Fall 2020
EN 500 – 001
(Xlisted – WS 525)
W – 2:00 – 4:30
Purvis
Feminist Theory: Major texts: “Gender and Excess”
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. Through a mixture of classic and contemporary readings from figures, such as Audre Lorde, Leo Bersani, Robert McRuer, Jennifer C. Nash, Amber Jamilla Musser, and others, this course examines several dimensions of excess in feminist, queer, disability, and critical race theory: psychoanalysis and gendered excess, such as jouissance, hysteria, and the sublime; fat as a feminist issue, including ties to pregnant bodies and other forms of fleshy or “feminine” embodiment; drag and drag balls, ACT UP, and other forms of queer excess, protest, and exhibitionism; transgressive politics, such as the naked protest; ornamentation and its ties to orientalism; queer embodiment; excess and raced bodies; classed sexuality; anger and excess; intersex; eccentricity; the grotesque and the carnivalesque; film genre and excess; critical madness; and riot grrrl power. These forms of excess and others transgress the contested borders, boundaries, expectations, and regulations of gender, sexuality, and “proper” subjectivity and enact the bold contestations of vibrant 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. (Prerequisites: None)
EN 524 – 001
TR – 12:30 – 1:45
Poole
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
Directed Readings
Section 001 – Registration must be approved by the Director of Graduate Studies – James McNaughton
Section 002 – Registration must be approved by the Director of Creative Writing – Wendy Rawlings
EN 532 – 001
(XListed – EN 455)
M – 10:00 – 12:30
McGee
Field Guide to Rhetoric and Composition
This course is designed to provide a broad overview and to introduce students to rhetoric and composition as a field. Rather than focusing on common threads of writing studies (e.g. the writing process, fallacies, or the rhetorical triangle), this course is aimed at exploring techniques, genres, and documents used in the discipline’s commonplaces. These issues of theory, methodology and practice include (but are not limited to) basic approaches to teaching writing, an overview of rhetoric and its relationship to writing instruction, and discussion of professional issues and questions in English Studies (such as the role of the humanities, the purpose of the English major, and the rise of digital humanities). This course is specifically concerned with students establishing a scholarly ethos as someone knowledgeable of how this field moves and shifts with respect to disciplinary relationships, disciplinary politics, and/or personal responsibilities.
EN 533 – 001, 002 & 003
TR – 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Loper, Kidd & Oliu
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 537 – 001
M – 10:00 – 12:30
Pionke
Introduction to Graduate Studies
This course aims to introduce graduate students to the discipline, as represented by its methodological origins (bibliography), some of its more prominent theoretical innovations (select formalist and ideological schools of criticism), its practices of research and writing, and its current professional state (the job and publication markets). Because of its demographics (mostly new MA students in literature but also sometimes also new MAs in CRES or Linguistics and new MFAs) the course aims to be broadly useful, to give all students a demystified leg up on their future courses by introducing them to new ways of thinking and writing that will be developed in depth in later graduate seminars. It also aims to sharpen their critical reading and presenting skills so that they will perform at the expected graduate level in other classes.
EN 539 – 001
T – 12:30 – 1:30
Crank
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
EN 598 – 001 – McNaughton – Non-Thesis Research
EN 598 – 002 – Rawlings – Non-Thesis Research
EN 599
EN 599 – 001 – McNaughton – Thesis Research
EN 599 – 002 – Rawlings – Thesis Research
EN 601 – 001
W – 2:00 – 4:30
Wells
Graduate 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
T – 10:00 – 12:30
Fagin Maples
Graduate Poetry Workshop
In addition to the traditional poetry workshop, this course will focus on centering revision of poetry. Revision is the most crucial component of creative writing, yet too often we draft poems, hastily decide their value and move on. In this course, workshop participants will return to their poems, operating with the belief that anything can happen—and beauty can be found—by the use of creative revision.
At the beginning of the semester, we will compile a collection of previously written poems (ranging from “finished” to abandoned work.) As we discuss methods and strategies for revision we will experiment with the text of these poems. We will utilize a variety of radical methods for revision such as expansion, cut & paste, and by considering new structural constraints. It will require the poet to be flexible with the original art they’ve created, and a willingness to be surprised. As the poet Rachel Richardson notes, “Revision can show you the unexpected paths…it can help you subvert roadblocks and find new life in static material. The goal in all of the revision process is not to “correct” or even “edit” poems, which suggests there is a single right way, but to explore them to see what more might be hiding within the rock, available to the persistent searcher.” We will be persistent in this pursuit and commit ourselves to the process of (actively) loving and re-seeing our poems.
