Spring 2024 English Dept. Courses

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

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
ENG 105 M002	Introduction 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	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			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 Hernan Diaz and Annelise Chen.
ENG 118 M001	American Literature, 1865 to Present	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Reese,Jacob Charles			In this course we will explore American history through the eyes of its artists—those who have sought to process, 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, The Vietnam War, the Tech Age, 9/11, 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, experimental fiction, poetry, music, film, and video games. By diversifying our understanding of the literary canon, we will explore not only themes and content, but also the formal and rhetorical strategies that authors utilize to construct compelling literature.
ENG 119 M001	Topics in U.S. Literary History: U.S. Fiction After 1945	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L
ENG 122 M003	Introduction to the Novel	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Adams,Jeffrey Garfield			This course will trace the history of the novel’s development from its genesis up to our present moment. Studying the novel as a historically emergent literary genre will enable a clearer understanding of how novels adapt to and influence the social conditions surrounding their production and reception. Novels are world-building texts, and readers of novels must take seriously the environments found within their pages. Studying novels with all this in mind will require students in this course to place the assigned novels into dialogue with structural problems pertaining to race, gender, class, and more. Potential texts we will be studying include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Horace Walpole’s The Castle Otranto (1764), Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), Lenora Sansay’s Secret History (1808), Herman Melville’s Israel Potter (1854-5), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018). This diverse range of texts will allow us to discuss the past, present, and future of what we understand to be novels by tracing their formal, political, and material metamorphoses across space and time.
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. This course features opportunities for creative work, as well as critical reading and writing.
ENG 140 M001	Reading the Enviroment	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Santiago, Samuel			Aggregating texts that span a broad variety of cultures, time periods, and media forms, this course explores how the natural world has been represented, imagined, enjoyed, and pondered through literary art. In large part, the course will focus upon art and literature as a means of understanding environmental crises, confronting questions about the relationship between humanity and nature with a particular focus on matters of environmental justice, including the extinctions, displacements, migrations, and extreme weather created by anthropogenic-induced planetary climate change. We will also examine the formal conventions and representational strategies employed by the texts we study, considering how matters of style, structure, and genre frame the environment within literature in order to communicate particular values and ideologies. Texts in this course will include both narrative and critical literature, film, music, and video games; we will develop diverse media literacy skills to address the complex variety of environmental representations we regularly face, but often take for granted. This is a writing intensive course that provides guidance and opportunities for improving professional composition skills.
ENG 142 M001	Narratives of Culture: Introduction to Issues of Critical Reading	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Moody,Patricia A			We will take 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.
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 or using social media), to try to understand how we learn to make sense of a globalizing world and live a particular culture—or cultures—in the U.S. today. To this end, we will explore the pleasures of becoming thoughtful readers of a variety of cultural texts. We will ask why characters such as Sherlock Holmes keep enticing readers and viewers in new forms, and how Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics engage fans. We will read Spiegelman’s Maus alongside comics and explore the significance of “popular” tv shows, such as Survivor and The Sopranos. We will consider why some movies are “blockbusters” and explore the various appeals of sci-fi and horror, while taking account of their relation to our own identity formation: how do you become “yourself” in a particular culture? As the course progresses, you should become a more sophisticated, creative and engaged reader of the many different cultural forms that help make the world meaningful to ourselves and others. This course satisfies the Critical Reflection requirement of the A&S Core.
ENG 151 M001	Interpretation of Poetry	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Haxton,Brooks			This course will involve reading of poems as examples of poetic techniques: image, narrative, diction, tone, argument, and so on. Each week’s handout will describe the technique in that week’s reading and present relevant questions. Four short essays by the students will analyze individual poems with respect to a poet’s use of one of these techniques. Final grades will include original and rewritten papers (75%) and classroom participation (25%). No prerequisites. Attendance required.
ENG 151 M002	Interpretation of Poetry	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Conrey,Sean M			This course introduces students to techniques and approaches to interpreting and analyzing poetry. We will thus develop close reading skills while learning to recognize forms and tropes common to English language poetry as well as poetry in translation. Reading work from the ancient period to the present day, we will develop critical reading habits in conjunction with the skills necessary to convey our interpretations in writing. Readings will interrogate the role of the poet as both the keeper of a culture’s history and it’s first critic, and so we will look particularly at how oral and literate traditions utilize different poetic forms toward these ends. Texts for this course may include the Anglo Saxon poem “The Wanderer,” the Norse Eddas, various song styles (hymns, blues, ballads, hip hop), work by the Transcendentalists and the Beats, The New York School, and contemporary work by CD Wright, Layli Long Soldier, Maurice Manning and Suheir Hammad.
