Department of English Courses

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

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
ENG 105 M002	Intro to Creative Writing	MW	09:30 AM - 10:25 AM	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	Grzecki, Matthew			This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear contemporary 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. Visiting Writers for the spring include Claire Messud, Maya Binyam and Natalie Shapero.
ENG 115 M001	Gothic and Monster Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Selthun,Elena Lin			From Frankenstein to Dracula, some of the most iconic and strangely sympathetic monsters in the Western imaginary are found in the genre of the Gothic. In this course, we will discuss and analyze how these monsters are constructed, why certain fears give them power, and how these fears and their monsters change or are buried over time, only to re-emerge transformed. We will unpack how and why Gothic monsters like ghosts and vampires embody cultural anxieties about gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, death, and ultimately, what makes us human (or not). Reading these monsters and their meanings and deconstructing their power can allow us to read the world around us more clearly. We will focus on reading the monstrous in Gothic British texts from the 19th century. These texts may include the spooky short stories of H.G. Wells, poems like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and novels like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. We will also look at some contemporary adaptations of Gothic monstrosity, such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) and Penny Dreadful (2014). This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 117 M001	American Lit to 1865	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Adams,Jeffrey Garfield
ENG 118 M001	American Lit Since 1865	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Kue,Debra Joyce
ENG 119 M001	U.S. Fiction After 1945	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L			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.
ENG 119 M002	Topics in U.S. Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			This course provides a rigorous historical and theoretical understanding of the relationship between hip hop culture and race. It examines the ways in which hip hop illuminates the workings of race and how race has profoundly shaped the emergence and trajectory of hip hop. Considered the most dynamic youth expressive form to have emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, hip hop has interfaced and intersected with racially formative moments in U.S. history, including the drug and culture wars of the 1980s, the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In examining the relationship between hip hop and race, we will engage with a wide range of texts such as literature, film, poetry, music, and visual art. We will approach these texts as constitutive of a hip-hop archive but also an archive of race, both of which are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive.
ENG 122 M003	Introduction to the Novel	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Sinha,Soham			This course offers a foundational exploration of the novel as a literary form, tracing its development over three hundred years. Through close readings of classics and contemporary novels, we will examine themes such as social class, gender, race, colonialism, and identity. We will also investigate the formal elements of the novel – theme, narrative and plot, setting, character, point-of-view, style, and tone, and consider how these elements interact and combine to generate meaning. Rather than treating the novel as a static literary form, this course will look at it as an ever-changing tradition that is in conversation with itself. Some questions that we will seek to answer are: how did the novel gain popularity? What is its relationship to the world? How is this literary form in conversation with sociopolitical perspectives and contexts? How do different sociopolitical perspectives and contexts affect this literary form? How do novels conform to and challenge dominant narratives? How do the authors engage with conventions, and challenge them? Text/Authors for this course may include – Austen, Dickens, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongo’s The River Between, and Tommy Orange’s There There. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 125 M001	Science Fiction	MW	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			The origins and definition of Science 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. The homework includes essays and quizzes.
ENG 140 M001	Reading the Environment	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Reese,Jacob Charles			Living in an age of anthropogenic climate-change, it is more important than ever to examine the historical traditions that shape and define our understanding of “Nature” and “the Environment.” With a critical focus for how media representation has the potential to shape our ecological future, this course will engage critically with a variety of historical and contemporary texts including literature, film, interactive documentary, visual art, social media, advertisements, and video games that that deal either directly or indirectly with the human/nature relationship and which inform domestic policy, international relations, and social values relating to the natural world and our place within it. In an effort to expand our considerations of what it means to be ecological agents of change in what has 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 the global ecology. With these issues in mind, we will construct a vocabulary to discuss ongoing representational trends across various media forms, their formal affordances and limitations, and their real-world potential to shape our response to ongoing ecological crises.
ENG 145 M001	Reading Popular Culture	MW	02:15 PM - 03:10 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			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 explore 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 consider 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 alongside comics and assess the significance of “popular” tv shows, such as Survivor and The Sopranos. We will ponder why some movies are “blockbusters” and think about 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 will learn ways to be 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 Critical Reflection requirement of the A&S Core; it is also an IDEA course.
