and Literary Texts
M/W 5:15 – 6:35 PM
Instructor: Deyasini Dasgupta
“What is race?” Is it based on biology? Is it, perhaps, a socially-constructed category? Does the categorization of race depend upon certain socio-cultural, economic, and/or political agendas? These questions mark the starting point of our discussions of race and literary texts in this class. Exploring the intersections between class, gender, sexuality and race, we will try to untangle some of the historical and lived experiences of racial identity. The aim of this class is to familiarize you with concepts of race, racism, racialized identities, and the problems of representation in literary texts, while providing opportunities for the development of your close-reading, writing, and critical analysis skills through the readings and assignments on the syllabus. To this end, our discussions will cover a wide range of time periods and literary genres, starting from early modern British drama like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to graphic novels like Spiegelman’s Maus, from 20th century American novels like Larsen’s Passing to pop-culture texts like Beyonce’s Lemonade album. Other readings may include Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Anna Deavere-Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and/or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

ENG 182 M004 Race and literary texts
M/W 5:15- 6:35 PM
Instructor: ATP
Construction and representation of race, especially as it affects the production and reception of literary and other cultural texts.

ENG 184 M002 Ethnicity and Literary Texts (meets with JSP 131, LIT 131, REL 131)
T/TH 11:00- 12:20 PM
Instructor: Kenneth Frieden
A wide-angle panorama of great stories written by Jewish authors, including Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, Elie Wiesel, and Yiddish women writers. Topics include narrative styles, parables, shtetl life in E. Europe, modernization, ideas of coherence and progress, radical textualism, love, marriage, and the Nazi genocide.

ENG 192 M001 Gender and Literary Texts
T/TH 2:00-3:20 PM
Instructor: ATP

Construction and representation of gender, especially as it affects the production and reception of literary and other cultural texts.

ENG 192 M002 Gender and Literary Texts (meets with WGS 192)
T/TH 9:30-10:50 AM
Instructor: Carol Fadda
In this course, students will read and analyze the portrayal and role of gender in a collection of literary texts, focusing on the ethnic, cultural, racial, sexual, historical, and creative implications of gender in relation to the texts' writers and characters. The selected literature includes novels, poems, essays, short stories, and graphic novel by the likes of Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Randa Jarrar, and David Henry Hwang. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that would reflect the students’ understanding of the issues raised in these texts. The main objective of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities as well as their analytical readings skills.

ENG 192 M003 Gender and Literary Texts
M/W 5:15-6:35 PM
Instructor: Wendy Jones
Construction and representation of gender, especially as it affects the production and reception of literary and other cultural texts.

ENG 192 M004 Gender and Literary Texts 
T/TH 2:00-3:20 PM 
Instructor: ATP 
Construction and representation of gender, especially as it affects the production and reception of literary and other cultural texts. 

ENG 215 M001 Introductory Poetry Workshop
M 12:45- 3:35 PM
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Weekly meetings of this workshop will focus on careful, constructive analysis of student poems, and on supplementary readings of other poetry. Besides writing a new original poem weekly, everyone will revise at least four poems on the basis of the workshop response. Reading and writing assignments will be handed out as we go. No prerequisites.

ENG 217 M001 Introductory Fiction Workshop
M 12:45-3:35 PM
Instructor: Jonathan Dee
This course will acquaint students with some of the fundamental rules, tricks, pleasures, etc. of storytelling in prose. We will spend the first four weeks reading and analyzing published stories and completing in-class writing exercises. The final ten weeks of class will be devoted to the reading and constructive critique of short stories written by you. Class attendance and participation are mandatory.

ENG 217 M003 Introductory Fiction Workshop
Tues 2:30- 3:20 PM
Instructor: Grzecki
This course will acquaint students with the fundamentals of writing fiction. Each week students will read and critique fiction written by their peers, as well as published work by modern writers. Students must come to class prepared and willing to discuss these stories. There will be in-class writing exercises and prompts which will lead students to create stories of their own. Class attendance and participation are mandatory.

ENG 242 M001 Reading and Interpretation
T/TH 12:30-1:50 PM
Instructor: Christopher Forster
Introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what we read but how we read it. We will learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading as well as demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways readers produce meaning. These meanings are produced both from the perspective of each reader’s unique experiences, and through various critical and theoretical approaches. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation, language, reading, authorship, subjectivity, ideology, culture, history and difference.

ENG 242 M003 Reading and Interpretation
M/W 12:45-2:05 PM
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it—and the difference that makes. Its goal, in other words, is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one mode or method of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways texts mean and the ways readers produce meaning. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation; author/ity, textuality, and reading; subjectivity; and culture and history.

ENG 303 M001 Reading and Writing Fiction
T/TH 9:30-10:50 AM
Instructor: Sarah Harwell
All creative disciplines depend on the study and imitation of the particular art form for mastery of their elements. In this course you will read and analyze a number of short stories in order to deepen your understanding of a variety of concerns in storytelling, including voice, style, description, story, and character. We will attempt to answer the question: how have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative texts? You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the texts studied. Possible authors include Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Edward P. Jones, Anton Chekhov, Donald Barthelme, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley and Raymond Carver.

ENG 304 M001 Reading and Writing Poetry
T/TH 12:30-1:50 PM
Instructor: Wojciechowski
T. S. Eliot said that minor poets borrow while great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating, and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate poems from canonical poets. We’ll examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we will read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We will deepen our understanding of a variety of poetic devices, such as diction, image, music, and metaphor. We will attend to each poet’s stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, as well as his or her techniques and habits. You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the poets studied.

ENG 305 M001 Critical Analysis: Introduction to Cultural Studies
M/W 12:45-2:05 PM
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
What does it mean to be a “cultural critic”? We will answer this question by studying literature alongside mass cultural forms such as advertising, television shows, and digital culture as well as everyday practices, such as shopping, reading the news, or going to the movies, to try to understand how we learn to make sense of a globalizing world and live a particular culture—or cultures—in the U.S. today. This course will provide you with basic concepts and strategies to be able to begin to call yourself a cultural critic—a thoughtful, questioning reader. By comparing and contrasting the strategies of literary texts with other cultural forms and practices in specific situations we can consider what makes literature particular as a mode of signification (meaning-making). We will also learn the importance of situating everything we study—and ourselves-- historically. As the course progresses, you should become a more sophisticated, creative and critical reader of the world in which we live as you learn to see how literature works in, with, and against that world.

ENG 310 M001 Literary Periods: British Modernism
T/TH 3:30-4:50 PM
Instructor: Christopher Forster
The first half of the twentieth century was an especially turbulent and provocative time in art and literature. It was a period that saw the height of British Imperial power, of the “Great War,” and of rapid technological change (including the emergence of film as a major cultural form). This environment produced the art and literature frequently called “modernist.”
This class will focus on this period (roughly, 1890-1930) and the authors and literature of the British Isles (and a little beyond). We will begin with late nineteenth-century precursors (including writers like Wilde, Mallarme, and Flaubert), before spending the majority of the semester reading some of the major works of the first half of the twentieth century (in both poetry and fiction, and maybe some film). We will end by looking at work forward to the consequences of modernism in our own moment.
Writers we will study might include Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, and others. Assignments include two major essays and shorter regular written responses.

ENG 311 M001 Love and Marriage in Renaissance England

T/TH 12:30-1:50 PM
Instructor: Wendy Jones
The Beatles once famously sang, "All you need is love." This course will take this phrase as a starting point for exploring "love" and its iterations in early modern England, especially as it relates to the institution of marriage. What was the status of "love" in the time of Shakespeare—a time when romantic ideals often conflicted with the realities of match-making? How was it defined, expressed, cultivated, destroyed? How did it manifest in marriage, and what were other acceptable (and transgressive) social sites of love? Texts under consideration will include literature and historical context from the time period as well as modern, scholarly research articles about this literature. Primary texts will likely include Shakespeare's Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter's Tale, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl, Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, as well as selections from a variety of poems by Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne. Assignments will include at least one short paper, an oral presentation, and one longer research paper. Pre-1900 course. This course will meet the Shakespeare requirement for English Education Majors.

ENG 313 M001 Race and Literary Periods before 1900: American Beginnings
M/W 3:45-5:05 PM
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
When, where and with what does “American literature” begin? At stake in this question are our basic assumptions about what American-ness is, as well as our basic assumptions about what literature is. Who gets to be called an “American” and what counts as “literature”? Should Native American oral stories be part of the canon of American literature? How about the letters from Spanish and French explorers describing the Americas and its peoples? How about William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which takes place on an island obviously inspired by the New World and which voices cutting critiques of colonization through its indigenous character Caliban? This class will place traditionally revered accounts of the British settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay into the context of a more expansively defined “early America,” encompassing Native America, the colonial Americas (Spanish, French, British and Dutch), and the writers in Europe who were responding to the idea of the New World (new to them, at least).

ENG 315 M001 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: The Holocaust in American Literature (meets w/JSP 300)
T/TH 2:00-3:20 PM
Instructor: Harvey Teres
If you believe awareness of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide should be a vital part of your education, this course is for you. We will explore the moral, religious, and artistic challenges faced by American writers who have represented the Holocaust and its aftermath in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Students will begin by reading a historical account of the Holocaust, followed by efforts to link the Holocaust to trauma studies, slavery, and other examples of genocide. We will spend the rest of the semester reading literary representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Texts will include Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” and The Ghost Writer; Bernard Malamud’s “The Last Mohican” and “Lady of the Lake”; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” “The Shawl,” and “Rosa”; Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II; Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution; Nathan Englander’s “The Tumblers”; and selected poetry by Jacob Glatstein, Charles Reznikoff, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Anthony Hecht, Elie Wiesel, and others.

ENG 320 M001 Hollywood Directors of the 1950’s
T/TH 3:30-4:50 PM

Screening M001 W 7:00-9:45PM
Instructor: Will Scheibel
The 1950s was a decade of socio-cultural change in the United States after World War II and industrial reorganization in Hollywood. While surveying key Hollywood directors of the era, this course will introduce you to the critical, theoretical, and historical methods of studying film authorship. Beginning with “the auteur theory” in its French and Anglophone conceptions, we will think about the signature style and personal vision of a director in relation to film aesthetics, identity, and textual politics. We will then build from these formal issues to look at directors in midcentury U.S. contexts, including the Cold War, urbanization and suburbanization, ideologies of consumerism and popular art, and constructions of masculinity and youth culture. Finally, we will consider the practical conditions of working in the industry during the decline of the classical studio system: making films at independent production companies, pushing the boundaries of censorship, and cultivating a directorial celebrity. Cinema studies has long been invested in the Hollywood directors of this profoundly transformative decade. This course seeks to understand why, and also what their legendary films, careers, and reputations still have to teach us about the history of American cinema more broadly.

ENG 321 M001 Shakespeare’s Medieval World
T/TH 2:00-3:20 PM
Instructor: Patricia A. Moody
Shakespeare belongs unquestionably to the early modern period, yet his world was largely medieval. Almost half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and such sources are present in others. Not only the theater itself, but what he read and wrote about show direct inheritance from the Middle Ages: the stories of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear; the feud of the Montagues and Capulets, the blend of comedy and tragedy, the very presence of kings and clowns on the same stage. We can recognize what Shakespeare achieved by recognizing how much the Middle Ages gave this greatest of playwrights to work with. We will examine this legacy from the medieval world, from mystery and morality plays, to medieval story tellers such as Chaucer; some works we will compare side by side

ENG 325 M001 The History and Varieties of English
T/TH 11:00-12:20 PM

Screening M001 T 7:00-9:45 PM
Instructor: Patricia A. Moody
Want to know what runes are really about? Be able to decipher literature written in Anglo-Saxon? Read some Chaucer in Middle English? Better understand Shakespeare? Know what IPA is and how it is used? Learn why and how English speakers across the US and globe sound so different from “us”?
This course aims to provide students with as much knowledge as possible, as interactively as possible, of fundamental linguistic concepts, the basic structures of the English language and representations of its history. Equally important, the course aims to develop critical awareness of contemporary language issues and the complex ways in which language and our ideas about language embed attitudes in popular culture (including Disney!) about issues such as gender, race, and class.

ENG 340 M001 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Film Noir/Noir Cultures
T/TH 5:00-6:20 PM

Screening T 7:00-9:45 PM
Instructor: Will Scheibel
Film noir (or “black film”) is a French term used in reference to dark melodramas, mysteries, and crime thrillers, traditionally from 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, but its definition varies from a genre to a visual style to a historical period. This course argues that noir encompasses different film genres, styles, and periods, and must be understood in relation to cultural expressions other than film. We will look at the various influences on what came to be called “film noir,” and what noir has influenced in turn. Beginning with Classical Hollywood cinema, the course then spans the following “noir cultures”: radio, comics, and popular literature; jazz and blues; street photography; urban and suburban geography and architecture; fashion; television; video games; and contemporary African-American, feminist, and queer filmmaking. What cultural needs and desires does noir serve? What does noir illuminate (albeit darkly) about our culture? Texts under discussion will include Blues in the Night (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Out of the Past (1947), The Naked City (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Blade Runner (1982), the Twin Peaks pilot (1990), A Rage in Harlem (1991), Bound (1996), Mulholland Dr. (2001), In the Cut (2003), and the video game L.A. Noire (2011).

ENG 352 M001 Race, Nation and Empire: Transnational Arab America (meets with MES 300)
T/TH 12:30-1:50 PM
Instructor: Carol Fadda
This course will focus on contemporary Arab American literary and cultural texts, emphasizing their portrayal of Arab and Muslim identities and communities in the US, while at the same time delineating the strong roots and connections that link these communities to original Arab homelands, including Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, to name a few. In doing so, students will read an array of Arab American texts (including novels, poems, graphic novels, plays, and essays) as well as historical and critical texts that portray the effects of transnationalism, dual citizenship, diasporic identity, racialization, and imperial wars, with a particular focus on how they intersect with gender and sexuality. Course readings and discussions are also meant to help students address anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in the US that well precedes the events of 9/11 and the ongoing “War on Terror.” In developing complex understandings of Arabs and Muslims in the US and their transnational links to the Arab world, we will read works by Edward Said, Rabih Alameddine, Mohja Kahf, Wafaa Bilal, Randa Jarrar, and Ella Shohat, among others.

ENG 401 M001 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry
TH 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Gibbs
This course is devoted to the poem and seeks to answer the question that all artists face: how does one transform feeling and experience into something more than the original impulse, how does one create art? You will develop your poetic skills by reading the work of published poets, writing a poem every other week, and critiquing one another’s poems. You will be expected to extensively revise four of the poems you write. The course is open to anyone who has taken the introductory poetry workshop (ETS 215). Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of four pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.

ENG 403 M001 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction
M 3:45-6:30 PM
Instructor: Grzecki
This fiction workshop will develop and expand upon the skills introduced in ETS 217. The primary focus will be on how to write better, more effective, more technically sophisticated short stories and/or novel excerpts; the secondary focus will be on how to critique constructively others’ work in these same forms. Most of the class will center on the writing and subsequent discussion of original work created by you; there will be some for-credit in-class writing exercises and previously published work to critique as well.

ENG 403 M002 Advance Fiction Workshop
T 3:30-6:15 PM
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Standard workshop format of targeted readings, craft exercises, weekly critiques.

ENG 407 M001 Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Literature
T/TH 11:00-12:20 PM
Instructor: Coran Klaver
The Victorian period stands in an interesting relation to our own--with surprising correspondences and disjunctions. These are particularly compelling in the areas of gender and sexuality. Despite the impression of many, Victorian culture and practice was often quite queer, with a proliferation of non-normative and perverse genders and sexualities. In this course we will examine a range of literary and cultural texts that engage more or less explicitly with genders and sexualities that push the boundaries of the mainstream and normative. Our investigations will draw upon the insights of recent feminist and queer theory and the context provided by primary and secondary historical materials. Our reading will include fiction by Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Michael Field,’ Christina Rosetti, and others. This Advanced Critical Writing course will help you to hone your research and writing skills and engage in deep and sustained critical inquiry. This course can be used in place of ETS 305.

