Rev 2/19/2024
EN 500-001
X-listed with EN 466
Selvi
W 2:00pm-4:30pm
Advanced Studies In Linguistic: Global Englishes
This course introduces students to the varieties of English and the implications of these varieties for using, learning, and teaching English in various socio-educational contexts. The course also examines the linguistic, social, and political impact of the global spread of English around the world, and where, when, why, and how new forms of English have emerged. It places specific emphasis on the set of implications for English teachers and learners in a superdiverse world.
EN 500-002
X-listed with WS 525
Purvis
W 2:00pm- 4:30pm
Feminist Theory and… “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 formal prerequisite to Part II in the sequence, but it does prepare students for the study of contemporary feminist theory in WS 530. This course locates a generative moment for contemporary feminist theory in the concept of “excess” and its intersections with gender, race, class, sexuality, and corporeality. Readings include a mixture of classics from authors including 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 issues of gender and excess in feminist, queer, disability, and fat studies; psychoanalysis (with attention to the monstrous-feminine, jouissance, hysteria, and the sublime); sexual ethics and body politics, including fleshy or “feminine” embodiment and transgender embodiment; queer excess, sexuality, protest, and exhibitionism; transgressive scripts and politics; raced bodies; intersex bodies; the grotesque, the carnivalesque, and the monstrous; film and excess, including the return of the monstrous-feminine; critical madness and neuroqueer feminism; and posthuman embodiment. These forms of excess transgress the contested borders, boundaries, expectations, and regulations of gender, sexuality, and “proper” subjectivity and enact bold contestations through 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 uses of alterity, the abject, or monstrous otherness. (Prerequisites: None)
EN 524-001
X-Listed with EN 424
Poole
TR 12:30pm-1:45pm
Modern English Grammar
This advanced grammar course examines the structure and usage of English, 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 functional grammar. Through readings, 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
TBD
Directed Readings
Does not meet
EN 532-001
X-listed with EN 432
Dayton
T/R 9:30am- 10:45am
Approaches to Teaching Composition
English 432/532 is an introduction to composition-rhetoric, designed for students who would like to pursue research in written communication, plan to teach writing someday, or simply want to know more about the field. We will explore questions such as: how do people learn to write in particular genres for specific purposes? How do our identities, linguistic influences, and cognitive processes all influence our writing? How can we help students (and ourselves) develop and improve writing skills over time? How does rhetoric inform the teaching of writing?
*This is a cross-listed course for undergraduate and graduate students. The content and concepts are the same for both groups, but graduate students will be expected to engage more deeply with reading and course assignments.
EN 533-001/002/003
FWP Staff
T/R 12:30pm – 1:30 pm
Practicum in Teaching College English 103
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 103 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
T 2:00pm-4:30pm
Literary Criticism
What constitutes a literary 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 2:00pm-4:30pm
Introduction to Graduate Studies
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 research methods, scholarly writing, and issues in the profession. Intended as an introductory course for new graduate students in literature, 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 IF offered
TBD
F 11:00am-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 598-002
TBD
Non-Thesis Research
EN 598-003
TBD
Non-Thesis Research
EN 599-001
TBD
Thesis Research
EN 599-002
TBD
Thesis Research
EN 599-004
TBD
Thesis Research
EN 599-005
TBD
Thesis Research
EN 601-001
Rawlings
T 10:00am – 12:30 pm
Fiction Workshop
We will write, read and discuss fiction, largely or entirely of the short variety.
EN 603-001
Estes
T 2:00pm-4:30 pm
Graduate Poetry Workshop: This course will support the reading and writing of poetry. The focus will be on the discussion of original student writing. Participants will engage in collaborative workshop discussions and explore various elements of poetic craft. This course will be open first to MFA students.
