Spring 2019
ENG 105 – Introduction to Creative Writing
MW 3:30 – 4:45 Professor Peter Covino
LEC: (4 crs.) Introduction to basic principles of reading and writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (may also substitute genres to include drama and/or screenwriting).
ENG 110 – Introduction to Literature
Multiple sections available see e-Campus for details.
LEC: (4 crs.) Analysis of literature through reading and discussion of a number of genres derived from a variety of literary cultures. Not available for English major credit.
ENG 160 – Literatures of the World
Multiple sections available see e-Campus for details.
LEC: (4 crs.) Cross-listed as (ENG), CLS 160. Introduction to significant works of world literature.
ENG 201 – Principles of Literary Study
Multiple sections available see e-Campus for details.
LEC: (4 crs.) Introduction to the study of literature through reading and discussion of major methodologies, analytical approaches, and perspectives in literary study. Students will also participate in a series of faculty presentations reflecting current critical and creative practices in the discipline. Restricted to English majors.
ENG 205A – Creative Writing: Poetry
MW 2:00 – 3:15 André Katkov
LEC: (4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 205B – Creative Writing: Fiction
MWF 9:00 – 9:50 Audrey Heffers
LEC: (4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 241 – U.S. Literature I
TuTh 2:00 – 3:15 David Faflik
LEC: (4 crs.) Selections from U.S. literature, beginnings to the mid-19th century.
ENG 242 – U.S. Literature II
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 Elizabeth Foulke
LEC: (4 crs.) Selections from U.S. literature, mid-19th century to the present. ENG 241 not required for 242.
ENG 243 – The Short Story
Multiple sections available see e-Campus for details.
LEC: (4 crs.) Critical study of the short story from the early 19th century to the present.
ENG 247 – Introduction to Literature of the African Diaspora
TuTh 9:30 – 10:45 Mohamed Anis Ferchichi
LEC: (4 crs.) Cross-listed as (ENG), AAF 247. This class will introduce students to the Afrodiasporic literature that developed within and without the African continent across multiple temporalities and geographies as well as to its different modes of cultural production, including (but not limited to) the oral tradition, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and cinema. While the Afrodiasporic literature had predominantly flourished with the Atlantic trade in African slaves since the 1500’s, reaching its zenith during the postcolonial period in the 20th century, the course will extend the temporal and geographical spectrums of the literature of the African diaspora back to the early diasporic streams within the African continent way before the transatlantic slave trades so as to study the early oral traditions. Methodologically speaking, the study of the literature of the modern African diaspora requires the study of Africa as Homeland, which is pivotal to any informed literary analysis of Afrodiasporic literature in this course. While our primary texts share common denominators (ancestral homesickness, collective memory, revival of the African cultural and linguistic lore, and the like), the course will attend to the ways of how each stream/text has its distinctive literary qualities and cultural idiosyncrasies. Thematically, we will engage questions about colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, colonialism in reverse, otherness, Black Atlantic, negritude, language, race, sexuality, tradition, and technology. We will attend to the ways of how the authors write inside and outside the Western tradition and how they deconstruct its generic conventions. The class will help you develop your close reading skills to fully engage with the texts and not just glean generic themes from them. We will close read Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Doris Lessing, Ken Saro-wiwa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ade Solanke, Aime Cesaire, Tayeb Salah, Amos Tutuola, and Toni Morrison.
ENG 252 – British Literature II
M 4:00 – 6:45 Professor Ryan Trimm
LEC: (4 crs.) Selections from British literature, 1798 to the present. ENG 251 not required for 252.
ENG 260 – Women and Literature
M W 3:30 – 4:45 Professor Jen Riley
ENG 263 – Introduction to Literary Genres: The Poem
TuTh 9:30 – 10:45 Professor J. Jennifer Jones
LEC: (4 crs.) Introduction to the study of the poem.
ENG 265 – Introduction to Literary Genres: The Novel
TuTh 12:30 – 1:45 Professor Stephen Barber
LEC: (4 crs.) Introduction to the study of the novel.
ENG 280 – Introduction to Shakespeare
MWF 10:00 – 10:50 Cole Chang
LEC: (4 crs.) Introduction to the major plays and poetry of Shakespeare.
ENG 304 – Film Genres – Film Noir
MW 5:00 – 6:15 Ryan Engley
This course will focus on the development of film noir. From its roots in German Expression to its current day manifestations in a film like Bladerunner 2049, film noir names a distinctive narrative and formal aesthetic. This course will investigate the trajectory of the film noir form, both in cinema and in critical scholarship.