ENG 151 M001	Interpretation of Poetry	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Haxton,Brooks
ENG 153 M001	Interpretation of Fiction	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Conrey,Sean M			This course introduces students to techniques and approaches to interpreting and analyzing fiction. We will develop close reading skills while learning to recognize the formal aspects of literary fiction, namely plot, character, setting, point of view, imagery and intertextuality. Across a range of texts from short stories, comics, novels, digital media and video games, we will work at developing critical reading habits in conjunction with the skills necessary to convey our interpretations in writing. Readings will be loosely organized around ways that cultures and countercultures interact, considering the dynamics between cultural insiders and outsiders, the position of the "other," and particularly the ways that artists can interrupt, reify, interrogate and disturb privileged ways of living. Texts in this course may include stories by Chimamanda Adiche, James Baldwin, and Mohja Kahf, novels (graphic and otherwise) such as There There by Tommy Orange and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, films such as Children of Men and Belfast, and the video game Never Alone.
ENG 154 M001	Interpretation of Film	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Santiago,Samuel Ethan			This course introduces students to the critical interpretation of film as a medium that, since the 20th century, has played a central role in constructing how we understand the world and our place within it. We will confront the following questions: How can we "read" films critically? How can we unpack film's formal elements to better understand matters of narrative, genre, production, and reception? What does it mean to think about films in the context of their history and production? This course will emphasize close attention to the specific aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of films to explore how they create meaning within broader sociopolitical systems of cultural exchange. We will also focus on cinema's formal language, interpreting specific techniques and components such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound production, and editing. The screenings for this class will draw from a variety of film traditions, such as classical Hollywood cinema, contemporary blockbusters, documentary, and avant-garde cinema. We will also engage with other screen media forms such as video games and virtual reality. No prior film experience is required. As a writing intensive class, we will ultimately focus on honing writing abilities and critical analysis, developing broadly applicable media literacy skills.
ENG 155 M001	Interpretation of Nonfiction	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Ugwu,Ejiofor Elija			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.
ENG 164 M001	Children's Literature	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			This course surveys a history of children’s literature – primarily European and American, but with some global reach. Children’s literature through time charts the evolving cultural attitudes about children and childhood, as well as adulthood and parenting. Likewise, as educational material, literature for children reflects ideas about what constitutes a citizen of a nation, a family member, and a good person, more generally. Because texts for children are what we generally engage with during the times when our brains are most rapidly developing, we are influenced profoundly by these texts. Relatedly, Children’s Literature is the most likely to be contested or banned. We’ll read and view a variety of genres and mediums, from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to graphic novel, chapter books, film, and television. Readings will include works by Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, Judy Blume, etcetera, along with works in the Sesame Street and Disney universes, and many more.
ENG 164 M002	Children's Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Healy,Meghan Riley			What constitutes children’s literature and how does the category reflect cultural values? How does children’s literature depict gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability? How does children’s literature depict children/childhood and what do these depictions reveal about the adults we are expected to become? Why is it that children’s literature is often the most contested and banned? These questions will guide our thinking as we work through a history of children’s literature. Across the semester, we will consider the historical, political, and cultural contexts that produce these literatures. Our course texts will primarily survey canonical works of children’s literature in American and European contexts but will also include some global reach. We will read and view a variety of genres and mediums, from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to film and television. Possible readings might include works by Hans Christian Anderson, Maurice Sendak, and Judy Blume, along with works in the Disney universe, and many more. Specific texts may include A Wrinkle in Time, Inside Out, episodes from Reading Rainbow, as well as selections from Aesop’s fables, the Panchatantra, and the Brothers Grimm.
ENG 171 M001	World Cinema	MW	12:45 PM - 01:40 PM	Hallas,Roger			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 Korean 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. Fulfills Writing Intensive, Critical Reflections, and IDEA requirements.
ENG 172 M001	Literature of War and Peace	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			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.
ENG 181 M002	Class and Literary Texts	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	PTI
ENG 184 M001	Ethnicity & Literary Texts	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A
ENG 192 M001	Intro To Queer LATINE/X LITERATURE	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Madarieta,Ethan R			In this class, we will read Latina/o/e/x literature, Queer Theory, and Queer of Color Critique to better understand queerness, Latinidades, and queer Latinidades. To get a broad understanding of queer Latina/o/e/x literature and queer Latinidades, we will explore a variety of literary forms such as the short story, novel, poetry, memoir, theatre and performance art, the graphic novel, music, film, and critical scholarship spanning more than sixty years. Specifically, we will look to these texts to help us understand how the ethno-racial category “Latino” has been queered over the last forty years; how Queer Latina/o/e/x theory has informed Latina/o/e/x literature and vice versa; the interventions of trans* studies on Queer Latine/x theory and Latina/o/e/x literature; and what role sex, race, gender, ability, documentation, nationality, and class play in queer Latina/o/x/e literatures and Latinidades.
