Fall 2024
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ENG105 – Introduction to Creative Writing
(4 crs.) Introduction to basic principles of reading and writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (may also substitute genres to include drama and/or screenwriting). (Lec. 3. Project 3/Online). (A3) (B1)
ENG110 – Introduction to Literature
(4 crs.) Analysis of literature through reading and discussion of a number of genres derived from a variety of literary cultures. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A3) (B1)
ENG120 – Poetry Out Loud
(4 crs.) Study of great poetry through the art of performance. Emphasis on public speaking skills, self-confidence, and study of literature to understand and express fundamental beliefs about life, love, pain, happiness. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A4) (B2)
ENG121 – OUTRAGE! Literature of Protest and Dissent
(4 crs.) Study of proud history of poems, songs, plays, and fiction speaking truth to power. Examination of the ways selected literary texts have engaged with different kinds of oppression. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A3) (C1)
ENG 122 – Poplife: How Popular Culture Explains the World
ENG160 – Literatures of the World
(4 crs.) Cross-listed as (ENG), CLS 160. Introduction to significant works of world literature. (Lec. 3, Rec.1, Online 1) (A3) (C2)
ENG205A – Creative Writing: Poetry (4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. (Lec. 3. Project 3/Online) ENG 205A may be offered online. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG205B – Creative Writing: Fiction(4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) ENG 205B may be offered online. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 210 – Reading Sport, Seeing Life; Professor Kyle Kusz.
ENG 242 – U.S. Literature II
ENG242 – U.S. Literature II(4 crs.) Selections from U.S. literature, mid-19th century to the present. (Lec. 3, Project 3) ENG 241 not required for 242. (A3) (C3)
ENG243 – The Short Story (4 crs.) Critical study of the short story from the early 19th century to the present. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) (A3) (B1)
ENG248 – Introduction to African American Literature (4 crs.) Cross-listed as AAF 248. (Lec. 3, Project 3) (A3) (C3)
ENG260 – Women and Literature. (4 crs.) Critical study of selected topics. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) (A3) (B1)
ENG 280 – Introduction to Shakespeare. (4 crs.)
ENG 305A – Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry; Professor Peter Covino; TuTh 2-3:15
ENG 348 – U.S. Lit & Culture 1865-1914; Professor David Faflik; TuTh 3:30-4:45
The Hawthorne Effect
Beginning with the theory of “romance” that author Nathaniel Hawthorne articulated midway through the nineteenth century, this course explores the migration of US letters away from the conventions of American Romanticism in the early national and antebellum eras toward the theories and practices of literary representation that we associate with the subsequent development of American Literary Realism, American Literary Naturalism, and American Literary Modernism before the start of the First World War. None of these transitions in literary content, style, or conception was seamless, as we will see. Nor did the strong pull of American Romanticism simply disappear overnight. The “romance” as Hawthorne conceived it continued to exert an at times shadowy influence (what we might call the “Hawthorne effect”) on the full range of literary experimentation that followed in that writer’s wake across the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the next. Among the novelists, short story writers, and poets whose works we will examine in this course are Elizabeth Stoddard, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton.
ENG 350 – Literary Theory and Criticism; Professor Ryan Trimm; M 3-4:45
ENG 363 – African American Fiction; Professor James Haile; TuTh 11-12:15
This course examines the relationship between African American literature, African American Fiction, Afrosurrealism, and what will be termed Black Speculative Fiction.
This course will examine how traditional texts within the canon of African American Literature and African American Fiction have always utilized elements of Afrosurrealism and Black Speculative Fiction, from the very beginning. For example, we will be reading early works from Phylis Whestley, Frederick Douglass, Sutton Griggs, and W.E.B. Du Bois and pairing them with contemporary writings from Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, N.K. Jemison, Percival Everette, and Helen Oyeyemi to demonstrate how and why surrealism and speculative fiction have and remain critical for writing and thinking about African American literary production.
