6797 ENGL 504-01 Advanced Creative Writing II: TTh 4:00-5:15PM
(Professor J. Skinner)
This is a workshop-style course in the writing of original poetry. While class sessions are used primarily to discuss work written by class members, some classes will focus on discussion of contemporary published work, and other issues relevant to the composition of poetry.
1188 ENGL 506-75 Teaching of Writing: TTh 5:30 – 6:45PM
(Professor T. Johnson)
English 506-75 is an introduction to the theories, research, and practice that informs the effective teaching of writing. Beginning with theories and research that examine what writing is, why it is important to teach writing, and how best to teach writing, the course will then move on to applying these concepts to practical applications (syllabi, assignment trajectories, paper comments) for teaching writing at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Guided by the common assumption that teaching is theory in practice, and that one must be reflective about one’s practice (continually examining and revising) to be an effective teacher, we will interrogate popular theories of writing with the goal of developing our own theories and approaches to teaching writing. Students should leave the course with the ability to draw connections between theories of writing, learning, teaching, and classroom practice as well as strategies for curricular, syllabus, and assignment design.
4808 ENGL 510-01 MA Coop Internship
(Professor S. Schneider)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
6942 ENGL 518-01 Foundations of Language: Th 4:00 – 6:45PM
(Professor E. Patton)
6003 ENGL 520-01 World Englishes: TTh 2:30 – 3:45PM
(Professor T. Soldat-Jaffe)
Note: This is a cross listed course. Check the course catalog description for the other department/course number under which it is offered.
4619 ENGL 522-01 Structure of Modern English: MW 2:00 – 3:15 PM
(Professor T. Stewart)
Note: This is a cross listed course. Check the course catalog description for the other department/course number under which it is offered.
This course is designed as a linguistic exploration of the various forms and combinations of words, phrases, and sentences that contemporary speakers of English typically recognize as belonging to that language, i.e. “English.”
To help in this exploration, students will:
• examine both popular and technical conceptions of “grammar”
• examine that variety of English referred to as Standard American English (SAE)
• consider some of the ways in which one can vary from SAE and still be speaking English
• consider the role of situation, audience, etc., in determining “appropriate use”
• acquire terminology and methods that permit clear description of English grammar
• collect real-life examples of actual English usage for detailed description
• identify and monitor trends in English usage to evaluate “changes in progress”
This course can count toward the undergraduate Minor in Linguistics, either as part of the Theoretical track or as an Elective (for more information, see http://bit.ly/lingminor).
9538 ENGL 543 – 75 Studies of Stuart and Commonwealth Literature:TTh 7:00- 8:15PM
(Professor D. Billingsley)
Prerequisite: ENGL 102 or 105; junior standing. In-depth study of selected movements,
genres, topics or groupings of writers from the Stuart and/or Commonwealth periods. Students earn graduate or undergraduate credit depending upon their registration status. By university policy, graduate credit requires
additional work.
This offering of the course will be based upon intensive readings in the works of Donne and Milton, with
additional readings in the works of their contemporaries and secondary criticism. Assignments and class
discussions will be organized topically to examine the poets’ treatment of particular subjects (e.g., women, polity,deity, science, the afterlife) as reflections or refractions of the various continuities and disjunctions of seventeenth century England.
Course objectives: By faculty decision, any 500-level course in English should help students do the following:
develop their own voice in argumentative source-based writing
exhibit flexibility and complexity of thought in analyzing literature and cultural studies
be comfortable with a variety of theoretical approaches, scholarly methods, types of evidence and modes of presentation
conceive, design, and finish an extended research project that demonstrates the features of “Ideas to Action” outcomes in effective communication, critical thinking and appreciation of cultural diversity. To this end, 500-level classes should require one sustained, longer project (for example, a 10-page essay) among other modes of assessment. In addition, by the end of this course, students should achieve reasonable competence in or familiarity with these areas of study:
A basic understanding of 17th-century English prosody;
Improved skills as a reader of poetry, both in public (oral) presentation and in private;
General familiarity with the biography and literary output of the two major poets;
Specific, detailed knowledge of at least one aspect of the cultural context in which the poets worked and wrote; and
Improved ability to organize and present a persuasive argument supported by literary-historical, critical and cultural evidence.