ENG 154 M001	Interpretation of Film	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Vangel,Simon Alexander
ENG 154 M002	Interpretation of Film	TTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Dima, Vlad			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. The course will cover several classic films (by Chaplin, Eisenstein, Welles, Hitchcock), contemporary auteurs (Peele, Tarantino, Spielberg), and global voices (Sembene, Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Varda), through which 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.
ENG 155 M001	Interpretation of Nonfiction	TTh	03:30 PM- 04:50 PM	Ugwu,Ejiofor Elija			This course will introduce you to methods for interpreting nonfiction. Nonfiction is often thought of as a transparent window onto reality, but in this course, we will unpack the way different texts use specific techniques to construct their images of reality. To do so, we will study a range of different genres like essays, memoirs, and histories as well as a variety of different mediums including graphic novels, documentaries, and virtual reality experiences to interrogate the rhetorical strategies that authors employ in their work, the relationship between form and content. We will read works by writers such as Ben Okri, Claudia Rankine, Imani Perry, Ta-Nehisi Coates to 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.
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, and Beverley Cleary, 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	O'Connell,Alexandra			In this course, we will analyze children’s literature as a literary, historical, and cultural phenomenon. Children’s literature is a multifaceted literary genre: it entertains, offers moral lessons, and represents cultural attitudes surrounding youth, adulthood, and proper citizenship. In this course, we will examine mainly Anglo-American children’s literature in a variety of historical periods, ranging from early religious primers to fairy tales, from picture books to YA novels, from historical fiction to banned books. Throughout, we will attend to the ways in which children’s literature both reflects and constructs norms of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (trans)nationality, and ability. The key questions we examine will include: How has children’s literature developed over time? What genres, styles, and themes does children’s literature explore? Who is children’s literature for–children or adults? Why has children’s literature recurrently been a space for ideological debates about race, gender, nation, and more?
ENG 170 M001	American Cinema, Beginnings to Present	MW	12:45 PM - 01:40 PM	Scheibel Jr.,Leonard			This course traces the history of American cinema from its emergence as a celluloid-based medium in the late nineteenth-century to its digital development at the intersections of multiple media companies and platforms. We will look at individual films not as ends in themselves, but as products of an industry, mass culture, and national artistic traditions. Our goals will be to understand how to interpret the meanings of individual films in particular historical contexts, as well as how to account for aesthetic, technological, and ideological changes over time. Learning this history will introduce you to various cinematic modes—fiction and non-fiction, narrative and the avant-garde, Hollywood and independent production—that shape different experiences. Course topics will include the following: the rise of cinema as an institution; the standardization of American film genres and storytelling; the classical studio and star systems of Hollywood; the shift to color, widescreen, and location shooting in the late-studio era; the political effects of the Cold War and the counterculture; new waves of film school-trained and independent directors; and recent directions for film style and genre in the early-twenty-first century.
ENG 171 M006	World Cinema: Beginings to Present	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Ozyenginer,Asli			Hollywood cinema has dominated the medium of cinema for over a century yet its centrality to filmmaking left cinema produced in different parts of the globe unacknowledged if not completely ignored until recently. Moreover, what has come to be known as “world cinema” and/or “global cinema” did little justice to the richness and complexity of films and filmic pleasures that were produced in non-Western contexts. This course has two goals: to provide a transnational approach to the history of cinema and to critically interrogate the category of “global cinema” and “world cinema”. Full coverage of transnational history of cinema is an impossibility in and of itself. Therefore, we will approach world cinema through three key frameworks that films around the world responded to/were the productions of: modernity, decolonization, and globalization. We will examine diverse politics and aesthetics of post-revolutionary Soviet cinema, the diverse pleasures of Japanese and Turkish melodrama, Egyptian Golden Age Cinema, French New Wave, Italian neorealism, Bollywood, postcolonial African cinema, Iranian neorealism and contemporary indigenous cinema, and Japanese anime. We will trace how aesthetics, technologies and economies of cinema have mutually influenced filmmaking traditions in diverse regions of the world, while thinking about ways to transnationalize and decolonize film history. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core. The purpose of writing-intensive courses is to familiarize students with the thought processes, structures, and styles associated with writing in the liberal arts.
