Spring 2015 Course Descriptions — Department of English

Spring 2015

3036 ENGL 202-01 Introduction to Creative Writing:

MWF 9-9:50am HUM109 (TBA )

3037 ENGL 202-02 Introduction to Creative Writing:

MWF 2:00-2:50pm HM217 (Professor Sova)

This course focuses on reading and composing poetry and creative prose. Through readings, workshops, and writing exercises in and out of class, students will have the opportunity to interact with other writers in addition to honing and developing their own creative process. The primary course goal will be to cultivate the creation of interesting literary fiction and poetry.

3349 ENGL 202-03 Introduction to Creative Writing:

T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA204 (Professor Martinez)

An Introduction to Creative Writing, offers the opportunity to explore the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama with the goal of enabling students to gain or improve competence as readers, writers, and critics in all three genres. Students will leave English 202 prepared for the demands of higher level creative writing courses, having learned a set of techniques for invention, writing, and revision; a critical vocabulary for each genre; experience in workshop sessions; and a broader knowledge of contemporary literature in each genre.

6902 ENGL 202-75 Introduction to Creative Writing:

T/Th 5:30 pm-6:45pm DA208B (Professor Ridge)

This course serves as an introduction to creative writing; students will become familiar with the conventions of poetry, fiction and drama. Through deep engagement with literary texts, students will identify elements of craft and utilize these techniques as they draft and revise their own original work. This course will also provide an introduction to the creative writing workshop: students will develop an analytical framework, provide feedback on their peers’ work, engage in constructive dialogue with one another, and utilize the comments they receive to refine their own writing.

4070 ENGL 250-01 Introduction to Literature –H:

T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA308 (Professor Griner)

Welcome to Introduction to Literature, a course that is intended to introduce you to methods of interpreting literature. We will read and analyze several types of literature during the semester, including short stories, novellas, short story collections that work as books, a novel, poetry, and creative nonfiction (a memoir).

In class, we will analyze both the content of the pieces we read and their structure, symbolism, and themes, with emphasis on the latter. The course should provide you with greater insight into the many different types of important and influential schools of criticism about literature, and to some of the many types of literature you might encounter in later English classes.

4740 ENGL 300-01 Introduction to English Studies-WR:

MWF 11-11:50am HM123 (TBA)

4741 ENGL 300-02 Introduction to English Studies-WR:

MW 4-5:15pm DA209B (Professor Mattes)

This introduction to the English major will cover a range of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama while introducing students to central terms and methods of literary criticism and history. In addition to giving close attention to the “internal,” aesthetic elements of texts, we will consider the social contexts in which such texts are written and read. These contexts include broader social, economic, and cultural currents in which our readings are embedded and to which they speak; changing disciplinary attitudes regarding issues of art, genre, canon, and more generally, the politics of literary study; and the contributions literary studies make to conversations across disciplines.

5328ENGL 300-03 Introduction to English Studies-WR:

T/Th 11am-12:15pm SH208 (Professor Mattes)

3038 ENGL 301-01 British Literature I:

MWF 10-10:50am DA104 (Professor Stanev)

This course will survey a representative selection of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Medieval, and Renaissance 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 and artistic ideas. Discussions will investigate the language and significance of a profoundly dynamic body of works, which emerge from the domains of heroic epics, romances, folk plays, the fabliaux, erotic and pastoral poetry, allegory, and liturgical and secular drama.

3759 ENGL 301-75 British Literature I:

T/Th 7-8:15pm DA308 (Professor Billingsley)

This course surveys British literature from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. We concentrate upon the reading and interpretation (both written and oral) of representative works; lectures and secondary readings provide historical and cultural background for understanding the works within the milieu of their creation. If this course is successful, at its end you should be able to do the following:

read and understand representative works in the context of their original creation and as received in critical study, and demonstrate that understanding in your own brief close readings and critical commentary;
demonstrate basic familiarity with the prosody of English poetry by the practical scansion of selected poems;
place these works in their historical, social and cultural context, and explicate that context in critical discussion of the works and authors;
participate in and synthesize other readers' perceptions in oral and written discussion; and
comprehend and express an informed historical-critical understanding of class, gender and literary culture issues in clearly organized, competently argued and well-supported academic prose.
Text: Greenblatt, et al., Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edition, Major Authors Volume 1.

3039 ENGL 302-01 British Literature II:

T/Th 11am-12:15pm DA204 (Professor Clukey)

This introductory course will undertake a chronological overview of the major literary and social movements of British literature from Romanticism to Modernism. We will consider poetry, short stories, drama, essays, and novels from and about England, the Celtic Fringe, and the British colonies. This course will provide you with the opportunity to reflect on how British literature reflects issues of empire, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and diaspora.

3040 ENGL 303-01 Scientific and Technical Writing-WR:

MWF 1-1:50pm DA104 (TBA)

3041 ENGL 303-02 Scientific and Technical Writing-WR:

T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA209B (Professor Olinger)

This course is designed for upper-division students in computer science, engineering, and the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics), as well as other departments. Given the diversity of majors and career trajectories here and the multiplicity of writing practices entailed, each of you will research writing and communication in your own academic and professional areas of interest. You will discover how members of your field communicate technical information—to each other and to the public—and you will develop strategies for analyzing and responding to these and other new writing situations.