Texts: John Carey, ed. John Donne (Oxford, 2000), and Stephen Orgel & Jonathan Goldberg, eds., John Milton:The Major Works, ed. (Oxford, 2003).
Graded work and grade scale:
Course forum on Blackboard (30%);
In-class exercises, including impromptu writing assignments and work assigned for overnight completion (15%);
One short essay (5-7 pages, 10%), due early in the term; and
A term essay on a topic approved by the instructor and submitted in successive drafts on a schedule to be announced at the beginning of October (45% total but awarded in parts reflecting the elements expected in the composition of the project). Undergraduate papers will be 10-12 pages long; graduate papers will be 15-18 pages long with additional requirements for bibliographical and critical support.
9539 ENGL 546 – 01 Victorian Crime and Madness: MWF 10:00- 10:50AM
(Professor M. Rosner)
Victorian readers were fascinated by crime and its causes. Some of those causes were traced to different kinds of madness, which were more likely to affect the “weak” individual. But some Victorian authors suggested that some kinds of madness could also affect significant parts of the culture. In this 500-level course, we will read Victorian non-fiction and fiction. Some readings will involve crime in part; some will involve madness in part; some will involve crime and madness at the individual and, perhaps, at the cultural level. We will also read several contemporary critical essays.
Tentative Texts—and we all have to use the same editions:
Lombroso, Criminal Man;Lombroso, Criminal Woman (electronic excerpt);Prichard, "Moral Insanity" (electronic excerpt);The McNaughton Trial information (electronic excerpt); Lytton, A Blighted Life; Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford University Press); Doyle, Hound of the Baskervilles (Dover Thrift Edition); Doyle, The Sign of the Four (Dover Thrift Edition); Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Dover Thrift Edition); several short stories, and S. Waters, Affinity (Riverhead Trade)
9540 ENGL 550-01 Black Arts Movement: MWF 11:00 – 11:50AM
(Professor D. Anderson)
This class will be devoted to the Black Arts Movement--an important, national artistic movement in the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s. Its artists and theorists sought ways to link artists and audiences, to develop new principles for evaluating art based on Black experience, cultural traditions, and ethical responsibility. They also sought new performance conventions for communicating with audiences about political, economic, and cultural issues, and developed such institutions as community centers and theaters.
Accordingly, we will examine precursors to the BAM, connections between the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power Movement, conversations and debates among Black Arts intellectuals and artists during the period, and the varieties of public art and institutions created in communities throughout the United States. We will also discuss the movement’s many influences and lingering controversies, including debates about the function and meaning of art, the place of ethnic literatures in English departments, ideas about race, identity, power, and integration, ideas about gender and sexuality, and the role and representation of women in the movement. We will finally look at competing assessments of the movement’s success and influence.
Writers may include such figures as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Addison Gayle, Harold Cruse, Larry Neal, Ed Bullins, Etheridge Knight, Hoyt Fuller, Maulana Ron Karenga, Haki Madhubuti, Mari Evans, Ishmael Reed, and many others. Likely assignments include regular blog posts, two research papers, and at least one exam.
This class is open to both graduate students and undergraduates. Graduate students will be asked to complete a separate set of assignments suitable for graduate study and credit.
9542 ENGL 551-01 Re-imaging Dante's Inferno in Modern English: TTh 1:00 – 2:15PM
(Professor A. Rabin and Professor C. Petrosino) - POST 1900
In this course, we'll explore the Inferno of Dante Alighieri with two purposes in mind: 1) to gain an understanding of the poem within its historical context and 2) to investigate how subsequent writers in the English-speaking world have worked with and against the poem's conventions. Readings will include modern English translations of Inferno and other Dantean texts alongside selections of modern and contemporary literary projects that take Inferno as a point of departure. Coursework will offer students the opportunity to complete a mix of critical and creative assignments in contemplation of Dante. As our goal will be to gain a better understanding of the text itself as well as some of the many works of art and literature it has inspired, this course will be team-taught by a poet and a literary historian, and we welcome students interested in criticism, creative writing, and intellectual history into the class.