ENG 192 M002	Gender & Literary Texts	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Klaver,Coran C
ENG 192 M003	Gender & Literary Texts	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Shaw,Morgan Taylor			How has modern-day “gender” come to be? What does it mean to say that gender is a social construct as well as a lived reality? How do other identity categories, like embodiment, race, disability, and sexuality, intersect with gender? Finally, what does literature, of all things, have to do with it? To help you answer these and other pertinent questions, this course will explore histories of gendered representation in poetry, film, novels, essays, plays, and more. Rather than organizing our course materials chronologically, this course organizes itself by gendered “tropes,” or recurrent ideas about gender that permeate the Western imagination. These include, but are not limited to, “The Pursuit,” “Love Hurts,” and “Racial Monstrosity.” By critically engaging media as varied as Beowulf (700-1000), Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1592), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and AI-powered imaging software, you will trace literary representations of gender across space, time, and genre while developing your reading, analytic, and writing skills in this course. As a discussion-based course, this listing also fulfills the writing-intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 195 M001	Arab American Literature	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Ozyenginer,Asli
ENG 215 M001	Introductory Poetry Workshop	M	06:45 PM - 09:30 PM	Rodriguez,John Christoper			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, critical 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	Th	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	Tentser,Misha			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, critical 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 M004	Introductory Poetry Workshop	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Holloway,Lily Alison			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, critical 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	W	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Clark,Joanna Ashley			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 some new or nuanced forms that may arise. 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	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Yates,Kira Sinclair			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	W	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Banks,Stephen Nailin			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	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Marchinkoski,Maria Jean			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories and revise one. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M004	Introductory Fiction Workshop	Th	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	Le,Janie T			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	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			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.
ENG 242 M005	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 300 M001	Both Here & Elsewhere: The Hybrid Poem	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	DiPrete, Mary			Speaking on structure, Ocean Vuong has offered that genre may be a container made of water. Evan as our inheritance of poetic form is precious to us, what happens when the forms we know can’t hold the poems we need to make? What happens when a poem necessitates that we build a shape we lack the blueprints for? In this generative course, we will focus on the capacities of the hybrid poem to hold our blur & our fragment, our dream & our vision, our hinterland & our wilderness. We will approach hybridity as it occurs in form, in content, & in process. We will ask what use genre labels offer a work & what use their disintegration offers. We will study the possibilities provided by a poetics that looks specificity beyond what has already been shown to be possible. We will consider the unique potential that hybridized work allows for relinquishing intent & allowing a poem to become itself on the page. We will challenge what we might mean by “the page.” We will attend closely to the mechanics of how these hybrids are made & strategize how we might build the containers to invite our own hybrids into being.
ENG 300 M004	Poetry & Environmental Justice	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Cooper,Lauren Alyssa			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 community-based youth writers to curate and produce a multimedia art installation and a public-facing publication. Students in the course will help develop and implement a multimedia creative project/installation by partnering with Write Out, a community writing collective that provides youth from traditionally underserved populations in Syracuse with the time and space to write, create, and share their stories on their own terms. 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.
ENG 300 M002	Mystery: Detectives, Doppelgängers, & the Disappeared	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Benz,Chanelle M			In this creative course, we will examine at the craft, range, and power of the literary mystery. From reading about unlikely detectives and unreliable narrators, silences and absences, quests and secret rites, doubles and ghosts, we will explore what delights and haunts us about pursuing the unknown. Mysteries, whether religious, macabre, psychological, mystical or Borgesian, are searches for the truth, but whatever the revelation, the truth is never just one story.
ENG 300 M003	Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror Fiction and Film	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Awad,Mona Y			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.
ENG 301 M001	Reading and Writing Prose	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
ENG 303 M001	Reading and Writing Fiction	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Stahl, Keith			All creative disciplines depend on the study and imitation for mastery of its elements. In this course, students will read and analyze short stories to deepen their understanding of a variety of concerns in storytelling, including voice, style, image, story, and character. We will attempt to answer the question: how have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative texts? Students will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the texts studied. Possible authors include Samanta Schweblin, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams, ZZ Packer, and Yiyun Li.
ENG 303 M002	Reading and Writing Fiction	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Gorevan,Molly Jo			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, Ernest Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, James Joyce, George Saunders, Grace Paley, and Denis Johnson
ENG 304 M001	Reading and Writing Poetry	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			T. S. Eliot said that minor poets borrow while great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating, and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate poems from canonical poets--possible poets include Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Theodore Roethke, and Terrance Hayes. We’ll examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we will read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We will deepen our understanding of a variety of poetic devices, such as diction, image, music, and metaphor. We will attend to each poet’s stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, as well as his or her techniques and habits. You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the poets studied.
