| ENG 105 M002 |
Intro to Creative Writing
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MW |
09:30 AM - 10:25 AM |
Grzecki,Matthew Kwan |
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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.
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| ENG 107 M001 |
Living Writers
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W |
03:45 PM - 06:30 PM |
Grzecki,Matthew Kwan |
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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.
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| ENG 114 M001 |
British Lit Since 1789
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Forster,Christopher Scott |
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This course surveys British literature from 1789 to the present, spanning the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary periods. We will read works from across Great Britain and its colonies, exploring how writers responded to, and helped shape, historical transformations including revolution, slavery, industrialization, imperialism and its aftermath, the world wars, and the rise of modern mass media. Our readings will cover major literary genres such as the novel, lyric poetry, and drama, as well as a broader range of cultural texts. Authors may include Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, John Keats, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, and others.
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| ENG 115 M001 |
Topics in British Literature
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Murphy,Magnolia Mae |
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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 (Never Let Me Go). 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.
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| ENG 118 M001 |
American Lit Since 1865
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Kue,Debra Joyce |
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| ENG 119 M001 |
U.S. Fiction After 1945
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Edmunds,Susan L |
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This course offers a survey of U.S. fiction from the 1940s to the present. We will read a selection of short stories and novels alongside a range of other literary and nonliterary genres, including the autobiographical essay, the memoir, New Journalism, poetry, the political manifesto and the literary preface. We will interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical lens, and place particular emphasis on investigating the interconnections between literary form and social change. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read texts associated with or influenced by the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts Movements, Second Wave Feminism, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and current struggles around immigration, Black Lives Matter, and climate change. We will read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Octavia Bulter’s Parable of the Sower alongside shorter works by Bernard Malamud, Hisaye Yamamoto, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Didion, Henry Dumas, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Lysley Tenorio, Jhumpa Lahiri, Viet Thanh Nyugen, Lydia Conklin, Brenda Peynado, Lauren Groff, Zach Williams, and Karen Russell.
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| ENG 125 M001 |
Science Fiction
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MW |
11:40 AM - 12:35 PM |
Kidd,Katherine A |
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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.
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| ENG 125 M006 |
Science Fiction
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TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Healy,Meghan Riley |
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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 media, 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.
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| ENG 140 M001 |
Reading the Environment
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TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Reese,Jacob Charles |
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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.
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| ENG 145 M001 |
Reading Popular Culture
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:10 PM |
Bartolovich,Crystal L |
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This class examines mass cultural forms such as advertising and movies as well as everyday practices (shopping, reading the news, or using social media), 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. To this end, we will explore the pleasures of becoming thoughtful readers of a variety of cultural texts. We will ask why characters such as Sherlock Holmes keep enticing readers and viewers in new forms, and how Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics engage fans. We will read Spiegelman’s Maus to think about “comics” and explore the significance of “popular” tv shows, such as Survivor and The Sopranos. We will consider why some movies are “blockbusters” and explore the various appeals of sci-fi and horror, while taking account of their relation to our own identity formation: how do you become “yourself” in a particular culture? As the course progresses, you should become a more sophisticated, creative and engaged reader of the many different cultural forms that help make the world meaningful to ourselves and others. This course satisfies the A&S Core Critical Reflection requirement as well as the university IDEA requirement.
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| ENG 151 M001 |
Interpretation of Poetry
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Smith,Bruce |
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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.
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| ENG 153 M001 |
Interpretation of Fiction
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Sinha,Soham |
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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.
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| ENG 155 M001 |
Interpretation of Nonfiction
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Ugwu,Ejiofor Elija |
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This course will introduce you 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 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 the listicle. We will not just work through these different forms and how they make meaning in a vacuum, we will instead focus on a variety of themes, topics, and issues throughout the course, including family, feminism, masculinity, sexuality, race, photography, and screen representations of the environment.
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| ENG 164 M002 |
Children's Literature
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Masri,Serene |
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| ENG 170 M001 |
American Cinema
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MW |
12:45 PM - 01:40 PM |
Scheibel Jr.,Leonard |
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This course traces the history of American cinema from its emergence as a celluloid-based medium in the late nineteenth-century to its digital development at the intersections of multiple media companies and platforms. We will look at individual films not as ends in themselves, but as products of an industry, mass culture, and national artistic traditions. Our goals will be to understand how to interpret the meanings of films in their historical contexts, as well as how to identify aesthetic, technological, and ideological changes over time. Learning this history will introduce you to various cinematic modes—fiction and non-fiction, narrative and the avant-garde, Hollywood and independent production—and how they function. Course topics will include the following: the rise of cinema as an institution; the standardization of American film genres and storytelling; the classical studio and star systems of Hollywood; the shift to color, widescreen, and location shooting in the late-studio era; the political effects of the Cold War and the counterculture; new waves of film school-trained and independent directors; and recent directions for film style and genre in the early-twenty-first century.