ENG 367 – The Epic; Professor Peter Covino; TuTh 12:30-1:45
ENG 379 – Contemporary Literature; Professor Janet Kong-Chow
21st Century African American Writers
If, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” what does the 21st century hold for Black American literature? In a century increasingly defined by environmental devastation, political and economic unrest, as well as global Black protest, African American writers grapple with diasporic identity, neoliberal diversity, afterlives of enslavement, and legacies of the civil rights movement. Special attention paid to the contemporary publishing market, experimental genres, Black Lives Matter, queer narratives, and performing authenticity.
ENG 385 – Women Writers; Professor Heather Johnson; TuTh 12:30-1:45
This course will focus on British women’s writing of the 20th century, with an emphasis on colonialism and postcolonialism. We will read novels and short stories to explore how women’s voices speak to issues in culture, politics, and literary innovation. Writers will include Woolf, Rhys, Winterson, Carter, Smith, Levy, Ali.
ENG 388 – Queer Literatures, Queer Cultures; Professor Stephen Barber; MW 2-3:15
ENG 396 – Literature of the Sea: the Rumowicz Seminar; Professor Martha Elena Rojas; MW 3:30-4:45
Washed: The Literal and Littoral in Oceanic Literary Studies
Thinking with Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019), and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, (2020), this course engages with the material, metaphorical, historic, and current possibilities afforded by Rhode Island’s coast, estuaries, and proximity to the ocean. How far can and do the networks and connections enabled by our location (in time and space) extend through riverways, estuaries, and ocean currents?
This course will work in partnership with the Providence Public Library, as part of its yearlong programming, “Washed,” under the direction of Christina Bevilaqua. We will collaborate with the PPL to create an interdisciplinary humanist laboratory that promotes active engagement with the ocean and waters. In the company of works by Oladiouh Equiano, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Kara Walker, we will read Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, Eli Nixon’s Bloodtide, Timothy Walker’s Sailing to Freedom, and Kevin Dawson’s Undercurrents of Power, with opportunities to engage directly with the authors of these works during the course of the semester as they visit Providence and Rhode Island.
The seminar also includes a field trip to Mystic Seaport to visit “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea,” an exhibit curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes. We will explore the possibility of additional visits to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and to Providence Public Library’s Special Collections to learn about and work with the Nicholson Whaling Collection as well as to learn about the art Becci Davis creates during her year-long residency at the library with and alongside William Martin’s logbook, the (rare extant) record of a Black whaling ship captain’s voyages.
ENG 405 – Capstone in Creative Writing; Professor Derek Nikitas; MW 3:30-4:45
ENG 410 – Capstone in English Literature; Professor Carolyn Betensky TuTh 11-12:15
No Easy Answers!
This capstone seminar invites you to further develop the theoretical frameworks and historical knowledges you have acquired as students of literature and culture at URI by integrating and applying them to the study of texts that grapple with complexity. Each text featured in this class asks difficult questions about meaning, belonging, justice, and love. Our job will be to discover rigorous ways to respond to the challenges these works pose without flattening them. Among the texts we will read: Michel de Montaigne, Essays; George Eliot, Silas Marner; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King, Toni Morrison, Beloved; Lynne Nottage, Sweat; Darrin Bell, The Talk, and poetry by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein.
ENG 447 – Poetry; Professor Travis Williams; MW 3:30-4:45
Renaissance Lyric
We will read widely in the tradition of English Renaissance lyric poetry, become expert in precise analytic description, gain familiarity with criticism of the tradition, and learn about the cultural and historical contexts of lyric production. Our guiding question will be “how did English relearn to be a literary language at the end of the middle ages.” Our reading will range from Skelton to Cavendish, with all the famous names in between, and include consideration of the court, the city, poetic form, patronage, gender, and race. The dominant critical method will be intense close reading: attending to poems as language objects. You will learn to read carefully, precisely, and in intense detail. The goal of analysis will be to articulate how a poem works line by line, word by word, and syllable by syllable; to understand how a poem functions and how it alters a reader’s perception of it moment by moment—an effort to understand why this collection of words in this arrangement has the effect it does, which could not be replicated by any other collection or arrangement. You will learn to appreciate the irreducible multiplicity of signification that characterizes all good poems.
