Department of English Courses

Linked course titles have extended descriptions. Syllabi provided where available.

Course	Title	Day	Time	Instructor	Room	Syllabus	Description
ENG 105 M001	Introduction to Creative Writing	TuThF	03:30 PM - 04:25 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			This course will introduce students to three types of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and mixed literary forms. The course will focus on inspiration (why write a poem or a story or an essay?) as well as the techniques of evocative, compelling writing across all literary genres (e.g., point of view, concrete detail, lyricism, image, voice, tone, structure, dialogue, and characterization). Students will examine work by authors from various traditions and produce creative work in each genre. ENG 105 prepares students for upper-level creative writing courses in fiction and poetry.
ENG 107 M001	Living Writers	W	03:45 PM - 06:35 PM	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			This class gives students the rare opportunity to hear visiting writers read and discuss their work. The class is centered on six readings and question-and-answer sessions. Students will be responsible for careful readings of the writers’ work. Critical writing and detailed class discussions are required to prepare for the question-and-answer sessions with the visiting writers. Possible writers for the fall semester include Christopher Kennedy and Hernon Diaz.
ENG 113 M001	British Literature, Beginning to 1789	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Shaw,Morgan Taylor			Are the gender critiques posed in Anglo-Norman poetry really so different from those we see today? How does pandemic, whether the Black Death of the 1300s or the contemporary COVID outbreak, shape literary perspectives? How do we, as readers, actively shape history as it is (imperfectly) represented within texts? This course will introduce you to British literature from the earliest Anglo-Saxon epics to the death-brooding poetics of the 18th century. We will read and analyze an array of literary works, attending to the transformation of English culture and identity over this 1000-year period. We will engage our course readings critically by situating them within their historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts. Given the nature of this course, we will also think critically about narratives of literary history as being “past.” Guided by these and other inquiries, you will develop your reading, analytic, and writing skills in this course as we chart a contiguous path through the early British literary canon.
ENG 115 M001	Topics in British Literature: Gothic and Monster Literature	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Selthun,Elena Lin			From Frankenstein to Dracula, some of the most iconic and strangely sympathetic monsters in the Western imaginary are found in the genre of the Gothic. In this course, we will discuss and analyze how these monsters are constructed, why certain fears give them power, and how these fears and their monsters change or are buried over time, only to re-emerge transformed. We will unpack how and why Gothic monsters like ghosts and vampires embody cultural anxieties about gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, death, and ultimately, what makes us human (or not). Reading these monsters and their meanings and deconstructing their power can allow us to read the world around us more clearly. We will focus on reading the monstrous in Gothic British texts from the 19th century. These texts may include the spooky short stories of M.R. James, poems like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and novels like Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. We will also look at some contemporary adaptations of Gothic monstrosity, such as Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) and Wuthering Heights (2011). This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 117 M001	American Literature, Beginning to 1865	MW	03:45 PM - 05:15 PM	Adams,Jeffrey Garfield			What is American literature and where did it start? What does it mean to be an “American”? How can an understanding of American literature and culture help us navigate the ever-shifting nature of the place we now call the United States? These questions, and more, will guide us through this semester as we untangle the connections between what the United States is now and what it once was for Indigenous people, white settlers, Black enslaved persons, and others. During this course, we will be reading an array of cultural texts published before 1865 that can be considered American. When approaching these texts, we will pay attention to their complicity with and challenges to oppressive racist and colonial logics. Crucially, having a social justice framework in mind when approaching these often-troubling works is not to dismiss the importance of reading them and engaging with their ideas. Rather a social justice approach to early American literature is a way of reckoning with texts that continue informing our cultural consciousness. This reckoning is achieved by reading these texts thoroughly and critically.
ENG 118 M001	American Literature, 1865 to Present	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Kue,Debra Joyce			This course will survey American writers and literary movements/paradigms in American literature from post-Civil War to the contemporary present. While examining various changes within the U.S. (such as, imperial expansion, mass immigration, urbanization, industrialization and its effect on laobr relations, new theories of race, gender, war world trauma, global networking, etc), we will be tracing the development of American literature (e.g. realism, naturalism, the gothic, modernism, and postmodernism) to examine how each literary movement questions, confronts, and critiques their historical moments. We will also examine how writers both define and destablize the notion of a fixed/singular American identity. The selected readings will offer a look into the diversity and internally complex nature of American literature–which attends to recognizing and reckoning with the inclusions, exclusions, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity and understanding how its contours impact upon our current moment.
ENG 119 M001	Post-1945 American Fiction	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Edmunds,Susan L			This course offers a survey of U.S. fiction from the 1940s to the present. We will read a selection of short stories and novels alongside a range of other literary and nonliterary genres, including the autobiographical essay, the memoir, New Journalism, poetry, the political manifesto and the literary preface. We will interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical lens, and place particular emphasis on investigating the interconnections between literary form and social change. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we will read texts associated with or influenced by the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts Movements, Second Wave Feminism and its critique by women of color, and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. We will also read contemporary fiction that engages social struggles around racism, border policy and climate change. The two novels we will read are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
ENG 125 M001	Science Fiction	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			The origins and definition of Science Fiction are debated by fans and scholars all over the world. Likewise, scholars continue to debate the value of the genre as Literature with a capital L. In this course, we will take the genre and its capacities for uniquely powerful social commentary seriously as we explore possible beginnings, movements, subgenres and shifts within Science Fiction short stories and novels, as well as some television and film. We will look primarily at U.S. American and British texts, but we will expand beyond the West somewhat. This is a great course to take before taking the Latine/x and African American/ Black speculative fiction courses offered in the English department. This course features opportunities for creative work, as well as critical reading and writing.
ENG 140 M001	Reading the Enviroment	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Goode,Michael			This course examines how writers and artists from different times, places, and cultures have grappled with the project of trying to understand, redefine, and take responsibility for our role and place in the natural world as animals and ecological agents. Much of the course will focus on literature and art that engages with ecological crises and with questions of environmental justice, including the extinctions, displacements, migrations, and extreme weather created by anthropogenic-induced planetary climate change. But we will also be considering various representational strategies that writers and artists have deployed over time and across cultures to make visible, comprehend, connect to, inspire action towards, express grief about, and take joy in different parts of the natural world. Readings will be a mixture of literary texts, artistic media, and critical writings. Assignments will include a mix of critical, creative, and mixed-media essays.
