Spring 2017

ENGL 504-01: Advanced Creative Writing II: Fiction 
TTh 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
Professor I. Stansel

This upper-division fiction course offers students who have already completed introductory and intermediate workshops the opportunity to further refine their craft. The discussion-based class will focus on the craft of short story writing, with a secondary and simultaneous examination of linked, or connected, stories. Through this we will begin to examine strategies for longer narratives, while still practicing the short form. We will read several collections of linked stories. Week-by-week, the class will examine different aspects of the storytelling craft, including scene-building, plot and sub-plot development, writing voice, among others. In addition to creating and workshopping short stories, students will work on developing story ideas and structuring approaches for a longer piece of writing.

ENGL 506-01: Teaching of Writing
 MW 5:30 – 6:45 PM
 Professor B. Horner

This course focuses on issues in the teaching of academic writing—commonly called “composition pedagogy”—primarily at the post-secondary level.  We will be attempting to make useful sense of composition scholarship by examining the terms, concepts, assumptions, and concerns that seem to be key in some of the literature constituting that scholarship.  Issues to be explored include classroom discourse, writing processes, reading in the teaching of writing, the making of knowledge through student writing, assignment design, teacher response to student writing, errors, language difference in writing, modality in writing, and the vexed issue of “standards.”  Students will be expected to attend all class meetings, participate actively in class discussions, and write and revise their writing frequently.

ENGL 510-01: MA Level Internship

*Requires Permission

ENGL 522-50/51: Structure of Modern English Professor T. Stewart

*Hybrid Course

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. 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”

ENGL 523-01: History of the English Language 
TTh 9:30 – 10:45AM 
Professor T. Stewart

This course traces the development of English from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) origins, through the Middle English (e.g., Chaucer) and Early Modern English (e.g., Shakespeare) periods, to Present-Day English. The course has a double emphasis:

• internal history (diachronic change), or how grammar and vocabulary change with use over time and space, and
• external history (language and dialect contact), including influences such as the 9^th century settlement of Vikings in Britain and the 11^th century Norman-French conquest of Britain.

Because English hasn’t been “perfected” (whatever that would mean), it hasn’t stopped changing and it won’t, as long as people use it as a living language. In order to speculate as to how English might change in the future, this course will also consider regional dialects, and both current and post-colonial English vernaculars around the world. This course can count in the Theoretical Track concentration or as an Elective for the Undergraduate Minor in Linguistics. Successful completion of this course will provide the student with:

• greater appreciation for the fluidity of language usage 
• broader understanding of the socio-political contexts for language change, and
• increased ability to describe language phenomena objectively. 

ENGL 545-01: Revolutionary Romanticicm
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 AM
Professor K. Hadley

The late 18^th and early 19^th centuries marked a period of rapid industrialization, with accompanying social problems such as the conditions in factories and mines, the precarious circumstances of child labor, the continued use of slave labor, violence against women, enclosure of land, poverty, and epidemics arising from poor sanitation, over-crowding, and sexually-transmitted disease. Politically, repressive measures were enacted and enforced against the populace in the effort to protect English soil from the exportation of French revolutionary fervor. Within this context, a number of socially-conscious forms of literature arose, garnered toward the middle classes in the effort to challenge the corruptions of industry and government. We will address a number of literary genres within this category, including social protest novels, political satire, dialogues, drama, essays, and poetry. Two exams will be given, and a staged research project will be assigned. Graduate students will submit a more sustained research project and otherwise participate regularly.

ENGL 546-01: Victorian Travel Narratives
TTh 1:00 – 2:15 PM
Professor M. Rosner

How did specific Victorians construct versions of Africa and their places in it? To find answers to that question, we’ll read and discuss several examples of Victorian travel/exploration stories (fiction and non-fiction).

ENGL 549-01: Studies in Post-Colonial Literature
MWF 12:00 – 12:50 PM
Professor A.E. Willey

ENGL 599-01: Writing Across the Disciplines 
MW 2:00 – 3:15 PM 
Professor A. Olinger

This course is designed for graduate and professional students in any department, as well as for advanced undergraduates in any department who are conducting research, writing theses, or considering graduate programs that will require extensive research-writing and literature reviews. Students who speak English as a second, third, or fourth language are especially welcome. In this course, students will:

• Investigate best practices for research, writing, and publishing in their discipline
• Reflect on their literacy and language background, habits, and goals
• Analyze articles in their discipline for particular linguistic and rhetorical patterns
• Apply what they’ve learned to an extended writing project of their design
• Improve their ability to edit for grammar, word choice, and punctuation and to craft more incisive prose
• Participate in a community of peers who share their work 

Feel free to contact the instructor, Dr. Andrea Olinger (arolin01@louisville.edu), if you have any questions about the class.