ENG 486 – British Authors: 19th Century; TuTh 12:30-1:45
Graduate Courses
ENG 510 – Introduction to Professional Study I; Professor Martha Elena Rojas; Tu 4-6:45
Required for 1st-year students — 1.5 credits.
ENG 514 – History of Critical Theories; Professor Ryan Trimm; W 4-6:45
ENG 605 – SEMINAR IN GENRES: Lyric Poetry
Professor J. Jennifer Jones; M 4-6:45
Poetry is one heart of the movements for personal, social, and political change that define the momentous historical era of British Romanticism (1770-1830). William Wordsworth understood poetry as capable of making people – and thus society – better by training them to perceive the complexities, acknowledge the sufferings, and participate in the transformations of the modern world. Percy Bysshe Shelley argued passionately on behalf of the centrality of poetry to social policy legislation, calling poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” Both writers devoted their lives to these ideas.
In this seminar, we will engage with the powers and pleasures of imaginative literature and its critical legacy through the study of one genre of poetry, an ancient form that is still vital today: lyric. A lyric poem is a brief linguistic articulation in the first person about an emotionally charged subject matter with associations to music and musicality. Lyric is generally understood to be the most personal literary genre. It is what speakers say to themselves and to others when they imagine themselves alone. And yet lyric is also understood to be the most universal of literary genres, composed of dense, abstract language and openly inviting all its readers to
assume its voice as their own. Lyric focuses on aspects of human experience –love, friendship, consolation; loneliness, grief, death; society, war, change – that draw human persons together through collective experience. Ultimately, lyric poetry strives to teach and delight us about ourselves as well as about persons not ourselves, connecting reader and poem in ways that facilitate imaginative inter/subjective exploration, thought, reflection, and critique.
This seminar will focus in depth on the period of British Romanticism, when the lyric underwent major generic transformation, supplemented by poems and poetic theory from the late medieval to the modern period as a means of providing the breadth necessary to understand the genre and its movements across time and into the modern era. Alongside lyric poetry and poetic theory, we will study influential literary criticism focused published over the past century, from the origins of New Criticism to issues and trends of the contemporary moment.
ENG 620 – Seminar in Culture and Discourse; Th 4-6:45
Professor James Haile III
Critical to black letters, and specifically, to African American literature from the very beginning has been a speculative imagination. Given the historical circumstances emergent from Western modernity (the cosmological order instantiated with/through chattel enslavement), Africans were faced with the erasure of the past as well as the denial of the present and the negation of a future. Within the context of black letters, and specifically, African American literature a speculative imagination counters the erasure of the past by the instantiation of another origin (blurring the lines between fact and fiction), the denial of the present with an instantiation of a parallel present, and the negation of the future with the creation of an alternate timeline. Taken together, black letters can be understood as utilizing African American literature as the vehicle for the speculative imagination. This course will feature the following works (although the list is not exhaustive):
- Historical writings of Phillis Wheatley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Sutton Griggs, Martin R. Delany, Harriet Jacobs, and George Schuyler
- Novelists and playwriters such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Lorraine Hansbury, and William Melvin Kelly
- Speculative and Surreal writings of Sheree Thomas, Henry Dumas, Douglass Ward Turner, Helen Oyeyemi, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, Rasheeda Philips, NK Jemison, and Octavia Butler
- The Poetics of James Weldon Johnson, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Camile Dungy, Melvin Tolson, and Langston Hughes
- Theorists such as Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Kenneth Warren, Henry Louis Gates, Elliot Mason, Kevin Quashie, Fred Moten, and Adam Pendleton
*I am currently organizing a conference on Philosophical and the Literary Truth. The conference will take place in the Fall ’24 and will be held in coordination with ENG 363 and 620. Students from each course will have the opportunity to present a commentary on one of the invited speakers for course credit.