Fall 2016
1135 ENGL 202-01 Intro to Creative Writ:MWF 9-9:50am DA206 (Prof. Stansel)
This course introduces students to three genres of creative writing: poetry, drama, and fiction. Students will read a variety of works in each, analyzing and discussing the texts from a writerly perspective. Students will examine the works using particular aspects of the writing craft (image, point of view, dialogue, etc.) as foundations for understanding. Then the class members will try their own hands at the creation of poems, plays, and stories. The class will discuss methods of invention and development and practice the art of revision. This is a discussion-based class and students should be ready to voice their thoughts and ideas using a developing workshop vocabulary.
1569 ENGL 202-02 Intro to Creative Writ:MWF 12:00-12:50pm HM122 (Prof Mozer)
Intro to Creative Writing lets students explore the genres of poetry, fiction, and playwriting through both reading and writing exercises, as well as small group workshops of your own creative work. This is an active, dynamic, discussion-based course where students will learn the elements of craft and style: we’ll talk character development, story structure, poetic forms and terms, word choice, etc. While this is a writing class, half of it will be reading, so be sure to bring your brain and a pen and be ready to take notes on that reading so you can look smart in class. For this section of 202, students will produce a small collection of three poems, one short story, and one scene or one-act stage play, in addition to written responses to peer work, a cover letter for the final portfolio, and a notebook full of writing exercises and responses to writing prompts.
5408 ENGL 202-03 Int to Creat Writ:T/Th 11:00am-12:15pm HM122 (Prof.Weinberg)
4995 ENGL 202-04 Intro to Creative Writ:T/Th 2:00-3:45pm TBA (TBA)
1136 ENGL 202-75 Intro to Creat Writ:T/Th 5:30-6:45pm HM113 (Prof Biberman)
5983 ENGL 202-96 Intro to Creative Writ:MWF 7:40am-9:10am TBA (Prof. Ritchie)
Restricted to students admitted to A&S High School coop program
8073 ENGL 250-01 Intro to Literature –H:MW 2:00-3:15pm DA204 (Prof. Boehm)
This course, primarily for non-English majors, will introduce you to different ways of interpreting literature. We will read and analyze different genres of literature, including short stories, poetry, drama, and a novel. Our focus will be on both the content of the works and their structures, rhetorical strategies, and themes. We will also examine different interpretive methods and schools of criticism. My hope is that you will learn some strategies for reading literature that will make you a life-long lover of literature.
Student outcomes for English 250 are as follows:
Students will 1) demonstrate an understanding of various literary genres; 2) develop and refine their ability to analyze and interpret literature, both in writing and in discussion; and 3) become familiar with the terms, ideas, and questions that inform literary study. These outcomes will be assessed through response papers (written both in class as quizzes and out of class as one-page response papers), essay examinations, and class discussion.
5409 ENGL 300-01 Intro to English Studies-WR:MWF 12-12:50pm TBA (TBA)
4128 ENGL 300-02 Intro to Eng Stud-WR:MWF11:00-11:50am DA207 (Prof. Anderson)
This writing-intensive course, which serves as an introduction to the English major, will require students to develop and practice their skills at reading, discussing, and writing about literature. English 300 will require students to use a discipline-specific vocabulary for analyzing literature, and explore and adopt strategies for writing argumentative papers. We will discuss key terms for poetry, fiction, and drama. Finally, the course will call on students to explore the nuances of particular literary works, as well as the artistic and cultural contexts in which the writing was produced. Outcomes will be assessed through essays, peer review of drafts, in-class writing, class discussion, and possibly class reports.
4762 ENGL 300-03 Intro to Engl Stud-WR:T/Th 8:00-9:15pm NS130 (Prof. Hadley)
This course will focus primarily on short fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries, with accompanying selections featuring writers on writing, and brief reviews and commentaries. Fiction readings will draw from a number of traditions, including British and American; romantic, realist, modernist and post-modernist; Southern American literature, and African, Asian, and Indian-American literature. As this introductory course invites students from across disciplines, emphasis in discussion will be on engaging with texts by way of presenting a number of general approaches (plot, character, setting, point of view, theme) and making connections based on such considerations. Course grades will take into account three exams, reading quizzes, and classroom participation.
7060 ENGL 300-04 Intro to Engl Stud-WR:T/Th 4:00-5:15pm HM219 (Prof. Turner)
This course will introduce you to a variety of literary genres--including poetry, the novel, drama, and the short story--through the theme of "emotion and gender." Many of our readings will revolve around figures from classical mythology. Analyzing these texts will help you to develop the central skill of literary analysis, or "close reading," and to apply close reading in a series of argumentative essays. Our course texts will draw from a range of historical periods, from Virgil's Aeneid to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
4136 ENGL 301-01 British Lit I:T/Th 9:30am-10:45am DA107 (Prof. Stanev)
This course will survey a representative selection of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Medieval, Renaissance, and Restoration texts that not only reflect a variety of cultural and historical experiences in England from about 700 to 1675, but that have also exerted considerable influence on British life and thought. We will blend lecture and creative dialogue in order to deepen our understanding of the early modern canon of British literature, and recognize and respond to specific historical changes in values and cultural ideas. Discussions will investigate the language and significance of a profoundly dynamic body of works, which emerge from the domains of the fabliaux, erotic and pastoral poetry, allegory, heroic epic, romance, and liturgical, as well as secular, drama. As a result, the student learning outcomes of this survey are: 1) to recover the significance of early modern writings in their original setting; 2) to recognize the chronological and stylistic pattern of change in the literary canon of the British Isles over a millennium; 3) to place some of the most widely acclaimed masters of the pen, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, among the writings and ideas of their contemporaries. These outcomes will be assessed through quizzes, midterm examination, two analytical essays with elements of research, and class discussion.
