ENGL 566 Special Topics in US Film and Media Mark Minett
Gambrell 123 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 2:50 PM – 4:05 PM
Superheroes Across Media
Given the box office and television success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the recent flourishing of superheroes in filmed and animated television, the superhero and the superhero genre has arguably never had a higher cultural or industrial profile. This class will examine the superhero genre’s movement across art forms, industries, and eras. In doing so we will engage with and refine notions of genre, adaptation, storytelling strategies, industry, and reception. Primary focus will be placed on examining the iterations of iconic DC and Marvel comic book superheroes such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers. The historical perspective we will take here seeks to cut against both the approach to superheroes as “modern myth” and essentializing notions of the superhero that you may be more familiar with. That is, rather than thinking about a superhero or the superhero genre in terms of broad cultural “significance,” pondering a given superhero’s psychology or personal philosophy as if they were coherent individuals rather than constructed characters, or gauging whether a given adaptation lacks fidelity, we will instead focus on understanding the large-scale design and concrete details of given iterations within specific industrial and cultural contexts. The class will serve as both a historical poetics of superhero storytelling across media and as a history of industrial imperatives and storytelling norms for multiple media forms. CRN 56596.
ENGL 601 Seminar in Verse Composition Nikky Finney
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
Second half of a year-long course in the writing of poetry taught by a contemporary poet. Limited to 15 students. CRN 41946.
ENGL 610 Fiction Workshop: Book-Length Manuscript David Bajo
HUMCB 408 • Thursdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
This course is a workshop for analyzing and critiquing student fiction. The stories, chapters, and excerpts submitted should be works intended for the MFA thesis, a collection or novel manuscript that is ready or near-ready for submission to publishers.
English 610 is for graduate students accepted into MFA Creative Writing program. It is an intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary short story and the novel chapter. Writers will spend the majority of their time composing original stories or chapters and analyzing the fiction submitted by other workshop members. Our discussion will focus on each writer’s aesthetic decisions and the elements of fiction, including language and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. We will also consider some recently published fiction and give some general consideration to the story form—its definitions, limits, variations, and possible futures. Interspersed will be discussions concerning professionalization. Prerequisites: admission to the MFA program in fiction. CRN 41947.
ENGL 692 Teaching of Literature in College Kevin Brock
Petigru 217 • Mondays & Wednesdays • 2:20 PM – 3:35 PM
This course is designed to give new graduate assistants the conceptual tools needed to teach rhetoric and argument in the composition classroom. Teaching composition and rhetoric is probably the most universal experience for graduate students and faculty in English. Regardless of specialization, you will almost certainly spend at least some of your time teaching composition from an argumentative point of view. The primary aim, then, is not to simply get you through your first year teaching, but to introduce you key rhetorical concepts and practices as a foundation for developing your own approach to teaching the course that coincides with both the discipline of composition and rhetoric and the university goals for the course. CRN 44347.
ENGL 706 Special Topics in 16th & 17th Century British Literature Ed Gieskes
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Shakespeare wrote his plays in a competitive and dynamic theatrical world and in this course we will survey that world. We will read plays by Shakespeare alongside those of his peers and sometime rivals as part of an effort to develop a sense of the shape of the dramatic field in early modern London. We will also examine representative scholarship in literary and theatre history. In addition to Shakespeare, writers may include: Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. CRN 54848.
ENGL 722 Special Topics in 20th & 21st Century American Literature Cat Keyser
HUMCB 412 • Tuesdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
Imposter Syndrome: The Modern US Novel and Uncertain Identity
This course will offer a survey of the twentieth-century U.S. novel, spilling into the twenty-first century, following the theme of imposture and the characterization of protagonists who perform an identity that they think or feel is not fully their own. These characters blur the supposedly indelible line between social categories (class, race, ethnicity, nationality, even humanity), and their performances reveal the artificiality as well as the lived power of whiteness, wealth, and Americanism. In this class, we will explore genres that emphasize transgressive behavior--like the novel of passing, hard-boiled detective fiction, and the psychological thriller—as well as the convergence of canonicity and imposture. After all, The Great Gatsby as “great American novel” is also arguably the story of a man who pretends to be something more than what and who he is. From James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), the modern and contemporary novel shows us how feelings of inferiority serve as the first form of acculturation to a divisive racial and economic system. Through the unlikely performances of anti-heroic characters, however, the novel exposes the holes in the social fabric that allows other ways of being and living to peek through. CRN 54849.
ENGL 734 Modern Literary Theory Jie Guo
HAMLTN 232 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Problems of literary theory from the 18th century to the 1960s. CRN 41951
ENGL 741 Special Topics in African American Literature Scott Trafton
HUMCB 412 • Wednesdays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
This course explores more than three hundred years of African American writing on the concept of freedom. From slave spirituals to postmodern poetry, from the earliest published volumes of Black verse to some of the most recent, from slave narratives and calls for revolution to domestic fiction and landmarks in queer Black writing, “freedom” has meant many different things to many different people, and in this course we will read a wide range of texts that investigate these meanings. Texts will range from David Walker to Angela Davis, from from W.E.B. Du Bois to Audre Lorde, and from Frederick Douglas to Toni Morrison. Assignments will include weekly response papers and 2 research papers. CRN 54850.
ENGL 790 Survey of Composition Studies Byron Hawk
HUMCB 412 • Mondays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
Comprehensive survey of the history and development of composition studies, and of the present state of knowledge about theories, principles, and practices in the field. Non-degree students may not enroll without the consent of the Director of Graduate Studies in English. CRN 54851.