9431 ENGL 554-01 Women’s Personal Narratives: Th 4:00-6:45PM
(Professor J. Griffin)
Women’s Personal Narratives (Fall 2014) will explore women’s rhetorical constructions of agency and subjectivity at the intersection of gender and traditional definitions of self and self-narrative. Women speak from within established androcentric institutions such as: education, family, work, politics, religion, citizenship, and culture. While we may not cover all of these intersections in the course readings, we will employ tools of analysis that can apply to all. Those tools will allow students to engage in research projects across any of these intersections. We will confine ourselves to narratives of self (autobiography, memoir, letters, diaries) written by women rather than about them, and we will interrogate the nuances of this distinction. Course materials will pull from both nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers as well as from contemporary theory in narrative and women’s rhetoric.
9543 ENGL 599-01 Advanced Studies in English-WR: Demystifying Writing Style: MW 4:00 – 5:15PM
(Professor A. Olinger)
“Style—so pure is the word in sound and aspect, it would be a delightful name for some choice being, a rare bird, a character in a fairy tale.” —Paul Valéry, Aesthetics
Even for writing scholars and the most expert literary craftsmen, “writing style” can be an elusive concept. What are prose styles, and who creates them—writers, readers, or some combination thereof? How do they emerge? Do they “mature”? If so, how? How can styles best be described? What do we mean when we call writing “dense,” “clear,” or “flowery,” for example? And how and why do stylistic values change over time?
This course will introduce you to theory and research on style definition and development and the history of English prose styles; equip you with a vocabulary for analyzing styles; and allow you opportunities to exercise and train your own. Course texts may include works from rhetoric and composition, like Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose and Paul Butler’s Style in Rhetoric and Composition, along with readings from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, creative writing, and literary studies. In addition to regular informal stylistic experiments, you will produce stylistic analyses (including those of your own writing) and a research project on a style question that interests you.
1197 ENGL 601-75 Intro to English Studies: M 7:00-9:45PM
(Professor G. Ridley)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
1668 ENGL 602-01 Teaching College Composition: T 4:00-6:45PM
(Professor B. Brueggemann)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
English 602 is an introduction to the theory, research and practice (TRP) that informs and energizes the effective teaching of writing. This course is intended to provide new teachers at UofL with both a theoretical and research-supported background AND a practical, hands-on experience and discussion around the teaching of college writing.
The class will be a highly interactive graduate seminar and it will feature:
* discussion (with shared responsibilities for that);
* small group learning and projects, informal writing (both in-class and with reading assignments);
* the development of pedagogical activities for your ongoing English 101 classrooms; and
* constructing a draft of a syllabus for an English 102 class (going forward).
We will form a teaching community and develop a sense of teaching as a public act as we work together in an open-door environment and become comfortable sharing and responding to each other’s teaching and writing (about teaching).
1559 ENGL 604-01 Writing Center Theory and Practice: TTh 2:30 – 3:45PM
(Professor B. Williams)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
This course prepares incoming GTAs to teach in the University Writing Center. In this course we will discuss the theoretical foundation necessary for examining pedagogical issues important to an effective writing center. We will cover topics including ways of approaching writing consultations with students, responding effectively to student writing, the role of style and grammar instruction in the writing center, consulting strategies for ESL students, digital media and writing center work, assessment and record-keeping, and resource development. We read a variety of scholarship on issues of literacy, composition and rhetoric, and writing center work as well as discuss issues raised in weekly work in the Writing Center.
1189 ENGL 606-01 Creative Writing I: M 4:00-6:45PM
(TBA)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
4809 ENGL 610-01 PhD Coop Internship:
(Professor S. Schneider)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
1190 ENGL 615-01 Thesis Guidance:
(Professor S. Schneider)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
6937 ENGL 621-01 Sociolinguistics: T 4:00 – 6:45PM
(Professor T. Soldat-Jaffe)
9544 ENGL 632-75 Shakespeare: W 7:00 – 9:45PM
(Professor M. 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.