ENG 410 M001 Practices of Games
M/W 3:45-5:05 PM
Instructor: Chris Hanson
This course will explore the evolving form of digital games, tracing their historical roots in analog board games and other associated cultural modes of play to current and possible future iterations of video games. We will employ a range of critical approaches to gaming; digital games will be “read” and critically interrogated as texts, and the relationships between game, player, design, software, interface, and structures of play will be discussed. We will explore analyzing and designing games to better understand the boundaries of what defines games and play in their separation from everyday life.

ENG 420 M001 Cultural Production and Reception: Reading Feeling
T/TH 3:30-4:50 PM
Instructor: Coran Klaver
What does it mean to read feeling? This course attempts to answer this question by using recent theoretical work on feelings and emotions as an analytical lens to examine a broad range literary and cultural studies. The course will be organized around several questions and problematics including: 1) the relationship between affect theory and psychoanalytic theory; 2) embodied affects; 3) sympathy and empathy as modes of communicating affect and emotion; 4) animal affects; and 5) specific emotional affect and emotional formulations such as melancholia, grief and mourning, shame and humiliation, love and intimacy, and hatred, particularly in relation to traumatic racial histories, the climate crisis, queer identities, and so forth. In order to explore these issues as well as to explore the role of literary texts in the expression and representation of affects, we will read one nineteenth-century novel, three twentieth-century novels, and a series of short texts including fiction and poetry.

ENG 494 M001 Research Practicum
TH 3:30-6:20 PM
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This one-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an honors and/or distinction project in ETS. Enrollment is by invitation to participate in the distinction program, and/or honors program, only. In five formal meetings, we will cover choosing an advisor, developing a suitable topic with engaging research questions, compiling a bibliography, reading critically, taking notes effectively, and writing a thesis proposal. Our work should prepare you to write your thesis in the spring semester, when you will enroll in ENG 495, Thesis Writing Workshop.

Spring 2019

ETS 105 Introduction to Creative Writing
M001 TuTh 9:30-10:50am
M002 TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Nana Adjei-Brenyah
In this class we’ll explore the power and craft of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction

ETS 107 Living Writers
M002-M011 W 3:45-6:30 PM
This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers’ work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers. The first class meets in Gifford Auditorium.

ETS 114 M001 British Literature, 1789 to Present
MW 5:15-6:35 pm
Instructor: Vicky Cheng
This course offers a survey of British Literature spanning the Romantic period, the Victorian period, the twentieth century, and the present. In this course, we will focus on British identity as reflected through historical events, social reform, cultural movements, and literary form. To this end, we will read and interpret visual and written texts interrogating what it means to be British, the ideologies that consolidate this sense of identity, and how “Britishness” becomes reified or challenged through political revolution, nationalism/imperialism, and (de)colonialism. Readings will span a broad range of forms, from novels and short stories to poetry and film.

ETS 117 M001 Survey of American Literature, Beginnings to 1865
MW 12:45-2:05 pm
Instructor: Patty Roylance
This is a course about the making of America. “America” (the idea—the concept of this particular place and what it symbolized) was produced in and through representations of the Western Hemisphere written both by people who lived and traveled here and by people who had never been here at all. This course will investigate how these representations did the work of “making” “America,” in ways that still influence our conceptions of this place. We will treat early American writing as an historical artifact, in which writers responded to and attempted to shape major events and issues in their historical context. We will cover over three hundred years, during which span of time various literary genres waxed and waned in their importance, moving especially from nonfictional poetry and prose in the early periods to the rise of the novel and other fictional forms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This course will be discussion-based and will help you to develop and sharpen your skills of reading, analyzing, and writing about literature, as well as encouraging you to question and investigate the meaning of “America.”

ETS 122 M001 Introduction to the Novel
TuTh 5:00-6:20 pm
Instructor: Haejoo Kim
This class explores the novel and its form by looking at some of the representative novels in terms of formal, historical, and national varieties. Some of the questions we will work on are: What are the narrative conventions of the novel? How do they affect the ways in which we perceive and imagine the world? How do the authors engage with these conventions, play with them and also challenge them? How can we understand the novelistic form in relation to the history of modernity? How do different sociopolitical perspectives and contexts change the literary form? Practicing close reading and critical analysis, students will develop skills to examine formal elements of the novel in relation to the conceptual frames of race, gender, class and nation. Readings may include: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

ETS 122 M003 Introduction to the Novel
MW 12:45-2:05 pm
Instructor: Evan Hixon
This course will examine the long history of the novel form, with an eye turned towards how the form has shifted and adapted over the past 500 years. Looking at a wide-range of novels, students will interrogate the texts to better understand the ways in which novels are shaped by the cultures that produce them and the ways that novels in turn shape culture. The course will examine the novel as an ever changing, self-reflective form of writing that is always in conversation with its own past. To this end, we will be reading novels from the 16th century onward, looking at major movements and genres in British and American literature. From the misguided romance of Don Quixote to the digressive mysteries of The Crying of Lot 49, this course will challenge students to engage deeply with the novel form its earliest roots in medieval chivalric tales through to its post-modern turn during the 20th century. This course will also place the novel into various critical and theoretical conversations concerning issues of class, race, gender and sexuality as the novel becomes engaged with shifting culture understandings of identity and representation. Possible texts include: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

ETS 145 Reading Popular Culture
MW 5:15-6:35 pm
Instructor: John Sanders
Can video games, television shows, and viral videos be considered “art”? How has the Internet and an interconnected media ecosystem affected how we tell and engage with stories? How do the processes of adaptation and appropriation shape cultures and identities within the United States and the world at large? In ETS 145, we will be investigating these questions by engaging with theories of popular culture and analyzing a range of texts across genres, media, and history. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with major approaches in the field of cultural studies and develop a critical vocabulary to talk about the media landscape which structures their everyday lives. Topics will include debates surrounding mass culture, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, fandom, nonlinear narrativity, and Internet memes. Readings will sometimes be supplemented with movie screenings, episodes of TV shows, or gameplay sessions, or with examples provided in lecture.

ETS 146 M001 Interpretation of New Media
MW 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Chris Hanson
Discussion Section M002 F 10:35-11:30am
Discussion Section M003 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Discussion Section M004 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Discussion Section M005 F 12:45pm-1:35pm
While print, films, interactive texts, and other modes of expression have traditionally been construed as separate entities, now we may also read and experience these diverse forms through a screen-based device such as a computer or mobile device. This course studies the growing number of forms in which a given cultural text is expressed and how our understanding of that text is shaped by its medium. We will examine the means by which “new” screen media are defined as well as the textual, cultural, and social implications of their deployment. While the boundaries between “old” media were clearly demarcated, digital media merge forms and practices with new technologies of production, delivery, and display. We will explore the commonalities across a range of screen-based forms, while also assessing the unique aspects that truly differentiate a given medium from another. This course will examine the function of medium specificity and its application to both “old” and “new” textual forms to map the ways in which our modes of reading shift from text to text and from screen to screen.

ETS 151 M001 Interpretation of Poetry
MW 2:15-3:35 pm
Instructor: Staff
The course will consist of discussions of poems from the various traditions of poetry: from anonymous ballads to spoken word poetry. I’m interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the intellect and the emotions. I’m interested too in what ways the poem provokes and challenges us, what gives the poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech. Students will be asked to write 6 two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the text. Students may opt to write more papers (up to 8) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a poet and present the work of the poet in a 4 to 5 page paper. Emphasis in discussions is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.

ETS 153 M002 Interpretation of Fiction
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Sean M. Conrey
This course introduces students to techniques and approaches to interpreting and analyzing fiction. We will develop close reading skills while learning to recognize the formal aspects of literary fiction, namely plot, character, setting, point of view, imagery and intertextuality. Across a range of texts from short stories, comics, novels, digital media and video games, we will work at developing critical reading habits in conjunction with the skills necessary to convey our interpretations in writing. Readings will be loosely organized around ways that cultures and countercultures interact, considering the dynamics between cultural insiders and outsiders, the position of the "other," and particularly the ways that artists can interrupt, reify, interrogate and disturb privileged ways of living. Texts in this course may include stories by Denis Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, and Mohja Kahf, novels (graphic and otherwise) such as Watchmen by Alan Moore and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, films such as Strocek and Lost in Translation, and the video game Never Alone.

ETS 154 M001 Interpretation of Film
MW 12:45-1:40pm
Screenings M 7:00pm
Instructor Will Scheibel
Discussion Section M004 F 11:40am-12:35pm
Discussion Section M005 F 12:45pm-1:40pm
Discussion Section M006 F 9:30-10:25am
Discussion Section M007 F 9:30-10:25am
Discussion Section M008 F 10:35-11:30am
Discussion Section M009 F 10:35-11:30am
Film was the dominant medium of the last century and yet we have only begun to understand it, especially in the post-celluloid period of digital and convergent screen cultures. What is the formal “language” of cinema? What are the elements of style through which films communicate? What are the interpretive tools necessary to “read” those elements? In this course, you will learn the audiovisual literacy skills for approaching these broad but fundamental questions to the critical study of films as texts. We will move from close analysis of film techniques and practice (sound, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing) to larger contexts of aesthetic meaning: narrative, genre, stardom, marketing and reception, authorship and representation, global cinema cultures, and the relationship between film and other media. Screenings will cover both classical and contemporary cinemas, including studio-era Hollywood productions, contemporary blockbusters, groundbreaking U.S. political films, and acclaimed international art films, in addition to innovative works from documentary and avant-garde traditions.

ETS 155 Interpretation of Nonfiction
M002 TuTh 11:00 am – 12:20 pm
M003 MW 3:45-5:05 pm
Instructor: Steven Doles
This course is a cross-media introduction to the interpretation of nonfiction. Students in the course will be exposed to a variety of forms of literary nonfiction, including the essay, memoir, journalism, true crime, and popular medical account. Visual and interactive works of nonfiction will include documentaries, essay films, news broadcasts, photo essays, reality television, and serious games. The organizing idea behind the course is the way in which nonfiction texts bring us to look anew at ourselves and at others. We will give particular attention to texts which give intense scrutiny to their authors’ own lives and histories, as well as those of other people, particularly across lines of class, race, and ability. Assignments for the course will include two response papers, a shorter critical essay, an essay project proposal, and a longer final critical paper. Grades will also include a participation component and occasional pop reading quizzes.

ETS 181 M002 Class and Literary Texts
MW 12:45-2:05 pm
Instructor: Deyasini Dasgupta
“Class” is a term that is at once familiar and yet so complex: not only does it surmount the boundaries (real or imagined) of space, time, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and language, the concept of “class” persists even today as an indelible marker of our identity. In this course, therefore, our objective will be to explore and untangle some of the historical and lived experiences of “class”—both within and as a part of various intersecting social forces. Looking across a wide range of periods and forms, from early modern drama to contemporary novels, murder mysteries to TV shows and songs, we will interrogate and analyze the ways in which different texts serve as mediating objects in the construction of class-based identity throughout history. Using methods of close-reading and intertextual analysis, we will engage with “class” both as an identity and as a cultural category. Some of the texts we’ll look at include Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Downton Abbey episodes, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (BBC adaptation), and/or song selections from Hamilton.

ETS 182 Black Women Writers
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: Marquis Bey
Black women are often overlooked when exploring the intellectual and literary traditions of America. How, then, might our understanding of history, politics, and the social shift if we took seriously the writings of black women? Spanning the era of American enslavement through Jim Crow into the 21st-century, in this course students will explore how black women's writing has been a major contributor to the long struggle for freedom.

This course will take as fundamental that black women present a radical method of thinking and living that centers those who are marginalized by race and gender-namely, black feminism. This mode of thinking arises unwaveringly from black women-black women who have a range of gendered expressions and statuses-and we will use essays, poems, multimedia, and music to explore black feminist knowledges. We will cover a wide array of tropes and themes that often emerge from this tradition: slavery, the intersection of race and gender, love and sex, black gender relations, queerness and transess, diaspora, masculinity, and more. Exploring these themes will permit students to sample the pressing points not only in a rich tradition but also still pervasive in their contemporary lives.

ETS 184 M001 Ethnicity & Literary Texts
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Instructor: Elizabeth Gleesing
The United States is commonly referred to as a multicultural society, a melting pot, and a nation of immigrants. With these designations in mind, this class seeks to question the relationship between identity and ethnicity in contemporary U.S. literary texts. In taking ethnicity as a lens, we can ask questions about what it means to be included in or excluded from American identity and what relationship there is between who we are and the places from which we and our ancestors have come. Along with these central questions, we will analyze themes of intra- and intergenerational conflict, in-between identities that seem to straddle national borders, and experiences of being a refugee or being a stateless person, effectively estranged from one’s home country. We will study short stories, poems, essays, visual works, and novels from some of the following authors: Gloria Anzaldúa, Louise Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colm Tóibín, Helena María Viramontes, and Gene Luen Yang. In addition to written texts, we will also look at how visual works like Beyoncé’s Lemonade and digital documentaries communicate ideas of generational change, historical memory, and displacement. Assignments are likely to include weekly informal responses, short analysis assignments, and two longer argumentative papers.

ETS 184 M002 Ethnicity & Literary Texts
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Chris Barnes
What is ethnicity, and what role does it play in the formation of identities and notions of belonging in the United States? Through a study of literary and other cultural texts, this course will interrogate issues of ethnicity in America in the twentieth and twenty-first century. We will address topics and themes such as the construction and negotiation of ethnic identities, generational conflicts over those identities, notions of belonging and/or estrangement from one’s homeland, and the racialization of ethnicity. Authors may include Gloria Anzaldúa, Mohsin Hamid, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Art Spiegelman. Through classroom participation, close reading exercises, and essay assignments, students will learn how to use the practice of close reading to interpret and analyze how texts engage with ethnicity as an identity and cultural category.

ETS 192 M001 Gender and Literary Texts
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Rhyse Curtis
What does it mean to say that gender is socially constructed? In this writing intensive course, we will explore this question. Throughout the semester, students will uncover how texts represent bodies, and how ideological and social structures, such as marriage, family, friendship, heteronormativity and homosociality, and feminism and patriarchy, seek to mold and support particular gender representations while excluding or controlling other modes of being. We will also discuss how gender intersects with other identity markers such as race, class, sexual orientation, and disability. The class will look at a range of media and genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, theater, film, the graphic novel, fanfic, games, and music. Readings may include works by Radclyffe Hall, Langston Hughes, Margaret Atwood, and Alison Bechdel, and critical readings may come from the works of Foucault, Butler, Halberstam, Irigaray, and hooks, among others. Students will also be required to view several films outside of class time, including Fight Club and Moonlight. Through rigorous classroom participation, weekly written responses, three essay assignments, and a class presentation, students will learn the practice and application of close reading to interpret and analyze texts for how they utilize the body as a means of “doing gender.”

ETS 192 M002 Gender and Literary Texts
TuTh 3:30-4:50 pm
Instructor: Dorri Beam
“I do/ I don’t: Marriage, Gender, and Sexuality in American Literature”: This course examines the development of the institution of marriage in the U.S. and the way it shapes lives, identities, gender roles, social relations, and the very fabric of society. Beginning in the nineteenth century and ending with recent marriage equality debates, we’ll examine literary representations of marriage and deviations from it--including bachelorhood, romantic friendship, Boston marriage, extended kinship networks, interracial marriage, divorce, polygamy, and gay marriage—to ask how gender and sexuality are being shaped by each imaginative plotting of marriage or resistance to it. Texts will range from Hannah Foster’s The Coquette and short stories by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett, to Zitkala Sa’s American Indian Stories, and up to Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, Silva Plath’s The Bell Jar, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home, and the TV series Big Love.