ENGL 791 Introduction to Research on Written Composition Chris Holcomb
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 4:25 PM – 5:40 PM
This course introduces you to a range of methods of research on writing, while focusing on one method in particular: Rhetorical Criticism (RC). After a brief unit that surveys those methods, we will take a deep dive into RC, a method that examines how texts function in their immediate and broader contexts, focusing on particular strategies and structures and their possible effects. Along the way, RC seeks to enrich our understandings of rhetoric and writing, contributing to such issues as “situated practical action and socially constructed knowledge and symbolically constituted identities and the constraints and resources of persistent rhetorical forms” (Benson xxi, original emphasis). Defined as such, RC can be said to cut across other methods because they all require scholars to assess the objects of their study in the contexts in which they were produced or received. Readings for this course will include instances of RC that have offered influential analyses of their target texts, have advanced the field in terms of its methods of analysis and scope, or (more typically) have accomplished both. Running parallel to this survey, you will be cultivating your own skills as rhetorical critics, preparing for your own projects, and expanding your own repertoire of interpretive strategies.
CRN 54852.
ENGL 803-001 Special Topics Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies Tony Jarrells
HUMCB 408 • Mondays & Wednesdays • 3:55 PM – 5:10 PM
The Historical Novel
This course will start with what the philosopher and literary critic, Georg Lukács, called the “classical form” of the historical novel, a genre that is experiencing a kind of global renaissance at the moment. In addition to Lukács’ foundational account of the genre, our early focus will be on the writer whose work, for Lukács, created the template for the form: Walter Scott. From there we will go backwards in time a bit to look at some of the theories of commercial modernity that Scott drew on for his fictional portrayals of history (David Hume, Adam Smith) and at the national tales (by Maria Edgeworth, say) that Scott claimed to be imitating in his novels. Next, and finally, we will turn in the other direction, forward in time, to look at 1. alternative modes of writing historical fiction (John Galt’s “theoretical histories”); 2. A number of critical accounts of the form (Frederic Jameson, Ian Duncan, Yoon Sun Lee); and 3. what the historical novel looks like in the twenty-first century (Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith). Please note that at the end of the semester, in May, USC will host the International Scott Conference (with Yoon Sun Lee as our keynote speaker). It is hoped that some students in the course might like to attend or participate in this event based on the work they do in the class, but this is not a requirement. CRN 46267
ENGL 803-002 Special Topics Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies Susan Vanderborg
HUMCB 412 • Thursdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
How have the idea and the form of the book changed over the mid-20th and early 21st centuries? This course examines an international selection of postmodern texts that have radically redefined the codex and the way it communicates.
Welcome to a rich range of print experiments: palimpsests, artists’ books, altered books, collage novels, wordless graphic novels, books with rearrangeable parts, and unreadable texts that test the very limits of how a book can signify. Then we’ll explore multimedia digital books, books as interactive documents, books as apps, books as games. We’ll look at book performances and installations, and finally the idea of a “living book” with bio art and transgenic poetry.
These texts map out exciting new lines of inquiry in the field of book history and trace complex relations between print and new media formats, as well as foreground the political and ethical implications of each format choice.
Assignments include a short paper modeled on a conference presentation and a longer paper as either a journal article draft or a creative project accompanied by a critical analysis, as well as weekly discussion posts, and a presentation on a critical or theoretical source.
The seminar is 90% discussion, 10% lecture. CRN 50551.
ENGL 804 Special Topics: Seminar in Theory and Critical Methodss Brian Glavey
HUMCB 408 • Mondays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
Vernacular Aesthetic Categories
In this class we will work collaboratively on the theoretical project of assembling a conceptual vocabulary for describing and analyzing the function of the aesthetic in our current moment of what Anna Kornbluh has recently called “Too Late Capitalism.” Traditional aesthetic theory—almost exclusively concerned with the beautiful and the sublime—has been organized around on a set of concepts arguably better suited to thinking about aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century than the age of TikTok. A premise of our investigations will be that it no longer self-evident that the aesthetic function is bound to a specifically delineated conception of art and literature, and that the aesthetic has instead expanded to “saturate,” as Sianne Ngai argues, “virtually every nook and cranny of the world that postmodern subjects inhabit.” We will build on Ngai’s trilogy of aesthetic theory (Ugly Feelings, Our Aesthetic Categories, Theory of the Gimmick) to think about how we might supplement the vernacular aesthetic categories she takes as central to contemporary life: the stublime, the cute, the interesting, the zany, the gimmicky etc. The class will provide an overview of the main tenets of aesthetic theory as they are articulated in Kant, Schlegel, Hegel, Adorno, Ranciere, Ngai, and so on, and will focus heavily on recent theoretical work on the aesthetic as it relates to our experience of platform capitalism and the attention economy. CRN 54855.
ENGL 890 Studies in Rhetoric & Composition John Muckelbauer
HUMCB 408 • Wednesdays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
Derrida and Writing
To my mind, Jacques Derrida is THE philosopher of writing – of what writing “is,” how it works, and what it can do. However, in the field of “writing studies” or “composition” relatively few scholars engage his work in much detail. This is at least in part because his writing is exceptionally difficult to read and really does require someone to help you through the basics of how his essays and his thinking work. This course is designed as just such an introduction to Derrida’s work and will focus primarily on his early writing, including Of Grammatology, “Signature, Event Context”, “Differance,” “White Mythology” and a host of other essays. The class will involve weekly interactive lectures and probably other things as well. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have about the class.
CRN 41923.