Fall 2023 English Dept. Courses

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

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
105	Introduction to Creative Writing	TuThF	03:30 PM - 04:25 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			This course will introduce students to three types of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (including mixed genres). 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.
107	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.
113	British Literature, Beginning to 1789	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Morgan Shaw			Are the gender critiques found in Anglo-Norman poetry really so different from those we see today? How does pandemic, whether the Black Death of the 1300s or the contemporary COVID outbreak, shape literary perspectives? How do we, as readers, actively shape history as it is (imperfectly) represented within texts? This course will introduce you to British literature from the earliest Anglo-Saxon epics to the death-brooding poetics of the 18th century. We will read and analyze an array of literary works, attending to the transformation of English culture and identity over this 1000-year period. We will engage our course readings critically by situating them within their historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts. Given the nature of this course, we will also think critically about narratives of literary history as being “past.” Guided by these and other inquiries, you will develop your reading, analytic, and writing skills in this course as we chart a contiguous path through the early British literary canon.
117	American Literature, Beginning to 1865	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Jeffrey Adams			What is American literature and where did it start? What does it mean to be an “American”? How can an understanding of American literature and culture help us navigate the ever-shifting nature of the place we now call the United States? These questions, and more, will guide us through this semester as we untangle the connections between what the United States is now and what was once “America” for indigenous people, white settlers, enslaved persons, and others. During this course, we will be reading an array of cultural texts. Works such as poems, historical documents, topographical surveys, sermons, treatises, novels, short stories, sacred texts, and more will be read in tandem. When approaching these texts, we will pay attention to their complicity with and challenges to oppressive racist and colonial logics; ideologies that are still at play today. Crucially, having a social justice framework in mind when approaching these often troubling works is not to dismiss the importance of reading them and engaging with their ideas. Rather a social justice approach to early American literature is a way of reckoning with texts that continue informing our cultural consciousness. This reckoning is achieved by reading these texts thoroughly and critically.
118	American Literature, 1865 to Present	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Jacob Reese			In this course we will explore American history through the eyes of its artists—those who sought to process, interpret, respond to, and influence their world through creative expression. As the United States emerged from the Civil War era and faced the various social, cultural, economic, and technological changes of the modern era, literature in turn adapted and shifted in response to these ever-changing social and global realities. To examine the shifting dialogues between authors and their socio-economic and cultural surroundings, we will trace the American Literary tradition through various historical events (WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Civil Rights Movement, 9/11, the Tech Age, etc.) and aesthetic movements (Realism, Naturalism, the Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc.). In addition, this course will attend to literary forms across various media, including the novel, short fiction, poetry, experimental fiction, music, film, and video games. By diversifying our understanding of the literary canon, we will explore not only the content of literature, but also formal and rhetorical strategies that authors utilize to construct compelling fiction. (This course fulfils the “writing intensive” requirement and provides an opportunity to develop critical thinking and analytical composition skills.)
119	Topics in U.S. Literature - Afro - Asian Intimacies	TuTh	08:00 AM - 09:20 AM	Sue-jin Green			In their 2018 special issue of Scholar and Feminist titled “Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations'', Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar foreground intimacy as a key term necessary to explore the often “elusive, discounted, or even illegible, practices, social relations, and spaces within and beyond the historical record” where Afro-Asian connections, conflicts, and solidarities manifest. These intimate sites of tension mark opportunities to illuminate the complications in comparative racialization frameworks that often pit different minority groups against one another. This course will draw on a dynamic archive of Afro-Asian formations from the late 19th century to the present through a variety of literary texts such as novels, short stories, poetry, and visual media such as films, television programs, and multimedia art. We will engage these texts with women of color feminist and queer of color critique frameworks which prioritize thinking across difference when challenging oppressive systems and institutions and to the interconnection of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and class within and across various marginalized communities.
121	Introduction to Shakespeare	MWF	02:15 PM - 03:10 PM	Callaghan,Dympna Carmel			Who was William Shakespeare? This lecture course aims to answer this question via an intensive introduction to his life and language. This class will focus on two key issues: first, the relation between Shakespeare’s life and his work, and secondly, on the language of his plays and poems. No previous familiarity with Shakespeare is required, but you do need to be committed to careful and sustained critical reading and analysis as well as active participation in the discussion sections. The main goals of this class are to help you read and enjoy Shakespeare, to foster rigorous intellectual engagement with his work, to learn about the historical context in which he was writing, and to develop your own critical writing skills. We will emphasize understanding and engagement with Shakespeare’s text rather than simply its “translation” or the rehearsal of plotlines. Since Shakespeare’s language is what most distinguishes him from his rivals and collaborators—as well as what most embeds him in his own historical moment—this class will take language to be the very heart of Shakespeare’s literary achievement rather than as an obstacle to be circumvented by the reader or audience. This is a writing intensive class, which means that it fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the University curriculum. The learning outcomes for this class are: *Intellectual focus*Advanced-level reading skills in the engagement with Shakespeare’s language*Critical thinking*Close reading* Use of textual evidence* Historical knowledge* Writing skills. Students will learn how to develop an academic argument and to communicate clearly, effectively, and eloquently.* Revision—how to improve or re-write a paper
125	Science Fiction	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 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. This is a great course to take before taking the Latine/x and African American/ Black speculative fiction courses offered in the English department. This course features opportunities for creative work, as well as critical reading and writing.