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| ENG 171 M001 |
World Cinema
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Kim,Hyejun |
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This course offers a critical exploration of world cinema by examining global cinematic practices and traditions over a historical continuum. Moving beyond a Hollywood- and West-centric model of film analysis, we will engage in a comparative study of films from postcolonial Africa, Russia, Yugoslavia, Iran, India, Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Our goal is to critically examine how and why certain film cultures, styles, and aesthetics have gained visibility with the label of ‘world cinema’ on the international stage. Key concepts such as national cinema, transnational cinema, first, second, and third cinema, as well as Third World cinema, will guide our discussions as we consider the interaction and tension between local and global sociocultural, aesthetic, and economic contexts in which films are produced and received. Topics for discussion include the emergence of cinema as a worldwide medium, transnational genre flows, modernity, (post)colonialism, globalization, gender, censorship, and the (trans)national film industries around the world
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| ENG 172 M001 |
Literature of War and Peace
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TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Roylance,Patricia J |
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This course examines artistic representations of American war and peace, studying how art reflects and also reimagines violent conflict. Ranging from the inspirational to the darkly satirical, and including fiction, reportage, poetry, film, television, graphic novels and songs, the texts covered in this course show the varying responses of artists to the aesthetic, political and moral provocations of war. The course is not arranged chronologically, but we will study texts that deal with major conflicts in American history, such as the U.S. Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam, as well as armed conflict between European Americans and Native Americans and the wars of the post-9/11 era.
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| ENG 181 M002 |
Class and Literary Texts
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Keckley,Nathaniel Powell |
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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 produced in a range of historical periods, from early modernity to the present day. We will explore how class produces, and is produced by, the media we consume. In this course, we will ask questions such as: How does our culture represent class, or not represent it (for instance, in Syracuse University’s non-discrimination policy)? How do the media we study represent, critique, or reconfigure our notions of 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.
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| ENG 182 M001 |
Race and Literary Texts
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MW |
05:15 PM - 06:35 PM |
Ozyenginer,Arda |
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| ENG 184 M001 |
Ethnicity & Literary Texts
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MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Torres-Saillant,Silvio A |
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Introduction to Latino Literature covers literary works by US authors of Hispanic descent as they capture the rapport of race and ethnicity in the United States, a nation with a long history of inter-group conflict based on ancestry. We discuss texts from a large body of writings penned by authors of Hispanic origin in North America from 1513, when Iberian ships landed on the Florida coast, nearly a century before the English came to Jamestown. We first sample texts by Spanish settlers and their North American-born Creole offspring before moving on to works by US-born authors of Latin American ancestry in the territory now known as the United States. We read them with a focus on their artistic quest as well as their social relevance insofar as we find them grappling with ways of tackling dark forces that have remained intent on obstructing visions of inclusion, equality, and justice for all segments of the US population. Covering poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and memoirs, we aim to represent fairly the Latin American countries to which US Latina/o/x authors trace their roots (Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Cuba among them).
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| ENG 192 M003 |
Gender & Literary Texts
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Selthun,Elena Lin |
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What is gender? What does it mean to describe gender as “socially constructed” vs “essential”? How does gender intersect with race, class, sexuality, and disability? Why are some gender identities and expressions targeted as “deviant,” “unnatural,” or “dangerous”? In this course, we will read novels, short stories, essays, poems, and films to critically think and write about how literary representations of gender can shape the ways we imagine and embody gender, both personally and socially. To understand the historical foundations of gender in Western literature, we will read 19th-century Victorian texts like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite, and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. We will also work with contemporary texts like Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” Andrew Joseph White’s “Chokechain,” and Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. Many texts in this course involve gendered violence or struggle, but we will also explore narratives of gender euphoria and community, such as Audre Lorde’s essay “The Erotic as Power” and Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning. This is a discussion-based course, and it fulfills the writing-intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
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| ENG 193 M001 |
Intro to Asian American Lit
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TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Virk,Amanpreet Kaur |
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In this course, we will historicize and examine ‘Asian American’ as a social and political category through an engagement with critical theory, literature, film, television, music, art, and activism. We will engage with cultural productions like films and literary texts in relation to concepts and theories of racialization, empire, diaspora, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and national (un)belonging. Throughout the course, we will work on understanding Asian Americans and Asian America relationally, to gain a broad perspective on how Asian Americans are positioned and tokenized within racial and social hierarchies in the U.S. We will use the framework of relationality to also examine transnational histories and intimacies between Asia and Asian America.
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| ENG 215 M001 |
Introductory Poetry Workshop
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M |
06:45 PM - 09:30 PM |
Haskal,Aliza |
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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.
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| ENG 215 M002 |
Introductory Poetry Workshop
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Th |
06:30 PM - 09:15 PM |
Cook,Macks |
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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.
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| ENG 215 M004 |
Introductory Poetry Workshop
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M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Jacobson,Olivia Jane |
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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.
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| ENG 216 M001 |
Intro Lit Nonfic Workshop
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W |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Pelkey,Katie Lynn |
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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.
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| ENG 216 M002 |
Intro Lit Nonfic Workshop
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M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Hoffman,Dylan |
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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.
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| ENG 217 M001 |
Introductory Fiction Workshop
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M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Nevin,Madison Unique |
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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.
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| ENG 217 M002 |
Introductory Fiction Workshop
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W |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Marchinkoski,Maria Jean |
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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.
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| ENG 217 M003 |
Introductory Fiction Workshop
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Tu |
03:30 PM - 06:15 PM |
Asofsky,Elena |
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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.
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| ENG 217 M004 |
Introductory Fiction Workshop
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Th |
06:30 PM - 09:15 PM |
Nash,Hannah Selden |
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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.