5572 ENGL 304-01 Creative Nonfiction

MWF 10-10:50am EH112 (Professor Mozer)

Creative Nonfiction Survey and Workshop
"What's so creative about nonfiction? Don't you just, like, write biographies and stuff?"
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that takes those creative techniques we typically assign to fiction—setting, plot, character development, dialogue—and uses them to make true stories more interesting and compelling. Other subgenres of creative nonfiction include memoir, personal essay, and some forms of journalism.

In this class, we will get to know the genre by reading the work of both published and student writers; both longer works or memoir and lots and lots of shorter essay. We will talk about bending and blurring genre lines. We will talk about craft. We will read a lot, write a lot, and talk--a lot. Students will do a series of short writing assignments across the semester. We will also do at least one workshop of one piece from each student--if you're shy about sharing your work with others, this might not be the class for you. But I hope it is. We all have stories to tell. Come craft and hone the telling of yours.

(Prerequisite note: Students must have completed a basic, introduction to creative writing course in order to take 304. This is a 300-level creative writing course. We will build upon a foundation that 202 has already put in place.)

3042 ENGL 305-01 Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction:

T/Th 11am-12:15pm TBA (Professor Ridge)

This intermediate workshop is essentially an investigation into how fiction (and the short story in particular) works, or, in some cases, doesn’t. It is designed to provide not only a valuable community in which to produce original fiction, but also a “practice space” to fine tune our approaches to writing, reading, and revising short stories. In addition to workshopping original stories, students will engage in critical reading with an eye towards craft. One of the primary objectives is to immerse students in the nuances of fiction by learning to read closely and carefully so that we can artfully dissect the architecture of a particular piece of writing.

4777 ENGL 305-75 Intermediate Creative Writing:Poetry:

MW 5:30-6:45pm HM219 (Professors 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 creative writing.

COURSE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Through the work of the course students will: build a vocabulary with which to discuss contemporary poetry; explore in some depth a number of contemporary published works and discern their strengths and weaknesses with increasing insight and clarity; learn to recognize the difference between levels of precision in language; learn something of the historical context for contemporary poetry; become familiar with some of the basics of prosody; and learn to profitably apply all of the foregoing to the improvement and growth of their own original poems, and to those of their peers.

4069 ENGL 306-01 Business Writing-WR:

T/Th 8-9:15am HM207 (TBA)

3043 ENGL 306-02 Business Writing-WR:

MWF 11-11:50am NS317 (TBA)

3044 ENGL 306-03 Business Writing-WR:

MW 4-5:15pm DA101 (TBA)

3046 ENGL 306-04 Business Writing-WR:

TTh 9:30-10:45pm SH208 (TBA)

3047 ENGL 306-05 Business Writing-WR:

TTh 11:00am-12:15pm NSLL30 (TBA)

3048 ENGL 306-06 Business Writing-WR:

T/Th 1-2:15pm DA103 (Professor Johnson)

English 306 explores the intersections of writing and economic relations (or more familiarly, business). In addition to creating documents standard to professional settings (briefs, proposals, cover letters, etc.), the course is designed to interrogate how professional settings are, in many ways, written by powerful cultural and institutional narratives. A student in English 306 should expect to create and revise documents in multiple genres. Each document should establish a clear purpose, sense of audience awareness, and sense of the writer’s presence and position.

5344 ENGL 306-50 Business Writing-WR:

Distance Ed. (Professor 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.

5345 ENGL 306-53 Business Writing-WR:

Distance Ed. (Professor Tanner)

5346 ENGL 306-54 Business Writing-WR:

Distance Ed. (Professor Tanner)

3486 ENGL 306-75 Business Writing-WR:

MW 5:30-6:45pm HM221 (TBA)

3049 ENGL 306-76 Business Writing-WR:

MW 7:00-8:15pm HM106 (TBA)

4763 ENGL 306-77 Business Writing-WR:

T/Th 4-5:15pm DA209B (TBA)

3487ENGL 306-78 Business Writing-WR:

T/Th 7:00-8:15pm HM217 (TBA)

6387 ENGL 309-01 Inquiries in Writing-WR:

T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DH208A (Professor Turner)

Personal Writing. Most of us were taught that you can’t use “I” in academic writing. But what about the occasions when you have to? There are circumstances in which you must use “I” statements, especially in jobs documents such as resumes, cover letters, and grant applications. In addition to practical applications, we will also examine how others, such as Alain de Botton and David Sedaris, have organized and expressed life experiences through personal essays and other creative non-fiction. The capstone assignment will be a personal essay or narrative.

3050 ENGL 309-02 Inquiries in Writing-WR:

T 1-3:45pm SH001 (Professor Rogers)

This English 309 section focuses on creative nonfiction and inquiry-based research writing. As we investigate creative nonfiction, the class will read a number of related writings as well as composing individual pieces. For the research component of the course (the “I-search” project), students will demonstrate their ability to discover and evaluate sources, discuss their findings, and reflect on the research process. All major work will be collected in a final portfolio that includes journal responses and 20 or more pages of revised writing.

