ENGL 603     Nonfiction Prose Workshop     |    Th 6-8:45     |     Barilla

 This course is an intensive workshop in the writing of creative nonfiction. We will explore the boundaries, aesthetics and traditions of the genre, with an emphasis on memoir. As this is a workshop, the bulk of our time in class will be spent discussing student writing, but the course will also include exercises in craft and close examination of innovative work in the field.

ENGL 691.001     The Teaching of Reading and Writing in College     |    MW 2:20-3:35     |     Rule

Supports GTAs teaching ENGL 101. Focus on best practices in writing pedagogy, classroom management, active engagement, and critical reading. Bulletin Description: “Introduction to the methods of teaching literature, with emphasis on current pedagogical practice and theory and applications of electronic media. The course meets during the first seven weeks of the term and provides supervision of graduate students teaching English 101” (2 credit hours)

ENGL 701.001     Special Topics in Old English Literature and Culture     |    TTh 11:40-12:55     |     Gwara   

Study of Old English language and literature, with an emphasis on language skills, philological analysis and close reading of poetic texts. Course outcomes include: 1. Proficiency in Old English grammar leading to competence in translating Old English prose and verse with the aid of a dictionary and other research tools. 2. Understanding Old English prose and verse genres. 3. Familiarity with, and understanding of, an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity as expressed in literary evidence. 4. General awareness of the development of the English language from its origins in the pre-Conquest period; 5. Competence using the basic tools of philological inquiry, including Old English Word Studies, Dictionary of Old English, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, Toronto Microfiche and Online Concordances of Old English and the specialist bibliographies in the discipline

Note: successful completion of this course with a grade of B or better can fulfill the foreign language requirement of the MA or PhD.

ENGL 741     Comics, Race, and Adaptation     |    TTh 11:40-12:55     |     Whitted

In this course, we will explore conceptual questions and debates about adaptation studies through the comics form, with a focus on race and historical representation. We will also consider transmedia storytelling and the impact of convergence culture on our evaluation of these works. Primary readings are likely to include comics adaptations and intertextual engagements with Frankenstein (and Victor LaValle’s Destroyer); The Confessions of Nat Turner (and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (and Walker and Anderson's Big Jim and the White Boy); Kindred (and the graphic novel); and Watchmen(and the TV series). Assignments to include weekly responses and visual annotations, a class presentation, and a research project.

ENGL 770.001     MFA Fiction Workshop     |    Tue 6-8:45     |     Blackwell

This is the fall MFA fiction workshop. Discussion will focus on each writer’s original work as art and craft. Both short stories and novels are welcome. As time allows, we’ll also do some guided writing exercises and consider contemporary aesthetic and professional issues in the field. (Please note that this course is designated for students admitted to the MFA program in fiction and is not open to undergraduates or for auditing.)

ENGL 771.001     MFA Poetry Workshop     |    Wed 5:50-8:35     |     Amadon

 In this course, students will write and revise new poems. Our goal in workshop discussions will be to discuss each poem in terms of the poet’s particular aesthetic, while also encouraging each other to push our work in new directions. Toward that aim, students will read and discuss books of contemporary poetry from poets with a variety of aesthetic leanings. The final portion of the semester will be devoted to workshopping portfolios, and our discussion will turn to larger issues in each poet’s work. Prerequisites: admission to the MFA program in poetry. 

ENGL 796.001     From Theory to Practice: Critical Feminist Pedagogy in English Studies      |    Th 6-8:45     |     Jordan

Feminist teaching comprises a wide-range of practices that include: collaboration, community-building, decentering power, engaging the knowledge of students and marginalized people, dialogue, and reflection. Feminist pedagogy is an approach that has changed and expanded over time to encompass queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and other critiques of power. In this course, we will build a foundation in the literature on feminist pedagogies and respond, experiment with, and develop practices for our own teaching. This course will be of interest to those students who want to learn more about critical pedagogies and their application to our teaching practices.  

ENGL 803.001     Capitalist Post-Realism: The Novel in the Ruins of Neoliberalism     |    Wed 5:50-8:35     |     Forter

A guiding assumption among critical theorists in recent decades has been that capitalism has so fully permeated the textures of contemporary life that it is impossible even to imagine a future that differs in substance from the present. This is the idea captured so vividly by Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism” and by the statement that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (variously attributed to Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson). This course begins with the intuition that recent developments have made this position increasingly hard to maintain. In different ways, the 2008 financial crisis, the global rise of a “populist” New Right, and the mass disruptions and sufferings of the COVID pandemic have helped reveal the cracks in the story that capital has long been telling about itself. Capitalism has not succeeded in colonizing or “really subsuming” everything; it has not in fact overcome all impediments to frictionless accumulation, nor has it eradicated the temporal otherness that critics have shown is the basis for enacting historical change. Developing in combined and uneven fashion, it has instead retained the residues of pasts that suggest other futures are possible.