ETS 192 M003 Gender and Literary Texts
MW 5:15pm-6:35pm
Instructor:Melissa Welshans
As current social movements like #MeToo and the events that lead to them underscore, one's gender and how society defines gender have broad implications for how individuals experience the world around them. But what is "gender," how has it been defined, and by whom? And how can an understanding of "gender" enrich our interpretation of literature and media? This class will answer these questions and more through an examination of texts including William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and it's film adaptation Ten Things I Hate About You, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the 1990 film Paris is Burning, the 2014 film The Babadook, and episodes of TV shows like Dietland and Queer Eye. Along with these texts, we will also read literary theory by a number of critics, including Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and others. This is a writing intensive course, so assignments will include at least two 6 page papers, a required course journal, as well as an oral presentation.

ETS 200 M001 Special Topics: Modern Horror Fiction
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Steven Doles
In recent decades horror fiction has become a massive genre and industry, with a number of authors such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice repeatedly topping bestseller lists. While horror has a longer lineage tracing back through the ghost and gothic tales of previous centuries, the horror genre itself developed through publishing and readership practices in the early and mid-twentieth century. Although horror fiction focuses on something as idiosyncratic and personal as what each of us finds scary, the genre is often highly self-aware of its own history, influences, and devices. We will read a number of authors throughout the semester, including (in rough chronological order) Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Ligotti, and Victor LaValle, among others. To further our understanding of how horror developed as a genre and of how authors conceive of their work, we will also read major critical statements by Lovecraft, King, and Ligotti, and might also look at small press publications by horror fans, as well as horror on old time radio shows such as Lights Out, in comics such as EC Comics Tales from the Crypt, and on television shows such as The Twilight Zone and True Detective.

ETS 215 Introductory Poetry Workshop
M 5:15-8:00 pm
Instructor: Staff
Weekly meetings of this workshop will focus on generating and critiquing student poems, and on supplementary readings of other poetry. Besides writing a new original poem every week, everyone will revise at least four poems on the basis of the workshop response. Reading and writing assignments will be handed out as we go. No prerequisites.

ETS 217 Introductory Fiction Workshop
M001 M 3:45-6:30 pm
Instructor: Nana Adjei-Brenyah
This workshop represents a chance to grow as an artist and writer. To do this we’ll focus on reading, writing and revising, which are the pillars of this kind of growth. We will think of ourselves as artists in pursuit of our greatest artistic self. We will challenge one another to work at our highest level in this pursuit. In this class we will practice through various methods, but our collective goal will be to encourage and inspire each other to write work that is “us.”

ETS 217 Introductory Fiction Workshop
M003 Tu 3:30-6:15pm
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn how to write a story, how to read closely and how to critique and revise stories. In class we will discuss student work as well as published work from outside the class. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will keep a writing notebook.

ETS 230 M001 Ethnic Literary Traditions
TuTh 2:00-3:20 pm
Instructor: Ken Frieden
An exploration into Jewish humor and satire. What are its characteristics? What does it mean? How does it work? What does it say about Jewish identity? We begin with Freudian theory and then focus on Yiddish satire and American humor. Class sessions will analyze literary works (e.g., by Sholem Aleichem, Leo Rosten, and Philip Roth), American Jewish stand-up comedy routines (e.g., by Lennie Bruce and Allan Sherman), early Yiddish movies (e.g., Yidl mitn fidl) and American films (e.g., by the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen). There will be weekly short writing assignments, to be posted on Blackboard and submitted in hard copy. Students are encouraged to bring their own Jewish film clips and jokes to class. To encourage active participation, students work in groups to present some aspect of American Jewish humor, such as female performances and television series, political satires, Jewish episodes in mainstream shows, and the limits of bad taste (e.g., as reflected in reactions to Larry David’s Holocaust-related humor). Last year, one option for the final project was to perform a five-minute standup routine. No prerequisites—no prior knowledge of Jewish culture or Jewish jokes is assumed. Meets with JSP/LIT/REL 237: Jewish Humor and Satire

ETS 242 Reading & Interpretation
M001 TuTh 9:30-10:50 am
Instructor: Coran Klaver
M005 MW 12:45-2:05 pm
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it—and the difference that makes. Its goal, in other words, is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one mode or method of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively, and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep, and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways texts mean and the ways readers produce meaning.

ETS 303 M001 Reading & Writing Fiction
TuTh 12:30-1:50 pm
Instructor: Nana Adjei-Brenyah
We’ll read the best fiction we can, we’ll learn to delight in its power.

ENG 304 M001 Reading & Writing Poetry
TuTh 9:30-10:50 am
Instructor: Sarah Harwell
T. S. Eliot said that minor poets borrow while great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating, and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate poems from canonical poets. We’ll examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we will read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We will deepen our understanding of a variety of poetic devices, such as diction, image, music, and metaphor. We will attend to each poet’s stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, as well as his or her techniques and habits. You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the poets studied.

ETS 305 M001 Critical Analysis: Literature and Its Media
MW 12:45-2:05 pm
Instructor: Chris Forster
We usually talk about “novels,” “poems,” or “films” (and texts of various other kinds). But what about the paper and ink (or parchment or wax or celluloid or LCD screens or tablets) that carry those texts? Does the history of these materials affect literary forms? Do they change how, or what, we read? This class pursues these questions by turning to the field of media studies, to see what implications it may have students of literature and culture. This class will cover a diverse and historically broad set of materials and concerns, looking at the history of texts from the ancient world (and oral poetry) through to contemporary developments in digital culture (poetry written on, and with, the Web; novels written on Twitter). We’ll read key thinkers and theorists of media studies (and related fields, like book history) as well as literary texts which foreground their own medium in provocative ways (like Tristram Shandy). Likely critics include Plato, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Walter Benjamin, alongside works by major poets, novelists, and writers (including Laurence Sterne, E. E. Cummings, and Teju Cole). Course work will include a final essay, regular short responses, and a presentation to the class, as well as some experiments with media and its history.

ETS 310 Literary Periods: Reading and Being Green Today
TuTh 12:30-1:50 pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
Earth Scientists have proposed that immediate, drastic action is needed to combat climate change and other ecological disruptions, and yet concrete interventions remain slow and inadequate. This course will consider how fiction might help encourage the lifestyle and policy changes that scientific facts, on their own, have not yet managed to produce. We will examine contemporary eco-fictions in various media, such as poems and novels by Atwood, Vandermeer, Powers, Octavia Butler, Indra Singh, Piercy, Erdrich or Silko, as well as films such as Okja, Wall-E, or Avatar. To evaluate the potential usefulness (or deficits) of their techniques and appeals, we will compare and contrast them with earlier eco-interventions that achieved considerable success, such as The Jungle, The Whole Earth Catalogue and Silent Spring, as well as current non-fiction eco-interventions such as The Sixth Extinction, Wangari Maathai’s “how to” eco-guides or “The Story of Stuff.” Assignments will include 2 short critical papers and a collaborative final project integrating literature, film or other creative cultural forms into a proposal for a concrete eco-justice initiative on campus. The class will engage throughout with serious practical considerations of how to change ourselves and the planet to encourage mutual thriving for all.

ETS 320 M002 Authors: James Joyce
TuTh 2:00-3:20 pm
Instructor: Chris Forster
This class offers an opportunity to read, with an unusual depth of attention and care, the major works of one of the most important and challenging writers of the twentieth-century: James Joyce. We will begin the semester by reading a selection from Joyce's early collection of short stories Dubliners and his autobiographical bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, before beginning a patient, chapter by chapter reading of Ulysses—a novel that regularly appears near, or at, the top of lists of “greatest” novels of the twentieth century. While our focus is on a single writer, Joyce’s work and the evolution of his career provide a rich opportunity for understanding the twentieth century. From his naturalist short stories to his modern (or even postmodern) novel Ulysses, Joyce offers an opportunity to survey the evolution of narrative style in the twentieth century. Ulysses poses questions at the center of our understanding of literature: about the relationship between literature, difficulty, and popular culture; about how narrative represents consciousness and interiority; about how literary form captures—or fails to capture—experience; and about how literary value relates to obscenity and provocation. Joyce’s work also opens onto questions broader than literature, concerning imperialism, Irish history, and the representation of gender. Assignments likely include short written assignments, research into Joyce’s context and background, and two major essays.

ETS 351 M002 Reading Nation and Empire before 1900: Writing Native America in Early American Literature
TuTh 9:30-10:50 am
Instructor: Scott Stevens
From captivity narratives, such as Mary Rowlandson’s, to the novels of James Fennimore Cooper, the figure of the “American Indian” in early American literature has had a lasting legacy in American culture. But how did Native writers represent themselves and their respective cultures and where does their writing fit within the larger framework of American literature? This course will read the works of key early American writers comparatively with such Native American authors as Samson Occom, William Apess, Jane Schoolcraft, Blackhawk, and Yellow Bird (aka John Rollins Ridge) in order to develop a more nuanced and balanced sense of early Native American letters. Recent critical readings by scholars such as Nancy Armstrong, Maureen Konkle, Gordon Sayre, Robert Warrior, and Jace Weaver, among others, will supplement our readings. Meets with NAT 400.

ETS 351 M003 Reading Nation and Empire Before 1900: The Literature of Revolution
MW 3:45-5:05 pm
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
This course will examine the literature and ideology of revolution in the United States and beyond. In defiance of Britain’s imperialist control, the colonies that became the United States of America struggled to unify, win their independence and form a new nation. We will read participants’ speeches, personal letters, pamphlets and declarations to analyze how this process took place through language. We will also read accounts of the Revolution and its ideals produced in later eras, including fiction by Irving, Cooper and Hawthorne and political statements from other revolutions around the world attempting to cite the U.S. Revolution as a precedent. In an interesting twist, the United States itself became the target of a serious attempt at revolution by the Southern states in the Civil War, in which the Union faced the challenge of subduing a rebellion presenting itself as the present incarnation of the “Spirit of ’76.” In this course, we will track, among other issues, how the same rhetoric of revolution is used to cast the United States first as the rebel and then as the tyrant a mere 85 years later.

ETS 352 M001 Race, Nation, Empire: Postcoloniality and the Global
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Chris Eng
What makes a world? Popular discourses celebrate globalization as a contemporary phenomenon characterized by connectivity, access, and diversity. Yet, the proliferation of borders—geographical, legal, and symbolic—radically trouble these idealistic accounts of inclusivity and progress. This course grapples with global literatures to explore the dark underside of globalization, minding the unevenness and violences of its histories and structures. Particularly, we will work through a set of literary and theoretical texts—by scholar-writers such as Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Karen Tei Yamashita—to investigate the role of literature and literary criticism in reproducing, complicating, and transforming the very conditions of the “global.” Following the routes and historical legacies of colonialism and postcoloniality that structure the modern world, our participation in larger academic conversations will be guided by the following inquiries: How do literary and cultural productions not only reflect, but also produce and uphold the very contours of globalization? What are the assumptions and values ascribed when we label a text as part of, or not part of, a “national literature” or “world literature”? How can we perform readings that attend to a literary text’s relationship to power dynamics and the world?

ETS 353 M001 Race, Nation & Empire before 1900: Jews and Judaism in the Renaissance Imagination
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
The expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 meant that Jews were at least officially not to be found in Shakespeare’s England. Traditional historiographies have emphasized the alienation of Jews from the centers of Christian life and have largely studied representations of Jews in Renaissance literature as specimens of fantasy and conjecture from an impassable distance. Recent scholarship has, however, uncovered growing evidence of more substantive exchanges between Jews and Christians. Such encounters took place mainly on the Continent but were described in literature that circulated across Europe. We will consider these developments as we read from a selection of canonical literary depictions of Jews and Judaism (Chaucer, Nashe, Shakespeare, and Marlowe) and from the literature of travel, policy, science, and theology in which Jews or Conversos and Jewish texts figure prominently in representation or in the conditions of their production and reception. Discussion will situate both sets of texts in the contexts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and in relation to the rise and fall of Empire (English, Spanish, Ottoman), urbanization, mercantile and capitalist economic development, and colonial expansion.

ETS 353 Race, Nation & Empire before 1900: American Captivities – Race, Gender, and Nation in the New World
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Dorri Beam
This course considers the captivity narrative as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent in a “land of freedom.” We’ll expand this genre beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity (in which colonial settlers recounted being captured and forced to live with Native Americans) to the stories of captured Africans, Native Americans, and women. We will use the genre to examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in early American literature.

After studying the iconic captivity stories of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, Mary Rowlandson, and Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, we turn to captivity as a leitmotif in African American literature, from slave narratives such as Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave to Nat Turner’s Confessions to John Edgar Wideman’s powerful contemporary account of his brother’s imprisonment. We’ll explore Native American experiences of captivity in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, Zitkala Sa, and ledger art by Plains Indians. We’ll watch several filmic adaptations of the captivity genre, including John Ford’s classic Western, The Searchers, Terrence Malick’s The New World, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Throughout, we’ll ask how, as students of American literature, we should understand our own captivation by and contact with the American captivity narrative.

ETS360 M003 Reading Gender & Sexualities: Queering Documentary
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Screening W 7:00pm
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Documentary representation has been central to the emergence and development of modern sexual identities. For instance, 19th century science turned to both photographic portraiture and written case studies in order to name and define homosexuality as a specific sexual identity. But forms of documentation have not only been used to discipline and pathologize queer sexual acts and identities. Queer subcultures, social movements and individual artists have also embraced the desire to document — but in the service of cultural expression, sexual liberation and collective memory. This course explores how different documentary genres (such as case studies, ethnographies, oral histories, historical narratives, testimonies, activist videos, portraits and [auto]biographies) in various media (film, video, photography, graphic art and literature) have become fundamental tools in the historical struggle over sexual rights across the globe. Attendance at weekly film screening required. This course counts toward the Film and Screen Studies track and the LGBT Studies minor. Crosslisted with WGS360/QSX300

ETS 360 M004 Reading Gender & Sexualities: Feminist Fictions
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Coran Klaver
This course will explore the history of Anglo-American feminism through the novels that figured the social, cultural, and theoretical issues facing feminist thinkers and activists alongside their political writings and actions. These novels reveal the strengths and limits of Anglo-American feminist thought at key moments in the development the feminist movements, exploring the way that feminist frameworks at specific moments fueled certain changes, even while reinforcing the status quo in in other ways, as well as the way they created possibilities for some women, even as excluding others from their liberatory promises. The course will begin with Maria Wollstonecraft’s novel, Maria, or The Wrongs of Women and include novels such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, George Gissings, The Odd Women, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Margaret Atwood’s The Lady Oracle, and Chimananda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. We will read short selections of nonfictional feminist writing from the periods alongside these novels. Students will be responsible for oral presentations on the history of feminism concurrent with the writing of these novels, two formal essays, and one creative engagement with today’s contemporary feminist moment.

ETS 400 M001 Selected Topics: The Mysteries of London
TuTh 3:30-4:50 pm
Instructor: Mike Goode
This course examines nineteenth-century crime and mystery literature about London, as well as contemporary novelists’, graphic novelists’, tourists’, and filmmakers’ fascination with this literature and with Victorian London. The course is a regular semester-long course taught on the Syracuse University campus, but students must also participate over spring break in an Syracuse Abroad short-term program involving eight days of on-site study in London with the professor. Texts covered will include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, and Alan Moore and Eddie Campell’s From Hell. Assignments will consist of a 5-page paper, a 10-page paper, reading quizzes, and a 20-minute presentation to be given during the spring break trip portion of the course. The course is capped at 20 students and admission is by application only. Applications were due at Syracuse Abroad on October 15, 2018.