1374 ENGL 302-01 British Lit II:T/Th 11:00am-12:15pm DA303 (Prof. Lutz)
This is a chronological survey of British literature from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. We will read canonical works from three literary periods: Romantic (1785-1830), Victorian (1830-1901), and Modern (1901- ?). Our primary concern will be on close readings of the assigned texts. Through this detailed and intricate understanding, we will explore what these texts say about the aesthetic and social concerns of the time. A central focus in our reading will be on tracing the movement of varying ideas of subjectivity from the Romantic sublime self and the importance of the individual imagination, through the Victorian definition of subjectivity as bounded by social relations and work, to the fragmentary, isolated selfhood, caught up in language, of the Modernist period. We will also concern ourselves with changing ideas about sexuality, gender, and class during these historical moments.
1630 ENGL 303-01 Scientific and Technical Writing-WR:T/Th 2:30-3:45pm (TBA)
1399 ENGL 303-02 Scientific and Technical Writ-WR:MWF 1:00-1:50pm DA104 (TBA)
5516 ENGL 303-03 Scient and Tech Writ-WR:T/Th 11:00am-12:15pm HM113 (TBA)
4220 ENGL 305-01 Inter Creat Wr:Playwrite:MWF 11-11:50am SK209 (Prof Stansel)
This course offers students an opportunity to expand on knowledge gained in introductory creative writing courses and to focus their concentration more intensively on playwriting. Week by week the class will examine different elements of dramatic storytelling: dialogue, character development, plot, set and setting, etc. Students will read and view plays by established and emerging playwrights, all the while working on their own dramatic works. The class will approach playwriting as a process of discovery, wherein students experiment with styles and forms in order to understand their own aesthetic interests. This is a discussion-based class and students should be ready to voice their thoughts and ideas. As with most courses, students will get the most from the class when they come to texts and discussions with energy and open-minded curiosity.
1137 ENGL 305-02 Inter Creat Writ:Fiction:T/Th 4:00-5:15pm LF102 (Prof Mozer)
1138 ENGL 306-01 Business Writing-WR:MWF 8:00-8:50am HM217 (TBA)
1139 ENGL 306-02 Business Writing-WR:MWF 9:00-9:50am HM101 (Professor TBA)
1140 ENGL 306-03 Business Writing-WR:MWF 10:00-10:50am TBA (Professor TBA)
1141 ENGL 306-04 Business Writing-WR:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm HM104A (TBA)
1142 ENGL 306-05 Business Writing-WR:T/Th 9:30-10:45am HM104A (Prof. TBA)
1143 ENGL 306-06 Business Writing-WR:MWF 11:00-11:50am DA308 (Professor TBA)
1144 ENGL 306-07 Business Writing-WR:T/Th 2:30-3:45pm TBA (Professor TBA)
4068 ENGL 306-08 Business Writing-WR:T/Th 4:00-5:15pm HM101 (Professor TBA)
4229 ENGL 306-09 Business Writing-WR:MWF 12:00-12:50pm NS128 (Professor TBA)
4760 ENGL 306-10 Business Writing-WR:MW 4:00-5:15pm LF102 (Professor TBA)
4711 ENGL 306-50Business Writing-WR: (Distance Ed.) Prof. Tanner
English 306 is designed for advance business students and Arts and Sciences students (juniors and seniors) anticipating careers in law, business, or government. This course assumes that the better prepared you are to communicate effectively and persuasively using customary business forms, the more readily will you achieve your personal goals. We will compose and present work in modes, both written and visual, expected in business and government. We will also practice composing processes, research relevant business questions, and practice professional problem-solving. As an integral part of these activities, we will examine the rhetorical nature of professional discourse in addressing diverse audiences, sometimes with multiple purposes.
4712 ENGL 306-53 Business Writing-WR:(Distance Ed.) Prof. Tanner
English 306 is designed for advance business students and Arts and Sciences students (juniors and seniors) anticipating careers in law, business, or government. This course assumes that the better prepared you are to communicate effectively and persuasively using customary business forms, the more readily will you achieve your personal goals. We will compose and present work in modes, both written and visual, expected in business and government. We will also practice composing processes, research relevant business questions, and practice professional problem-solving. As an integral part of these activities, we will examine the rhetorical nature of professional discourse in addressing diverse audiences, sometimes with multiple purposes.