3051 ENGL 310-01 Writing About Literature Nonmajor-WR:

T/Th 9:30-10:45am SH001 (TBA)

3052 ENGL 310-02 Writing About Literature Nonmajor-WR:

TTh 1-2:15pm DA301 (TBA)

5331 ENGL 310-03 Writing About Literature-Nonmajor-WR:

MW 4-5:15pm DA308 (TBA)

4071 ENGL 311-01 American Literature I:

MWF 1:00-1:50pm DA306 (Professor Chandler)

This survey of American literature will explore its beginnings in the period of European contact and extend to the era of the Civil War. The course will examine a range of literature within its cultural and historical contexts.

3054 ENGL 312-01 American Literature II:

MW 2-3:15pm DA104 (Professor Adams)

American Literature II: American Selves, American Others

This course will introduce major texts of American poetry, prose, and drama from (roughly) 1860 to 1960. We will pay particular attention to how writers articulated ideas of “self” and “other,” and how these notions reflected or critiqued rapidly changing historical and cultural conditions . Authors will include (among others) Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Chopin, James, Gilman, DuBois, Crane, Black Elk, Eliot, O’Neill, Wright, Hurston, Hughes, and Ellison.

3053 ENGL 312-02 ENGL American Literature II:

T/Th 1-2:15pm DA104 (Professor Adams)

American Literature II: American Selves, American Others

8327 ENGL 325-01 Introduction to Linguistics:

MWF 9-9:50am HM221 (Professor Soldat-Jaffe)

Linguists believe that language is a complex social phenomenon – not an autonomous entity -, which occurs exclusively in social settings, and that these two factors (i.e. language and its social settings) influence each other. In this understanding, language is a form of social behavior and therefore fundamental for the speaker’s identification with its environment. Moreover, language and its social setting interact, language influences social settings and social settings influence language. In other words, following Halliday, language is "a social-semiotic," a system of meaning that operates through output.

This class is an introductory course into the science of language, also known as linguistics. We will look at how language "works": what is the internal structure of language (the description of language) and the usage of it (the analysis of language)? We will investigate in this course what it means when we say that "language is more than just a language". We will find answers to questions such as "what is language?", "how do we use language?", "how do children learn language?", "are there other forms of language?", "what happens when we loose language due to an accident e.g.?", etc.

5573 ENGL 325-50 Introduction to Linguistics:

Distance Learning (Professor Patton)

3055 ENGL 334-01 Shakespeare II:

MWF 11-11:50am HM101 (Professor Stanev)

We live in a world of idioms and proverbs; one such is that Shakespeare is our contemporary. Is he indeed? What did we appropriate by naming him so? What do we really know of the Bard and his works, and how did Shakespeare become our contemporary? Are we aware how his social and cultural milieu influenced his drama? Moreover, how does one read Shakespeare? How is one supposed to understand his dramatic language and its structural complexities? The course will attempt to answer these and some further questions by examining a number of Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, romances, comedies, and sonnets. We will contextualize some of the major socio-political and cultural changes in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which influenced the Bard, and our discussions will explore how he reflected on, as well as contributed to, the dynamism of Tudor and Stuart society.

4305 ENGL 369-01 Minority Trads Amer Lit – CD1:

T/Th 9:30-10:45 DA107 (Professor Heryford)

From Environmentalism to Environmental Justice: Race, Ethnicity and Ecology in Contemporary US Literature and Culture

In our own current historical moment, often defined as an era of ecological crisis, when the effects of global climate change and resource scarcity are drastically altering the lives of a vast majority of the world’s people, where the term genocide now refers not only to aggressive acts of killing, but also to the exclusion of the many from the right to survival, why is it that in the United States, the term ‘environmentalism’ is often embedded within a bourgeois, apolitical discourse, signaling to practices of corporate ‘green’-washing and a sustainability model that, as ecocritic Stacy Alaimo notes, more often than not works to “render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite?”

In this course, we will look at the way in which environmental movements of the 20^th and 21^st centuries have been challenged and re-imagined by cultural texts documenting ecological harm and crisis as they continue to play out along uneven divides structured by race, ethnicity, class and cultural difference. Focusing on a wide range of contemporary US cultural producers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Helena María Viramontes, Jamaica Kincaid and Karen Tei Yamashita, we will explore issues of the environment as they are inherently tied to questions of social activism and historical redress. Additionally, we will be concerned with how different cultural forms are able to articulate, what ecocritic Rob Nixon has referred to as, the slow violence of environmental and social catastrophes, highlighting “disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image saturated world.” In charting these different historical and cultural shifts, this course will ultimately work toward new definitions of environmentalism, ones similar to Graham Huggins and Helen Tiffin’s assertion that there is “no social justice without environmental justice; and without social justice – for all ecological beings – no justice at all.”

4742 ENGL 370-01 Study Abroad:

(Professor Willey)

6929 ENGL 372-01 “Who Done It?” Det. Fiction:

MWF 11-11:50am DA101 (Professor Rosner)

In this class, we will examine key works of detective fiction as well as some novels that are not as well know--works by Poe, Doyle, Christie, Tey, Dexter, Cornwell, Lem. We'll also read and discuss some criticism. I'll lecture for some parts of class; we'll have conversations about the texts for most parts of class. Homework, reading quizzes, exams, 1-2 projects.