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| ENG 230 M001 |
Jewish Humor and Satire
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TTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Frieden,Kenneth B |
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Comedy in Three Acts-Act 1: Theories of humor, illustrated by Freud’s Jewish and Yiddish jokes from Vienna. Act 2: Reading Yiddish monologues and studying stand-up comedy performances. Act 3: Writing and performing Jewish stories and stand-up comedy. On the night before every Tuesday class, students post analyses of an assigned text or performance and write a short draft in the style of that source. For every Thursday class starting in week 4, students write, revise, post, and perform their own material. Throughout the semester, we read Stephen Rosenfield's Mastering Stand-Up and use it as a guide to researching, writing, and performing stand-up comedy. Students learn about specific genres (e.g., anecdotal, observational, self-deprecating) and techniques (e.g., act-outs, figures of speech, misdirect) that are used by stand-up comedians. After the Spring Break, students will compile and revise their drafts into a stand-up comedy set and prepare for the final performance. To succeed in this marathon of more than 26 writing tasks and courageous stand-up performances requires stamina and ongoing commitment.
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| ENG 230 M002/NAT 200 M003 |
(Re)Writing Residential School
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TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Evans,Vanessa K |
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In 2022, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the Indian Residential School System as an act of genocide. While the US government has yet to issue a similar resolution, Indigenous authors from across North America have been telling the stories of residential and boarding schools for more than a century. As such, this course centers the work of Indigenous writers whose texts respond to, resist, and expose residential and boarding schools for what they were: institutions of assimilation and extermination. By focusing on residential and boarding school stories, we will consider how Indigenous authors are representing the reclamation, recovery, and continuance of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Together, we will contemplate the following questions and many more: Why does (re)writing and (re)storying residential school matter? What might it mean to write and rewrite the school story genre from an Indigenous perspective? What alliances or connections exist or can be built across seemingly disparate Indigenous North American (con)texts impacted by residential and boarding school systems?
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| ENG 242 M001 |
Reading and Interpretation
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Roylance,Patricia J |
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ENG 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 ENG 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.
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| ENG 242 M005 |
Reading and Interpretation
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MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Forster,Christopher Scott |
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This course introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it. The goal is not only to learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course will enhance your ability to interpret texts contextually and closely, and to articulate your understanding effectively in writing. We will read texts include Hamlet and the Great Gatsby, as well as other texts, to explore a range of key theoretical approaches.
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| ENG 300 M001 |
Fiction, History and Imagination
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MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Brunt,Christopher Michael |
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Fiction writers have always used historical events and historical figures in their work. Writers also borrow from and imitate other forms and media. Why do that? And how to make it work? In this class we will examine how different writers play with these possibilities, while generating our own brief works of fiction. We will look at fiction that uses historical events and figures from real life, or uses a research-intensive constraint of place or of occupation, and discuss how newspapers, academic essays, encyclopedias, films, diaries, letters, ads, Wikis, tweets, and other media can inspire the fiction writer’s imagination. We will contemplate the things that fiction can do that a biography or work of history cannot do. How do creative writers draw from primary documents, found cultural artifacts, everyday familiar formats and tech to make imaginative art? Where to draw from and how to manage it?
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| ENG 300 M002 |
ContemporaryPoetry&Fiction
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TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Kennedy,Christopher G |
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In this class, we will read and discuss poems, short stories, and at least one novel by a variety of contemporary American poets and fiction writers. Students will respond to the readings each week by writing creative or analytical responses.
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| ENG 300 M003 |
Poems from Around the World
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Haxton,Brooks |
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In this course the reading list will include poets from various times and places, most in translation, a few originally in English, about half of the poets men, about half women. We will start with a Babylonian priestess (Enheduanna). Other readings will include Greek and Roman poets, Chinese from the Tang and Sung Dyntasties), Japanese poets from the Heian Dynasty and later, oddball originals in English (including Wyatt, Blake, Dickinson, Lawence, Millay, and Valentine), and hallucinogenic visions from Maria Sabina. Getting the originals to come alive across the distance between languages and cultures will be a focal challenge. Written work for the semester will be analysis of readings and poems inspired by them.
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| ENG 300 M004 |
Fiction and Self-Making
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TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Gorevan,Molly Jo |
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What does it mean to grow up? How do stories shape our understanding of becoming a person? Is every story a coming-of-age story? This course looks at the coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman, from its classic roots to its modern reinventions. We’ll consider how authors from Kazuo Ishiguro to Justin Torres both follow and break the rules of the genre, and how telling the stories of historically excluded identities reshapes what the form can do. Along the way, we’ll ask: How can writing capture the experience of being a young person now? Our focus will be on craft—techniques we can borrow for our own work, which we will generate and workshop in class. Possible authors include Sally Rooney, Shirley Jackson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Justin Torres, and Jane Austen.
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| ENG 300 M005 |
Poetry and Environmental Justice
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TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Cooper, Lauren |
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Using poetry as a starting point for exploring how creative forms can help advance environmental justice, this course introduces key public humanities methods, including how to build equitable partnerships that center community voices and ideas. In addition to learning how a range of poets confront diverse instances of environmental injustice, students will gain first-hand experience collaborating with the Environmental Storytelling Series, an annual series of linked events, programs, workshops, and courses that engage the impacts of the climate crisis on central New York and interconnected ecosystems around the world. Students in the course will develop pedagogical and creative materials for ESS, working with our SU, SUNY-ESF, and community partners to do so. Whether focusing on poetry, or on community-engaged partnerships and writing, the course will examine how recycling, re-use, and re-framing can be used to “break up” old ideas to create new, more just and collaborative possibilities.