ENG 142 M001	Narratives of Culture: Introduction to Issues of Critical Reading	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 145 M004	Reading Popular Culture	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Reese,Jacob Charles			In this course, we will examine various forms of media which we consider “popular culture” and utilize critical frameworks through which we might come to better understand where pop culture comes from, how it is constructed, and how it functions in a modern, globalized socio-cultural context. We will cover a broad history of popular culture, from classical theater to reality TV and from to video games to social media, to examine how “culture” is constructed and reinforced through economic structures of production. We will examine counter-cultural movements, the construction of fan communities, serialization, and the emergence of streaming and transmedia storytelling as well as many other topics which continue to shape our current media climate. As we work together to reframe how we read the media around us, you will come to better understand how media affects culture, how these influences shape our lives, and how larger forces are involved in creating and perpetuating these forms of cultural production. As such, this course will arm you with tools and frameworks to help you be an informed individual who can critically engage with the various forms of pop culture media which are all around us.
ENG 145 M005	Reading Popular Culture	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Santiago,Samuel Ethan			How do mass and popular entertainment media influence our lives, culture, and actions? How do popular narratives contribute to the shaping of communities and identities? How to texts become contexts through adaptation, ohmage, and parody, iterating upon pop-cultural phenomenon to refresh, reimagine, and remix things of the past into our present? In this class, we'll see where these questions lead us as we investigate texts from a broad variety of popular genres and media forms, including literature, music, film, video games, social media, news, and advertisements, among others. Likewise, we'll consider the concept of popularity in comparison to its opposite, the unpopular, forming a nuanced understanding and questioning the validity of that cultural binary. For example, does subcultural, or countercultural, necessarily mean unpopular? Ultimately, we will study popular and culturally influential texts as a means of understanding the ways in which ideology and political power permeate everyday life. By focusing on honing writing abilities and critical analysis, this class will impart broadly applicable media literacy skills.
ENG 151 M001	Interpretation of Poetry	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Conrey,Sean M			This course introduces students to techniques and approaches to interpreting and analyzing poetry. We will thus develop close reading skills while learning to recognize forms and tropes common to English language poetry as well as poetry in translation. Reading work from the ancient period to the present day, we will develop critical reading habits in conjunction with the skills necessary to convey our interpretations in writing. Readings will interrogate the role of the poet as both the keeper of a culture’s history and it’s first critic, and so we will look particularly at how oral and literate traditions utilize different poetic forms toward these ends. Texts for this course may include the Anglo Saxon poem “The Wanderer,” the Norse Eddas, various song styles (hymns, blues, ballads, hip hop), work by the Transcendentalists and the Beats, The New York School, and contemporary work by CD Wright, Layli Long Soldier, Maurice Manning and Suheir Hammad.
ENG 152 M001	Interpretation of Drama	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			This course offers an introduction to the interpretation of Western dramatic literature in English or English translation by surveying a selection of plays and dramatic texts from antiquity through the twenty-first century. We will encounter classical theater, medieval and early modern drama (including Shakespeare), Realism, Expressionism, and a range of popular and avant-garde theatrical movements and experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will examine the formal features and conventions of Western dramatic traditions while emphasizing the ways these have evolved in dynamic (sometimes conservative, sometimes radical) response to social, cultural, and political pressures. This course welcomes students both new to dramatic literature and those who have studied theater in other contexts. Screenings and attendance of theatrical productions required.
ENG 153 M005	Interpretation of Fiction	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Sinha,Soham			What is the relationship between fiction and reality? Is there truth in fiction? What is the relevance of fictional storytelling in today’s world? These are some of the questions that we will seek to answer as part of this course. Through interactive classroom sessions, we will look at the truths of fiction across a range of narrative forms - the fairy tale, short story, video game, film, and short novel. In addition to reading/viewing and interpreting fictional texts, we will develop an awareness of the various elements of fiction: theme, narrative and plot, setting, character, point-of-view, style, and tone. We will pay attention to how a story is told and how a story is received. Broadly speaking, we will study fiction as a social force that, in addition to being a form of entertainment, also communicates certain values and ideologies. By developing close reading techniques, we will invest ourselves in uncovering the intricate processes that make fiction powerful and relevant. Texts for this course may include Frantz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core.
ENG 154 M002	Interpretation of Film	MWF	09:30 AM - 10:25 AM	Scheibel Jr.,Leonard			Film was the dominant medium of the last century and yet we have only begun to understand it, especially in the post-celluloid period of digital and convergent screen cultures. What is the “language” of cinema? What are the conventions of style through which films communicate? What are the audiovisual literacy skills necessary to “read” films as texts within aesthetic systems? In this course, we will approach these broad but fundamental questions to the interpretation of film. Based in close analysis, the course will introduce you to how films are composed through mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. We will then consider the structures of narrative and genre that organize those formal elements, as well as the economic contexts of film promotion, reception, and stardom that determine cinematic meaning. As the semester draws to a close, we will examine film techniques in relation to issues of authorship, including race and ethnicity, gender, sexualities, transnationalism, and intermediality. The films in this course derive from a range of traditions, such as studio filmmaking in the Classical Hollywood era, independent cinema, documentary, the avant-garde, and the Hollywood blockbuster.
ENG 155 M002	Interpretation of Nonfiction	MW	05:15 PM - 06:35 PM	Ugwu,Ejiofor Elija			This course will introduce you to methods of interpreting nonfiction. While we often believe that nonfiction conveys truth and reality, in this course we will focus on how different texts construct their claims to truth and arguments about reality. To do so, we will study and interrogate the rhetorical strategies authors employ, the relationship between form and content, the generic conventions of different nonfiction forms, and how texts construct both a speaking position and an audience. In addition to introducing ways to interpret nonfiction, this course aims to introduce a wide variety of nonfiction media forms such as the essay, the graphic novel, autobiography, memoir, documentary video and digital documentary, reality television, photography, digital games, and digital nonfiction forms like the listicle. We will not just work through these different forms and how they make meaning in a vacuum, we will instead focus on a variety of themes, topics, and issues throughout the course, including family, feminism, masculinity, sexuality, race, photography, and screen representations of the environment.
