Department of English Courses

Linked course titles have extended descriptions. Syllabi provided where available.

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
ENG 105 M001	Intro to Creative Writing	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:25 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			This course will introduce students to three types of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and mixed literary forms. 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, voice, tone, structure, dialogue, and characterization). Students will examine work by authors from various traditions and produce creative work in each genre. ENG 105 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry.
ENG 107 M001	Living Writers	W	12:00 AM - 12:00 AM	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			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.
ENG 114 M001	British Lit Since 1789	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Goode,Michael			Few nations in the world have changed more dramatically in the past 250 years than Great Britain, and these changes are evident throughout its literature. This course moves briskly through more than two centuries of Britain’s literary history, covering the art and culture of four distinct periods, spanning the years 1789-2022: Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern/Postcolonial. Historical topics will include: changes in literary forms and genres; slavery and abolition; political revolution; the industrial revolution; the Enlightenment; apocalyptic fears; urbanization; evolution; religion; social reform movements; race, class, gender, and sexuality; nationalism; colonialism and its aftermath; the World Wars; the politics of writing in the English language; cloning; Black Lives Matter; Brexit; and the COVID-19 pandemic. Course texts include a wide variety of poems, short stories, a play, some punk rock and reggae song lyrics, and a few films, as well as the novels Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen), Dracula (Bram Stoker), and Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro). Assignments include three five-page papers and weekly quizzes tied to the lectures and readings.
ENG 115 M001	Topics in British Literature - Gothic and Monsters Literature	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Selthun,Elena Lin			From Frankenstein to Dracula, some of the most iconic and strangely sympathetic monsters in the Western imaginary are found in the genre of the Gothic. In this course, we will discuss and analyze how these monsters are constructed, why certain fears give them power, and how these fears and their monsters change or are buried over time, only to re-emerge transformed. We will unpack how and why Gothic monsters like ghosts and vampires embody cultural anxieties about gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, death, and ultimately, what makes us human (or not). Reading these monsters and their meanings and deconstructing their power can allow us to read the world around us more clearly. We will focus on reading the monstrous in Gothic British texts from the 19th century. These texts may include the spooky short stories of H.G. Wells, poems like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and novels like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. We will also look at some contemporary adaptations of Gothic monstrosity, such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) and Penny Dreadful (2014). This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 115 M002	Topics in British Literature - Popular Science in British Literature	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Murphy,Magnolia Mae			This course will explore the various ways in which popular scientific discourse has shaped British literature throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The course will begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein– often considered the first science fiction novel in English– and will also include works from British modernism (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway), postmodernism, and the contemporary dystopian fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. In addition to novels, course material will include short fiction, poetry, popular science publications, and podcasts that provide a survey of evolving science discourse and corresponding literature. In considering literature as a cultural response to shifting paradigms of science, we will explore questions such as: how does scientific discourse make its way into literature? To what extent do various works and authors take the implications of scientific discourse seriously as a description of reality? Where is the dividing line between ‘science fiction’ and science-in-fiction, and what purposes do these categories serve? How does scientific discourse shape British conceptions of the self and “others”? How are existing power dynamics reinforced or undermined through science in fiction? This course fulfills the writing-intensive requirement. No previous science experience is required or assumed.
ENG 118 M001	American Lit Since 1865	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Kue,Debra Joyce
ENG 118 M002	American Lit Since 1865	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L			This course offers a survey of U.S. literature written in the last century and a half. Class discussion will combine close readings of selected literary texts with a focus on how texts engage the dynamic relationship between sociohistorical change and the emergence of new literary forms. Recurring topics of discussion include: war; immigration; racial justice and injustice; U.S. consumerism and the growing production of waste; identity politics, and climate change.
ENG 119 M001	I do/I don’t: Forms of Marriage in American Literature	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Beam, Dorri			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 singledom, romantic friendship, arranged marriage, marriage during and after slavery, Boston marriage, polygamy, reproductive rights, laws against interracial marriage, divorce, 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 selections such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, to short stories by Sui Sin Far and Kate Chopin, and up to Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks and the TV series Big Love. 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 singledom, romantic friendship, arranged marriage, marriage during and after slavery, Boston marriage, polygamy, reproductive rights, laws against interracial marriage, divorce, 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 selections such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, to short stories by Sui Sin Far and Kate Chopin, and up to Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks and the TV series Big Love.
ENG 121 M001	Introduction to Shakespeare	MW	02:15 PM - 03:10 PM	Callaghan,Dympna Carmel			Who was William Shakespeare, and what fired his imagination? This fun and informative lecture course aims to answer these questions via an intensive introduction to his life, his loves, his religion, his theatre, and his world. The main goal is to understand Shakespeare’s creativity as both a playwright and as a poet in relation to your own. You will gain confidence in your capacity for critical and creative insight and expression. You will read and watch performances of some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, including Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Richard III, but you will also read the Sonnets along with some less well-known works not only as clues to what inspired his extraordinary achievement but also as an inspiration to your own. (This class meets the writing intensive requirement).
ENG 125 M001	Science Fiction	MW	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			The origins and definition of Science Fiction or speculative fiction are debated by fans and scholars all over the world. Likewise, scholars continue to debate the value of the genre as Literature with a capital L. In this course, we will take the genre and its capacities for uniquely powerful social commentary seriously as we explore possible beginnings, movements, subgenres and shifts within Science Fiction short stories and novels, as well as some television and film. We will look primarily at U.S. American and British texts, but we will expand beyond the West somewhat. This lecture course includes a Friday Discussion Group component, some opportunities for creative work, as well as critical reading and writing.