EN 608-001
M – 2:00 – 4:30
Wells
Novel II
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. So long as you have the opening of a novel completed and a plan for proceeding (can be rough, muddled, and provisional), new novelists are also welcome, space permitting.
EN 608 – 002
R – 2:00 – 4:30
Behn
Forms Special Topics: Writing Habit, Writing Process
This course is about the act of writing. We will examine a variety of writers’ processes and habits. We will look into the science of habit formation and then read a wide range of writers discussing their approaches: processes, habits, and thoughts concerning the practice of writing. We will read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, and then look at interviews, writing advice, etc. from artists such as Joy Williams, Toni Morrison, Twyla Tharpe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Roxane Gay, Anne Lamont, Stephen King, Layli Long Soldier, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Terrance Hayes, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothea Brande, Brenda Ueland, and Natalie Goldberg. In many cases we will be reading interviews or short essays by these folks, not entire books. Week by week, we will try on their advice to see what works for us, reflecting on our own individual habits, challenges, approaches, etc. as we go. We will also inspire one another by creating and sharing prompts, approaches, readings, etc. This is not a workshop. Rather, the focus is on generating writing, and finding ways that work for each of us to write over a lifetime. Each week, expect some reading (about an hour) and very enticing invitations to sit down (or stand up, or walk around, or get together, or, or, or…) and write.
EN 608 – 004
R – 10:00 – 12:30
Nkweti
Speculative Fiction
This course will explore a diverse array of speculative fiction forms – from Afrofuturism and steamfunk, to “sword & sorcery” and steampunk. Expect a variety of “out of this world” reading selections tackling “real world” issues surrounding gender and sexuality, ethics and technology, race and ethnicity, and more. Class sessions shall include a rigorous schedule of readings, in-class exercises, writing assignments, and thoughtful discussion.
EN 608 – 005
T – 2:00 – 4:30
Rawlings
The Contemporary Essay
“Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship, how intuitive and scholarly knowledge can cook down together, how discovery can be a deep pleasure.” So says Rebecca Solnit in her introduction to The Best American Essays 2019. We will investigate all these things via reading a variety of contemporary writers of this capacious form.
EN 608-006
T – 10:00 – 12:30
Nkweti
Page to Stage: Acting for Fiction Writers
This course will explore the art of acting as a medium for fiction writers to grow as practitioners on the page and artists on the stage. Expect to hone your craft – create tighter, true-to-life dialogue and lived-in characters as well as bolster confidence for reading performances. Class sessions will be hybrid experiences comprising a studio style, in-class element – improvisational group exercises, interactive theater games – as well as an array of writing assignments that draw upon lessons learned from personal performance and readings of exemplar dramatic texts. Active participation in all that’s weird and wonderful is a must.
EN 609 – 001
M – 12:00 – 12:50
Rawlings
300-Level Creative Writing Teaching Practicum
This is a required course designed to support first-time teachers of EN 300-level Creative Writing classes with a communal space to discuss strategies for effective teaching and to address issues and questions that arise in the classroom.
EN 609 – 320
R – 5:00 – 5:50
Behn
EN 200 Teaching Practicum
This is a required course designed to support first-time teachers of EN 200, Introduction to Creative Writing, with a communal space to discuss strategies for effective teaching and to address issues and questions that arise in the classroom.
EN 609 – 321
W 5:00 – 5:50
Wells
Form, Theory, and Practice: Academic Job Market
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, diversity statements, interviews, these are the things that will be discussed and practiced during this course.
EN 612 – 001
W – 2:00 – 4:30
Worden
Topics in Applied Linguistics: The Translingual Turn in Second Language Writing and Composition Studies
In the past decade, writing research and pedagogy invoking a “translingual approach” has proliferated in the fields of second language writing (SLW) and composition studies (CS). A translingual approach challenges the ideological separation between “languages” and instead views language use (including writing) as the fluid mixing of linguistic codes and resources which transcends traditional language boundaries. Such an approach has wide-spread appeal for its ability to account for language use in an era of super-diversity and its potential as a means of resisting monolingual bias and inequity. However, the movement has not been without controversy and has sparked heated debates, open letters, manifestos, and social media arguments from both proponents and critics. In this graduate seminar, we will explore the translingual turn of the last decade and how it has influenced and continues to influence SLW and CS research and practice. We will examine the movement’s roots in research on multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language ideologies. We will read work by prominent scholars in the translingual turn including Suresh Canagarajah, Xiaoye You, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, and we will also examine the arguments of those more critical of the movement’s popularity such as Paul Kei Matsuda, Dwight Atkinson, and Christine Tardy. Throughout the class, students will be invited to critically consider the translingual turn in writing studies and its potential role in their own scholarship and teaching.