ETS 401 M003 Advanced Poetry Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
The purpose of this course is to develop the skills needed to make poems vivid and accessible for readers. In discussion and written comments on each other’s work students use their imagination and intelligence to help each other accomplish this difficult task. Everyone writes one new poem each week, some in response to assignments, and then revises four of these into carefully considered form. Requirements include reading, written analysis of poems, and memorization. The course is open to anyone who has taken the introductory workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission. 

ETS 403 M002 Advanced Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Fiction Workshop. Craft. Production. Basic workshop format, 2 reader critiques a session plus assigned reading.

ETS 407 Advanced Critical Writing: The Natural and Supernatural in Medieval Literature
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Patricia Moody
This topic allows us to explore the various and complex ways in which medieval persons understood both the natural and the supernatural or “fantastic.” Historian Robert Bartlett offers the caveat that the belief systems of the Middle Ages were no more coherent than our own, but rather reflect overlapping zones of intellectual debate, difference, and even "discomfort." This literature course investigates the aesthetic-fictional structures and properties of supernatural figures, states, and worlds, and how the "natural" and "supernatural" inform each other. Theoretical texts (Freud and Todorov for example) will help us reflect upon the psychological, philosophical, cultural, social, political and other uses of the supernatural and why and how they have endured over time. We will also venture into some contemporary works, such as Tolkien and modern works such as Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere (1996), the film Pan’s Labyrinth and portions of historian Scott Poole's book Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and Haunting (2011). This Advanced Critical Writing course will help you to hone your research and writing skills and engage in deep and sustained critical inquiry. This course can be used in place of ETS 305.

ETS 411 Forms & Genres Before 1900: Reading, Breathing Shakespeare
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
Acting and voice coaches have written extensively about breathing Shakespeare’s language, finding its poetry and the power of its rhythms in the “breath” of the line. What does this mean for students of literature? We will read from acting and voice pedagogy alongside classical rhetorical/oratorical treatises (that Shakespeare most certainly studied in grammar school) in order to consider what a focus on reading and breathing affords the literary, historical, and theoretical study of Shakespeare. How does reading aloud change our relationship to the plays in performance, in “private” reading, in the classroom, and in the “archive”? What becomes clearer and more accessible? What becomes more opaque and difficult? How might we observe Shakespeare’s experience as an actor in the attention he gives to the management of the breath both structurally and thematically? We will read fewer plays slowly so as to experiment with reading and performance techniques together in and outside of class. We will make at least one trip to the theater and will view a variety of adaptations and filmed productions. Non-traditional, pedagogical and performance-based, para-academic assignment options will be available for all students but may be customized to enhance the experiences of VPA/Drama and Education Majors.

ETS 420 M001 Cultural Production & Reception: The Hollywood Star System
MW 3:45-5:05 pm
Screening W 7:00pm
Instructor: Will Scheibel
Idols of the screen, models of style and politics, brand identities, and icons of popular culture, Hollywood stars continue to fascinate us as moviegoers. Identification in cinema is not the exclusive domain of the camera, but involves a relationship we share with characters, actors, and star personas. To that end, acting is not the function of scripted plot, nor is charisma a “natural” state of being; each requires critical analysis to understand the labor of artistic subjects and the roles of fan discourse, journalism, and the trade press in determining a career in the entertainment industry. In this course, we will learn the techniques and traditions from which an actor draws, the relationships between an actor and other elements of a film’s mise-en-scène, and how an actor becomes a star through the machinery of promotion, publicity, criticism, and commentary. We will look specifically at famous cases from the Classical Hollywood era, between the late-1920s and the early-1960s, the period in which actors worked under long-term contracts at studios that manufactured their images to be admired, even desired, by the public. The phenomenon of Hollywood stardom remains alive and well, and the story of contemporary celebrity culture begins here.

ETS 420 M002 Cultural Production & Reception: Esports & Games in Culture
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Chris Hanson
Video games have rapidly become a leading contributor to global media culture, rivaling other media industries such as film and television. Esports have more recently become a significant part of this discussion, transforming video game competition into a globalized commodity and entertainment industry. This course will examine how esports and games function in culture, looking at U.S. and global historical contexts. We will explore a range of cultural topics in games and esports, such as fan communities; the function of gender, ethnicity, and identity through multiple registers; industrial practices; the professionalization of play; and the relationships between digital games, esports, and analog games and sports. In addition to a variety of digital and analog games, we will also study relevant screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the key aspects of the histories and cultures of esports and games.

ETS 421 M001 Cultural Production & Reception Before 1900: Medieval Masterpieces
TuTh 2:00-3:20 pm
Instructor: Patricia Moody
In Europe, from about the time of the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century to roughly the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, the period called “medieval” was marked by war, plague, famine, crop failures, and crusades; it was also a period remarkable for its advances in science, technology, architecture, literature, and the arts. This course examines selected masterpieces of the medieval era across cultures, from Beowulf and Boethius to the Chanson de Roland, Dante and Chaucer. Literary texts will be examined alongside other cultural masterpieces such as illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, chant, and cathedrals.

ETS 421 Cultural Production & Reception Before 1900: Christopher Columbus
MW 2:15-3:35 pm
Silvio Torres-Saillant
“Christopher Columbus” cover the cultural history of a Genoese mariner who in 1492, sailing under the flag of Catholic Spain, arrived in the Caribbean, never got close to the US mainland, yet became an unchallenged symbol of US patriotism. In the 18th century, while the US founders proudly vaunted their Protestant English stock, the Admiral became memorialized in the name of the US capital, “District of Columbia.” Subsequently, the adventurer who opened the Americas for conquest by the Spanish Empire began to lend his name to US cities, government buildings, rivers, and universities, with Columbus Circle monuments spreading throughout the country. Today the name of the Genoese appears on more US natural sites or parts of the built space than that of any of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington. We will read Washington Irving, Joel Barlow, Wilhanan Winchester, and several other key contributors to the US adoption of Columbus as an icon American patriotism. The class will consider questions pertaining to the construction of public memory and its consequences.

ETS 495 Thesis Writing Workshop
Th 3:30-6:15 pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This course is a continuation of ETS 494. It is intended to serve as a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research toward producing an ETS Distinction Essay or Honors Thesis. Enrollment requires successful completion of ETS 494 (or equivalent) and is by instructor permission only.

Fall 2018

Lower Division Courses

ETS 105 M001: Introduction to Creative Writing
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Nana Adjei-Brenyah

This course is designed to introduce the student to three types of creative writing: poetry, fiction and nonfiction (including mixed genres). Our objective is to discover the inaugural steps to writing effectively in each category. The course will focus on inspiration (why write a poem or a story or an essay?) as well as the techniques of evocative, compelling writing across all literary genres (e.g. point of view, concrete detail, lyricism, image, metaphor, simile, voice, tone, structure, dialogue, and characterization). Students will read and analyze work by authors from various traditions, and produce creative work in each genre. ETS 105 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry.

ETS 107-1 Living Writers
W 3:45-6:30 PM
ETS 107-2 through 10
W 3:45-6:30 PM
Instructor: Staff
This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers’ work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers. The first class meets in Gifford Auditorium.

ETS 114 M001: Survey of British Literature, 1789-present
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Mike Goode

Few nations in the world have changed more dramatically over the past 250 years than Great Britain, and these changes are evident throughout its literature. This course moves briskly through just over two centuries of Britain’s literary history, covering the art and culture of four distinct periods: Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-War/Postmodern/Postcolonial. Historical topics will include: slavery; political revolution; the industrial revolution; the Enlightenment; urbanization; evolution; religion; social reform movements; the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; nationalism; imperialism; colonialism and its aftermath; the World Wars; postmodernism; the politics of choosing to write in English; and the history of literary forms. Readings will include novels, poems, plays, and song lyrics by writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Sam Selvon, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Johnny Rotten, Bob Marley, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith. Assignments will include three five-page papers and a final examination.

ETS 119 M002: Topics In US Literature and History: Experimental & Emerging Genres 1980-Present
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: John Colasacco

Because all writing is experimental, and no work considered valuable and excellent fails to test, reconfigure, or broaden the language, a course devoted to the recent history of experimental and emerging genres will need to examine & seek new patterns of expression in a range of exemplary texts and cultural artifacts, with emphasis on close reading practices, attention to rhetorical/historical contexts, and strategies for effective response/critique. In particular, the past forty years will frame our study of the rapidly expanding diversity of voices and forms that lead to our current understandings of literary art. Historically, experimentalism sharpens under regressive regimes; in this class, student writers committed to the idea that the stories that need to be written are the ones that can’t be told will find a through-line to their ambitious forbears, and will better understand how to read and create the texts that define literary/American history.

ETS 121 M001: Introduction to Shakespeare
Lecture: MW 11:40-12:35pm
Discussion: F 10:35-11:30am or 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Dympna Callaghan

Do you love Shakespeare, or do you hate him, or have you never read him at all? No matter which of these is true for you, this course will help you understand his writings. We will read some of his most famous works, such as Macbeth and Richard III and watch performances of them, but we will also cover some of his lesser-known writings, such as The Comedy of Errors and the Sonnets. We will also learn about his life and the society in which he lived. Loving the bard is not a course requirement, but reading him with care and attention is.

ETS 122 M001: Introduction to the Novel
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Haejoo Kim

This class explores the novel and its form by looking at some of the representative novels in the English and American traditions. What are the narrative conventions of the novel? How do they affect the ways in which we perceive and imagine the world? How do the authors engage with these conventions, playing with them and also challenging them? Practicing close reading and critical analysis, students will develop skills to examine formal elements of the novel in relation to the conceptual frames of race, gender, and class. We will also engage with critical readings of the texts. Readings may include: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

ETS 145 M004: Reading Popular Culture
MW 9:30-10:25am
Discussions: Th 3:30-4:25pm and 5:00-5:55pm; F 9:30-10:25am and 10:35-11:30am
Instructor: Steven Doles

What place and value do mass forms of entertainment, literature, and art hold for our lives? How are our communities and identities shaped by those same mediated works? Why do fans of Harry Potter or Star Trek place so much importance on these imaginary stories? Do the music subcultures young people are so often invested in have lasting import, or are they merely a means to kill time? Throughout this course we will be exploring these and other questions. To focus our attention on these questions, we will read a number of works of fiction and nonfiction throughout the semester, including John Scalzi's Redshirts, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Simon Reynold's Generation Ecstasy, and William Gaddis's Agapē Agape. Readings will sometimes be supplemented with episodes of TV shows or movies, or with examples of popular and classical music, either to be examined on your own, or with examples provided in lecture. Our two major areas of focus for the semester will be popular media franchises and their fans, and music subcultures and their participants. Students will also become familiar with major approaches in the field of cultural studies, and develop a critical vocabulary to talk about the media that is interwoven with their everyday lives. If we are lucky, we may have some special guests stop by to demonstrate and discuss their own participation in the culture that surrounds us.

ETS 151 M001: Interpretation of Poetry
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Bruce Smith

The course will consist of discussions of poems from the various traditions of poetry: from anonymous ballads to spoken word poetry. I’m interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the intellect and the emotions. I’m interested too in what ways the poem provokes and challenges us, what gives the poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech. Students will be asked to write 6 two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the text. Students may opt to write more papers (up to 8) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a poet and present the work of the poet in a 4 to 5 page paper. Emphasis in discussions is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.

ETS 153 M001: Interpretation of Fiction
MW 2:15-3:10pm
Discussion F 10:35-11:30am or 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Erin Mackie

Cultures tell many of their most profound truths in their fictions. We will look at the truths of fictions across a range of narrative forms, from the faery tale to the novel. As we read we will develop an awareness of the elements of fiction: plot, setting, character, point-of-view, style, and theme. We will pay attention not only to the story told but also to who is telling it and to whom, its narrator and its audience. And always, we will think about the values, or truths, promoted by the fiction and the ends it seeks to achieve in its telling.

ETS 154 M002: Interpretation of Film
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: Rhyse Curtis

From its humble origins as a sideshow spectacle, film quickly matured into the dominant medium of the 20th century, and remains a towering cultural and artistic form to this day. However, while we are immersed in film culture, how many of us have the interpretative tools necessary to decode cinema, to “read” them as unique and meaningful visual texts? This course aims to foster those skills. Through the course of our discussions, students will become familiar with the terminology, techniques, and historical context necessary for analyzing and writing about film from a textual studies perspective. Along the way, students will be exposed to multiple primarily English language films from across the history of cinema in order to apply and practice their analytical skills, from the early days of proto-cinematic technologies to the post-celluloid films of the digital era. This course will touch on topics such as: formalist concepts of film; narrative traditions in Hollywood cinema; counter traditions in avant-garde works; discussions of genre; and the influence of marginalized voices in cinema.

ETS 155 M002: Interpretation of Nonfiction
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Elizabeth Gleesing

This writing-intensive course introduces students to methods of interpreting nonfiction. While we often believe that nonfiction conveys truth and reality, in this course we will focus on how different texts construct their claims to truth and arguments about reality. To do so, we will study and interrogate the rhetorical strategies authors employ, the relationship between form and content, the generic conventions of different nonfiction forms, and how texts construct both a speaking position and an audience. In addition to introducing ways to interpret nonfiction, this course aims to introduce students to a wide variety of nonfiction media forms such as the essay, the graphic novel, autobiography, memoir, poetry, documentary video and digital documentary, reality television, photography, digital games, and digital nonfiction forms like the listicle. We will not just work through these different forms and how they make meaning in a vacuum, instead we will focus on a variety of themes, topics, and issues throughout the course, including food politics, feminism, sexuality, race, photography, disaster narratives, and screen representations of the environment.

ETS 171 M001: World Cinema
Lecture: MW 5:15-6:10pm; Screening: M 7:00-9:45pm
Discussion: F 9:30-10:25am or 10:35-11:30am
Instructor: Roger Hallas

Cinema has often been called a universal language and it is certainly made all over the globe. But world cinema has a richness and complexity that defies a single model, despite the cultural dominance and economic power of Hollywood cinema. This course examines how the international history of film has been shaped by the larger historical processes of modernity, colonialism, postmodernism and globalization. We will explore the diverse pleasures, politics and aesthetics of cinema from around the world, including German Expressionism, post-revolutionary Soviet cinema, French New Wave, Bollywood, postcolonial African cinema, Hong Kong action films, Hollywood blockbusters, Iranian neorealism and contemporary indigenous cinema. We will trace how aesthetics, technologies and economies of cinema have mutually influenced filmmaking traditions in diverse regions of the world. Moreover, we will investigate how cinema contributes to our understandings of the world, our places within it, and our relations to other parts of it. In sum, we will discover how world cinema is always both local and global. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required. Film and Screen Studies Course.

ETS 181 M001: Class and Literary Texts
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Sean M. Conrey

From William Blake’s descriptions of living conditions in early industrialized England, James Agee’s stories of tenant farmers during the Depression, to Ursula LeGuin’s’s speculative fiction focused on labor exploitation, questions of social class have long been a focus of novelists’, poets’ and essayists’ work. Parallel to the ways that writers affect and engage social class, critical readers can engage with the concepts of social class as they read. Concerned with the social divisions of privilege, wealth, power and status, class, like race and gender, is a social construction that is imposed on, and performed by, all of us as a way of stratifying and defining who we are. Though the restraints of social class readily subject us to the power of others, these restraints may also, when well understood, provide a springboard for advocacy and direct social action. This course provides an introduction to these concepts and exposes students to key texts in literature, film and other media as a way of fostering critical engagement and developing richer social responsibility through textual interpretation.

