ENGL 601 Seminar in Verse Composition Dings
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 10:05 PM – 11:20 AM
Second half of a year-long course in the writing of poetry taught by a contemporary poet. Limited to 15 students. CRN 41777.
ENGL 610 Fiction Workshop: Book-Length Manuscript Blackwell
HUMCB 408 • Thursdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
This is the spring MFA fiction workshop. Students will produce original work and analyze the fiction submitted by other workshop members. Both short stories and novel excerpts are welcome. Discussion will focus on each writer’s artistic decisions and the elements of fiction, including language and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. As time allows, we’ll also consider some contemporary aesthetic and professional issues. (Please note that this course is designated for students who have been admitted to the MFA program in fiction and is not open to undergraduates or for auditing.) CRN 41778.
ENGL 650 Special Topics in Literature Madden & Robbins
MCMSTR 213 • Mondays & Wednesdays • 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
PHOTOPOETICS: Poetry and Photography
taught by Ed Madden and Kathleen Robbins
"The relationship between poem and photograph has always been one of disruption and serendipity, appropriation and exchange, evocation and metaphor." - Michael Nott, Photopoetry 1845-2015: A Critical History
This course is a creative exploration of the relations between poetry and photography, asking writers and photographers to work alongside one another and learn from each other's creative practices. While poetry and photography are distinct forms, poets and photographers may perceive and represent the world in similar ways. This course will explore and combine methods of making, as we utilize the tools and ideas from each field, with particular interest in form, content, sequence, composition, and meaning. The course is an advanced seminar with an emphasis on development of ideas, with class time to include lectures, demonstrations, critique, and discussion. We will also study the book and the exhibition as platforms for work, devoting some attention to book art, limited edition, and handmade books. The culmination of the course will be a collaborative book and exhibition of poetry and photography produced during the semester at the SVAD Studio at Stormwater Studios. CRN 55691.
ENGL 692 Teaching of Composition in College Brock
GAMBRL 247 • 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 44024.
ENGL 709 Special Topics in 19th Century British Literature and Culture Stern
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 11:40 AM – 12:55 PM
Forming Victorians
Working with a range of 19th-century novels, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose, this seminar will explore works that have proved foundational to current discussions of formalism in literary studies. We’ll be attending especially to interactions between time and form, analyzing the impact of deep time on common understandings of history and exploring the innovative new forms that emerged alongside new configurations of the past. We’ll read predominantly canonical works by Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot. Secondary materials will lead us into discussions about historical contexts, design theory, genre crossings, and environmental studies. Assignments include short weekly responses, an annotated bibliography and presentation thereof, and four short (4-6 page) papers. CRN 55693.
ENGL 721 Special Topics in 19th Century American Literature & Culture Greven
HUMCB 412 • Mondays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
Influence and Intertextuality in the American Renaissance
Emboldened by the work of scholars such as Wai Chee Dimock, Ronan Mcdonald, and Julia Kristeva, this course reopens the question of literary influence in major texts of antebellum American literature. Rather than reestablishing traditional paradigms of influence, the course will focus on influence as a means of innovation and transformation of a wide array of source materials. Influence is a crucial component of American writers’ conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, race, and class as well as their development of an American literary form. While American writers' engagement with British literary tradition will be a central concern, we will explore the impact of non-Western and non-literary texts as well. CRN 55694.
ENGL 731 Special Topics in Children's and Young Adult Literature Viswanath
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Reading Visual Narratives in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Images often evoke thoughts and feelings, and provide aesthetic experiences to readers and viewers of all ages. The focus of this course, therefore, is to explore a wide range of visual texts meant for young readers and audiences to better understand how such visual narratives contribute to young learners’ literacy and meaning making. Together, we will explore a variety of genres including picture books, graphic novels, television, and film. Note: This is a reading intensive course; come prepared to read! We will work to analyze visual media, not create them. Assignments include weekly responses and annotations, presentations, midterm and final research projects. The course does not require prior experience with picture books, film, or drawing abilities. CRN 50607.
ENGL 734 Modern Literary Theory Miller
HUCB 308 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 4:25 PM – 5:40 PM
This course will begin with the observation that the literary text and its cognate cultural forms (such as film, music, visual art) are aesthetic objects. Theories of literature from 1700 to 2000 all, on one level or another, deal with this basic observation. As we move through the history of that period, we can chart the understanding of the nature of that object by the way it is situated between four cardinal points, whose definitions and interrelation shift over time: the beautiful, the sublime, nature and the real. Those four points will guide our readings throughout the semester. Students will have a take-home midterm, a final, and an essay. CRN 41781.
ENGL 747 Special Topics in Global Anglophone Literature and Culture Forter
HUMCB 412 • Tuesdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
Capitalism, Time, and Global Anglophone Fiction
This course invites students to read a number of Anglophone fictions in the context of global capitalism’s construal of time. Its large ambitions are several. First, we will explore how capital subordinates human beings to processes of quantification that tie wage labor to abstract, measurable time. This leads to a generalized form of domination that Moishe Postone calls “the domination of people by time” (“Rethinking Marx’s Critical Theory,” 49). Second, we will examine the temporal unevenness of capitalism’s expansionary logic. While aiming to assimilate and homogenize life in every corner of the globe, this logic produces an imbalance within capital, such that “some areas [of the world] must be sacrificed for the development of others: . . . the countryside for the city . . . the colony for the metropole, or even one city for another” (Harry Harootunian, Modernity, v). Third, we will analyze contemporary capital’s efforts to mask this imbalance. These efforts involve a construal of the present as permanently “closed” and an insistence that the only future imaginable is one which extends that present indefinitely. The condition of such a mirage is capital’s erasure of “shadows, obscurities, [and] alternate temporalities,” as this produces “a world identical to itself . . . and thus in principle without specters” (Jonathan Crary, 24/7, 19).