ENGL 599-02: Advanced Studies in English Writing: A Reintroduction to Books
T Th 4:00 – 5:15 PM 
Professor M. Mattes

How do people “know” themselves and their worlds through books? What is distinctive about knowledge that is created through the writing, reading, publishing, and collecting of books? How does book knowledge—that is, bibliographic knowledge—shape our world? Most importantly, what are the social consequences of knowledge created in such a way? This semester we will try to find some provisional answers to these questions. First, we will tackle case studies that examine the bibliographic underpinnings of literary, cultural, and media theory. Then, armed with tools from these fields and some familiarity with the role of books and allied media in their development, we will consider works from a diverse range of genres and social contexts that can, in part, be read as a series of polemics about the role of bibliographic knowledge.

In analyzing how literature is aesthetically, thematically, rhetorically, and physically bound up in books, we will trouble the everyday ordinariness of “the book”—a thing, a practice, and a standard that is so often taken for granted. Readings and writing assignments, at once theoretical, historical, and technical, point to the heterogeneity and ubiquity of bound-and-inscribed forms and place them in relation to a vast array of communication technologies and practices. Students will foster and demonstrate this “intermedial” awareness during in-class reading responses and a significant final project. In addition to these traditional assignments, this course has an obligatory hands-on component—object lessons that I am calling “book studies.” Students will transcribe across paper structures and digital platforms, survey artists’ books, explore local expressive cultures, and delve into the memoirs of a laboring printer and publisher in order to consider how books are a means of interpretation. By demanding rigorous attention to media practices, this course not only asks how other people think with books—it implores us to do so, too.

ENGL 607-01: Creative Writing (II)
T 4:00 – 6:45 PM 
Professor C. Petrosino

*Requires Permission

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor or enrollment in a degree program in English. Recommended prior coursework: ENGL 503, ENGL 504, or equivalent.

This graduate-level workshop is for writers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and drama. Because this is an advanced course, I expect students to demonstrate a working knowledge of the basic literary terms appropriate to each genre. This workshop-style course invites students to continue developing their own writing practices, while adding new compositional and critical techniques to their repertoires. We’ll devote most class sessions to reviewing peer-generated works-in-progress, but we’ll also discuss some published texts in each genre and take time to explore other relevant elements of the creative process. Students should be prepared to participate energetically in group critique sessions (i.e., “workshop”) in addition to polishing their own writing. Students will assemble a portfolio (containing 30-60 pages of prose/drama OR 20-30 pages of poetry OR some combination of these) at semester’s end. Each student will also write significant responses to each peer manuscript and compose 5 brief responses to selected published pieces. The final grade will be calculated based on the above items, plus attendance and participation.

ENGL 610-01: PhD Level Internship

*Requires Permission

ENGL 615-01: Thesis Hours

*Requires Permission

ENGL 620-75: Research in Composition 
M 7:00 – 9:45 PM 
Professor A. Olinger

This course will explore key methodologies and methods that have shaped research in Writing Studies. We will investigate an array of approaches (e.g., ethnographic methods, discourse-based interviews, surveys) as well as ethical issues around data collection and representation. Throughout the course, you will conduct micro-studies, investigate a topic of your choosing in more depth, and develop a research proposal.

ENGL 651-75: The Victorian Gothic 
T 7:00 – 9:45 PM 
Professor D. Lutz

In the last twenty years we have seen a revival of all things gothic—an interest in supernatural haunting and communion with the dead as well as representations of the attraction to the villain, the demon lover, and the vampire. A reveling in sadomasochistic relationships and in the sublime of altered states of consciousness, such as nightmares and drug-induced fantasies, add to this resurgence. While the heyday of the gothic novel began in 1764 and ended in 1820, its influence ran deep throughout the Victorian period (1830–1901). We will seek to understand the Victorian fascination with ghosts, mystery, corruption, dysfunctional families, and evil through the writings of Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others.

ENGL 660-01: African American Literature and the Roots of Environmental Justice 
M 4:00 – 6:45 PM 
Professor D. Anderson

In this course, we will examine the importance of environmental literature to the African American literary tradition. In particular, we will explore literature that addresses social justice in an environmental context, both to appreciate its role in the development of a broader literary tradition, and to see its connections to what would become an environmental justice movement.

I intend this course to be a broad survey that will include major voices (such as Douglass, Chesnutt, Dunbar, Du Bois, Hurston, Morrison), and literary movements (the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement), as well as forgotten figures who deserve to be recovered. We will also read important scholarship by Kimberly Smith, Kimberly Ruffin, Evie Shockley, Paul Outka, and others.

