| 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 |
03:45 PM - 06:30 PM |
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-113-M001 |
British Lit to 1789
|
TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Keckley,Nathaniel Powell |
|
|
Knights, monsters, devils, witches – these figures fill British literature. Sometimes they’re terrifying forces of nature; sometimes they’re embodiments of a feared and hated Other; and sometimes they’re symbols of environmental and political struggle. In this course, we will explore the origins of British literature, from its beginnings before English or literature as we know them even existed. We will read, recite, and decipher Anglo-Saxon riddles, Arthurian romances, and Renaissance drama, and trace the idea of a united Britain, from King Arthur to the modern age. And we will see how literature and language were used to construct the fantasy of a United Kingdom and justify the world’s largest empire.
|
| 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-M002 |
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 (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.
|
| ENG-118-M002 |
American Lit Since 1865
|
TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 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 |
Topics in Black U.S. Literature and Media
|
TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Taylor,Arianna |
|
|
|
| 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-122-M001 |
Introduction to the Novel
|
TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Smith-Ruttan,Finnegan Anthony |
|
|
A panorama of texts written by Jewish authors—from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 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. 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-125-M001 |
Science Fiction
|
MW |
11:40 AM - 12:35 PM |
Kidd,Katherine A |
|
|
|
| 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 media, including radio shows, pulp magazines, films, 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 Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla (1954), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), novels such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and short stories by Nnedi Okorafor, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, and Isaac Asimov.
|
| ENG-140-M001 |
Reading the Environment
|
TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Selthun,Elena Lin |
|
|
We often imagine “nature” and “the environment” as separate from our human lives and spaces (cities, houses, classrooms, etc.), accessible only in protected parks or remote wilderness. In this course, we will think through this distinction of what “counts” as nature/the environment, particularly in the context of anthropogenic climate change, evolution and extinction, industrial pollution and disturbance, and the relationship of humans to other species. By closely reading various forms of media, including historical and contemporary literature like On the Origin of Species and Forest Euphoria, films like Wolfwalkers, poems like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” video games like Palia, and the environment itself, we will analyze, write about, and discuss how these texts imagine human relationships to nature and how we impact and participate in various ecologies. Throughout this course, we will critically reflect on the local ecology of Syracuse as well as more global ecologies, and we will discuss how reading the environment can change our relationships with it, as well as potentially shaping future ecologies. This is a discussion-based course, and it fulfills the writing-intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
|
| ENG-142-M001 |
Afrofuturism
|
MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Lavender III,Isiah |
|
|
At its simplest, Afrofuturism means speculative fiction written by Black people in a global context. But such a working definition of Afrofuturism elides the sheer scale of this burgeoning aesthetic movement, now in its third decade, which includes all forms of Black cultural production—music, dance, art, theater, film, literature, and scholarship. Afrofuturism is a set of race inflected reading protocols designed to investigate the optimisms and anxieties framing the future imaginings of Black people. As a speculative concern with what was via what is via what could be, Afrofuturism offers a complex challenge to remember and reconnect a past that informs the present and builds a future. Alternate histories, captivity narratives, alien encounters, and travels through time and space provide ideal ways to go b(l)ack to the future. Consequently, this course concerns the literary and critical strands of Afrofuturism, with some attention paid to music and film.
|
| 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 - 04:40 PM |
Tiongson,Antonio T |
|
|
This course constitutes a critical engagement with popular culture, examining a range of theoretical approaches as well as key concepts and key debates in the study of popular culture. 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 investigate how popular culture is not merely a reflection of society, but a catalyst for social transformation. At the same time, this course will draw on your intimate familiarity with popular culture 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 how and why popular culture matters. To accomplish this, we will investigate a number of popular expressive forms including girlhood, boy bands, fandom, high school proms, quinceaneras, hip hop, country music, bounce music, EDM, TikTok, and electric powwows as well as what artists such as BTS, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, T-Pain, Beyonce, Big Freedia, and The Halluci Nation reveal about the contours and trajectory of popular 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-153-M005 |
Interpretation of Fiction
|
TuTh |
08:00 AM - 09:20 AM |
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 Franz 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-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 two evening screenings over the course of the semester is required.