Finally, we will approach these matters through literary works that help us imagine alternatives to capital’s ways of telling time. These works aim to reclaim the time that capital relentlessly steals from us. They uncover the sedimented residues of other temporalities within the “closure” of our present. They map the disparate and uneven ways in which capital’s temporal regimes affect men and women, racially marked bodies, migrants, and sexual “others.” And they do all of this by inventing forms that allow us to make the case for literature as a type of constructive-inventive activity which initiates us into other worlds. These are works that intimate “futures possible” (Anna Kornbluh’s term) where stolen time will have been returned to us, where disposable time is no longer the mere antithesis of labor time but has been transformed into a time that’s really and actually free.
Literary Works will include some of the following:
R. Indiana, Tentacle;
M. Hamid, Exit West
H. Phillips, The Need
Y. Gyasi, Homegoing
B. Lerner, 10:04
E. Lim, Dear Cyborgs
C. N. Adichie, Americanah;
K. Thompson Walker, The Dreamers
M. Bell, Appleseed
A. Ghosh, Gun Island
Z. Mda,The Heart of Redness
Z. Wicomb, David’s Story
I. Mbue, How Beautiful We Were
C. Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Critical readings will include works by some of the following:
K. Marx; C. L. R. James; F. Fanon; W. Benjamin; E. Bloch; G. Nanni; M. Postone; J.
Crary; F. Jameson; A. Malm; A. Kornbluh; M. Nilges; B. Best; N. Brown; R. Dienst;
A. Kundnani; S. Haartman; K. O. Okoth; J. Odell. CRN 55695.
ENGL 754 Special Topics in Film and Media Studies Van Fleit
HUMCB 206 • Tuesdays & Thursdays • 2:50 PM – 4:05 PM
Adaptation in Global Culture
Films based on novels, comic books, or even news stories invite their audiences to make a comparison between the original text and the adaptation. Interpreting these films raises questions about the relationship between the source material and the new text that shed new light on theories of intertextuality. This class will first give students a grounding in the history of adaptation studies, a field that has seen a seismic shift in recent years as scholars have moved away from a focus on the fidelity of the adaptation to the consideration of a number of new approaches such as examination of the transtextual relationship between the original and the remake; the interpretation of cultural difference when analyzing adaptations of source materials from different national traditions; and a questioning of the privileging of “the literary” when evaluating a film adaptation of a literary text. We will then focus on case studies of three different kinds of adaptations: cross-cultural adaptation in films such as Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, an adaptation of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affair, or the South Korean film Oldboy in English and Hindi adaptations; adaptations of literary texts such as Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in literature, film, and visual arts around the globe; and finally we will look at adaptations of video games, comic books, and even poetry into the narrative form of television and film. CRN 58023.
ENGL 794 Modern Rhetorical Theory Muckelbauer
HUMCB 408 • Tuesdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
Survey of 20th-century contributions to rhetorical theory. Non-degree students may not enroll without the consent of the Director of Graduate Studies in English. CRN 58833.
ENGL 795 The Teaching of Business and Technical Writing Hawk
HUMCB 408 • Wednesdays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
A study of theory and practice in business, technical, and scientific writing with emphasis on the pedagogical materials and techniques available to the business and technical writing teacher. Non-degree students may not enroll without the consent of the Director of Graduate Studies in English. CRN 55697.
ENGL 803-001 Special Topics: Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies Özselçuk
HUMCB 412 • Wednesdays • 5:50 PM – 8:35 PM
Borders, Bodies, Belonging
This seminar will focus on a range of media (such as novels, fiction and non-fiction films, graphic novels, new and/or multimedia art, architecture) to investigate processes of b/ordering in the current context of global migration and proliferating borders. We will be especially concerned with border crossings that articulate territorial borders with other boundaries, including linguistic, gender, sexual, temporal, class, species, etc., and, in so doing, meditate on the constitutive role of border regimes in the making and imagining of the world. The primary texts will allow us to think about the border not only and simply as a site of control, exclusion and dispossession, but also inclusion, transformation and political possibility. Our discussions of these creative works will involve questioning and complicating the dominant representational regimes of humanitarianism and securitization. They will be informed by secondary, theoretical readings from thinkers that may include Gloria Anzaldúa, Étienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Jacques Rancière, Christina Sharpe, Harsha Walia, Eyal Weizman. CRN 45831.
ENGL 803-002 Special Topics: Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies Trafton
HUMCB 412 • Thursdays • 6:00 PM – 8:45 PM
FREEDOM TRAINS
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 49481.
ENGL 831 Theory of Prose Fiction Jimenez
HUMCB 408 • Mondays • 4:40 PM – 7:25 PM
Various types of prose fiction from folk tales and fables to short stories and novels; including historical changes in fictional forms, the function of technical devices, and modern theories of narrative. You must be enrolled in the MFA, Creative Writing program to register for this course. CRN 55698.