ENG 311 M002	Medievalism: King Arthur	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 312 M001	Race and Literary Periods	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A
ENG 312 M002	Death and the Undead in African and Diasporic Literature and Cinema	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Dima,Vlad			This course investigates representations of death and of undead figures (spirits, zombies, vampires etc.) in African and Diasporic Literature and Cinema. We will unpack the relationship between the undead and the living in order to explain (some of) our current cultural anxieties and to understand our fears of and fascination with the afterlife. In the process, we will learn about the unique attitudes toward death in the Global South, and we will compare the differences between figures of horror and fantasy across the Global North and the Global South. The undead, as a symbol, also prompts us to consider how relations between life and afterlife are negotiated in particular cultural and historical settings and what kind of metaphors they elicit: “viral” immigration, the unrelenting memory of slavery, capitalist violence, the culture of terror, repressed sexual desire, or cinematic spectatorship. The latter leads us to the final, terrifying questions of the course: what does it mean to be ideologically invested as a spectator? Does it mean that we are zombie-figures ourselves? We will study texts written by Soyinka, Huchu, Sembene, and Mabanckou; we will also watch films made by Gerima, Bekolo, Haroun, and Mati Diop.
ENG 320 M001	James Joyce	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			This class offers an opportunity to read, with an unusual depth of attention and care, the major works of one of the most challenging writers of the twentieth century: James Joyce. We will begin the semester by reading a selection from Joyce’s short stories and his autobiographical PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, before beginning a patient, chapter by chapter reading of ULYSSES—a novel which regularly appears near, or at, the top of lists of “greatest” novels of the twentieth century. The class offers a unique opportunity to develop a depth of knowledge and familiarity about a single writer. The evolution of Joyce’s work, however, also offers an opportunity to consider questions fundamental to twentieth-century literature—questions about literature and difficulty, about how narrative represents consciousness, and about how literary form captures (or fails to capture) experience. Joyce’s fiction also opens on questions broader than literature—questions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, of obscenity and literature, of race and empire, of gender and representation.
ENG 321 M001	Authors before 1900	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Klaver,Coran C
ENG 321 M002	Authors before 1900	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Moody,Patricia A			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.” The quotation marks in the preceding statement are intended to call attention to the phrases they mark as worthy of further scrutiny. This course will examine the man Geoffrey Chaucer in his historical context, the turbulent period of emergent early modern culture. Most importantly; we’ll read Chaucer’s major works in the language they were written in, including the Canterbury Tales, paying particular attention to the forms and genres Chaucer worked with.
ENG 330 M001	Film Noir Crime and Detection	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Doles, Steven			Popular with critics, scholars, and everyday audiences, “film noir” is a key category in our understanding of Hollywood representations of crime, deviancy, and investigation. From its origins in French criticism responding to Hollywood cinema in the post-World War II period, the concept of film noir took on a life of its own, finding new application in a string of “neo-noirs” from the 1970s through to today, as well as in innumerable popular culture appropriations and parodies. In this course, we will examine the history of the category, investigating its historical sources, mutations, and continued popularity. We will also consider how the film noir depicts criminality and the investigative process, placing these depictions in their historical contexts. Films examined will include a wide variety of films noir across the history of the category, from the 1940s to the contemporary period, with the first portion of the course focusing on studio-era noir, and the latter portion on neo-noir.
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 400 M001	Jane Austen in Context	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Goode,Michael			This course analyzes Jane Austen’s novels in two sets of cultural contexts: first, the early nineteenth-century British context in which they were written, and, second, the contemporary global context in which they continue to be adapted and read. Through lectures, readings, and discussions, the first half of the course will introduce you to Austen’s novels, examining their participation in early nineteenth-century British concerns over everything from authorship, poetry, Gothic novels, architecture, fashion, garden design, and estate management to rank, class, gender, sexuality, slavery, and imperialism. The last half of the course examines Austen film adaptations, fan culture, and literary tourism in order to understand the significance of the ongoing boom in Austen’s popularity. The two complementary halves of the course are bridged by eight days of on-site study in southern England, where students visit locations associated with Austen and Regency Britain. Class size is limited to 20. Students must enroll in both the Syracuse and England portions of the course. Admission to the course is by application only through Syracuse Abroad. The application process closed on October 15, 2024.