|
| ENG-164-M002 |
Children's Literature
|
TuTh |
03:30 PM - 04:50 PM |
Grey,Maja Nicolette |
|
|
Children’s literature has a history of engaging with the same historical, sociopolitical, and cultural dilemmas as other genres of literature, but often in more subtle and fun—but no less meaningful—ways. As such, these texts, which are among the first we encounter in our lives, have the power to shape not only how we think and feel, but, ultimately, who we become—all in a short period of time before being relegated to our past. In this course, we will focus primarily on works of British and American children’s literature to examine key questions including: How and why does children's literature use a fantastical bent to tackle real-world problems? Why are so many works of children’s literature stories wherein the children must save themselves (and everyone else too)? And the age-old question: is children's literature really just for children? Additionally, in considering film and tv adaptations of children’s literature, we will examine how, when, and why these texts are adapted and often changed for a new audience. Specific novel-length texts may include The Bad Beginning, The Chronicles of Narnia, Elatsoe, Magyk, The Mysterious Benedict Society, A Wrinkle in Time, and/or their adaptations; more stereotypically canonical texts will also be examined.
|
| ENG-171-M001 |
World Cinema
|
TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Kim,Hyejun |
|
|
This course offers a critical exploration of world cinema across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By exploring German expressionism, French New Wave, Chinese Melodrama, Mexican Golden Age cinema, Bollywood, Postcolonial African Cinema, political Iranian cinema, Hong Kong New Wave, Japanese anime, Thai art cinema, Indigenous horror cinema, transnational blockbusters and more, we will examine how film has functioned as a global medium shaped by the intertwined histories of modernity, colonialism and globalization. Moving beyond Hollywood- and Eurocentric models of analysis, the course investigates how these regional film cultures and movements have developed through dynamic exchanges between local traditions and transnational flows of capital and ideas. By surveying the sociocultural, aesthetic, and industrial dimensions of cinema in these regions, we will consider how films negotiate questions of identity, genre circulation, gender politics, history, and sovereignty.
|
| ENG-171-M002 |
World Cinema
|
MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Hamead,Tasneem |
|
|
Cinema has often been called a universal language, and it is certainly made all over the globe. But world cinema has a richness and complexity that defies a single model, despite the cultural dominance and economic power of Hollywood cinema. This course examines how the international history of film has been shaped by the larger historical dynamics of modernity, colonialism, postmodernism and globalization. We will explore the diverse pleasures, politics and aesthetics of cinema from around the world, including German Expressionism, post-revolutionary Soviet cinema, Chinese melodrama, French New Wave, Bollywood, postcolonial African cinema, Japanese anime, Iranian neorealism, contemporary indigenous cinema and transnational blockbusters. We will trace how aesthetics, technologies and economies of cinema have mutually influenced filmmaking traditions in diverse regions of the world. Moreover, we will investigate how cinema contributes to our understandings of the world, our places within it, and our relations to other parts of it. In sum, we will discover how world cinema is always both local and global.
|
| ENG-174-M001 |
World Lit to 1000
|
TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Teres,Harvey Michael and Brunt,Christopher Michael |
|
|
This team-taught course by poet Chris Brunt and scholar Harvey Teres will expand your understanding of cultures from around the world as you read and discuss some of the most achieved and influential examples of literature from African, Asian, and Western traditions. These diverse texts and cultures will provide vital contexts for your exploration of your own life, and contemporary social life in general. We will begin with some of the oldest literature in the world (Enheduanna’s poems, Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems), and go on to read sections from the Hebrew Bible, Sanskrit and Greek epics (The Ramayana and The Iliad), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucius and Zhuangzi), Greek and Roman lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid), The New Testament, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Chinese Tang and Song dynasty poetry (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, and others), excerpts from the Qur’an, stories from 1001 Nights, and excerpts from The Tale of Genji by the Japanese woman writer Murasaki Shikibu, arguably the first novel ever written. Classes will alternate between lectures and discussions.