EN 613 – 001
W – 2:00 – 4:30
Selvi
Linguistics
A study of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, neurolinguistic, and other approaches to understanding how people develop skill in a second language.
EN 620 – 320
T – 5:00 – 7:30
Poole
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 (syntax, phonology and phonetics, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics) as well as subfields such as language variation, language change, and language and the brain. Students will learn to apply the tools and techniques of language analysis through hands-on activities and projects.
EN 630 – 001
Independent Studies
Registration must be approved by the Director of Graduate Studies – James McNaughton
EN 635 – 001
T – 2:00 – 4:30
Crank
Literary Criticism
This course aims to familiarize students with the core concepts, critical debates, and major ideas that animate the discipline of queer theory’s especially as they relate to analyses of literary objects. While we will be interested in plotting an evolution of the word “queer” in cultural and historical contexts, we will mostly study how these competing and contested cultural referents offer potential resources to us in literary study. In addition to the prominent scholars of queer theory” Patrick Johnson, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner, just to name a few. We will be focusing on literary texts that extend, complicate, and enrichen the theories that we examine. Possible authors include: Wilde, Allison, Grimsley, Bechadel, Baldwin, Emezi, Lawlor, Greenwell, and probably a couple more, yo.
EN 635 – 002
TR – 8:00 – 9:15
Wittman
Literary Theory
This course offers an introduction to the history of translation practices through a study of critical essays from Jerome and John Dryden to Walter Benjamin and Vladimir Nabokov. Class time will be divided between analysis of theoretical writing and evaluative discussion of competing English-language translations. This course will demonstrate that the history of English-language literature is a history of translation, that it owes its development, in part, to the efforts of translators, many of them invisible. One of the purposes of the course is to make students aware of the 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 discussion of gender, poetics, ideology, class, and nationhood. We will devote particular attention to the changing valences of the key concept of equivalence. Over the course of the semester we will explore the practice and consequences of literary translation, learning about the role translations play in the interpretation and consecration of literature. What gets translated? Who translates it? What approach to translation is used?
We will give particular attention to the place of translation in the trajectories of English-language literature in the twentieth century. Special emphasis will be given to twentieth-century theory and the work of key twentieth-century translators including Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and Constance Garnett. How have recent translators challenged traditional requirements for translation and fidelity, such as fluency in the source language and a scholarly background in the source culture? How does global mobility change the landscape for translators?
This course is open to all students and there is no language requirement. Assignments include a term project (research paper or else translation plus theoretically-informed translator’s preface) and a presentation. Students will draw up the final project in consultation with the professor.
EN 639 – 001
W 10:00 – 12:30
Niiler
Seminar – Aspects of Writing Program Administration
This seminar will focus on multiple aspects of writing program administration, including leadership, history of the field, teacher training, pedagogy, assessment, inter- and intradepartmental relationships, program development, problem-solving, and more.
EN 643 – 001
T – 9:30 – 12:00
Deutsch
Seminar 20th Century American Lit
Queer Outlaws in 20th Century American Literature: Drag queens, transvestites, hustlers, drug dealers, and lesbian ex-pats, such figures fill the imaginations of queer writers for much of the 20th century. Of course, simply to be queer or to be gender nonconforming was to be marked both legally and metaphorically as an outlaw figure, as someone who lived and often thrived outside the religious, social, medical, and legal conventions of American culture, really up until this day. This course will explore plays, poetry, and novels that depict the lives of such non-homonormative figures, often via works that obtained cult followings and thus managed to influence a wider swathe of American literary narratives. Participants in this seminar, which is not for the faint of heart, must be willing to consider critically points of view with which they might not necessarily agree and settings that they might occasionally find offensive regardless of their own socio-political situation, but which nonetheless engage with vital strands in American literature and history. Together, we will examine the art, culture, and contexts of works such as John Rechy’s City of Night, Amiri Baraka’s Toilet and The Baptism, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Rabih Alameddine’s Angel of History, as well as numerous other works.