125	Science Fiction	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 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. This is a great course to take before taking the Latine/x and African American/ Black speculative fiction courses offered in the English department. This course features opportunities for creative work, as well as critical reading and writing.
140	Reading the Enviroment	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Goode,Michael			This course examines how writers and artists from different times, places, and cultures have grappled with the project of trying to understand, redefine, and take responsibility for our role and place in the natural world as animals and ecological agents. Much of the course will focus on literature and art that engages with ecological crises and with questions of environmental justice, including the extinctions, displacements, migrations, and extreme weather created by anthropogenic-induced planetary climate change. But we will also be considering various representational strategies that writers and artists have deployed over time and across cultures to make visible, comprehend, connect to, inspire action towards, express grief about, and take joy in different parts of the natural world. Readings will be a mixture of literary texts, artistic media, and critical writings. Assignments will include a mix of critical, creative, and mixed-media essays.
142	Narratives of Culture: Introduction to Issues of Critical Reading	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Moody,Patricia A			Each section of ETS 142 takes up a number of several major issues of concern to contemporary literary and cultural studies. These issues include authorship, language, reading, subjectivity, ideology, space/time, history, and difference. As we explore each area, you will be introduced to the issues at stake and then examine those issues as they arise in a wide range of cultural texts. You will also be invited to explore these issues in cultural texts you locate outside the class which you will bring in to share in discussion or in your formal papers. Think of this course as a writing-intensive reading and interpretation workshop: The issues and texts can be challenging when encountered for the first time, and the language in some of the readings may be difficult. But through this course, offered in a workshop approach, you will gain skill at critical reading and effective academic writing.
145	Reading Popular Culture	MWF	02:15 PM - 03:10 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			This course examines the nature of contemporary youth involvement in social movements focusing, in particular, on youth activism in the post-Civil Rights era. The course explores the circumstances under which youth-based and youth-led social movements emerge as well as the role of youth expressive forms and forms of technology in the formation, development, and political trajectory of these movements. At the same time, the course examines how youth conceive of social justice and social change and how youth go about framing social issues. To accomplish this, we will examine a range of theoretical approaches as well as key concepts and key debates in the study of social movements and apply them to case studies. In particular, we will scrutinize a select number of examples of youth involvement in social movements, including youth involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-sweatshop movement, the global justice movement, the prison abolition movement, the immigrant rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #NoDAPL movement. Ultimately, the course attempts to draw larger theoretical lessons about the nature of power, social change, and contemporary youth politics. It aims to provide theoretical analytic tools to decipher how social movements work and why they matter.
151	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. From ancient poems to the most contemporary. I’m interested in what makes the poem memorable and moving, how it is a vehicle for the intellect and the emotions, how it’s “the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart”. I’m interested too in what ways the poem provokes and challenges us, what gives the poem its power to seduce and trouble and soothe, what gives it its music and voice as distinct from speech. Students will be asked initially to write 2 two-page analytical papers in which they make an original argument about a poem we have discussed in class. From the feedback they receive on these papers, they will work one of them into a 4-page analytical paper at midterm. Following midterm, students will be asked to choose a poet and write a one-page prospectus towards for a more extensive, final 4 to 5-page paper. Detailed instructions for all papers will be given two weeks before the due date
152	Interpretation of Drama	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			This course offers an introduction to the study of Western dramatic literature in English or English translation by surveying a selection of plays and dramatic texts from antiquity through the twenty-first century. We will encounter Greek and Roman theater, medieval and early modern drama (including but not exclusively Shakespeare) as a way of preparing to spend the second half of the course studying 20th and 21st century dramatic texts that span across artistic movements. We will examine the formal features and conventions of Western dramatic traditions while emphasizing the ways these have evolved in dynamic response to social, cultural, and political pressures. This course welcomes students both new to dramatic literature and those who have studied theater in other contexts. Plays chosen for close study will be selected with care not to repeat the reading lists of DRA courses. Screenings and attendance of theatrical productions required.
153	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.