9545 ENGL 643-01 Romantic Modernities, Romantic Modernities: The Origins of Modernity in the Long
18th Century: Th 4:00 – 6:45PM
(Professor K. Hadley)
This course will discuss the structuring logic of the commodity as it takes form in the late 18th century: its striking presence in a number of influences within the period, its manifestation in literary texts, and its pervasive influence on into 20th c. postmodernity. We will spend time defining the commodity form as it is initially conceptualized by Marx (Marx’s Capital, vols. 1 & 2), understanding its structuring logic in relation to the period and, finally, uncovering evidence of this structuring at work within contemporary texts.
A number of factors have been identified at work in the period as influencing the growth of the commodity form: among them new forms of machine labor, of consumption and economic exchange, and a profound sense of the increasing rapidity of historical change (factors reflected famously in Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads). Given the rise of industrialized labor in the period, we’ll address a society increasingly reliant on commodified time in the form of labor. This specific form of commodification—the new focus on time in the period and on its increasing standardization—contributes to a characteristic sense of the impoverished nature of present, living experience (see postmodern insights of Benjamin, Horkheimer & Adorno, and theorists of the modern temporalization of history such as Peter Osborne, Reinhart Koselleck, Moishe Postone, etc.). We’ll also take a few weeks to observe the manifestation of this influence on the so-called “Romantic Aesthetic Ideology” (see Immanuel Kant, Percy Shelley).
We’ll spend some time relating these abstractions back to the literature of the period, including a selection of works by William Wordsworth, and others by assorted contemporary writers (see Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin). Wordsworth in particular will be of use here for the way in which his “poetics of modernity” is peculiarly saturated within the very paradigm he is trying to describe. In this way, we’ll look at how contemporary writers stage with some intensity the core components of modernity, those now as often associated with postmodernity. Allowing for the possibility that seminar participants will be more familiar with such issues as they appear closer to our present moment, creative thinking across the long stretch of modernity / late modernity / postmodernity will be encouraged throughout.
ENGL 672—01 The History of Rhetoric from The Renaissance to Present: Th 7:00 – 9:45 PM
(Professor S. Schneider)
This course will focus on the history of rhetoric, focusing on the development of rhetoric after Ramus and Bacon. We’ll examine two trends—first, the trend that separated invention from style, a trend carried into the eighteenth and nineteenth century as current-traditional rhetoric; the second, following Vico, looked to reinvigorate key classical conceptions of language. We’ll look at this second trend through authors such as Perelman and Burke.
We’ll likely draw on The Rhetorical Tradition for context before examining key texts—Vico’s New Science, Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives, and contemporary theoretical texts—in order to construct a working history of how notions of invention have changed over the last four centuries.
6790 ENGL 681-01:Composing Identities: Exploring Literacy, Culture, and Agency: M 4:00- 6:45PM
(Professor B. Williams)
The transformative power of literacy remains a pervasive concept in contemporary culture. Even within the field of literacy studies, where there have been critiques of the mythologies of literacy, the narrative that reading and writing can be empowering and transformative remains enmeshed in the institutions and scholarship. Yet transformation, if it happens, may be a complex set of experiences that are partial, recursive, and not uniformly positive. These experiences, and the social performances and personal conceptions of identity they help shape, are vital to understanding literacy practices and teaching. This seminar will explore questions of literacy, identity, and agency that take place both in and out of school. We will begin with discussions of how identity has figured into conversations about literacy and teaching writing, including examinations of theories of identity that have been particularly powerful in shaping these conversations in our field. We will then explore how issues of identity shape and are discussed in scholarship about literacy practices both in and out of the classroom. In particularly we will examine how conceptions and performances of identity intersect with issues of power, technology, rhetorical awareness, community, and emotion. The seminar will finish with a discussion of the implications for pedagogy of theories and practices of literacy, identity, and agency. And we’ll try to have fun doing all of the above.
9546 ENGL 681-02 Seminar in Digital Media: W 4:00-6:45PM
(Professor M. Sheridan) - CANCELLED
In this Digital Media graduate seminar, we’ll create a rough map of the what and how of current digital media research and scholarship within writing studies. We’ll explore the what in three large units: the first unit will provide a contemporary lay of the land by examining foundational questions, ways of producing, and methods of researching. The second unit will cover “hot” topics, including circulations, mobile technologies, online identity formation, and genre; the third unit will explore cross-disciplinary theoretical and methodological frameworks (e.g., techno- or cyberfeminism; actor-network theory). For the how, we’ll research and compose in various digital formats, investigating how conversations are started and arguments are made on various sites (e.g., blogs and twitter) and through various modes (e.g., text, audio, movies, visual).