EN 605-001
Champagne
W 10:00am – 12:30pm
Forms Special Topics: Creative Nonfiction
EN 605 is a graduate writing course in creative nonfiction (with a particular focus on the memoir and essay), intended to expose students to a range of its subgenres and authors, and to provide a common language with which to discuss them. The purpose of building this vocabulary is to enable students to become adept at identifying and articulating – to themselves and others — how a piece of nonfiction works, rather than focusing exclusively on what it means (placing aside personal aesthetics). In this class, we will ask the question: how do we as writers define creative nonfiction? In short, the answer is “true stories, well told,” but this growing genre offers up many other considerations: how can something factual also be creative, and where do we draw our own personal lines between the truth and imagination? By reading as writers, identifying (and experimenting with) genre, and by writing and workshopping pieces in progress, students will explore several varieties of the creative nonfiction essay, including memoir, personal, and lyric.
EN 608-001
Nkweti
R 2:00pm-4:30pm
Forms Special Topics: Readings in 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” fiction, essay, film, and other media 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, and thoughtful discussion. While there will be generative writing assignments and craft prompts to elicit original work, this class is not a workshop.
EN 608-002
Brouwer
R 10:00am-12:30pm
Forms Special Topics: 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 608-003
Maples
W 2:00pm-4:30pm
Forms of Creative Writing: Historical Personal Poetry
This course will offer an exploration of historical persona, an immersive and unique mode of documentary poetry. We’ll take a look at how practitioners employ voice, character and history to create meaningful work.
EN 608-004
Brorby
M 10:00am-12:30pm
Forms Special Topic: Sentences
This prose class will closely examine sentences–what work they do, how they work, what opportunities they possess–to help participants see the potential to further their own writing on the page.
EN 608-005
Wells
M 2:00pm-4:30pm
Forms of Creative Writing: The Case Against Linear Time
In The Case Against Reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that “spacetime is doomed,” and he believes he and his team of scientists have proven that a linear conception of time, while a useful interface, is not actually reflective of reality. All writers, preoccupied as we are with memory, history, mortality, the future, think about, work with, and represent time. While many artists, and many religious traditions, explicitly challenge linearity, what would it mean for writers to really free themselves from the narrative hegemony of the straight temporal line, from a reductive notion of cause and effect, from the orderly logic of sequential thought and action? What would it mean to become, like Billy Pilgrim, “unstuck in time”? How might doing so impact our anticipation and experience of death? Our experience and understanding of life, loss, love, the natural world, planetary devastation, interdependency? If history is not history but also the present and future, might this open up our understanding of and reckoning with the longstanding consequences of imperialism, colonialism, genocide? Might it allow us to think more deeply, more broadly, widely, diagonally, extradimensionally about the human animal’s most harmful impulses? What would happen if, as Ted Chiang asks in Story of Your Life, we could in fact exceed the limitations of spacetime and begin to think of story, character, plot, our lives in teleological rather than causal terms? Many indigenous cultures view the world in ways that have little to do with the linear construct of time, ways that science is only just beginning to bear out, and this class seeks to examine how we as writers might open up more emotional dimensions in our work by questioning consensus reality and rethinking how we impose order on the chaos of experience. Writers working in any genre are welcome.
EN 609-001
Champagne
M 1:00pm-1:50pm
200 Practicum
This course is the practicum for new teachers of 200-level creative writing courses.
EN 609-321
Ander Monson, Visiting Writer
TR September 10th – October 3rd 6-7:30pm (Zoom)
Lose Yourself: Writing About Music, Games, Movies, and Books
In this brief course we’ll read great writing about music, games, movies, and books, which is to say mostly everything, and learn to lose (and find) ourselves in these things by writing about, into, and out of them. What emerges from us when we write closely about something we love (or hate, or both)? We’ll mostly be focusing on nonfiction here but other forms of response (poem, story, etc) are all welcome. We probably won’t have to watch Predator. Probably.
