Fall 2016 

ENGL 504-01: Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry 
TTh 11:00 – 12:15PM
TBA
ENGL 506-75: Teaching of Writing
TTh 4:00 – 5:15 PM
Professor K. Kopelson
ENGL 510-01: MA Level Internship
ENGL 518-01: Foundations of Language
TTh 9:30 – 10:45 AM
 Professor K. Swinehart
ENGL 522-01: Structure of Modern English
MWF 1:00 – 1:50 PM
Professor T. Stewart
ENGL 543-75: Studies in Commonwealth Literature
TTh 7:00 – 8:15 PM
Professor D. Billingsley
ENGL 550-01: Studies in African American Literature
TTh 1:00 – 2:15 PM
Professor K. Chandler
ENGL 551-01: Animal Studies
TTh 2:30 – 3:45 PM
Professor G. Ridley
ENGL 551-02: Jewish Graphic Novels
1:00 – 2:15 PM
Professor R. Sherman
ENGL 574-01: 1960’s American Lit.
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 AM
TBA
ENGL 577-01: Harlem Renaissance
MW 2:30 – 3:45 PM
Professor K. Logan
ENGL 599-01: Documentary Film
MW 2:00 – 3:15 PM
Professor T. Johnson
ENGL 601-01: Introduction to English Studies: Autobiography
T 4:00 – 6:45 PM 
Professor K. Chandler
According to the University’s catalogue, this course is designed to “introduce students to research methods, print and electronic resources, strategies for reading and writing scholarly texts, and the seminar format.” We will undertake these goals through close attention to an inclusive American genre: the autobiography. We will examine how autobiographers have used different media and literary forms to interpret and present their lives: the prose narrative, film, the children’s book, and poetry. A tentative list of texts that we will explore includes autobiographical writing by Elizabeth Ashbridge, Venture Smith, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Zitkala-Sa, Richard Wright, Allison Bechdel and Maya Angelou; films by Michael Mills, Marco Williams, and Jerome Hill; and poetry by Walt Whitman, Robin Coste Lewis, Marilyn Hacker and Marilyn Nelson.
ENGL 602-01: Teaching College Composition
M 4:00 – 6:45 PM
Professor B. Brueggemann
*Requires Permission. English 602 focuses on the theory and practice of teaching writing at the college level.  We will engage reading, activities, and discussion that encourage reflective, critical, and flexible teaching practices in college-level writing classrooms.  This course is designed for (graduate) students who are teaching in the Composition Program at the University of Louisville.

ENGL 604-01: Writing Center Theory and Practice
TTh 2:30 – 3:45 PM
Professor B. Williams
*Requires Permission
ENGL 606-01: Creative Writing I
M 7:00 – 9:45 PM
Professor P. Griner
*Requires Permission
ENGL 610- 01: PhD Level Internship
*Requires Permission
ENGL 615-01: Thesis Guidance
*Requires Permission
ENGL 621-01: Sociolinguistics
T 4:00 – 6:45 PM
Professor T. Soldat-Jaffe
ENGL 632-75: Shakespeare
Th 7:00 – 9:45 PM
Professor S. Matthew Biberman

Since the rise of queer theory, literary critics have extensively explored Shakespeare's understanding and representation of human sexuality.  At the same, little thought has been given to the question of how Shakespeare understands and represents the experience of human love in his work. In this graduate seminar, we will attempt to rectify this problem by connecting the two topics.  We will focus on a range of plays, as well as the sonnets and the narrative poems.  Our reading will include work from Freud, Lacan, and others as warranted.

Requirements: Students are expected to participate actively in the seminar and to submit a range of writing, from in class "free writes" to polished academic papers.  Verbal requirements include the following: lead class discussion of one text during the semester, provide brief verbal "walk throughs" of both midterm essays and final projects, and generally engage in class discussion.  Written requirements center around a midterm set of two brief essays and a final seminar project (where the "default" assignment is to write a paper on this seminar's subject matter but suitable for presentation at any academic conference of your choice).  Final projects can deviate from the default assignment (past examples include designing high school lesson plans, creative writing, digital media projects, etc.) but all such experimental projects are subject to the professor's approval.

