Courses Offered
EN 500 – 001
X-listed with WS 525
Purvis
W – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Feminist Theory
Gender and Excess in Feminist Theory: Sexuality, Corporeality, and Monstrosity
Part I in a feminist theory course sequence, this interdisciplinary approach to the subject is open to interested graduate students from all areas of study. Students may enroll in either course, or both. This course does not serve as a prerequisite to Part II in the sequence, but it does prepare students for the study of contemporary feminist theory in WS 530. It locates a major generative moment for contemporary feminist theory in the concept of “excess” and its intersection with gender, race, class, sexuality, and corporeality. Readings include a mixture of classics from authors such as Audre Lorde, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, and recent work from contemporary theorists, such as Jennifer C. Nash, Amber Jamilla Musser, Ela Przybylo, Kara Keeling, and others. This course examines excess in feminist, queer, disability, and fat studies; psychoanalysis and gendered excess (with attention to jouissance, hysteria, and the sublime); sexual ethics and body politics, including fleshy or “feminine” embodiment; queer excess, sexuality, protest, and exhibitionism; transgressive politics, such as naked protest; raced bodies; intersex bodies; the grotesque, the carnivalesque, and the monstrous; film and excess; critical madness; neuroqueer feminism; race, ethnicity, and ornamentation. These forms of excess and others transgress the contested borders, boundaries, expectations, and regulations of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and “proper” subjectivity and enact bold contestations through feminist art, theory, and politics. Students will emerge with a solid background in feminist theory and a more complex understanding of sexualities, embodied existence, gendered and raced difference, as well as an array of feminist resources and strategies for change, including the deployment of alterity, the abject, or monstrous otherness. (Prerequisites: None)
EN 524 – 001
X-listed with EN 424-001
Poole
TR – 12:30 – 1:45 pm
Structure of English
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, research projects, and discussion, students will attain a solid understanding of the English language’s structure and usage. Writing proficiency within this discipline is required for a passing grade in this course.
EN 529-001/004/005
TBA
Directed Readings
EN 532 – 001
TBA
TR– 2:00 – 3:15 pm
Approaches to Teaching Composition
This course is designed to introduce students to rhetoric and composition as a field of study. We will look broadly at theory, methodology, and practice, focusing on topics including (but not limited to): approaches to teaching writing, an overview of rhetoric and its relationship to writing instruction, and discussion of professional issues in English Studies (such as the role of the humanities, the purpose of the English major, and the rise of digital humanities).
EN 533 – 001
Loper
TR – 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Practicum in Teaching College English 101
Fall semester only. Required of all graduate assistants teaching EN 101 for the first time. Teachers must have 18 graduate hours in English. Training in reaching EN 101 student learning outcomes. Further instruction in issues related to the professional development of composition teachers. Course is designed to mentor and support GTA teachers. Please note: EN 533 begins with required orientation workshops and an intensive multi-day orientation session immediately prior to the start of the fall semester. Orientation attendance is mandatory for retaining a graduate assistantship.
EN 533 – 002
Niiler
TR – 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Practicum in Teaching College English 101
Fall semester only. Required of all graduate assistants teaching EN 101 for the first time. Teachers must have 18 graduate hours in English. Training in reaching EN 101 student learning outcomes. Further instruction in issues related to the professional development of composition teachers. Course is designed to mentor and support GTA teachers. Please note: EN 533 begins with required orientation workshops and an intensive multi-day orientation session immediately prior to the start of the fall semester. Orientation attendance is mandatory for retaining a graduate assistantship.
EN 533 – 003
Oliu
TR – 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Practicum in Teaching College English 101
Fall semester only. Required of all graduate assistants teaching EN 101 for the first time. Teachers must have 18 graduate hours in English. Training in reaching EN 101 student learning outcomes. Further instruction in issues related to the professional development of composition teachers. Course is designed to mentor and support GTA teachers. Please note: EN 533 begins with required orientation workshops and an intensive multi-day orientation session immediately prior to the start of the fall semester. Orientation attendance is mandatory for retaining a graduate assistantship.
EN 535 – 001
Pionke
R-9:30am-12:00pm
Literary Criticism
What constitutes a text? How might we read it? Why should anyone care that we have? These deceptively simple questions lie at the heart of literary study, and they have been answered in myriad ways over the past two-and-a-half thousand years. After briefly historicizing these matters through highly selective readings from Classical and Enlightenment antecedents, this course will track the development of modern literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through critical responses to three fecund nineteenth-century literary texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Students should emerge not only more knowledgeable about these particular texts, but also well-prepared to read with versatile acuity any text that they feel merits their own and other critics’ sustained attention.