ENG 305A – Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry
MW 2:00 – 3:15 Professor Peter Covino
LEC: (4 crs.) Intensive writing and reading workshop for students at the advanced level who have preferably taken at least one previous class in creative writing. Student may repeat ENG 305 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 305B – Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
MW 3:30 – 4:45 Laura Marciano
LEC: (4 crs.) Intensive writing and reading workshop for students at the advanced level who have preferably taken at least one previous class in creative writing. Student may repeat ENG 305 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 305D – Advanced Creative Writing: Screenwriting – Television
TuTh 9:30 – 10:45 Professor Derek Nikitas
LEC: (4 crs.) This course will focus on the strategies and challenges involved in writing teleplays for drama or comedy shows. We will cover the one-hour drama and half-hour comedy genres and the continued evolution of contemporary “prestige television” by reading and analyzing produced teleplays. Each student will develop television show ideas, structure an episode, write a TV pilot (on deadline!), and collaborate with other students on a brief “series bible.” We will also practice “pitching” ideas and discuss the business of television writing.
ENG 338 – Native American Literature
TuTh 3:30 – 4:45 Catherine Winters
LEC: (4 crs.) This course will focus on novels and other works of prose by Native American authors spanning from American colonization to the contemporary era, with an emphasis on recent novels. We will consider these texts alongside significant critical work within the field by scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and David Treuer.
ENG 339 – Literary Nonfiction: Dreams
TuTh 2:00 – 3:15 Professor Mary Cappello
LEC: (4 crs.)
“You think you are dreaming the book. You are its dream.”—Edmond Jabès
“In dreams begins responsibility.” –WBYeats
How does literature as dream-work give us access to the alternative worlds we can sense but not see? To the terms of our desire and of our yearning? To the residual, the left-out or the left-over? This course will explore those features that distinguish literary nonfiction from straight nonfiction, or journalism, i.e., its play with the uncanny, sur-reality, the unconscious, metamorphosis, linguistic over-determination, and competing forms of “reality.” We will range from notions of dream as they are informed by literary theory and psychoanalysis, to material that exceeds the borders of reason (nightmare), to literary nonfiction’s address of ideology, as in “the American Dream.” If all literary production is a kind of dream-work, what are the stakes of singling out literary nonfiction in dream’s name? What does the dream ask of the dreamer? What is its mode of address and the terms of its making, its temporality (day or night, waking or sleeping), its duration, its sensory limits (in color or b/w; acoustically or visually)? Though our focus will be on literary texts composed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries mostly of US origin under the aegis of a newly invented category, “literary nonfiction” aka “creative nonfiction,” we will give equally serious attention to significant precursors (e.g., Charles Lamb’s “Dream Children”; Thomas DeQuincey’s, Confessions of an English Opium Eater) and the post-Holocaust, May ’68-inflected la boutique obscure: 124 dreams by French experimentalist, Georges Perec. Our foundational theoretical reading will range from Lydia Davis’ essay on memory’s displacement by dream—“Remember the Van Wegenens”—to passages from Freud’s famous writing on dreams and palimpsests, Charles Rycroft’s The Innocence of Dreams, and, as major orienting example, Sharon Sliwinski’s Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought. Filmic and other significant intertexts (i.e., paintings, architectures, popular cultural documents) will feature, cued by the literary texts we will be studying. Students will write numerous short thought pieces and riffs throughout the course of the semester; make group presentations; and dabble in literary nonfiction themselves all in preparation for a final, substantive analytic essay on literary nonfiction as dream-work. It is expected that, together, we’ll do a great deal of dreaming.
ENG 345 – Topics in American Colonial Literature: Witchcraft
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 Danielle Cofer
LEC: (4 crs.) In this course we will read literary texts with a focus on the impact of the infamous Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) in order to trace the development and after effects of witch hysteria in the American imaginary. Through close-reading, we will interpret the symbolic and narrative qualities of the testimonies of the witchcraft trials to situate them within the field of literary studies. As such, we will develop an understanding of the colonial period in context: reasons for colonization, development of social, political, religious institutions, and how the political, social, cultural, and other crises (including Indian war) of the post-1660s period created tensions and stoked fears throughout the region, manifesting in a myriad of literary and cultural productions. We will also look to sermons to analyze the changing role of religious writing of the period and its treatment of witchcraft, with particular focus on the writing of Increase Mather and Cotton Mather. We will also consider the significance of the witchcraft trials in nineteenth-century America in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) as well as how the witchcraft trials are recast in contemporary literature in texts such as Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986). In what ways do the ghosts of the Salem witch trials continue to haunt American literature, then and now?