|
| 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-182-M001 |
Race and Literary Texts: Reimagining Young Adulthood: Indigenous YA Literature
|
TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Evans,Vanessa K |
|
|
What is the relationship between race and young adult (YA) literature? What kinds of stories are young people expected to see themselves in, and which voices have historically been excluded? In North America, the YA genre has long been dominated by narratives centered on white, middle-class characters. Yet in the last two decades, Indigenous writers have increasingly reconceptualized the genre by centering the experiences of Indigenous youth. Unlike non-Indigenous YA stories where defiance might look like refusing to sell chocolates in a school sale or running away from school (Cormier; Salinger), this class considers how rebellion in Indigenous YA literature is part of a wider continuum of Indigenous resistance. Rather than depicting coming-of-age as the suppression and reshaping of youth into compliant citizens, Indigenous YA stories imagine coming-of-age as a communal process where belonging can expand—rather than diminish—personal agency. Reading texts such as Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson (Haisla & Heiltsuk) and Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache) alongside theories of the genre, this course contemplates how Indigenous YA narratives (re)imagine adolescence as a site of resistance and relational belonging
|
| ENG-182-M002 |
Race and Literary Texts: The Short Story in Black Literature
|
TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Kumavie,Francisca Delali |
|
|
Short stories by Black writers are a crucial site for the examination of race and literary texts and form. In this introductory level class, we will consider the intersection of literatures and race through the form of the short story. This means we will rely on the short story form to examine Black literatures and cultures. We will examine how Black writers have experimented with the form of the short story to developed nuanced and complex understanding of Black existence that map and imagined speculative geographies and futures that interrogate race and racial imaginaries. We will engage the broad scope of Black literatures as an interactive, critical, and experimental body of literary and cultural works. Throughout the course, we will interrogate the persistent presence and engagement with transatlantic slavery, race and racism, violence, gender and sexuality, and the nation-state in Black literatures and cultures.
|
| ENG-184-M001 |
Ethnicity & Literary Texts
|
MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Torres-Saillant,Silvio A |
|
|
|
| ENG-184-M002 |
Ethnicity & Literary Texts
|
TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Frieden,Kenneth B |
|
|
A panorama of texts written by Jewish authors—from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 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. 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
|
MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
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-192-M002 |
Gender & Literary Texts
|
MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Fadda-Conrey,Carol |
|
|
In this course, students will read and analyze the portrayal and role of gender in a collection of literary and theoretical texts, focusing on the ethnic, cultural, racial, sexual, historical, and creative implications of gender in relation to the texts’ writers and characters. We will begin with the premise that gender is a social construct—rather than a natural, ahistorical “essence”—and examine the ways in which literature participates in the social reproduction of gender, as well as the difference that gender makes in the production and reception of literary texts. The selected literature features novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and a graphic novel by a variety of writers including Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Mohja Kahf, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that would reflect the students’ understanding of the issues raised in these texts. The main objective of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities as well as their analytical readings skills. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
|
| ENG-193-M001 |
Intro to Asian American Lit
|
TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
Virk,Amanpreet Kaur |
|
|
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 and theoretical texts that explore racialization, empire, 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 also use the framework of relationality to examine ransnational histories and intimacies between Asia and Asian America.
|
| ENG-195-M001 |
Arab American Literature
|
MW |
05:15 PM - 06:35 PM |
Masri,Serene |
|
|
|
| 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 |
06:30 PM - 09:15 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-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-242-M001 |
Reading and Interpretation
|
MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Beam,Dorothy R |
|
|
Introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what we read but how we read it. We will learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading as well as demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course is designed to enhance your ability to read and interpret contextually as well as closely, to help you to articulate your understanding effectively and to draw connections through reading and writing. Through close, deep, and thoughtful reading of literary texts as well as essays by critics and theorists, we will explore the ways readers produce meaning. These meanings are produced both from the perspective of each reader’s unique experiences, and through various critical and theoretical approaches. Each section of ETS 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include representation, language, reading, authorship, subjectivity, ideology, culture, history, and difference.