ENG 175 M001	World Literature Since 1000 C.E.	TuTh	09:30 AM - 11:10 AM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course will introduce you to some of the most highly valued literary works of the past thousand years. Starting with the West African epic Sunjata and Dante’s Inferno (Italy), we will read two of the formative geniuses of the Renaissance Miguel de Cervantes (Spain) and William Shakespeare (England), as well as the inventor of the essay Michel de Montaigne (France) and the extraordinary Marguerite de Navarre (France). From here we will proceed in roughly chronological sequence to enjoy 16th-19th-century works, including the lively novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en (China), the haiku poetry of Matsuo Bashō (Japan), Voltaire’s Candide (France), the Vietnamese classic The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, and poetry by Ghalib (India). We will then read the following masters of modern and contemporary literature: fiction by Rabindranath Tagore (India), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Lu Xun (China), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt), and Hanan Al-Shaykh (Lebanon); lyric poetry by T. S. Eliot (U.S.), and Anna Akhmatova (Russia); and drama by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria). We will consider these remarkable works with several questions in mind: How do the language, the form, and the values of these texts serve to challenge or confirm your own values and way of life? How have the writers mastered their craft in such a way as to evoke your thoughts and feelings? How does literature work as “equipment for living”?
ENG 181 M002	Class and Literary Texts	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Sinha,Soham			In this course we will examine a selection of literary texts and visual media through the lens of a social category that is often ignored – due to cultural blind spots, critical dismissals, and even deliberate suppression within social histories, literary canons, and classrooms: the economic class system. Broadly speaking, we will discuss some of the key concepts of social class and examine how these concepts are reflected in the assigned primary texts. Some of the questions that we will seek to answer are – are working-class texts produced by, for, or about working-class people? Are representations of the working class in these texts fair, productive or accessible? What are the obstacles to representing class experience? Who counts as the working class or the middle class? What counts as labor? Why do we need to talk about social class? What emerges when we consider social class alongside other constructs like race and gender? The readings and viewings for this course will range from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the Amazon Prime series Downton Abbey and Oscar award winning film Parasite.
ENG 182 M002	Race and Literary Texts	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Gleesing,Elizabeth Conry			What is race? This is the central question we will consider in this course on race, representation, and textual analysis. Throughout the semester we will question how race intersects with other aspects of our identities to shape our lived realities as we discuss and analyze how different content creators understand, reveal, and contest race in their written and visual works. This class will consider texts from a variety of genres, from novels, short stories, and poetry to graphic novels, film, documentary, and new media in order to think through the socio-cultural implications of racial formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Potential topics we will explore could include: the politics of representation in media, empathy and humanization, cross-cultural identification, and surveillance of marginalized communities. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core, so come prepared to write shorter and longer analyses of written and visual texts throughout the semester.
ENG 184 M001	Ethnicity & Literature Ethnicities Across the U.S. Landscape	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Bermudez,Johanna			Using fiction, memoir, drama, children’s literature, and even some poetry and film, this course explores the connections between ethnic identities, literature, and constructions of the Other in the United States. It seeks to interrogate mainstream notions of assimilation, citizenship, and belonging as it focuses on narratives told by members of ethnic groups. We will explore works by writers with divergent racial and ethnic histories that beckon us to reconsider how we understand “ethnicity.” Writers whose work we will discuss include Sandra Cisneros, Jean Chen Ho, Diana Abu-Jaber, Wajahat Ali, and Grace Cho. Class readings will also include works of scholars whose essays examine the historical and social factors that make up an "ethnic" identity. Ultimately, this class seeks to address questions such as: what is ethnicity beyond a checkbox? Is it merely a blanket term for constructing the boundaries between “us” and “them”, or does it point to certain cultural, religious, social, linguistic, gendered and/or political modes of identification or forms of belonging? What does it mean to have an ethnic identity, and how does literature help construct, transform, challenge, or resist that identity?
ENG 192 M001	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 have to do with these inquiries? 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 “Seductive Monsters.” By critically engaging media as varied as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Jonathan Lynn’s Clue (1985), 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 192 M002	Gender & Literary Texts	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Healy,Meghan Riley			What is gender? What does it mean to say that gender is a social construction? How does gender intersect with other social formations like race, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability? How do gender and texts work to represent and create bodies? This course will explore textual representations of gender and sexuality and their cultural, historical, and social implications. Through an examination of short stories, films, poetry, and other media forms, we will address these questions and think about the ways that literary texts construct, rewrite, and interrogate gender as a social category. We will think about how literary texts represent and challenge ideological and social structures like heteronormativity, marriage, feminism, racism, citizenship, and patriarchy. Potential authors and theorists include Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Eli Clare.