154	Interpretation of Film	MWF	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.
155	Interpretation of Nonfiction	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Santiago, Samuel			What is nonfiction’s relationship to reality? This course will take an eclectic approach to answering this question by exploring writing, film, games, and music to form a critical literacy of nonfiction’s formal elements across media forms while also testing its boundaries. Though often presenting itself as transparent and realistic, nonfiction utilizes a variety techniques and strategies to construct particular views of reality. By studying those techniques and strategies, we will form a critical literacy of nonfiction as a genre distinct from but also related to fiction. We will explore and interrogate the rhetorical strategies that authors employ in their work, the relationship between form and content, the institutional certification of “knowledge,” and the relationship of audiences to given nonfiction works. We will explore how meaning and “truth” are produced in these works and how they relate to larger frameworks of gender, race, nationality, class, sexuality, disability, and the environment. This is a writing intensive course that provides guidance and opportunities for improving professional composition skills.
156	Interpretation of Games	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course serves as an introduction to game studies and we will explore key critical frameworks and concepts for analyzing and understanding games and gameplay. In addition to games, we will also study screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies. Attendance at weekly discussion sections and evening screenings is required.
164	Children's Literature	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Ejiofor Ugwu			This course takes a transnational approach to the study of children’s literature. Apart from a survey of canonical works of children’s literature in the American context, we will engage with variety of genres and mediums from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, graphic novel to comics and film from other cultures. Among other texts, we will be reading Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Anderson and The Brothers Grimm, Chinua Achebe’s The Drum and Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors. Readings for the course will be guided by the following questions while maintaining the focus on the role of memory, cognition, and adult perceptions of children's minds: How does children’s literature reflect and respond to changing notions of children and of childhood? How do the texts construct gender, race, ethnicity, and class? How do the texts written for children respond to controversial (social) issues such as environmental crisis, immigration, and citizenship? You will see on the syllabus that some readings come with “critical supplements.” We will also read a fair amount of literary criticism written about the course texts, so prepare to be challenged, even when examining picture books.
164	Children's Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	GA
171	World Cinema, Beginings to Present	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	GA
174	World Literature, Beginings to 1000	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course 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 (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. You will have the option of either producing shorter response papers or traditional midterm and final interpretive essays.
182	Race and Literary Texts - Call and Response: Intro. to Black Literature	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Kumavie,Francisca Delali			This class considers Black literatures and cultures as interrelated rather than as discrete set of literary and cultural practices. It uses the framework of “call and response”—a participatory model of civic, literary, and musical forms—to stage a conversation between literary and cultural texts written by Black writers at different periods of time. Questioning how writers have been inspired by, critical of, and have repeated with difference the themes, traditions, and concerns of earlier generations, we will engage the broad scope of Black literatures as an interactive, critical, and experimental body of literary and cultural works. 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.
182	Race and Literary Texts: Intro to AfroLatine/x Literature	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Madarieta,Ethan R			Who is Afro-Latina/o/e/x? Are Afro-Latines/xs Black or Latine/x, or both? And how do African continental, Black American and Diasporic, Indigenous, and colonial histories shape our understandings of Afrolatinidades / Latinidades? To answer these questions, this course focuses on the critical exploration of Afro-Latine/x literature, scholarship, and film by Black, Latin American, Indigenous, Latine/x, and Afro-Latine/x artists and scholars. For example, we’ll read novels by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Piri Thomas, and Jamie Figueroa, and scholarship by Alan Palaez Lopez, Tanya Katerí Hernández, and Silvio Torres-Saillant, among others. These conversations will help us better understand the complexities of blackness, Latinidades, indigeneity, and race in a transnational and transcontinental frame—from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. Our study will enable us to thoughtfully question fixed notions of identity and their categories, and critically engage literary and media representations of Afro-Latinidades.
184	Introduction to Latino Literature	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A			A historically grounded overview of poetry, drama, fiction, and essays by US authors of Hispanic ancestry, the course starts with the 16th century, 80 years prior to the 1607 arrival of English fortune-seekers in the Powhattan region that they called Jamestown. Our readings span a long history of US Hispanic print culture, from the colonial period to the start of the 21st century. Students will get a feel for the diversity of cultures, ancestries, and heritages that marked the American experience from the start.
184	Ethnicityand Literary Texts	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Frieden,Kenneth B			A panorama of great stories written by Jewish authors, including Ecclesiastes, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Kafka, Agnon, Wiesel, and Yiddish women writers. Topics include narrative techniques and figurative language, shtetl life in E. Europe, modernization, love, marriage, humor, the Nazi genocide, and post-war trauma. Emphasizing the interconnections between theme and rhetoric, students will be required to submit short analyses on Blackboard before each class. This writing intensive course might also be called a writing marathon. While learning about Jewish literature as an ethnic literary tradition in this course, students develop skills such as close reading and rhetorical analysis, critical thinking, incisive writing, and public speaking. Change your style; change your life.