ENG 348 – US Literature and Culture from 1865 to 1914
MWF 12:00 – 12:50 Serap Hidir
LEC: (4 crs.)
ENG 352 – Black Images in Film
TuTh 11:00 – 12:15 Professor Gitahi Gititi
LEC: (4 crs.)
ENG 355 – Literature and the Sciences: Novels & the Neuroscience of Memory
MW 3:30 – 4:45 Professor Sarah Eron
LEC: (4 crs.) What do novels have to do with neuroscience? This course aligns studies in the history of the novel with recent discoveries in neuropsychology. It considers the novel as the art form of memory. In a 2013 Ted Talk, Elizabeth Loftus claimed, “Memory works like a Wikipedia page; you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.” Dr. Loftus’ work led to a new field, called “memory science.” In an attempt to discover the plastic nature of neural associations, these researchers play with the minds of their subjects, implanting fictional memories into the brain’s unsuspecting networks. As memory borrows ideas from the news, family, friends, twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, it rewires and transforms its own history.
In neuropsychology, memory’s collusion with fiction, its proneness to error, is now old hat. From interests in “absent-mindedness,” “confabulation” and “source confusion” to “telescoping” and “verbal overshadowing,” the notion of memory as a recording device has bottomed out of brain studies. So what does this mean for the field of literature? We once read novels as representations of personal history and autobiographical memory. Increasingly, studies of the genre see it as a mediating form that interacts with readers in the real world. Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald—were they memory scientists? In this class, we will read five novels (both historical and contemporary) alongside selected essays in cognitive studies in an attempt to explore how novels both represent and change the way we think today.
ENG 376 – Topics in Victorian Literature and Culture: Siblings
MWF 1:00 – 1:50 Beth Leonardo-Silva
LEC: (4 crs.) Siblings in Victorian literature can be doting companions or vicious enemies, but they almost always play a pivotal role in the protagonist’s development. Romantic lovers in Victorian literature are often described as being sibling-like, without anyone raising an eyebrow. This course will explore the violent passions and hatreds between siblings, as well as the seemingly bizarre connections between romantic and brotherly/sisterly love, in order to rethink our understanding of the “typical” Victorian family and to question our assumptions of what the novel is “really” about.
ENG 383 – Modernist Literature
TuTh 2:00 – 3:15 Professor Jean Walton
LEC: (4 crs.)
ENG 396 – Literature of the Sea: The Rumowicz Seminar
TuTh 12:30 – 1:45 Professor Martha Elena Rojas
LEC: (4 crs.) Studies of maritime literature and culture. Guest lecturers and field trips.
ENG 405 – Creative Writing Capstone
Th 4:00 – 6:45 Professor Mary Cappello
LEC: (4 crs.)
ENG 447 – Poetry
TuTh 12:30 – 1:45 Professor Jennifer Jones
LEC: (4 crs.)
ENG 450G – Performing Race
MW 2:00 – 3:15 Professor Christine Mok
LEC: (4 crs.)
This course examines the role that race has played in the shaping of theatre, alongside the roles that theatre has played in creating and sustaining cultural conceptions about race (gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, nationality). Using performance as an entry point into larger critical thinking about performance, difference, identity, authenticity and embodiment, we will analyze plays, while also considering photography, music, television, and film, in the course of a broader conversation about race and theatricality. We will look at how race is constructed or deconstructed, maintained or dismantled onstage, in the wings, and in the streets.
ENG 478 – Medieval Authors – Chaucer
TuTh 11:00 – 12:15 Professor Travis Williams
SEM: (4 crs.)
ENG 486 – British Authors: 19th Century – Trollope
MW 2:00 – 3:15 Professor Carolyn Betensky
SEM: (4 crs.)
*This course will satisfy the1800-1900 historical period requirement and can be used for the 1660-1800 requirement through a request for a curricular modification from an English Advisor.