2970 ENGL 373-01/WGST 325 Women in Literature-CD2:

MWF 12:00-12:50pm HM221 (Professor Heryford)

Eco-feminism: A Study of Gender and Environmental Literatures

In this course, we will look at the way in which nature writing, environmentalism, and environmental justice movements have been influenced, critiqued and re-constructed by cultural texts documenting forms of ecological engagement and environmental activism that attend to questions of gender and sexuality. Focusing on a transnational range of women writers and cultural producers from the late-19^th century to the present, including Isabella Bird, June Jordan, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Hogan, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Bhanu Kapil, we will explore issues of the environment as they are linked to gender politics. This course will be concerned with the historical waves of feminist activism and situate itself within an intersectional reading of literature that considers these texts as mutually constituted by questions concerning gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. We will encounter terms and fields of study such as environmental justice, eco-feminism, environmental sexism, and critical species theory. Additionally, we will be concerned with how different feminist cultural producers are able to articulate intersections between ecological politics and other state-sanctioned and extra-legal attempts to control women’s voice, mobility, and bodies. Ultimately, in charting these different historical and cultural shifts, this course will work toward a definition of ecofeminism in which the fight against environmental injustice cannot be separated from the struggle against patriarchy, and visions of ecological sustainability are directly tied to women’s liberation and gender justice.

3641 ENGL 373-02/WGST 325 Women in Literature-CD2:

T/TH 4:00-5:15pm HM215 (Professor Heryford)

Eco-feminism: A Study of Gender and Environmental Literatures

8312 ENGL 375-01 LGBTQ LIT – CD2:

MWF 1-1:50pm HM113 (Professor Kopelson)

This section of LGBTQ Literature examines four novels and one play (all post 1900) which ask us to reflect on the concepts of belonging, community, race, and nation in the context of, or as these intersect with, LGBTQ issues, identities, and concerns.

The five works we will study are:

Larsen, Nella. Passing.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room.

Lorde, Audre. Zami:A New Spelling of My Name.

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: Parts I and II.

We will get to spend three weeks engaged in discussion and reading and responding to criticism of each work. Course requirements will also likely include in-class responses to the readings and two critical papers of 5-7 pps each.

8619 ENGL 391-01 Studies in the Novel:

MW 5:30-6:45pm HM121 (Professor Mattes)

“Book Histories of the Novel”

This undergraduate survey of prose fiction to 1870 inserts established novelistic traditions across literary periods and movements into the cultural histories of authorship, reading, and publishing. Thus, our considerations of particular novels and their aesthetic powers will not only examine their formal, linguistic elements. Special attention will also be given to the formats, technologies, and markets through which writers and readers across a range of ethnicities produced and encountered fiction, as well as to how our semester’s readings both intervened within and were shaped by changing sociopolitical contexts on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Assigned novels may include works by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Martin Delaney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

7985 ENGL 402-01 HON: Frankenstein Myth – WR:

T/Th 9:30-10:45am HR204 (Professor Hadley)

7988 ENGL 402-02 HON: Illness as Culture – WR:

MW4-5:15pm HM123 (Professor Kopelson)

Course Description ENGL 402-02/HON 436 and 446-02

“Illness as Culture,” spring 2015, Professor Karen Kopelson

It is obvious that certain illnesses can mark, and sometime demarcate, an individual life, or at least a period of one’s life, but illnesses can also mark and demarcate a cultural period. One need look no further than to all the pink ribbons that decorate NFL fields and player uniforms each October during Breast Cancer Awareness month to be reminded that breast cancer is currently what a number of writers have called America’s “darling” disease and arguably has been so since the early 1990s.

But a number of other diseases or disorders of the contemporary period have attracted similar amounts of cultural attention—sometimes becoming a celebrated cause, as breast cancer has, sometimes becoming a source of and an outlet for cultural fear, anxiety, or fascination, often all of the above at once. In the 1980s, for instance, AIDS crystallized both fear of contagion and fearless activism. Addiction, too, since at least the 1980s, has proved both endlessly fearsome and fascinating for our culture, as we have declared “war on drugs” but at the same time cannot turn on the TV without learning of which celebrity now is going off to “rehab.” With further regard to drugs, since the mid 1990s we have been living in an age of anti-depressants and various other mood stabilizers and, whether as cause or effect of the advent and spread of psychotropic drug use, depression and bipolar disorder are undoubtedly now diseases/disorders of our day. Finally, and most recently, writers and critics are beginning to describe autism as “the pathology of our era” (early 2000s to present), as indicated not only by the exploding rates of autism itself but by the explosion of cultural narratives such as memoirs and novels and movies about autistic individuals within the last several years.

This course will organize itself around, and will examine critical/theoretical texts on, these five major illnesses/disorders/disabilities which seem to have acquired so much cultural significance in the contemporary period (breast cancer, AIDS, addiction, depression/bi-polar disorder, autism) and essentially will ask why this is so: Why do—and what kinds of—meanings attach to certain illnesses or disorders at certain cultural moments, in this case, the contemporary moment, and what can be learned about our cultural moment and its meanings and values, hopes and fears, by exploring the meanings and discourses around illnesses? To explore such questions, we will be reading and responding to texts from a wide variety of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to: literary and cultural studies, disability studies, philosophy, anthropology, criminology, and sociology.

As an upper level WR course, the course will require at least one discipline specific research-based paper as well as a variety of other writing assignments in response to the readings.