ENG 193 M001	Introduction to Asian American Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Kue, Debra			This course is a selective examination of major works, authors, and themes of Asian American literature from the mid-20th century until our contemporary moment. We will explore questions, such as: What does it mean to be “Asian American?” What are some of the central debates and conversations surrounding this term? How have Asian American artists and writers contended with this question in their cultural productions over time? How does Asian American literature and scholarship resist monolithic understandings of Asian American identities and experiences? In an examination of novels, poetry, short fiction, memoir, art, film, reality TV, documentary, food, music, performance, activism, comedy, and textile, we will engage in interdisciplinary approaches as we think through different critical historical moments (such as the Vietnam War, WWII, the Civil Rights social movements of the 1960s, and 9/11). We will examine the complexity and shifts of Asian American experience across different historical, political, social, and cultural contexts, and also examine the common thematic concerns of these texts.
ENG 215 M004	Introductory Poetry Workshop	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Anthony Ornelez			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	Introductory Literary Nonfiction Workshop	W	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Mary DiPrete			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	Aurora Huiza			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	Courtney Noh			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	Kayleigh Ford			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 221 M001	Humanistic Computing	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			This class introduces computer programming to students who may not otherwise study computer programming—students in the humanities, and others who wish to better understand computer programming and how it is reshaping the world around us. Computers now write poems and make art. Data mining and “distant reading” allow scholars to analyze thousands of texts at once. This class makes introduces programming from the perspective of the humanities, while also treating computer programming as itself cultural, as a practice with a history that shapes how we imagine it now. No previous experience is necessary. We will start from the ground up, learning to program with a focus on basic skills that are most relevant to students of art, literature, history, and related fields. Along the way, we will investigate the specific challenges and opportunities that computer programming affords the humanities. What new questions can we ask? What limitations do we encounter? In seeking to adapt the tools of programming to the needs of the humanities, this class also offers an opportunity to think about the goals, values, and modes of thinking and interpretation that characterize the humanities.
ENG 230 M001	Comedy in Three Acts	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Frieden,Kenneth B			Act 1, 1905: Sigmund Freud, staging original theories of humor, illustrated by Jewish humor from Vienna and New York. Act 2, 1864-1939: Yiddish fiction and early Yiddish cinema. Act 3, 1946-2024: American-Jewish stories, films, and stand-up comedy. On the night before every Tuesday class, students post short analyses of an assigned text or performance. For every Thursday class starting in Week 3, students, write, post, and prepare to perform their own original humorous material. This marathon of two dozen writing tasks and courageous stand-up performances requires stamina and ongoing commitment. Small coaching workshops held on Zoom will assist students as they revise and rehearse for a public performance at the end of the semester. Questions: Contact Prof. Frieden, kfrieden@syr.edu
ENG 242 M001	Reading and Interpretation	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 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 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 300 M001	Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror in Fiction and Film	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 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 300 M002	Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			Do you like to read and write poetry? Do you like to read and write short prose? Then you might be interested in prose poetry and flash fiction. Prose poetry is a hybrid form of poetry and prose, and flash fiction is a form of prose that can be as short as a few sentences or as long as a few pages. This class will provide an opportunity to read prose poetry and flash fiction and write creative responses. Some writers we will read include Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Amy Hempel, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, and Cornelius Eady.
ENG 301 M001	Practicum in Reading and Writing Prose	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
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	British Literary Periods Before 1900: Romanticism and the Environment	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Goode,Michael			The modern environmental movement found early expression in British poetry, novels, and painting between 1770-1845. This course examines how British artists in this period responded to various dramatic environmental developments—both how they tried to counter-act these developments and how they understood the challenges of representing them. We will also be tracing certain recognizably “Romantic” relationships to nature into a variety of contemporary artistic efforts to represent environmental crisis and change, including works that will be on display in the Syracuse University Art Museum for its Spring show Assembly, which explores intimate ecologies. Historical topics covered in the course will include: the Industrial Revolution and the privatization of public lands; the notions of “geologic time” and “extinction” and the challenges they presented to traditional religious beliefs; new religious movements fueling conservation efforts by promoting the idea of nature’s divinity; new aesthetic tastes for landscape contributing to nature tourism and to new media; and politicians turning “nature” into a political football through debates over “natural rights” and “natural law.” Assignments will include a traditional five-page critical essay, a photo essay with 5-page reflection, and a curatorial final project.