ENG 125 M003	Science Fiction	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Healy,Meghan Riley			This course examines the science fiction genre as it moves across time, medium, and space. In our exploration of the genre, we will think through such questions as: What does the “science” of science fiction entail, and how does it shift across time? What role do aliens, androids, artificially intelligent constructs, and other familiar science fiction figures play in shaping conceptions of progress, otherness, and selfhood? How does science fiction attempt to predict the future and who are these futures for? To help answer these and other important questions, we will explore science fiction texts across a variety of mediums, including radio shows, pulp magazines, television show episodes, short stories, and more. Our texts will not focus on one particular time period, nor will we necessarily move through the genre chronologically. Our texts may include films such as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), novels such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor and Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, and short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, and jaye simpson.
ENG 140 M001	Reading the Environment	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Reese,Jacob Charles			Living in an age of anthropogenic climate-change, it is more important than ever to examine the historical traditions that shape and define our understanding of “Nature” and “the Environment.” With a critical focus for how media representation has the potential to shape our ecological future, this course will engage critically with a variety of historical and contemporary texts including literature, film, interactive documentary, visual art, social media, advertisements, and video games that that deal either directly or indirectly with the human/nature relationship and which inform domestic policy, international relations, and social values relating to the natural world and our place within it. In an effort to expand our considerations of what it means to be ecological agents of change in what is often termed the “Anthropocene,” we will discuss issues of environmental justice, non-human agency, aestheticization, and more to examine how our engagement with the environment shapes our global ecology. With these issues in mind, we will construct a vocabulary to discuss ongoing representational trends across various media forms, their formal affordances and limitations, and their real-world potential to shape our response to ongoing ecological crises.
ENG 142 M001	Narratives of Culture	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	PTI
ENG 142 M002	Narratives of Culture	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 145 M001	Reading Popular Culture	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			This course constitutes a critical engagement with popular culture, examining a range of theoretical approaches. We will consider the ways in which popular culture serves as a site of ongoing political struggle, exploring the ways popular culture is implicated in the consolidation and subversion of the prevailing social order. We will also interrogate the role of popular culture in the formation of social markers such as youth, race, gender, class, and sexuality and conversely, the role of social markers in the formation of popular culture. At the same time, this course will draw on your intimate familiarity with popular culture, specifically as consumers, fans, and producers of popular culture to better understand how popular culture shapes all our lives. The aim of the course is to familiarize you with a critical vocabulary to make sense of the broader significance and relevance of popular culture—how and why popular culture matters and what it means to approach popular culture as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry. To accomplish this, we will investigate a number of popular expressive forms including girlhood, teen magazines, boy bands, fandom, high school proms, quinceaneras, hip hop culture, , and Indigenous urban culture.
ENG 151 M001	Interpretation of Poetry	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Smith, Bruce			The course will consist of discussions of poems from the various traditions of poetry: from anonymous ballads to spoken-word poetry. We’re 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.” We’re 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.
ENG 152 M001	Interpretation of Drama	MW	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			This course offers an introduction to the interpretation of Western dramatic literature in English or English translation by surveying a selection of plays and dramatic texts from antiquity through the twenty-first century. In the first half of the semester students will be familiarized with classical theater, medieval and early modern dramatic texts and traditions (including Shakespeare). In the second half, students are introduced to a range of popular and avant-garde theatrical movements and experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries. The course examines key formal features and conventions of Western dramatic traditions while emphasizing the ways these have evolved in dynamic (sometimes conservative, sometimes radical) response to social, cultural, and political pressures. This course welcomes students both new to dramatic literature and those who have studied theater in other contexts. Screenings and attendance of theatrical productions required.
ENG 153 M005	Interpretation of Fiction	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Sinha,Soham			What is the relationship between fiction and reality? Is there truth in fiction? What is the relevance of fictional storytelling in today’s world? These are some of the questions that we will seek to answer as part of this course. Through interactive classroom sessions, we will look at the truths of fiction across a range of narrative forms - the fairy tale, short story, video game, film, and short novel. In addition to reading/viewing and interpreting fictional texts, we will develop an awareness of the various elements of fiction: theme, narrative and plot, setting, character, point-of-view, style, and tone. We will pay attention to how a story is told and how a story is received. Broadly speaking, we will study fiction as a social force that, in addition to being a form of entertainment, also communicates certain values and ideologies. By developing close reading techniques, we will invest ourselves in uncovering the intricate processes that make fiction powerful and relevant. Texts for this course may include Frantz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 154 M002	Interpretation of Film	MW	09:30 AM - 10:25 AM	Hallas,Roger			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 moviegoing has transformed over time. No prior film experience is required. The course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core in the College of Arts and Sciences and the University’s IDEA requirement. It also counts towards the Film & Screen Studies track in the English and Textual Studies major.
ENG 155 M002	Interpretation of Nonfiction	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Ugwu,Ejiofor Elija
ENG 156 M001	Interpretation of Games	MW	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course serves as an 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 weekly discussion sections and evening screenings is required.