ETS 181 M002: Class & Literary Texts
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Evan Hixon

This course will examine the complicated relationship that exists between literary production and concerns of social, economic and cultural class. Looking at a large cross section of Anglophonic literature, we will examine the historical, theoretical and lived experiences of class both as it exists apart from and within a complicated web of intersecting social forces. We will be examining texts which cover a wide range of periods and forms, from medieval poetry to contemporary novels with an eye tuned towards the ways in which these texts serve as mediating objects that help us better understand the construction of classed identity throughout history. The course will focus on the social construction of class and the ways in which class serves to organize and define social commonwealths and communities. Treating literary texts as important objects in the construction and interrogation of classed identities, students will be asked to read several literary texts and produce written work analyzing those works through the lens of class. Possible texts will range from the epic poems of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to modernist novels such as Nella Larsen’s Passing and E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. This course satisfies the writing-intensive requirements of the Liberal Arts Core. The purpose of a writing intensive course is to familiarize students with the thought processes, structures, and styles associated with writing in the liberal arts.

ETS 182 M001: Race and Literary Texts
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: John Sanders

As multiple theorists on race have noted, although the concept of race is a historically contingent social construct with no basis in biological fact, it is a construction that shapes our daily lived experience and our relationship to society at large. The influence of race can be felt not just in the world we live in, but in the worlds we explore through art, music, literature, and visual culture – worlds which may mirror, mediate, or resist this influence in equal measure. The aim of this course is to explore some of these textual representations of race in/as fiction, as well as the social and cultural implications contained within such representations. To do so, we will be drawing works from a variety of primarily English language sources across genre and historical contexts, from early explorations of the racial imaginations to 20th century realist novels to contemporary sci-fi and fantasy. Through classroom participation activities, close-reading exercises, and formal essays, students will learn how to utilize close-reading skills to interpret and analyze texts that encourage us to engage with race as an identity and cultural category.

ETS 182 M002: Race & Literary Texts
TuTh 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Chris Barnes

Michael Omi and Howard Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” Even though race has been shown to have no biological basis, it nonetheless, as Omi and Winant indicate, is a construction that shapes our daily, lived experience, as well as our relationship to society at large. By taking students through a progression of section topics that together build a coherent understanding of race, the state, history, and cross-racial solidarity, this course will help illuminate the ways in which past issues and concerns surrounding race resonate with contemporary concerns. We will use literary and other cultural texts to interrogate issues of race in America in the twentieth and twenty-first century; to explore how racial categories have been (re)created; and to investigate how categories like gender, class, and sexuality intersect with race. Authors may include Jean Toomer, Nella Larson, Claudia Rankine, and Junot Diaz. Through classroom participation, close reading exercises, and three extended essay assignments, students will learn how to use the practice of close reading to interpret and analyze the ways texts encourage us to engage with race as an identity and cultural category.

ETS 182 M003: Race & Literary Texts
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Chris Eng

Envisioning American Dreams and Realities

Whither the American Dream? Exacerbating skepticism around the honored ideal, recent occurrences—from the housing market crash and economic repression in 2007 to the rising xenophobia after the 2016 election—have prompted some to question whether we should more accurately speak of the ‘American Nightmare.’ Most urgently, race highlights the contradictions embedded within the American Dream: the perils that accompany its promises and the realities that undermine its ideals. For instance, how do we grapple with the fact that the nation’s celebration of ideals such as freedom and equality have historically coincided with harsh realities of slavery, exclusion laws, disenfranchisement, and segregation? This course examines literary works by writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, and Bich Nguyen, who explore how race, class, and sociopolitical contexts unevenly determine who has the opportunities and resources for realizing this dream and why it remains an illusion for so many. Elucidating the stark realities for minoritized communities, these writers leverage the American Dream as a platform for social justice to demand changes to the disconnect between ideal and reality. Accordingly, their imaginative works grapple with the possibilities for realizing a more perfect union while radically expanding our vision of what such dreams entail.

ETS 184 M002: Ethnicity & Literary Texts: Great Jewish Writers
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm (meets with REL/JSP/LIT 131)
Instructor: Ken Frieden

A wide-angle panorama of great stories written by Jewish authors, including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, Elie Wiesel, and Yiddish women writers. Topics include shtetl life, superstition, modernization, alienation, rebellion against authority, radical textualism, love, marriage, and the Nazi genocide. Our literary approach to works in the Jewish literary tradition emphasizes interconnections between theme and rhetoric. Immersion in texts, a particular tendency in traditional Jewish circles, sometimes appears as an escape from Jews’ powerlessness in the outside world. The strategy has limitations.

Texts

Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. Ed. Ken Frieden. Trans. Ken Frieden, Ted Gorelick, and Michael Wex. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1983 [or subsequent Schocken editions of The Complete Stories].

Agnon, S. Y. A Book that Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories [this edition preferred]. Ed. Alan Mintz, Anne Golomb Hoffman, and Nahum N. Glatzer. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2008.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

Keret, Etgar. Four Stories. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010.

Found Treasures. Ed Frieda Forman et al. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994.

ETS 184 M003: Ethnicity & Literary Texts
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Deya Dasgupta

What is ethnicity? Is it just a blanket term for constructing boundaries between “Us” and “Them”, or does it trace itself to certain cultural, social, linguistic and/or political paradigms? In this class, drawing on texts about ethnic as well as cross-cultural diversity, we will consider these very questions, not only to understand the identities that we construct for ourselves but also those that are imposed upon us by others. Consequently, we will reflect on the ways in which literature helps construct and maintain those identities, and how different spaces are created around different ethnic identifications. While we will use some theoretical texts to foreground our discussions, much of our focus in this class will be on the reading and interpretation of literary texts themselves. In this, we will be looking at popular TV shows, graphic novels, science fiction, children’s literature, short stories, and novels, even as we think through the concepts of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, transnationality, intersectionality, race/racialization, etc. Thus, some of the works or authors we may explore in this class include Maus, Persepolis, The Office, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anna Deavere-Smith, Shyam Selvadurai, Cherrie Moraga, Alice Walker, Zadie Smith, Saidiya Hartman and/or Sherman Alexia.

ETS 192 M001: Gender & Literary Texts
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Vicky Cheng

In this course, students will read and analyze the portrayal and role of gender in a collection of literary texts, focusing on the ethnic, cultural, racial, sexual, historical, and creative implications of gender in relation to the texts' writers and characters. The selected literature includes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and a graphic novel by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Randa Jarrar, and David Henry Hwang. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that would reflect the students’ understanding of the issues raised in these texts. The main objective of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities as well as their analytical readings skills. Cross listed with WGS 192.

ETS 192 M003: Gender and Literary Texts
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Instructor: Melissa Welshans

This course takes as its central premise the idea that gender is a useful category for literary analysis. To that end, this class will use gender as the central lens through which to explore literature from a variety of genres and time periods. But what is "gender" and how has it been defined variously across space and time? This class will answer these questions and more. Texts under consideration may include Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and poetry by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and others. Assignments will include formal essays and at least one in-class presentation. Cross listed with WGS 192.

In this class we will read and discuss American literature that takes up environmental values and makes an inquiry into the relationship between humans and non-human ecological communities. From frontier wilderness narratives and Puritan representations of the wild, to Native American reclamations and revisions of those depictions; from transcendentalist visions of nature as the source of spiritual and intellectual life, to modern-day “cli-fi” that that offers a frightening dystopian look at the impact of human activity on the planet, we’ll read novels, works of nonfiction, and poems that confront us with the uneasy terrain of personal vs. planetary ethics, and compel us to deepen our understanding of our various constructs of — and responsibility to – the natural world. Authors will include a selection from the following: Henry David Thoreau, Mary Hunter Austin, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Joy Williams, Cormac McCarthy, and Paolo Bacigalupi.

ETS 215 M001: Introductory Poetry Workshop
M 12:45-3:35pm
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

Weekly meetings of this workshop will focus on careful, constructive analysis of student poems, and on supplementary readings of other poetry. Besides writing a new original poem every week, everyone will revise at least four poems on the basis of the workshop response. Reading and writing assignments will be handed out as we go. No prerequisites.

ETS 217 M001: Introductory Fiction Workshop
M 12:45-3:35pm
Instructor: Arthur Flowers

Sophomore Fiction. Workshop format critiquing two student stories a week plus chosen readings. Craft. Production. Vision.

ETS 217 M003: Introductory Fiction Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Nana Adjei-Brenyah

This course will acquaint students with the fundamentals of writing fiction. Each week students will read and critique fiction written by their peers, as well as published work by modern writers. Students must come to class prepared and willing to discuss these stories. There will be in-class writing exercises and prompts which will lead students to create stories of their own. Class attendance and participation are mandatory.

ETS 242 M001 and M003: Reading & Interpretation
TuTh 12:30-1:50PM (M001)
MW 12:45-2:05PM (M003)
Instructors: Chris Forster (M001)/Silvio Torres-Saillant (M003)

ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what we read but how we read it. We will learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading as well as demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways readers produce meaning. These meanings are produced both from the perspective of each reader’s unique experiences, and through various critical and theoretical approaches. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation, language, reading, authorship, subjectivity, ideology, culture, history and difference.

Upper Division Courses

ETS 301 M001: Reading & Writing Prose
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Jules Gibbs

Students will discuss, analyze and eventually reproduce the various techniques of published prose writers in various nonfiction genres, including the personal essay, the polemical essay, literary journalism, and the lyric essay. Authors to be studied as models could include: John McPhee, Cheryl Strayed, Joy Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, Martin Espada, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Jamaica Kincaid, James Baldwin, and Mary Gaitskill. Students will be required to produce both creative and analytical responses to the texts studied.

ETS 303 M002: Reading & Writing Fiction
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Sarah Harwell

All creative disciplines depend on the study and imitation of the particular art form for mastery of their elements. In this course you will read and analyze a number of short stories in order to deepen your understanding of a variety of concerns in storytelling, including voice, style, description, story, and character. We will attempt to answer the question: how have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative texts? You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the texts studied. Possible authors include Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Edward P. Jones, Anton Chekhov, Donald Barthelme, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley and Raymond Carver.

ETS 305 M001: Critical Analysis: Introduction to Cultural Studies
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

What does it mean to be a “cultural critic”? This course will provide you with basic concepts and strategies to be able to answer this question and begin to call yourself a cultural critic. By comparing and contrasting the strategies of literary texts with other cultural forms and practices in specific situations we can consider what makes literature particular as a mode of signification (meaning-making). We will also learn the importance of situating everything we study—and ourselves-- historically. Hence, we will study literature alongside mass cultural forms such as advertising, television shows, or digital culture as well as everyday practices, such as shopping, reading the newspaper, or going to the movies, to try to understand how we learn to make sense of a globalizing world and live a particular culture—or cultures—in the U.S. today. As the course progresses, you should become a more sophisticated, creative and critical reader of the world in which we live as you learn to see how literature works in, with, and against that world.

ETS 310 M001: Literary Periods: U.S. Modernism
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Susan Edmunds

This course focuses on U.S. modernist fiction. Modernism was a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth- century international movement that rejected earlier norms of literary and aesthetic representation, and instead created narratives that resemble dream, cut up and rearranged linear narrative time-lines, and/or rejected the rules of ordinary syntax. In the course, we will focus on how U.S. modernist writers responded to changing models of individual and collective consciousness, and sought to use their writing as a space in which to promote human consciousness as both an index and agent of social change. We will read texts associated with High modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the proletarian literature movement, and mass cultural modernism. Likely texts include: Stein, Tender Buttons; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Toomer, Cane; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Hammett, Red Harvest; Larsen, Quicksand; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; and Hughes, The Ways of White Folks.

ETS 311 M001: Literary Periods Before 1900: Romanticism & the Environment
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Mike Goode

The modern environmental movement found early expression in British poetry, novels, and painting between 1770-1845. This course examines how British artists in this period responded to a variety of dramatic developments: the Industrial Revolution and the privatization of public lands creating radical changes to the landscape, ecologies, and rural communities; natural scientists challenging religious beliefs about the Earth and its organisms by introducing the notions of “geologic time” and “extinction”; new religious movements fueling conservation efforts by promoting the idea of nature’s divinity; new aesthetic tastes for landscape contributing to nature tourism and to new media (panoramas, photographs, stereographs, picturesque gardens); and politicians turning “nature” into a political football through debates over “natural rights” and “natural law.” Writers, artists, and landscape designers covered will include: William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron, John Keats, Percy Shelley, John Clare, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Thomas Gainsborough, Robert Barker, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, George Washington Wilson, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, Richard Payne Knight, and Humphrey Repton. Assignments will include three five-page papers. Pre-1900 Course.

ETS 315 M001: Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: Literature of the Caribbean Diaspora
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant

This course explores the rapport between Here and Elsewhere in the works of North American and European writers who trace their ancestry to the Caribbean region. The course looks at their accomplishments as literary artists, the place of ancestral heritage in their systems of significance, and the ideological negotiation of their diasporic location. Considering the tension stemming from their speaking as American, Canadian or European writers while upholding the banner of their Caribbean ancestral origins, we examine their tendency to fuel their literary imagination by drawing from the cultural, existential, and political tension emanating from the counterpoint of home and location, origin and destination, as well as from their problematic citizenship. The readings will cover texts by Cristina Garcia, Junot Díaz, Rhina P. Espaillat, Rosa Guy, Merle Collins, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Paule Marshall, M. Nourbese Philip, Denis Henriquez, Ellen Ombre, Astrid Roemer, Gisèle Pineau, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Pauline Melville, and Zadie Smith. We will cover issues of language, transnationalism, exile, ethnic identity, and literariness while engaging contemporary criticism and theory pertinent to the study of diasporas. Cross listed with LAS 300.

ETS 321 M001: Authors Before 1900: Chaucer and Contemporaries
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Patricia Moody

This course will provide a substantial background for understanding the literature of the late middle ages. The fourteenth century is a vital period, marked by significant changes in major institutions of the time: the court, the church, and the very social structure of late-medieval England. This setting of stress was also the environment in which three remarkable writers, in whose works one can see attempts at creating order in literary, moral, and social senses. Examining the ways in which Chaucer, Gower, and Langland focus their attention on order and decay in the England of their day, the course includes readings representing a wide range of genres from all three writers, as well as from that most prolific of all writers, Anonymous. Pre-1900 Course.

ETS 325 M001: The History and Varieties of English
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Patricia Moody

Want to understand IPA? Study runes? Be able to read literature written in Anglo-Saxon? Middle English? Understand Shakespeare? Learn why and how English speakers across the US and globe sound so different from “us”? This course aims to provide students with as much knowledge as possible, as interactively as possible, of fundamental linguistic concepts, the basic structures of the English language and representations of its history. Equally important, the course aims to develop critical awareness of contemporary language issues and the complex ways in which language embeds attitudes.

ETS 360 M001 Gender & Sexuality: Queer Youth – LGBTQ Narratives of Coming-of-Age and Coming Out
MW 2:15-3:35pm (meets with WGS 360 M001 and QSX 300 M001)
Instructor: Chris Eng

Does it get better? Confronting unprecedented rates of suicide and depression among queer and trans youth, the “It Gets Better” campaign promised a brighter future, urging these youth to endure. Yet, the encouragement to wait does not adequately address and challenge the conditions that make the world inhospitable for those of non-normative gender and sexual identities. Indeed, dominant “coming-of-age” narratives inhibit the flourishing of queer youth insofar as they prioritize heteronormative milestones that discipline children into sanctioned gender roles. Meanwhile, common understandings about ‘coming out’ and LGBTQ identity also fail to fully account for the needs and experiences of these youth. Looking at works by writers such as Alison Bechdel, Audre Lorde, and Rakesh Satyal, this course examines how queer and trans youth navigate their social worlds and the precarious uncertainties of growing up. These texts underscore how the dangers they face—of bullying, homelessness, homophobia, and heterosexist violence—are intimately shaped by race, class, and other sociopolitical contexts. Yet, far from suggesting a life defined exclusively by sorrow and threat, these writers illuminate the imaginative practices by which queer and trans youth craft possibilities for beauty, pleasure, joy, friendship, and fabulosity, compelling us to envision alternative, better worlds. 

