Fall 2015
EN 500-001: Advanced Studies in Linguistics: Language and Culture
R. Nelson
CRN# 45290
W 2:00-4:30 PM
By the end of the semester, the student should understand the roles language and culture play in the constitution of an individual, in the conditioning of perception of self, others, and world, the role language plays in the transmission of cultural values and perspectives, the role culture plays in understanding the behavior of others, and how different cultural and linguistic practices are related to different educational outcomes. This course will cover topics in cultural psychology, cognitive linguistics, and anthropology. Special emphasis will be put on the constitutive, normative, and interpretive functions of culture and the function of language in the shaping and transmission of culture.
EN 500-002: Special Topics: “Voices of the Renaissance: Machiavelli”
B. Godorecci
CRN# 50087
R 3:30-6:00 PM
This course will focus on our close reading of several of Machiavelli’s most famous works, including The Prince, The Discourses, and The Mandrake, while looking attentively at the times in which he was writing, and in what way Machiavelli remains one of the most important “voices of the Renaissance.” We will also be reading two other Machiavellian comedies, the Andria and the Clizia, along with the imitative forerunner of the Clizia, Plautus’ Casina. In addition to our examination of Machiavelli’s thought on topics such as history, “political science,” imitation, and theater, we will also discuss Machiavelli’s position regarding the querelle on language, the so-called “questione della lingua,” as expressed in his work, A Dialogue on Language. It is the aim of this course to examine Machiavelli’s works in detail while considering his relevance for other major European thinkers and writers, such as William Shakespeare. To this end, part of our course reading will include Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
EN 500-003: Transfeminisms
J. Purvis
CRN# 50088
W 2:00-4:30 PM
Much like the term, Queer, Trans- signifies plural locations and non-binary conceptions of bodies and identifications; like Queer, it challenges the fixity of meaning and narratives of linear progression. The subject of this course, trans- and transfeminisms is not simply a trans-cognizant and trans-inclusive approach to feminist theory. This course examines key moments in the trans-ing of feminism and its constitutive categories and modes of analysis, including the category, woman, which can be traced back to Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech and other early feminist interventions that interrogate the category, “woman.” A range of authors, including Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Marilyn Frye, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Susan Stryker, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam, and Gayle Salamon, enact theoretical interventions that disrupt, denaturalize, rearticulate, and make visible the normative linkages assumed to exist between biological specificity, social roles and statuses, and gendered personhood and raise issues involving difference, hierarchy, bodies in systems of power, and institutions that produce various possibilities of viable personhood and eliminate others. These are issues central to feminist analysis, transgender theory, and queer theory, all of which demand that we critically assess the structuring systems of sex and gender with relation to sexuality, desire, embodiment, and subjectivity. Despite misguided attempts to separate feminism from transgender theory, or trans- from queer theory, this course explores the assertion that the most politically efficacious forms of feminism are always-already queer and trans. This course investigates what we mean by Transfeminisms, examines the Transgender theory and the trans-ing of categories; it extends Trans- and Trans-feminist approaches to transnational, transcultural, transspecies, and transgenerational theories and politics, which generates new methodologies, new modes of gendered subjectivity, new discourses, and new lines of inquiry that promote structural transformation and justice.
EN 500-004: Critical Theory
M. Zupanic
CRN# 47365
T 3:30-6:00 PM
This graduate course, taught in English and cross-listed between FR 511, RL 557 and EN 500-004, serves as a general introduction to trends in critical theory. It offers a combination of research methodologies, theory, and practice; an application of various approaches; a verification of acceptability of research perspectives and procedures. Students are to examine various schools of criticism and theory and apply them to their own text analysis. Critical thinking is being developed based on readings prepare students for the final project (oral and written), based on the application of various theories and critical approaches to a chosen text. For more information, please contact Dr. Zupancic, mzupanci@ua.edu
EN 523-001: History of the English Language
C. Davies
CRN# 50110
MW 2:00 – 3:15 PM
An introduction to the external history of the English language along with the study of the accompanying internal changes in structure.