ENG 164 M002	Children's Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Gleesing, Elizabeth
ENG 171 M001	World Cinema	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Kim,Hyejun
ENG 174 M001	World Lit to 1000	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael/Brunt,Christopher Michael
ENG 181 M001	Class and Literary Texts	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Conrey,Sean M			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	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Keckley,Nathaniel Powell			What is class? We often talk about the “middle class” or “white collar workers” or “unskilled labor” as if these were common-sense terms. But class is a very slippery thing: dynamic, omnipresent, and often contradictory. Is class an identity? An income bracket? A social status? This class-about-class will investigate what class is, how it is formed, and how it structures our lives. Alongside these historical inquiries, students will also develop skills for analyzing a variety of media forms, including plays, films, and poems. We will explore how class produces, and is produced by, the media we consume, with a special focus on texts that are by and/or about the working class. In this course, we will ask questions such as: How does our culture represent class, or not represent it? How do the media we study represent, critique, or reconfigure class? How can the experience of class instigate political change? How is class inflected by other structures, such as gender, race, and nationality, and how do these categories complicate conceptions of class? Students will emerge with increased media literacy and a deeper understanding of class, culture, and society.
ENG 182 M001	Race and Literary Texts - Indigenous Futures & Literary Nationalisms	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Madarieta,Ethan R			We often refer to the original peoples of what is now named the Americas as Native American, Indian, or First Nations, but what is this identity? Is it racial, ethnic, cultural, political, territorial, national? What is indigeneity, this global category for first peoples, and who is Indigenous? And what can literature tell us about these questions? In this class we will consider these and other questions through analysis of literary, critical, and historical texts and story as literary presentations of Indigenous Sovereignty, Autonomy, Autochthony, and Political Order. We will read a variety of literary forms and genres – oral, textual, and oraliture – that may include “Native American Renaissance” novels such as Ceremony by Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko and House Made of Dawn by Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday; contemporary horror fiction such as Moon of the Crusted Snow by Anishinaabe Wasauksing First Nation writer Waubgeshig Rice, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones; graphic novels such as Cherokee artist Roy Boney Jr.’s ᎦᎸᎶᎯ (Sky) and The Reckoner Rises series by David A. Robertson of the Norway House Cree Nation.
ENG 182 M002	Race and Literary Texts	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Kumavie,Francisca Delali			What does it mean to read race in literary texts? What does race mean? How is blackness distinct from other racial formations? What does it mean to be Black in the world? We can answer these questions in many distinct ways depending on the socio-historical period, and the geographical space in which we inhabit. In this introductory class, we will consider these questions through literature written by black writers across time and space. We will consider black literatures and cultures as interrelated rather than as discrete set of literary and cultural practices. We will use the framework of “call and response”—a participatory model of civic, literary, and musical forms—to stage a conversation between literary and cultural texts written at different periods of time. Questioning how writers have been inspired by, critical of, and have repeated with difference the themes, traditions, and concerns of earlier generations, we will engage the broad scope of Black literatures as an interactive, critical, and experimental body of literary and cultural works.
ENG 184 M002	Ethnicity & Literary Texts	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Frieden,Kenneth B			A panorama of memorable texts written by Jewish authors—from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes, sometimes attributed to King Solomon), to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye and beyond, including stories by Peretz, Kafka, Agnon, Wiesel, Yezierska, Paley, and Keret. Topics include narrative techniques and figurative language, shtetl life in E. Europe, modernization, love, marriage, humor, the Nazi genocide, and post-war trauma. The main focus is on European and American prose authors. In preparation for class discussions, on the evening before each session, students submit short posts on Blackboard. With about 26 assignments, this writing intensive course is a writing marathon. Immersion in texts, a particular tendency in traditional Jewish circles, may have sometimes been an escape from Jews’ experience of powerlessness in the outside world. The strategy had limitations. Zionism attempted a pragmatic solution by rejecting the Diaspora and asserting power—but creating new problems. Texts: Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz; Elie Wiesel, Night; Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939 (short story version); Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers; Etgar Keret, Four Stories.
ENG 192 M001	Gender & Literary Texts	TuTh	08:00 AM - 09:20 AM	Klaver,Coran C			What is gender? What does it mean to say that gender is a social construction? How does gender intersect with other social formations like race, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability? How do gender and texts work to represent and create bodies? This course will explore textual representations of gender and sexuality and their cultural, historical, and social implications. Through an examination of novels, short stories, films, and other media forms, we will address these questions and think about the ways that literary texts construct, rewrite, and interrogate gender as a social category. We will think about how literary texts represent and challenge ideological and social structures like heteronormativity, marriage, feminism, racism, citizenship, and patriarchy.
ENG 193 M001	Intro to Asian American Lit	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Virk,Aman Kaur			In this course, we will examine how writers, poets, filmmakers, and artists of Asian descent in America conceive of and contest the category of ‘Asian American.’ We will read primary texts alongside excerpts from scholarly and critical works to help us unpack questions about what the category of ‘Asian American’ means, and how this category gains meaning through intersections of citizenship, gender, sexuality, and class. Other questions that inform this class include: How are cultural, social, and political identities developed and how do history, literature, and media shape those identities? How do categories like ‘Asian American’ (or some of its popular offshoots, like ‘South Asian American’) come to be formed in the first place? What are the limitations and possibilities for coalition building that open through identifying with such categories? We will also explore the historical and contemporary relationships of Asian Americans to empire, diaspora, racial capitalism, colonialism, settler colonialism, and national (un)belonging. We will take up questions related to these themes in relation to major historical events like WWII, the social movements of the 1960s, 9/11, and the rise of anti-AAPI violence as well as responses to such violence in recent years.