|
| ENG-242-M002 |
Reading and Interpretation
|
TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Torres-Saillant,Silvio A |
|
|
|
| ENG-300-M001 |
Mystery in Fiction
|
TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Benz,Chanelle M |
|
|
|
| ENG-300-M002 |
The Poetics of Dreams
|
TuTh |
05:00 PM - 06:20 PM |
DiPrete, Mary |
|
|
|
| ENG-300-M003 |
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 |
Contemporary American Poetry - Coming of Age
|
TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Gorevan, Molly |
|
|
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 coming-of-age stories and novels. We’ll consider how authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, Justin Torres, and Sally Rooney 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 we capture in writing the experience of being a young person now? Our focus will be on craft—techniques we can borrow from the authors we read for our own work, which we will generate and workshop in class.
|
| 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 in order 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 Donald Barthelme, James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams, ZZ Packer, Yiyun Li and Samanta Schweblin.
|
| ENG-309-M001 |
Literature and its Media
|
TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Goode,Michael |
|
|
Literature and AI explores how writers, filmmakers, and theorists have imagined artificial minds—and how those imaginings engage with the notion of intelligence itself. Much of the course will trace literary representations of artificial intelligence, spanning roughly two centuries (novels from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 to Debbie Urbanski’s After World, and plays and films from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Alongside these texts, we will examine evolving concepts of “intelligence”—human, animal, and machine—through philosophical and cognitive theories, situating large language models (LLM) against other theories of language. We will also analyze AI-generated literature, comparing its narrative strategies with human-authored works, as well as think critically about the limitations of LLM-based AI to interpret literary and filmic texts. In general, students will be asked to reconsider what it means to read, write, and think in the age of AI. In addition to participating in class and taking reading quizzes daily, students will complete three writing assignments: one, in-class essay exam; one, traditional literary critical essay; and one essay generated 100% by interacting with AI.
|
| ENG-310-M001 |
British Modernism
|
TuTh |
09:30 AM - 10:50 AM |
Forster,Christopher Scott |
|
|
The term modernist has been used to describe the art and literature of the early twentieth century. But what exactly is it? Or, if it is over, what was it? This class explores that question in English literature (though we'll occasionally stray beyond these geographical boundaries). Is modernism a useful designation? How have critics understood it? What does it exclude? How does it relate to the larger context of the twentieth century? These and other questions will inform a set of readings that includes poems by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, fiction and essays by Virginia Woolf and others. In thinking about modernism we will also attempt to think about its relationship to the periods, styles, and intellectual currents that preceded it, surrounded it, and followed it, while considering the problem of periodization and literary history more broadly. Course assignments include Blackboard Posts, short responses, and two longer essays.
|
| ENG-315-M001 |
Ethnic Literatures&Cultures
|
MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Torres-Saillant,Silvio A |
|
|
|
| ENG-325-M002 |
History & Varieties of English
|
TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Moody,Patricia A |
|
|
|
| ENG-330-M003 |
Crime Films
|
MW |
05:15 PM - 06:35 PM |
Doles,Steven Matthew |
|
|
This course will focus on crime films throughout film history 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, heist, 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. We will pay special attention to the role of melodrama within the crime genre. Films likely to be viewed in the course include Scarface (1932), The Public Enemy (1931), Goodfellas (1990), Gangs of Lagos (2023), Out of Sight (1998), Hard-Boiled (1992), The French Connection (1971), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Basic Instinct (1992), Baazigar (1993), Brute Force (1947), Caged (1950), Prison on Fire (1987), Infernal Affairs (2006), and The Departed (2006).
|
| ENG-345-M001 |
Critical Theory
|
TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Madarieta,Ethan R |
|
|
What is Critical Theory? What is “critical” about Critical Theory? What can it do in the world, especially in these times of constant crises? The goals of this class are to learn how to read Critical Theory, to imagine different worlds, to abolish preconceptions, to change everything. To do so, we will discuss, for example, Political, Cultural, and Literary theory, analytic approaches in Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Psychoanalysis, Critical Indigenous, Black, and Critical Race and Ethnicity studies, Translation and Memory Studies. Specifically, this class will read Critical Theory beyond its Western canon, making central Indigenous thought. As such, this is an excellent class for students interested in philosophy, film and media, literature, and culture, Land Back, and everyone who wants to change the world.