ETS 361 M002: Gender & Sexuality Before 1900: What Was Sex? Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Dorri Beam

This class explores the possibility that sex and sexuality have histories and may mean differently across time. Before the relatively recent invention of heterosexuality and homosexuality in the late nineteenth-century, what was sex? What did it include and exclude? How did people understand their intimate relations? 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 and belonging to them? How did social structures--for instance, marriage and the family or the nineteenth-century color line and legal segregation--organize sex, feeling, affiliations, and identities? The nineteenth-century is arguably the period of the emergence of “sexuality,” and we will examine the use of literature itself for thinking about the history of sexuality while also dipping into other areas such as health reform, marriage advice, utopian manifestos, and sex radicalism; practices of polygamy and celibacy; and African American and Native American resistant formations of marriage or family. Texts may include Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories, ed. Christopher Looby; Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Charles Chesnutt, Stories of the Color Line; Kate Chopin, A Vocation and A Voice. Pre-1900 Course; Crosslisted with WGS 360 and QSX 300.

ETS 401-2: Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry
Tu 5:15pm-8:00pm
Instructor: Sarah Harwell

This course is devoted to the poem and seeks to answer the question that all artists face: how does one transform feeling and experience into something more than the original impulse, how does one create art? You will develop your poetic skills by reading the work of published poets, writing a poem every other week, and critiquing one another’s poems. You will be expected to extensively revise four of the poems you write. The course is open to anyone who has taken the introductory poetry workshop (ETS 215). Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of seven pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.  

ETS 403 M001: Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction
Tu 12:30-3:20pm
Instructor: Jonathan Dee

This fiction workshop will develop and expand upon the skills introduced in ETS 217. The primary focus will be on how to write better, more effective, more technically sophisticated short stories and/or novel excerpts; the secondary focus will be on how to critique constructively others’ work in these same forms. Most of the class will center on the writing and subsequent discussion of original work created by you; there will be some for-credit in-class writing exercises and previously published work to critique as well.

ETS 406 M001: Advanced Critical Writing in ETS: History of the Book
MW 2:15-3:35pm
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 (its actual paper, ink, binding, etc.) and the modes of its production, circulation and reception affect our sense of its content? We will cover a wide range of texts and topics, from medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare to romance novels and e-readers. We will sometimes meet at Bird Library, to examine archival materials in Special Collections related to our course topics. A research project will require you to work with Special Collections archival material, on an aspect of book history of particular interest to you. This Advanced Critical Writing course will help you to hone your research and writing skills and engage in deep and sustained critical inquiry. This course can be used in place of ETS 305.

ETS 410 M001: Forms & Genres: Cinema and the Documentary Idea
MW 3:45-5:05pm with Screening on W 7:00-9:45pm
Instructor: Roger Hallas

From 13th to Amy, from Exit Through the Gift Shop to The Jinx, documentary is enjoying a boom time right now, but its longer history reveals even richer and more diverse means to engage the world. Invented in the late nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by the modern demand for evidence. But the medium has also long been a tool for personal self-exploration. These widely differing aspects of the documentary idea have shaped film’s rhetorical capacity to construct sophisticated arguments about the real world using sound and image. We will examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also fake documentaries, wildlife films, docudramas, experimental film and reality television. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the radical decoding of the world in early Soviet cinema and 1960s political film to the subversive playfulness of the contemporary mockumentary, the course explores the power, appeal and impact of the documentary idea within different national, historical and political contexts. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required. Film and Screen Studies Course.

ETS 410 M004: Forms and Genres: Modern American Fiction
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Susan Edmunds

In this course, we will examine a range of fiction written between 1880 and 1945. Discussion will place the three major literary modes of the period--Realism, Naturalism and Modernism---in a sociohistorical context. We will try to understand how the larger social conflicts and social upheavals of the period prompted writers to become dissatisfied with inherited forms of literary representation and to devise new modes of representation which they claimed were more suited to bringing about–or protesting--social change. Throughout the semester, we will return to texts that focus on acting, masking, posing, and “passing”--as well as social climbing, falling, and drifting--in order to explore how changing codes of social performativity challenge and transform existing categories of race, class and gender. Likely texts include: Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Wharton, House of Mirth; Larsen, Passing; Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; West, The Day of the Locust.

ETS 411 M001: Forms & Genres before 1900: Realism’s Others
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Coran Klaver

The Victorian novel is often associated with realism, the idea that fiction strives to provide an accurate representation of reality. For many nineteenth-century novelists, however, the literary conventions of realism were too limiting—they chafed against or outright rejected elements of realist literary form, as well as with the values, priorities, and definitions of what counted as “real” that inhered in realist conventions. Instead of the “reality” of social norms and hegemonies, many Victorian novelists’ turns to the realities embedded in more marginal or contested literary forms such as melodrama, Gothic, ghost stories, sensation fiction, imperial romance, science fiction, and detective fiction. This course will use these “other” genres as lenses into the issues and experiences of Victorian life that this not fit into the heterosexual, middle-class norm of domestic realism. In addition to reading novels by Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, students will write three papers, keep an in-class journal, and have either a final examination or regular reading quizzes. Pre-1900 Course.

ETS 420 M001: Cultural Production and Reception: Experiencing Film
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm; Screening Th 6:30-9:15pm
Instructor: Steven Doles

How can we best describe what we are doing when we watch a film? How do the spaces and contexts in which we watch shape our response to the film? Are we all having the same experience when we watch, or do different audiences respond in their own ways? This course is designed to explore questions like these in two ways. On the one hand, we will discuss various topics in film studies connected to these concerns, including audience reception, exhibition, theories of spectatorship, cinephilia, and cult movies. We will also develop a set of practices of attentive and imaginative viewing through a series of exercises, drawing upon perspectives that are sometimes called “contemplation” or “mindfulness.” These might include exercises such as journaling or free-writing, repeated rewatching of scenes or extended looking at frame captures, silent reflection, and trip reports of spaces of exhibition outside the university. Our first-hand experiences will thus become evidence for thinking about and exploring the approaches that film scholars have developed to these topics. In addition to our viewing of narrative fiction films ranging from the accessible to the challenging, selected nonfiction and experimental films will allow us to explore how our experience changes when viewing these other film modes. Film & Screen Studies Course.

ETS 421 M002: Production & Reception before 1900: Shakespeare and the Natural World
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan

Global virus epidemics, drought, flood, deforestation, toxic water and air, food-insecurity: these are but a few of the effects of climate-change brought on or accelerated by human agents, and Shakespeare has much to say about them. His plays witness and reflect on a period of radical transformation of deep-set ideas and the social and cultural institutions (gender, church, city, state, family, market, etc.) that housed them. Reading a selection of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, we will explore ways that meditations on the natural world shape his reflections on these social and political transformations, and vice versa. Our investigations will be guided by attention to the relationship between form and matter in Shakespeare’s work and in the early modern period. To that end, our reading of the plays will emphasize dramatic technique and foreground aspects of theatrical performance, which we will consider through experiments in staging and performance wherever possible. Together, we will learn to read, observe, and listen for the ways that live, embodied, multisensory theatrical experience shapes our capacity to observe and imagine the dynamism of Shakespeare’s natural worlds. This course will address the interests of students in the sciences and theater/literary studies alike. No prior Shakespeare experience required. Pre-1900 Class.

ETS 444 M002: Theoretical Modes of Inquiry: Game Studies in Practice
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Chris Hanson

What are the roles of games and play in contemporary culture and how are these roles shifting? How do we “read” and interpret a game such as Grand Theft Auto or Super Mario Bros. or virtual reality (VR) experiences via the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive? Just as digital games have grown profoundly more complex in the last fifty years, theoretical and critical approaches to games have proliferated and diversified, moving well past early debates between those studying games as narratives and those who examine games as systems of play. Of course, the study of games predates the digital age, and 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 non-digital and digital games as case studies for our critical consideration. We will explore core game studies concepts through writing analytically and creating games that illustrate or challenge these theories. In addition to a variety of games, our study will include screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies. Film and Screen Studies Course.

ETS 494 M001: Research Practicum
Th 3:30-6:15pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

This one-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an honors/distinction project in ETS. Enrollment is by invitation to participate in the distinction program, and/or honors program, only. In five formal meetings, we will cover choosing an adviser, developing a suitable topic with engaging research questions, compiling a bibliography, reading critically, taking notes effectively, and writing a thesis proposal. Our work should prepare you to write your thesis in the spring semester. The texts covered in class will be your own writing and research for the most part, but some supplemental readings will be posted on Blackboard, so you should budget funds to print these out as well as to make copies of your completed assignments for me, your classmates and your adviser, as directed. The exercises and workshops are designed to prepare you for ETS 495: Thesis Writing Workshop in the spring.

Spring 2018

ETS 107-1 Living Writers
W 3:45-6:30 PM
ETS 107-2 through 10
W 3:45-6:30 PM
Instructor: Staff

This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers’ work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers. The first class meets in Gifford Auditorium.

ETS 113-1 British Literature, Beginnings to 1789
TuTh 3:30-4:40pm
Instructor: Adam Kozaczka

This writing-intensive course offers a survey of British literature from its beginnings until 1789. We will read texts written during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Civil War and Restoration, and the Eighteenth Century. Beginning with a study of Arthurian legend and the Saxon and Norman literary origins of Englishness, the course will move on to study the poetry and drama of Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries. We will examine the literary efforts of England’s monarchs, with readings by Elizabeth I and James I, along with samples from an increasingly scandalous, ‘libertine’ tradition. Other highlights will include Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, and some Irish and Scottish texts. The course will close with a look at the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, and will consider the role of sympathy and sensibility in Swift, Sterne, and others. We will discuss literature and culture: heritage, identity, language, gender, sexuality, literacy, class, religion, and even witchcraft will all be political topics addressed at various points in discussion. We will learn about specific forms of literature including the lais, the sonnet, the mock heroic, the Restoration comedy, and the sentimental novel, and will write academic essays about them.

ETS 118-1 American Literature Since 1865
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Hillarie Curtis

This course will explore major authors and literary movements in American Literature from 1865 to the present. Course readings will include fiction, essays, and poetry from both mainstream and marginalized authors. These readings will provide examples of U.S. writers engaging with the global literary aesthetic movements of Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism while also exploring voices and modes of storytelling and narrative unique to U.S. Culture, such as Native American literature, the Southern Gothic, the Harlem renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. During this course students will read literature emerging during moments of historical and aesthetic transition in American history, and interrogate connections between American literature, culture, politics, and history. This course will attempt to answer these questions (and others): What does it mean to be “American” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What is the story of the twentieth-century U.S. and why is it important that these authors tell it in the way they do? Authors may include: Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Jack London, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zitcala Ša, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Sherman Alexie, Ron Rash, and others.

ETS 119-2 Topics in U.S. Literary History: We Protest—The Art of Dissent
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Chris Eng

Dissent has always been central to the project of American democracy. From fights for emancipation in the nineteenth century to Black Power and Occupy Wall Street, protest movements elucidate and challenge the inequalities innate to the nation, demanding a more perfect union. Practitioners of dissent underscore that how we narrate our demands impacts the possibilities for political efficacy in achieving these goals. They thus compel us to consider the art of dissent. Accordingly, this course examines how distinct genres of vocalizing dissent (i.e. manifestos, pamphlets, petitions, protest novels) work in tandem with modes of radical collective action (i.e. strikes, movements, rallies, sit-ins). Contemplating the longer political and literary history of protest in the United States, we will read writings by dissenters that might include Frederick Douglass, Sutton Griggs, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Sunil Yapa. Focusing in on the freedom dreams of the 1960s-70s radical social movements and contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter that organize against police brutality and the rampant xenophobia following the 2016 election, we will contemplate the possibilities for art to mobilize a collective “we” that not only protests uneven power structures, but also crafts imaginative visions for a socially just world.

ETS 121-1 Introduction to Shakespeare
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Evan Hixon

In her preface to the Bedford edition of Romeo and Juliet, Dympna Callaghan writes that, “[c]ontrary to popular opinion, Shakespeare’s plays bear no resemblance either to mathematical problems requiring a solution (the meaning of the play) or to Sphinx-like riddles whose enigmas must eternally haunt us (the mystery of the play)”. Taking this suggestion seriously, this course will serve as an introduction to the writing and life of William Shakespeare, the most famous and well-read playwright of early modern England. Through reading a selection of his plays, this course intends to give students an overview of Shakespeare’s works, his language and the world in which he lived. Beyond simply rehearsing plot lines and famous quotations, this course will emphasize the social, historical and theatrical conditions which impacted the production and consumption of Shakespeare’s plays during the late 16th and early 17th century. The primary goal of this course is to teach students the skills necessary to perform sustained critical analysis of Shakespeare’s text as well as provide students with a better understanding of Shakespeare’s world and his place within the literary canon. No previous knowledge of Shakespeare is required for this course, but this is a reading and writing intensive course.

ETS 122-1 Introduction to the Novel
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: Maxwell Cassity

Where did the novel come from? What is the first novel? How did the novel come to evolve in an American context? How have literary aesthetics and movements such as realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism influenced the development of the novel as a genre? This course will examine the origins and rise of the genre and explore how the novel has come to play a major role in the literary history of America. Students will explore critical writings on genre, aesthetics, and form alongside excerpts and full novels from a range of authors including Miguel Cervantes, Aphra Benn, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and others.

ETs 145-1 and 145-3 Reading Popular Culture
M001: MW 12:45-2:05pm with Screening on W 7:00-9:45pm
M003: MW 3:45-5:05pm with Screening on W 7:00-9:45pm
Instructor: Steven Doles

The vast majority of the texts and objects we experience in our everyday lives, from TV shows to toothbrushes, are mass produced within a commercial context. Scholars and critics have frequently been highly skeptical of these texts, seeing them as overly commodified and inferior to high art. However, within the past several decades a model of popular culture has become more prominent within the academy which examines the ways people make use of cultural products rather than how these products use and exploit their consumers. In this course, we will examine both sides of this debate, gaining an understanding of important concepts in the study of popular culture, and applying them to a wide variety of examples. The course will take us from discussions about how to define popular culture and how to recognize the elements that can make a text meaningful to a popular audience, to examinations of actual instances of fandom, including fan fiction and videos. Specific case studies will include phenomena such as comic book fandom and Star Trek conventions, but students are also encouraged to bring their own experiences and knowledge into discussion and assignments, which might include two papers, a midterm and final, and short writings throughout the semester. Attendance at weekly screenings is required.

ETS 146-1 Interpretation of New Media
TuTh 2:00-2:55pm
Screening Th 7:00-9:45pm
Discussion Sections: F 11:40-12:35pm; 12:45-1:40pm
Instructor: Chris Hanson

While print, films, interactive texts, and other modes of expression have traditionally been construed as separate entities, now we may also read and experience these diverse forms through a screen-based device such as a computer or mobile device. This course studies the growing number of forms in which a given cultural text is expressed and how our understanding of that text is shaped by its medium. We will examine the means by which “new” screen media are defined as well as the textual, cultural, and social implications of their deployment. While the boundaries between “old” media were clearly demarcated, digital media merge forms and practices with new technologies of production, delivery, and display. We will explore the commonalities across a range of screen-based forms, while also assessing the unique aspects that truly differentiate a given medium from another. This course will examine the function of medium specificity and its application to both “old” and “new” textual forms to map the ways in which our modes of reading shift from text to text and from screen to screen.

ETS 151-1 Interpretation of Poetry
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Bruce Smith

The course will consist of discussions of poems from the various traditions of poetry: from anonymous ballads to spoken word poetry. I’m interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the intellect and the emotions, how it’s “the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart”. I’m interested too in what ways the poem provokes and challenges us, what gives the poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech.