ENG 195 M001	Arab American Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Ozyenginer,Asli
ENG 215 M001	Introductory Poetry Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	TA			Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in their best order.” In this introductory workshop, we will help each other find the best words to put in their best order. You will be required to write both creatively and critically as you compose your own poems, work on imitations, revise, and analyze and critique the poems of others. There will be a variety of creative prompts, exercises, and assigned readings to deepen your knowledge of poetry, as well as contribute to your growth as a creative writer. All poetic souls welcome. Participation and attendance are necessary.
ENG 215 M002	Introductory Poetry Workshop	Tu	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	TA			Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in their best order.” In this introductory workshop, we will help each other find the best words to put in their best order. You will be required to write both creatively and critically as you compose your own poems, work on imitations, revise, and analyze and critique the poems of others. There will be a variety of creative prompts, exercises, and assigned readings to deepen your knowledge of poetry, as well as contribute to your growth as a creative writer. All poetic souls welcome. Participation and attendance are necessary.
ENG 216 M001	Intro Lit Nonfic Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	TA			This course will introduce students to the non-fiction workshop. Students will practice writing, reading, and critiquing various genres within non-fiction writing, such as the personal essay and memoir, the experiential essay and the lyric essay. In class, we will discuss student work as well as published work. Students will learn to use fictional devices such as setting, point of view, character, dialogue, plot construction, and metaphor to craft factually accurate essays about real observed or experienced events. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M001	Introductory Fiction Workshop	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	TA			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories and revise one. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M002	Introductory Fiction Workshop	Th	11:00 AM - 01:45 PM	TA			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories and revise one. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M003	Introductory Fiction Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	TA			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories and revise one. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M004	Introductory Fiction Workshop	W	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	TA			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories and revise one. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 242 M001	Reading and Interpretation	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This course will introduce you to the study of English and Textual Studies, stressing not only what we read but also--self-consciously--how we read. Rather than being organized around one particular author, genre, or historical period, then, this class is organized around different lenses through which any text might be read, such as ecocriticism or gender. Its goal is to show how meanings are created through acts of interpretation and to highlight the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course will help you to look more closely at the structure and form of literary texts and visual media, situate them within a range of questions and contexts, and write about them with clarity and sophistication.
ENG 242 M002	Reading and Interpretation	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A
ENG 300 M001	Myteries in Fiction	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Benz,Chanelle M			In this creative course, we will examine at the craft, range, and power of the literary mystery. From reading about unlikely detectives and unreliable narrators, silences and absences, quests and secret rites, doubles and ghosts, we will explore what delights and haunts us about pursuing the unknown. Mysteries, whether religious, macabre, psychological, mystical or Borgesian, are searches for the truth, but whatever the revelation, the truth is never just one story.
ENG 300 M002	Selected Topics	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	ABUTOHA,Mosab M H
ENG 300 M003	Selected Topics - Reading and Writing Comedy	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			In this course, we will study comedic writing and the role comedic stories play in our cultural conversations, with special attention to the ways they mediate deeply contested issues. By examining theories of comedy and humor as well as some representative comedic works in literature, film, and TV, we will explore how we as creative writers can use comedy in our own work. This is a generative class, and it will include fiction and nonfiction prompts.
ENG 300 M004	Selected Topics - Contemporary American Poetry	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			In this class, we will read and discuss several influential poets whose work has helped to define American poetry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Poets we will read include James Wright, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Jean Valentine, Robert Hayden, and Lucille Clifton. Assignments will include creative and analytical responses.
ENG 301 M001	Reading and Writing Prose	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			In this course, students will discuss, analyze, and reproduce the techniques of published prose writers in various nonfiction genres, including the personal essay, literary journalism, flash nonfiction, memoir, and the lyric essay. Authors to be studied as models may include James Baldwin, Tom Bissell, Jenny Boully, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Jay Caspian Kang, Barry Lopez, Joseph Mitchell, Jon Ronson, and Zadie Smith. Students will be required to produce both creative and analytical responses to the texts.
ENG 303 M002	Reading and Writing Fiction	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			All creative disciplines depend on the study and imitation for mastery of its elements. In this course, students will read and analyze short stories to deepen their understanding of a variety of concerns in storytelling, including voice, style, image, story, and character. We will attempt to answer the question: how have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative texts? Students will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the texts studied. Possible authors include Samanta Schweblin, James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams, ZZ Packer, and Yiyun Li.
ENG 309 M001	Literature and its Media	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			We usually talk about "novels," "poems," and "films" (and "texts" of various other kinds). But what about the paper and ink (or parchment or wax or celluloid or liquid crystal displays) that carry those texts? Do these materials affect the forms and content represented? Do they change what, or how, we read? This class draws on media studies to investigate the ways that materiality impacts meaning. We will consider a wide range of works, looking at the history of text technologies from the ancient world through to contemporary developments in digital culture. We will pay particular attention to literary works that foreground questions of textual materiality, including Bram Stoker’s DRACULA (1897) and Laurence Sterne’s TRISTRAM SHANDY (1759), as well as more recent experiments in digital fiction. We will examine how “artificial intelligence” systems (like ChatGPT) generate texts, and what that means for literature.