|
| ENG-352-M001 |
Race, Nation, & Empire
|
TuTh |
11:00 AM - 12:20 PM |
Dima,Vlad |
|
|
|
| ENG-352-M002 |
Race, Nation, & Empire; : US Minority Literatures and Cultures
|
MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Fadda-Conrey,Carol |
|
|
This course offers an introduction to the study of minority experiences within US national and transnational contexts. We will focus on key questions that interrogate the ways in which US minority formations, extending to the ethnic, racial, gendered, sexual, and religious, intersect with and inform performances of US citizenship and belonging. In addressing these questions, we will situate such formations across a long historical continuum, looking at them through various theoretical, critical, and literary lenses to unpack some of the confluences and divergences among various minority experiences in the US. The framework of our analysis will not be restricted to a comparative model entrenched in the constructs of similarity and difference, but will integrate a focus on the relational by looking at the ways in which histories of racism, sexism, religious bias, and national exceptionalism draw on each other. In doing so, it becomes important to investigate these minority positionalities not only within the specific context of the US nation-state but also within a transnational framework to examine how decolonization, neocolonialism, and military conflicts have and continue to shape our understanding of US racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, and national identity formations.
|
| ENG-353-M001 |
American Captivities
|
MW |
03:45 PM - 05:05 PM |
Beam,Dorothy R |
|
|
This course considers the captivity narrative as a recurring form in American literature and asks why it should be so prevalent in a “land of freedom.” We’ll expand this category beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity tales (in which colonial settlers recounted being captured by Native Americans) to examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in the accounts of captured Africans and Native Americans. After the iconic captivity narratives of Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, Puritan Mary Rowlandson, and Seneca woman Mary Jemison—each with very different trajectories—we will explore Native experiences of captivity in the work of Lisa Brooks, Leslie Marmon Silko, Zitkala Sa, and "ledger art" of the Great Plains. We’ll likewise examine resistance to captivity as a leitmotif in African American literature and resistance movements, from fugitive slave narratives to prison abolition. We’ll watch several filmic adaptations of the captivity genre, from John Ford’s classic Western, The Searchers, to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Throughout, we’ll ask how, as students of American literature, we should understand our own captivation and contact with the American captivity narrative.
|
| ENG-360-M001 |
Queer Comics
|
MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Kidd,Katherine A |
|
|
|
| ENG-361-M001 |
Gender & Sexuality before 1900
|
MW |
12:45 PM - 02:05 PM |
Klaver,Coran C |
|
|
This course will explore the history of Anglo-American feminism through the novels, novellas, and short stories that figured the social, cultural, and theoretical issues facing feminist thinkers and activists alongside their political writings and actions. These novels reveal the strengths and limits of Anglo-American feminist thought at key moments in the development the feminist movements, exploring the way that feminist frameworks at specific moments fueled certain changes, even while reinforcing the status quo in in other ways, as well as the way they created possibilities for some women, even as excluding others from their liberatory promises. The course will begin with Maria Wollstonecraft’s novel, Maria, or The Wrongs of Women and include novels such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Hannah Craft’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Mona Caird’s The Wings of Azrael, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Jamaica Kincaids’s Lucy. We will read short selections of nonfictional feminist writing from the periods alongside these novels. Students will be responsible for oral presentations on the history of feminism concurrent with the writing of these novels, two formal essays, and one creative engagement with feminism and fiction.
|
| ENG-401-M001 |
Advanced Writ Workshop: Poetry
|
Tu |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Gibbs, Jules |
|
|
In this class, we will emphasize risk taking and discovery through experiments with language and form. We’ll focus on the ways language, especially in the form of poetry, becomes a record of our ever-evolving engagement with the sensory world. We will proceed with the assumption that the poet must enter into a reciprocal and often destabilizing relationship with their surroundings. The poet must linger longer, ask the more difficult questions; they must, to paraphrase Whitman, put a second eye to the eye, a second ear to the ear, a second brain to the brain. The class will be conducted in the workshop format, which will consist of generative writing prompts, craft and revision strategies, and group discussions centered on your poems, as well as discussions of illustrative poems from our tradition. The aim is to discover the greater possibilities for your writing in a challenging and supportive environment.