GRADUATE CLASSES
ENG 511 – Introduction to Professional Study II
T 7:00 – 9:45 Professor Kathleen Davis
SEM: (1.5 crs.) ENG 511 will continue the work of ENG 510, keeping a focus both on discipline-specific academic preparation and on “Next Gen” skills necessary for career flexibility. During this semester we’ll focus on topics such as: Preparing for Conferences; Getting Published; Issues in the Academy; and Writing for the Public. We will also continue our work on digital skills and grant writing.
ENG 543 – Studies in 19th Century American Texts: New England Transcendentalism
T 4:00 – 6:45 Professor David Faflik
SEM: (3 crs.) This course examines the complex cultural phenomenon of New England transcendentalism in its various phases during the period from 1830-1870. A “moment” rather than a full-fledged movement, the multifaceted reform urge that was transcendentalism touched literature and liberal religion in the United States as much as it impacted philosophy and society. It did so, moreover, through the work of some of the mid-nineteenth-century nation’s most celebrated thinkers and writers, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. We will examine the full historical context of writings by these and other “like-minded” authors. And, of course, we will read deeply from their respective literary texts, in addition to considering lesser-known (but equally compelling) works from their friends, neighbors, and detractors. Our larger aim is to assess the importance of this transcendental “moment” to the regional American past, and, by extension, the present.
With these ideas in mind, we will pursue four intersecting areas of interest in this course: regionalism, romanticism, spiritualism, and secularism.
ENG 557 – Studies in British Texts After 1900: Neurology, Modernity, and WWI
TH 4:00 – 6:45 Professor Jean Walton
SEM: (3 crs.) The primary focus of this course will be English literature written just prior to, during, in response to, or in some way informed by the First World War, with an emphasis on fiction and memoir (or fictionalized memoir, or memorializing fiction). We will take as our frame of reference the question of how research on modernity and neurology, nerves, or “nervous systems” intersects with research on British literature and culture of the Great War. How does the context of this war inform discursive accounts (medical, military, literary, industrial, memorializing, didactic, autobiographical, etc) of the felt experience of the body in its gendered, raced, sexualized, classed, particularity? How does WW1 discourse shed light on our assumptions about the presumed distinctions between the brain and the mind; the organism and the body; passivity and activity; service and self-preservation; attention and distraction; memorialization and amnesia; expression and repression; utterance and aphasia? How does mediation of the war change as the writer becomes more distanced from it in time? Or if the writer was not literally “in the trenches?” We will pay particular attention to tracing how habitual, mundane modes of bodily functioning (locomotion, ingestion, excretion, seeing and hearing, sleeping and waking, desiring, self-comforting, crying, etc) are structured in and by literary representations of the war. Authors to be included: Richardson, Lytton, West, Allatini, Ford, Sassoon, Graves, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys, Beckett, and/or others.
ENG 605 – Seminar in Genres: Victorian Constructions of Race
M 4:00 – 6:45 Professor Carolyn Betensky
SEM: (3 crs.) What did “race” mean to the Victorians? “Race” did not have a stable meaning in the nineteenth century. The term could designate a group of people, a nation or tribe, with a common cultural or linguistic inheritance, or it could mean a category of humans who shared a particular trait. In the earlier part of the century, “race” was an oppositional term used to distinguish some Europeans from the “savage” races; it was often deployed to explain the collective character of the working classes. From mid-century onward, “race” could but did not necessarily imply a biological essence. Some theories contended that all races had originated from a single source, whereas competing theories held that racial difference implied different species. These different understandings and uses of racial categories did not only contradict each other, but they also contradicted themselves internally. In this course, we will explore the Victorian racial imagination in several novels written over the course of the century in historical, anthropological, and critical contexts.
ENG 620 – Seminar in Culture and Discourse: Postmodernity Between the Aesthetic and the Cultural
W 4:00 – 6:45 Professor Ryan Trimm
SEM: (3 crs.) The course will examine the arc of postmodernism with an eye to the tension between the cultural and the aesthetic. The course will chart both significant works of fiction (by authors such as Samuel Beckett, John Fowles, Angela Carter, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Tom McCarthy, and Sarah Waters) and the theoretical works that helped define this trajectory (such as those by Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and David Harvey). Our discussions will be inflected by issues such as relations between the modern and the postmodern, narrative and the image, and the beautiful and the sublime. We’ll also investigate whether postmodernity is over, and what might come after the postmodern. These individual threads will help us develop the explore the stakes of evaluating the postmodern moment as one torn between the aesthetic and the cultural.