ENG 156 M001	Interpretation of Games	MWF	11:40 AM - 12:35 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course serves as an introduction to game studies and we will explore key critical frameworks and concepts for analyzing and understanding games and gameplay. In addition to games, we will also study screen-based media texts which explicitly or implicitly engage with the concepts of game studies. Attendance at weekly discussion sections and evening screenings is required.
ENG 164 M002	Children's Literature	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Healy,Meghan Riley			What constitutes children’s literature and how does the category reflect cultural values? How does children’s literature depict gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability? How does children’s literature depict children/childhood and what do these depictions reveal about the adults we are expected to become? Why is it that children’s literature is often the most contested and banned? These questions will guide our thinking as we work through a history of children’s literature. Across the semester, we will consider the historical, political, and cultural contexts that produce these literatures. Our course texts will primarily survey canonical works of children’s literature in American and European contexts but will also include some global reach. We will read and view a variety of genres and mediums, from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to film and television. Possible readings might include works by Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and Judy Blume, along with works in the Disney universe, and many more. Specific texts may include James and the Giant Peach, A Wrinkle in Time, Inside Out, as well as selections from Aesop’s fables, the Panchatantra, and the Brothers Grimm
ENG 171 M001	World Cinema: Beginings to Present	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Ozyenginer,Asli
ENG 174 M001	World Literature, Beginings to 1000	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course will expand your understanding of cultures from around the world as you read and discuss some of the most achieved and influential examples of literature from African, Asian, and Western traditions. These diverse texts and cultures will provide vital contexts for your exploration of your own life, and contemporary social life in general. We will begin with some of the oldest literature in the world (Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems), and go on to read sections from the Hebrew Bible, Sanskrit and Greek epics (The Ramayana and The Iliad), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucius and Zhuangzi), Greek and Roman lyric poetry (Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid), The New Testament, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Chinese Tang and Song dynasty poetry (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, and others), excerpts from the Qur’an, stories from 1001 Nights, and excerpts from The Tale of Genji by the Japanese woman writer Murasaki Shikibu, arguably the first novel ever written. Classes will alternate between lectures and discussions. You will have the option of either producing shorter response papers or traditional midterm and final interpretive essays.
ENG 184 M002	Ethnicity & Literature Ethnicities Across the U.S. Landscape - Great Jewish Writers	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Frieden,Kenneth B			A panorama of great stories written by Jewish authors, from Ecclesiastes to Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Kafka, Agnon, Wiesel, Yezierska, Serdatzky, and Paley. Topics include narrative techniques and figurative language, shtetl life in E. Europe, modernization, love, marriage, humor, the Nazi genocide, and post-war trauma. In preparation for class discussions, on the evening before each session students will submit short posts on Blackboard. With about 26 assignments, this writing intensive course is a writing marathon. Texts: Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; Classic Yiddish Stories; Elie Wiesel, Night; Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers.
ENG 192 M001	Gender & Literary Texts	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol			In this course, students will read and analyze the role of gender in a collection of literary and theoretical texts, focusing on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, religion, and class in national and transnational contexts. We will begin with the premise that gender is a social construct—rather than a natural, ahistorical “essence”—and examine the ways in which literature participates in the social reproduction of gender, as well as the difference that gender makes in the production and reception of literary texts. The selected literature features novels, poetry, essays, and short stories by a variety of writers including Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel, Randa Jarrar, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This course is reading intensive, so students should be ready to handle rigorous reading assignments, accompanied by writing analytical papers that would reflect the students’ understanding of the issues raised in these texts. The main objective of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking capabilities as well as their analytical readings skills. This course fulfills the writing intensive requirement of the Liberal Arts Core. The purpose of the writing-intensive course is to familiarize students with the thought processes, structures, and styles associated with writing in the liberal arts.
ENG 200 M001	Latinx Pop Culture	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Bermudez,Johanna			This course considers what it means for Latinx peoples to be represented within the meaning-making system that is popular culture. Does popular culture potentially influence, dictate, or challenge how Latinx people are viewed and/or treated? We will interrogate the role of popular culture in the formation of social markers such as youth, race, gender, class, and sexuality. This course will draw on students’ intimate familiarity as consumers, fans, and producers of popular culture to better understand how popular culture shapes all of our lives, including our perceptions of ethnic groups. We will engage with a variety of mediums including comic books, articles, music videos, films, and short stories. We will ask why mainstream figures such as Miles Morales and Selena Quintanilla became popular, how can the Bad Bunny craze speak to bigger issues of consumerism, what can the quinceañera reveal about evolving cultural values, and does being a Messi fan bring certain expectations?
ENG 200 M002	African Fiction	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Dima,Vlad			This course primarily explores the films and the novels of Ousmane Sembene, who is perhaps the most important artistic voice of postcolonial Africa. Widely viewed as the “father” of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene actually began his career as a prolific writer, and he adapted several on his writings to the screen. Therefore, one of the main aims of this course is to uncover the relationship between written word and visual text: is there such a thing as a literary cinema and, can we also talk about a cinematic writing? We will read short stories and two novels, Black Docker (1956) and God’s Bits of Wood (1960). We will also watch several of his films (Black Girl, Mandabi, Xala, Faat Kiné, and Mooladé). The modules of the course will follow three themes that emerge in Sembene’s work: power, identity, and historical trauma. As these themes match up with other postcolonial works, further readings from other African writers and filmmakers will be included: Wole Soyinka, Mariama Ba, Felwine Sarr, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Djibril-Diop Mambety, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mati Diop etc.
ENG 215 M001	Introductory Poetry Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Ott, Teresa			Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in their best order.” In this introductory workshop, we will help each other find the best words to put in their best order. You will be required to write both creatively and critically as you compose your own poems, work on imitations, revise, and analyze and critique the poems of others. There will be a variety of creative prompts, exercises, and assigned readings to deepen your knowledge of poetry, as well as contribute to your growth as a creative writer. All poetic souls welcome. Participation and attendance are necessary.