5570 ENGL 403-01 Advanced Creative Writing:

MWF 12:00-12:50pm DA308 (Professor Petrosino)

This workshop is for serious writers of poetry, 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 students’ 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 20-25 pages of prose/drama OR 15-20 pages of poetry OR some combination of these) at semester’s end. Each student will also write significant responses to each peer manuscript. The final grade will be calculated based on the above items, plus attendance and participation.

[Note: There will be at least one field trip to a Louisville location early in the semester for which all

students must be in attendance. Scheduling for this field trip will occur in consultation with the

class.]

5571 ENGL 413-01 British Literature-Beg. To Shakespeare-WR:

TTh 1-2:15pm DA203 (Professor Dietrich)

We will read a selection of romances from the late medieval and early modern periods, asking about the roles played by texts in this era of cultural change. We will read some theoretical articles and chapters and bring theory to bear on interpretation. The goals of the course are for students to become familiar with literature of this historical period, to become better readers and writers, to learn to find, evaluate and use secondary sources in making an argument, and to get some practice using various interpretive methods. Likely texts include “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the “Lancelot” and one or two other romances by Chretien de Troyes, Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur,” some of The Faerie Queen, and –purposefully pushing the genre boundaries a bit—Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (Final choices will depend greatly on what texts are available at a reasonable price.) Students should expect to complete daily writing assignments and two short essays (2-3 pages) and a longer paper requiring research (10 pages).

8296 ENGL 414-01 British Literature Skakespeare Neocl – WR:

T/Th 9:30-10:45am ED114 (Professor Biberman)

A WR course, English 414 is a survey of British writers from the Renaissance period through the Romantic age. In this course we will read and interpret a range of literary works, drawn largely from the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. Over the course of the semester, students will refine their abilities to analyze literature, both in reading and writing. To do this we will concentrate on learning how to situate texts, both within the moment of their composition and the moment of their reception. You will write frequently about our readings and class discussions, sharing your observations about these texts with classmates, and with the professor. In addition to recognizing the importance of knowing your audience and its expectations, you will gain exposure in this class to some of the basic skills needed to conduct research and work with archival resources. You will also practice incorporating secondary sources into your own writing, a task that will involve gaining an understanding of the theoretical approaches currently utilized in discussions of literature and cultural studies across the curriculum. Periodic short responses, close reading midterm essays, annotated bibliography, final research styled seminar paper.

8298 ENGL 415-01 19^th C British Literature – WR:

MWF 9-9:50am DA204 (Professor Rosner)

In this class, we will focus on how Gothic fiction was transformed in different ways in the nineteenth century. 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 nineteenth-century 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. Homework, reading quizzes, several essays--this is a WR course.

English 372: "Who Done It?": Detective Fiction. In this class, we will examine key works of detective fiction as well as some novels that are not as well know--works by Poe, Doyle, Christie, Tey. Dexter, Cornwell, Lem. We'll also read and discuss some criticism. I'll lecture for some parts of class; we'll have conversations about the texts for most parts of class. Homework, reading quizzes, exams, 1-2 projects.

6389 ENGL 416-01 Modern British & Irish Literature – WR:

T/Th 2:30-3:45pm DA208B (Professor Clukey)

It has been said that British modernism was a literary movement by exiles and immigrants. This course will put that thesis to the test by examining British literature from roughly 1900 through 1950. We’ll read essays that seek to define “Modernism” (or more likely “modernisms”), along with theoretical essays on cosmopolitanism and urban life that will help contextualize the unique experience of the modern city within English history and underscore the importance of London as a metropole, the bureaucratic seat of empire. Next, we’ll survey canonical works of English modernism before turning to literary responses to metropolitan modernism by immigrant writers from Ireland and the Caribbean. Course discussion will pay particular attention to how early twentieth-century authors sought, in the words of Ezra Pound, to “make it new.”

8299 ENGL 420-01 American Literature 1865-1910-WR:

MW 2-3:15pm HM207 (Professor Griffin)

19th-Century Modernism? American Fiction, 1865-1900

Modernist writers and critics insisted that Modernist writing represented a radical break with the past (Make it new!) But in order to make such claims Modernists had to caricature Victorian writing as conservative, predictable, naïvely representational, and moralistic. Nineteenth-century writing was said to represent an orderly, unified world that disregarded all that was harsh, vulgar, sexual, and violent. It was regarded as narrowly nationalistic and conservative, as opposed to the international and innovative Modernist Movement. In this seminar, we will read a range of fiction written by American authors between 1865 and 1900. In doing so, we will pay particular attention to formal technique, political ideology (esp. as related to nationalism), and self-censorship. How would we understand these texts if we were to reject a teleological, progressive literary history? How might we read them if we regard them neither as evidence of nineteenth-century artlessness nor of admirable proto-Modernism?

Class will combine lecture and discussion. Assignments will include weekly written responses to the readings and a written final exam.

Readings will be chosen from among the following:

Secondary

W.H. Auden, “Introduction,” The American Scene by Henry James (1946)

Rita Barnard, “Modern American Fiction” (2005)

Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism (2009)

Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002)

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Simon Joyce’s, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007)

Edgar Saltus, “The Future of Fiction” (1889)

Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924)

Primary

Charles W. Chesnutt, “Dave’s Neckliss” (1889), “Po’ Sandy” (1888), “The Sheriff’s Children,” (1889), “The Wife of His Youth” (1898)

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1894)

Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889)

Henry James, “Daisy Miller” (1878), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); “The Foreigner” (1900)

Harriet Prescott Spofford, “The Amber Gods” (1863)

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)

6793 ENGL 422-01 American Literature 1960-Present – WR:

MWF 10-10:50am WS106 (Professor Adams)

American Literature Since 1960

This course will survey some major texts of American poetry, prose, and drama since 1960, tied together by a loose thematic focus on their investigations and criticisms of the self. We will read poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian; prose by Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Jhumpa Lahiri; and plays by Edward Albee, August Wilson, and Sarah Ruhl.