EN 524-001: English Structure and Usage
D. Liu
CRN# 43638
MW 3:00-4:15 PM
This advanced grammar course examines the structure and usage of the English language, including morphology (word formation/structure), syntax (the patterns of sentences), and discourse (the context in which utterances are patterned and made meaningful). We will review both traditional and contemporary approaches to English grammar, such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, lexico-grammar, pattern grammar, and systemic functional grammar. Through reading, individual and group research projects, and discussion, students will attain a solid understanding of the English language’s structure and usage. EN 529- 001 CRN# 42588 Directed Reading A. Cook
EN 529-002: Directed Reading
R. Behn
CRN# 42589 Directed Reading
EN 529-003: Directed Reading
D. Liu
RN# 42590
EN 533-001/101: Practicum – Teaching College English
M. Robinson
CRN#s 42779 / 46440
TR 12:30-1:30 PM
Teaching College English Practicum – This two-credit-hour practicum and mentor system is designed to help develop effective pedagogy for teaching composition and to address practical teaching concerns. The course is required for all GTAs with 18 or more graduate hours who are teaching UA composition courses for the first time and will consist of a one-hour large group meeting and a one-hour small group mentor meeting each week.
EN 533-002/102: Practicum – Teaching College English
TBA
CRN#s 46205 / 46442
TR 12:30-1:30 PM
Teaching College English Practicum – This two-credit-hour practicum and mentor system is designed to help develop effective pedagogy for teaching composition and to address practical teaching concerns. The course is required for all GTAs with 18 or more graduate hours who are teaching UA composition courses for the first time and will consist of a one-hour large group meeting and a one-hour small group mentor meeting each week.
EN 533-003/103: Practicum – Teaching College English
B. Champagne
CRN#s 46206/46443
TR 12:30-1:30 PM
Teaching College English Practicum – This two-credit-hour practicum and mentor system is designed to help develop effective pedagogy for teaching composition and to address practical teaching concerns. The course is required for all GTAs with 18 or more graduate hours who are teaching UA composition courses for the first time and will consist of a one-hour large group meeting and a one-hour small group mentor meeting each week.
EN 533-004 /104: Practicum – Teaching College English
TBA
CRN#s 50125 / 50126
TR 12:30-1:30 PM
Teaching College English Practicum – This two-credit-hour practicum and mentor system is designed to help develop effective pedagogy for teaching composition and to address practical teaching concerns. The course is required for all GTAs with 18 or more graduate hours who are teaching UA composition courses for the first time and will consist of a one-hour large group meeting and a one-hour small group mentor meeting each week.
EN 535-001: Translation Theory
E. Wittman
CRN# 48484
R 2:00-4:30 PM
This course offers an introduction to the history of translation theory through a study of critical essays from Jerome and Dryden to Benjamin and Derrida. Class time will be divided between analysis of theoretical writing and evaluative discussion of competing English-language translations. We will see that the history of English literature would have been different, if not impossible, without the efforts of countless translators, many of them anonymous. One of the goals of the course is to make students aware of central issues in the burgeoning field of translation studies, including the social and economic factors that come into play whenever we ferry texts between languages, cultures, and eras. The methods and procedures that we study will lead to discussions about gender, poetics, ideology, class, and nation. We will devote particular attention to the changing valences of the key concept of equivalence and consider the role translations play in the consecration of literature.
EN 537-001: Introduction to Graduate Studies
A. Pionke
CRN# 45064
R 10:00 -12:30 PM
A study of selected bibliographical resources and of some of the important method approaches employed in literary study, including an introduction to critical approaches, scholarly writing, and issues in the profession.
EN 539-001: Approaches to Teaching the Sophomore
TBA
CRN# 49826
T 12:30 – 1:30 PM
This course is required for all GTAs assigned to teach a 200-level EN survey for the first time. It may be taken concurrently with or in advance of teaching one’s first literature survey and is typically taken by Ph.D. students in their second year of coursework and by MFA students in their third year of coursework. A grade of “pass” is required for students to teach literature courses in the department of English. Students should expect to meet weekly to discuss practical subjects like how to manage daily discussion, construct exams, assign and grade papers, and otherwise ensure that learning outcomes are being met. Students should also expect to prepare teaching materials for a number of the 200-level surveys and to have those items evaluated for their agreement with the department’s 200-level course guidelines.
EN 598-001: Non-Thesis Research
A. Cook
CRN# 48485
EN 598-002: Non-Thesis Research
R. Behn
CRN# 48486
EN 598-003: Non-Thesis Research
D. Liu
CRN# 48487
EN 599-001: Thesis Research
A. Cook
CRN# 42598
EN 599-002: Thesis Research
R. Behn
CRN# 42599
EN 599-003: Thesis Research
D. Liu
CRN# 42600
EN 601-001: Hypoxic Workshop of Prose
M. Martone
CRN# 42463
M 10:00-12:30 PM
Writers may anticipate contributing one or more pieces each week and considering the contributions of colleagues in the class. Process instead of product. Descriptive instead of prescriptive. Quantity has a quality all its own. For candidates for the MFA in Writing, but if space is available other writers will be considered after providing a portfolio of work.