|
| 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 |
Stahl, Keith |
|
|
This class will focus on how to write effective and engaging short stories and/or novel excerpts, by building on skills introduced in ENG 217. Students will identify strengths and questions within their peers’ texts, and offer written and verbal feedback, so that everyone benefits in the workshop process. We will also discuss some previously published works, many by Syracuse alumni. Dynamic, for-credit, in-class writing exercises will regularly be conducted.
|
| ENG-403-M002 |
Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction
|
Th |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Spiotta,Dana |
|
|
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.
|
| ENG-406-M001 |
Literature and Censorship
|
TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Forster,Christopher Scott |
|
|
At the start of the twentieth century, literature was often the object of government censorship. Indeed, obscenity trials play a key role in the literary history of the twentieth century. Attempts to ban books have returned to headlines once more recently. What motivates such censorship? How has it changed historically? What lessons, if any, does past censorship offer for the present? What does book censorship tell us about how the power of literature is imagined and contested? This class takes these questions as an occasion for research and fulfills the English Department’s “Advanced Critical Writing” requirement. A deliberate, conscious consideration of writing and the research process will be at the center of this class. Our research and writing will be focused on the relationship between literature, obscenity, and censorship—and the evolving history of these terms. We will read key works that have been censored, both from early in the 20th century and from today. We will examine them alongside scholarship, newspaper accounts, and court trials in order to study censorship as a literary and cultural phenomenon. Texts include LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, LOLITA, THE WELL OF LONELINESS, and GENDER QUEER.
|
| ENG-410-M001 |
American Poetry 1900-Present
|
TuTh |
02:00 PM - 03:20 PM |
Teres,Harvey Michael |
|
|
This course will introduce you to some of the most accomplished and influential American poems and poets of the past century, and it will also help you to understand the role poetry has played, and continues to play, in the lives of Americans. To this end, you’ll be reading and listening to slam and hip hop poets, but also learning about the rich traditions and amazing poets who came before them. A short list of these poets includes the two 19th-century poets who helped create modern poetry—Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—and Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht, and Rita Dove. We will proceed under the assumption that most students have had relatively little experience reading poetry and might be ill at ease doing so. We’ll spend a good bit of time becoming familiar with what poetry is--its various elements, techniques, forms, and functions—and how to read it. The focus will always be on deriving pleasure from recognizing how masters orchestrate the subtleties of language and meaning. Due attention will be paid both to the formal elements of poems, and to the place a poem occupies within its time and our own. An option for your final project will be to do a high school presentation featuring some of the poetry we cover during the semester.
|
| ENG-412-M001 |
Black Literary Experimentations
|
TuTh |
12:30 PM - 01:50 PM |
Kumavie,Francisca Delali |
|
|
What constitutes the “experimental” in Black literature? Is it a reimagining and innovation of form, subject matter, content, style, mode, or even theme? Perhaps it is pulling the histories of Black people into the world of literary texts, or perhaps it is a cross pollination that blends music and visual art with poetry and fiction to produce something unlike the forms that are designated canonical. If Black experimental literature is, to use Elizabeth Alexander words, “that which breaks with the doctrinaire and lets the previously unimaginable happen,” how does it highlight and disrupt approaches to reading and interpretation? This course will read, listen, and watch a range of scholarly, literary, performances, and visual texts that wrestle with received form and innovate them into something else. We will examine what constitutes Black literary experimentation by reading works by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankin, and Nathaniel Mackey, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosely, John Edgar Wideman, and Percival Everett.