ENG 312 M001	Race and Literary Periods: 20th C U.S. Southern Lit (REC credit)	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L			In this course, we will read novels and short stories about the U.S. South. After a brief look at nineteenth-century antecedents in short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Chesnutt, we will focus on fiction written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine literary genres and aesthetic modes that have been strongly associated with the region, such as the Southern Gothic and the Southern grotesque. And we will explore the literary evolution of regional social categories and character types ranging from white trash, the black folk, and queer childhood to the doomed aristocrat, the conjure woman, the unquiet dead, and the freak. Throughout the course, we will examine how writers have used the U.S. South’s distinctive literary traditions to talk about race in and beyond the region -- particularly as race relates to questions of gender and sexuality, wealth and poverty, violence and the law, and regional and global power relations. Course texts include: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing; Brandon Hobson, The Removed.
ENG 315 M002	Ethnic Literatures and Cultures—Post-WWII Jewish-American Literature	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course will survey some of the major achievements in fiction and poetry by Jewish- American writers since WWII. We will begin with the literature of the post-WWII era and its efforts to fashion an adequate response to the Holocaust and assimilation, moving to the 1960s and new, experimental ways of living and writing for Jews and Americans as a whole. The latter portion of the course will focus on the forms and themes of recent and contemporary writing. Writers may include Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Bob Dylan, Cynthia Ozick, Anthony Hecht, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, E. L. Doctorow, James Salter, Art Spiegelman, Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander, Nicole Krauss, or Aimee Bender. Here are some questions the course will address: Do Jewish-American writers share a way of experiencing and reflecting about the world? Are there forms, themes, assumptions, and attitudes that are identifiable as "Jewish-American"? Is the hyphenated identity of Jewish-American that nourished the work of previous generations of Jewish writers still valid? What Jewish traditions—religious and otherwise—have shaped their writing? How have Jewish-American writers responded to more recent cultural and political developments, including race relations and anti-Semitism?
ENG 330 M001	Topics in Theorizing meaning and Interpretation	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Doles,Steven Matthew			How can we best describe what we are doing when we watch a film? How do the spaces and contexts in which we watch shape our response to the film? Are we all having the same experience when we watch, or do different audiences respond in their own ways? This course is designed to explore questions like these in two ways. On the one hand, we will discuss various topics in film studies connected to these concerns, including audience reception, exhibition, theories of spectatorship, cinephilia, and cult movies. We will also develop a set of practices of attentive and imaginative viewing through a series of exercises, drawing upon perspectives that are sometimes called “contemplation” or “mindfulness.” These might include exercises such as journaling or free-writing, repeated rewatching of scenes or extended looking at frame captures, silent reflection, and trip reports of spaces of exhibition outside the university. Our first-hand experiences will thus become evidence for thinking about and exploring the approaches that film scholars have developed to these topics. In addition to our viewing of narrative fiction films ranging from the accessible to the challenging, selected nonfiction and experimental films will allow us to explore how our experience changes when viewing these other film modes.
ENG 352 M002	Hip Hop, Nation, and Global Flows and Formations	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			Examining the transnational origins, circulation, and adaptation of hip hop in various settings and locales around the globe, this course approaches hip hop as a global formation that transcends national, ethnic and linguistic boundaries. We will track the transnational roots of hip hop; specifically, its grounding in Afro-Caribbean sound system culture, emergence as an urban expressive form in the South Bronx, and subsequent spread and rise as a global phenomenon. Taking a comparative approach, we’ll take a close look at hip hop scenes in Southeast and East Asia, Latin America, Western Europe, and West Africa as well as Native North America. In addition to rap music, we’ll scrutinize the other elements of hip hop—writing or graffiti, DJing, and breakdancing—and the ways they have taken root in hip hop scenes across the globe. We’ll also investigate why hip hop holds widespread appeal among marginalized youth and why it constitutes an indispensable organizing tool in contemporary social movements and protests. At the end of the semester, you will have a better understanding of the emergence of locally inflected hip hop scenes across the globe and the indispensability of hip hop as a vehicle for marginalized youth to voice their grievances.