EN 601-002: Novel II
K. Wells
CRN# 46415
W 2:00 – 4:30 PM
This class is intended for students enrolled in the MFA program in creative writing. It is the second half of a year-long novel writing workshop. This semester will be devoted to the examination and practice of the craft of the long form. New novelists are welcome, space permitting.
EN 603-002: Poetry Workshop
H. Staples
CRN# 47364
T 2:00-4:30 PM
Paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould describes evolution as “a process of constant branching and expansion.” We will engage this process within poetry in order that your writing may give way to novel literary creations through conversation with other writers, both living and dead. Texts include Best American Poetry 2015, The Business of Fancy Dancing, Sherman Alexie; From Sand Creek, Simon Ortiz; The People, Yes, Carl Sandburg; Unraveling at the Name, Jenny Factor; and other texts.
EN 605-320: Nonfiction Workshop
H. Felt
CRN# 48489
T 5:00-7:30 PM
In this workshop, your goal will be to understand how you make decisions while writing nonfiction. Where is your ego appearing on the page? How are you contorting your writing around a piece of missing information? And w requirement, but students who have such a conference in mind should think about applying for travel funds early in the semester.
EN 608-003: Comedy
W. Rawlings
CRN# 45292
R 2:00-4:30 PM
“There is a thin line between the comic and the horrible,” claims Milan Kundera. Why should this be the case? This will be a hands-on course investigating forms and strategies of comedy. We’ll read in several genres and watch performances by comedians, and we’ll also discuss contexts for comedy such as race, class, nationality and gender. Possible texts include David Kirby, The Ha-Ha; Roddy Doyle, The Van; Sandra Tsing Loh, Depth Takes a Holiday; Aravind Adiga, White Tiger. We’ll also investigate the relationship between comedy on the stage and page. Writing assignments will range from a short monologue to a longer comic work of prose, poetry, or nonfiction. Poets and prose writers welcome. Everyone will tell a joke or two
EN 608-004: Of Bodies Changed to Other Forms I Tell
J. Brouwer
CRN# 50528
F 2:00 – 4:30 PM
Classics for Contemporaries In this class we’ll read about the rage of Achilles, the Sirens’ song, the Trojan horse, Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, and scores of other stories that have shaped Western culture over the last 2,500 years (give or take). We will also make additional contributions to that culture by completing a variety of imaginative writing projects inspired by our reading. Texts: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses, along with some supplementary/contextual/critical material. Open to MFA students in any major genre; writing assignments will be genre-neutral
EN 609-320: Wild, tame, and In Between
R. Behn
CRN# 48490
W 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Writing about Animals This one-hour course will meet every other week for two hours. We will read creative and critical works–poems, fiction, and non-fiction– about a broad range of animals including mammals, birds, insects, microscopic worms, and other nominees. Each week we will respond to readings and student work. We will also write during class from time to time. Occasional field trips include dog-friendly venues, a trip to the “Worm Shack” on campus,and other choices as voted upon by the group. How can we write about animals without being sappy or predictable? Without resorting to an us/them stance? How might we think like an animal? How might animals be a part of our creative process?
EN 609-321: Practicum
M 5:00-5:50 PM CRN# 49829 Practicum for first-time teachers of EN 200 M. Martone
EN 609-322: Job Market
T 5:00 – 5:50 PM CRN# 48705 Job Market K. Wells This course is devoted to educating you about and preparing you for the academic job market. Letters of application, CVs, dossiers, writing samples, teaching philosophies, interviews, these are the things that will be discussed, practiced, and demystified (somewhat) by this course.
EN 609-323: Approaches to Teaching the Sophomore
Y. Manora
CRN# 49103
T 12:30 – 1:30 PM
This course is required for all GTAs assigned to teach a 200-level EN survey for the first time. It may be taken concurrently with or in advance of teaching one’s first literature survey and is typically taken by Ph.D. students in their second year of coursework and by MFA students in their third year of coursework. A grade of “pass” is required for students to teach literature courses in the department of English. Students should expect to meet weekly to discuss practical subjects like how to manage daily discussion, construct exams, assign and grade papers, and otherwise ensure that learning outcomes are being met. Students should also expect to prepare teaching materials for a number of the 200-level surveys and to have those items evaluated for their agreement with the department’s 200-level course guidelines.
