EN 500 – 001
W – 2:00 – 4:30 Purvis
X-Listed with WS 530

Rev. 09/01/2022

Special Topics: Women in Contemporary Society: Feminist Theory

Open to graduate students from all disciplines with an interest in feminist theory, this interdisciplinary approach to feminist theory focuses on abjection and the affective turn in critical theory—in particular, the promising effects of interrogating the workings of disgust and shame. Given the gendered dimensions of affect, as well as the associations of disgust and shame with marginalized groups, regions, nations, and bodies, this subject area is rich with critical insight and vital resources for theorizations and mobilizations associated with rethinking 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 gender, race, and class, LGBTQI issues, borders, regions, nation, citizenship, agency, and embodiment. Readings from Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, Jennifer C. Nash, Darieck Scott, José Esteban Muñoz, Hil Malatino, and others draw from and contribute to an array of related areas of inquiry, including queer theory, disability studies, literary theory, media studies, fat studies, queer of color critique. (Prerequisites: none)

EN 500 – 002
TR – 12:30 – 1:45 Worden-Chambers X-Listed with EN 466

Community-based English Language Teaching

In this course, we will examine the scholarship and engage in the practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages in community-based language programs. Topics covered in readings and discussion will include working with students with limited literacy and interrupted formal education, trauma-informed pedagogy, needs analysis, and English for specific purposes. In addition to readings and discussions, this class will incorporate a significant practical component. Students will partner with community-based language classes in the Tuscaloosa area to observe and assist the teachers and will propose and complete projects designed to be implemented in these existing class contexts.

EN 529 – 001 Crank
EN 529 – 002 Rawlings

Directed Reading – Literature Directed Reading – Creative Writing

EN 534
TR – 12:30 – 1:30

001 – Loper 002 – Oliu 003 – Niiler

Practicum in Teaching College English 102

Spring semester only. Required of all graduate assistants teaching EN 102 for the first time. Teachers must have 18 graduate hours in English. Training in reaching EN 102 student learning outcomes. Further instruction in issues related to the professional development of composition teachers. Course is designed to mentor and support GTA teachers.

Non-Thesis Research

EN 598 – 002 Crank EN 598 -003 Rawlings

Thesis Research

EN 599 – 001 Crank EN 599 – 002 Rawlings

EN 601 – 001 T – 2:00 – 4:30 Nkweti

TBD: None Provided

General description from UA catalog: Fiction Workshop
Enrollment limited to students with approved portfolios (approval secured upon admission to the MFA program or during advising period; see creative writing director). Focus will be discussion of original student writing; other reading and writing may be assigned.

EN 603 – 001 W – 2:00-4:30 Behn

Poetry Workshop

This course is centered on the creation of new poetry by class members. We’ll explore the creative process in a variety of ways and share our literary passions with one another. In addition to presenting poem drafts that will be discussed in small groups, we’ll do brief, low stakes exercises created by class members. The idea is to stimulate creativity and practice the writing habit. The course will include an (optional) opportunity to work on a long poem or series of poems.