ENGL 673-75: Rhetoric, Gender, and Emotion in the Pre-Modern Classroom 
W 7:00 – 9:45 PM 
Professor J. Turner

For well over 1,000 years, young boys were taught literacy skills by reading, imitating, and varying texts by Claudian, Statius, Virgil and Ovid. These classical texts often include intense despair, suicide, and sexual violence. Saint Augustine recalls that in grammar school, he was “forced to … weep over the death of a Dido who took her own life from love,” and “to recite the speech of Juno in her anger and grief” (Confessions 1.13, 17). The practice of empathizing with emotional literary characters—many of whom were women—and composing and performing speeches in response, continued from Augustine’s Rome and well into the Renaissance. This course will survey the role of emotion and gender in the pre-modern classroom, dedicating special attention to the function of identification, empathy, and memory. Texts may include Augustine’s Confessions, George Kennedy’s Progymnasmata, Statius’ Achillead, Ovid’s Heroides, Lynn Enterline’s Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, and James McGaugh’s Memory and Emotion. The course will close by considering how to adapt ancient writing pedagogy for the modern classroom. Graded work will likely include oral reports, a literature review of relevant research surrounding your chosen topic, and a final essay. Students will have latitude to customize their research papers for their specific historical period and/or learning goals, and each topic will be negotiated with the professor.

ENGL 681-02: Community Literacy 
M 4:00 – 6:45 PM 
Professor B. Williams

Literacy is an ongoing, vibrant part of the experiences of everyone in our culture and shapes experiences and identities in virtually every part of our lives. This course will focus on several key conversations about how writing and reading takes place in non-school settings.

First, we will dig into the varied and growing body of research on the literacy practices of people in their daily lives. We’ll be reading a number of different texts across cultures and communities and discussing the factors that shape literacy practices in different communities, and in turn how those communities shape conceptions and engagement with creating and interpreting texts. We will also talk about the approaches of the researchers in terms of their methods and ethics.

Also, we will explore approaches for engaging in literacy research and pedagogy in community settings. We will use participatory action research as a way of thinking about how such work can offer ways of co-creating knowledge and sustainable change in academic-community partnerships. We will also be talking about ethical concerns involved in such work. The course will also involve engagement with a community literacy project or organization.

Finally, we will also be discussing the implications of research and action around issues of community literacy for the identity of the rhetoric and composition as a field. We will think about how we define ourselves and our goals, and how institutional systems and ideologies complicate this kind of work. Also, we’ll try to have fun.

ENGL 681-03: History and Compartive Linguistics 
TTh 4:00 – 5:15 PM 
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. This course can count in the Theoretical Track concentration or as an Elective for the Undergraduate Minor in Linguistics.

ENGL 682-01: Language and Culture 
MW 4:00 – 5:15 PM 
Professor K. Swinehart

ENGL 686-01: The New Southern Studies 
Th 4:00 – 6:45 PM 
Professor A. Clukey

It all started when Houston Baker Jr. and Dana Nelson called for a “new southern studies” in a special issue of the journal American Literature published 2001—or so the story goes. Not surprisingly, it’s actually more complicated than that).

Nonetheless, the study of southern literature and culture has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years. The “old” southern studies was wedded to a vision of southern culture inherited from the Southern Agrarians and New Critics like Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks. Their (markedly white, straight, male) South was defined by the burdens of defeat, memory, time, and history. In contrast, the New Southern Studies is skeptical, even hostile, to such constructions of southern culture. It seeks to replace outdated ideas of southern melancholy with anti-exceptionalist and anti-essentialist critical frameworks. In place of the monolithic South of old, the New Southern Studies has surveyed a proliferation of micro-“Souths”: Native Souths, Queer Souths, Latin@ Souths, Poor Souths, Urban Souths, Global Souths, Neoliberal Souths, Undead Souths, and many, many other Souths.

This course will track the sea changes in southern cultural studies that have occurred since 2001 and examine a range of texts that question, deconstruct, or redefine what it means to be “southern.” We’ll read criticism by Barbara Ladd, Jon Smith, Debra Cohn, Leigh Anne Duck, Martyn Bone, Scott Romine, Coleman Hutchison, Eric Gary Anderson, and others. Literary texts will start with a few books from the southern canon—perhaps William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Harper Lee—and move on to largely contemporary literature by writers like Jesmyn Ward and Monique Truong.

ENGL 689-01: Directed Reading for Exams

*Requires Permission

ENGL 690-01: Dissertation Research

*Requires Permission

ENGL 691-01: Contemporary Theory 
Th 7:00 – 9:45 PM 
Professor K. Kopelson

This course surveys key developments in contemporary critical theory, starting with structuralism and post-structuralism and moving through more recent developments such as postcolonialism, gender studies and queer theory, “posthumanism” and the like. Though this is a survey course which, as such, is dedicated to acquainting you with and immersing you in what can legitimately be called the “canon” of critical theory, we will also attempt, toward the end of the course, to think (and write) about canonical theory’s contemporary manifestations, permutations, and applications. Our main course text will be Julia Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2^nd edition. The course will require engaged participation in seminar discussions, weekly written syntheses of the readings, two take-home examinations, and a project on contemporary manifestations of canonical theory.