EN 613-001: Second Language Development
D. Liu
CRN# 45294
R 2:00 -4:30 PM
This course explores issues and theories about second language development. It focuses on the study of learner language; language learning process; biological, psychological, and social factors affecting the process; and the role of formal instruction in second language development. Where relevant, first, third, and fourth language development issues will also be addressed.
EN 620-001: Graduate Introduction to Linguistics
C. Davies
CRN# 49830
T 2:00-4:30 PM
An advanced introductory linguistics course that focuses on the English language and which has relevance for students in the applied linguistics/TESOL, literature, rhetoric and composition, and MFA programs.
EN 630-001: Directed Reading
A. Cook
CRN# 42602
EN 630-002: Directed Reading
R. Behn
CRN# 42603
EN 630-003: Directed Reading
D. Liu
CRN# 43751
EN 640-001: Blood Melodrama
F. Whiting
CRN# 49831
MW 4:30-5:45 PM
Few popular aesthetic phenomena have had as far-reaching influence as the mid-century American crime fiction and film collectively termed “noir.” This course is intended as an inquiry into film and fiction noir’s place in U.S. cultural production. We’ll examine a selection of twentieth-century noir fiction and film as well as a selection of theoretical and historical texts in order to get a sense of the movement’s characteristic formal and thematic elements. At the same time, we’ll concentrate on the ways in which these popular crime novels and films provided a medium for negotiating larger cultural issues and anxieties in pre- and post-WWII U.S. society. More particularly, we’ll try to chart some of the complex relations between noir’s concern with issues of transgression, deviance, punishment, evidence, and epistemology and the broader cultural concerns of masculine and feminine sexuality, changing class and economic structures, and the often submerged issue of race that are invariably present in noir works.
EN 654-001: Seminar in Visual and Digital Rhetoric
TBA
CRN# 49832
R 3:30–6:00 PM
This seminar focuses on understanding what rhetoric is and how to identify it in visual and digital “texts.” It explores how to use rhetoric as a pedagogical tool for incorporating visual elements into composition classes
EN 658-001: History of Rhetoric and Composition II
M. Robinson
CRN# 49833
W 10:00-12:30 PM
The Renaissance to the Postmodern Era This seminar covers rhetorical texts from the Renaissance to the Postmodern era, particularly texts having influence on today’s field of composition
EN 662-001: 15th Century Arts of Homage
A. Cook
CRN# 49834
M 11:30-2:00 PM
This course participates in the recent revival of critical interest in Chaucer’s fifteenth-century imitators, chief among them Lydgate, Henryson, and Hoccleve. We will explore how fascinations with Chaucer’s classicism fueled poetic re-castings of the relationship between Lancastrian patronage and literary tradition. We will also consider how the literature of the period speaks to twenty-first-century concerns with subjects such as textual dissemination and the centrifugal force of state power. Course requirements include a weekly discussion question and a fifteen-page research paper that you will revise once in response to my commentary before submitting it for a grade. Be prepared for a heavy reading load.
EN 668-001: Writing Early Modern Epic
E. Wilson
CRN# 46210
W 3:30-6:00 PM
How do you become the writer of epic? And then, what becomes of you? This course will trace the discursive trajectories of writers of major early modern epics from their juvenilia to their magnus opus. We will see the different ways in which early modern English writers approached epic poetry, and how they created, challenged, and changed conceptions of what could be done in English vernacular epic. Core authors for the course will include Edmund Spenser, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton: for each, we will read some of their very early works including drama and prose to establish their youthful reading and writing methods before seeing how these morphed into their mature epics. Epic relies upon a network of writers and writing techniques, and we will look at interactions between our authors throughout the course, culminating in a study of Jane Austen’s juvenilia which in turn engages with, adapts, and redeploys specific scenes and literary features of the early modern epics which are the focus of the course.