ENG 310 M001	Literary Periods	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Edmunds,Susan L			This course focuses on fiction by U.S. writers who participated in the early-twentieth- century international Modernist movement, which rejected earlier norms of literary and aesthetic representation. Some modernists created narratives that resemble dreams, fantasies and memories. Some purposely rejected the rules of grammar and syntax, while others cut up and re-arranged linear narrative timelines. Class discussion will focus on how U.S. modernist writers responded to changing models of individual and mass consciousness as both sites and agents of social change. During the semester, we will read texts associated with high modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the proletarian literature movement, and mass cultural modernism. Major areas of social change and social struggle to which these texts respond include: veteran disillusionment following World War I; debates surrounding immigration and the fight for racial justice; the 1920s sexual revolution and early 20th century feminism; capitalist expansion, labor radicalism, and the Great Depression; and the relationship between high art and mass culture. Course texts include: Hammett, Red Harvest; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Toomer, Cane; Larsen, Quicksand; Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Olsen, Yonnondio; and Hughes, The Ways of White Folks.
ENG 311 M001	Literary Periods before 1900 - Romanticism and the Environment	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Goode,Michael			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 various dramatic environmental developments—both how they tried to counter-act these developments and how they understood the challenges of representing them. We will also be tracing certain recognizably “Romantic” relationships to nature into a variety of contemporary artistic efforts to represent environmental crisis and change. Historical topics covered in the course will include: the Industrial Revolution and the privatization of public lands; the notions of “geologic time” and “extinction” and the challenges they presented to traditional religious beliefs; 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; and politicians turning “nature” into a political football through debates over “natural rights” and “natural law.” Assignments will include a traditional five-page critical essay, a photo essay with 5-page reflection, and a curatorial final project.
ENG 311 M002	People, Places, Nature: The Storied Environments of Late 19C American Fiction	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Beam,Dorothy R			This course looks at the outpouring of fiction in the U.S. dedicated to particular places and environments in the years between the Civil War and the turn into the twentieth century. In this period of rapid expansion and industrialization, a period of migration, immigration, and displacements of peoples living in and coming to the U.S., a good deal of fiction hunkered down in specific locales. Those left behind or displaced by these forces were frequently cast as “backward” or “queer” anti-moderns, soon to be obsolete. This literature both trades in and critically occupies that story as it creates the world of such characters, evoking the particularities of place, imaginatively entwining natural and social ecologies, and considering the forces that shaped its inhabitants. From rural New England, to abandoned plantations and Southern swamps, to the wilds of gold rush California: literary environments were invested with questions about the interrelation of place and time; of plants, geography, animals, and people; and of social and national identities. We will read primarily short stories, by Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.
ENG 312 M001	Race and Literary Periods	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A
ENG 313 M001	Race/Lit Periods Before 1900	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			When, where and with what does “American literature” begin? At stake in this question are our basic assumptions about what Americanness 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). Indigenous perspectives will be emphasized throughout the semester as a necessary context for understanding writing that emerged from settler colonial projects.
ENG 325 M002	History & Varieties of English	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 330 M001	Good Life	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			What makes a good life? A course on “Happiness” at Yale in 2018 proved to be the most popular class ever taught there, indicating a hunger among students for engagement with such questions. In the face of seemingly intractable challenges to individual, collective and planetary existence, much less well-being, posed by climate change, war, social injustice, work precarity and other crises, it can feel anxiety-provoking to raise the question of the “good.” And yet, for centuries, many thinkers and artists have taken consideration of what constitutes a “good life” to be crucial to our humanity. We will explore some of the most influential of these earlier formulations from Plato onward, but the bulk of our reading, viewing and discussion will concern 21st century visual media and fiction (e.g. Hyde’s Eleutheria; Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; Riley’s Sorry to Bother You). You will also engage in practical activities that have been associated with pursuing a “good life,” including inventorying what elements (Wealth? Meaning? Purpose? Family?) you think build a good life and testing out their potential for success given different definitions of the “good.”
ENG 330 M002	Theorizing Meaning & Interp - Time Across Media	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course will explore representations and uses of time across multiple media, focusing on media objects which reference their own temporality or reconfigure time using formal methods such as repetition and narrative structures built around time travel, as well as theories about temporality. Media texts, forms, and related technologies examined in the course will include narrative and experimental film and video, television, interactive media, and video games. The role of medium specificity in both the representation of time and our experiential understanding of temporality will be considered, as well as the cultural and social significance of historical shifts in notions of time. Texts and technologies to be examined may include Life of an American Fireman (1903), Ballet Mécanique (1924), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), A Movie (1958), Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Groundhog Day (1993), time-shifting on television (i.e. VCRs and TiVos), Memento (2000), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Decasia (2004), Lost (2004-2010), YouTube, Braid (2008), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and Before Your Eyes (2021).
ENG 330 M003	Experiencing Film	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Doles,Steven Matthew			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 and viewers 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 and film culture 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.
