ENGL 691     Teaching of Literature in College     Rule  |  HUCB 209  |  M/W  |  2:20 PM – 3:35 PM

ENGL 691 is designed for graduate students teaching ENGL 101 at USC for the first time. It provides a community of support and ethos of growth among a diverse cohort of 101 instructors, each with different experience, areas of study, and expertise. ENGL 691 is a blend of just-in-time 101 classroom problem solving along with scholarly consideration of English studies concepts and the complexities of teaching writing. CRN 13545.

ENGL 706    Special Topics in 16th and 17th Century British Literature and Culture     Harris  |  HUMCB 408  |  T/Th  |  2:50 PM – 4:05 PM

Shakespeare Adapted

In this course, we will study and critique the place of adaptations in the Shakespeare canon and in Shakespeare studies. The course will examine a range of texts and other media across time, space, and cultures. We will thus consider how situating Shakespeare as an adapter, an originator, and a collaborator inflects our understanding of Shakespeare, while surveying the multiple key theoretical approaches guiding research in Shakespeare and adaptation studies. CRN 21491.

ENGL 709    Special Topics in 19th Century British Literature and Culture     Millen  |  HUMCB 412  |  Wed  |  5:50 PM – 8:35 PM

Genre Wars

This course concerns itself with the great and glittering grab-bag of late-Victorian genre fiction. At a time when writers and critics were sparring over the meaning and morality of realism—then something of a dirty word, for reasons that will be important for us—readers were spoilt for choice of weird and wonderful tales that cast into narrative the urgent social and political questions of their moment: the New Woman; the coming of the Demos; the modern regime of sexuality; the massive expansion of the imperial regime; the social possibilities of art; and anxieties about a degenerating imperial core and the ailing health of the novel. We will approach these concerns from the standpoint of popular forms of storytelling, taking in our train the realism debates, the romance revival of the 1890s (adventure fiction, the detective novel, speculative fiction), the shrunken horizons of literary naturalism, the questions put to art and the artist by aestheticism. What is the fate of the novel at the exhausted end of the so-called century of progress? How might we understand the generic and formal explosion of the realist novel both in terms of continuities (the rewiring of mid-century social realism) and of innovations: the stylistic and strategic modes of depiction we have come to describe as literary modernism? Approaching the genres of the closing decades of the nineteenth century in all their concrete and historical particularity will allow us to take a longer view on the drift of modern literary history and the surprisingly enduring afterlives of Victorian storytelling. Possible authors include: Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli, Henry James, H. Rider Haggard, Margaret Oliphant, Olive Schreiner, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. CRN 28227.

ENGL 722     Special Topics in 20th & 21st Century American Literature and Culture     Keyser  |  HUMCB 412  |  Thur  |   6:00 PM – 8:45 PM

Troubling Women: The Modern US Novel and Controversial Characters

This course follows the figure of the scandalous woman through twentieth-century US fiction, recognizing that both misogyny and desire contribute to her characterization. The woman who cannot be controlled or contained, who is scapegoated by her community, who shirks social or sexual mores is such a prominent figure in the modern novel that she might even be deemed its preoccupation. Taking an intersectional feminist approach to the modern novel will help the seminar explore the reasons that the body, desires, agency, and autonomy of girls and women take center stage in the genre. Furthermore, the seminar will explore how the plot and themes of a modern novel may be working to discipline this controversial character, while imagery, tone, or digression can point us in a different direction, naming the undisciplined modern woman as a queer or heroic figure, even when she seems to be vilified. CRN 24926.

ENGL 733    Classics of Western Literary Theory     Miller  |  HUMCB 414  |  Wed  |   4:40 PM – 7:25 PM

Problems of literary theory in texts from the ancients to the 17th century, with an emphasis on the classical tradition. CRN 26223.

ENGL 739      Special Topics in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies   Lee  |  HUMCB 408  |  Tue |  6:00 PM – 8:45 PM

Women of Color Feminisms

The ambit of women-of-color feminism designates at least four things: an existing socio-political movement, an established yet expanding field of thought and study, an insurgent method of thinking and action, and an avenue of imagining modes of being and building worlds anew. This course will attend to all four, though it will definitively emphasize the last—we will learn together what it means to think through the lenses of women-of-color experiences against the imposed violences in and of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, particularly in the neoliberal era. In doing so, we will sample from critical voices from this tradition and consider how its thinkers have theorized community, embodiment, love, power, resistance, sociality, time, violence, and voice. We will engage with both constitutive and adjacent discourses of Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, SWANA feminisms; abolition studies; queer of color critique; gender theory; racial misandry studies; and trans studies. No prior work in these discourses is necessary, though the cultivation of your commitment to women-of-color liberation will be our fundamental aim. CRN 28228.