EN 685-001: Seminar in Victorian Literature
A. Pionke
CRN# 49835
T 2:00–4:30 PM
Victorian Women’s Poetry: This graduate seminar is designed to introduce interested graduate students to the historically neglected corpus of Victorian poetry written by women. Like their male counterparts, female poets of the Victorian period had to come to terms with the rapid industrialization, class conflict, increasing secularization and growing sense of alienation that characterized the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, not to mention the poetic legacy bequeathed to them by earlier Romantic writers. Unlike their male contemporaries, however, Victorian women poets often, and to fascinatingly different degrees, approached these and other topics with an acute awareness of their own shifting role as women writers in a society largely controlled by men. This course adopts a topical approach to Victorian women’s poetry. Each week, a prominent and recurring subject, theme or representational strategy will serve as the point of entry into a cluster of poems by a variety of authors. In addition, for the majority of the semester, one class each week will be devoted to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel, Aurora Leigh (1856). One of the most important poems by any nineteenth-century author, Aurora Leigh is certainly the single most influential work in Victorian women’s poetry, serving not only as a defense-by-example of the professionalization of women’s writing, but also as a source of imagery, argument and versification for many of the women poets who came after Browning. Our final three weeks together will be devoted to an expanded examination of the poetry of Augusta Webster, one of the most interesting and accomplished poets of the Victorian period who was, until very recently, almost entirely forgotten in the process of canon formation.
EN 690-001: Critically Cosmopolitan
D. Deutsch
CRN# 49836
T 10:00 – 12:30 PM
English Literature, 1890-1945: In the midst of tempestuous, often violent rising nationalisms across early twentieth-century Europe, the best English writers frequently presented themselves as simultaneously citizens of England and citizens of the world. These writers were critically cosmopolitan. They were self-conscious inheritors and innovators of European, Eastern, and American aesthetic histories, theories, and artifacts. These writers explicitly embraced a range of aesthetic forms, languages, geographies, sexualities, genders, and political traditions with an eye and ear towards the international community. This course will introduce students to representations and critiques of cosmopolitanism in British literature from 1890 to 1945 that remain influential in the contemporary period. We will consider novels, poetry, and plays by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Katharine Burdekin, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh, among others. Students will also be asked to read early and much more recent critiques of the relationship between early twentieth-century cosmopolitanism and modernist styles.
EN 698-001 Non-Dissertation Research
CRN# 42604 Non-Diss Research A. Cook
EN 698-002: Non-Dissertation Research
CRN# 42605 Non-Diss Research R. Behn
EN 698-003: Non-Dissertation Research
CRN# 42606 Non-Diss Research D. Liu
EN 699-001: Dissertation Research
CRN# 42609 Diss Research A. Cook
EN 699-002: Dissertation Research
CRN# 42610 Diss Research R. Behn
Spring 2016
EN 500-001: Strange Worlds: Postcolonialism & the Diasporic Imaginary
D. Yoon
CRN# 13439
T 2:00-4:30 PM
“I had no nation now b race, class, sexuality, the body, nation, region, and other promising locations ripe for rethinking the workings of abjection and affect, the politics of disgust and the politics of shame. With particular attention to developments in contemporary feminist theory, this course engages in critical explorations and interventions concerning zones of intelligibility and the lack thereof, where disgust and shame circulate and proliferate meaning in relation to masculinities and femininities, LGBTQI issues, the borders between human/animal and living/dead, class, region (e.g., the dirty South), racism (as abjection), nation, citizenship, agency, and embodiment. Scholars, such as Sally Munt, Sara Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, and Sharon P. Holland draw from an array of related areas of inquiry, including queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, terrorism studies, and queer of color critique to promote enhanced cognizance and creative modalities for resistance, rework of identificatory mechanisms, and advance new forms of subjectivity and sociality. (Prerequisites: none)
EN 512-001: Computers and Writing
A. Buck
CRN# 19806
F 10:00-12:30 PM
A survey of how computers can be used to help students improve their writing and to help teachers improve their writing instruction. This course provides an overview of computers and writing as a disciplinary field within rhetoric and composition, including historical trajectory and major and recent trends. This course will ask students to consider both the theoretical and pedagogical implications of digital writing technologies. Students will compose both print and digital projects in this course.
EN 523-001: History of the English Language
C. Davies
CRN# 19827
TR 11:00-12:15 PM
This course traces the evolution of the English language from its Indo-European roots to its contemporary forms as a basis for understanding English grammar, pronunciation, and spelling and as a background for studying English literature. The course examines the development of English from two perspectives: its outer history (i.e., the sociohistorical, cultural, and political forces that have helped shape the language) and its inner history (the phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes that comprise that have taken place). In addition, it looks at some general principles of language change and relates them to specific developments in English. By the end of the course, you should understand why the English language is the way it is and where many nonstandard features of English come from.