ENG 400 M002	Black/Arab Relationalities	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol and Olwan, Dana			This combined advanced undergraduate/graduate-level seminar focuses on connecting histories of racism and oppression across Black and Arab racial divides through the study of a wide range of interdisciplinary texts from multiple historical, political, and literary genres. Applying a range of feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial methods at the nexus of theory and practice, we will together address the following questions: How do Black, Arab, and Black Arab communities encounter one another in the U.S.? What are the intertwined histories, stories, and narratives that shape their experiences? How can these histories, stories, and narratives be told, read, and recorded in ways that challenge and resist the assumed dominance and the ascendancy of the Black/White US racial binary? Driven by an investment in developing critical understandings of the place(s) we live in, we will connect Arab, Black, and Black Arab histories, encounters, and experiences of systemic and racial oppression within the city of Syracuse to broader national and transnational racial landscapes. In centering the lived experiences of Black, Arab, and Black Arab individuals and communities on the level of the local, the national, as well as the transnational, the course invites students to rethink the Black/White binary and the knowledges resulting from such constructions. Doing so will help students hone the critical and analytical skills necessary for identifying, building, and supporting solidarities amongst Arab, Black, and Black Arab communities in the US and beyond.
ENG 401 M003	Advanced Writ Workshop: Poetry	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			In this course, students will develop their existing skills writing a poem every other week, and critiquing each other’s poems. We will discuss how to generate rough drafts and how to approach revision with the ultimate goal of producing poems that replicate the emotional and psychological states that inspire them.
ENG 402 M001	Adv Workshop: Literary Nonfic	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
ENG 403 M001	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Benz,Chanelle M
ENG 403 M002	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			This class will develop and expand upon the literary skills introduced in ENG 217 (which is a prerequisite). The primary focus will be on how to write better, more effective, more technically sophisticated short stories and/or novel excerpts; the secondary focus will be on how to critique constructively others’ work in these same forms. There will be some in-class exercises, as well as some published work to analyze. But most of the class will center on the writing and constructive critique (both written and verbal) of original work created by you: 2-3 submissions over the course of the semester, maximum 25 pages each, distributed to your peers a week in advance for their reading pleasure. We’ll talk as well about the writing life beyond the college workshop: publishing, graduate MFA programs, etc.
ENG 403 M003	Advanced Wrt Workshop: Fiction	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	PTI			This fiction workshop will develop and expand upon the skills introduced in ENG 217. The primary focus will be on how to write better, more effective, more technically sophisticated short stories and/or novel excerpts; the secondary focus will be on how to write more helpful feedback letters. In class, we will discuss student work as well as previously published work. There will be some for-credit in-class writing exercises as well.
ENG 406 M001	Literature and Censorship	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 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. More recently, attempts to ban books have returned to headlines. What motivates such censorship? How has it changed historically? This class 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 to study the relationship between literature, censorship, and obscenity. Texts include LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, LOLITA, THE WELL OF LONELINESS, and GENDER QUEER.
ENG 410 M001	Socially Engaged Holiday	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Doles, Steven			"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.
ENG 411 M002	Doing Shakespeare	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			Have you ever acted or participated in any aspect of theater-making? Have you wished you could but lacked the chance to try? Are you a past or present theater-maker who craves the opportunity to apply those “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 the second offering of this class, in which students will assume a variety of roles in mounting a staged reading (or if consensus and resources allow) a fuller production of a Shakespeare play that we will select collectively, study both academically and as theater practitioners, distributing assignments 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. Curiosity, commitment, and an appetite for creative and intellectual risk strongly suggested. Please note that class will meet regularly in the assigned daytime slot but will additionally hold rehearsals in an evening time block for which you will be required to register to protect your availability. Fulfills pre-1900 requirement.
ENG 412 M001	Indigenous Horror Literature	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Madarieta,Ethan R			“We saw the ones who killed us, risen from deep in the cold earth with the mud and the worms, heading north across the town square, where colored stones paved a way to the river with its amber waters known best for being the place where our women disappeared. Didahihi!” So begins Cherokee citizen, Brandon Hobson’s short story, “The Ones Who Killed Us.” But is this the beginning of a true story, a post-apocalyptic history of the ‘ordinary violence’ of Indigenous elimination, or is it the beginning of a horror story? Is it both? To answer these questions, we will consider not only a texts narrative content, generic, and formal aspects, but the spaces, memories, histories, and discourses in which they are embedded. We will read Indigenous horror literature because it is enjoyable (and frightening), and for what it tells us about Indigenous life, political order, land, memory, and history, colonial productions of identity (race, gender, etc.), the state, and the nation, which make its study distinctly important. Possible texts include Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) horror comic series Earthdivers, short stories from the recent Never Whistle at Night, the movie Blood Quantum, as well as scholarship in Critical Indigenous Studies.