4713 ENGL 306-54 Business Writing-WR: (Distance Ed.) Prof. Tanner
English 306 is designed for advance business students and Arts and Sciences students (juniors and seniors) anticipating careers in law, business, or government. This course assumes that the better prepared you are to communicate effectively and persuasively using customary business forms, the more readily will you achieve your personal goals. We will compose and present work in modes, both written and visual, expected in business and government. We will also practice composing processes, research relevant business questions, and practice professional problem-solving. As an integral part of these activities, we will examine the rhetorical nature of professional discourse in addressing diverse audiences, sometimes with multiple purposes.
7857 ENGL 306-55 Business Writing-WR: (Distance Ed.) Prof. Tanner
English 306 is designed for advance business students and Arts and Sciences students (juniors and seniors) anticipating careers in law, business, or government. This course assumes that the better prepared you are to communicate effectively and persuasively using customary business forms, the more readily will you achieve your personal goals. We will compose and present work in modes, both written and visual, expected in business and government. We will also practice composing processes, research relevant business questions, and practice professional problem-solving. As an integral part of these activities, we will examine the rhetorical nature of professional discourse in addressing diverse audiences, sometimes with multiple purposes.
1145 ENGL 306-75 Business Writing-WR: MW 5:30-6:45pm HM207 (Prof. TBA)
4266 ENGL 306-77 Business Writing-WR:T/Th 5:30-6:45pm NS317 (Prof. TBA)
3947 ENGL 309-01 Inquiries in Writ-WR:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm HM204 (Prof. Sheridan)
All English 309 classes focus on responding to differing rhetorical situations at an advanced level in appropriate modes for diverse audiences. They emphasize creating and revising several substantial writing projects and they seek to develop critical reading and writing abilities in multiple genres.
This particular section of English 309 will focus on Writing for Public Audiences. For the first half of the semester, we will read and write about a shared inquiry: what is the purpose of higher education today? We’ll read academic essays, governmental reports, and popular press articles and videos, and we’ll experiment with developing best strategies for writing to a general audience (e.g., a letter to the editor to The Courier Journal), for a specialized audience (e.g., an article in The Louisville Cardinal) or for a mix as these (e.g., composing an audio essay to be played on NPR). In the second half of the course, you will investigate a particular angle on that topic, and write textual and digital compositions intended to persuade a specific audience about one aspect of this broad topic. No previous knowledge about this topic or composing with digital media is needed.
1146 ENGL 309-02 Inquiries in Writ-WR:T 4:00-6:45pm HM117 (Prof. Rogers)
*This section requires permission from the department
English 309, Inquiries in Writing, is a course that focuses on nonfiction narrative and research writing. The class will read and discuss creative nonfiction genres such as essays, memoirs, and literary journalism, and will also work on research projects focused on the academic interests of each student. The final portfolio for this course will include about twenty pages of revised writing and a number of journal entries.
5410 ENGL 310-01 Writ About Lit Nonmajor-WR:MWF 9:00-9:50am DA208B (Prof TBA)
4996 ENGL 310-02 Writ About Lit Nonmjr-WR:MWF 12:00-12:50pm HM114 (Professor Kelderman)
This is an introduction to the field of English literary studies for non-majors. Students will read, discuss, and write about novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. In the course of the semester we will develop the vocabulary, interpretive methods, and writing skills necessary for literary analysis. In the process students will learn to analyze, construct, and refine arguments through several formal writing projects. This course will be largely discussion-based, and during Friday workshops students will work in groups to help each other revise preliminary drafts. The guiding theme for the course readings and activities is “being at home in American literature.” We will trace the theme of houses and other living spaces in American literature, to ask how writers from different periods and backgrounds have thought about what it means to be home, return home, own a home, or lose one. Texts include multiple short stories and poems, two plays, and three novels: House of the Seven Gables, The Bluest Eye, and House on Mango Street.
3948 ENGL 310-03 Writ About Lit-Nonmajor-WR:T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA301 (Prof.TBA)
1147 ENGL 311-01 American Lit I:MWF 10:00-10:50am DA107 (Prof. Ryan)
In English 311 we will read and consider a wide range of texts written by Americans (or, in some cases, by people who visited North America) from the early colonial period to around 1865. Along the way, we’ll pursue three main categories of investigation:
1. Literary analysis: To what possible interpretations do these works lend themselves? How does textual evidence support or undermine particular interpretations? How do different works of literature fit together or speak to one another?
2. Contextualization: How do works of literature speak of (and to) the historical moments in which they were produced? What kinds of dissonances, productive or otherwise, arise when twenty-first-century readers approach these texts?
3. Canonization: How are certain works deemed worthy of study, while others are left out? What assumptions and decisions do we make in assigning value to works of literature? How are "classics" made and how are we, as participants in a university course, involved in that process? What other versions of American literary history are possible or defensible? How do the conventional periods into which we divide American literature—often related to the various wars in which the US has participated—define and perhaps limit the study of literature?
Assignments will include short response papers, reading quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam.