ENG 345 M001	Critical Theory - How to Change Everything	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Madarieta,Ethan R			What is Critical Theory and what is critical about Critical Theory? What can Critical Theory do in the world, especially in these times of constant crises? The goal of this class is to use Critical Theory to imagine a different world, to abolish all preconceptions, to change everything. Throughout, we will discuss Political theories, theories of gender and sexuality, Queer, trans*, and Feminist theories; Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalytic, Race Critical, and Literary theories; Black Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Translation Studies, and Memory Studies. As such, this is an excellent class for students interested in philosophy, film and media, literature, and cultural, and everyone who wishes to change the world.
ENG 352 M001	Blackness Beyond the Nation State	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Kumavie,Francisca Delali			This class seeks to interrogate the tenure and meaning of blackness outside the frame of the nation-state. In other words, what does it mean to be black outside the limits of the nation-state? Does it change how people experience the long history of slavery and its afterlives? Does it change the nature of anti-blackness? Or does it change nothing at all. Reading literature by writers from across the globe, we will ask if blackness can be restricted to national territory or histories. Some of the books we will be reading include Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, Helen Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water.
ENG 352 M003	Global Formations of Hip Hop	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			Examining the transnational origins, circulation, and adaptation of hip hop in various settings and locales around the globe, this course approaches hip hop as a global formation that transcends national, ethnic and linguistic boundaries. We will track the transnational roots of hip hop; specifically, its grounding in Afro-Caribbean sound system culture, emergence as an urban expressive form in the South Bronx, and subsequent spread and rise as a global phenomenon. Taking a comparative approach, we’ll take a close look at hip hop scenes in Southeast and East Asia, Latin America, Western Europe, and West Africa as well as Native North America. In addition to rap music, we’ll scrutinize the other elements of hip hop—writing or graffiti, DJing, and breakdancing—and the ways they have taken root in hip hop scenes across the globe. We’ll also investigate why hip hop holds widespread appeal among marginalized youth and why it constitutes an indispensable organizing tool in contemporary social movements and protests. At the end of the semester, you will have a better understanding of the emergence of locally inflected hip hop scenes across the globe and the indispensability of hip hop as a vehicle for marginalized youth to voice their grievances.
ENG 360 M001	Queer Comics	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			Just like LGBTQ+ folx in the mainstream, comics as a medium have become increasingly accepted as literary texts deserving of close academic attention (and appreciation). In fact, the comics medium – a.k.a. graphic novel or sequential art – is particularly apt for telling queer stories, because it is accessible and malleable, lending itself uniquely to queer world-building and the representation of identities and bodies in transition. In this class, we will look at LGBTQ+ representation in sequential art from a variety of time periods, but in particular the 20th and 21st centuries, using visual and literary analysis. Some course texts will be Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Trung Le Nguyen's The Magic Fish, works by Michael DeForge, webcomics, superhero comics, and many others. Students will have an opportunity to do creative work in addition to the critical writing of the course.
ENG 400 M001	Air, Breath, and Atmosphere	W	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Shirilan, Stephanie			What does it mean to think, speak, and write about “what’s in the air? What is the history of this “figure” of speech? What are its poetic and political legacies and how might we remake them in a world reminded of the unequally experienced precarities of air and breath in the contexts of pandemic and climate change? In the past twenty years, the “atmospheric,” “respiratory,” and “pneumatic” humanities have emerged as vital areas of research out of fields and disciplines as varied as climate and environmental studies, religion, philosophy, ethnomusicology, human/geography, critical race, trauma, affect, sensory and performance studies. This course will explore how literary and performance scholarship might make use of these innovations to theorize (from the Greek, “to make visible”) so-called “invisible” experiences of air, breath, and atmosphere. Student interests will help to determine primary readings, but these will be drawn from classical to contemporary texts across diverse genres and cultures of production. Assignment options will emphasize social and creative engagement. These will include opportunities to participate in and conduct research on planned eco-performance, medical humanities, and local/community educational programs and events. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Intellectual and creative curiosity, generosity and accountability required
ENG 401 M001	Advanced Writ Workshop: Poetry	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:20 PM	Haxton,Brooks			A poem is personal expression and an effort to reach a stranger. The purpose of this course is to develop the skill to make emotion accessible to readers. Students help each other in this work. They write one new poem each week and revise four of these into more considered form. Requirements include written critique of classmates’ poems, as well as reading and written analysis of published poems. The course is open to those who have taken the introductory poetry workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit ten pages of poetry to be considered for admission.
ENG 402 M001	Adv Workshop: Literary Nonfic	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
ENG 403 M001	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	M	03:45 PM - 06:15 PM	PTI
ENG 403 M002	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			This class will develop and expand upon the literary skills introduced in ENG 217 (which is a prerequisite). 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. There will be some in-class exercises, as well as some published work to analyze. But most of the class will center on the writing and constructive critique (both written and verbal) of original work created by you: 2-3 submissions over the course of the semester, maximum 25 pages each, distributed to your peers a week in advance for their reading pleasure. We’ll talk as well about the writing life beyond the college workshop: publishing, graduate MFA programs, etc.
ENG 403 M003	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	PTI
ENG 407 M001	Advanced Crit. Writing Pre1900 - History of the Book	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			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.