ENG 215 M002	Introductory Poetry Workshop	Tu	06:30 PM - 09:15 PM	Clark, Joanna			Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in their best order.” In this introductory workshop, we will help each other find the best words to put in their best order. You will be required to write both creatively and critically as you compose your own poems, work on imitations, revise, and analyze and critique the poems of others. There will be a variety of creative prompts, exercises, and assigned readings to deepen your knowledge of poetry, as well as contribute to your growth as a creative writer. All poetic souls welcome. Participation and attendance are necessary.
ENG 216 M001	Introductory Literary Nonfiction Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Rodriquez, John Christopher			This course will introduce students to the non-fiction workshop. Students will practice writing, reading, and critiquing various genres within non-fiction writing, such as the personal essay and memoir, the experiential essay, and some new or nuanced forms that may arise. In class, we will discuss student work as well as published work. Students will learn to use fictional devices such as setting, point of view, character, dialogue, plot construction, and metaphor to craft factually accurate essays about real observed or experienced events. Participation and attendance are mandatory
ENG 216 M002	Introductory Literary Nonfiction Workshop	Th	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Yates, Kira			This course will introduce students to the non-fiction workshop. Students will practice writing, reading, and critiquing various genres within non-fiction writing, such as the personal essay and memoir, the experiential essay, and some new or nuanced forms that may arise. In class, we will discuss student work as well as published work. Students will learn to use fictional devices such as setting, point of view, character, dialogue, plot construction, and metaphor to craft factually accurate essays about real observed or experienced events. Participation and attendance are mandatory
ENG 217 M001	Introductory Fiction Workshop	M	03:45 PM - 06:30 PM	Chollampatt, Nabeel			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M002	Introductory Fiction Workshop	Th	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Bexley, Everett			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 217 M003	Introductory Fiction Workshop	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Gorevan, Molly Jo			This class will introduce students to the fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will learn the elements of story, how to read closely, and how to critique one another's stories. You will also learn how to revise your own work. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We will do in-class writing exercises, and each student will write two stories. Participation and attendance are mandatory.
ENG 242 M001	Reading and Interpretation	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A			Introduces literary studies as an academic discipline, focusing on reading practices and axes of analysis. It covers a sampling of schools of thought in literary theory and criticism, and it enables students to see that the outcome of their reading act may vary depending on the angle from which they approach a text. Recognizing their own a priori critical or theoretical stances, they acquire the tools needed to test their reading mode vis-à-vis that of others. Enhancing their skills as interpreters of texts, they sharpen ability to grasp the literature produces and conveys meaning and learn to place literary works in relation to the historical contexts that informs both writers and readers. The course surveys criticism and theory from antiquity through modernity to apply them to our reading of iconic literary texts such as The Oresteia, Othello, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz covering roughly the same time span. We will also ask whether literature can play a role in enhancing the quality of social relations.
ENG 300 M001	Fiction, History and Imagination	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Brunt,Christopher Michael			Fiction writers have always used historical events and historical figures in their work. Writers also borrow from and imitate other forms and media. Why do that? And how to make it work? In this class we will examine how different writers play with these possibilities, while generating our own brief works of fiction. We will look at fiction that uses historical events and figures from real life, or uses a research-intensive constraint of place or of occupation, and discuss how newspapers, academic essays, encyclopedias, films, diaries, letters, ads, Wikis, tweets, and other media can inspire the fiction writer’s imagination. We will contemplate the things that fiction can do that a biography or work of history cannot do. How do creative writers draw from primary documents, found cultural artifacts, everyday familiar formats and tech to make imaginative art? Where to draw from and how to manage it?
ENG 300 M002	Poems of the Known and the Unknown	TuTh	05:00 PM - 06:20 PM	Haxton,Brooks			The reading for this course will explore vivid representations of daily experience and departures into the unfamiliar. We will read recent poems and work from poets from the past two centuries, realists and fabulists. We will practice attention to precise details of experiences represented, whether familiar or foreign. Student work will include analysis of readings and original composition
ENG 300 M003	Sci-Fi & more: Using Science in Fiction, Poems & Literary Non-Fiction	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Maria Marchinkoski			What do writers as disparate as Kazuo Ishiguro, Louise Gluck, Samuel Delany, Richard Powers, Octavia Butler, and Bram Stoker have in common? They all engage with scientific truths (and sometimes falsehoods) to reveal something new about humanity, the world around us, and the world to be. Writers apply scientific discoveries to ground, re-imagine, and expand their writing, no matter what genre they’re immersed in. In this class we’ll discuss how to employ historical and current scientific truths to imagine new metaphors, go beyond human-centered tropes, or construct new universes. This is a discussion-based craft class which will require the student to reflect, discuss, read, and write science-inflected fiction, poems, and/or non-fiction.
ENG 301 M001	Practicum in Reading and Writing Prose	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			In this course, students will discuss, analyze, and reproduce the techniques of published prose writers in various nonfiction genres, including the personal essay, literary journalism, flash nonfiction, memoir, and the lyric essay. Authors to be studied as models may include James Baldwin, Tom Bissell, Jenny Boully, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Jay Caspian Kang, Barry Lopez, Joseph Mitchell, Jon Ronson, and Zadie Smith. Students will be required to produce both creative and analytical responses to the texts.
ENG 303 M002	Practicum in Reading and Writing Fiction	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Harwell,Sarah Coleman			All creative disciplines depend on the study and imitation for mastery of its elements. In this course, students will read and analyze short stories to deepen their understanding of a variety of concerns in storytelling, including voice, style, image, story, and character. We will attempt to answer the question: how have authors generated emotions, interest, and power in creative texts? Students will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the texts studied. Possible authors include Samanta Schweblin, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Edward P. Jones, Joy Williams, ZZ Packer, and Yiyun Li.