1148 ENGL 311-02 American Lit I: T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA204 (Prof. Mattes)
Our course surveys texts in American literature from the pre-colonial period up to 1865—texts that were composed and interpreted by people hailing from numerous ethnicities, including Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Europeans. We will pay especially close attention to the expressions of women, natives, and people of African descent who lived, worked, and wrote during European and American quests for empire and social control. We will also focus on the media, formats, and practices used to constitute literature across a wide array of genres. So, in addition to assigned readings from our anthology and on the course website, we will spend time considering the mediation of our semester’s readings—in the past and in our own time. Yoking literary study to this media-aware approach will help us account for our reliance upon acts of translation, transmission, and transcription that make these diverse works available to us.
1149 ENGL 312-01 American Lit II: MW 2:00-3:15pm DA107 (Prof. Adams)
This course will introduce students to major texts of American poetry and prose from (roughly) 1860 to 1940. We will pay particular attention to how writers articulated ideas of “self” and “other,” how they appealed to these notions to reflect or critique rapidly changing historical and cultural conditions, and how these texts shaped (and continue to shape) our conception of what counts as “American.” Authors will include (among others) Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Chopin, Gilman, DuBois, Black Elk, and Faulkner.
9405 ENGL 325-01 Intro to Linq:MWF 10:00-10:50am HM103 (Prof Stewart, Jr.)
Description: Linguistics is the study of the forms and functions of human language. The study of language forms includes the description and analysis of speech sounds (phonetics & phonology), word forms and their relationships (morphology), building phrases and sentences (syntax), and meaning units and combinations (semantics). The study of language functions includes the analysis of the role of dialects and registers in society, the dynamics of language variation, processes of language change, and the ways in which language is acquired and develops.
Objectives: By the end of this course, a student will be able to:
Note: This course is a Core course in the Undergraduate Minor in Linguistics. For more information, see http://bit.ly/UG_lingminor.
1150 ENGL 333-01 Shakespeare I:T/Th 9:30-10:45am DA303 (Prof. Wise)
26 April 2016 will mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakepeare’s death. This fall we will welcome to Louisville an international exhibit of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, which preserved 36 plays, 18 of which might have been lost had they not been collected in this printed volume. Our course will be a celebration of the life and remarkable plays and poetry of William Shakespeare, with a focus on a broad variety of Shakespearian texts and contexts. We will study seven plays and a few sonnets, using diverse critical lenses that elucidate the time-resistant themes and complex human concerns that captured his imagination, permeated his language, and led him to embrace the theater as his universe. Our activities will include short lectures, long discussions, informal and formal writing, video viewing, research projects, performance exercises, and group presentations.
7669 369-01 ENGL Min Trads ENGL Lit-CD1:T/Th 9:30-10:45 HM114 (Prof. Willey)
In this class, we will be reading literature by Caribbean immigrants to America from 1900 to the present. Beginning with the literature of Pan-Africanism brought to the United States by the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, we will explore how Jamaican immigrants like Garvey and Claude McKay helped shape one of the most important schools of African American writing, the Harlem Renaissance. We will continue tracing the path of Jamaica in American literature by reading Paule Marshall’s groundbreaking novel, Brown Girl, Brownstone, one of the first popular novels from the burgeoning field of African American women writers popular in the 1960s and 1970s. From there we will move on to investigate a another central (and growing) site of influence from the Caribbean, The Dominican Republic, with a study of Julia Alvarez’ How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, and the more recent coming of age story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. To end the course, we will look at the legacy of revolutionary ideologies from the Caribbean and how writers working from within the legacies of the earliest Caribbean national revolution (Haiti) and the most recent revolution (Cuba) have come to define themselves as part of America through Edwidge Danticat’s novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory and Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
1151 ENGL 373-01 Women in Lit-CD2:MW 4:00-5:15pm HM121 (Prof. Peck)
*This course is cross-listed
This class will investigate how women writers and readers have shaped the contours of the literary experience over time. Though focusing our attention on novels and poetry, we will also look at texts, such as Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels, that challenge traditional definitions of the literary. On a daily basis students will consider how the concepts “literature” and “woman” help define each other. Contemporary theories of gender will also be touched on.
1645 ENGL 373-02 Women in Lit-CD2:T/Th 11:00-12:15pm TBA (Prof. Hadley)
*This course is cross-listed
On the heels of Victorian gender conventions, the 20th century witnessed the birth of the “New Woman.” Celebrated and reviled, women in the period were pushing boundaries in a number of public spheres, with the suffragist movement and the right to vote (1920), the freedom to travel alone, the increasing numbers of women receiving university education and degrees, and the exercise of new sexual freedom with accompanying birth control and childcare movements. The modernist woman writer (reflecting more general intellectual trends) likewise revised inherited conventions, seeking to discover a new “woman’s sentence” of her own, one more accurately defining and reflecting women’s experience. With the final decades of the century, women began to experience an increasing sense of diversity, of “difference,” especially given the rapidly expanding fields of lesbian literary studies, and literary representations of African-American, ethnic, and postcolonial traditions.
This course will explore such cultural and literary developments as they are reflected in select texts by women writers of the 20th century. As such, we will discuss the increasing forms of difference represented in women’s writing, particularly as they are addressed in racial, ethnic, and postcolonial contexts.