Students will be asked to write 6 two-page papers in which they examine closely a single poem by a poet from the text. Students may opt to write more papers (up to 8) and receive extra consideration for them. In addition, students will be asked to choose a poet and present the work of the poet in a 4 to 5-page paper. Emphasis in discussions is on style and substance, music and image. Multiple ways of reading poems will help the students expand the range of poetic possibilities.

ETS 153-1 Interpretation of Fiction
Lecture: MW 11:40am-12:35pm
Discussion Sections: F 10:35-11:30am; 11:40am-12:35pm
Instructor: Kevin Morrison

Fictional texts, including short stories, novellas, and novels, invite us as readers to enter worlds very different from, or quite similar to, our own. These worlds may be long gone, as in the case of historical fiction, or, as with science fiction, not yet come. They may be ideal (utopian fiction), nightmarish (dystopian fiction), or downright terrifying (post-apocalyptic fiction). Or they may closely approximate the world you already inhabit (realist fiction). This is a course for anyone who loves fiction and is curious about how its formal elements—point of view, plot, character, description, narrative, dialogue—contribute to our understanding of a given work. By reading a variety of texts culled from different historical periods, national literatures, and genres, and through a mixture of lecture and discussion, you will come to more fully appreciate how fiction works, what it contains, and why it continues to matter.

ETS154-1 Interpretation of Film
MW 12:45-1:40pm
Screening M 7:00-9:45pm
Discussion Sections: Th 3:30-4:25pm; Th 5:00-5:55pm; F 9:30-10:25am; F 10:35-11:30am
Instructor: Roger Hallas

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interpretation of film. Regarded as the quintessential medium of the last century, cinema has profoundly shaped the ways in which we see the world and understand our place within it. Focusing principally on classical and contemporary English-language cinema, we will investigate precisely how meaning is produced in cinema. The course integrates a close attention to the specific aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of film with a wide-ranging exploration of the social and cultural contexts that shape how we make sense of and take pleasure in films. We shall also devote attention to the question of history: How may one interpret a film in relation to its historical context? Film history incorporates not only the films that have been produced over the past one hundred years, but also an understanding of how the practice of movie-going has transformed over time. No prior film experience is required.

ETS 155-2 Interpretation of Nonfiction
TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm
Instructor: Rachel Snyder-Lockman

This writing-intensive course offers an introduction to literary nonfiction. We will read nonfiction from the American social protest literary tradition in a variety of forms including essays, history, journalism, letters, memoir, pamphlets, and speeches. As we read, we will learn about literary elements including voice, style, structure, plot, point of view, setting, characterization, and theme. We will also consider each text’s purpose and audience. Possible assignments include but are not limited to three five-page papers, weekly written reflections, and a final exam.

ETS 155-3 Interpretation of Non-Fiction
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Johnathan Sanders

Contrary to popular belief, we rarely (if ever) have access to “pure knowledge” of the world; facts are always shaped by the way in which they are communicated. This course seeks to examine the intersection of two of these mediating forces – medium and genre – by examining works of non-fiction invested in issues surrounding technology. By paying close attention to aspects of these texts’ construction such as tone, point of view, and narrativization, we can better understand how and why people attempt to represent “reality” in various contexts. The course will begin by examining some fears and fantasies about technology both past and present, exploring manifestos, essays, and reportage from the turn of the century onwards. We will move on to non-literary forms of non-fiction – audio, photography, and documentary film – in order to investigate questions of truth and identity in a technologically mediated world. Towards the end of the course, our focus will shift towards new media forms of non-fiction (such as hypertexts, video essays, and docu-games) and how they complicate our understandings of knowledge production and representation in the digital age.

ETS 175-1 World Literature from 1000 C.E. to the Present
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Harvey Teres

This course will introduce you to some of the most valued and enduring examples of world literature since 1000 C.E. Texts will likely include Dante’s Inferno; the African epic Sundiata; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Shakespeare’s Othello; Voltaire’s Candide; Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West; Basho’s haiku poetry; Goethe’s Faust; Ghalib’s and Tagore’s poetry; fiction by Chekhov, Lu Xun, Woolf, and Borges; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Anna Akhmatova’s poetry; and Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The objective of the course is to enhance your global cultural literacy by familiarizing you with some of the most influential books and cultures from around the world. This will prepare you to become an informed global citizen and at the same time provide essential background for understanding English and American literature and culture. Classes will alternate between lectures and discussions. You will have the option of either producing shorter response papers or traditional midterm and final interpretive essays.

ETS 181-2 Class and Literary Texts
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Sean M. Conrey

From Dickens’ descriptions of living conditions in Victorian England, James Agee’s stories of tenant farmers during the Depression, to Ursula LeGuin’s’s speculative fiction focused on labor exploitation, questions of social class have long been a focus of novelists’, poets’ and essayists’ work. Parallel to the ways that writers affect and engage social class, critical readers can engage with the concepts of social class as they read. Concerned with the social divisions of privilege, wealth, power and status, class, like race and gender, is a social construction that is imposed on, and performed by, all of us as a way of stratifying and defining who we are. Though the restraints of social class readily subject us to the power of others, these restraints may also, when well understood, provide a springboard for advocacy and direct social action. This course provides an introduction to these concepts and exposes students to key texts in literature, film and other media as a way of fostering critical engagement and developing richer social responsibility through textual interpretation.

ETS 182-1 Race & Literary Texts
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Chris Barnes

Michael Omi and Howard Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” Even though race has been shown to have no biological basis, it nonetheless, as Omi and Winant indicate, is a construction that shapes our daily, lived experience, as well as our relationship to society at large. By taking students through a progression of section topics that together build a coherent understanding of race, the state, history, and cross-racial solidarity, this course will help illuminate the ways in which past issues and concerns surrounding race resonate with contemporary concerns. We will use literary and other cultural texts to interrogate issues of race in America in the twentieth and twenty-first century; to explore how racial categories have been (re)created; and to investigate how categories like gender, class, and sexuality intersect with race. Authors may include Jean Toomer, Nella Larson, Claudia Rankine, and Junot Diaz. Through classroom participation, close reading exercises, and three extended essay assignments, students will learn how to use the practice of close reading to interpret and analyze the ways texts encourage us to engage with race as an identity and cultural category.

ETS 182-2 Race and Literary Texts
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: Haejoo Kim

The aim of this course is to explore the textual representation of race and their cultural and social implications. By looking at a variety of materials including novels, novellas, essays, and short stories, we will examine how race as a social category has been and continues to be historically constructed, reproduced, and interrogated. Some of the major questions with which we will engage are: How was the category of human historically constructed in Western tradition, and what was its relationship with race? How has been “blackness” represented in American context? How do race interact and intersect with other social formations, such as gender, class, and nationality? What is the history of colonialism and what is its effect? To address these questions, we will be covering a range of writers such as Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Nella Larson, Mary Shelley, Nam Le, and Helen Oyeyemi.

ETS 184-2 Ethnicity and Literary Texts
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Elizabeth Gleesing

The United States is commonly referred to as a multicultural society, a melting pot, and a nation of immigrants. With these designations in mind, this class seeks to question the relationship between identity and ethnicity in contemporary U.S. literary texts. In taking ethnicity as a lens, we can ask questions about what it means to be included in or excluded from American identity and what relationship there is between who we are and the places from which we and our ancestors have come. Along with these central questions, we will analyze themes of intra- and intergenerational conflict, in-between identities that seem to straddle national borders, and experiences of being a refugee or being a stateless person, effectively estranged from one’s home country. Potential authors we will study include: Sherman Alexie, Helena María Viramontes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gene Luen Yang and Gloria Anzaldúa. In addition to written texts, we might also look at how short films like Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory visually communicate ideas of generation change and historical memory. Assignments are likely to include turning in weekly informal responses, generating questions for discussion, and writing three analysis papers.

ETS 192-1 Gender & Literary Texts
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Carol Fadda

In this course, students will read and analyze the portrayal and role of gender in a collection of literary texts, focusing on the ethnic, cultural, racial, sexual, historical, and creative implications of gender in relation to the texts' writers and characters. The selected literature includes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and a graphic novel by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Randa Jarrar, and David Henry Hwang. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that would reflect the students’ understanding of the issues raised in these texts. The main objective of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities as well as their analytical readings skills.

ETS 192-3 Gender and Literary Texts
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Instructor: Ashley O’Mara

When people say that gender is a social construct, what do they mean? This writing-intensive course will explore how authors and creators have written, unwritten, and rewritten gender in response to how ideological and social systems define it at notable moments in history — from asexuality to ze pronouns, and from creation narratives to current events. We will pay special attention to how these systems manifest in marriage and celibacy, family and friendship, heteronormativity and homosociality, and feminism and patriarchy, as we consider how race, class, sexual orientation, and disability impact gender identity and expression in different sociohistorical contexts. The class will look at a range of media and genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, theater, film, the graphic novel, fanfic, games, and music. Readings may include works by authors such as Kempe, Shakespeare, Woolf, Hughes, and Kingston, as well as both popular and documentary visual media. Critical readings may include theory from Anzaldúa, Butler, Foucault, and hooks. Students will develop literacy and analytic skills through close-readings, critical essays, and creative projects based on the course texts.

ETS 215-4 Introductory Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:30pm
Instructor: Jules Gibbs

Writers, said Saul Bellow, are readers moved to emulation. In this course, students will closely study poems in our various traditions so that they may develop a more sophisticated understanding of what makes a poem work, and thereby emulate those strategies in their own writing. Through reading assignments, writing exercises, peer critiques, lively and engaged in-class discussions, and attendance at various author readings, students will develop a critical acumen, hone verbal and written critiquing skills, and draft and revise original pieces of poetry with an eye towards craft and invention.

ETS 217-3 Introductory Fiction Workshop
Th 12:30-3:15pm
Instructor: Jonathan Dee

This course will acquaint students with some of the fundamental rules, tricks, pleasures, etc. of storytelling in prose. Each week students will read and critique fiction written by their peers, as well as published work by modern writers. Students must come to class prepared and willing to discuss these stories. There will be in-class writing exercises and prompts. Class attendance and participation are mandatory.

ETS 230-1 Ethnic Literary Traditions: Travel Narratives and Pilgrimages
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Ken Frieden

When does a trip become a pilgrimage? The more we invest a destination with meaning, the more appropriate it is to call a visit a pilgrimage. Sea voyages influenced the rise of the European novel, and travel has been a prominent motif in religious literature and popular culture. We will look at pilgrimage narratives and accounts of secular travel, primarily by Jewish travelers.
In this writing intensive course, students will be asked to write very short analyses—just a few sentences—for almost every class session. You will also write your own travel narratives.
Sample Texts:

Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts. Ed. Elkan Nathan Adler. New York: Dover, 1987.

Romanelli, Samuel. Travail in an Arab Land. Trans. Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Nahman of Bratslav and Nathan Sternharz [1806-1810/1815]. The Tales. Trans. Arnold J. Band. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

ETS 242-4 Reading and Interpretation
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Meina Yates-Richard

ETS 242-5 Reading and Interpretation
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Patricia Roylance

ETS 242 introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what we read but how we read it. We will learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading as well as demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep and thoughtful reading of literary and non-literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways readers produce meaning. These meanings are produced both from the perspective of each reader’s unique experiences, and through various critical and theoretical approaches. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation, language, reading, authorship, subjectivity, ideology, culture, history and difference.

ETS 304-1 Reading and Writing Poetry
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Sarah Harwell

T. S. Eliot said that minor poets borrow while great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating, and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate poems from canonical poets. We’ll examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we will read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We will deepen our understanding of a variety of poetic devices, such as diction, image, music, and metaphor. We will attend to each poet’s stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, as well as his or her techniques and habits. You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the poets studied.

ETS 305-1 Critical Analysis: The Racial Imagination
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant

This course will look at theories of race with a focus on the intellectual history of responses to the advent of blackness, the rise of whiteness, and the partition of humanity into phenotypically differentiated branches as captured by literature and thought across several centuries. The class will survey William Shakespeare’s “dark lady” and the Bard’s relationship with Lucy Negro, Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, Thomas Jefferson’s reading of Phillis Wheatly, William Taylor Coleridge’s difficulty with the “race” of Othello, Wallace Stevens’ stigmatization of Gwendolyn Brooks, and the critical discussion about the all-black production of “white” plays on the contemporary American stage, among other “racial moments” in literature and thought. The class will consider these vis-à-vis the representation of phenotypical difference in texts written in European countries from Homer through the 1400s prior to the rise of the Christian West and the advent of the racial other as a factor of social relations and geopolitical exchange.

ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis: Literature and its Media
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Chris Forster

We usually talk about “novels,” “poems,” or “films” (and texts of various other kinds). But what about the paper and ink (or parchment or wax or celluloid or LCD screens or tablets) that carry those texts? Does the history of these materials affect literary forms? Do they change how, or what, we read? This class pursues these questions by turning to the field of media studies, to see what implications it may have students of literature and culture. This class will cover a diverse and historically broad set of materials and concerns, looking at the history of texts from the ancient world (and oral poetry) through to contemporary developments in digital culture (poetry written on, and with, the Web; novels written on Twitter). We’ll read key thinkers and theorists of media studies (and related fields, like book history) as well as literary texts which foreground their own medium in provocative ways (like Tristram Shandy). Likely critics include Plato, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Walter Benjamin, alongside works by major poets, novelists, and writers (including Laurence Sterne, E. E. Cummings, and Teju Cole). Course work will include a final essay, regular short responses, and a presentation to the class, as well as some experiments with media and its history.

ETS 310-1 Literary Periods: U.S. Southern Literature in the 20th Century
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Susan Edmunds

In this course, we will read novels and short stories about the U.S. South. After a brief look at nineteenth-century literary antecedents in works by Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Chesnutt, we will focus on fiction written in the twentieth century. We will examine aesthetic modes and categories that have been strongly associated with the South, such as the gothic, the grotesque, the folk, and the vernacular. And we will explore the literary evolution of Southern character types ranging from white trash and the black folk to the doomed aristocrat, the conjure woman, the sexual queer and the freak. Throughout the course, we will examine how writers have used these literary genres and character types to talk about race in (and beyond) the South -- particularly as race relates to questions of gender and sexuality, wealth and poverty, violence and the law, and regional and global power relations. Texts include: Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road; William Faulkner, As I lay Dying; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms; Cormac McCarthy, Child of God; Toni Morrison, Tar Baby; and Susan Choi, The Foreign Student.

ETS 311-1 Literary Periods Before 1900: Romance in the Middle Ages – “What’s Love Got to Do with it?”
TuTh 2:00-3:20pm
Instructor: Patricia Moody

Before the twelfth century, western vernacular writings dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical, and factual themes, all of which were held to convey the truth. During the second half of the twelfth century, however, a new genre emerged: the romance, which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed largely to break free from traditional presuppositions. Medieval romances astound the modern reader—first, by their broad circulation throughout Europe; second, by the multitude and variety of stories, characters, themes, and motifs they reveal; and finally, by the sheer diversity of their forms and subject-matter, complexity of narrative strategies and perspectives, and the critical responses they invite. This course offers an examination of medieval fictionality. Beginning with the origins, forms, and contexts of medieval romances, we examine the emergence of romance in its first formative period in the twelfth century, the role of magic and fantasy, and transformations of stories from ancient to modern times. Throughout we will consider the difficulties of the genre and the kinds of sociological and cultural issues romance interrogates.
Pre-1900 course.