EN 525 -001: Variation in American English
C. Davies
CRN# 15204
TR 2:00-3:15 PM
The study of the experience of the English language in America, with particular emphasis on its development and dialects. We’ll explore differences in accent, vocabulary, grammar, and patterns of language use among people from across the United States. We’ll look at how dialect differences developed, reflect on how language is a part of our identity, and consider the consequences of linguistic stereotyping, both positive and negative.
EN 601-001: Graduate Fiction Workshop
W. Rawlings
CRN# 15294
T 2:00-4:30 PM
Students in the graduate creative writing program will work together with the goal of helping each other develop as writers and readers. Emphasis will be on writing as a contemporary art form rather than on polishing prose for particular genres or markets. Students will write short stories for class discussion, and we’ll supplement student writing by reading stories by contemporary writers that illustrate ways to handle voice, structure, time, and other craft issues.
EN 603-001: Graduate Poetry Workshop
J. Brouwer
CRN# 11037
T 2:00-4:30 PM
This is a workshop course, and the majority of our time will be spent discussing the poems you write. However, on the theory that lively reading can aid and abet lively writing, we will also read and discuss poetry and criticism by others. This course is open to any MFA student regardless of major genre. Other interested graduate students must submit a sample of 5-7 pages of poetry to the Director of Creative Writing well before pre-registration to be considered for admission.
EN 605-001: Writing a Nonfiction Book–Part I
H. Felt
CRN# 19830
W 5:00-7:30 PM
In this two-semester course, students will learn how to conceive of and write a book-length work of nonfiction. The first half (Spring 2016) will focus on gathering material, establishing a structure, producing generative writing, and articulating project goals in the form of pitches, query letters, and book proposals. Students will be expected to have a topic in mind at the beginning of the course. While the emphasis will be on continuous narrative, students may also write a series of interrelated pieces, so long as the connection between them is clear and the 150-page requirement is met by the end of the second half (Fall 2016).
EN 608-001: Anthologizing Anthologies
M. Martone CRN# 19831 M 2:00 – 4:30 PM This course will examine the shadowy form known as the anthology and the “authors” of such books who are usually thought of as “editors.” We will consider a variety of examples of poetry and prose from mere collections of “best” work to aesthetically directed and framed assemblages geared to define and champion certain styles, points-of-view, or content. We will read many introductions, prefaces, and other kinds of enabling apparati and probably attempt to put together our own anthologies as a term project.
EN 608-002: Forms Special Topics: Fabulist Fiction
K. Wells CRN# 19832 W 2:00 – 4:30 PM In her introduction to Halldor Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier, Susan Sontag says, “Narratives that deviate from [the] artificial norm” of realist fiction “and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all…still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre,” provoking labels that consign them to “the outlying precincts of the novel’s main tradition,” and it is with some of these deviant, martian fictions that this course will be concerned. Fabulist fiction is, fundamentally, fiction in which anything can happen, fiction unfettered by empirical reality, in which human beings sprout wings or apes deliver disquisitions on what it is to be human, fiction set in historical theme parks built according to verisimilitude tips acquired from ghosts, fiction of the supernatural, paranormal, romantic, surreal, metaphysical, the oneiric, unlikely, implausible, the uncanny, the marvelous, fiction in which magic, myth, and dream construct a cosmos at a tilt.
EN 608-003: [RE]MARK[S] OF THE BEAST
H. Staples
CRN# 13336
W 10:00-12:30 PM
“I is an other,” wrote French prose-poet Arthur Rimbaud. For the most part, our unconscious and, so too our fullest selves, slip beyond our conscious recognition. Access to a state of being where normalized meanings and subjectivities are destabilized is accomplished for writers using a variety of methods, many grounded in surrealist, divination, and meditative practices. What arises from these efforts? Those indeterminate beasts whose call we will heed and howl in this course. We will follow and/or develop techniques and games to activate the imagination, while reading and writing within and without genresall writers welcome. Our texts may include: Nadja, Andre Breton; Dark Matter, Aase Berg; 300, 000 Blake Butler (visiting writer, Bankhead Reading Series); A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, CA Conrad; I’m Ok, I’m Pig, Kim Hyesoon; I-Ching (Book of Changes); Blue Fasa, Nathaniel Mackey; Descent of Alette
EN 610-001: Theory and Methods of TESOL
D. Liu
CRN# 15535
T 2:00-4:30 PM
This course offers an overview of the theoretical bases and practical applications of approaches to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). We will cover topics, such as the linguistic, psychological, and social aspects of second language learning, learner motivation, integrated skills teaching, successful teaching principles and strategies, choosing materials, assessment, culture in the classroom, and technology as a classroom resource.