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| ENG 301 M001 |
Reading and Writing Prose
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Stahl,Keith |
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All creative disciplines depend on the study and modeling of the particular art form for mastery of its elements. In this course, we will discuss, analyze, and imitate the techniques of iconic prose writers of various nonfiction genres, including personal essay, humor essay, literary journalism, and memoir. We will attempt to answer the questions: What keeps us reading? How have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative nonfiction texts? Through in-class discussions and exercises, we will examine the symbiotic relationship between all prosaic elements, from sentence level diction to character and theme, with your goal being to display an understanding of the various strategies employed by writing analytic responses to the works studied, peer critiques, and your own emulative creative nonfiction pieces.
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| ENG 303 M001 |
Reading and Writing Fiction
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TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Gorevan,Molly Jo |
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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 James Baldwin, Joy Williams, Haruki Murakami, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, Samanta Schweblin, and Denis Johnson.
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| ENG 304 M001 |
Reading and Writing Poetry
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TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Diprete,Mary Elizabeth |
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On the project of artistic influence, T.S. Eliot offers this: Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. This course is rooted in the hereditary, communal nature of poem-making and begins from the understanding that poets have always learned their craft by imitating other poets. What, then, delineates an act of regurgitation from the creation of something new? We will investigate this question not by avoiding imitation, but by plunging headfirst into it. We will examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily as we approach imitation as a threshold for translation. That is: we will read like writers, looking for what we can steal. Or, put another way, what we might discover when we write so deeply into the influence of a poem that it becomes you. Together, we will study the work of seven poets representing the diversity of the field. We will look at the poems in front of us and attempt to answer, how did they do that? You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the poets studied. Attendance and participation are absolutely non-negotiable.
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| ENG 312 M001 |
Race and Literary Periods
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Torres-Saillant,Silvio A |
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Race and Literary Periods tells the story of the birth and expansion of racial thought. Via texts spanning 4000 years relating to Africa, Europe, Asia, and Eurasia, we visit a forgotten time when people of different ancestries, heritage, and phenotypes interacted as enemies or friends without that difference playing a role in their relationships. We look at the shift in the rapport between conquerors and vanquished after the 1492 landing in the Americas, when Christians moved to the forefront of global power. Unlike their precursors, Christian overlords found it hard to view their foreign subjects as their equal, a dissociation that would bring about the wholesale racialization of the species as our readings show. Among our readings is the ancient Greek novel Aethiopica whose protagonist is an Ethiopian princess who is born white despite the dark skin of her parents. Fearing a “shameful death” if her husband accused of adultery, the Queen sends her away, telling her husband their baby was stillborn. The baby survives somehow and at one point discovers her true origins. Through trials and tribulations, she sets out on a quest to recover her home, which she does at age 18.
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| ENG 312 M003 |
Race and Literary Periods
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TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Edmunds,Susan L |
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In this course, we will read novels and short stories about the U.S. South. After a brief look at nineteenth-century antecedents, we will focus on fiction written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine literary genres and aesthetic modes that have been strongly associated with the region, such as the Southern Gothic and the Southern grotesque. And we will explore the literary evolution of regional social categories and character types ranging from white trash, the black folk, and queer childhood to the doomed aristocrat, the conjure woman, the unquiet dead, and the freak. Throughout the course, we will examine how writers have used the U.S. South’s distinctive literary traditions to talk about race in and beyond the region -- particularly as race relates to questions of gender and sexuality, wealth and poverty, violence and the law, and regional and global power relations. Course texts include: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing; Brandon Hobson, The Removed.
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| ENG 315 M001 |
Ethnic Literatures&Cultures - The Holocaust in American Literature
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:10 PM |
Teres,Harvey Michael |
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This course will explore the representation of the Holocaust (or “Shoah,” or “Khurban”) in the literature of the United States since WWII. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with the history of the Holocaust according to the account published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Ken Burns’ excellent documentary. We will then explore the history of the changing American response to the Holocaust throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Authors will include W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Jerzy Kosinski, and many others. Students will have the option of producing a traditional final essay or preparing a collaborative presentation to a local high school class on a Holocaust-related topic.
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| ENG 320 M001 |
Authors - Chaucer In Context
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Moody,Patricia A |
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The fourteenth century is a vital period, marked by some of the major crises of Western history. It also produced Chaucer, traditionally regarded as “the father of English poetry,” one of the pillars of what has long been recognized as “the English literary tradition”; his unfinished masterpiece The CanterburyTales has been a monument worthy of both appreciation and scrutiny for almost 600 years. This course will take the cultural icon of Geoffrey Chaucer along with his most famous work as its subject. We will examine the age and culture that produced a ‘Chaucer’ and The Canterbury Tales in the language they were written in, as well as the subsequent construction and reception of that same ‘Chaucer.’
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| ENG 320 M002 |
Authors: Toni Morrison: Narrating the Black Presence
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TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Kumavie,Francisca Delali |
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Before her death in 2019, the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison had published eleven novels, two plays, a libretto, two short stories, five children’s books and several critical pieces. Collectively, Morrison’s body of work narrates the Black presence that underpins official stories and narratives but are rarely part of “the official story” of the nation-state. But what is this Black presence? And how precisely does Morrison use it to unsettle the official narratives of the State? Throughout the course, we will read some of Morrison’s most significant works closely and carefully, situating her in the context she wrote most persistently about, the United States. We will examine some of her novels and her short story, asking how Morrison’s work confronts slavery and its legacies, reimagines myths of nation-building, chronicles the complex existence of Black men and women, and unsettles enduring racial mythologies. In addition to Morrison novels and her short story, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, A Mercy and Recitatif, we will also read her essays and scholarly interpretations of her work.