EN 648 – 001
W – 10:00 – 12:30
Smith
The Roots of American Racism, State-Sanctioned Violence and a Black Protest Tradition in Early African American Literature
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police, Black leaders and news commentators filled the airwaves with pleas for people to protest ‘peacefully,’ propping up the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to protest. News coverage even homed in on peaceful protestors and castigated those caught looting and starting fires. But is there really a right way to protest? Football quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a silent, nonviolent protest by taking a knee during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes white and Black joined in. Their silent, nonviolent protest sparked national outrage, even prompted the president to call them “sons of bitches.” The protest all but cost Kaepernick his career.
The violent/nonviolent dichotomy that characterizes our discussions of riots and protests is a false one. Social protests by design transgress; they disrupt the status quo, which makes protest an inherently violent act, an inherently disrespectful act. The rhetoric, especially when directed at Black protest movements, is embedded in a deeper impulse to police the behavior of Black Americans, to describe their behavior in terms of right and wrong – respectable versus disrespectable. In other words, we attach a moral judgement to forms of protest; it is a kind of respectability politics, the term used to describe a form of assimilation and self-policing that occurs when members of an oppressed group seek to model (and condemn those in the group who do not model) the cultural and social mores of a dominant group in order to illustrate their humanity and advocate for equality. Today, for example, we shun the black militancy of Civil Rights leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. We praise the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the one who gets a national holiday, the one for whom elementary schools and streets in every major and smaller city are named. The irony, of course, is that King leveraged black militancy and white violence to advance the Civil Rights movement. However, we describe the history of that movement in terms of its nonviolent aspects. We are driven to do this, in part, by respectability politics.
Respectability politics has long circumscribed the Black American experience and the literature produced by Black communities. This seminar course will examine some of the earliest examples of that literature – with a special focus on 19th century slave narratives – to understand where, how, and why protest emerged in African American literature as a strategy to combat American racism and state-sanctioned violence. We will explore the extent to which respectability politics shaped representations of protests in those early texts. While the course will focus largely on early African American literature, we will examine also several 21st century neo-slave narratives, like Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Beloved and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, to see how modern writers re-imagine that protest tradition within a 21st century context. Students will write a traditional seminar paper and will have the opportunity to present their work at the 21st biennial (virtual) conference of the Society of Early Americanists in March 2021.
EN 654 – 001
TR – 2:00 – 3:15
Tekobbe
Digital Rhetoric
Visual & 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 662 – 001
R – 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 668 – 001
M – 2:00 – 4:30
Ainsworth
Seminar in Renaissance Literature III: Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation
This course will cover John Milton’s poetry and a selection of his prose works, with a focus on its musical elements and a concentration on literary interpretation. Beginning with a few central concepts like harmony, concord and discord, and solo/choral song, we will explore Milton’s poetry and prose with particular attention to their formal characteristics. Other broad topics and angles of approach that may feature include theology, materialism, performativity and queer theory. If interest warrants, we may also explore Milton’s cosmology, his understanding of time, his humor, and his politics. We will also discuss how to teach Milton, especially as part of a broader survey course like 205/215.
Assignments include a seminar paper, a book review, and leading part of a class discussion, in addition to primary and secondary reading.
EN 683-001
W – 2:00 – 4:30
Tedeschi
Seminar in Romantic Literature
What is literature and what does it do? In what ways does poetry, and particularly lyric poetry, distill or inflect literariness? And how might we conceive of the objects of inquiry for literary criticism? This course considers three responses to these questions in three conversations. First, it examines the premises of the must-cite contemporary Romantic literary studies by Kevis Goodman, Marjorie Levinson, Anne-Lise Fran’s is, Amanda Jo Goldstein, and Anahid Nersessian. Does literature, these critics ask, have a unique power to register a quality of experience or of nature that is otherwise invisible to the humanities and natural sciences? Second, it analyzes the works of a group of critics who begin from the premise that literary forms, and especially the rigors of versification, impose and enable distinctive ways of thinking. How do these critical inquiries relate to each other, and how do they signal the departures from the foundational works of, for example, I. A. Richards, M. H. Abrams, and Christopher Ricks? And third, this course studies the thinking of literature in the poetry and critical prose of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Texts will include the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s conversation poems, selections from the Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, and Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere, selections from the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, and The Prelude.