9201 ENGL 373-50 Women in Lit-CD2: Distance Ed (Prof. White)
In this course we will examine the way archetypes of women are portrayed in major literary works in different cultural periods. Focusing on the way gender binaries function to create expectations of female behavior, this course uses various texts to discuss how gender norms contribute to the cultural representations of women. We’ll challenge ourselves to think about how these literary texts complicate women’s participation in society: reducing women to accepted gender roles; or place women on the fringe of society for their rejection of the expectations placed on them by their community.
9202 ENGL 374-01 Gender & Children’s Lit-CD2:MW 2:00-3:15pm HM123 (Professor Heinecken)
*This course is cross-listed
This course examines the representation of gender and race in children’s and YA literature through close readings of a range of novels published in the U.S. and Britain after 1850.Course readings are presented in a chronological fashion in order to foreground the evolution of ideologies at work in children’s literature over time, with a particular focus on multicultural literature published after 1960. Works that will be examined include classic and contemporary books by leading authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Sherman Alexie, Virginia Hamilton, Cynthia Kadohata, Carolyn Keene, and Mildred Taylor, among others. There is extensive reading required. This course satisfies the University Gen Ed CD2 requirement.
9204 ENGL 375-01/WGST 375:LGBTQ Lit-CD2:T/Th 2:30-3:45 HM121 (Prof. Kopelson)
*This course is cross-listed
In this section of LGBTQ Literature we will read mid-to-late 20th century works which will have us reflect on the concepts of belonging, community, race, and nation in the context of, or as these intersect with, LGBTQ issues, identities, and concerns.
More specifically, we will read novels (and one play) which feature characters who, to varying degrees, struggle not only with sexual identity but who struggle with sexual identity in the context of—and sometimes because of—questions or issues of belonging to various communities (marked by race or gender or class or politics, for example), and who even struggle with the notion of belonging to the larger “community” of the nation (US). Though the word “America” appears in only one of our works’ titles (the play Angels in America), in many ways this is a course about America, or at least about slices of America, represented literarily, at various points in history from the 1920s through the more recent past (the 1990s). Course themes will thus be lent particular salience by the election season in which we will find ourselves.
In addition to reading our main literary works, we will read and respond to literary criticism on each text under study as part of the course’s efforts to deepen your understanding of the conventions of analyzing and writing about literature.The course allows for students to take essay examinations or write papers of literary analysis as the midterm and final course projects.
9164 ENGL 394-01 American Short Fict:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm DA208B (Prof. Ridge)
By reading a range of contemporary American short fiction, we will investigate the way in which this genre speaks to American concepts: culture and counterculture, individualism, and the American Dream.
6538 ENGL 401-01 HON:The Suffragettes-WR:MWF 11:00-11:50 HR204 (Prof. Clukey)
*This section is restricted to students eligible for the Honors Program
2016 is not just an election year: it’s an election year in which a female candidate is a serious contender for the office of President of the United States. Nearly a century after the ratification of the nineteenth amendment that gave women the constitutional right to vote, it’s time to take a look back at American and British women went from being the legal property of their husbands and fathers to fully-fledged citizens and political agents. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to examine first wave feminism in general and the fight for the vote in particular. We will discuss nineteenth-century gender roles for white and black women, class hierarchies in the feminist movement, anti-feminist activism against women’s suffrage, the connection between women’s rights and imperialism, racism within the women’s movement, and the militant turn of the 1910s. Although many people today associate suffragettes with black-and-white photos of women in big hats, I think you’ll find that first wave feminist activists were far more interested in dismantling strident gender roles, heckling the president, revolutionary suicide, and bomb making than in Victorian femininity.
9194 ENGL 401-02 Avant-Garde @ Black Mnt Coll:T/Th 4:00-5:15pm TH132 (Prof. Golding)
*This course is cross-listed
What It Means To Be Avant-Garde: Literature, The Arts, and Experimental Education at Black Mountain College
This seminar explores the relationship between the arts and education at Black Mountain College (1933-1957), the tiny experimental college in North Carolina that centered its curriculum in the arts and that—in terms both of the figures who taught there in multiple disciplines and the students it produced—became one of the most influential arts institutions of the twentieth century. The literary component of the class focuses on the poetry, short fiction, and cultural theory of the Black Mountain School, those poets who attended or taught at Black Mountain between about 1948 and 1956 and the associated poets who shared the same networks of correspondence and publication into the 1960s. Equally important to the course, however, will be the interaction of literature with major figures in the other arts: Merce Cunningham in dance, John Cage and David Tudor in music, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg in painting, Mary Caroline Richards in ceramics. A central goal is to pursue the implications of a question posed in the poet Lyn Hejinian's My Life: "Isn't the avant-garde always pedagogical [?]” For the community of artists and students at Black Mountain, what were the connections between experimental art making and cutting-edge thinking about teaching? If all goes according to plan, the seminar will include a field trip to the major retrospective exhibit “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957”
(http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/leap-you-look-black-mountain-college-1933%E2%80%931957), now at the ICA in Boston but coming to Ohio State.