ENG 305 M001	Topics in Critical Analysis; Literature and its Media	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			We usually talk about "novels," "poems," and "films" (and "texts" of various other kinds). But what about the paper and ink (or parchment or wax or celluloid or liquid crystal displays) that carry those texts? Do these materials affect the forms and content represented? Do they change what, or how, we read? This class draws on media studies to investigate the ways that materiality impacts meaning. We will consider a wide range of works, looking at the history of text technologies from the ancient world through to contemporary developments in digital culture. We will pay particular attention to literary works that foreground questions of textual materiality, including Bram Stoker’s DRACULA (1897) and Laurence Sterne’s TRISTRAM SHANDY (1759), as well as more recent experiments in digital fiction. We will examine how “artificial intelligence” systems (like ChatGPT) generate texts, and what that means for literature.
ENG 311 M001	People, Places, Nature: The Literary Environments of Late 19th-century American Fiction	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Beam,Dorothy R			This course looks at the outpouring of fiction in the U.S. dedicated to particular places and environments in the years between the Civil War and the turn into the twentieth century. In this period of rapid expansion and industrialization, a period of migration, immigration, and displacements of peoples living in and coming to the U.S., a good deal of fiction hunkered down in specific locales. Those left behind or displaced by these forces were frequently cast as “backward” or “queer” anti-moderns, soon to be obsolete. This literature both trades in and critically occupies that story as it creates the world of such characters, evoking the particularities of place, imaginatively entwining natural and social ecologies, and considering the forces that shaped its inhabitants. From rural New England, to abandoned plantations and Southern swamps, to the wilds of gold rush California: literary environments were invested with questions about the interrelation of place and time; of plants, geography, animals, and people; and of social and national identities. We will read primarily short stories, by Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.
ENG 312 M001	Race and Literary Periods - Antiquity to 1900	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Torres-Saillant,Silvio A			Surveys the periods when writers, theologians, and scholars classified as meriting greater or lesser value the branches of humanity based on race. We cover ancient Mesopotamia, the Greek, Roman, and Hebrew worlds, plus Africa, early Christian Europe, China, and the Ottoman Empire to recover the memory of a time before phenotype and ancestry became key factors deciding rapport among people across different regions of the world. We take the fateful 1492 landing of Columbus in the Caribbean as the watershed moment marking a new era of social relations globally. Over the next 450 years follows a huge literary and scholarly output by Christian authors certifying by the word the subjugation of foreign others, branding them inferior. We begin by reading a 4th century CE Greek novel featuring a heroine whose mother (the Ethiopian Queen) sent her away upon birth because of her white skin, unlike the complexion of her royal parents. She feared dying “a shameful death” if her husband, seeing the baby, deemed her adulterous. Thanks to steps she took to enable an eventual reunion, she regains her now 18-year-old daughter at the novel’s end, after all numerous, dangerous trials.
ENG 313 M001	Race & Literary Periods Before 1900: American Beginnings	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			When, where and with what does “American literature” begin? At stake in this question are our basic assumptions about what Americanness is, as well as our basic assumptions about what literature is. Who gets to be called an “American” and what counts as “literature”? Should Native American oral stories be part of the canon of American literature? How about the letters from Spanish and French explorers describing the Americas and its peoples? How about William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which takes place on an island obviously inspired by the New World and which voices cutting critiques of colonization through its indigenous character Caliban? This class will place traditionally revered accounts of the British settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay into the context of a more expansively defined “early America,” encompassing Native America, the colonial Americas (Spanish, French, British and Dutch), and the writers in Europe who were responding to the idea of the New World (new to them, at least). Indigenous perspectives will be emphasized throughout the semester as a necessary context for understanding writing that emerged from settler colonial projects
ENG 315 M001	Topics in Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: The Holocaust in American Literature	TuTh	02:00 PM - 03:20 PM	Teres,Harvey Michael			This course will explore the moral, religious, and artistic challenges faced by American writers who have represented the Holocaust and its aftermath in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Students will begin by reading a historical account of the Holocaust, followed by efforts to link the Holocaust to trauma studies, slavery, and other examples of genocide. We will spend the rest of the semester reading literary representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Texts will include Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic,” The Ghost Writer, and The Plot Against America; Bernard Malamud’s “The Last Mohican” and “Lady of the Lake”; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” “The Shawl,” and “Rosa”; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II; Nathan Englander’s “The Tumblers”; and selected poetry by Jacob Glatstein, Charles Reznikoff, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Anthony Hecht, Elie Wiesel, and others.
ENG 325 M002	History and Varieties and English	TuTh	03:30 PM - 04:50 PM	Moody,Patricia A
ENG 329 M001	Theorizing Games and Game Design	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Hanson,Christopher			This course will examine a range of critical approaches to gaming and game design; games will be “read” and critically interrogated as texts, and the relationships between game, player, designer, software, interface, and play mechanics will be discussed
ENG 330 M001	Good Life	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			What gives rise to “good life”? In the face of seemingly intractable challenges to individual, collective and planetary existence, much less well-being, posed by climate change, war, pandemic, social injustice, work precarity and other crises, such a question can feel anxiety-provoking to ask. And yet many thinkers, for centuries, have taken it to be unavoidable. We will explore some of the most influential of these earlier formulations from Plato onward, but the bulk of our reading, viewing and discussion will concern the 21st century: What does the popularity of “survival” series on television, as well as shows like The Good Place, have to tell us about “good life”? How about fiction such as Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, Ling Ma’s Severance or Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon? Or concepts such as “cruel optimism,” “undercommons” and “capitalist realism”? We will explore a number of attempts to grapple with the question of “good life”—and impediments to it-- but we will also engage in some practical activities that have been associated with its pursuit, including inventorying what elements you think build a good life and testing out their potential for success given different definitions of the “good.”