EN 612-001: Topics in Applied Linguistics: Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary
D. Liu
CRN# 15537
M 2:00-4:30 PM
Vocabulary and grammar are arguably the two most important parts in language learning. Using contemporary linguistic theories and approaches, such as cognitive/corpus linguistics and construction/pattern grammar, this course explores effective and creative ways of teaching vocabulary and grammar. Via readings and discussions, the class will gain a sound understanding of the new theories and will use them to critically examine lexico-grammatical descriptions and teaching practices in existing language textbooks and reference materials. In addition, students will, individually and collectively (in groups), develop lexico-grammatical teaching activities, exercises, assessment instruments, and lesson plans and share them in class.
EN 617-001: Teaching Academic Language Skills to Non-Native English Speakers
R. Nelson
CRN# 15224
W 2:00-4:30 PM
A course focusing on the teaching of academic writing skills in the context of an American university.
EN 635-001: Seminar in Postcolonial Criticism
C. Iheka
CRN# 19833
R 2:00-4:30 PM
What is postcolonialism? Is it even possible to define this term? How can we locate it temporally? In other words, when does it start and has it ended? These are some of the overarching questions that will guide our readings and class selection in this course. For conceptual purposes, we would locate the idea of the postcolonial in three broad categories: Introduction to Postcolonialism, Before Edward Said, and Edward Said and Beyond. We will explore the various definitions of the term and critiques of the idea of the postcolonial as a conceptual category. Our readings and discussions will also consider recent explorations in the field as it pertains to globalization and new critical approaches such as ecocriticism. Readings will include the works of Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Robert Young, Anthony Appiah, Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak.
EN 637-001 Critical Prose Workshop
H. White
CRN# 17497
W 2:00-4:30 PM
The purpose of this class is to shape a piece of each student’s critical writing into publishable form. To this end the class will be run as a workshop, with the students’ own writing as our primary material. On days when we focus on a single student’s essay, another class member will be assigned to present that essay to the class, by identifying its thesis, describing its situation in a larger critical field, and outlining its argument. At other times students will be asked to bring in pieces of their essays for more intense focus. At the end of the class each student will submit his or her essay to a refereed journal.
EN 639-001: Oral and Community Histories, Rhetorics, and Literacies
M. Robinson
CRN# 17498
T 9:30-12:00 PM
This course will explore theories and methodologies of oral histories, community histories, oral rhetorics, community rhetorics, oral literacies, and community literacies and will culminate in a service learning project where students engage in an oral community history collection project in the Historic Black Town of Hobson City, Alabama.
EN 640-001: Disposable South
J. Crank
CRN# 17530
M 10:00-12:30 PM
In a recent article in The New Yorker, George Packer concludes that the South’s contemporary political identity has been hijacked by a self-defeating, dogged isolation and stubborn nostalgia — reactionary perspectives that Packer finds indicative of the South’s place as “America’s colonial backwater.” Colonial readings aside, one could make the argument that visions of the South frequently reference tropes of trash: the region is disposable, unnecessary; its people poor, illiterate “trash”; its customs and traditions worthless and backwards; its “toxic” food consisting of processed garbage; its cultural achievements middling and superfluous. This course will examine southern “trash” as a framing device for reading (or asserting) an authentic South; we will examine literary and cultural texts (such as cookbooks, manifestos, and films) in order to understand various constructions of the disposable South in contemporary culture (The Queer South, the PostSouth, the Dirty South, the New South, etc.) We’ll also be interested in “disposable” southern identities and how they dialogue with issues of abjection, poverty, queerness, gender, segregation, race, and empire.
EN 643-001: Tragedy
D. Deutsch
CRN# 19834
T 9:30-12:00 PM
What is tragedy? How does society deal with large-scale catastrophes of a political, religious, idealistic, or organic nature? By giving up? By forging on? What makes a tragic hero or heroine? What is the relationship between tragedy and comedy? These are some of the issues we’ll examine as we look at how an individual or a small group confronts the hostile forces of gods, fates, or even simply social conventions. After examining the classical dramatic tradition, we’ll swiftly move on to tragedies in the American tradition. For this, we’ll take a look at plays that have shaped the American tragic landscape and apply the concept of tragedy to modern American fiction and poetry. For help, we’ll turn to influential definitions and theories of tragedy, particularly those of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Miller.