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| ENG 321 M001 |
Authors before 1900
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Moody,Patricia A |
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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 these provide a presence in many more. Not only the theater itself, but what he read and wrote about show direct inheritance from the Middle Ages: Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear; the blend of comedy and tragedy, the very presence of kings and clowns on the same stage. We can recognize what Shakespeare achieved only by recognizing how much the Middle Ages gave this greatest of playwrights to work with. We will examine the legacy of the medieval world, from the mystery and morality plays, to medieval story tellers, and compare some works side by side (for example, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida).
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| ENG 321 M002 |
Authors before 1900: Reading Brontes
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TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Klaver,Coran C |
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Course description: This course will examine the writings of author-sisters Ann, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte in both their socio-historical and biographical contexts. In addition, the course will examine 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; 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 romance, Rebecca. Our secondary readings will focus on two sets of overlapping themes—feminine agency, female embodiment, and feminine desire and the Gothic and the Byronic. Students will work together on two group presentations, write two mid-term essays, and do a final project that may be creative and collaborative in nature.
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| ENG 330 M001 |
Socially Engaged Hollywood
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TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Doles,Steven Matthew |
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"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.
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| ENG 340 M001 |
Theorizing Forms & Genres: Popular Culture and Social Change
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MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Tiongson,Antonio T |
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This course examines the relationship between popular culture and social change, how popular culture has served and continues to serve as a catalyst for social change. The course focuses on the role of culture as a force for social change and as an indispensable element of social movements. In particular, the course examines the poetic, performative, visual, imaginative and symbolic aspects of social movements, or the deployment of aesthetics to achieve political ends. We will scrutinize a select number of expressive forms such as film, music, visual art, murals, theatrical performance, poetry, and literature to provide theoretical analytic tools to decipher the indispensability of popular culture to social change.
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| ENG 352 M001 |
Race, Nation, & Empire
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Fadda-Conrey,Carol |
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What is the role of graphic novels in addressing questions of race, ethnicity, and migration in national and global contexts? How do representations of racial and ethnic minorities in graphic novels help readers interrogate social constructions of difference and belonging, at the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, nationality, and religion? How do graphic novels contribute to producing critical histories of racial struggle, dispossession, and trauma across time, space, and generational divides? This course addresses these and similar questions by featuring a range of graphic novels and related scholarly texts that provide important insights into individual and collective experiences/histories of enslavement, racialization, immigration, and militarization within the US and transnationally. Featured graphic novels include Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream.
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| ENG 360 M001 |
Queering Documentary
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MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Hallas,Roger |
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Documentary representation has been central to the emergence and development of modern sexual and gender 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 and trans 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, documentary portraits and [auto]biographies) in moving image media have become fundamental tools in the historical struggles over sexual and gender rights including gay liberation, trans* liberation, lesbian feminism, AIDS activism and queer/trans* BIPOC resistance. This course counts toward the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Studies minor and the Film and Screen Studies track in the English and Textual Studies major.
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| ENG 360 M002 |
Reading Gender & Sexualities
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TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Kidd,Katherine A |
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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.
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| ENG 361 M001 |
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality
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TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Beam,Dorothy R |
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This class explores the possibility that sex, sexuality, and gender have histories and may mean differently across time. 19th century American literature will be our laboratory for thinking about these histories. How did people understand their intimate relations before the emergence of a hetero-homo binary? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? We will also dip into health reform, marriage advice, utopian manifestos, and sex radicalism; practices of polygamy and celibacy; and African American and Chinese American resistant formations of family and community. Texts may include Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories; Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Sui Sin Far, Mrs Spring Fragrance; Charles Chesnutt, Stories of the Color Line; Kate Chopin, A Vocation and A Voice.
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| ENG 401 M003 |
Advanced Writ Workshop: Poetry
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M |
03:45 PM - 06:30 PM |
Diprete,Mary Elizabeth |
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|
Poetry is the language of intensity, C.D. Wright tells us. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified. In this course we will obsess (intensely) over poem-making as the creation of an artwork: a series of structural choices that both sources from the private wellspring of the writer’s psyche and evokes meaning for the reader. We will recognize this phenomenon as both fundamentally astonishing and absolutely indispensable to the work of a poem, devoting ourselves to the careful craft through which this experience becomes possible. We will attune to form and attend to the sculptural possibilities of the page. We will come together with profound respect for the workshop as a space of making and remaking, of excavation and cultivation. Writers in this workshop will build a portfolio of poetry, some of which will respond to prompts. Requirements include weekly readings of assigned collections and craft essays, deeply collaborative presence in the workshop, and acute revision of draft work. This course is open to anyone who has taken the sophomore workshop, ENG 215. Seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.
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| ENG 402 M001 |
Adv Workshop: Literary Nonfic
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M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Brunt,Christopher Michael |
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| ENG 403 M001 |
Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction
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Th |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Benz,Chanelle M |
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In this course, students will work to develop a substantial body of their own fiction. We will discuss technique, dissect work by a range of published writers, and read essays on craft. Together, we will examine the art of fiction in a generous and challenging environment. Students will investigate fiction’s possibilities, develop an understanding of their style and aesthetics, and deepen their creative process by exploring form, narrative tension, point of view, character development, voice, and other aspects of craft.
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| ENG 403 M002 |
Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction
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M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Stahl,Keith |
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This class will focus on writing effective and engaging short stories and/or novel excerpts, by building on skills introduced in ENG 217. Students will write stories outside of class, and also maintain a portfolio of generative in-class creative writing exercises, focusing on voice, character, plot, and theme. Students will offer written and verbal feedback for their peers’ creative texts, in a safe, supportive, creative environment.