9547 ENGL 681-03 Toni Morrison: W 4:00-6:45PM
(Professor S. Griffin)
This seminar will study the literary, cultural, and historical figure of Toni Morrison. Best-known as a novelist—and perhaps as a guest on Oprah, Morrison has also been a teacher (Howard and Princeton Universities), an editor (Random House), a librettist (Margaret Garner), a political activist (collections on Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas and on O.J. Simpson), a children’s book author, and someone who has worked intensively with photography and photographers. A Nobel Prize Winner, who has been translated into multiple languages, Morrison is an international figure. What are the meanings of these Toni Morrisons? What is their history? How did this woman come to stand for Black Women’s Writing in America?
We will study Morrison’s writing across a range of genres, looking at the trajectory of her career and the developments in her writing. We will pay attention as well to critical, theoretical, popular, and writerly responses to that oeuvre.
9628 ENGL 681-04 Historic and Comparative Linguistics: W 4:00- 6:45PM
(Professor T. Stewart)
Historical and Comparative Linguistics are two sub-areas of language study that have a long and respected role in the development of Linguistics as a scientific discipline. Although the two areas are complementary in many ways, they differ in the following areas of focus:
Historical Linguistics is the study of language change over time. This may entail looking at earlier and later states of the same language (Diachronic Linguistics) or, where direct records of earlier language forms is lacking, constructing hypothetical forms based on languages descended from that earlier stage (via Reconstruction). Other important outcomes of the study of language change include residual effects of Language Contact on the development of particular languages, the identification of Language Families (i.e., languages descended from the same common source), and a theory of how language change is more or less likely to proceed in the general case.
Comparative Linguistics involves the examination of different languages and language varieties in order to see not only how languages can be alike or different (whether they be genetically related or not, a.k.a. Language Typology and Language Universals), but also to gain evidence for, and possibly to reconstruct (see above), the linguistic details of common ancestor languages of related languages (using the so-called Comparative Method).
Thus one cannot consider language change without considering particular language states (Synchronic Linguistics), and for an insightful account of either sort, historical or comparative, a researcher must have a clear picture of linguistic structure in general. Consequently, this course entails the knowledge of the basics of linguistic theory, such as speech sounds, word formation, sentence formation and word order, and also word meaning. These areas will be touched on both early in the course and at a number of points throughout the semester. Students who are new to Linguistics are strongly encouraged to consult introductory Linguistics texts (such as Language Files) in order to help in the acquisition of basic concepts and methods for language description.
1659 ENGL 689-01 Directed Reading- Comprehensive Exams
(Professor S. Schneider)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
1191 ENGL 690-01 Dissertation Research
(Professor S. Schneider)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
6783 ENGL 692-75 Queer Theory: T 7:00-9:45PM
(Professor K. Kopelson)
Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.
This course provides an (ironically straight and linear) overview or survey of what might (also ironically) now be considered the “canon”—or at least some canonical texts and theorists—of queer theory. We will begin with texts and theorists that have retrospectively been understood to found queer theory; move through queer theory’s heyday of the 1990s; and then spend the last third or so of the course examining more contemporary manifestations of queer theory (mid-2000s—present), particularly as these work within and against queer’s normalization and domestication, and within and against what preeminent queer theorist Michael Warner has called the “tragically mistaken” but nonetheless “widespread impression that queer theory is a thing of the past.” Put otherwise, we will strive in this course to understand how and why queer theory was so provocative in its founding moments and to ask what, if anything, queer theory has left to offer us in this day when, as Warner also puts it, queer has become “a cable TV synonym for gay.”*
Course requirements will include but are not limited to: weekly writing in response to readings; rigorous class participation; a final research project and/or seminar paper.
Prerequisite: English 691 or equivalent comprehensive survey of contemporary critical theories.
*see Warner’s “Queer and Then.” Chronicle of Higher Ed, Jan 1, 2012.