The wager of this course is that a type of fiction has recently emerged that’s uniquely able to illuminate this shift. That fiction is perhaps best termed “capitalist post-realism.” The term has two related senses that the course aims to explore. First, the genre “comes after” the era in which capitalist realism (as Fisher defined it) held sway: the “post” here names the waning of a time in which capital had succeeded in predefining both reality and the “realistic” by excluding from them anything that threatened capital’s ongoing hegemony. Second, the fictions we’ll read are post-realist in a formally specific way. In their effort to depict contemporary reality at a moment when capital has de-realized (virtualized) the real, they develop forms that refract, deform, and interrogate the techniques on which they themselves rely. The very volatility of our current reality leads them to push the methods of realism to their inner yet outermost limits: they try to release from realism itself the unreality of a future-possible that the real of capital at once constitutes, delineates, and obscures.

We will read novels by some of the following: Catherine Lacey, Katy Kitamura, Yaa Gysasi, Zoë Wicomb, Colson Whitehead, Jeff Vandermeer, Martin McInnes, Vincenzo Latronico, Emma Cline, Claire Baglin, Elvia Wilk, Phaswane Mpe, Helen Phillips, Mohsin Hamid. Alongside these, the course will ask you to engage with theorists of realism, capital, and/or the various crises of our present: Karl Marx, Jonathan Crary, Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, Christina Sharpe, Arun Kundnani, Anna Kornbluh, Achille Mbembe, Andreas Malm, Jodi Dean, Joshua Clover, Mathias Nilges, Georgy Lukács, Carolyn Lesjak, Franco Moretti.

ENGL 803.002     The Country and the City     |    Tue 6-8:45     |     Jarrells

This course has two general aims. The first is to study a selection of Romantic-era writers whose work focuses on place and change – especially economic change and (relatedly) environmental change. Such writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Robert Burns, John Clare, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth. In addition, we will look at periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the London Magazine, both of which pronounced upon and battled over the various “schools” of poetry (the Lake School, the Cockney School, etc.). The second aim is to revisit a classic account of English literary history – Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) – to better situate this Romantic-era writing in relation to the economic and environmental changes that were taking place in the period: the Enclosure acts (which privatized common lands), the emergence of “improvement” agriculture (or agrarian capitalism), the slave trade, Britain’s numerous colonial ventures, and what Wordsworth called “the increasing accumulation of men in cities.” Revisiting The Country and the City will also provide us with an opportunity to explore some key critical categories developed in Williams’s work, several of which – including structures of feeling, mediation, cultural formation, and ideology (dominant, residual, and emergent) – are being engaged with renewed vigor in literary and cultural studies today. 

ENGL 804.001     Realism and Naturalism: Theories and Forms     |    Mon 4:40-7:25     |     Woertendyke

In The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Frederic Jameson begins with a problem: “lt is as though the object of our meditation [begins] to wobble, and attention to it slip[s] insensibly away…in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution.” We could say this about all literary forms as our attempt at defining depends upon an arbitrary pause, an attempt to stop and observe, that once let go transforms again. But there is something particular about realism that grounds, that becomes the axis around which other aesthetic categories (romance, naturalism, modernism) pivot. This course will work through the incredibly rich theoretical and formal tradition by focusing on early iterations and classical foundations. Literary writers will likely include Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, Emilè Zola, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Edith Wharton. Theories of realism will include work by Jameson, Ian Watt, George Lukàs, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yoon Sun Lee, and William Dean Howells. The course will conclude by looking at the feisty debates over realism and naturalism that played out in U.S. letters from the 1870s through the early 20^th century.

ENGL 890.001     Writing, Rhetoric, and Generative AI     |    Mon 5:50-8:35     |     Brock

The Roman rhetorician Quintilian defined the perfect rhetor as “a good man speaking well.” Several decades ago, Richard Lanham complicated this definition by asking whether it was necessary to be a good person in order to be an effective rhetor. Even more recently, Generative AI, as a timely example of a nonhuman agent, might lead us in practice to ask whether the perfect rhetor need be a person at all.

Generative AI–and specifically Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini–have been given a wide range of labels over the last several years, including inspiration, collaborator, equalizer, assistant, therapist, entertainer, enabler, sycophant, thief, plagiarist, fraud. Conversations abound across disciplinary, industrial, and popular spheres about the promises, perils, and potential inevitability of generative AI technologies.

Over the course of the semester, we will engage a variety of rhetorical theory, academic research, and broader public texts to help us explore such questions as: how do LLMs work, generally speaking, and why should rhetoricians attend to their construction? To what extent is generative AI a continuation of historical developments in communication technologies, and to what extent is generative AI a unique situation? How can scholars of writing and rhetoric understand the role(s) that generative AI currently and potentially play in academic, civic, and professional communication? How can writing scholars contribute to public discourse and policy relating to generative AI?