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| ENG 403 M003 |
Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction
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M |
03:45 PM - 06:30 PM |
Spiotta,Dana |
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This class is for students who have completed the introductory fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will write stories and critique peer stories. Our focus will be on how we revise. In addition to student work, we will discuss some published works from established writers. We may do in-class writing exercises.
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| ENG 406 M001 |
Ecopoetics and Ecocriticism
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MW |
05:15 PM - 06:35 PM |
Conrey, Sean |
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This class fulfills the English Department’s “Advanced Critical Writing” requirement. Emphasizing a place-based and ethics-driven approach, in this class we will use concepts from the fields of ecopoetics and ecocriticism to inform, renovate and ground our current writing and research, framing these processes as modes of care. Through critical reflection and hands-on practice, students will consider how our role as textual critics and scholars can be fully embodied and participatory in the lives of the environments, places and people from which our work evolves. The class may feature work by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, Robert Macfarlane, Diane Glave and Keith Basso as well as films, artwork, music and other texts to help foster more responsible, critical and ecological writing
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| ENG 410 M001/NAT 400 M001 |
Indigenous Futurisms
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Evans,Vanessa K |
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This course considers how Indigenous futurisms—the artistic movement which tells stories about Indigenous people using science fiction, gothic, horror, and fantasy genres—are theorized and expanded in contemporary Indigenous novels, short stories, and films. More specifically, our course considers how Indigenous futurisms imagine otherwise to consider what our worlds might be (and become) if we change the stories we consume and the stories we tell. Central to our discussions will be the idea that Indigenous Peoples are already living in post-apocalyptic realities, having endured centuries of colonial violence, dispossession, and attempted erasure. Accepting this reality shifts how we think about our reality: apocalypse is not a singular cataclysm awaiting us in the future but an ongoing condition that Indigenous artists are already narrating, surviving, and transforming. Together, we will contemplate the following questions and many more: How might Indigenous futurisms reframe apocalypse not as an end but as a context for survivance, resurgence, and continuance? What might it mean to imagine futures without and beyond logics of exploration, colonization, extraction, and dominance? How do Indigenous futurisms encourage readers to reflect on our responsibility to past, present, and future human and non-human kin?
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| ENG 410 M002 |
Forms and Genres - Detective Fiction
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TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Klaver,Coran C |
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This course examines the genre of crime fiction, attending to the emergence and evolution of genre and its subgenres. We will begin by reading texts from the nineteenth-century U.S. and Britain by Poe and Doyle, in order to explore some of the founding convention of the genre. We will go on to explore the Golden Age detective fiction of Agatha Christie and the classic hardboiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, followed by adaptations of the hard-boiled genre by Chester Himes and Sara Paretsky. We will then move to texts written outside the Anglo-America contexts to examine the Nordic Noir phenomenon, Steig Larson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the US-African novel Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Finally, we will return to the British Isles to read Val McDermid’s Scottish Noir novel, Broken Ground. Analysis of these texts will attend to the role of place, the nature of interpretation, and to the shifting effects and meaning of imperialism, colonialism, race, class, and gender on the shape of the genre. In addition, threaded throughout the course we will be examining adaption and the re-medition of detective fiction into different media ecologies.
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| ENG 412 M001 |
Memory in Indigenous Lit.
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TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Madarieta,Ethan R |
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In this class, we will discuss how Indigenous forms and processes of memory are represented in Indigenous people’s literatures. Thinking from and with Indigenous literatures enable us to ask questions such as, is there memory in blood, in the land, in a stone, mountain, river, racoon or are these themselves memory? (How) does memory constitute a Nation, a people, and a person? In pursuit of these questions and concerns, we will develop and practice a method of “reading mnemonically” to examine representations of memory forms and practices across various genres of Indigenous literatures. Such a practice will enable us to attend to the distinct ways form and genre shape memory and our understandings of it. Throughout the class, we will engage both critical scholarship and other literatures, broadly defined, such as novels, poetry, plays, ceremony, and film, across fiction and non-fiction, and literary subgenres such as horror, fantasy, Sci-Fi, Indigenous futurisms, and historical fiction.
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| ENG 412 M002 |
Near FUTURE America—Identity Politics and the Environment
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MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Lavender III,Isiah |
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How does America understand itself? The tension between hope and disaster has never been greater as the American century labors onward through identity politics and climate change. In this course we will examine and interrogate how American SF writers have imagined an explosive sense of what it means to be American at present with respects to themes of identity and difference, climate change, mass incarceration, and second-class citizenship as well as history and futurity. In other words, we will consider the promise of adventure versus the threat of destruction in American science fiction of the contemporary age, where anything can and will happen—in good ways, in bad ways, in ugly ways.
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| ENG 420 M001 |
Family Photos/Social Justice
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Hallas,Roger |
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Everyday photography has played significant roles in U.S. social movements and community organization from the Abolitionist movement to AIDS activism to Black Lives Matter. Although technologies developed for taking family photographs have played significant roles in the social construction of white middle-class heteronormativity, they have also been mobilized to transform issues normally construed as “private” into public ones, preserve and affirm marginalized community histories excluded from official archives, and bear witness to historical trauma. This course combines critical and creative research with student community engagement. We will examine both the diverse uses and values of family photographs from the late 19th to the 21st century and the social history of Syracuse since the mid-20th century. Students will participate in two community projects: 1) Black Family Photography in Syracuse, which aims to build an inclusive, sustainable, and transformative community-based archive for public memory, collective well-being, and social justice through local communities coming together to share their stories through family photographs; 2) a new community project with Syracuse LGBTQ elders. This course counts toward the Film and Screen Studies track in the ENG major, the LGBTQ Studies minor, and the Minor in Atrocity Studies and the Practices of Social Justice.