ENG 420 M001	Family Photos/Social Justice	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Hallas,Roger			Vernacular (or everyday) photography has played significant roles in U.S. social movements and community organization from the Abolitionist movement to Black Lives Matter. Although the technologies developed for taking family photographs have been understood to play 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 political 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 cultural and social history of Syracuse since the mid-20th century. Students will contribute to the community project 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. This course counts toward the Film and Screen Studies track in the English and Textual Studies major and the Minor in Atrocity Studies and the Practices of Social Justice.
ENG 421 M001	Shakespeare’s Natural Worlds	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			Global epidemics, drought, flood, deforestation, pollution, food-insecurity: these are but a few of the effects of climate-change brought on or accelerated by human agents, and Shakespeare has much to say about them. His plays reflect on the radical transformation of ideas about the natural world in a period that underwent seismic political, theological, economic, and ecological change. Alongside selections of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, we will read from a wide variety of 16th and 17th century texts that witness these transformations. This is a Special Collections Research Center based course. We will meet at the center at least every other week to examine physical copies of these texts. But rare books will make up only part of our archival inquiry. A driving question for our course will be what it means (and entails) to study Shakespeare’s natural worlds here at this University, with its layered institutional and regional histories whose ecological legacies we will investigate through the examination of materials ranging from colonial maps and land surveys to early 20th century geology department expeditions, throughout considering what roles the study and cultural re/production of Shakespeare has played throughout in the lecture hall and theatrical productions, student publications and private scrapbooks. Fulfills pre-1900 requirement.
ENG 421 M002	Mysteries of the Manor House	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Goode,Michael			In fiction and in film, the country manor is a haunted house—always figuratively, sometimes literally. British and Irish novelists, especially, have invested the manor’s stately walls, immaculate grounds, and luxurious interiors—not to mention its ruined wings, secret gardens, and scheming inhabitants—with a host of conflicting cultural associations. It can be a symbol of national stability, wealth, tradition, taste, moral improvement, feminine refinement, and order. Depending on the novel, it can just as easily stand for decay, excess, domination, patriarchy, repression, simulation, scandal, and mystery. In this course, we will study how different generations of novelists and filmmakers use the setting of the British manor house to comment on England, Britain, and the British Empire, as well as to define what it means to be English and British. In so doing, we shall examine how manor house novels and films are commenting on the activity and artifice of national fiction-making. Course texts will include novels by Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sarah Waters, and films by Alfred Hitchcock, Merchant and Ivory, Sam Mendes, and Alejandro Amenábar.
ENG 422 M001	The Telling Sound(s) of African Cinemas	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Dima,Vlad			This course explores the narrative use of cinematic sound and music by African francophone filmmakers between 1966 and 2024. The course follows historical, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches to studying African cinematic sound(s). It first connects African sound(s) to African orality and European counter-cinema practices. Second, it links sonic images to issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Third, it focuses on the materiality of voice(s), voice-over, and on diegetic/nondiegetic choruses. Meaningful sound—as diegetic noise, dialogue and voices, or diegetic/nondiegetic music—represents a hallmark in the oeuvre of pioneering African directors Djibril Diop Mambety, Safi Faye, or Souleymane Cissé. Sound continues to be foregrounded narratively by the next generation of African directors, including Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Abderrahmane Sissako. The newest generation—Mati Diop, Maïmouna Doucouré, Alain Gomis, and Ramata-Toulaye Sy—have likewise maintained proximity to aural cinematic practices. The result is that African films often push the visual narrative to the side. In the process, African cinemas find their own, original voice, which counters the visual-centric practices of the Global North. All the directors mentioned above will feature in the course.