ENG 353 M001	American Captivities: Race, Gender, and Nation in the U.S.	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 genre beyond its traditional focus on Puritan captivity (in which colonial settlers recounted being captured and forced to live with Native Americans) to the stories of captured Africans and Native Americans. After the iconic captivities of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, Puritan Mary Rowlandson, and Mary Jemison, we’ll examine resistance to captivity as leitmotif in African American literature from fugitive slave narratives to current resistance to mass incarceration. We’ll explore Native understandings of captivity in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, Zitkala Sa, and ledger art of the Great Plains. We’ll watch several filmic adaptations of the captivity genre, from John Ford’s classic Western, The Searchers, to Terrence Malick’s The New World, to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. We will use the genre to examine issues of cultural contact and containment, freedom and imprisonment, and national inclusion and exclusion in American culture.
ENG 360 M001	Queering Documentary	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Hallas,Roger			Documentary representation has been central to the emergence and development of modern sexual and gender identities. For instance, 19th century science turned to both photographic portraiture and written case studies in order to name and define homosexuality as a specific sexual identity. But forms of documentation have not only been used to discipline and pathologize queer sexual acts and identities. Queer subcultures, social movements and individual artists have also embraced the desire to document — but in the service of cultural expression, sexual liberation and collective memory. This course explores how different documentary genres (such as case studies, ethnographies, oral histories, historical narratives, testimonies, activist videos, portraits and [auto]biographies) in moving image media have become fundamental tools in the historical struggles over sexual and gender rights including gay liberation, trans* liberation, lesbian feminism, AIDS activism and queer/trans* BIPOC resistance. This course counts toward the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Studies minor, 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 401 M003	Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			In this course, students will develop their existing skills by reading the work of published poets, 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	Advanced Writing Workshop: Literary Nonfiction	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael
ENG 403 M001	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			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 critique 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 403 M002	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	PTI
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 in order to study the relationship between literature, censorship, and obscenity. Texts include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, The Well of Loneliness, and Gender Queer.
ENG 411 M001	Forms and Genres before 1900: Medieval Romance	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 411 M002	Forms and Genres before 1900: 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 inaugural offering of this class, in which students will assume a variety of roles in mounting a single Shakespeare play that we will select and produce collectively, study both academically and as theater practitioners, distributing assignments that will range from stage, lighting, sound, and costume design, to publicity, accessibility/inclusivity, extensive dramaturgy, as well as stage management, directing, and acting. No prior acting, theater, or Shakespeare experience required. Curiosity, commitment, and an appetite for creative and intellectual risk strongly suggested. Please note that class will meet regularly in the MW time slot but will hold rehearsals Thursdays 9:30-10:50, for which you will be required to register to protect your availability. Fulfills pre-1900 requirement.
ENG 420 M001	Soccer in Africa and the World	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Dima, Vlad			This course focuses on how soccer is represented and understood in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond the continent, in a transnational, cultural dialogue with South America and with the Global North. It is meant to make us think about African soccer as cultural and political practice, while keeping in mind that this is a sport, or a game. What does this sport—“the beautiful game”—the most widely followed and adored game, mean to Africans (and others)? What is the role of fans and spectators, alongside readers of literature and viewers of film? How does soccer link Africa to the rest of the world, both materially and philosophically? We will briefly cover the history of the game, in the world and in Africa, and its social impact. We will learn about both magic and racism in African soccer; we will read a novel, discuss paintings, photographs, soccer kits, museum exhibits, and we will watch several films that represent soccer in meaningful ways. Most importantly, we will connect the game to important issues of the postcolonial world, as it extends out of Africa and as it reverberates across the globe.
ENG 420 M002	Everyday Media and Social Justice	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Hallas,Roger			Vernacular film, video and photography have played significant roles in social movements and community organization from the Abolitionist movement to Black Lives Matter. Although the technologies developed for taking family photographs and home movies 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 and home movies from the late 19th to the 21st century and the cultural and social history of Syracuse since the mid-20th century. Students will engage with Family Pictures 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 495 M001	Thesis Writing Workshop	Th	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This course is a continuation of ENG 494. It is intended to serve as a forum for small-group mentoring and directed research toward producing an ENG Distinction Essay/Honors Thesis. The workshop will largely involve presenting drafts of your thesis and engaging in collegial peer critique. Since this is a two-credit course, we will not meet every week, but you are expected to be working on your thesis consistently, even during weeks in which there is no formal meeting or assignment due. Participation in this course is by permission only and requires successful completion of ENG 494.
ENG 615 M003	Open Poetry Workshop	Tu	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	Luan, Emily			In this workshop, we will focus on individual poems, as well as each poet’s work in the context of a collection and/or larger project. Depending on class size, students will be workshopped once a week or every other week, with a “collected poems” workshop at the end of the semester. Open to all graduate students interested in writing poems and/or putting together a book-length project (MFA students prioritized; non-MFA students need instructor permission).