EN 648-001: TBA
Y. Manora
CRN# 17499
W 10:00-2:30 PM
For more information, email Professor Manora at ymanora@ua.edu.
EN 651-001: Politics of Teaching Writing
A. Dayton
CRN# 19835
R 9:30-12:00 PM
This course begins with this assumption: that teaching and learning are inherently political acts, taking place in complex institutional, economic, and cultural contexts. We will address the political aspects of composition studies, beginning with a discussion of the value of teaching writing and the uses of the humanities in twenty-first century America. We will discuss critical pedagogy, its adaptation in US college classrooms, and its critics and alternatives. We will look at specific axes of difference in the classroom—race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and social class, and we will discuss the forces outside the classroom—institutional, cultural, and economic—that impact our work. Finally, at the end of the semester we will return to our initial question—what are the humanities, particularly English studies, for?
EN 666-001: Writing Race, Acting Race in the Anglo Atlantic World
C. Smith
CRN# 19836
R 2:00-4:30 PM
This graduate course will appeal to students interested in Renaissance literature and to those invested in early American and African American. We will view (English) Renaissance literature from a transatlantic perspective, examining in particular the development of racial discourses in the literature—resulting from English/New World encounters with black Africans and Native Americans. The course applies the underlining principle of Critical Race Theory – that the concept of race has had a profound effect on the social, legal, historical, and literary structures that comprise United States culture. To better understand how U.S. culture arrived at this point, students will journey back to sixteenth and seventeenth-century England to examine the earliest manifestations of racial discourses in an ever-expanding English American empire. We will pursue this course while keeping in mind the warnings from race theorists and historians who caution against applying the term ‘race’ to earlier historical periods in which people were classified based on cultural distinctions, not biological ones. They point out that our contemporary understanding of ‘race’ as a scientific, biologically-based system of difference is an invention of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientists. However, as Maria Elena Martinez rightly points out in Genealogical Fictions, in properly historicizing the term ‘race,’ we should be careful not to dismiss its presence and function in earlier periods. We will operate, then, on the assumption that racial discourses developed before the nineteenth century. Such discourses were, in fact, an integral part of early European imperial projects. Focusing specifically on the English, as a case study of sorts, students will examine how the English wrote about ‘race,’ how they categorized people based on cultural and geographical differences and how they defined themselves based on those differences. We will emphasize the stakes and the problems racial classification created for each writer and English empire. Why did race matter, how did it matter, and what did these writers do when they encountered figures in the Americas whose actions defied racial classification. Course readings include the works of William Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Ben Johnson and the travel narratives of John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake.
EN 669-001: The Strode Seminar
S. O’Dair
CRN# 11772
M 2:00-4:30 PM
Shakespearean Ecologies After reading a volume of essays on Shakespearean ecocriticism, the engaging and feisty ecocritic Greg Garrard—himself not a Shakespearean—began to wonder at this possibility: is “ecocriticism itself. . . Shakespearean”? What Garrard wonders is whether Shakespearean, and indeed Renaissance, understandings of nature and culture, of human and non-human, might allow us to jettison Enlightenment and Romantic definitions of them all, definitions that have helped edge us to worrisome economic and environmental conditions in the 21st century. Shakespearean ecologies might “enthuse us with the comic spirit of ambivalence, adaptation, and resilience” and so might, “if we are pretty lucky, extremely clever and reasonably good, help found a sustainable future.” Maybe. Maybe not. But if so, this is a fitting consideration during a spring in which we honor the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Our considerations will not stop at a sustainable future or at the comic but include the tragic, the tragi-comic, and the historical. And also the methodological problems haunting ecocriticism as a whole (e.g. theory contra nature-writing, the global contra the local, and environmental justice contra conservation). And haunting Shakespearean and Renaissance ecocriticism in particular, especially historicism contra presentism. Or as I put it in the essay I contributed to the volume that sparked Garrard’s musings, “Is it Ecocriticism if It Is Not Presentist?” Readings TBA but they will include plays, theory, and history. Participation required; one short paper; one seminar paper.