ENGL 654-01: American World Literature: Fiction, Post-1945
W 4:00 – 6:45 PM
Professor A. Jaffe
The course explores intersections of the global dimensions of American literature, its representations of itself in the larger world, focusing on post-1945 fiction. The troubles with the term American are familiar. It isn’t just a sobriquet for one country, the USA - but also designates various pluralities, two contiguous continents and various proximate lands. A hemisphere, half the world brain, the word designates a force-field of reception - a form of quasi-nationalism abstracted into a semi-formed aesthetic. Here, I very much am thinking of the course with “hemispheric” and “geo-spheric” orientations. The three key words of this seminar might be understood as a three distinct conceptual problems. What I have in mind for the title is less a special patriotic container - and even less a market for some worthy literary objects in an age of US-American hegemony (though we’ll read some excellent and frequently discussed novels of this period, including (probably!) Nabokov, Pynchon, Cole, Yamashita, Adichie, Lerner, Rankine) - and more a belated sense of a need for methodological orientations for a kind of mobile or wayward literature “in a plastic and assimilable age,” to borrow from Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian theorist.
ENGL 681-75: Mobility Work in Composition: Translation, Migration, Transformation
M 7:00 – 9:45 PM
Professor B. Horner
In coordination with the October 2016 Watson Conference theme “Mobility Work in Composition: Translation, Migration, Transformation,” we will devote this seminar to exploring emerging models and countermodels for mobility work in composition and beyond as these are engaged in scholarship on knowledge transfer, translinguality in writing, transnational writing programs, transnational rhetorics, and more broadly in scholarship on the movement and transformation of writers, writing, knowledge, and writing programs within and across borders of nation states, genres, institutions, languages, modalities, and disciplines, the globalization and “internationalization” of higher education, and the mobility and mobilization of students, faculty, and knowledge attending these.  Watson conference keynote texts will be approached in the context of this growing scholarly literature.  Seminar projects taking the form of responses to the keynote texts will be considered as potential contributions to the edited collection to emerge from the conference.

ENGL 681: Victorian Jewels
W 7:00 -9:45 PM
Professor S. M. Griffin
Amber, diamonds, jet, pearls; amulets, cameos, crowns, rings:  Jewels and jewelry glitter in the plots and on the characters of many nineteenth-century fictions. In their beauty coalesces some of the central ideologies and cultural and economic practices of the age. At various times, Victorian jewelry can serve as an emblem of wealth, taste, mourning, and even race. Jewels point to gendered gift economies, imperial pillage, laws governing inheritance, international trade, class structures, geological history, and the commodification of beauty.  This is an era in which the British regard India as ”The Jewel in the Crown” of Empire, in which mourning jewelry becomes a major industry; events ranging from the California Gold Rush to Anglo-American archaeological discoveries caused shifts in jewelry fashions. Superstitions accrued around gemstones that embody histories of themselves, their owners, and their origins. In this seminar we will read a number of Anglo-American fictions in which jewels figure prominently. What is the nature of these jewels? Where do they come from? How are they fashioned and re-fashioned—and by whom? Are they best understood as commodities? Fetishes? Art? Things? In attempting to answer these and other questions, we will draw on a variety of theories including thing theory, marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory, as well as on scholarly work in cultural studies, material history, and fashion history. 
Readings may include:
  • Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
  • Emily Dickinson, selected poems
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, “The Speckled Band,” “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Ring of Thoth”
  • H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
  • Henry James, “Paste”; Guy de Maupassant, “The Necklace”
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug”
  • Harriett Prescott Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” “A Lost Jewel”
  • Bram Stoker, The Jewel of the Seven Stars
  • Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
ENGL 687-01: From the Primary to the Presidency: Campaign Rhetoric in Post-Truth Age
T 4:00 – 6:45 PM
Professor S. Schneider
Paul Krugman famously said of the 2012 presidential election:  “Welcome to Post-Truth Politics.”   While we might question whether the factual distortions of that election cycle are all that new, Krugman’s statement nonetheless seemed to sum up a shift in how campaign rhetorics were practiced and perceived.  2016 looks to be no exception, with several primary campaigns defying the expectations that many of us have about facts, truth, and fair play.  This seminar will offer students a chance to not only study how the rhetorical study of campaign rhetorics has changed in recent years, but also to examine how contemporary media environments challenge how we understand the relationship between rhetoric and politics on the campaign trail.  We’ll likely start with debates about the political function of the public sphere before looking at the role of the “public screen” and social media in the shaping of campaign rhetorics.  We’ll also look at recent arguments about data, polling, and other prediction models in order to assess how campaign rhetorics function in an age of fast media.  Possible readings may include Tulis’ Rhetorical Presidency, Geer’s In Defense of Negativity, Jurgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms, Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, Cohen and Karol’s The Party Decides, Judis and Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority, and George Lakoff’s Moral Politics.
ENGL 689-01: Directed Reading for Exam
*Requires Permission
ENGL 690-01: Dissertation Research
*Requires Permission
ENGL 692-75: Engaging Some of the Greatest Hits
Th 4:00 – 6:45 PM
Professor M. Sheridan
*Requires Permission. Within Writing Studies, what we study and whom we draw upon seem to be ever expanding.  In this class, we’ll track some of that expansion by focusing on 6 key terms, reading oft cited interdisciplinary theorists and works that represent how they’ve been taken up within our field.  The terms and theorists may change, but at the moment include: Heterglossia (Mikhail Bakhtin), Institutional Ethnography (Dorothy Smith), Assemblage (Bruno Latour), Networks (Manuel Castells), New Materialism (Laurie Gries), Circulation Studies (DeVoss & Ridolpho; Catherine Chaput). The goal of the course will be to read important, primary texts, and to investigate how and why these theories and methodologies have become important to Writing Studies scholars today. Like many graduate courses, this will be a reading heavy course.