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| ENG 420 M002 |
Crime Films
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MW |
05:15 PM - 06:35 PM |
Doles,Steven Matthew |
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This course will focus on crime films throughout film history, from silent era shorts about train bandits to contemporary depictions of international cybercriminals, and will include English language cinema as well as international cinemas such as Hong Kong, Bollywood, and Nollywood. We will consider specific subcategories of the crime film, such as gangster, detective, heist, caper, and prison films, and will place crime films in historical context by comparing them to developing official and popular discourses on crime, investigation, and punishment, and also explore the depiction of crime as a figuration of social conflict. Students will complete written critical papers and smaller assignments directed at expanding film studies oriented research skills, such as locating archival sources or developing filmographies and bibliographies
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| ENG 471 M001 |
Experiential Learning pre-1900
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MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Shirilan,Stephanie |
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Are you a past or present theater-maker who craves the opportunity to apply “creative” skills to academic research? Are you a “critical” student who might be curious about applied artistic research and the unique knowledges and perspectives generated through creative practice? If so, come join us for this experiential learning adventure, in which students will assume a variety of roles to mount a show that may vary in form from a highly produced staged reading to a full production of a Shakespeare play that we will study in depth both academically and as theater practitioners, distributing roles and tasks that will range (depending on scale of production), from set/sound/light design to publicity, accessibility/inclusivity, and from dramaturgy to acting and directing, which students will be encouraged to participate in regardless of prior experience. No pre-requisites except curiosity, commitment, and an appetite for creative and intellectual risk. Please note that this is a 6-credit course. Course time and labor requirements reflect this. In addition to our MW day-time slot, we hold class/rehearsal on Thursday nights from 7-10 pm, for which you will be required to register. Fulfills 3 credits of the pre-1900 requirement.
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|
|
Th |
07:00 PM - 10:00 PM |
Shirilan,Stephanie |
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| ENG 615 M003 |
Open Poetry Workshop
|
Tu |
06:30 PM - 09:15 PM |
Kennedy,Christopher G |
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The workshop is open to all graduate students interested in writing poems (students not matriculated in the MFA Program need my permission to register, and MFA students have priority). Depending on class size, students will submit a poem every week or once every two weeks. Close readings and critiques of student work will be the focus of the course, though I may occasionally bring in poems by other poets.
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| ENG 617 M001 |
Open Fiction Workshop
|
M |
03:45 PM - 06:30 PM |
Awad,Mona Y |
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This goal of this class is to generate fiction and to inspire and prompt you toward fearless creative exploration. The writing you do here may be strictly exploratory or you can focus on an ongoing project. All forms of fiction (novels, stories, hybrids, etc.) are welcome. We’ll read each other’s work generously and closely, focusing on language, narrative structure and potential revision. In addition to weekly workshop, there will also be some readings which we’ll use to ground the workshop and to contextualize ourselves as readers and writers.
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| ENG 630 M003 |
Confessions,Comedy,Performance
|
M |
02:15 PM - 05:00 PM |
Frieden,Kenneth B |
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Varieties of first-person narrative: autobiography, diary, and autobiographical fiction. We will devote a portion of each class session to student writing and performances of fictional or autobiographical monologues. Establishing a basis for analysis and inspiration are selections from influential early modern autobiographies by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Solomon Maimon. In the second month of the semester, we sample fiction and autobiographical writing by Eastern European authors. A third section of the class focuses on diaries, followed by a look at stand-up comedy. Students will write short literary analyses of readings throughout the semester; they will also write and perform first-person narratives or original comic monologues. In the final weeks of the semester, students will either a) complete a project in creative writing, to be performed in class, or b) write and present a paper about a pertinent text that they have chosen for the class to read.
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| ENG 630 M004 |
Reading Mnemonically: Indigenous Memory Studies in Literature
|
Th |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Madarieta,Ethan R |
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Memory is a lived experience, embodied as electric and chemical processes and the effects of these processes, as well as sustained in ritual practices, across generations, and representations in speech, texts, and archives, broadly defined. Further, memory is a necessary component of creativity and learning, inseparably intwined with cognition itself. Indeed, we could neither have a self nor a sociality without memory; could neither write, read, nor speak without memory. Thus, we might say, 1) there is no language nor literature without memory, and 2) memory can be found both in the material fact and semiotic content of literature. But what is memory, and what is its qualia? What is this thing, process, action, form? What is it that we are “finding” in literatures, objects, bodies that we call memory? Is it universal? And what, after all, is important (to life, to the study of literature) about seeking the answers to these questions? Rather than assuming the universal applicability of memory processes and categories developed by a Euro-American Memory Studies and given the central mnemonic importance of story for Indigenous peoples, this course looks to Global Indigenous literary representations through a framework of literary nationalism and inter/nationalism. In doing so, it defies otherwise homogenizing studies of Indigenous memory and literature. Literary nationalist approaches call for literary inquiry and exegesis within the political contexts, places, cosmologies, and histories of the specific Indigenous Nation from which a literature is written, while also attending to the various inter- and intranational relations within which these literatures mean. As such, a literary nationalist approach is meaningful precisely because it is an inter/nationalist study of Indigenous literatures. Drawing upon scholar Steven Salaita’s description of inter/nationalism as a commitment to mutual liberation, and what Haak’u poet Simon Ortiz argues is the struggle against colonialism that gives substance to a nationalist literature, this class considers the practices and forms of memory of each Indigenous Nation as the possible grounds for realizing mutual liberation. Thinking from and with Indigenous literatures enable us to ask questions such as, what are the politics behind the concepts of history, “time immemorial,” “settler time,” and notions of historical progress? And how do Indigenous literatures and critical scholarship disrupt these memorial temporalities? Is there memory in blood, in the land, in a stone, mountain, river, racoon or are these themselves memory? (How) does memory constitute a Nation, a people, and a person? Considering the ongoing structures of settler colonial violence, what is the relationship of Indigenous peoples’ memory and forgetting to trauma, representation, and repetition? In what ways does thinking the foundational categories of Memory Studies such as that of sensory, working, prospective, procedural, episodic, semantic, short- and long-term memory become complicated when thought from a specific Indigenous Nation’s “field of signification” (local indexes) or a person’s “locus of enunciation” (the experiential location from which one speaks)?