ENGL 765      Advanced Film Study  Janzen  |  HUMCB 508  |  Mon |  4:40 PM – 7:25 PM

Religion in Mexican Film

This course examines Mexican film from the beginning of sound film (1930s) to the present. It focuses on the representation of religion in these films, and the relationships between the representation of religion and state funding, as Mexican film developed in this period. Language of instruction depends on course enrollment. CRN 28282.

ENGL 770      MFA Fiction Workshop   Bajo  |  HUMCB 408  |  Mon |  5:50 PM – 8:35 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 770 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 28229.

ENGL 771      MFA Poetry Workshop    Countryman  |  HUMCB 408  |  Wed  |  5:50 PM – 8:35 PM

In this course, students will write and revise new poems and respond to one another’s work in written comments. We will also read poems by outside writers, which we'll look at alongside and in conversation with student work. Prerequisites: admission to the MFA program in poetry. CRN 28230.

ENGL 790      Survey of Composition Studies     Hawk  |  HUMCB 408  |  Thur  |  6:00 PM – 8:45 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 28231.

ENGL 792    Classical Rhetoric     Holcomb  |  HUMCB 408  |  Tue  |  6:00 PM – 8:45 PM

This course surveys key texts on rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome. We’ll start with the Greeks, including the Sophists, Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Isocrates, and Aristotle’s On Rhetoric. We’ll then trace developments during the Hellenistic period (or what Jim Kinneavy calls the “Age of Codification”) and its influence on Roman rhetorics, including the anonymous Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. As we read these texts, we’ll be interested in recovering the material circumstances of oratorical performances in ancient Athens and Rome. We’ll also situate these texts (particularly the Roman ones) in their broader historical and political contexts. As we do so, we’ll find that the issues debated in ancient rhetorics raise questions about our own political circumstances. We’ll end the semester with a short unit on the rhetoric of humor, and we’ll find that several ancient rhetoricians (particularly Cicero and Quintilian) had quite a lot to say about humor’s rhetorical powers and pitfalls. CRN 28232.

ENGL 803-001      Special Topics Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies      Jelly-Schapiro  |  HUMCB 408  |  T/Th  |  10:05 AM – 11:20 AM

Cultures of Extraction

Capitalist modernity was born in the space of the colony, and in the moment of extraction. The mining of gold and silver in the New World signaled what Henri Lefebvre would later describe as the “absolute predominance of exchange over use,” the essence of commodity culture. And the surplus value derived from the combination of slave or wage labor and subterranean metals catalyzed the expanded reproduction of industrial capital within the metropole. The extraction of precious metals, moreover, dovetailed—in a historical and structural sense—with the extraction of fossil fuels. The intensification of mineral mining in North America and Southern Africa, for example—most especially the gold rushes in California and on the Witwatersrand—coincided, in the middle and latter decades of the 1800s, with the advent or acceleration of commercial fossil fuel production. The first commercial oil wells were drilled in Ontario and Pennsylvania in 1858 and 1859; the exploitation of large petroleum reserves in Texas began around the turn of the century. At that same time, the expansion of coal mining—across the surface of the earth and into its depths, in Appalachia as in Yorkshire—made possible the explosion of steam power, which drove the infrastructure of both primitive accumulation and expanded reproduction: the mining and smelting of gold, silver, iron, and copper; the transportation, via rail, of those minerals and the migrant workers enlisted to extract them; the refinement of cotton in the mills of Lancashire and New England. And today, various sites and technologies of extraction—from the tar sands of Alberta to the coltan mines of Central Africa—continue to shape social and political life around the planet. Reading historical and contemporary works of theory and fiction—as well as film, music, and visual art—from around the world, this course will consider the literary and cultural mediation of extractive modernity at large. CRN 15776.

ENGL 804   Special Topics: Seminar in Theory and Critical Methods     Glavey  |  HUMCB 412  |  Mon  |  5:50PM – 8:35PM

Lyric Theories

This class will survey the long history of thinking about lyric poetry: what it is, how it works, how it relates to other genres and modes, how it relates to history. Our syllabus will be organized in particular around recent debates surrounding historical poetics, a field that argues that the idea of lyric is itself a modern invention, one that we have learned to project backward onto texts that might in the past have been recognized according to different protocols. In addition to a selection of representative lyric poems, we will be reading theory and criticism by figures including Lauren Berlant, Stephanie Burt, Jonathan Culler, Paul De Man, Allen Grossman, Virginia Jackson, Barbara Johnson, Anahid Nersessian, Anthony Reed, Gillian White, and others. CRN 29226.