3618 ENGL 423-01 African/American Literature 1845-Present-WR: CD1

MW 2-3:15pm ED113 (Professor Schneider)

In this course we’ll survey the African American literary tradition from 1845 to the present. We’ll look at how African Americans understood their roles as authors, with a particular focus on the ways that they used literary texts to create and negotiate cultural and political identities. We’ll also look at how these questions were taken up by major literary movements like the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Course texts may include works by authors such as Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, as well as critical essays by figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.

3056 ENGL 450-01 Cooperative Internship in English Studies: Internship

(Professor Chandler)

8676 ENGL 455-01 Cooperative Internship in English Studies: Internship

(Professor Chandler)

8648 ENGL 470-01 Am. Countrcltu Literature 1960s & 70s - WR:

MWF 11-11:50am LF102 (Professor Ridge)

This special topics course engages with fiction, poetry and nonfiction written during a decade of cultural, social, and political upheaval, from the early Beats at the end of the 1950s to Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America to feminist writers like Adrienne Rich to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. We will look at how writers of this era responded to changing attitudes about race, gender, class, and war; we'll also examine how these writers utilized, modified, and innovated upon traditional forms in order to express their perspectives. These examples will spark our own creative and formal responses to the ideas, attitudes, politics, and experiences of this era.

3057 ENGL 491-01 Interpretive Theory:New Criticism-Present:

TTh 11:00am-12:15pm NS110 (Professor Biberman)

This course aims to provide an in-depth introduction to contemporary theories of interpretation. The basic premise of the course is that it is best to study contemporary theory as both a methodology course and a period course. In other words, I teach “intro to theory” as a course that surveys a prominent and an influential genre of “literature” written (for the most part) in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is literature that follows the rise of the so-called New Criticism (circa 1920-1950); this “thought style” and then gives way to the so-called New Historicism. That said, there are some basic tensions that structured “theory” discourse and we will spend some time investigating those preoccupations. Our topics this semester will include formal critique vs contextual critique, psychoanalysis vs. historicism, and aesthetics vs politics (though these three sets could be and often are collapsed into one binary). Finally we will review the institutional narrative underwriting this course via a reading of the cultural study Peepshow, a investigation of the new social media. The goal there will be to test ways to extend academic (theoretical or post-theoretical discourse) so as to embrace and articulate a digital (or post-material, that is—a virtual) aesthetic. This course will be taught as an upper-level seminar, and thus classes will be structured around interrogation and discussion, rather than on lecture. Students will also review the basics of research in the discipline though periodic discussion of the imposed (and often misleading) distinction between primary (or archival) and secondary sources. Requirements: periodic short responses, two midterm essays, two final essays.

8302 ENGL 492-01 Post Colonial Theory:

MWF 1-1:50pm SK208A (Professor Willey)

This course is a brief introduction to and survey of the major movements, concerns, and thinkers in the vast field loosely gathered under the rubric “Postcolonial Theory.” We will be interrogating the origins and significance of the term itself as well as other key terms in the practice of postcolonial theory such as “native,” “hybridity”, and “nation.” We will also look at how some key terms in other areas of theoretical discourse, such as feminism or postmodernism, enter into Postcolonial theory. Readings will be comprised of a short introduction to the concerns of Postcolonial theory by Robert Young, essays from an assigned Anthology of Postcolonial Theory, as well as two novels (Achebe's Things fall Apart and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions) that we will refer to throughout the semester.

3619 ENGL 504-01 Advanced Creative Writing II – Fiction:

T/Th 4:00 – 5:15pm (Professor P. Griner)

Prerequisite: two undergraduate college courses in creative writing, or graduate-student status. This is a workshop-style course in the writing of original fiction. Class sessions are used primarily to discuss work written by class members, which is distributed and studied in advance of the discussion. You are also required to write three short papers: two will be responses to fiction readings you attend during the semester, and the third will be about a collection of short stories or a novel published in the last five to ten years.

3058 ENGL 506-75 Teaching of Writing

T/Th 5:30 – 6:45pm (Professor J. Turner)

English 506 is an introduction to the theory and practices that inform the teaching of writing. Although we’ll initially look at theories of what writing (and the teaching of writing) is, we’ll also look at how theory governs pedagogical practice. We will examine both the pedagogical approaches that govern the teaching of writing, and the various practical activities—curriculum design, assignment design and sequencing, classroom activities and management, formative and summative assessment—we might use to ground and elaborate those approaches in the classroom.

4743 ENGL 510-01 MA Graduate Coop Internship:(Professor S. Schneider)

Note: This section requires permission from the instructor.

4381 ENGL 518-01 Foundation of Language:

T/Th 2:30 – 3:45pm (Professor E. Patton)

Note: This is a cross-listed course. Check the course catalog description for the other department/course number under which it is offered.