ENG 352 M001	U.S. Immigrant Fiction, 1900-2024	TuTh	09:30 AM - 10:50 AM	Edmunds,Susan L			Celebrations of the immigrant past are common in the U.S., where we like to talk about the American Dream and the idea of the American Melting Pot. But the fiction of our immigrant writers reveals a much more complex picture. In this course, we will read fiction that portrays immigrant experiences marked by ethnic and racial conflict, struggles over the racial boundaries of whiteness, debates about the value of assimilation, and the traumatic effects of war, dislocation and uncertain legal status. We will also examine literary tropes developed across immigrant traditions during a period in which the United States’ rise to global dominance has not only changed who immigrates to the U.S. and why, but also the stories immigrants tell. We will start with some early- and mid-twentieth-century examples of immigrant writing before focusing on fiction written in the last thirty years. In addition to short stories by various authors, we will read two novels: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane.
ENG 352 M002	Race, Immigration, and the Graphic Novel	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Fadda-Conrey,Carol			What is the role of graphic novels in addressing questions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and migration in national and global contexts? How do representations of racial and ethnic minorities in graphic novels help readers interrogate social constructions of difference and belonging, at the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality? How do graphic novels contribute to producing critical histories of racial struggle, dispossession, and trauma across time, space, and generational divides? This course addresses these and similar questions by featuring a range of graphic novels and related scholarly texts that provide important insights into individual and collective experiences/histories of racialization, immigration, and Indigenous struggles within North America and globally. Featured graphic novels include Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land, Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Mira Jacob’s Good Talk, and Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, among others.
ENG 352 M003	Contemporary British Film	MW	12:45 PM - 02:05 PM	Hallas,Roger			Despite the popular representation of Britain as a royalty-obsessed, class-ridden and anachronistic nation, British cinema of the past four decades offers an aesthetically rich and ideologically complex engagement with the profound changes that have transformed the country from Thatcherism to Brexit (i.e., the radical reorganization of its economy and social policy, the postcolonial reckoning with its imperial history, the divisive debate over its relationship to Europe and the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). A small national film industry struggling against Hollywood’s global hegemony, contemporary British cinema has managed to carve out a distinctive profile in the global film market, which includes a heritage cinema that uses costume drama and literary adaptation to explore postcolonial nostalgia for empire; a searing realist cinema that interrogates the persistence of class struggle; and a formally innovative Black British film movement that probes the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. In sum, the organizing question that guides us through the course will be: how do specific film practices sustain, challenge, or reconfigure conceptions of nation identity? A Film & Screen Studies course as well as the Race, Empire, Culture requirement of the English and Textual Studies major.
ENG 353 M001	Race, Nation, and Empire before 1900: Jews and Judaism in the Early Modern Christian Imagination	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Shirilan,Stephanie			The expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 meant that Jews were at least officially not to be found in Shakespeare’s England. Traditional historiographies have emphasized the alienation of Jews from the centers of Christian life and have largely studied representations of Jews in Renaissance literature as specimens of fantasy and conjecture from an impassable distance. Recent scholarship has, however, uncovered growing evidence of more substantive exchanges between Jews and Christians. Such encounters took place mainly on the Continent but were described in literature that circulated across Europe. We will consider these developments as we read from a selection of canonical literary depictions of Jews and Judaism (Chaucer, Nashe, Shakespeare, and Marlowe) and from the literature of travel, policy, science, and theology in which Jews or Conversos and Jewish texts figure prominently in representation or in the conditions of their production and reception. Discussion will situate both sets of texts in the contexts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and in relation to the rise and fall of Empire (English, Spanish, Ottoman), urbanization, mercantile and capitalist economic development, and colonial expansion.
ENG 360 M001	Queer Comics	MW	02:15 PM - 03:35 PM	Kidd,Katherine A			Just like LGBTQ+ folx in the mainstream, comics as a medium have become increasingly accepted as literary texts deserving of close academic attention (and appreciation). In fact, the comics medium – a.k.a. graphic novel or sequential art – is particularly apt for telling queer stories, because it is accessible and malleable, lending itself uniquely to queer world-building and the representation of identities and bodies in transition. In this class, we will look at LGBTQ+ representation in sequential art from a variety of time periods, but in particular the 20th and 21st centuries, using visual and literary analysis. Some course texts will be Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, AK Summers’ Pregnant Butch, Kelly Sue McConnick and Valentine Delandro’s Bitch Planet, works by Michael DeForge, a number of webcomics, superhero comics, and many others. Students will have an opportunity to do creative work in addition to the critical writing of the course.
ENG 361 M001	Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the History of Sexuality	TuTh	12:30 PM - 01:50 PM	Beam,Dorothy R			This class explores the possibility that sex, sexuality, and gender have histories and may mean differently across time. 19th century American literature will be our laboratory for thinking about these histories. How did people understand their intimate relations before the emergence of a hetero-homo binary? Into what categories did people fit their self-stylizations of gender, affect, and pleasure? What worlds spin out from past organizations of gender and sex or are foreclosed by them? We will also dip into health reform, marriage advice, utopian manifestos, and sex radicalism; practices of polygamy and celibacy; and African American and Native American resistant formations of family and community. Texts may include Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories; Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Charles Chesnutt, Stories of the Color Line; Kate Chopin, A Vocation and A Voice; Zitkala Sa, Indian Stories.
ENG 401 M001	Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:20 PM	Brunt,Christopher Michael			In this course, writers will develop their existing skills by reading the work of published poets, writing a new poem every week, and preparing thoughtful and concise feedback on each other’s poems. Other requirements include memorization of published poems, the reading and discussion of essays on poetic form and craft, and a diligent commitment to attendance and participation at the workshop table. Our work will culminate in a final portfolio of revised poems and a critical introduction for one of our peers’ portfolios.
ENG 402 M001	Advanced Writing Workshop: Nonfiction	W	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Mary DiPrete			On the project of articulating what we might mean when we call a work of writing “an essay,” John D’Agata offers this: maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental. In this course we will obsess over essay-making as the creation of an artwork, a made object, a series of material choices that both sources from the private wellspring of the writer’s psyche and seeks to evoke meaning in the psyche of a stranger. We will devote ourselves, then, to structure and craft. We will attune to lyric and attend to the possibilities of a form that is uniquely hybridized. We will look at essays that we admire and attempt to answer, how did they do that? Writers in this workshop will build a portfolio of creative nonfiction, some of which will response to assignments and weekly prompts. Requirements include weekly readings, written analysis of peers’ works, careful and collaborative presence in workshop, acute revision of draft work, and memorization. This course is open to any non-creative writing major who has taken the sophomore workshop (ENG 216) or any creative writing major or minor who has taken any introductory workshop (215, 216, 217). Seniors who have not had a workshop may submit a portfolio of five pages of original creative nonfiction to be considered for admission
ENG 403 M001	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	M	03:45 PM - 06:15 PM	Grzecki,Matthew Kwan			This fiction workshop will develop and expand upon the skills introduced in ENG 217. The primary focus will be on how to write better, more effective, more technically sophisticated short stories and/or novel excerpts; the secondary focus will be on how to write more helpful feedback letters. In class, we will discuss student work as well as previously published work. There will be some for-credit in-class writing exercises as well.