ENG 495 M001	Thesis Writing Workshop	W		Bartolovich,Crystal L			This 2-credit writing workshop is a continuation of ENG 494. It is intended to serve as a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research and writing toward producing an ENG Distinction Essay/Honors Thesis. The workshop primarily will involve presenting drafts of your thesis and engaging in collegial peer critique. Participation is by invitation to the English Distinction Program only. Prerequisite: ENG 494; Permission of Workshop Instructor and Thesis Adviser
ENG 600 M001	Black/Arab Relationalities	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol and Olwan, Dana			This combined advanced undergraduate/graduate-level seminar focuses on connecting histories of racism and oppression across Black and Arab racial divides through the study of a wide range of interdisciplinary texts from multiple historical, political, and literary genres. Applying a range of feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial methods at the nexus of theory and practice, we will together address the following questions: How do Black, Arab, and Black Arab communities encounter one another in the U.S.? What are the intertwined histories, stories, and narratives that shape their experiences? How can these histories, stories, and narratives be told, read, and recorded in ways that challenge and resist the assumed dominance and the ascendancy of the Black/White US racial binary? Driven by an investment in developing critical understandings of the place(s) we live in, we will connect Arab, Black, and Black Arab histories, encounters, and experiences of systemic and racial oppression within the city of Syracuse to broader national and transnational racial landscapes. In centering the lived experiences of Black, Arab, and Black Arab individuals and communities on the level of the local, the national, as well as the transnational, the course invites students to rethink the Black/White binary and the knowledges resulting from such constructions. Doing so will help students hone the critical and analytical skills necessary for identifying, building, and supporting solidarities amongst Arab, Black, and Black Arab communities in the US and beyond.
ENG 615 M003	Open Poetry Workshop	Tu	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	Harwell, Sarah			“A water nymph made of bone/tries to summon a river out of limestone”-Alice Oswald. How does one summon poetry out of the no-poetry of the world? While the focus of this course will be on your poems in progress, we will also explore, through poems and essays brought in by the workshop leader and students, the various ways of summoning poetry. All students will be expected to bring in their original poems, participate in class discussions, prepare in advance written comments on peers’ works-in-progress and attend conferences with workshop leader.
ENG 617 M001	Open Fiction Workshop	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Spiotta,Dana
ENG 630 M002	Contemporary US Fiction	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L			In this seminar we will read works of US. fiction written in the last five or so years. Most class sessions will pair a a few short stories or a short novel with a critical reading, though the syllabus will also include a handful of longer novels read over two class sessions. 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. There will be a special emphasis on stories of immigration, of minority experience, and of climate change. Written assignments will consist of weekly Blackboard posts and a final seminar paper (20-25 pages). The syllabus will include new or recent work by Jamel Brinkley, Lydia Conklin, Lauren Groff, Jean Chen Ho, Tommy Orange, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Alejandro Varela, Bryan Washington, and Zach Williams. I’m also thinking about including new work by Kaveh Akbar, Jennifer Egan, Justin Torres and Joy Williams. If you are thinking about taking the course and would like to suggest other writers and/or a particular text for the syllabus, please let me know. I am eager to read new things and to put together a syllabus that reflects the literary and research interests of class participants.
ENG 630 M004	Race as/and Technology in the Literary Imaginary	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Kumavie,Francisca Delali			This course examines the interplay between technology, race, and their inventions/articulations/ expression in literary and cultural texts. Specifically, it will interrogate the entwinement between technology and Black imaginaries, culture, literature, and expressive arts. The course asks two urgent questions: first, how have writers and critics understood technology’s influence on Black life and death; second, how have these writers and critics used technology to reveal the invisible dimensions of our world view and world. Drawing on literary and critical texts across time and space, we will examine technology as an inescapable fact of Black existence by paying attention to the accretion of systems that constitute technology, and well as the distillation of such technologies into systems of dominance. We will consider technology itself as a product of literary or artistic expression, and thus a world-making project subject to reinvention. The class will examine how race functions as technology, how algorithms entrench engineered inequality, as well as how surveillance technology reinscribes the racial violence of carceral systems. Further, we will interrogate how AI creates opportunities for reassessing enduring concepts in literature such as the conditions of the human, intelligence, consciousness, and intimacy as well as the creation of a technological underclass.
ENG 650 M003	Seven Poets	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Haxton,Brooks			This course will spend two weeks on the work of each of seven American poets: Sharon Olds, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Brigit Kelly, and T.J. Jarrett. We will read and discuss a selection of the poems of each and respond to the work in prose or verse, analytical or creative. An expressive recitation from memory of at least thirty lines from the poet may be substituted for written work.
ENG 650 M004	European Poetry and Fiction (and Beyond)	Th	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			We will read the work of “contemporary” European poets and fiction writers whose work addresses authoritarian political and social conditions, and we will read writers from other parts of the world whose work reflects the impact of subtler forms of oppression, or perhaps better stated, more accepted forms of political and social oppression. Writers we will read include Paul Celan, Wislawa Szymborska, James Baldwin, Antonio Fian, Vasko Popa, and Zibigniew Herbert. There will be weekly writing assignments, consisting of brief responses (creative or analytical).