192	Gender and Literary Texts	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Arda Asli Oz
193	Introduction to Asian American Literature	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Debra Kue			This course will problematize Western logic and constructions of “literature” and knowledge production surrounding the Asian/Asian-American experience and engage in an interdisciplinary approach toward unpacking the politics that impact the experiences of Asian/Asian-Americans, as well as their projects of identity formation, knowledge production, and literature, which include the novel, poetry, fiction, memoir (Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), drama, film (Everything Everywhere All at Once), reality TV shows (Bling Empire) , documentary, music (KPop), food (Grace Cho’s Tastes Like War), performance, activism, and textile (Hmong paj ntaub). To further contextualize the Asian/Asian-American experience, this course will also excavate US nation-state regimes of erasure of Asian/Asian-American bodies from legal, social, historical, and political public discourse, and engage counterarchives to (re)imagine Asian/Asian-American futurity. As Asian/Asian-American subjects continue to forage racialized and gendered identities and negotiate the expectations, stereotypes, and limitations of different cultures and its conditions, this course will put into conversation works of Asian/Asian-American creatives with the climate of our contemporary moment, such as the the pandemic, Anti-Asian violence, the Asian model minority myth, as well as exploring conflict/wartime afterlives, diasporic dislocations, trauma, family, generational disparity, sexuality, gender, and performance, as well as practices of Asian/Asian-American recuperation and repair.
194	Introduction to Latina/o/x Literature	MW	03:45 PM 5:05 PM	Johanna Bermudez			This course sets out to ask: what would it look like to think about Latinx people in the U.S. in a new way that is not simply quantitative—to regard Latinxs as more than checkmarks on census forms, or as data points in demographic surveys. From “securing the Latino vote”, to concerns about border security, the U.S. has a long-established perception of who Latinxs are and the roles they can play, roles fraught with tensions and absent histories. Introduction to Latinx Literatures presents an imaginative richness that allows us to (re)experience what it might mean to be a Latinx / Latinx diasporic person in the U.S. It illuminates underrepresented views, discourses, and expressions of creativity while simultaneously interrogating what “literature” as a category means for this conversation regarding Latinx peoples. Additionally, this course intends to broaden the knowledge and understanding of Latinx’s historical and present-day literary contributions to the literary field. Thus, we will read various genres, including poetry, short stories, graphic narratives, memoirs, and fiction. The course will explore themes such as gender and sexuality, transnational migration, speculative fiction, and Black and Indigenous storytelling within the Latinx framework.
195	Arab American Literature and Culture	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	GA
215	Introductory Poetry Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	TA CW			In this workshop, we will explore the craft of writing poetry through study and discussion of contemporary poets and their varying techniques. Each week, we will read and discuss work by other writers as well as produce and workshop the form, process, and subject of our own poetry. Through this study, we will hopefully gain a better understanding of the voice and talent within our own work.
217	Introductory Fiction Workship	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			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. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
217	Introductory Fiction Workship	Th	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	TA CW			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. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
217	Introductory Fiction Workship	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	TA CW			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. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
242	Reading and Interpretation	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Klaver,Claudia C			Reading and Interpretation introduces students to the field of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it. The goal is not only to learn how meanings are created through acts of critical reading, but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course will enhance your ability to interpret texts contextually and closely, and to articulate your understanding effectively in writing. Each section of ENG 242 takes up issues of central concern within contemporary literary and cultural studies. These include subjectivity, ideology, power, history, language, meaning, gender, and race.
242	Reading and Interpretation	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			This course introduces students to the discipline of English and Textual Studies, stressing not what is read but how we read it. Rather than being organized around an author, genre, or historical period, this class is organized around ways of reading. Its goal is to show how meanings are created through acts of interpretation and to highlight the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. This course will introduce traditions and schools of literary interpretation and demonstrate different approaches to interpreting texts. It will ask students to look closely at the structure and form of texts, as well as situating them within a range of questions and contexts. It will also help you to articulate an argument about textual meaning effectively in writing. We will explore the ways texts (often by interacting with other social/historical/political forces) produce meaning by reading essays by critics and theorists, alongside a selection of primary texts.
300	Making Fiction: History, Research, and Imagination	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Brunt, Chris			Fiction writers have always used historical events and historical figures in their work. Writers also borrow from and imitate other forms and media. Why do that? And how to do that and make it work? We will examine how different writers play with these possibilities. We will look at fiction that uses historical events, figures from real life, or uses a research-intensive constraint of place or of occupation. We will discuss how newspapers, academic essays, encyclopedias, films, videos, screenplays, diaries, letters, ads, Wikipedia entries, tweets, and other media/formats can inspire the fiction writer’s imagination and concentration. We will contemplate the things that fiction can do that a biography or a book of history cannot do. Where to draw from and how to manage it? How do creative writers draw from primary documents, found cultural artifacts, everyday familiar formats and tech to make imaginative art?