EN 537 – 001
Dowd
M – 2:00-4:30pm
Introduction to Graduate Studies
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of literary studies from a practical and methodological standpoint. The seminar will include a hands-on introduction to research methods, scholarly writing, and issues in the profession. Intended as an introductory course for new graduate students, EN 537 takes a broad focus in order to facilitate engagement with the material, theoretical, and practical aspects of literary studies. Along the way, we will consider topics related to the current state of the field and the profession.
EN 539-001
TBA
F 11:00-11:50am
200 Level Teaching Practicum
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. We will divide our time among logistical topics like syllabus design, daily lesson plans, and appropriate writing prompts; while also devoting our collective energies to unraveling the daily mysteries of those concurrently teaching literature for the first time. Sympathetic identification, sage advice, and esprit de corps, hopefully with a minimum of sententiousness, awaits. A grade of “pass” is required for students to teach literature courses in the department of English.
EN 598-001
TBA
Non-Thesis Research
EN 598-002
TBA
Non-Thesis Research
EN 599-001
Crank
Thesis Research
EN 599-002
Rawlings
Thesis Research
EN 599-002
Buck
Thesis Research
EN 599-002
Poole
Thesis Research
EN 601 – 001
Wells
M – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Fiction Workshop
This class is intended for students enrolled in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and will concentrate on the writing, reading, and workshopping of fiction.
EN 603 – 001
Brouwer
R – 10:00 am – 12:30 pm
Poetry Workshop
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 may aid and abet the production of lively writing, we will also read and discuss poetry and criticism by others. In summary, it’s going to be fun. Contact me if you have any questions.
EN605-001
Taught by New CNF Professor
M-10:00am-12:30pm
Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Focus will be discussion of original student writing; other reading and writing may be assigned. Open to MFA students.
EN 608 – 002
Nkweti
T – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Forms Special Topics:
In a Flash: Tiny Tales in the Age of Insta
Battened down hatches in a bottle. Bonsai trees blooming on a grain of rice. These miniaturized moments of artistry are kissing cousins of flash fiction. Alternatively described as nanofiction, quicktion, short shorts, sudden fiction, microfiction, and even prose poetry; flash fiction is storytelling boiled down to its essence, the tea leaves divining the goings-on in the larger world. Through an exploration of exemplar works by authors like Jamaica Kincaid, Lydia Davis, and Sofia Samatar as well as narrative modalities native to our digital age like Instagram micronovels and twitter story threads; students shall hone their ability to render realized characters, deploy vibrant and layered language, and draw emotional resonance on the page, in 2000 words or less.
EN 608 – 003
Behn
W – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Forms Special Topics: Collaboration
We will read, read about, and be inspired by the practices and fruits of writers working with other writers and with artists in other disciplines. We’ll explore writers gathering in the same space, writers groups, writers’ colonies, writing collectives (Cave Canem, Kundiman, etc.), groups with games and prompts (Oulipo, Dada). We’ll collaborate with existing texts (erasure, intercutting, borrowing of elements, response, rejoinder, extension, beginnings, forms, etc.), and collaborate with one another in lots of ways, both in-the-moment and stretched out over time (tankas, various “corpses,” interchanging elements, writerly tasks, letters, research finds, etc.). We’ll read (and sometimes Zoom with) current collaborating writers. We’ll use, but in no way limit ourselves to, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry and They Said: A Multi-genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. Where possible, we’ll also collaborate with students at UA who are in other arts disciplines such as dance, visual art, and/or music. “
EN 608 – 004
Estes
R – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Forms Special Topics:
The Long Poem
This course will undertake a study of the long poem, which in its many forms can go by various names (besides, simply, “the long poem”)—from narrative poem to book-length poem, from verse novel to hybrid poem—and they nearly always resemble, evoke, or explicitly embody, the epic. Long poems are somewhat unfashionable, less than workshop-friendly, and demanding for both reader and writer, as they require a committed attention in an attention-strained world. Yet a long poem rewards its reader and its writer with an unrivaled depth of pleasure and possibility; indeed, a strong poet’s strength is often judged in relation to this quality of sustained extension. In this course you will experience the uniquely immersive quality of reading and writing the long poem and begin an unfinished project of your own that, with any luck, will blossom into a Project worth pursuing. We will read poetry across the spectrum from traditional to innovative, possibly and among others: Alice Notley, A.R. Ammons, Tyehimba Jess, Hiromi Itō, Denise Duhamel, Matias Viegener, CD Wright, John Ashbery, Heather McHugh, Anne Waldman, Homer, Whitman, Rilke, James Merrill, Claudia Rankine, Derek Walcott, Vikram Seth, and Anne Carson.”