EN 609-322
Brorby
M 5:00pm -5:50pm
This class is focused on the creative process by examining writing and interviews by accomplished artists about their own creative processes. Students will conduct a number of experiments throughout the semester to help get them into a groove and out of their comfort zones.
EN 613-001
Selvi
T 2:00pm-4:30pm
Second Language Development
Teacher-learners in this course will explore the complex and fascinating world of (first and second) language acquisition/development and raise and address questions including but not limited to the following: “what does it mean to learn/acquire a language?”, “who is considered a good language learner?”, “how do individual differences affect second language acquisition”, “how has our understanding of this language learning process developed through research and practice?”, and “how does SLA research influence classroom instruction?”. Through inquiry, readings, and in-class and online discussions, we will critically examine foundational theories and research perspectives from linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural traditions in the field of SLA and will constantly seek connections to educational contexts.
EN 620-001
Poole
R 2:00pm – 4:30pm
English Linguistics
An advanced introductory linguistics course that focuses on the English language and which has relevance for students in the applied linguistics/TESOL, literature, rhetoric and composition, and MFA programs.
EN 639-001
Fitzsimmons
R 2:00pm-4:30 pm
Topics in Rhetoric and Composition: Public Rhetorics of the Body
“Whether you’re the explicit target of unjust systems or not, inequality makes us all sick.” – Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
In this course, we’ll explore multidisciplinary theories and rhetorics around the body in a variety of public forums and activist struggles—from queer and disabled performing arts groups to recent TV shows to the Black Panthers’ medical activism to movements for racial justice in health policy and medical research. Starting in rhetorical theory and health justice, we will also engage with work from fields such as disability studies, critical race studies, queer theory, women’s and gender studies, decolonial studies, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and cultural and public rhetorics. We’ll engage with TV shows like Euphoria and Dopesick, listen to podcasts like All My Relations and Disability Visibility, and read and view the work of activists like Sonya Renee Taylor, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown, Alice Wong, and disability justice group Sins Invalid. In looking at both academic and public-facing work across several modalities, we’ll think about how we represent bodies ourselves—both in our own research and in public-facing work of our own. As we think through what it looks like to do research, facilitate conversations, and create dialogue in both academic and public settings, you will be asked to complete response papers, a literature review and presentation, a collaborative podcasting project, and a research paper.
EN 643-001
Cardon
T 2:00pm-4:30pm
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:
- Differentiate among groups that are often elided under a racial umbrella (e.g., different indigenous tribes, or people of different Asian descents);
- Differentiate between the experiences of “white ethnics” (e.g., Jewish or Italian immigrants) and “nonwhite ethnics”
- Differentiate between recent immigrants and assimilated descendants who share the same ancestral origins (e.g., Africans and African Americans);
- 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 Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back, 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 652-001
Buck
T 2:00pm-4:30 PM
Composition Theory
This course will provide an overview of the major theories and philosophical underpinnings informing the field of rhetoric and composition studies and the pedagogy of teaching writing. We will discuss major assumptions in the field, historical trajectories, current pressing debates, and more recent theoretical developments as they pertain to the composition classroom, and we will discuss specific pedagogical approaches and activities. This course is designed for CRES students, but other graduate students who would like to further explore writing pedagogy are welcome.
EN 663-001
McElroy
W 10:00am – 12:30pm
This course focuses on two key literary figures of Elizabethan England—Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Both were instrumental in the project to promote English letters, to create—as Spenser described it—“the kingdom of our own language.” Celebrated as a soldier, patron, courtier, and poet in his lifetime (and even more exuberantly after his early death), Sidney spoke modestly of his literary vocation yet left an influential and innovative corpus of prose and poetry. Our readings will include his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, his Defence of Poesy, and his prose romance, the Old Arcadia. Spenser is arguably the most important non-dramatic poet of the Renaissance, and claimed to pursue a Virgilian career path— from pastoral to epic—in order to become the great English poet of his age. And yet his works are far from straightforward, exploring, rather, the complexities of national and religious identity, art and morality, sex and spirituality. In this course, we will read widely in Spenser’s poetry, including generous doses of his lush, multifaceted, and fantastic epic romance, The Faerie Queene.