300	The Poetics of Dreams	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Gibbs, Jules			All poems are, in a way, dreams: they come from the inexhaustible unconscious and are imagined in visually arresting ways as little movies or stories. In this course, we’ll study the poetics of dreams (of both the waking and sleeping varieties), and investigate poems that seek to locate or dislocate an elusive idea of “the self” and “the other” via strangeness. We’ll take a cue from Fanny Howe’s assertion that “every experience that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural.” Students will read and write poems as experiments in self-invention, in constructing and destabilizing identity and experience. How can poetry communicate in ways that both reveal and conceal, enchant and confound? How can poems invite stranger, more expansive representations of our inner lives, and as such, construct a personal mythology? How do the formal aspects of poetry mediate, fragment, and reshape experience? Students will read poems and essays by 19th, 20th, and 21st century poets, and will craft creative responses to these works. Students will be expected to share and critique each other’s work throughout the semester, and revise poems towards a final portfolio.
301	Practicum in Reading and Writing Prose	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 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.
303	Practicum in 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 Kirsten Valdez-Quade
305	Topics in Critical Analysis; Literature and its Media	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			We usually talk about "novels," "poems," and "films" (and "texts" of various other kinds). But what about the paper and ink (or parchment or wax or celluloid or LCD screens or tablets) that carry those texts? Do these materials affect the forms and content represented? Do they change what, or how, we read? This class draws on media studies to investigate the ways that materiality impacts textual meaning. This class will cover a diverse and historically broad set of literature and media, looking at the history of text technologies from the ancient world through to contemporary developments in digital culture. To explore these questions, we’ll focus on a few literary texts which foreground questions of textual materiality, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Tristram Shandy (1759), as well as more recent experiments in digital fiction.
312	Race and Literary Periods - Antiquity to 1900	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A
313	Race & Literary Periods Before 1900: American Beginnings	TuTh	02:00 PM - 3:20 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			When, where and with what does “American literature” begin? At stake in this question are our basic assumptions about what Americanness is, as well as our basic assumptions about what literature is. Who gets to be called an “American” and what counts as “literature”? Should Native American oral stories be part of the canon of American literature? How about the letters from Spanish and French explorers describing the Americas and its peoples? How about William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which takes place on an island obviously inspired by the New World and which voices cutting critiques of colonization through its indigenous character Caliban? This class will place traditionally revered accounts of the British settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay into the context of a more expansively defined “early America,” encompassing Native America, the colonial Americas (Spanish, French, British and Dutch), and the writers in Europe who were responding to the idea of the New World (new to them, at least). Indigenous perspectives will be emphasized throughout the semester as a necessary context for understanding writing that emerged from settler colonial projects.
315	Topics in Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: The Holocaust in American Literature	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course will explore the moral, religious, and artistic challenges faced by American writers who have represented the Holocaust and its aftermath in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Students will begin by reading a historical account of the Holocaust, followed by efforts to link the Holocaust to trauma studies, slavery, and other examples of genocide. We will spend the rest of the semester reading literary representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Texts will include W. E. B. Du Bois’ “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” and The Ghost Writer; Bernard Malamud’s “The Last Mohican” and “Lady of the Lake”; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” “The Shawl,” and “Rosa”; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II; Nathan Englander’s “The Tumblers” and “What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank”; and selected poetry by Jacob Glatstein, Charles Reznikoff, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Anthony Hecht, Elie Wiesel, Sherman Alexie, and others.
325	History and Varieties and English	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Moody,Patricia A			Want to know what IPA is and how it is used? What runes really are? Be able to decipher literature written in Anglo-Saxon? Read some Chaucer in Middle English? Better understand Shakespeare? Learn why and how English speakers across the US and globe sound so different from “us”? Or what Disney does with language?This course aims to provide students with as much knowledge as possible, as interactively as possible, of fundamental linguistic concepts, the basic structures of the English language and representations of its history. Equally important, the course aims to develop critical awareness of contemporary language issues and the complex ways in which language and our ideas about language embed attitudes about issues such as gender, race, and class.
360	Queer Comics	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			Just like LGBTQ+ folx in the mainstream, comics as a medium have become increasingly accepted as literary texts deserving of close academic attention (and appreciation). In fact, the comics medium – a.k.a. graphic novel or sequential art – is particularly apt for telling queer stories, because it is accessible and malleable, lending itself uniquely to queer world-building and the representation of identities and bodies in transition. In this class, we will look at LGBTQ+ representation in sequential art from a variety of time periods, but in particular the 20th and 21st centuries, using visual and literary analysis. Some course texts will be Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, AK Summers’ Pregnant Butch, Kelly Sue McConnick and Valentine Delandro’s Bitch Planet, works by Michael DeForge, a number of webcomics, superhero comics, and many others. Students will have an opportunity to do creative work in addition to the critical writing of the course.