Course Description: Pre-requisite: ENGL 102 or 105; junior standing. Note: Cross-listed with ENGL 518. A survey of both the theoretical and applied aspects of Linguistics. This is not an in-depth exploration of single-topic in the field of Linguistics. This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the discipline of linguistics. The course is, simply put, a graduate level introductory linguistics course. NOTE: If you have taken LING/ENGL 325, this may not be the course for you! Please see the instructor to determine the suitability of this course to fit your particular needs if you are an undergraduate student and/or you have recently taken LING/ENGL 325. This course will introduce students to aspects of theoretical (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) linguistics and explore various aspects of applied linguistics. This course will also encourage graduate students to think critically about language and its use.

7383 ENGL 522-01 Structure of Modern English:

T/Th 11:00am-12:15pm (Professor T. Stewart)

Also Available as a Hybrid Course: ENGL 522-50 Structure of Modern English: - blended course with 6 face-to-face meetings: Th 4:00PM – 5:15PM 1/8, 1/22, 2/5, 2/19, 3/12, & 4/2

Required Textbook:

Börjars, Kersti & Kate Burridge. 2010. Introducing English Grammar. 2^nd ed. London: Hodder.

Course Description and Objectives: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 in the Theoretical Track concentration or as an Elective for the Undergraduate Minor in Linguistics. For more information, see http://bit.ly/UG_lingminor

Student Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of this course, students are expected to be able to:

distinguish between language issues that are fundamental to the construction of English sentences and those that constitute “pet peeves” and “complaint triggers”;

identify English examples in terms of grammatical categories, inflectional forms, clausal functions, and syntactic constructions;
produce original examples of each of the types listed in (2) above;
attend to everyday English language use for the purposes of identifying and collecting examples of specified structure-types; and
describe, compare, and contrast example English structures in detail, through the rigorous application of the concepts, categories, and methods of descriptive linguistics.

5077 ENGL 523-01 History of the English Language:

T/Th 1:00-2:15PM (Professor T. Stewart)

Required textbooks:

Jan Svartvik & Geoffrey Leech. 2006. English: One Tongue, Many Voices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

David Crystal. 2003. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2^nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Description: 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.

5574 ENGL 535-01 Teaching English as a Foreign Language:

Th 4:00-6:45pm (Professor E. Patton)

Course Description: Pre-requisite: ENGL 325/518 or LING 325/518; junior standing. Note: Cross-listed with ENGL 535. This course is an applied linguistic course that explores the theoretical and practical construct from which to view the discipline of Teaching of English as a Foreign Language. It is, from a theoretical standpoint, the intersection between the fields of WorldEnglishes and Teaching English as a Second Language. From a practical perspective, this course is designed for any student interested in second language learning and more specifically, for those who are particularly interested in teaching English overseas. While theoretically grounded, the course will provide practical applications and projects for students planning on Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

8309 ENGL 541-01 Literature in an Age of Conquest: England 900-1200:

MWF 11:00-11:50AM (Professor A. Rabin)

This class will focus on literature composed in Britain between 900 and 1200, a period during which England experienced two civil wars and four separate conquests (including the Norman Conquest of 1066). This period also witnessed the evolution of English literature away from the Germanic world of Beowulf and towards the courtly culture of King Arthur. The texts composed during these three centuries explore what it means to be English, particularly In the face of civil unrest and patterns of conquest and re-conquest. They examine how the emergence of a national literature contributes to the development of a national identity, and whether this identity can survive the violence of Viking and Norman invaders. We will trace these questions in order to see how texts of this period formulate a vision of English culture, one that comes to the fore with the rise of that most vibrant of medieval literary genres, the narratives of King Arthur and his court.

6381 ENGL 551-01 Animal Studies:

T/Th 4:00-5:15pm (Professor G. Ridley)

Please note: this course meets the 1700-1900 literature requirement at both the undergraduate and graduate level

What is Animal Studies? In 1975, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation provided a sustained – and highly controversial – engagement with questions about man’s treatment of non-human animals. The book is widely held to be a foundational text for the modern animal rights movement, and it is this movement that many – wrongly – assume to be the sole focus of Animal Studies. Certainly the questions that Singer poses in his book are inescapable in the field, but discussion of bio-ethics and modern agri-business is by no means the entirety of the discipline, which touches upon subjects as diverse as Art History, Cultural Studies, History, History of Science, Law, Literature and Philosophy. In the last decade, scholars working in every period of literature have begun to ask questions about the representation of animals. Their role in the medieval bestiary or the fable seems obvious, but even here, the gulf between a particular species and its artistic or literary representation can be a wide one. Indeed, many of the most famous species of the bestiary (such as the dragon or unicorn) have generated their own field of crypto-zoology (the description of - and lore surrounding - animals that do not exist). Given such a vast field, any course must therefore necessarily be selective, not simply in terms of texts, but with regard to the branch of Animal Studies explored.

The course will take as its focus the representation of animals in literature of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The class will read seminal modern works in the field of Animal Studies, such as Singer’s Animal Liberation, but we will apply these modern concerns to consideration of the representation of animals in an earlier age. The 18^th and 19^th centuries are chosen as a pivotal in man’s engagement with the natural world due to several factors including: the doubling of the number of known animal species in the first half of the 18^th century (largely as a result of imperial exploration); Bakewell’s manipulation of the bodies of livestock animals at New Dishley; the trial of animals during the period, for crimes including treason and murder; and the rise of the indoor dog and cat, sharing its owner’s food and domestic accommodation. It is the latter development that, perhaps more than any other, drives the 18^th century development of experiments with point of view, so that by the time of Kendall’s Keeper’s Travels (1798), an author attempts to take his readers inside the mind of a dog, showing its experience of a wide range of recognizably human emotions.