EN 667-001
Tavares & Stoneking
W 2:00pm-4:30 PM
Shakespeare in Performance
This course offers a studio setting in which to develop essential skills for engaging with Shakespeare in performance. Particular attention will be paid to intersectional considerations of race, gender, and sexuality using contemporary productions of Hamlet, including the recent Pulitzer winning adaptation Fat Ham (James Ijames). To this end, the course comprises three units: exploring critical foundations of approaching a dramatic text for performance; analyzing live performance and articulating those stage interpretations for a variety of audiences; and practicing the essential skills of a dramaturg, including script cutting, production consultation, and season curation. In addition to assigned readings, film screenings, and guest speakers, class business will also entail performance exercises, staging experiments, and other theater games. Participants develop a portfolio of materials reflecting professional norms and critical debates of Shakespeare in contemporary performance. Graduate students in Creative Writing, History, Literature, Strode, Women’s Studies, and Writing Studies welcome.
EN 683-001
Tedeschi
T/R 11:00am-12:15pm
Seminar in Romantic Literature: Wordsworth and Friends
What is poetry? What does it do? And how does it do what it does? This course approaches these questions through three conversations. First, it examines the premises of the must-cite works of current Romantic literary studies by Anne-Lise François, Anahid Nersessian, and Jonathan Kramnick. 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? Second, it considers the critical writings of contemporary poets—including Susan Stewart, John Hollander, and James Longenbach—who consider how poetic techniques construct different moods, feelings, and ways of thinking. And third, it examines how William Wordsworth and his associates conceived of the relations among poetic forms and techniques, ways of thinking and feeling, and the social logic of communicating through poetry. We will read deeply in 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 works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, and John Clare. This course is for students interested in the crafts of reading, writing, and/or writing about poetry: MFAs are warmly welcome.
EN 693-001
Wittman
T/R 8:00am-9:15am
Seminar in Postcolonial Literature and Theory
“Pedagogical Style”
In this class we look at recent self-writing by Claudia Rankine (Just Us), Jenn Shapland (My Autobiography of Carson McCullers), Kate Zambreno (Heroines), Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes), Roxane Gay (Hunger), Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness), Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings) and Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts). We will carefully situate these vital works within the history of self-writing and look at the way in which these writers renew and redirect the autobiographical trajectories characteristic of earlier self-writing by switching their orientation to face the future and by celebrating adult life as growing season, a time of Bildung. We will discuss how the self-writers in question trace future-oriented paths through the past, reject triumphalism, and complicate both identity and individualism, just as they refine and redefine autobiographical genres. We will explore these self-writers as chroniclers of Generation X’s adult life in particular and map the writers’ unique relationship to new forms of knowledge and knowledge gathering in an Information Age that they are both of and set apart from. Crucially we will theorize the writers’ status as (for the most part) graduates of MFA programs and professors of creative writing at the university level. We will discuss their ongoing relationship to the workshop, either as participant or facilitator. Our overriding task will be to understand the way in which these works share what we can call a “pedagogical style,” one characterized by clarity, exposition, and classical rhetoric, all of which offer a warrant for reading them in pedagogical terms in concert with traditional scholarly approaches. In the interest of further understanding pedagogical style, we will look carefully at the way in which many of these writers deftly make use of the tools and gains of scholarship. We will ponder the future of self-writing and ask if we might be looking at the scholarship of the future.
There are five assignments in this class: reading the books (“get ready to read”), participation, a presentation, a 250-word abstract for the final paper plus brief presentation during the last two days of class, and the final paper (16-20 pages).
EN 698-001
Cardon
Non-Dissertation Research
EN 699-001
Cardon
Dissertation Research