361	What Was Sex? Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Beam,Dorothy R			Before the relatively recent invention of sexuality and sexualities in the late nineteenth-century, what was sexuality? What did it include and exclude? This class explores the possibility that sex, sexuality, and gender have histories and may mean differently across time. 19th century American literature will be our laboratory for thinking about these histories. How did people understand their intimate relations before the emergence of a hetero-homo binary? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? We will also dip into health reform, marriage advice, utopian manifestos, and sex radicalism; practices of polygamy and celibacy; and African American and Native American resistant formations of family and community. Texts may include Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories; Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Charles Chesnutt, Stories of the Color Line; Kate Chopin, A Vocation and A Voice; Zitkala Sa, Indian Stories.
379	Games in Culture	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course will examine how games function in culture, looking at U.S. and global historical, cultural, and social contexts and industrial practices. We will explore a range of cultural topics in games as we examine them as globalized media industries.
401	Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:20 PM	Haxton,Brooks			The purpose of this course is to develop the writer’s skill in making an experience vivid and accessible for readers. In discussion and written comments on each other’s work students use imagination and intelligence to help each other accomplish this difficult task. Everyone writes one new poem each week, some in response to assignments, and then revises four of these into carefully considered form. Requirements include reading of poems and written analysis of poems. The course is open to anyone who has taken the introductory workshop. Juniors and seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of ten pages of original poetry to be considered for admission.
402	Advanced Writing Workshop: Literary Nonfiction	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
403	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Benz, Chanelle			In this course, students will work to develop a substantial body of their own fiction. We will discuss technique, dissect work by a range of published writers, and read essays on craft. Together, we will examine the art of fiction in a generous and challenging environment. Students will investigate fiction’s possibilities, develop an understanding of their style and aesthetics, and deepen their creative process by exploring form, narrative tension, point of view, character development, voice, and other aspects of craft.
407	Advanced Critical Writing: Topics before 1900	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Klaver,Claudia C			This course will draw on environmental criticism to examine the nineteenth-century British novel. Even before Darwin’s 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species, historians had begun charting the history of humans in relation to other forms of being. Through this course, we will explore the Victorian novel as a narrative form that attempts to conceptualize and plot the relations between humans and their environments. Key areas of inquiry will be the influence of Darwinian thought and evolutionary theory, the relationship and systemic links between English and imperial environments, and environmental disaster. Our novels will explore various environments—regional, urban, and global—as well as the connections between these. Readings for the course will include: George Eliot, Mill on the Floss; Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; and Richard Jeffries, After London. These novels will be supplemented by one other novel and selected readings in ecocriticism and environmental criticism. As an Advanced Seminar in Critical Writing, this course will also help students design, develop, and write a fifteen-page research paper based on the questions and materials from this course. Requirements for the course will include a series of scaffolded written assignments, in-class writings, an oral presentation, and a fifteen-page literary research paper.
407	Advanced Critical Writing, Topics Before 1900: History of the Book	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			This course is designed as an introduction to the field known most commonly as “the history of the book.” We will investigate what difference it makes to consider the materiality of a text when interpreting it. How do a text’s material form (its actual paper, ink, binding, etc.) and the modes of its production, circulation and reception affect our sense of its content? We will cover a wide range of texts and topics, from medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare to romance novels and e-readers. We will sometimes meet at Bird Library, to examine archival materials in Special Collections related to our course topics. A research project will require you to work with Special Collections archival material, on an aspect of book history of particular interest to you. This Advanced Critical Writing course will help you to hone your research and writing skills and engage in deep and sustained critical inquiry.
410	Topics in Forms & Genres: Socially Engaged Hollywood	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 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.
411	Forms and Genres before 1900: Reading Breathing Shakespeare	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			Acting and voice coaches have written extensively about breathing Shakespeare’s language, finding its poetry and the power of its rhythms in the “breath” of the line. What does this mean for students of literature? We will read from acting and voice pedagogy alongside classical rhetorical/oratorical treatises (that Shakespeare most certainly studied in grammar school) in order to consider what a focus on reading and breathing affords the literary, historical, and theoretical study of Shakespeare. How does reading aloud change our relationship to the plays in performance, in “private” reading, in the classroom, and in the “archive”? What becomes clearer and more accessible? What becomes more opaque and difficult? How might we observe Shakespeare’s experience as an actor in the attention he pays to the management of the breath? We will read fewer plays slowly so as to experiment with reading and performance as research techniques. Pedagogical and performance-based assignment options will be available to all students but may be customized to enhance the experiences of VPA, Drama, and Education Majors. Prior experience with Shakespeare welcomed, not required.