EN 698 – 001 – McNaughton – Non – Dissertation Research
EN 699 – 001 – McNaughton – Dissertation Research
FALL 2019
EN 500-001 / 45402 Dorothy Worden: Special Topics in Linguistics: Language & Culture
For override contact: jfuqua@ua.edu
M 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
This course focuses on the relationship between language and culture as it is conceptualized and studied in the field of linguistics. Topics will include the historical division of language and culture in linguistics; the relationship between language, culture, and cognition; the cultural underpinnings of lexis and grammar; the relationship between language, culture, and identity; and the role of culture in educational contexts, specifically language classrooms.
Jennifer Purvis: Women in Contemporary Society
EN 500-002 / 45679 (xl WS 525-001)
W 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Open to graduate students from all areas with an interest in feminist theory, this interdisciplinary approach to contemporary feminist theory explores the self-other paradigm established in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and its outgrowths, as well as how the third term—“mere flesh,” the inhuman other, the disposable, the abject—upsets the binary logic that has dominated our thinking about oppressions for more than half a century. From French Feminisms’ monstrous feminine to the present, alterity, the notion of radical otherness exposes systems of belonging that define citizens, subjects, nations, and regions and organize humanity along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, ability, and class. Yet those who are marginalized often resist associations with alterity. Authors Luce Irigaray, Barbara Creed, Hortense Spillers, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Alexander Weheliye, and others challenge us to think through and beyond the ways in which otherness and abjection are harmful; invite us to think outside the terms of normalcy, inclusion, and the human; question central binaries; and explore spaces of liminality. Drawing their insights from a variety of fields—including French Feminisms, queer theory, cultural studies, critical race theory, philosophy, post- and de-colonial theory, feminist art and film theory, monster studies, disability studies, and more—the authors in this course examine transgression, borders, leakiness, dirt, danger, zombies, vampires, the monstrous feminine, sexual deviants, zones of uninhabitability, the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the vagina dentate, and other terms associated with abjection and radical alterity that challenge an “us/them” world. (Prerequisites: none)
Gadsden Classes
EN 500-359—Gadsden
S 9:00 am — 5:00 pm
EN 500-361—Gadsden
S 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Amber Buck: Computers & Writing
EN 512-001/47979
R 10:00 am – 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 524-001/41605 (XL 424-001) Dilin Liu: Structure of English
For override contact: jfuqua@ua.edu
TR 12:30 pm – 1:45 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, 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: Directed Readings
529 – 001 / 47980 James McNaughton: MA/PhD
529—002 / 47981 Kellie Wells: MFA
EN 533: Practicum in Teaching College English 101
Various Instructors
T R 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
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.
533 – 001 CRN# Luke Niiler
533 – 002 CRN# Jessica Kidd
533 – 003 CRN# Natalie Loper
533 – 004 CRN# Marni Presnall
Must simultaneously register for Thursday session with same lecture instructor.
EN 535-001/47982 Steve Tedeschi: Literary Criticism
T 2– 4:30 pm
The course introduces and surveys the history of conceptions and practices of literary criticism in the western tradition from classical antiquity to the present. The primary objectives of the course are to understand these various perspectives, purposes, and practices both for their own sake and for the sake of reflecting critically upon contemporary critical practices. Readings will track lines of thought and dispute in the classical period (Plato, Aristotle), the Renaissance (Dante, Sidney), and the long eighteenth century (Kant, Wordsworth) before tracing the historical evolution of kinds of critical thought and practice, including varieties of Marxisms, psychoanalytical approaches, formalisms, structuralisms and poststructuralisms, gender and sexuality studies, historicisms, cultural studies, postcolonialisms, and/or hermeneutics
EN 537-001/42225 Michelle Dowd: Introduction to Graduate Studies
M 10 am – 12:30 pm
This course is a study of selected bibliographical resources and of some of the important methodological approaches employed in literary study, including an introduction to critical approaches, scholarly writing, and issues in the profession.
EN 539-001/43740 (609-002) Albert Pionke: Approaches to Teaching the Sophomore EN Survey
T 12:30 pm –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. 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: Non-Thesis Research
EN 598-001/ 43442 All Literature/CRES/Strode McNaughton, J
EN 598-002/ 43443 All Creative Writing Wells, K
EN 598-003/ 45403 All TESOL Liu
EN 599: Thesis Research
EN 599-001: 41205 All Literature/CRES/Strode McNaughton, J
EN 599-002: 41206 All Creative Writing Wells, K
EN 599-003: 41207 All TESOL Liu
EN 601-001 /41124 Wendy Rawlings: Graduate Fiction Workshop
W 2 pm — 4:30 pm
This course is a forum for students in the graduate creative writing program to work together with the goal of helping each other develop as writers and readers. Students will articulate through their discussions of their classmate’s work, through the application of literature and theory read in other classes, and especially through the fiction they write in this class, an awareness of the contemporary moment in literary practice, a reason for doing whatever they are doing in their own fiction, and a means to bring the two together.