ENG 617 M001	Open Fiction Workshop	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Awad,Mona Y			This goal of this class is to generate fiction and to inspire and prompt you toward fearless creative exploration. The writing you do here may be strictly exploratory or you can focus on an ongoing project. All forms of fiction (novels, stories, hybrids, etc.) are welcome. We’ll read each other’s work generously and closely, focusing on language, narrative structure and potential revision. In addition to weekly workshop, there will also be some readings which we’ll use to ground the workshop and to contextualize ourselves as readers and writers.
ENG 630 M002	ShakespearemPractice	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:20 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			This course will examine and analyze a variety of ways of “doing” Shakespeare (as modes of artistic production, cultural formation, and scholarly investigation). We will consider and compare such modes of “doing” as they have been historically opposed by practitioners of literary criticism and by theater makers as a primary way of inquiring about the “meanings” of Shakespeare and the ideological apparatuses that determine such. We will have ample opportunity to meet and work with undergraduate students who will be spending the semester studying a single play and mounting its production, studying by a doing that aims to challenge the disarticulation of critique from practice. Students in the graduate course will be encouraged to experiment with creative and applied practices in their own research, whether by participating in the undergraduate production, or through other means that best serve their interests, needs, and areas of specialization.
ENG 630 M004	Victorian Genders and Sexualities	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Klaver,Coran C			The goal of this course is to introduce graduate students to a range of feminist, queer, trans, and intersectional readings of nineteenth-century literary and cultural texts. Although our readings will be heavily weighted toward the Victorian novel, we will also read a significant selection of Victorian poetry and nonfiction prose. The course will be divided into four segments (though most of the literature that we read could fall into more than one segment). First, we will examine fictional, poetic, theoretical, and critical models of normative White, bourgeois genders and heterosexualities in Victorian England. We will explore the domestic ideology that dominated the organization of such cultural norms, examining particularly the forms of masculinity and femininity that it naturalized, and the institutions of romantic love and bourgeois marriage that the ideology supported. Primary texts for this section will include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as well a poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning. In the second segment of the, we will examine the Victorian gender identities are shaped through their intersectionality with disability, class, and race and how transgender and transsexual identities are imagined and figured in Victorian literature. Texts here will probably include Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady, Mary Seacole’s memoirs, The Wonderful Adventure of Mary Seacole in Many Lands, and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. In the third segment of the course, we will explore desires and practices that coexist with, are articulated in relation to, and at times present transgressive challenges to more normative Victorian desires and sexualities. Examining sites such as the eroticized child, cross-class and interracial romances, cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic desire, creating a much more complex account of Victorian identity and desire. We will examine Hannah Cullwick and Walter Munby’s cross-class love affair and marriage, the Peter Barrie’s Peter Pan, and poetry by Christina Rosetti, Michael Field, and others. In the fourth segment of this course, we will explore the Gothic through the lens of trans theory and other theories that challenge Enlightenment models of the human along the axes of gender, race, criminality, and ability. We will probably take for our text Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Additional Gothic texts may include Richard Marsh, The Beetle, Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and/or H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. In a final portion of the class or coda, we will explore adaptation with Professor Mike Goode, probably through Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Assignments will include weekly discussion questions, discussion facilitation, and short writing assignments. Final paper assignments may include a seminar paper OR a combination of an annotated bibliography, a conference paper, and/or a syllabus and rationale essay.
ENG 650 M003	Forms - Translations	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Haxton,Brooks			For this practicum in the art of translation each student chooses what to translate. Fluency in another language is welcome, but not at all a prerequisite. Working from existing variant translations, and with translating software is welcome. Reading for this course includes essays on translation and translations of poetry and prose. We will discuss the technical choices of translators, and analyze the success of translations for accuracy, tone, style, and so on (given limited command of various languages). The prerequisites are an interest in translation and willingness to engage the challenge at the student’s level of skill in the source language.
ENG 650 M004	Directions in 21st Century Fiction	Th	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			An exploration and critique of current literary practice, as reflected in a survey of recent novels and short stories, and a frank, constructive discussion of one’s proposed voice within it. Some contemporary critical essays will be assigned and discussed as well. One week will be carved out for a mini-seminar on the craft and business of book reviewing. Each student will be required to prepare a 15-minute presentation on a contemporary work of fiction not on the syllabus; the theme of this presentation will be “Why Jon Should Have Put This Book on the Syllabus.”