ENG 407 M002	Advanced Crit. Writing Pre1900 - Vitorian Ecologies	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Klaver,Coran C			This course will draw on environmental criticism to examine the nineteenth-century British novel. Even before Darwin’s 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species, historians had begun charting the history of humans in relation to other forms of being. Through this course, we will explore the Victorian novel as a narrative form that attempts to conceptualize and plot the relations between humans and their environments. Key areas of inquiry will be the influence of Darwinian thought and evolutionary theory, the relationship and systemic links between English and imperial environments, and environmental disaster. Our novels will explore various environments—regional, urban, and global—as well as the connections between these. Readings for the course will include: George Eliot, Mill on the Floss; Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; and Richard Jeffries, After London. These novels will be supplemented by one other novel and selected readings in ecocriticism and environmental criticism. As an Advanced Seminar in Critical Writing, this course will also help students design, develop, and write a fifteen-page research paper based on the questions and materials from this course. Requirements for the course will include a series of scaffolded written assignments, in-class writings, an oral presentation, and a fifteen-page literary research paper.
ENG 410 M001	Forms and Genres	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T
ENG 420 M001	Hollywood in the 1970's	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Doles,Steven Matthew			This course will focus on the American cinema of the 1970s, a decade frequently seen as a high point for the medium in the US. The decade saw the flourishing of directors deeply aware of Hollywood history who came up through film schools, television, and the low-budget genre filmmaking of American International Pictures. Films of the decade are frequently marked by narrative and formal sophistication, as well as self-reflexive homages and borrowings from previous decades of movie history. Films watched will include many landmark movies of the decade, such as Wanda (dir. Barbara Loden, 1970), Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (dir. Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), The Parallax View (dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1974), Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975), Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975), Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976), Mikey and Nicky (dir. Elaine May, 1976) and Blue Collar (dir. Paul Schrader, 1978). We will also look at some movies which were extremely popular but have not been canonized to the same extent, such as Love Story (dir. Arthur Hiller, 1970), Car Wash (dir. Michael Schultz, 1976), Smokey and the Bandit (dir. Hal Needham, 1977), and 10 (dir. Blake Edwards, 1979) in order to provide a broader sense of the cinema of the decade. (The final filmography of the course may include some different films than those listed here.) Topics explored might include the shifting industrial context of Hollywood, independent filmmaking, distinctive genres of the decade (disaster, conspiracy thriller, horror), blockbuster films and their promotional and exhibition contexts, and the made-for-TV movie. Assessments in the course will include interpretive critical papers as well as smaller assignments intended to develop research skills important to film studies scholarship.
ENG 494 M001	Research Practicum in ETS	Th	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This one-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an Honors and/or Distinction project in English. 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 situating yourself in a scholarly conversation. Our work should prepare you to write your thesis in the spring semester, when you will also enroll in ENG 495: Thesis Writing Workshop.
ENG 630 M002	Introduction to Critical Race and Ethnic Studies	M	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol			This proseminar offers an introduction to some of the major concepts and texts in critical race and ethnic studies. Examining some of the main issues defining the study of race and ethnicity in US national and transnational frameworks, we will familiarize ourselves with formative debates related to the establishment of ethnic studies programs in the 60s and 70s and the continuance of anti-racist, decolonial, and liberation struggles in the present moment; as well as the histories and effects of US racial and ethnic formations, color-blindness, comparative racialization, and violence against Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities. Moreover, with race and racism structuring historical and contemporary social justice struggles in the US and globally, this course examines their foundational logics within and beyond the Black/white binary through which they have been primarily understood. This analysis includes colonization and the racial underpinnings of the settler-colonial logics of Indigenous elimination, histories of enslavement, the civil rights movement, up till the current moment of anti-racist struggles. Informed by intersectional, relational, feminist, and transnational theoretical frameworks, the course readings will cover Black feminist thought, critical race theory, queer of color critique, narratives of anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles, and critiques of settler-colonialism, among others. We will investigate the histories and implications of the turn to the “critical” practice of ethnic studies and race theory with an emphasis on how race and ethnicity are constructed in relation to concepts of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, ability, religion, Indigeneity, citizenship, and immigration. Covering a number of foundational and interdisciplinary texts in critical race and ethnic studies, as well as the specific fields of African American Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Arab American Studies/SWANA Studies, course readings include works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Suheir Hammad, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jodi Byrd, David Palumbo-Liu, Claudia Rankine, and others.
ENG 631 M001	Critical Theory	M	03:45 PM - 06:35 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			“Critical Theory” introduces some of the most interesting and influential modes of inquiry shared by criticism across fields. We will attempt to understand both the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches as well as how theory informs literary critical practice. The result is a class that will be neither a totally coherent survey of critical theory nor a practical “methods” course, but an uneasy balance between these competing goals. Topics we may cover include the “New Criticism,” Marxist and feminist criticisms, deconstruction, the “new historicism,” a variety of materialisms, as well as debates about “distant reading” and “postcritical” reading. Likely theorists and critics include foundational figures like Frederic Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Donna Harraway. Ultimately the class helps bootstrap graduate-level research and inquiry in “English” (conceived as broadly as possible). Assignments may include short presentations to the seminar, shorter written assignments that provide interpretations of works based on theoretical readings in the class. This class will not, however, require a longer seminar essay.
ENG 650 M001	Forms	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	ABUTOHA,Mosab M H
ENG 650 M002	Forms - Novel Structure	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Spiotta,Dana			Randall Jarrell famously described the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” With that as a starting point, we will engage with questions about what a novel is and how it works. We will read a number of novels and discuss how they work on both a macro and micro level while giving particular attention to the architecture of the novel. The novels will be chosen for interesting approaches to form and for representing a diversity of narrative strategies. We will discuss how to write a long-form fictional project and think about various approaches to structure, organizing principles/conceits, schemata, outlines, and revision. The class will include generative/creative components. This course is only available to MFA students in fiction and poetry.