EN 601-002/49861 Michael Martone: Cross Section Workshop
M 2 pm – 4:30 pm
Instead of looking at each piece individually and holistically as in the traditional workshop, the Cross-Section Workshop will look at all the pieces at the same time. We will take “cuts” through each work, beginning with the title, then first line, then first paragraph, first page, etc. The discussion will be more about process instead of product, more strategic instead of tactical. The traditional “gag” rule where the writer of the work is asked to listen and not speak during the critique will be relaxed. In this workshop all of the writers will be asked to talk at all times, attempting to focus on the aesthetic choices and theories that operate behind and before the performance on the page. We will attempt to look (in this microscopic way) twice during the semester with (perhaps—I haven’t tried this before) a flash prose hypoxic sprint session in between the two longer looks. Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property will be the only required text.
EN 603-002
Mondays 2:00 – 4:30
Robin Behn
This course centers on the creation of new poetry by class members, paying special attention to the creative process and to the varied literary passions of the participants. In addition to substantial poem drafts that will be discussed by the class, we will also do a variety of brief exercises created by class members based on their interests. The course will include an (optional) opportunity to work on a long poem or series of poems. Along the way, we’ll take a quick look at some of the many alums of our MFA program who have published books of poems.
EN 608-001/ 41125 Michael Martone: Forms: The Chapbook
M 10:00 am — 12:30 pm
We will study and produce this hybrid book form known as a “chapbook.” The class will be conducted as a hypoxic workshop with writers contributing a poem, micro fiction or essay, or story or essay each week with the goal of creating a 14-25 page book. Also we will read and talk about various examples of chapbooks published recently.
EN 608-002/41129 Kellie Wells: The Short Story in the 21st Century
M 2 pm – 4:30 pm
At any given moment in time, the short story is either being pronounced critically ill and not expected to live much longer or robust of constitution and in a state of renaissance, forever shuttling between its death throes and ain’t-over-yet reinvigoration, but ultimately languishing, say it’s most tepidly enthused critics, in the long shadow of the novel. In writing programs, where countless short stories get authored and anatomized every semester, this diagnosis rests, anxiously, on the question of the story collection’s commercial potential, which, feast or famine, appears to be eternally dismal, or so we’re often told. In 2014, however, the short story was said to be having a moment, as evidenced by the fact that George Saunders’ Tenth of December won that year the inaugural Folio Prize, and Lydia Davis won the rival Man Booker International Prize the previous year. In recent years, when the short story has been on the ascendant, it is our ever diminishing attention spans that have been snidely credited with the uptick in interest, a notion that reduces the flashiest of fictions (like, say, those that Lydia Davis writes) to literary clickbait. But perhaps it’s actually the form of the short story itself that is evolving, slipping nimbly between genres, growing more expansive, inclusive, daring, and in so doing is attracting a growing fan base. In this class we’ll read stories and collections published in the last two decades to see what writers have been doing to vitalize the form in the 21st century. Writers we’ll read might include Otessa Moshfegh, Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Zach Doss, Kristine Ong Muslim, and others.
EN 608-004/47983 Robin Behn: Forms of Poetry
W 2 pm — 4:30 pm
Forms of Poetry This is a chance to get up close and personal with the substance and deployment of language in poetry. We’ll write in some traditional forms drawn from English and other languages, including contemporary iterations and mutations of those forms. We’ll also spend plenty of time on free verse. We’ll develop our ears and eyes, becoming more fluent with meter, many types of rhyme, figures of speech, phonemes, sound patterns, repetition, uses of punctuation and other symbols, uses of the “page,” large and small rhetorical patterns, and what Jack Gilbert called “the form of the invisible.” We’ll find new ways to make the mind move. We’ll become conscious of these elements and experiment with what they can do, the effects they can have. Then, through practice, quite unconscious again, so that they’ll always be “there” at our disposal as we write. The course is about poetry, but prose writers are most welcome; no prior experience is needed. In past years, prose writers have found that the course ends up enriching their practice of prose as well as emboldening them in the realm of poetry.