ENG 650 M005	Forms: Satire	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Spiotta,Dana			“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game,” Nabokov said, claiming parody for himself. “Satire is taking a hard look at the world as it is,” writes Jesse Armstrong, the Succession showrunner, claiming something else for himself. What are satires and parodies for? How do we use them? Are they subversive? If so, of what? What about the Wolf of Wall Street problem? The Patrick Bateman problem? What are the techniques that writers use in satirical and parodic modes (dislocation, inversion, exaggeration, register-jamming, etc)? We will be looking at contemporary (21st and late 20th century) forms of satire, parody, absurdism; we will examine how writers combine satiric modes with other modes, from broad comedy to subtle deadpan to serious critique. We will be looking at fiction, TV shows, movies, sketches, digital media. Texts include fiction in excerpts and full works (Don DeLillo, Paul Beatty, Patricia Lockwood, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Charles Yu, George Saunders and others) movies (Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Jordan Peele) TV episodes (Succession, Atlanta), plays, poems, some twitter nonsense, some comedy sketches. This class will include generative exercises in various techniques and strategies.
ENG 650 M006	Demons and Angels	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Smith,Bruce			The artistic night mind, the dream power that radiates from it, can be represented by the demon. The luminous counter-figure, the angel, is the other vital spirit of the creative imagination. This course will explore Garcia Lorca’s black sounds and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s white fire as manifestations of the two poles of poetry. The demon charges and electrifies a work of art from below. The angel falls out [or is evicted] from above. This course will explore the two sources of rapture and terror in 10 contemporary books of poetry. Course work will be weekly discussions of the texts led by students and creative responses to the work resulting in a final manuscript of poems collected in a chapbook.
ENG 730 M001	Graduate Seminar	M	03:45 PM - 06:00 PM	Frieden,Kenneth B
ENG 730 M002	Media and Time in the Nineteenth Century	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			This course will investigate the experiences of time offered by nineteenth-century media. We will study the century’s new media technologies, including photography, electric telegraphy, telephony and sound recording, among others. But we will also study preexisting media that people in the nineteenth century actively used, and which helped to structure their senses of time: manuscript, print including books and newspapers, painting and other visual arts, performance, etc. To explore media’s role in reproducing or contesting hegemonic experiences of time, we will study the telegraph’s implication in the standardization of time but also consider counter-temporalities, particularly those embodied in indigenous media forms and activities, both traditional and nontraditional. We will read some literary representations of nineteenth-century media, to assist us in unpacking the discourses attached to particular media forms. Media enabled experiences of modernity, instantaneity, and simultaneity, but through their storage capacity, they also had the potential to connect users to the past and the future. Media forms understood as purely ephemeral, such as telephony and performance, nonetheless had a transcriptive relationship with the human body, which itself can be understood as a medium. Students in the course will be welcome to produce research either on any aspect of nineteenth-century media (broadly defined) or on relationships between media and time in any period/context.
ENG 730 M004	Relational Approaches to Critical Race and Ethnic Studies	M	09:30 AM - 12:20 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol			This course takes up the critical study of US race and ethnicity in relational, intersectional, and transnational frameworks. We will read a range of texts that emphasize the interconnections as well as the differences in the histories and experiences of racialized and minoritized communities in the US, extending to African American, Arab American, Muslim American, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous communities. We will focus on key questions that interrogate the ways in which US minority formations, extending to the ethnic, racial, gendered, sexual, and religious intersect with and inform performances of citizenship and belonging in the US. In addressing these questions, we will situate such formations across a long historical continuum including, for example, constructions of minority citizenships in the nineteenth century up till post-9/11 Islamophobic imaginings of the “terrorist” body. Such intersections will be examined through feminist, anti-imperial, decolonial, and anti-racist theoretical, critical, and literary lenses, which will help us unpack some of the confluences and divergences among various marginalized and racialized communities in the US and transnationally.
ENG 799 M001	Second-Year MFA Essay	F	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			Each student will write a critical essay of approximately five thousand words (20-30 pp.), addressing a specific aspect of a major writer’s formal technique. The essay will focus on craft elements in one work (or several short works) of one writer in your genre (fiction or poetry). Ideally, this should be an element or issue that ramifies in your own creative work. The essay is not a research paper; it is intended as a demonstration of your close-reading skills and of the utility of criticism as a way of clarifying some of your own beliefs and aspirations regarding your artistic practice.