ENG 650 M005	Money	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			No, not how to earn it (sorry): how to write about it. Novels in the era of liberal democracy have always struggled to engage without mystification the subject of their characters’ money and where it comes from. We’ll look at efforts both ancient and recent to write about rich, poor, and the traversability of the gap between the two. Two writing assignments, both creative in nature. Texts may include: The Big Money, Dos Passos; Crazy Rich Asians, Kwan; Cannery Row, Steinbeck; The Hit, Mayfield; Preparations for the Next Life, Lish; A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul; Germinal, Zola; Money, Amis; The Street, Petry; High Rise, Ballard; Help Wanted, Waldman; Financial Lives of the Poets, Walter.
ENG 650 M006	Literature of Salvation & Catastrophe (Both Personal & Historic)	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Karr,Mary Marlene
ENG 650 M007	Late 20th and Early 21st American Poetry	Th	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			We will read and discuss a range of verse poems and prose poems by poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and discuss the different approaches these poets take to their work. Some poets we will read are James Tate, Robert Hayden, Denis Johnson, Jean Valentine, Cornelius Eady, Carolyn Forché, and Russell Edson. There will be weekly creative responses.
ENG 715 M001	First Poetry Workshop	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Haxton,Brooks			Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.
ENG 716 M001	Second Poetry Workshop	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Smith,Bruce			Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week. The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to everyone. By Craft and Imagination, I mean bringing everything to a poem in the way of personal and cultural resources. Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as model or target for discussions of what gives pleasure and what stimulates the mind to analysis, then slaps it silly with audacities. Examples of what can be used by the writer, style, content, perspective are important as resources available to the writer. I’ll begin class with what I call, an “exemplary” poet – avoiding the more proscriptive term “essential.” Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.
ENG 717 M001	First Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Spiotta,Dana			This course is the required workshop for students in the first year of the MFA Program in Fiction.
ENG 718 M001	Second Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Benz,Chanelle M
ENG 719 M002	Third Poetry Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Karr,Mary Marlene			Which texts do we not just read and "get" but compulsively reread--not just for aesthetic pleasure or distraction but for survival? For me it's often the darkest & the lightest, the most agonized & the most redemptive. The class will draw from all genres, and topics will include encounters with the divine both secular and religious. In some ways, the purpose of the class is for students to cultivate tools to save themselves (and any worthy others); or to find a place in your body for presence (yourself fully alive in your perceptions) and/or Presence (some sense of treasured others or Other). Every sensitive person needs a spacebar they can press. The lines of Czeslaw Milosz spring to mind: "What is a poetry which does not save Nations or peoples? A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls." (In a way, the brand x misogyny of the last line here--even as it dismisses certain suffering --emboldens me to honor it in the syllabus.) Religious texts peppered in may include Psalms translated by Robert Alter, Sufi mystics, excerpts from The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse edited by Kaveh Akbar & Paige M. Lewis, poems from Joy Harjo's anthology of Native Nations.
ENG 721 M001	Third Year Fiction Workshop			Saunders, George			This class is required of, and restricted to, third-year students in the fiction program. What we’re studying here is story dynamics (i.e., we’re running a story lab). We’ll be reading and critiquing stories written by the other writers enrolled in the class, as well as published stories, trying to treat each story as an honorable and interesting example of the form, while paying attention to its beauties and its deficiencies with equal interest. We aren’t judging, we’re analyzing (celebrating, even), trying, in the process, to gain some visceral insight into what makes stories compelling and moving. We’re like…biologists, presented with the chance of observing an entirely new species. The main questions should be, “What does this seem to want to be?” and “How does this thing seem to want to work?” My focus is on line-editing and cause-and-effect, with the goal of bringing out what is truly unique in the writer – trying to urge her to do what only she can do.
ENG 730 M001	Graduate Seminar	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie
ENG 730 M003	Graduate Seminar - Queer and Trans Visual Culture	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Hallas,Roger			This seminar will explore the aesthetics and politics of contemporary queer and trans visual culture through a focus on documentary films and photobooks. Documentation has been central to the emergence and development of modern sexual and gender identities. For instance, 19th and 20th century science turned to both photographic portraiture and written case studies to name and define homosexuality and transsexuality as specific identities. But forms of documentation have not only been used to discipline and pathologize queer and trans bodies, acts and identities. Queer and trans subcultures, social movements and individual artists have also embraced the desire to document—but in the service of cultural expression, sexual and gender liberation, and collective memory. Alongside reading relevant queer and trans theory, the seminar will also engage with interdisciplinary scholarship on performance, documentary, and the archive as key optics. Topics will include activism, domesticity, porn, nightlife, biography, criminality, science, and health. Photographers and filmmakers will include Akram Zaatari, Zanele Muholi, Sunil Gupta, Isaac Julien, John Greyson, Paul B. Preciado, Barbara Hammer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Del LaGrace Volcano, Nan Goldin, Cheryl Dunye, Richard Fung, Tourmaline, Cecilia Aldarondo, Wu Tsang, Zachary Drucker, and Chase Joynt. Space permitting, seniors or graduate students from other departments may apply to register for the course by contacting Professor Hallas at rhallas@syr.edu.