|
| ENG-428-M001 |
Video Essays as Film Criticism
|
MW |
02:15 PM - 03:35 PM |
Hallas,Roger |
|
|
Are you looking for a new and dynamic way to express your ideas about the screen media you consume or study? Is there a film or TV show you’re obsessed with, and you want to know what makes it work in terms of style, genre, narrative or theme? Are you a filmmaker who wants to make better films by dissecting great movies? Do you want to be a scholar, writer, critic or arts journalist who can communicate ideas about screen culture in multimedia formats? This course is for you! It provides a comprehensive introduction to making critical video essays (videographic criticism). It will be a hands-on, practice-based course that develops critical and technical skills in making video essays using non-linear editing software through a series of short exercises in preparation for a final video essay on the film or TV show of your choice. An intellectual passion for screen media is vital, but no prior experience in media production or non-linear editing is required. A pre-requisite for the course is having taken one film/media studies course (ENG154, ENG156, ENG170, ENG171, ENG176, FIL225, FIL226, FIL253, FIL254, CRS483 or COM117). Contact Prof. Hallas (rhallas@syr.edu) if you have taken another film/media course not listed that could count as a pre-requisite.
|
| ENG-630-M001 |
Game Studies
|
Th |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Hanson,Christopher |
|
|
Just as digital games have grown profoundly more complex in the last fifty years, theoretical and critical approaches to digital games have proliferated and diversified, moving well past early debates between narratology and ludology. Of course, the study of games predates the digital age, and in this course we will engage with the foundational texts which serve as precursors to the contemporary critical approaches which we will also explore. We will trace the historical development of game studies as a discipline, while also examining both traditional and digital games as case studies for our critical consideration. In addition to ergodic texts, we will also study screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies.
|
| ENG-630-M002 |
Contemporary US Fiction
|
Tu |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Edmunds,Susan L |
|
|
In this course we will focus on US. fiction written in the last five or so years. Most class sessions will pair a few short stories with selected author interviews and book reviews, but we will also read some novels over two class sessions each. In selecting texts, I am prioritizing stories that combine a traditional focus on intimacy and its vicissitudes with a more recent focus on the micro- and macro-dynamics of globalization. In my selection process, I’ve also prioritized works by contemporary writers of color, works featuring LGBT+ characters, and works engaging current struggles around racial justice, sexuality, immigration and climate change. If you would like to suggest a contemporary writer or text for us to read, please do!
|
| ENG-631-M001 |
Critical Theory
|
Th |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Madarieta,Ethan R |
|
|
The goal of this course is to offer both a “foundational” and future-oriented overview of Critical Theory, within and beyond its assumed Western intellectual genealogies. To achieve this goal, the course gathers texts from across disciplines and fields into an accretive syllabus with the hope that prior readings will provide the language and framing for understanding subsequent ones. As a preparatory course for doctoral study, this seminar focuses on the practice of reading and rereading, which is the work of critical theory itself. Although thorough study of any aspect of Critical Theory is impossible in such a course, we will discuss texts across Political, Cultural, and Literary theory, the analytics of Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Psychoanalysis, with a focus on Critical Indigenous, Black, and Critical Race and Ethnicity studies. This structure allows for both a specialist and generalist approach but means that this is not a Critical Theory course that pretends to know or attempts to establish a proper genealogy of critical theoretical thought. Rather, this course aspires not solely to learn “the term of the position” in critique, but to enable us to “alter the position of the terms,” that is, to critique critique (Lyotard, Driftworks,13).
|
| ENG-650-M001 |
Prose, Poetry and Flash Fiction
|
Tu |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Kennedy,Christopher G |
|
|
In the past twenty-five years or so, the prose poem and flash fiction (aka micro-fiction, sudden fiction, micro-story, short short story) have emerged as viable sub-genres. Though both forms have a long history, in recent years a number of print and on-line journals and anthologies have begun to feature work from these two sub-genres, and some new journals are devoted exclusively to the forms. Despite the proliferation of pp/ff, as one anthology characterizes the work, defining the difference between the two is often a difficult and perplexing task. Why is one piece of writing a prose poem and another of similar length a work of flash fiction? This class will provide an opportunity to explore prose poetry and flash fiction with the goal of distinguishing the characteristics that make them separate forms while identifying their commonalities. Writers we will read include Lydia Davis, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, Charles Simic, Amy Hempel, Russell Edson, Cornelius Eady, Garielle Lutz, and Diane Williams.