The course will include time spent in Special Collections in the Ekstrom Library, working with Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and examining its representation of the natural world.

Primary texts studied will include (but are not limited to):

Francis Coventry, The Adventures of Pompey the Little (1751)

Dorothy Kilner, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783)

Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories (1786)

Edward Augustus Kendall, Keeper’s Travels (1798)

Secondary material discussed in class will include the following (some of which may be assigned as extracts):

Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a Bat?” (1979)

Frank Palmeri, Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2006)

Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid (1997)

Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love of Animals (2008)

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975)

5567 ENGL 564-01 Emily Dickinson and Her Afterlives:

T/Th 2:30-3:34pm (Professor V. Adams)

In this course, we will read the major poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as a selection of her correspondence. We will then analyze various key moments in the history of her reception, with an eye to how different historical and intellectual contexts found value in her work. These contexts include: the collection, editing, and publication of her poetry; the affirmation of Dickinson's work by the poets and writers associated with the New Criticism; feminist approaches to Dickinson in the 1960s and 70s; theorization of the lyric genre and of "lyricization"; philosophical approaches to Dickinson's poetry; and Dickinson's continuing impact on contemporary experimental and avant-garde poets.

8310 ENGL 571-01 African American and Native American Literature, Publics, and Textualities, 1768-1854:

M/W 2:00-3:15pm (Professor M. Mattes)

This course explores recent concepts that foreground the make and movement of texts in terms of the historical experiences, spatial geographies, and communicative practices of African Americans and Native Americans. For example, the reconceptualization of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” continues (Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance; Joseph Rezek, “The Print Atlantic”), while recent scholarship in Native studies has increasingly turned toward the concept of “Indian Country” (Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America; Phillip Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America). This course uses such frameworks to reveal overlaps and connections among the literatures of African and Native America. In doing so, this course brings into relief the textualities and underlying knowledges through which writers and readers across ethnicities experienced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American life, including war, captivity, slavery, religion, revolt, disease, science, urban space, plantation labor, imperial expansion, media culture, and literary and historical discourse. Special attention will be given to the media among which ethnic literatures across a wide array of genres appeared. Thus, in addition to current-day texts, we will take advantage of local and digital archives, which house the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formats that African Americans, Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Europeans used to constitute and interpret their writings. This media-aware approach will help us account for the intercultural conditions of textual production and circulation at work in the past, as well as our reliance upon the acts of translation, transmission, and transcription that make this diverse literature available to us.

8311 ENGL 599-01 Reflections on American Empire in an “Age of Globalization”:

T/Th 1:00 – 2:15pm (Professor R. Heryford)

This course will be devoted to unearthing and addressing the contours of ‘American Empire’ as they appear in 20^th and 21^st century texts produced both within and outside the geographic boundaries of the United States. The first half of this course will trace 20^th century US military imperialism, from occupations in Haiti (1914-1934) and the Philippines (1898-1946), up through Cold War interventions in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Angola, and Vietnam, reflecting on a range of writers and cultural producers like José Martí, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, William Faulkner, Rubén Darío, Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Ariel Dorfman, each of whom held markedly different investments, perspectives, and positions regarding this question of ‘American Empire’

The second half of this course will be concerned with questions of borders, migration and economic development schemes in our contemporary historical moment, what some 21^st century historians have referred to as “an age of globalization.” We will encounter a series of films and written texts from such cultural producers as Cormac McCarthy, Gloría Anzaldua, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gregory Nava, Stephanie Black, and Roberto Bolaño, reading their ‘globalization narratives’ in conversation with earlier discussions about 20^th century US imperialism. The mediation and synthesis of these diverse and distinct historical texts and periods will be centered upon the broader question – what might reflections on 20^th century ‘American Empire’ teach us about the cultures and politics of globalization today? Students should leave this course with a thorough and engaged understanding of many of the current intersections between American Studies and post/de-colonial scholarship.

8846 599-02 Advanced Writing Across Disciplines:

T/Th 4:00 – 5:15pm (Professor A. Olinger)

Have you sought to improve your writing but received little feedback beyond “correct your grammar”? Are you curious about the linguistic and rhetorical patterns common to writing in your discipline?

This course is designed for graduate and professional students in any department, as well as for advanced undergraduates in any department who are considering graduate school or conducting research. Students who speak English as a second, third, or fourth language are especially welcome.

In this course, students will:

Reflect on their literacy and language experiences, habits, and goals
Investigate the processes and politics of research, writing, and publishing in their discipline
Analyze scholarship in their discipline for particular linguistic and rhetorical patterns (e.g., how introductions are organized; how sources are critiqued)
Apply what they’ve learned to an extended writing project of their design
Participate in a community of peers who share their work and compare their experiences within and across disciplines, languages, and cultures
Improve their ability to edit for grammar, word choice, and punctuation and to craft more incisive prose

Feel free to contact the instructor, Dr. Andrea Olinger, if you have any questions about the class.