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| ENG 650 M001 |
20th Century Poets
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Th |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Haxton,Brooks |
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We will read and discuss selected poems by seven poets: Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Hayden Carruth, and Jean Valentine. Discussion in class will focus, mainly, on individual. Writing assignments, every other week, may be analysis of a poem by that poet or a poem responding to the formal and thematic interests of the poet. The grade for the course will include written assignments and class discussion.
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| ENG 650 M004 |
Mystery: Detectives, Doppelgängers, & the Disappeared
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Th |
03:30 PM - 06:15 PM |
Benz,Chanelle M |
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In this course, we will look at the craft, range, and power of the literary mystery. From unlikely detectives to 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.
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| ENG 650 M005 |
Innovation and Tradition in Contemporary Poetry
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Tu |
03:30 PM - 06:20 PM |
Smith,Bruce |
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Because poetry is an old form it is linked with traditions that speak to a continuum with the cultures of the past. And because the work of the poet is to “make it new” [in Pound’s words], the poet makes certain ruptures and stands often in opposition to the status quo. Octavio Paz says in Children of the Mire that “Modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment … but in an instant yields its place to still another tradition which in turn is a momentary manifestation of modernity.” So the Confessionals react against the impersonal nature of the Modernists as the Modernists invented a mode that opposed [and continued] Romanticism. The course will also examine seven books of contemporary poetry in order to first determine the style and then the cultural context for each work. Books that represent the diverse tribes of American poetry are under consideration. Older and newer models will be paired for reading and students will be asked to do weekly presentations as well as written responses to the reading.
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| ENG 650 M006 |
Tentacles Longer than the Night
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Tu |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Awad,Mona Y |
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In this course, we will explore horror as a mode, thinking about how it operates in fiction and its immense potential for storytellers. We will read classic and contemporary stories (we’ll also watch some films) and think about what makes horror so successful and compelling. We'll examine the roots of the genre, where it has gone and where fictionalized horror still might go. What we can learn from horror as fiction writers writing both outside and within the genre? What does horror have to teach us about life in America and about the ways in which we story that life? We'll use these discussions to elicit new creative works and think about what horror can offer us as artists today. We’ll look closely at writing techniques and tropes from the genre—use of perspective, setting, unreliable narration, the tension between the real vs the imagined, the handling of wonder, the grotesque, the uncanny and the supernatural—and discuss how they can be deployed in order to achieve particular narrative effects.
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| ENG 730 M001 |
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality
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Tu |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Beam,Dorothy R |
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Before the relatively recent invention of sexuality and sexualities in the late nineteenth-century, what was sexuality? What did it include and exclude? How did people understand their intimate relations before the emergence of a hetero-homo binary? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? How did social structures--marriage and the family or the color line and legal segregation--organize sex, feeling, affiliations, and identities? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? How does sexuality or gender function as a lens when we examine the past? The course will be grounded in queer, trans-, and queer of color theory, gender studies, and critical race theory. Against the emerging institutionalization of marriage and romantic love, we will consider the challenge presented by resistant formations of family and community, and by same-sex love, polygamy, celibacy and utopian communalism.
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| ENG 730 M002 |
Hamlet: Icon and Mystery
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Th |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Callaghan,Dympna Carmel |
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This course focuses on the most iconic and influential work in the English language. Our primary goal will be to dive deep into the text(s) of the play. However, we will also examine its contexts and consider the vast range of productions, spin-offs, allusions, and appropriations it has spawned, from literary pinnacles like James Joyce’s Ulysses to popular TV shows such as Star Trek, and most recently, the novel and film, Hamnet. Hamlet is also the source of the most perplexing mystery in all English Literature. It exists in not one but three versions. Q1, the earliest text, is radically different from the two later texts. To compound the conundrum, these two differ from one another in significant ways. We will read the three extant versions of Hamlet with a focus on the play’s language—both its poetry and its prose. We will pay minute attention to the text even as we study the overarching issues of the play, as well as Hamlet’s relationship to other writing of the period and to the subsequent creative tradition it has inspired. Final projects may be academic or creative, and no prior experience with Shakespeare is required.
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| ENG 799 M001 |
M.F.A. Essay Seminar
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F |
12:45 PM - 03:30 PM |
Dee,Jonathan R |
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