|
| ENG-650-M002 |
Forms
|
Tu |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Awad,Mona Y |
|
|
|
| ENG-650-M005 |
Ulysses for Writers
|
M |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Spiotta,Dana |
|
|
When our list-obsessed culture makes its pronouncements about the best novels ever written, James Joyce's Ulysses often lands at the top. This class will attempt to get beyond (underneath, behind) this novel's iconic status. Most of the class will be devoted to a close reading of Ulysses, keeping track of what accumulates as we examine Joyce’s narrative strategies, techniques, and innovations. We will look at the architecture of the novel and consider how it is possible to create a system without being overly schematic. We will read to understand the book, but also, we will read with an eye toward developing our own work and our own ideas about what a novel can do. We will discuss what kind of art we can create to counter or subvert our current moment and its conventions. And in the last few weeks of class, we will read some fiction by writers of today who have a Joycean devotion to innovative forms (for example, Counternarratives by John Keene). There also will be a generative/creative component as part of the class.
|
| ENG-650-M006 |
Womenfolk
|
Th |
09:30 AM - 12:15 PM |
Karr,Mary Marlene |
|
|
It’s heresy to teach a wad of books by women without some feminist brackets around it, but I plan to try. Rather than rehash theory, I wonder if just reading great (by my standards) texts we might not discover what it means to write like a woman. Below are all works I’ve tried to steal from. (An asterisk means I’d really like to teach this one.) (PS I’ll spend the summer coming up with a better construct than this, I swear. Am stuck on a freezing movie set in the Czech Republic w dying computer….) We’ll spend the first class workshopping a) the syllabus and b) each student’s singular form of talent/duende & any pitchforked demon(s) you might aim to exorcise. We’ll also c) start to decide what types of writing you’d like to take on (probably creative rather than critical but who knows) for grades.
|
| ENG-715-M001 |
First Poetry Workshop
|
Th |
12:30 PM - 03:15 PM |
Kennedy,Christopher G |
|
|
Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and critique one another’s poems in class with the ultimate goal of learning how to become better writers and readers of poetry. Admission is strictly limited to first year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.
|
| ENG-716-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 |
Benz,Chanelle M |
|
|
|
| ENG-718-M001 |
Second Fiction Workshop
|
W |
12:45 PM - 03:30 PM |
Awad,Mona Y |
|
|
|
| ENG-719-M002 |
Third Poetry Workshop
|
W |
12:45 PM - 03:30 PM |
Karr,Mary Marlene |
|
|
|
| ENG-721-M800 |
Third Fiction Workshop
|
ONLINE |
|
Saunders,George W |
|
|
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-M003 |
Queer of Color Critique: Foundations, Archives, and Formations
|
Tu |
03:30 PM - 06:15 PM |
Tiongson,Antonio T |
|
|
This graduate seminar examines the intellectual and political foundations of queer of color theorizing, specifically its roots in women of color feminism, post-structuralism, critical race theory, and queer studies. It delves into queer of color critique’s core interventions in queer theory (its presumed whiteness) and studies of race and ethnicity (its presumed heteronormativity) and its investment in speculative world-making, futurity, and imagining otherwise. Centering the works of queer thinkers of color and Indigenous thinkers, the seminar scrutinizes foundational texts, debates, and methodological concerns that undergird a queer of color critique. It apprehends queer of color critique as an archive of queer epistemologies that intervenes in and disrupts canonized queer theory and historiographies. In addition, the seminar traces early iterations as well as new directions and developments in the trajectory of queer of color critique. Throughout the semester, then, we will study the work of scholars, artists, activists, and scholars like Combahee River Collective, Jose Esteban Munoz, Gloria Anzuldúa, Roderick Ferguson, Charlene A. Carruthers, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Jodi Byrd, and Hokulani K. Aikau who have profoundly shaped the contours of queer of color critique.
|