EN 608-005/47984 Joel Brouwer: Classics for Contemporaries
R 2 — 4:30 pm
Of Bodies Changed to other forms I tell: 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 608-006 / 47042 Heidi Staples: Hope is the Thing
F 1pm – 3:30 pm
Hope is the Thing: “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote. In this class, we will pursue hopefulness and enchantment as psychological states from which to draw writing inspiration by considering birds. We will examine and attempt representations of birds as familiar cultural tropes articulating the numinous, and we will pursue and reflect upon encounters with birds as fragile fellow creatures scaling the Anthropocene. We will bird-watch in published writings, in our own efforts, and in our very airs. Excursions will include a bird-watching event with the Birmingham Audubon Society and the EcoLit Arts Lab annual trip to Dauphin Island, where we will write while walking through the Audubon Bird Sanctuary on Dauphin Island, a recognized site of global significance for birds. Other texts may include Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, edited by Billy Collins; The Genius of Birds (nonfiction), Jennifer Ackerman; The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis (novel), White Bird: A Wonder Story (YA graphic novel), R.J. Pallacio.
EN 609-001/ 43613 Heidi Staples: Form Theory Practice
M 12:30 pm – 1:20 pm
This is a course designed to support first-time teachers of EN 200, Introduction to Creative Writing, with a communal space to discuss strategies for effective teaching and creative writing pedagogy.
EN 609-002/44569 (539-001) Albert Pionke: Form Theory Practice
T 12:30 pm – 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. 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 609-003/44567 Michael Martone: CW Pedagogy
TIME TBA
This is a course designed to support first-time teachers of EN 200, Introduction to Creative Writing, with a communal space to discuss strategies for effective teaching and creative writing pedagogy.
EN 609-320 / 44176 (43444) Wendy Rawlings: Forms of Creative Writing: The Second Person
W 5:00 pm – 5:50 pm
You want to write in the second person, but why? The second person is strange; it’s exotic — maybe even revolutionary! But is it? Maybe second person point of view is just plain irritating, a gimmick. Fine. Skip it! Still, wouldn’t you like to spend an hour a week discussing and experimenting with some of the most interesting examples of second person POV with other writers? Sure you do. Go ahead. Give it a crack.
EN 612-001/44570 Robert Poole: Topics in Applied Linguistics
For override contact: jfuqua@ua.edu
W 2:00 – 4:30 pm
This graduate seminar explores theory and pedagogical 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 corpus-aided approaches, digital gaming, telecollaboration and computer-mediated communication (CMC), and social media.
EN 613-001/42321 Dilin Liu: Second Language Development
For override contact: jfuqua@ua.edu
T 2:00 pm – 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 / 43743 Robert Poole: English Linguistics
For override contact: jfuqua@ua.edu
T R 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm
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 (syntax, phonology and phonetics, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics) as well as subfields such as language variation, language change, and language and the brain. Students will learn to apply the tools and techniques of language analysis through hands-on activities and projects.
EN 639-001/ 45406 Cindy Tekobbe: Feminist Rhetoric
T 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
This seminar will investigate feminist rhetorical texts along multiple trajectories. We will examine feminist rhetoric from a historical perspective, we will explore feminist research methodologies, and we will interrogate contemporary rhetorical feminisms, including Royster, Kirsch, Rhodes, and more. In this course, you should develop an understanding of the various feminist voices in rhetoric and composition and recognize their influences on the shaping of the field today. Assignments include weekly readings, case studies, and a seminar paper. Creative options are available.
EN 643-001 /47985 Heather White: American Modernist Poetry
R 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
The focus of this course will be three pivotal figures in modernist American poetry: Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. The primary goal of our work will be developing a deep familiarity with each poet’s canon. In order to better understand their work and its significance to American poetry, we will also read among their forerunners and inheritors: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and others.
EN 651-001 /49808 Amy Dayton: Politics of Teaching Writing
R 2:00 pm – 4:30 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 then turn to an examination of 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. 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 an initial question—what does it mean to teach writing, as Shari Stenberg puts it, in a “neoliberal age?”