ENG 403 M002	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Spiotta,Dana			This class is for students who have completed the introductory fiction workshop. Participants in the workshop will write stories and help critique peer stories. Our focus will be on how to revise stories. We will discuss student work in addition to published work from established writers. We may do in-class writing exercises.
ENG 403 M003	Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Stahl, Keith			This class will focus on how to write effective and engaging short stories and/or novel excerpts, by building on skills introduced in ENG 217. Students will identify strengths and questions within their peers’ texts, and offer written and verbal feedback, so that everyone benefits in the workshop process. We will also discuss some previously published works, many by Syracuse alumni. Dynamic, for-credit, in-class writing exercises will regularly be conducted.
ENG 407 M001	Advanced Critical Writing: Topics before 1900- History of the Book	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Roylance,Patricia J			This course is designed as an introduction to the field known most commonly as “the history of the book.” We will investigate what difference it makes to consider the materiality of a text when interpreting it. How do a text’s material form (its actual paper, ink, binding, etc.) and the modes of its production, circulation and reception affect our sense of its content? We will cover a wide range of texts and topics, from medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare to romance novels and e-readers. We will sometimes meet at Bird Library, to examine archival materials in Special Collections related to our course topics. A research project will require you to work with Special Collections archival material, on an aspect of book history of particular interest to you. This Advanced Critical Writing course will help you to hone your research and writing skills and engage in deep and sustained critical inquiry.
ENG 410 M001	Cinema and the Documentary Idea	MW	03:45 PM - 05:05 PM	Hallas,Roger			Documentary is currently enjoying one of its most innovative and exciting periods as new technologies and creativities reshape the documentary idea. Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by the modern demand for objective scientific evidence. But the medium also has a long history as a creative tool for self-representation and the exploration of subjectivity. Cinema continues to be regarded in various ways as a powerful visual technology for capturing the “real” in all its diversity. This course investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film, television, and digital practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, fake documentaries, wildlife films, docudramas, reality television and immersive digital media. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological, and anthropological frameworks. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the radical defamiliarization of the world in 1960s political cinema to the subversive playfulness of the contemporary mockumentary, the course explores the relations between documentary practices from different national, historical, and political contexts. A Film & Screen Studies course.
ENG 412 M001	Introduction to African Cinema	TuTh	11:00 AM - 12:20 PM	Dima,Vlad			This course is an overview of sub-Saharan francophone African cinema spanning from 1966 to 2020. We will study directors from the pioneering African wave (Ousmane Sembene, Djibril-Diop Mambety, Safi Faye, Souleymane Cissé) and also contemporary artistic voices (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mati Diop, Alain Gomis, Mahamat Haroun Saleh, Abderrahmane Sissako, Maïmouna Doucouré etc.). Students will learn about the history and the aesthetics of francophone African cinema, and how to analyze and write about African films (no prior experience with film study is required). Thematically, the course is split in three major strands to be explored in depth through film viewings and secondary readings: 1/ Aesthetics of image and sound (learning about the construction of narratives, forms, and genres through close textual examination and interpretation); 2/ the African city and/or space (discovering the links between cinema, ideology, and national/regional politics); 3/ African identities (examining the politics of the body, the politics of race, and finally, the meaning of spectatorship in relation to questions of identity formation on and off the screen).
ENG 494 M001	Research Practicum in English and Textual Studies	Th	03:30 PM - 06:20 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This one-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an Honors and/or Distinction project in English. Enrollment is by invitation to participate in the Distinction Program, and/or Honors Program, only. In five formal meetings, and a series of scaffolded assignments, we will cover choosing an adviser, developing a suitable topic with engaging research questions, compiling a bibliography, reading critically, taking notes effectively and situating yourself in a scholarly community. Our work should prepare you to write your thesis in the spring semester, when you will enroll in the second half of this course, ENG 495, the Thesis Writing Workshop.
ENG 630 M002	Graduate Proseminar - Fiction from Modernism to Postmodernism	M	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Forster,Christopher Scott			This course explores the politics and meanings of experimentation in fiction throughout the twentieth century and into the present by examining key accounts of modernism and postmodernism alongside influential and exemplary instances of each. Each week we will read a novel in order to explore the history of what “modernism” and “postmodernism” have meant, how these terms have evolved and been contested, and where debates about these terms stand today. Along with careful attention to modernism and postmodernism as stylistic and formal phenomenon, we will consider the historical contexts, and the political meanings of modernism and postmodernism. Is there a politics to modernism and postmodernism? How do modernism and postmodernism express, or contest, larger cultural forces like imperialism and its aftermath? Are these terms still useful points of reference outside a Eurocentric frame of reference? Key authors may include James Joyce, Virginia Woof, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Ayi Kwei Armah, Arundati Roy, Zadie Smith, and Anna Burns (among others).