4333 ENGL 403-01 Advanced Creat Writ: MW 4:00-5:15pm HM223 (Prof. Weinberg)
In this advanced multi-genre workshop, students with a strong commitment to writing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or drama will rhapsodize about craft, write many pages, and engage in the art of constructive criticism. It will be up to you to decide which genre or genres to concentrate on; the main objective is the continued development of your writing practices, while adding new compositional and critical techniques to your repertoire. Short writing exercises will encourage you to experiment, to try out different approaches. While class sessions will be used primarily to discuss work written by class members, readings and discussions will also focus on contemporary published work and other issues relevant to creative writing. In addition to producing a portfolio of revised work, you will complete a creative research project designed to inspire the imagination and strengthen the final product.
ENGL 413-01 British Lit-Arthurian Romance Lit:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm HM106 (Prof. Dietrich)
We will read a selection of Arthurian romances from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, examining the nature of the cultural transition from Medieval to Early Modern. We will pay particular attention to conflicting constructions of nobility, masculinity, honor, chivalry, and Christian ethics. We will also focus on making and evaluating arguments in the discipline of English, including the ability to identify the critical method being employed. Students will be asked to write short responses to the readings, to summarize two critical works, and to complete a ten-page research paper.
9165 ENGL 415-01-19th Century Brit Lit-WR:MWF 9:00-9:50am DA208A (Prof.Rosner)
Description: Fiction can be discussed in many ways. In this class, we will focus on how Gothic fiction was transformed in different ways in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Toward that end, we’ll begin by identifying characteristics of Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, and then we’ll discuss what some later nineteenth-century British authors did with one or more of these characteristics in order to meet their needs.
This is a lecture-discussion/conversation class. I’ll lecture for some parts of class; we’ll have conversations about the texts for most parts of class. Class participation is essential but so is careful reading on schedule. To encourage attention to details for class conversations, expect regular reading assignments. Because English 415 is a WR course, you should also expect regular formal and informal writing assignments.
7672 ENGL 418-01 Amer Lit to 1830-WR:T/Th 9:30-10:45pm NS130 (Prof. Mattes)
This course explores American literature written during the late-colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. Students consider how Enlightenment-era writers yoked assumptions about reason, feeling, and representation to comprehend their worlds. After a brief introduction to Enlightenment thought in North American and Atlantic contexts, students delve into works involving revolution and political representation; the contributions of Native Americans and African Americans to science, history, education, and religion; the transnational dimensions of Enlightenment discourse; the everyday experiences of women; and belletristic writing. Students will write a short, formal response; an annotated bibliography; and a significant essay that incorporates archival sources and scholarship. In order to facilitate our writing about literature from this period, we will visit two local sites pertaining to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American culture: The Filson Historical Society and the Locust Grove Plantation. These on-site researches will help us better understand the histories, genres, and media through which early Americans constituted themselves.
7673 ENGL 422-01 Amer Lit 1960-Pres-WR:MW 4:00-5:15pm HM221 (Prof. McDonald)
The open road has long held the promise of mobility and freedom in the American imagination. By the 1960s, however, the romantic vision of the road as an inclusive space of national promise had begun to fray at the edges. Increasingly, writers, filmmakers, and social critics depicted the road as a dangerous “fringe zone” populated by the nation’s drifters, deviants, and discontents. In this course, we will read and watch a wide range of contemporary road narratives with the goal of tracing the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the genre. We will ask what these stories of rebellion and transgression can tell us about mainstream American life: its fantasies and fears, its political promises and persecutions, its forms of community and methods of exclusion. How does the road narrative upset national tropes of identity, such as individualism, the nuclear family, and the American Dream? What do we make of the genre’s recurring themes of violence, disenfranchisement, and death? Why do these tales of marginalization and difference so often focus on white cis men? Finally, what types of community and personhood become possible on the road, and for whom? Students in this class will engage critically and creatively with the assigned texts, which may include works by Jack Kerouac, John A. Williams, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, Hunter S. Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Sam Shepard, C.D. Wright, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barry Hannah, Sherman Alexie, Karen Tei Yamashita, Geoff Ryman, Lorrie Moore, and Cormac McCarthy. Films may include Badlands, Easy Rider, Wild at Heart, Thelma and Louise, and My Own Private Idaho.
1626 ENGL 423-01 Afr/Amer Lit. 1845-Pres-WR: CD1MWF 1:00-1:50 DA107 (Prof. Anderson)
This literature survey will introduce you to African American literature, but will also discuss ways that this literature relates to a broader American literary tradition (as well as other traditions), and even ways that bodies of literature are conceived and debated.
We’ll cover a larger range of literature, from the 18th century to the present, and discuss the complex relationships of African American literature to its historical contexts, such as the importance of literacy, and the uses of literature for social representation and moral suasion. We will also discuss the relationship of literature to such to abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights movement. Outcomes will be assessed through essay examinations, essays (including a research paper), class reports, summaries of scholarship, in-class writing, and class discussion.
