ENGL 771.001 Seminar in Verse Composition Tue 6:00 PM - 8:45 PM Finney
Second half of a year-long course in the writing of poetry taught by a contemporary poet. Limited to 15 students.
ENGL 770.001 Fiction Workshop: Short Story Th 6:00 PM - 8:45 PM Jimenez
Instruction in the writing of short fiction taught by a contemporary prose writer. May be repeated once for credit.
ENGL 692 Teaching of Composition in College TTh 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM Brock
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, instructors of rhetoric and composition will almost certainly spend at least some teaching such courses from various argumentative models and perspectives. The primary aim for ENGL 692, then, is not to simply get new instructors through their first year of teaching, but rather to introduce them to key rhetorical concepts and practices as a foundation for developing an individual approach to teaching the course that coincides with both the discipline of composition and rhetoric and the university's Carolina Core goals for the course.
ENGL 706.001 Special Topics in 16th and 17th Century British Literature and Culture TTh 4:25 PM - 5:40 PM Shifflett
BRITISH EPIC, SPENSER TO OSSIAN
Survey of early modern long narrative poetry. Authors are likely to include Spenser, Harrington, Daniel, Chapman, Beaumont, May, Cowley, Davenant, Cavendish, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, Blackmore, and Macpherson/Ossian. This course is for anybody who enjoys reading and talking about literature.
ENGL 721.001 Special Topics in 19th Century American Literature & Culture Mon 4:40 PM - 7:25 PM Davis
The Long Gilded Age
The historian Leon Fink coined the term “The Long Gilded Age” to describe the period from the late 1870s to around 1920. Traditionally understood as consisting of two segments—the Gilded Age followed by the Progressive Era (a.k.a. the “GAPE”)—the decades surrounding the turn into the twentieth century remain, along with our current era, among the most volatile in U.S. history. These pivotal decades saw the rise of Jim Crow after the failure of Reconstruction, the ultimately successful fight for woman’s suffrage amid a backlash against the perceived “feminization of American culture,” the closing of the country’s frontier, Indigenous genocide, two foreign wars, ongoing labor conflict, a cycle of economic depressions, a widening wealth gap, seemingly unbridled urban-industrial expansion, the emergence of eugenics as a reform movement, the ascendancy of monopoly and consumer capitalism, and the age of imperialism. This special-topics graduate course will focus on key literary works produced during this roughly forty-year period, paying particular attention to their formal and thematic engagement with these and other pressing issues of their day, many of which continue to inform our own moment.
ENGL 734.001 Principles of Literary Criticism Wed 5:50 PM - 8:35 PM
Muckelbauer
(Crosslisted with CPLT702)
The work of English Departments has changed significantly over the last few decades, due in no small part to the intervention of what is sometimes called Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, or Critical Theory. As a result, theory is also one of the most polarizing focal points in today’s academy. But whether you love it, hate it, fear it, or just have no concrete idea what “it” is, it’s nearly impossible today to become a humanities scholar without becoming steeped in some version of theory. This course is designed as a survey of the various strains of theory that have circulated through English Departments in the last 40 years. I have organized the course around theoretical questions (What is “Literature”? What is “subjectivity” and why does it matter? What does “meaning” mean?); this approach will allow us to examine the many different “-isms” through which scholars have responded to such questions (new criticism, postmodernism, reader-response theory, feminism, queer theory, Marxism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, etc.). We will conclude the course by focusing on some contemporary theoretical directions, including new materialisms, eco-crit, and affect studies.
ENGL 748.001 Special Topics in Postcolonial Literature and Culture TTh 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Gulick
(Crosslisted with CPLT740)
Decolonize Everything: Theorizing Justice and Freedom from the Global South, 1804 to the Present
This course will offer a rigorous introduction to anti-, post-, and decolonial thought, from Haiti’s fiery 1804 Declaration of Independence through recent decolonial approaches to feminism, critical theory, publishing, science, and world literature. Literary readings will be drawn from Anglophone and Francophone African and Caribbean canons (all in English or English translation); possible titles include Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, as well as poems by Kei Miller, Tsitsi Jaji, Tjawanwa Dema, and others. Critical readings will be drawn from the work of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, David Scott, Gary Wilder, Sylvia Tamale, and Achille Mbembe.
This course is designed both for students with a preexisting interest in postcolonial literature and theory and for students whose backgrounds and focus lie elsewhere. MFA students will have ample opportunity to develop final projects that help further their craft, though those projects will need to be scholarly rather than creative. This section of ENGL 748 will be cross-listed with CPLT 740; students from English and Comparative Literature are free to register for either course number. The course will count toward your degree requirements exactly the same either way.
Interested students are encouraged to contact me at agulick@mailbox.sc.edu and share what they hope to get out of the class, as well as any specific areas of interest you might hope to focus on; I’ll use this information to develop my syllabus.
Please check with me before purchasing books for this course at the Russell House Bookstore (I am very unlikely to have finalized the syllabus by their book order deadline). All books required for purchase on the final syllabus will also be available at All Good Books in Five Points.
ENGL 791.001 Introduction to Research on Written Composition Thur 6:00 PM - 8:45 PM Rule
Introduction to the types and methods of research on written composition, both qualitative and quantitative, with intensive analysis of representative exemplars of these types and methods. Non-degree students may not enroll without the consent of the Director of Graduate Studies in English.
ENGL 803.001 Special Topics: Seminar in Literary & Cultural Studies TTh 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM
Vanderborg
New Media Poetries
What are “new media” and how have they transformed the form and function of poetry in the 21st century? We’ll look at evolving definitions, practices, and theories of new media poetries, while keeping in mind James O’Sullivan’s argument that “newer media” are always in dialogue with previous media and movements.
Print itself was once a revolutionary new medium, and it still produces stunningly innovative poetic forms. We’ll examine recent experiments in print speculative poetry, code poetry, concrete poetry, and palimpsest poetry, as well as the exciting new genre of comics poetry.
We’ll discuss poems embodied beyond the page in sculptural forms—poem-benches you can sit on, concrete poetry embedded in landscapes, poems in boxes and jars, installation poems, and a volvelle poem.
Then we’ll take a deep dive into multiple genres of digital poetry—hypertext poems, multimodal documentary poems, glitch poetry, photogram poetry, infinite scroll poems, poem films, poems set against a sky-screen of night stars, and 3D digital poems you can navigate.
Beyond the digital, we’ll explore bio poems genetically encoded in bacterial hosts and proposals for poems for whales, dolphins, bees, and elephants.
For each experiment, we’ll chart its messages, history, style, and audience, covering Anglophone or translated poems from multiple countries. Authors may include: Tracy K. Smith, giovanni singleton, Eduardo Kac, Margaret Rhee, Christian Bök, Porpentine, Amee Pollack and Laurie Spitz’s collaborations, Sharon Daniel, Amira Hanafi, Mez Breeze, Sharif Ezzat, Diego Bonilla, and Rodolfo Mata.
ENGL 890.001 Studies in Rhetoric and Composition Mon 5:50 PM - 8:35 PM Hawk
Topics selected by the instructor for specialized study. May be repeated as topics vary. Non-degree students may not enroll without the consent of the Director of Graduate Studies in English.