ENG 631 M001	Critical Theory	M	09:30 AM - 12:20 PM	Bartolovich,Crystal L			This course provides an introduction to a range of concepts, debates and protocols—that is, the underwriting assumptions-- on which the discipline of English currently relies. Given this extravagant claim, it is worth noting, then, what this course will not do so that you can adjust your expectations accordingly: it will not answer every question you have about “theory”; it will not tell you everything you need to know to succeed in the profession; indeed, it will not give you any pat solutions at all. What it will do is introduce you to modes of questioning, evaluation, research and theorizing that are necessary to any “critical” (as we will see, even this term is contested) practice. To this end, we will explore ways of reading theoretical and critical texts, examine how questions and problems have been and are now generated in English, and consider why new critical practices emerge (or fail to do so). We will thus read very recent articles and chapters as well as explore the longer history of concepts and theories on which such texts rely (whether implicitly or explicitly). Because of its emphasis on thoughtful engagement with a variety of different approaches and skills, this class will ask you to present several short, workshop papers on practical topics, such as locating and exploring journals and archives important to your field, writing proposals, and formulating good reading and research questions. There will thus be no long “seminar paper” due at the end of the semester.
ENG 650 M002	Forms	Tu	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	PTI
ENG 650 M005	Forms - Voice	M	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Benz,Chanelle M			Whether it belongs to NoViolet Bulawayo or David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Natalie Diaz, or John Keene, a text’s voice must feel authentic, revelatory, and close to preordained, but the right voice is hardly ever delivered straight from the muse. No matter how transparent or dialed-up the style, voice is a literary performance which is as much about where the voice is coming from as it is about what is being communicated. In this class, we will read and dissect authorial voices from a range of creative writers while examining the creation of voice in our own work. We will explore ways to create different voices and deepen the questions that these voices are asking. The course is divided roughly into four sections: Voice is Character, Voice is Place, Voice & the Eye, and Voice & the Sentence.
ENG 650 M006	Forms - Memoir	Th	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Karr,Mary Marlene
ENG 650 M007	Forms - Best Version	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			One of the great mysteries of writing fiction and poetry is when and how to revise: How does a writer know when a story or a poem is finished? How much should a writer rely on other opinions to reshape their vision? In this class, we will read different versions of several published stories and poems, including Raymond Carver’s versions of the stories in the Gordon Lish-edited collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as well as different drafts of student work, as a catalyst for discussion about how to edit and revise to arrive at the “best version” of a piece of writing.
ENG 715 M001	First Year Poetry Workshop	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Kennedy,Christopher G			Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and critique one another’s poems in class with the ultimate goal of learning how to become better writers and readers of poetry. Admission is strictly limited to first-year poetry students in the MFA Program.
ENG 716 M001	Second Poetry Workshop	Th	12:30 PM - 03:15 PM	Haxton,Brooks			Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.
ENG 717 M001	First Year Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Dee,Jonathan R			This workshop will focus on fiction writing and the useful critique thereof. We will read and discuss two or three student-submitted stories/novel excerpts each week. Some outside reading may also be assigned. Open to first-year fiction MFA students only.
ENG 718 M001	Second Fiction Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Benz,Chanelle M			In this course, students will work to develop a substantial body of their own fiction. We will discuss technique, dissect work by a range of published writers, and read essays on craft. Together, we will examine the art of fiction in a generous and challenging environment. Students will investigate fiction’s possibilities, develop an understanding of their style and aesthetics, and deepen their creative process by exploring form, narrative tension, point of view, character development, voice, and other aspects of craft. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to turn in three or four short works.
ENG 719 M002	Third Poetry Workshop	W	12:45 PM - 03:30 PM	Karr,Mary Marlene			This is an advanced course, so I assume you’re all passionate about poetry and motivated enough to read a) write, b) critique each other’s work with utmost care and respect, c) rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. It’s a class based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each other’s poems should be detailed and serious. I’d also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. First and foremost, you must get along with each other, and anyone engaging in an ad hominem attack on anyone else in the group will be asked to leave the room. No violence, no threats of violence. You can be ironic about yourselves or me but not each other. Congeniality is a requirement for the class. You can disagree with each other, but I expect respectful comments and tone. Anyone unable to get along will not pass the class. Often people say, “We don’t have to love each other…” This class works best if we love each other. It’s part of my pedagogy.
ENG 721 M002	Third Year Graduate Fiction Workshop		Online	Saunders,George W
ENG 730 M001	Graduate Seminar - Ecological Being Before and After the Anthropocene	Tu	09:30 AM - 12:15 PM	Goode,Michael			This course focuses on the complexity of thinking and representing basic ecological things—air, climate, ecosystems, animal ways of perceiving, overwhelming weather events, geologic time, petroleum, the water cycle, and so forth—at a time when it has never been more urgent to do so, on existential and environmental justice grounds. The intellectual, political, and ethical challenges lie not just in the complexity of the ecological things themselves or in the complex ways in which environmental harms tend to exacerbate existing histories of inequity. The challenges lie, too, in the complex ecological significance of media, for we necessarily represent or communicate about ecology through media, and those media not only carry ecological footprints but also shape our ecological being by altering how we perceive, do, and dwell. To focus us intellectually and historically, we will be considering artistic works tied to our contemporary moment of climate change and unfolding mass extinction alongside artistic works tied to an earlier time and place—late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain—when ecological changes had become palpable enough that many writers and artists felt urgency, too, to engage in various representational and media experiments to try to grapple with how to represent basic ecological things. The point is not to conflate the two time periods but to use their difference to help bring into view the historicity of the present and of our present ecological media, with the hope that this can somehow make a positive difference.
ENG 730 M003	Archives and the Poetics and Politics of Knowledge Production	Tu	03:30 PM - 06:15 PM	Tiongson,Antonio T			This graduate seminar constitutes a critical encounter with the nature of knowledge production—how we come to know what we know—through a consideration of various kinds of archives including slavery archives, colonial archives, haunting and ghostly matters, archives of trauma, affective archives (unhappy archives), archives of dissonance and gossip, archives of wake work, archives of antiblackness and performance, archives of abjection, archives of queer visual and public culture, archives of the forever war, and archives of Indigenous futurity. It examines what goes into the making of archives and what kind of work they do as well as why deciphering archives is such a fraught and vexed endeavor. The seminar aims to familiarize graduate students with emergent and new approaches to thinking about and understanding archives, why it has become a focal point of inquiry across disciplinary formations. It aims to compel students to be more self-reflexive about their own source materials, to think through the specificities, complications, and challenges of engaging with their own archival materials. In short, the seminar investigates the nature of knowledge production in a way that accounts for the contingencies of power and history.