1152 ENGL 450-01 Cooperative Internship in English Studies: Internship:(Prof. Chandler)
*This section requires permission from the instructor
7114 ENGL 455-01 Cooperative Internship in English-CUE:(Prof. Chandler)
*This section requires permission from the instructor
9166 ENGL 470-01 Studies Lit Movement-WR:MWF 2:00-2:50pm DO006 (Prof. TBA)
3537 ENGL 491-01 Inter.Theory:New Crit-Present:MWF 1:00-1:50pm HM108 (Professor McDonald)
What is literature and how do we read it? In this course, we will begin to answer these deceptively difficult questions by examining the major schools of 20C interpretive theory, from New Criticism to contemporary work in affect theory and media studies. The aims of the course are as follows: 1) to gain a theoretical understanding of the basic terms, concepts, and approaches of major critical schools; 2) to gain a historical understanding of how critical theory has developed over time; 3) to become skilled practitioners of different critical methods through in-class lab work. As we read, historicize, evaluate, and practice interpretive theory, we will participate in debates that lie at the very heart of the humanities. What is the difference between a work and a text? Is there such a thing as objective criticism? Who “authors” a text’s meaning? And why does it matter?
4237 ENGL 491-75 Interp Theory:New Crit-Present:T/Th 5:30-6:45pm HM108 (Professor Adams)
This course introduces students to central texts and movements in literary and cultural theory in the 20th Century. We will organize our readings around three large topics: 1) the distinctiveness of literary art, 2) interpretation and its related problems (among them intention, affect, and meaning), and 3) issues in representation (including history, ideology, gender, race, and sexuality).
5411 ENGL 504-01 ADV Creative Writ II-Poetry:T/Th 11:00am-12:15pm TBA (Professor Maxwell)
In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack recalls the coining of the term “poethics” as her “attempt to note and value traditions in art exemplified by a linking of aesthetic registers to the fluid and rapidly changing experiences of everyday life.” She later describes the “poethical” as a “questing to know what can be known only by means of poetry, approaching what is radically unknowable prior to the poetic project, acting in an interrogative mode that attempts to invite extra-textual experience into the poetics somehow on its terms, terms other than those dictated by egoistic desires.” In this course, we will aim to occupy a poethical position and engage in some writing experiments that prioritize investigation of—and interaction with—the world “on its terms.” The class will consist of four units: Object Studies, Documentary Poetics/Literary Activism, Collecting, and Walking Forms, and readings will include work by Francis Ponge, Maggie Nelson, C.D. Wright, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Sei Shōnagon, Robyn Schiff, and Harryette Mullen.
1153 ENGL 506-75 Teaching of Writ-WR:CUE T/Th 4:00-5:15pm NS110 (Professor Kopelson)
In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about some past and recent Composition Studies scholarship which has shaped the theory and come to inform the practice of teaching writing at the postsecondary level. (Note that though the scholarship we will be working with deals largely with teaching college writing, it will be relevant to teaching writing at the secondary level as well.) As we wrestle with this scholarship, we will continually pose questions such as: What does it mean or entail to teach “writing?” To what ends do we teach it? In the process of addressing these questions, we will find that “teaching writing” is hardly a straightforward or objective task, but one that involves many complex social, personal, disciplinary, and political interactions and ramifications.
4137 ENGL 510-01 Grad Coop Internship MA Level:(Professor Schneider)
*This section requires permission from the instructor
9407 ENGL 518-01 Found of Language:T/Th 9:30-10:45am HM210 (Professor Swinehart)
This course introduces students to approaches to the study language from the adjacent fields of linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. Areas covered include semiotics, semantics, syntax and morphology, phonetics and phonology, discourse and pragmatics, animal versus human communication, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and writing systems. Across topics an emphasis is placed on orienting students to the diversity of human languages through a comparative approach.
9408 ENGL 522-01 Structure of Modern English:MWF 1:00-1:50pm HM210 (Professor Stewart, Jr.)
*This is a cross-listed course
Examination of the structure of modern English language; emphasis on grammatical terminology and systems of classification. Students collect and analyze linguistic examples, spoken and written. Recommended for prospective English teachers.
Prerequisite: ENGL 102 or 105; junior standing.
Note: This course can count in the Theoretical Track concentration or as an Elective for the Undergraduate Minor in Linguistics. For more information, see http://bit.ly/UG_lingminor.
Course Goals:
Student Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
9167 ENGL 543-75 Stud in Stuart & Cmnwlth Lit-CUE:T/Th 7:00-8:15pm SK111 (Prof. 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 across the range of seventeenth-century English poetry and prose from Jonson to Milton. 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.
9168 ENGL 550-01 Stud in Afr-Amer Lit-CUE:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm DA101 (Prof. Chandler)
This course will explore the developing culture of reading among African Americans from before the Civil War through the early years of the twentieth century. It will examine the role of periodicals, church schools, and literary societies, as well as private and public writing by Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Rebecca Primus, William Wells Brown, William Still, Ida B. Wells, and others. Goals for the course will be exploring archives of African American writing to consider the variety of literature and publishing venues in the latter half of the 19th century. This will facilitate understanding nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American intellectual and literary pursuits. The course will explore key questions about identity, society, nature, and cultural memory.