412	Introduction to African Cinema	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Dima, Vlad			This course is an overview of francophone African cinema, featuring representative films and directors from Senegal, Mali, Chad, Cameroon, Algeria, and Morocco, and spanning from 1966 to 2020. We will study directors from the pioneering African wave (Ousmane Sembène, Djibril-Diop Mambéty, Safi Faye) and also contemporary artistic voices (Merzak Allouache, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mati Diop, Maïmouna Doucouré, Mahamat Haroun Saleh, Abderrahmane Sissako etc.). Students will learn about the history and the aesthetics of francophone African cinema, and how to analyze and write about African films (no prior experience with film study is required). Thematically, the course is split in three major strands to be explored in depth through film viewings and theoretical readings: 1/ Aesthetics of image and sound (learning about the construction of narratives, forms, and genres through close textual examination and interpretation); 2/ the African city and space (discovering the links between cinema, ideology, and national/regional politics); 3/ African identities (examining the politics of the body, the politics of race, and finally, the meaning of spectatorship in relation to questions of identity formation on and off the screen). Cross-listed with AAS200. For degree credit, ENG majors must take the ENG course code (not the AAS one).
412	Race, Forms & Genres - Youth, Power, & Social Movements	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			This course examines the nature of contemporary youth involvement in social movements focusing, in particular, on youth activism in the post-Civil Rights era. The course explores the circumstances under which youth-based and youth-led social movements emerge as well as the role of youth expressive forms and forms of technology in the formation, development, and political trajectory of these movements. At the same time, the course examines how youth conceive of social justice and social change and how youth go about framing social issues. To accomplish this, we will examine a range of theoretical approaches as well as key concepts and key debates in the study of social movements and apply them to case studies. In particular, we will scrutinize a select number of examples of youth involvement in social movements, including youth involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-sweatshop movement, the global justice movement, the prison abolition movement, the immigrant rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #NoDAPL movement. Ultimately, the course attempts to draw larger theoretical lessons about the nature of power, social change, and contemporary youth politics. It aims to provide theoretical analytic tools to decipher how social movements work and why they matter.
412	Race, Forms & Genres - African Literature in a Global Age	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Kumavie,Francisca Delali			Since its inception, African literature has never been confined to the borders of the African continent. Though it has, in the last decade, become a part of the terrain of American literary interests, this literary form has always been in intimate conversation with the world around it. The most widely read example of African literature, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is deeply concerned with the Europeans who intrude into the lives of its major characters. Things Fall Apart is merely one example of the plethora of literary and cultural texts concerned with African and the world. This course aims to read literary texts by African writer who engage with globality. Throughout this class we will contend with African literature in its various permutations and figurations across genres to probe into its modes of writing and imagining blackness and anti-blackness, gender, ability, and other so called identity politics.
494	Research Practicum in English and Textual Studies	Th	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This one-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an honors and/or distinction project in English. Enrollment is by invitation to participate in the distinction program, and/or honors program, only. In five formal meetings, and a series of scaffolded assignments, we will cover choosing an adviser, developing a suitable topic with engaging research questions, compiling a bibliography, reading critically, taking notes effectively and situating yourself in a scholarly community. Our work should prepare you to write your thesis in the spring semester, when you will enroll in the second half of this course, ENG 495, the Thesis Writing Workshop.
630	Cinema and the Documentary Idea	M	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Hallas,Roger			Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity’s demand for empiricism and rational, scientific evidence as well as its profound investment in visual spectacle. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for documenting the world, and for capturing the “real.” This seminar investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film, video, and digital practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, travelogues, essay films, autoethnographies, mockumentaries, docudrama and interactive documentaries. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary,” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological, and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, through the modernist estrangement of the world in Soviet and 1960s political cinema, to the inflammatory provocations of Surrealist filmmakers and contemporary fake documentaries, the course explores the relations between film, video, and digital practices from (often radically) different national, historical, and political contexts. This course has been conceived in an interdisciplinary vein, so we will also be examining documentary moving images in relation to other forms of documentary practice, both textual and visual. Student research projects may thus concentrate on moving image media or examine their relationship to other documentary forms.
631	Critical Theory	M	3:45 PM - 6:30 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L
650	Forms	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.
650	Forms - Literary Mapping	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Emily Lee Luan			What is liberated through formal constraint? How do we wed the argument of a poem to its visual and formal concerns? In this course, we will examine how formal rules, in various cultures and traditions, have shaped an understanding of “the poem,” as well as how contemporary writers invoke or enact procedural experiment in their work. We will begin with received forms, such as the haiku, Tang-era regulated verse, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, pantoum, and sonnet, and move towards broader ideas of procedure and constraint—erasure/found poetry, the visual poem, Oulipo poetics, radical translation, and other contemporary innovations in form. All the while, we will focus on how we might subvert and work against form, thereby transforming the boundaries of the poem.