EN 663 – 001/47250 Brad Tuggle: The Problem of the Human in Renaissance English Literature
T R 8 am – 9:15 am
Primarily, this course is an opportunity to read the poetry and prose of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. We will read lyric poetry (Astrophil and Stella, Amoretti, Epithalamion) pastoral romance (The “Old” Arcadia), literary criticism (The Defence of Poesy and the Letter to Raleigh), and epic romance (Books I, III, and IV of The Faerie Queene). We will direct our conversations and research projects around two sets of problems associated with the category of the human, one ontological, the other ethical. The first set concerns how we define and understand this category. For example, we will explore whether post humanists are right to see, even in the Renaissance, a radical undermining of the “Great Chain of Being” that privileges humans above other kinds of entities. The second set of problems concerns interpersonal ethics. How do we humanely interact with others? Much of the poetry and prose we read this semester suggests, I think, an acknowledgment of the inscrutability of other minds, a respectful attitude of trust as a counterweight to skepticism and jealousy. Or at least that is one hypothesis with which I may ask you to wrestle. Graded Assignments / Research Article 20-25 pages / Research Prospectus 10 pages
EN 685-001/47987 Albert Pionke: Seminar Victorian Literature
W 10:00 am – 12:30 pm
Fictions of (Il) Legitimacy According to literary historian Michael McKeon, the novel as we understand it emerged in the seventeenth century in response to “the curse of modernity,” identified as the “sociohistorical condition of status inconsistency.” Things did not become less uncertain with the passage of time. In fact, the roughly 60,000 novels published during the reign of Victoria continued to encode within themselves an only increasing anxiety about who should enjoy social precedence over whom and about how to legitimate those who deserved it. Orphans, bastards, con artists, agitators, parvenus, and other socially questionable figures loom large in period fiction, each offering a case for testing the limits of inherited forms of status hierarchy. This course will follow a few of them on their largely failed aspirations for social legitimacy, and will examine the novels in which they appear for signs that the genre itself was being stretched by their actions. It is, after all, novelists who have the most to gain and to lose in the creation of characters who do not live up to standards set by the society that buys or does not buy the books in which those characters and their misadventures appear.
EN 690-001/47988 James McNaughton: Modern British Literature
T R 9:30 am – 10:45 am
Late modernism, Samuel Beckett, and the politics of non-identity In this seminar, we read works by Samuel Beckett alongside works by others to ask how literature might contend with specific historical urgencies: the rise of authoritarianism in the 30s; postwar reckoning with French collaboration and with genocide; and 1950s torture debates. Sometimes we’ll approach this task contextually, by familiarizing ourselves with specific history that changes how we interpret works we thought we knew. With Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf, and Victor Klemperer, we’ll examine how fascist propaganda functions and whether literature can possibly respond. We’ll consider how Gertrude Stein captures the Phoney War and Beckett’s _Godot_ refutes the mythology of French Resistance. On torture, we will read Henri Alleg’s _The Question_ and Jean Améry’s _At the Minds Limits_. Other times we’ll approach the task theoretically, reading Theodor Adorno, Elaine Scarry, and Gorgio Agamben, among others. But again and again we will return to Beckett’s work because with unrivaled integrity his writing asks difficult and pertinent questions: how can literature respond to genocide without normalizing it? Should the atrocities of WWII be understood separately from the history of colonialism? What value is there in eschewing identity politics, pathos, sincerity, and redemptive humanism for a starker confrontation with non-identity, disgust, laughter, and failure? We will track the advances by which Beckett reworks the formal conventions of Western imaginative art—from the sentence to the stage set—as he confronts contemporaneous culture with its blind spots. Students can expect to write a research paper and give a presentation.
EN 693-001/47989 Emily Wittman: Seminar in Postcolonial Literature and Theory
T R 11:00 am -12:15 pm
World Literature What on earth is “world literature?” It is a difficult and perhaps impossible category or genre to define, particularly in a country where approximately 3% of books published annually are translated. In this course, we will investigate this contested genre, the assumptions that gave birth to it, and its persistence. What does it mean to take a course in world literature? Where does the world begin? Is the category of world literature geographically determined or is it more of a stylistic and aesthetic category? Furthermore, how are the foreign-language works published in the United States deemed meritorious? Why are some books translated into English while others are not? There has perhaps never been a time when issues of nationality, language, and translation have been more important or more troubling. In this course, we will investigate how literature arrives on the global stage with particular attention to translation, cultural capital, and the avenues for literary consecration. We will explore the important role of international literary prizes (including controversies). As we read six contemporary novels from a diverse selection of authors, we will supplement our reading with theoretical work by a number of scholars of both world literature and translation, including Pascale Casanova, Lawrence Venuti, Gideon Toury, André Lefevere, and Christopher Prendergast. Possible novelists we read might include J. M. Coetzee, Jenny Erpenbeck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ismail Kadare, Ornela orpsi, Kawabata Yasanuri, Lázló Krasznahorkai, Elfriede Jelinek, Mohsin Hamid, and Mario Vargas Llosa.