9169 ENGL 551-01 Animal Studies 1700-1900:T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA207 (Prof. Ridley)
9208 ENGL 551-02/HUM561-01 Jewish Graphic Novels:T/Th 1:00-2:15pm HM111 (Prof. Sherman)
In recent years the graphic novel has received considerable attention as an explosive cultural phenomenon. Today one cannot walk into any chain bookstore without noting the ever-proliferating bookshelf space afforded for the display of graphic novels, as many in the publishing industry have become aware of their artistic and literary, as well as commercial, vitality. As Hillary Chute asserts, graphic novels embody “an embrace of reproducibility and mass circulation as well as a rigorous, experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention.” This course offers students a substantial encounter with the variety of challenges to Jewish identity and selfhood represented in the graphic novel’s enduring fascination with the consequences of the erasure/repression, as well as celebration, of ethnic/racial origins. We will examine how graphic novels (and even the comics genre) can embody a powerful composite text of words and images that produces effects significantly different from more traditional forms of literary narrative. And this creative power becomes especially striking when placed in the service of racial, religious, and ethnic identity exploration. This course explores the profound influence of the Jewish imagination on the art of visual narrative from the creation of Superman to graphic memoirs about Auschwitz and beyond.
9170 ENGL 574-01 Amer Lit 1960-Pres:Nat Amer.-CUE:MWF 10:00-10:50am GH202 (Prof. Kelderman)
When N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn in 1969, this marked a key moment in a literary movement now known as the “Native American Renaissance.” Why did this literary tradition emerge when it did, and how did it influence contemporary Native American literature? What are the aesthetic, cultural, and political questions that Native authors brought to the fore? And why did some writers enter the canon of (Native) American literature, while others have been overlooked? In exploring these questions, we will examine how Native American writers since the early 1960s have artistically engaged critical issues facing tribal nations in the United States. We will read novels, poetry, plays, and political writings by Native American authors, and study several films by Native directors. In the process, students will become familiar with relevant keywords in Native American literary studies, such as indigeneity, gender, nationalism, sovereignty, race, colonialism, and modernity. Students who take this class will closely engage with works by authors including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marnie Walsh, James Welch, Simon Ortiz, LeAnne Howe, Louise Erdrich, Paula Gunn Allen, and Gerald Vizenor.
7679 ENGL 577-01 Harlem Renaissance-CUE:MW 2:30-3:45pm DA205 (Prof. Logan)
In-depth study of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in relation to other literary and artistic productions of the period and to cultural and historical contexts.
9189 ENGL 599-01 Documentary Film:MW 2:00-3:15pm WS108 (Prof. Johnson)
Increasingly, non-fiction film has emerged as a popular and powerful medium in the twenty-first century. Documentaries have shaped the public agenda (An Inconvenient Truth, Bowling for Columbine, Food Inc.); podcasts have taken on traditional institutions like law and economics (Serial, Freakonomics); most recently, there has been a marked rise in attention to pseudo-non-fiction in cinema as the biopic has emerged (The Big Short, The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, Straight Outta Compton, Steve Jobs). To understand this broad genre of non-fictional and visual texts, this course introduces students to the work of a variety photographers, filmmakers, folklorists, podcasters, and writers all working in a non-fiction capacity to record and persuade using visual materials. We will be viewing and discussing traditional documentaries like Ways of Seeing, Food Inc., and An Inconvenient Truth; non-fiction programming and podcasts like PBS’s Nature/NOVA, Ken Burn’s Civil War, and the Freakonomics Blog;anda variety of industrial and educational films from throughout the twentieth-century (just to name a few). We turn to these texts in order to explore the narrative, aesthetic, and theoretical decisions the filmmakers have made. Students will be producing response essays to these materials, their own documentary short, podcast, or photographic exhibit, and a final critical essay that fulfills the Arts and Sciences CUE requirement.
9188 ENGL 599-02 Adv. Stud in Engl;WR;CUE;MWF 2:00-2:50pm HM204 (Prof. Fuller)
In this mixed-genre writing workshop, we will each choose one creative project to finish by the end of the semester. We’ll begin by establishing the features that most writing genres and art forms share, with readings and exercises that flex our senses of what’s possible in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, drama, and even text/visual art hybrids such as graphic novels and comic books. Any of these genres or forms is available to you for the final project, but as we move forward, beyond the similarities, and into the specific demands of each genre, and then more importantly, toward the specific needs of each students’ creative plan, that’s when the course becomes more individualized in support (both from your instructor and workshop peers), the readings (works that are relevant to your project), and the methods that you present your progress (Is there a video? An image? Does it need to be read aloud?). To magnify the process of your creative writing project, you will also plan and complete a concise research component, that contextualizes the project within its tradition. This will be especially informative to other members of the class, after we begin workshopping the products of our individual efforts, without necessarily sharing those same practices for that style/form/genre. Included in this research portion of the project, you will also have the opportunity and expectation to find venues for a project such of yours, beyond the context as a student (Is there a magazine that seems to feature works like yours? An arts festival or convention? A book publisher?). This course is about completing ideas, and thinking about representing yourself and your project far beyond graduation. At the end of the semester, we will hold a literary reading that highlights our combined efforts and represents our completed works to each other, and the community.