EN 609 – 001
Rawlings
M – 12:00-12:50 pm
Form Theory Practice
This is the required pedagogy course for those teaching EN 200 for the first time.
EN 609 – 320
Wells
M – 5:00-5:50 pm
Form Theory Practice
This is the required pedagogy course for those teaching a 300-level creative writing course for the first time.
EN 609 –321
Estes
T-5:00-5:50pm
Form Theory Practice:
The Literature of Video Games
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. So begins “Colossal Cave Adventure,” a text based video game often credited as being the first real work of interactive fiction. In this class, we will play through several story-driven games, examine the depths and merits of their writing, and discuss the ways in which storytelling, art, and game mechanics interoperate to create a fun, emotional, and immersive experience for the player. We will talk with some writers who are living the dream, making money making games; and if time and patience allows, collaborate to devise and design a game world, which perhaps in a future class we might actually write. YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.”
EN 609 –322
Behn
W-5:00-5:50pm
Form Theory Practice:
Online Tools, Sites and Apps
We’ll explore a range of online tools, sites, and apps for writers. Everyone in the class will contribute sites or sources, leading us down various virtual rabbit-holes during in-class writing exercises. To whet your appetite: plot-generator.org.uk, spoonbill.org/n+7/, bandnamemaker.com, double-rhyme.com…. Now it’s your turn….
EN 612 – 001
Poole
W – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Special Topics
This graduate seminar explores the application of various technologies for second/foreign language teaching and learning. The course will survey research in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and technology-enhanced language learning (TELL) with a particular focus on corpora and corpus-based tools, digital games, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and social media.
EN 613 – 001
Selvi
T– 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Second Language Development
A study of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, neurolinguistic, and other approaches to understanding how people develop skill in a second language.
EN 620 – 001
Worden
R – 2:00 – 4:30pm
English Linguistics
EN 620 is a graduate-level introductory linguistics course with relevance for students in the Applied Linguistics/TESOL, literature, composition and rhetoric, and MFA programs. The class explores the core elements of linguistics (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) as well as subfields such as language variation, language change, and discourse analysis. Students will learn to apply the tools and techniques of language analysis through hands-on activities and projects.
EN 639 – 001
Dayton
W – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Rhetorics and Composition
This course will examine the intersection of literacy, democracy, and social class, focusing on how literacy has served as a tool for fostering civic engagement, political activism, and at times, social control. We will consider the role of literacy in the formation of the American nation and the development of its modern identity; foundational theories of literacy and learning; conceptions of intelligence and the relationship between literacy and cognition; popular beliefs about literacy; literacy and social movements, and transnational literacy. Our readings will include foundational studies as well as new and emerging research.
EN 640 – 001
Trout
W –2:00-4:30pm
Special Topics Seminar in American Literature
American Fiction of the First World War: Gender, Modernism, and Memory
Though later overshadowed by the Second World War, the First World War turned American culture upside down. American entry into the conflict in 1917 created new workplace opportunities and new identities for American women, accelerated the Great Migration of African Americans out of the Deep South, and led to status gains (many later reversed) by various immigrant groups. The war also saw a disturbing expansion of federal power, used to clamp-down on organized labor and expressions of dissent; widespread vigilantism directed against German-Americans; and the advent of sophisticated multimedia propaganda campaigns whose messaging, as we would say today, became ubiquitous. Militarily, the conflict was an ordeal for the USA—the first time since the Civil War when tens of thousands of young American men died in battle. The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic, which hit in 1918, added to the death toll, killing approximately 50,000 Americans in uniform and an additional 600,000 civilians. Immediately after the conflict, paranoia, reactionary politics, and racism created a toxic national environment, as seen in the Red Scare of 1919-1920, which extended the wartime attack on free speech into the postwar years, and the Red Summer of 1919, when so-called race riots (usually white attacks on black neighborhoods) occurred throughout dozens of cities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
All of this left a deep imprint on American literature. This seminar will consider the many ways in which the First World War complicated American constructions of gender, supercharged American Modernism, and intensified literary engagement with issues of public memory. Texts will include Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Victor Daly’s Not Only War, William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William March’s Company K, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. We will also read some of the best scholarship on this subject, including Pearl James’s The New Death: American Modernism and World War I and Keith Gandal’s War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature.”