ENG 650 M005	Point of View: A History	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			Is “point of view,” for the fiction writer, a relatively small palette of techniques that have been around since time immemorial, or is it something that has evolved over time, with its own history that parallels the histories of the societies that produce and consume it? It’s both, and we will look at it from both angles. Several generative creative exercises will be included. Among the texts, in whole or in part: Hunger, Hamsun; In a Grove, Atugawa; Jealousy, Robbe-Grillet; Mrs. Bridge, Connell; So Long, See You Tomorrow, Maxwell; The Years, Ernaux; The Mothers, Bennett; Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro; No One Writes to the Colonel, Garcia Marquez; Pure Colour, Heti; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Guibert; Deacon King Kong, McBride; Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu; Imagine Me Gone, Haslett; James, Everett; Gone Girl, Flynn.
ENG 650 M006	The Devil Inside: Villains and Antiheroes in Fiction	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Awad,Mona Y			In this course, we will be exploring villainy in fiction. Villains are some of the most enduring characters in literature—some are archetypal antagonists, some are monstrous, and some unsettlingly familiar. Others are all too human. Often, they are a manifestation of deeply ingrained cultural fears but the more interesting villains are complicated, idiosyncratic and mysterious, eluding easy categorization. What makes a villain? Why do we need them? Why do they stay with us? In this course, we will be looking closely at the myriad ways in which villainy runs through fiction as a kind of pulse, a source of tension, shadow and conflict in narrative. We will be reading short stories, novels and screening films in order to observe the ways in which the villain has shaped the story and functioned as a fixture of storytelling traditions.
ENG 730 M001	Temporalities of Screen Media	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Hanson,Christopher			The adoption of standard time in the late 19th century was a direct result of industrialization and the development and expansion of steam-powered transportation across Europe and North America; as railway networks grew to connect more distant spaces, so too did the need to synchronize train schedules between towns and regions. Prior to the widespread use of standardized timekeeping, a single train could pass through dozens of local time “zones” during a trip of a few hundred miles. Railroads also contributed to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as the “annihilation of time and space” as geography was altered and compressed by the capacity to travel large distances in short amounts of time and senses of localized time were discarded in favor of standardized modes. During this period, the function of time within social and cultural practices shifted dramatically; temporality was explicitly linked to the measurement of productivity of labor with devices such as the time-stamp machine and the emergent representational forms of photography and cinema radically reconfigured understandings of time. A pronounced and sustained investigation on the experience of time and space emerged in the wake of these profound industrial, technological, cultural, and social changes—an inquiry which continues to this day as later media forms such as television, digital media, and video games continue to challenge, redefine, and reshape our experience of time. This course will examine the varied functions of temporality in screen media through a range of theoretical lenses, using mainstream and experimental films, games, television programs, and other media texts as our case studies to investigate the shifts in the conceptions and experiences of temporality initiated by industrialization and which continue today. The role of medium specificity in both the representation of time and our experiential understanding of it will be considered, with a focus on screen media objects which reference or reconfigure their own temporality.
ENG 730 M002	Early Modern Trans Studies	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Callaghan,Dympna Carmel			This course addresses the paradox that in the rigidly patriarchal early modern world, which ostensibly embraced anatomical identity as a grounding certainty, gender was nonetheless more complex than the idea of a binary antithesis allows; that is, male and female, whose relation to one another is as the “opposite sex.” This complexity is evident in early modern cross-gender stage practices whereby pubescent and pre-pubescent anatomically male actors played women, who sometimes went on to live with a trans residue in their adult lives, as well as in the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, John Donne, and John Milton, among others. This course will explore why the idea of gender transition so preoccupied these writers whose ideas of gender transformations were indebted to The Book of Changes, The Metamorphoses, by the bad-boy Roman poet, Ovid. Both in the original Latin, but especially in translation, he was the most influential literary precursor of the era. Our readings will also explore current uses of the term “trans” and the idea of transness as referring not only to a spectrum of experiences associated with transgender identity, but as a range of philosophical, philological, and intellectual ideas arising from it and from the kinetic prefix “trans” that suggests movement through, across, residing in transitive social spaces, from one thing to another. The “trans” lexicon includes, for example, transgression, transience, transition, translation, and transformation. Transformation is the critical moment, the turning point the twist, in every story, every history. “Trans” as method brings new energy to not only to traditional areas of literary inquiry but also to areas as varied as post-colonial and race studies, disability, post-humanist, trans-humanist, and ecological studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminism and queer studies, poetics, and genre studies, among others. Thus, I welcome final projects that use the course material as deep context for exploration of students’ own interests-whether as creative writing, film, media, or literature from any period.
ENG 799 M001	M.F.A. Essay Seminar	F	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Spiotta,Dana