EN 608 – 001 T – 2:00 – 4:30 Brouwer

Forms Special Topics: The Uses of History

THE USES OF HISTORY. Henry James, in a scathing 1904 letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, railed against the historical novel, saying that any imaginative interpretation of historical events was “condemned” to “a fatal cheapness,” because it is impossible for an author to represent in fiction “the whole CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision” of people who lived in an age in which the author did not. This seems like a reasonable charge, and it raises the question of why a creative writer would choose in the first place to base an imaginative text on a historical event or historical characters. Isn’t it the historian’s job to research and explain the facts of history, and the creative writer’s job to invent imaginary events and people? Why would a writer want to assume the burden of what James sees as the impossible task of getting “real” history right, when she might instead utilize her power to simply invent an imaginary histoire of her own? Might imaginative literature have the capacity to express certain historical realities more effectively than traditional historical studies? In what ways might those traditional historical studies themselves be a species of creative writing? In this course, we will investigate the uses of history in imaginative writing (and, to a lesser extent, the uses of the imagination in historical writing), and differences between the past as it is presented in “non-fictional” histories and in imaginative works based upon historical events. We’ll read imaginative works that somehow engage a historical era, person, phenomenon, or event; survey some critical essays that examine problems in historiography; and attempt a variety of history-based creative writing exercises ourselves. For a final project, each student will complete a long imaginative work (in any genre) that springs from and/or responds to a historical subject of the student’s choosing. Texts may include works by Elizabeth Alexander, Christa Wolf, Kwoya Maples, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lynn Nottage, Mai Der Vang, Bertolt Brecht, Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tyehimba Jess, Isaac Babel, Roberto Bolano, Adrian Matejka, Jorie Graham, Charles Reznikoff, Don Mee Choi, Nikky Finney, J.M. Coetzee, Martha Collins, Don DeLillo, Cornelius Eady, Ha Jin, Herodotus, Henry James, Akira Kurosawa, Rachel Loden, Sigrid Nunez, Michael Ondaatje, Julie Otsuka, Layli Long Soldier, Suzan-Lori Parks, Gillo Pontecorvo, Muriel Rukeyser, W.G. Sebald, Joseph Skibell, W.D. Snodgrass, Graham Swift, D.M. Thomas, Thucydides, Natasha Tretheway, Hayden White, C.D. Wright, Marguerite Yourcenar, or others. N.B.: MFA students specializing in any genre are welcome. Writing assignments and final projects may be written in any genre.

EN 608 – 002 R – 2:00 – 4:30 Estes

Forms Special Topics: The Arts of Adaptation

Because a majority of successful (i.e. money-making) films and television shows are based on existing intellectual property—novels, comics, nonfiction books and articles, older film and TV— there is demand for writers who can re-imagine extant material for the screen. In this course, we will study representative examples of works that have been adapted into screenplays, examining the formal, narrative, and sometimes inspired moves writers make to create compelling cinematic stories. As a project, you will adapt a work of your choice into a screenplay or television pilot.

EN 608 – 003
T – 10:00 – 12:30 Maples

Forms Special Topics: From Stars to Constellation: Structures of the Poetry Collection

What makes a group of poems a poetry collection? This course will explore how writers and editors of poems employ thematic structuring, sequencing, and patterning to create a single, resonate work of art. To that end, we will identify repetitive structures and threads of a collection. We will study their strategic placement with an eye for how the overall structure impacts the experience of the reader. We will speculate: 1) on the writer’s purpose for inclusion of poems, 2) on the editor’s method of sequencing the poems as they appear. Participants will ultimately be invited to consider methods for patterning their own portfolios and collections. How do we determine which of our poems “speak” to each other? How can we sequence our poetry to create the experiences we want for our readers?

EN 608 – 004 M – 2:00 – 4:30 Wells

Forms Special Topics: Putting the Rat in Art

The purpose of this class is simple: to generate new writing with consistent and scheduled frequency so that you bypass the internal critic and get to an unexpected place, produce work you might not have produced otherwise. There are many ways to catalyze the subterranean intellect, which burbles away in the shadowy and consciously inaccessible recesses of the imagination. Constraints or prompts are one way to do it, in part because they appear to reduce the immediate stakes and distract us with a problem to solve. Raymond Queneau says the way OuLiPo writers, those mathematical formalists, disengage that stymieing critic is by becoming rats who themselves construct the maze from which they try to escape. Writing quickly is another way to dodge the censor. But we will also put this approach to work in the workshop conversation itself, coming up with different constraints each week that will dictate the mode of response—one week haiku, say, the next week Tarot. We’ll provide first-blush feedback in different forms, offering impressions, prophecies, associations, constellations, in which we reflect back to the writer that wild array of things the work allows us to see.

EN 608 – 005
W – 10:00 – 12:30 Rawlings

Sequencing Your Comic DNA

What makes you laugh and why? We will explore your “why” as part of our practice of comic writing in a variety of genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, monologues, and/or sketch writing. Theories of comedy and the relationship between comedy and identity will inform our discussions and writing, and you’ll produce comic writing that emerges from your own identity and interests. We will also think through how and why comedy sometimes fails. Possible texts include Friday Black by Nana Adjei-Brenyah, The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty,. Come and share a joke or two!

EN 609 – 001
T – 12:00 – 12:50 Rawlings

Forms Theory: EN 200 Teaching Practicum

This is the required teaching practicum for all graduate students teaching EN 200 for the first time.