EN 643 – 001
Cardon
T-9:30am-12:00pm
Late American Literature: Multiethnic American Literature
“Ethnicity” is a slippery term, one that means different things at different moments in U.S. history. It has connotations of “otherness,” race, ancestry, culture, and national origins. It has been used to differentiate immigrants and their offspring from assimilated white Americans; it has also been used to differentiate race from an ancestral or national culture associated with a particular background.
In this course, we will look at, first and foremost, the popularization of this term after World War II, particularly during the “Ethnic Revival” of the 1960s and 70s. We will also look at representations of ethnicity in various works of late American literature––works that may do the following:
1) Differentiate among groups that are often elided under a racial umbrella (e.g., different indigenous tribes, or people of different Asian descents);
2) Differentiate between the experiences of “white ethnics” (e.g., Jewish or Italian immigrants) and “nonwhite ethnics”;
3) Differentiate between recent immigrants and assimilated descendants who share the same ancestral origins (e.g., Africans and African Americans);
4) Differentiate among the experiences of those belonging to the same ethnic groups across different generations.
Specific readings TBD but may include Helen Barolini’s Umbertina, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Cherríe Moraga, and Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, among others. Assignments include keeping up with weekly readings, participating in class discussion, leading discussion of one novel and one critical text, and writing a seminar paper at the end of the semester.
EN 654
Buck
T-2:00-4:30pm
Seminar in Visual and Digital Rhetoric
“This seminar focuses on understanding rhetoric in visual and digital texts. This course explores contemporary rhetorical theory connected to visual and digital communication and considers the traditional rhetorical canon (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) for the digital age. The course readings will explore approaches for analyzing visual and digital texts as well as employing visual and digital methods in rhetoric and composition scholarship.”
EN 667 – 001
Tavares
T – 2:00 – 4:30 pm
Shakespeare in Performance Practicum
Designed for graduate Literature and History students, this course offers a studio setting in which to practice essential skills for interpreting medieval and early modern entertainments. Participants will develop a portfolio whose materials reflect professional norms of Shakespeare in contemporary performance. First will be reviewing, or how to “read” performance as a text employing best practices for recording and contributing to the archive of the otherwise ephemeral. Exploration of the dramaturg’s role will follow, to include script cutting, production consultation, and season curation, among other contributions to the making of early performance today. Participants conclude the course by selecting one of two culminating trajectories: performance history, charting a stage tradition habituated in (re)making early theatre; or performance-based research, designing a study where a playtext is the medium by which to test a discrete hypothesis. Work will be undertaken in teams to develop industry-standard skills necessary to negotiate complex, collaborative workflow. In addition to assigned readings, film screenings, and guest speakers, class business will also include devising exercises, staging experiments, and other theatre games.
EN 683 – 001
Tedeschi
R-2:00-4:30pm
Seminar in Romantic Literature
What is poetry? What does it do? And how does it do what it does? This course considers three conversations that arise from these questions. First, it examines the premises of must-cite contemporary Romantic literary studies by Kevis Goodman, Anne-Lise François, and Amanda Jo Goldstein. Does literature, these critics ask, have a unique power to register a quality of experience and/or of nature that is otherwise inaccessible to the humanities and natural sciences? Second, it follows the works of critics—such as Susan Stewart, John Hollander, and Christopher Ricks—who consider how poetic form works upon the senses, conjures moods or feelings, and constructs specific ways of thinking. And third, it examines how the Romantic poets themselves think about the relations among form, sense, feeling, and thought. Readings will revolve around the poetry and critical prose of William Wordsworth, including the Lyrical Ballads, Home at Grasmere, selections from the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, and The Prelude. To put Wordsworth in perspective, we will also read poems and critical essays by Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
EN698-001
Crank
Non-Dissertation Research
EN 699-001
Crank
Dissertation Research