ETS 311-2 Literary Periods Before 1900: Love and Marriage in Shakespeare’s England
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Instructor: Melissa Welshans

The Beatles once famously sang, "All you need is love." This course will take this phrase as a starting point for exploring "love" and its iterations in early modern England, especially as it relates to the institution of marriage. What was the status of "love" in the time of Shakespeare--a time when romantic ideals often conflicted with the realities of match-making? How was it defined, expressed, cultivated, destroyed? How did it manifest in marriage, and what were other acceptable social sites of love? Texts under consideration will include a number of Shakespeare's works, including Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as works by his contemporaries: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl, Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, and assorted poetical works by the likes of Edmund Spenser and John Donne. Assignments will include at least one short paper, an oral presentation, and one longer research paper. Pre-1900 course. This course will meet the Shakespeare requirement for English Education Majors.

ETS 311-3 Literary Periods Before 1900: Eighteenth-Century Worlds
TuTh 5:00-6:20pm
Instructor: Erin Mackie

This course explores some important topographical, social, and cultural sites of the British eighteenth century. We look at how people oriented themselves to the new urban physical and media landscapes; how they negotiated relations between the metropolis and its New World colonies; how they navigated an ever more demanding world of fashion and consumption; and how they developed new interior landscapes of the imagination, aesthetic taste, and emotional response. Paying attention to formulations of class and status, taste and decorum, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, we will look at how modern notions of difference, cohesion, legitimacy, and cultural aesthetic value were formed. We will end the course looking at the contemporary reconstruction of an eighteenth-century world in Williamsburg, Virginia. Authors we will read include: John Dryden, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Frances Burney, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith. Pre-1900 course.

ETS 315-1 Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: U.S. Immigrant Fiction in the 20th and 21st Centuries
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Susan Edmunds

Celebrations of the immigrant past are common in the U.S., where we like to associate immigrant stories with the American Dream and the idea of the American Melting Pot. But the fiction of our immigrant writers reveals a much more complex picture. In this course, we will read fiction that portrays immigrant experiences marked by ethnic and racial conflict, shifting gender and family norms, debates about the value of assimilation, and the traumatic effects of war, dislocation and uncertain legal status. We will also examine literary tropes developed across immigrant traditions during a century in which the United States’ rise to global dominance has not only changed who immigrates to the U.S. and why, but also the stories immigrants tell. Texts include: Abraham Cahan, Yekl; Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Helena Maria Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus; Lê Thị Diễm Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For; Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers, as well as short stories by Sui Sin Far, James Farrell, Hisaye Yamamoto, Nam Le, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

ETS 315-2 Ethnic Literatures & Cultures: Reading Lives
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant

This course introduces students to autobiography--broadly conceived to include memoirs, testimonial texts, and other forms of life-writing—with a focus on works published by US authors of various ancestries, including Amerindian, Asian, African, and Hispanic descent as well as writers of Jewish, Irish, and Italian ancestry prior to their entering the sphere of US whiteness. We study life-writing as a literary genre and as a means for individuals to enter the realm of history. We consider autobiography in terms of its similarity to and difference from fiction while exploring the notion of ethnicity, race, and ancestry as these appear represented in written lives. We will read “ethnic” American texts that set out to narrate the self, taking on the difficulty inherent to the problem self-representation and the equally complex challenge of performing a social identity in a text. We consider the fortunes of live-writing when practiced by writers whose community of shared heritage resides in marginal sectors of the social system, asking how they interact with the way mainstream authors write themselves into history. Authors studied include Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Carlos Bulosan, Jovita Gonzalez, John Okada, Luther Standing Bear, Mario Puzo, Anzia Yezierska, William Alfred, Claude Brown, Piri Thomas, Sui Sin Far, Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez, Norma E. Cantu, Alice Walker, Jack Agueros, Esmeralda Santiago, and Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

ETS 320-1 Authors: Hollywood Directors of the 1950s (meets with HOA-300)
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Screening W 7:00-10:00pm
Instructor: Will Scheibel

The 1950s was a decade of socio-cultural change in the U.S. after World War II and industrial reorganization in Hollywood after the Paramount Case of 1948, an event that signaled the decline of the old studio system. While surveying the major Hollywood directors of the era, this course will introduce you to the critical, theoretical, and historical methods of studying film authorship. Beginning with “the auteur theory” in its French and Anglophone conceptions, we will move from aesthetics of signature style and personal vision to the politics of authorship and identity. We will then build from these issues to look at directors in the contexts of postwar U.S. ideology and culture more broadly, from mid-century modernity to consumerism and popular art, from social problem discourses to the anti-Communist “Red Scare” of the HUAC investigations. Finally, we will consider the historical-material conditions of working in the U.S. motion picture industry, as directors adapted to changes in Hollywood filmmaking practice: a new, horizontally integrated mode of production, distribution, and exhibition; economic constraints; weakening censorship regulations from the Production Code Administration; and competition with television through color and widescreen technologies. Cinema studies has long been invested in the Hollywood directors of this profoundly transformative decade. This course seeks to understand why, and also what their legendary films, careers, and reputations still have to teach us about the history of U.S. cinema. Film and Screen Studies course.

ETS 320-3 Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien
TuTh 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Pat Moody

J.R.R. Tolkien was a university professor, philologist, poet, and writer—hardly the credentials that would cause him to be called “the writer of the century.” His writings, however, particularly The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, have propelled his name to such fame as he never dreamt of. This course will trace Tolkien’s career as academic AND writer: we’ll read his translation of Beowulf (paying close attention to his copious notes), his scholarly articles, and his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We’ll learn about his friends at Oxford, known as The Inklings, and then turn to the works that have made him so famous, concentrating on how Tolkien’s vast learning and curiosity about myth and oral literature inform his fiction. We may even learn to write in runes and speak Elvish!

ETS 321-1 Authors Before 1900: Brontes
MW 2:15-3:35pm
Instructor: Claudia Klaver

The Byronic Hero, the madwoman in the attic, the Gothic romance, and the feminist heroine: these are a few of the legacies left by the writing of the Bronte sisters, their biographers, and their twentieth-century critics. This course will examine at once the writings of Ann, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte and the “myth of the Brontes” as constructed by Charlotte Bronte herself, her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, and by critics and fans through to the present day. We will read selections from the Bronte juvenilia; Elizabeth Gaskell’s influential Life of Charlotte Bronte; and the novels, Ann Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette. We will end the class by reading two very different “rewritings” of Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s postcolonial novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, and Daphne Du Maurier’s mid-20th–century Gothic romance, Rebecca. Our secondary readings will focus on historical contexts of the Brontes and the emotional worlds of their novels. These emotional worlds are key to understanding the imaginative power of these novels for romance reader and feminists alike. Students will work facilitate class discussion, conduct and present independent research, and write three 5-7 page essays. Pre-1900 course.

ETS 360-1 Reading Gender & Sexualities: Gender and Sexualities in the Arab World and its Diaspora
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Carol Fadda

This course explores the ways in which gender and sexualities are represented in an array of visual, historical, and literary texts from the Arab world and its diaspora. Some of the main issues that will be addressed include the historical development of feminism in the Arab world, the construction of gender roles in the context of war and conflict, as well as the outspokenness of many of the region's writers on topics such as love, sex, and homosexuality. In studying these issues, we will also be focusing on texts by writers of Arab descent living in the US who respond to and engage with their counterparts in the Arab world on some of the same topics but from a diasporic perspective, thus emphasizing a transnational and transcultural approach to our study of gender and sexuality. The main aim of the course is to familiarize students with some of the main issues surrounding the topics of gender and sexualities in the Arab world, encouraging them to sharpen their critical and analytical skills in their engagement with this material.

ETS 360-2 Reading Gender & Sexualities: Queer (Be)Longings of Asian American Literatures
MW 5:15-6:35pm
Instructor: Chris Eng

There’s something queer about the relationship between Asian/Americans and U.S. national identity. From the bachelor sojourner to the forever foreigner, representations of Asian bodies as alien illuminate how citizenship extends beyond legal status to encompass cultural notions of national belonging. As ideals surrounding heteronormative domesticity consolidated criteria for who counts as American, Asian bodies were constructed as a threatening other, exhibiting modes of gender and sexuality deemed improper, perverse, and deviant. Since these depictions were used to rationalize exclusionary policies, dominant efforts have responded by refuting these representations and thus further marginalizing gay and lesbian struggles. Instead, this course centers LGBTQ Asian/American experiences that proliferate queer (be) longings to critique the inequities of citizenship and imagine alternative social visions. It explores a range of cultural texts including novels, plays, experimental film, and performance art—by artists including David Henry Hwang, Maxine Kingston, and Chay Yew—that proffers forms of belonging and longing that exceed the conventional parameters of American identity. “(Be) longing” thus serves as our guiding framework for grappling with the historical configuration of Asian/Americans as perverse subjects of U.S. citizenship and war as well as the creative modes of queer world making enacted through activism and art that desire otherwise.

ETS 361-1 Gender & Sexuality Before 1900: Sex and the City in English Renaissance Drama
MW 12:45-2:05pm
Instructor: Melissa Welshans

Before Carrie Bradshaw was writing about the struggles of dating in The Big Apple, writers in Renaissance England were exploring the nature of romance in the bustling metropolis of London. This course will attend specifically to the plays known as “city comedies” that proliferated at the turn of the seventeenth century and consider the ways in which they articulate the unique challenges urban living presented to matters of gender, sex, sexuality, courtship, and romance in renaissance London. Specific texts under consideration will likely include Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, John Marsten’s The Dutch Courtesan, and Thomas Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Assignments will include at least two short papers and an oral presentation. Pre-1900 course.

ETS 401-3 Advanced Poetry Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Brooks Haxton

The purpose of this course is to develop the writer’s skill to make an experience vivid and accessible for readers. In discussion and written comments on each other’s work students use imagination and intelligence to help each other accomplish this difficult task. Everyone writes one new poem each week, some in response to assignments, and then revises four of these into carefully considered form. Requirements include reading, written analysis of poems, and memorization. The course is open to anyone who has taken the introductory workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission. 

ETS 403-1 Advanced Fiction Workshop
Tu 3:30-6:20pm
Instructor: Arthur Flowers

This class is for fiction writers with workshop experience. We will work on writing and reading stories. In class we will discuss student work as well as work by contemporary writers. We will focus on useful critique, significant revision, and close reading

ETS 406-1 Advanced Critical Writing in ETS: Utopia and Dystopia
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

The novelist Junot Diaz has recently called dystopia the “default narrative of our time,” given that apocalyptic images of civilizational collapse abound globally in many forms, from fiction, film, and games to political discourse and advertising. This course will consider how and why a preoccupation with society as a “bad place” (what dystopia means etymologically) has emerged as a cultural dominant by contrasting dystopia with “utopia” (“good/no place”)—a narrative form invented by the English Humanist Thomas More in early sixteenth England. We will read several utopias in their historical contexts as well as examine the emergence of dystopia when the historical conditions that encouraged utopianism changed. Possible texts include: Shakespeare’s Tempest, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Huxley’s Brave New World, Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer. In addition, this class will help you hone your research writing skills since you will be exploring a utopian/dystopian topic of your choice individually. Over the course of the semester, through a series of scaffolded assignments, you will research, draft and finalize a paper of 10-12 pages, demonstrating a sustained argument supported with appropriate evidence. Pre-requisites: A&S writing sequence, ETS 242 and two upper division ETS classes. Enrollment limited to 17.

ETS 410-1 Forms & Genres: Practices of Games
TuTh 11:00-12:20pm
Instructor: Chris Hanson

This course will explore the evolving form of digital games, tracing their historical roots in analog board games and other associated cultural modes of play to current and possible future iterations of video games. We will employ a range of critical approaches to gaming; digital games will be “read” and critically interrogated as texts, and the relationships between game, player, design, software, interface, and structures of play will be discussed. As we examine the development of games and their associated genres, we will investigate the historical, social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of individual games, and consider the relationship of games to other media forms and texts. Film and Screen Studies course.

ETS 410-2 Forms & Genres: Socially Engaged Hollywood
MW 5:15-6:35pm with Screening M 7:00-9:45pm
Instructor: Steven Doles

"If you want to send a message, use Western Union," a powerful studio executive says in an apocryphal, but oft-repeated, Hollywood legend. The line distills the common assumption that popular movies are intended to entertain, and that they are incapable of serious engagement with social causes. Throughout its history, however, Hollywood has released a large number of topical, engaged films commenting on contemporary issues, often to both critical and financial success. Our goal in this course is to return these films to their historical contexts, examining the purposes and meanings they served both for those who made them and those who watched them. We will develop a number of approaches to these films, thinking about topics such as how the studio system and censorship shape films as texts, to how different audiences engage with and interpret them, to how Hollywood narratives fit into a larger media environment. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required. Film and Screen Studies Course.

ETS 420-4 Cultural Production & Reception: Obscenity and Censorship
TuTh 3:30-4:50pm
Instructor: Chris Forster

At the start of the twentieth century, literature was often the object of government censorship. Indeed, obscenity trials play a key role in the literary history of the twentieth century. Yet, by the end of the century the lawyer Charles Rembar could declare “the end of obscenity” for works of literature. What happened?

This class offers an opportunity to consider this question by examining key novels that have been censored, declared obscene, or otherwise suppressed. How does the value of “art” contrast with that of obscenity or pornography? How do questions of gender and sexuality influence which works are suppressed? We will read key works (mostly from the 20th century) alongside court decisions and other accounts of the trials of key works of literature. Assignments include short essays and a longer writing assignment. Course texts will likely include a brief selection from James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, among others.

ETS 421-1 Cultural Production & Reception Before 1900: Victorian Domesticity
MW 3:45-5:05pm
Instructor: Kevin Morrison

The Victorians are known for their intense affections. Lyric poetry—ranging from mawkish verse to philosophically complex ruminations on the epistemology of love (how does one know love? how does one know the other through love?) as well as the phenomenology of love (how do we experience it?)—celebrated the couple. Domestic idylls of the 1830s through the 1850s venerated the familial hearth and sang the praises of wife and mother. Marriage plot novels elevated love over the many other feelings (duty, obligation) and pragmatic motivations (joint labor, property consolidation) on which unions might be based. Yet if Victorian literature often sought to ennoble, refine, and provide an idiom for expressing the affections, it just as frequently explored the spectacular collapse of affective ties, the failures of intimacy, and the estrangement among families, spouses, and lovers. This course attends to the period’s complex renderings of Victorian domestic life. Pre-1900 course.

ETS 450-1 Reading Race & Ethnicity: Latinos in Cinema (meets with LAS-400 and HOA-400)
TuTh 9:30-10:50am
Screening Tu 7:00-10:00pm
Instructor: Will Scheibel

One of the fundamental qualities of cinema is its ability to mediate particular bodies in particular spaces, but what happens when those bodies and spaces construct racial or ethnic identity and difference for a mass viewing public? Cinema has the power to give visibility to minority groups on a global stage, just as it has the power to render those groups invisible or distort understandings of their lived experiences. This course focuses on the diverse Latino representations in U.S. narrative fiction film. We will look at the questions, problems, and meanings that arise from onscreen images of the Latinos, as well as how the creative labor and self-representation of Latinos have served as artistic expression and social protest from the margins of the film industry. As you learn the styles, themes, politics, and contexts important to this history, you will also learn the cultural competencies to read film texts from a critical ethnic studies perspective. Emphasizing particular contributions of Latino stars and filmmakers, course topics will include: the roles of national borders; relationships of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the Good Neighbor Policy; the Chicano Movement; migration narratives; transnational genre filmmaking; autobiography; and the global auteurism of New Mexican Cinema. Film and Screen Studies course.

ETS 495-1 Thesis Writing Workshop
Th 3:30-6:15pm
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich

This course is a continuation of ETS 494. It provides a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research toward producing an ETS Distinction Essay/Honors Thesis. The workshop will largely involve presenting drafts of your thesis and engaging in collegial peer critique. Participation is by invitation only.