EN 609 – 320 M – 5:00 – 5:50 Wells

Forms Theory Practice: EN 300 Teaching Practicum

This is the required pedagogy course for those teaching a 300-level creative writing course for the first time.

EN 609 – 321 T – 5:00 – 5:50 Brouwer

Form Theory Practice: Creative Criticism

“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.”

— Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1888).

This course’s modest proposal is that criticism is a creative art, or at least can be if you do it right. We will read, analyze, and produce criticism, and discuss publication venues for same. As we go along, we’ll take up several questions: What’s criticism for? What’s a book review for? What’s the difference between criticism and book reviews? Is there any money in this? How much, exactly? Oh.

And finally, one for Oscar: How can one’s criticism be a record of one’s own soul if its originating impulse and reason for being is wholly dependent upon someone else’s text? (We’ll see what Socrates has to say about that one.)

EN 609 -322 R 5:00-5:50 Estes

Form Theory Practice: The Icon of the Writer

The construction of artistic identity is the most arduous endeavor a young writer must undertake, the core apprenticeship, that we rarely talk about in school. As such, this is a short course in ambition: in psychology, mysticism, history, ethics, romance, and the impassioned risk one takes to

create: a high-stakes gamble that puts in play life and death, sanity and madness. We will sift through art, text, film, and the detritus of our own souls in an effort to understand why a small subset of humans—why we—have felt driven, often beyond reason, to write. Your project will be to produce, in the medium or genre of your choice, your own Künstlerroman: the story of the artist’s education.

EN 610 – 001 W – 2:00 – 4:30 Selvi

TESOL: Theory and Methods

A detailed account of language teaching approaches and methods according to their underlying theories of language and language learning.

EN 612 – 001 R – 2:00 – 4:30 Selvi

Topics in Applied Linguistics: Critical Approaches to TESOL

A critical investigation of being and becoming a second language teaching professional in/for diverse teaching settings and realities.

EN 617 – 001 M – 2:00 – 4:30 Worden

Teaching Academics Writing to Non-native English Speakers

This course is a theoretical and pedagogical introduction to the teaching of English academic language skills to adult learners of English with a particular focus on teaching writing in the American university context. We will examine the theories and disciplines that have significantly informed second language writing research and pedagogy. Additionally, we will examine some of the emerging issues in the field of second language writing including such topics as trans lingual practice, identity and politics second language writing, multilingual creativity, and the increasingly multilingual student population at US universities. We will build on this theoretical foundation to develop skills in a variety of pedagogical practices including needs analysis, course design, assignment design, lesson planning, writing assessment, responding to student writing, and error correction.

EN 637 – 001 T – 2:00 – 4:30 White

Writing for Publication

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

—William James, “The Will to Believe”

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 638 – 001 R– 2:00 – 4:30 Dziuba

History of Rhetoric

This class will cover the history/histories of rhetoric from ancient Greece through the modern age. We will consider rhetorical history and theory as contested sites, juxtaposing supposedly canonical texts with counternarratives and alternative traditions. We will consider why rhetoric has been, during certain historical moments, held up as the ideal course of study for educated people, and at other times, viewed as an atheoretical set of tricks used to deceive and manipulate. We will also consider methodologies for historical research and pedagogical applications.

EN 641 – 001 M– 8:00 – 10:30 Smith

Seminar American Literature Before 1850 “Race in Early America”

This graduate course will appeal to students interested in early American literature but also Renaissance literature and early African American literature. We will view early American 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, and Geraldine Heng in The Invention of Race, 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.

We will focus specifically on English America, as a case study of sorts; students will examine how the English-Americans 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 American

settler colonialism and imperialism. 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?

Equally important, students will interrogate Black and Native experiences in this early era. What did it mean to be Black or Native in the early Atlantic world? How did early Black and Native writers and thinkers talk about race? In what ways might we see these figures engaging their environments in ways that accommodate, challenge, or reshape the racial discourses of the day? These questions will help students theorize race in the early modern Atlantic from the perspective of Black Africans and Natives. We have asked often enough what European (-Americans) meant when they employed racial language in their texts in the early modern period. This course will help students to reorient themselves by taking seriously Black Africans and Natives as intellectuals and as cultural doers during the early modern period.

EN 643 – 001 W – 2:00-4:30 Trout

Seminar in 20th-Century American Literature: Willa Cather: Culture, History, and Place

Notoriously private and artistically idiosyncratic, Willa Cather (1873-1947) has long defied easy classification. Is she best understood as a queer writer? As a naturalist turned modernist? As a regionalist? Or as a melancholy romantic who retreated into the past (and completely revamped the historical novel in the process). This seminar will stress the complexity and multilayeredness of Cather’s work by tracing its engagement with central themes in American culture and American history, including immigration, race, education, consumerism, and empire. In addition, we will consider Cather as a sophisticated writer of place who was attuned to the natural world in ways that make her something of a proto-environmentalist. Fortunately, Cather’s oeuvre is manageable, and we will be able to read most of her major works in one semester, including O Pioneers!, My Antonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, Death Comes for The Archbishop, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Collected Stories. We will also sample some of the best recent scholarship on Cather, including work by Daryl Palmer and Janis Stout. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

EN 652 – 001
W – 10:00 – 12:30 Niiler

Composition Theory

A survey of major theories in composition studies, exploring philosophical underpinnings and major issues in the field.

EN 653 – 001 T – 2:00 – 4:30 Buck

Research Methodology

This course is designed to provide an overview of basic methodologies and methods used in Composition and Rhetoric studies. This class will focus on the study of empirical research methods as well as practice using methodological frameworks employed within the field, including archival, quantitative, and qualitative methods. We will also examine ethical issues in designing and

conducting research studies. Together, we will explore a range of research methodologies, and you will conduct a research study using one of these methods.

EN 662– 001
T – 9:30 – 12:00 Cook

Romance and Gender

This course focuses upon the construction of gender in medieval romances ranging from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. We will examine medieval representations of gendered bodies, sexuality, marriage and the family. We will also track fundamental changes in public attitudes toward gender over the course of this period and develop a variety of working models for theorizing gender in medieval romances. Finally, medieval studies itself will be an object of our analysis, as we examine medieval scholars’ continued interest in gender and their use of contemporary theory as a means to explore the past.

EN 664 – 001 M – 2:00 – 4:30 Dowd

Seminar in Renaissance Literature II: Early Modern Women’s Writing

It has been over ninety years since Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own lamented the supposed lack of women writers in Shakespeare’s England. In the decades since, scholars have greatly enriched our understanding of the richness and diversity of women’s writing from the period, but the literary histories of early women writers remain works-in-progress, ripe for further analysis and exploration. In this seminar, we will enter that critical conversation by considering a broad range of Englishwomen’s writings from the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will pay particular attention to formal development and experimentation as we examine texts from a wide variety of genres, including poetry, polemic, drama, and even early science fiction. We will also explore the critical history of early modern women’s writing as a field of study and consider collectively what the future of this scholarship might look like. In addition to a wide range of secondary scholarship, primary texts to be discussed will likely include Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, the poetry of Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, among others. Open to all PhD, MA, and MFA students.

EN 674-001 R- 9:30-12:00 Weiss

Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Human Clay: Enlightenment and Education

Children’s literature emerged as an important genre during the eighteenth century, a result of increased literacy rates, the emergence of a middle class, and the influence of Enlightenment philosophical texts that emphasized the idea of human malleability. In this course, we will read parts of the most influential educational treatises of the Enlightenment—John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile—to understand how parents learned to mold their children into moral members of a larger community and prepare them to be happy and useful adults. And, we’ll see how these ideas were conveyed to children themselves through enjoyable stories intended to shape the child reader’s character. Because the educational

materials of the Enlightenment were intended to form the opinions and virtues of children, they offer insight into key ideological and sociological changes and struggles of the long eighteenth century. These include increasing secularization; the growth of capitalist values; anxieties about social mobility; conflicts over colonial expansion and the slave trade; new ideas about gender and the roles of women; political reactions to the French Revolution; and the debate over the meaning and value of “nature.” The course will also cover database research techniques for out-of-print eighteenth-century texts, as well as information about the history of the children’s book genre in the period. Major assignments will be a 15-page research-based seminar paper and a separate book-history presentation.

Non-Dissertation Research

EN 698 – 001 – Crank

Dissertation Research

EN 699 – 001 – Crank