650	Forms - Theatre of the Word	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Benz,Chanelle M			In this class, we will read plays by writers such as Federico García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Shakespeare, Erik Ehn, Anton Chekhov, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Ruhl, and Suzan-Lori Parks. We explore what the physicality of language in the Theatre can illuminate for us about Character, Dialogue, Voice, and the Image. During the course, students will work on adapting their own novel, story, poem or series of poems into a play, discovering what can be transposed and what must be transformed, and inventing a theatrical language to create something new.
650	Forms - Art of the Fairy Tale	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Awad, Mona			In this course, we will study fairy tales thinking about why these particular narrative forms, developed orally centuries ago, continue to have resonance and power today and how they are so adaptable to such varied expression and reimagining. What do fairy tales say about a particular culture and its ideas about the world? How do they reinforce or challenge our ideas about life and human experience, subvert or affirm the social norm? How do fairy tales enable us as creative writers to tell our own stories? Reading both contemporary and classical variants from around the globe as well as watching films, we will examine the characteristics of the fairy tale—its motifs, storytelling strategies, as well as its deployment of wonder, violence, magic and transformation—in order to explore the fairy tale’s immense storytelling potential for fiction writers. Critical texts will also be included. Though this course will focus on reading and discussion, there will be opportunities to write creatively throughout the term: optional writing exercises and prompts, a final creative assignment, and possibly a short workshop depending on interest.
715	First Year 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 poetry students in the MFA Program.
716	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.
717	First Year Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			This workshop will focus on fiction writing and the useful critique thereof. We will read and discuss two or three student-submitted stories/novel excerpts each week. Open to first-year fiction MFA students only.
718	Second Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Spiotta,Dana			This is a required fiction workshop for MFA students in their second year.
719	Third Poetry Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Haxton,Brooks			For the 3rd - year poetry workshop, we will concentrate on work that seems useful in the semester leading up to completion of the MFA thesis. This will involve focusing on the continuing strengths indicated by the writer’s work so far and on possibilities yet to be explored. As readers of each other’s poems in earlier workshops, the students have become a particularly rich resource for each other. We will work to use this resource to everyone’s best advantage, in new poems and revisions.
721	Third Year Graduate Fiction Workshop		Online TBD	Saunders,George W			In this course, which is required of, and restricted to, third-year MFA students in fiction, we will read, analyze, and critique published work and new from within the cohort. The aim is to come to a better understanding of what makes fiction work and, more specifically, what makes ours work (or not).
730	Reading the Body, Reading the Land	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Madarieta,Ethan R			This course is an investigation of how the body and the land are discursively produced, often conflated, and violently severed. It looks to poetry, fiction, history, and theory for counter-formations of the body, land, and their relations. The course is organized into three coherent sections: The Body, The Land, The Body Is (Not) the Land. First, The Body pairs critical theoretical readings concerning body as “natural” formations (human/non-human, biologized race, sex, etc.) and as political formations (citizen/non-citizen, human/non-human, race, sex, gender, etc.) with literary representations that either align with or counter these. Second, The Land pairs critical theoretical readings concerning land and landscape as “natural” formations (ecological, geological, aesthetic, etc.) and as political formations (geographical, national, legal, etc.) with literary representations that either align with or counter these. And third, The Body Is (Not) the Land complicate those frames listed above through the exploration of narratives which conflate the body with the land within Settler definitions or intertwine them within co-constitutive ecological relationships between body and land, such as in many Indigenous cosmologies. As such, this course is fundamentally multidisciplinary, engaging texts from global Black, Indigenous, and Settler-colonial studies, gender, trans*/travesti, (cuy)r, and queer studies, geography, political theory, and ecocriticism, to name a few. Possible literature includes: Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (2021) by Jamie Figueroa (Afro-Taino), A History of My Brief Body (2020) by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000/2006) by Cesar Aira, Return to My Native Land (1956/1969) by Aimé Césaire, and Fanon City Meu (2017) by Jaime Luis Huenún (Huilliche).
730	Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Beam,Dorothy R			Before the relatively recent invention of sexuality and sexualities in the late nineteenth-century, what was sexuality? What did it include and exclude? How did people understand their intimate relations before the emergence of a hetero-homo binary? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? Did they have an idea of sexuality as an identity? How did social structures--marriage and the family or the color line and legal segregation--organize sex, feeling, affiliations, and identities? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? How does sexuality, and the host of concerns we might gather under it, function as a lens when we examine the past? The course will be grounded in queer, trans-, and queer of color theory, gender studies, and critical race theory. Against the emerging institutionalization of marriage and romantic love, we will consider the challenge presented by resistant formations of family and community, and by same-sex love, polygamy, celibacy and utopian communalism. Texts may include Queer Nineteenth-Century American Short Stories; Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Charles Chesnutt, Stories of the Color Line; Kate Chopin, A Vocation and A Voice, Zitkala Sa, American Indian Stories, and Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood.