ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Kate Daniels
(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This an intensive graduate workshop in writing poetry. We will read various volumes of contemporary poetry in conjunction with the Visiting Writers series. Students will be expected to produce a significant portfolio of poems by semester's end; attend regular conferences with the instructor; and participate intensely in class by preparing advance written responses to the week's offerings.

ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing
Topic: Reading Emily Dickinson
Kate Daniels
(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate seminar designed for MFA students. Our focus will be on the syntax, grammar, parts of speech, diction, and punctuation preferred by Dickinson in both her poems and her prose. Our goal will be to develop some ideas about how those choices accounted for her startlingly unconventional, pre-Modern, pre-psychoanalytic literary voice. We will examine Dickinson’s language through close readings of many poems and letters. There will be some comparison of her unique utterances with more conventional examples from the period (Longfellow, for example), but for the most part, we will spend our time getting our hands dirty in the guts of the poems to discover how they work. Over the summer, please read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Thomas Johnson, ed.) and one of the biographies. You will also need to familiarize yourself with Dickinson’s preferred metrical form, common (or hymn) meter. Additional readings during the semester will include letters and manuscript versions of many poems. In a final writing project, students will address aspects of Dickinson’s praxis within the context of the aesthetics and formal practices of their own creative work. Grading: 1/3 each for class participation; seminar presentation; writing project.

ENGL 310-01 Seminar in Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies
Kathryn Schwarz
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)


The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality. From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse. Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions. At the same time, those approaches put in question the processes through which orthodoxies—of literary works, and of literary critical practices—takes shape. The particular ways in which this happens raise a number of provocative questions. How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds? How do the history plays, traditionally regarded as articulations of exclusively masculine preoccupations, enable the development of feminist historicism? In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory? Why is Shakespeare so central to the current tensions between historicist and presentist approaches to sexual and gendered identity?

In this course we will look at a range of Shakespeare’s works in relation to the ideological discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. We will read these works in the context of significant critical interventions, and the theoretical methodologies on which those interventions draw. Our goal is not only to consider the sexual politics of the Shakespearean, but to use that issue as a focal point for questions about the larger implications of critical practice.

ENGL 320-02 Studies in American Literature
Topic: Antebellum U.S. Print Culture
Teresa Goddu
(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This course will focus on the emergence of a national literary marketplace in the U.S. antebellum period by examining how the market revolution structured the trade in print.

By examining print as a cultural as well as marketable commodity, the course will situate texts within a variety of distributional, technological, consumerist as well as discursive networks of meaning. It will examine a range of popular print forms—from almanacs and gift books to periodicals and pamphlets—in conjunction with the canonical literature of the period. For instance, we will read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in relationship to the gift book, The Pearl, in order to understand how Hawthorne deployed popular print forms to write a bestseller. The course will introduce students to archival research as well as to the interdisciplinary methodology of the history of the book which maps the relationships between the materiality of the text (its publication history or status as a commercial commodity) and its meaning. The course will draw on a number of fields—including material and literary culture, economic and social history, and technology—in order to map the intersections between cultural and commercial history. Several short papers and a final 20-25 pp. paper.

This seminar will investigate the relationship between literature and geography: how literature, particularly the novel, both imagines and represents political territory, and how literary historians and critics narrate this relationship. We will focus on the circulation of literature, literary communities, and languages beyond national borders, interrogating such terms as "international," "transnational," "global," and "diasporic."  The class will be divided into two sections. The first section will explore key theoretical models of literary geography, Weltliteratur, “Third-World Literature,” and imagined communities. The second section of the class will examine two geographically motivated models of literary history: The Black Atlantic and the Jewish Diaspora. Both these models harness the power of regional and diasporic geographies to challenge national literary narratives and to make visible obscured cultural formations. Students in the class will be given an opportunity to develop and explore their own alternative literary geographies. Readings include literary works by Junot Diaz, José Rizal, Derek Walcott, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka, and Jacqueline Kahanoff. Critical works include texts by Aijaz Ahmand, Benedict Anderson, Rey Chow, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford, and Daniel Boyarin.

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "The Idea of Black Culture"
Hortense Spillers
(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course will attempt to lay out a theory of black culture in its local and diasporic instances by looking at some of the work of W.E.B.DuBois over and against some of the writings of the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse.

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English/American Literature
Topic: 'Out of Ireland we have come:' Big House Fiction and Anglo-Irish Identity
Michael Neill
(Wednesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, wrote of her family home: 'It is the negation of mystical Ireland: its bald walls rebut the surrounding, disturbing light. Imposed on seized land, built in the rulers' ruling tradition, the house is, all the same, of the local rock, and sheds the same grey gleam you see over the countryside.' This course will use a range of fictions centred on the so-called 'big houses' of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as a means of exploring the fertile, but ultimately self-destructive contradictions of a hybrid settler culture.

     Maria Edgeworth,

          Castle Rackrent
          The Absentee

     Anthony Trollope, 

          The Kellys and the O'Kellys
          The Landleaguers

     Somerville and Ross,

          The Real Charlotte
          The Big House at Inver

     Elizabeth Bowen,

          The Last September
          Bowen's Court

     Molly Keane, 

          Two Days in Aragon
          Good Behaviour

     William Trevor,

          Fools of Fortune
          The Story of Lucy Gault

     J.G. Farrell, 

          Troubles

     Brian Friel,

          Aristocrats
          The Home Place

     W.B. Yeats 

          Collected Poems

ENGL 303-01. Graduate Fiction Workshop
Lorraine Lopez
(Mondays 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This workshop/studio course focuses on the development of fictive works-in-progress in connection to investigation and discussion of elements of craft. Graduate writers will be required to present a minimum of three pieces of new and original fiction composed during the semester, to provide substantive reviews of work by peers on a regular basis, to compose a publishable book review, and to lead a workshop discussion on craft in conjunction with a selected short story that will be appropriate for presenting in an undergraduate workshop. Finally, this workshop will investigate the novella form and how it works in relationship to the short story and the novel. Toward this end, workshop.

ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Rick Hilles
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

The primary focus of this graduate poetry workshop will be a discussion of your work-in-progress. Since all of you are in the process of compiling your own collections, we will supplement our reading with a selection of notable contemporary poetry books—some first and second books, others by poets well into careers—including:

Larry Levis, Elegy

Brian Turner, Here, Bullet

Tracy K. Smith, Duende

Andrew Feld, Citizen

Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors

Afaa Michael Weaver, The Plum Flower Dance

A Van Jordan, Macnolia

Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome

In addition to writing your own work and providing commentary on the work of your peers, you will also be asked to give one presentation (on one additional poetry collection, of our choosing).

ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
Peter Guralnick
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, and Louis Menand . Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.

ENGL 321-01 Studies in Southern Literature
Michael Kreyling
(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

This seminar is organized on the belief that all you have to know about Southern Lit is embedded in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Each chapter contains the trace, or an even stronger mark, of another genre or topic or theme crucial to understanding the field. In the first chapter, for example, Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson (poor Quentin) that he might aspire to be a writer and she has the material appropriate for the Southern Writer: Old South fustian such as Thomas Nelson Page produced by the bale. Sutpen’s adventures in the West Indies – another example -- connect with the current attention to the Caribbean South, an aspect of the “new southern studies.” The seminar will proceed accordingly, chapter-by-chapter through Absalom with excursions suggested by each.

A sample of accompanying reading:

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls Rising.

Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road.

Lars Von Trier, Manderlay (DVD).

Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding and The Bride of the Innisfallen.

Octavia Butler, Kindred.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.

ENGL 355-01 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "Histories of Narrative Cinema"
Paul Young
(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)

This course begins with the contention that the history of narrative cinema, already the target of revisionist historians in recent years, is in dire need of further revisionist research and theorization. Where once critics characterized the first films (especially before 1907) as slipshod affairs in search of the narrative sophistication that characterizes later Hollywood productions, the excavation of pre-1915 American cinema that began in the late 1970s helped catalyze the claim that the early cinema had a full-blown aesthetic of its own, which André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning dubbed ³the cinema of attractions.² Recent scholarly work on the ³transitional era² between the cinema of attractions and "classical" Hollywood narrative, however, seems to have edged the field back toward its previous teleological bent, as if all roads of narrative experimentation necessarily led to the seamless illusionism of classical narrative technique. To prepare us to make our own discoveries about narrative cinema's diversity of form, style, and technique, we will read key theorists of narrative in general (the Russian formalists, Genette, Barthes, Jameson, Brooks) and cinematic narrative in particular (Bordwell, Thompson, Branigan, Chatman, the "political modernists" of the 1960s and 70s, Gunning) and view a wide range of film genres that range from the 1890s to the 1930s. Presentations and seminar papers will focus on trends, experiments, dead ends, and "forgotten futures"

of the fiction film, pursued via research into (for example) individual films, genres, production companies, directors, screenwriters, histories of distribution and/or exhibition practices, and trade and fan publications (including contemporary screenwriting manuals).

ENGL 355-02 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: Biotechnology and Culture: Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics
Jay Clayton
(Thursdays, 12:30-3:00 P.M.)

In the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory was as much a cultural as a scientific concern. Questions about evolution’s impact on religion, social theory, racial science, degeneration, and eugenics were debated among scientists, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, poets, and novelists. Today, the revolution in genomics has had an equal impact on contemporary culture. Novels, films, visual arts, and popular culture explore topics such as cloning and stem-cell research; genes for violence, homosexuality, and long life; ecological protests against manipulating the genetic code; religious objections to evolution; genetic privacy; the patenting of genes; DNA evidence in criminal cases; and bioterrorism

This course will look at new models of interdisciplinary work in the humanities by focusing on the changing relationship of biotechnology and culture from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. We will discuss texts from a number of different genres, including science writing, Victorian fiction, postmodern fiction, science fiction novels and films, autobiography, and critical essays on science theory and biotechnology.

Readings will be evenly divided between the nineteenth and the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, and will include many of the following texts: Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Origin of the Species (1859), Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865), Thomas H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain (1889), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), J.B.S. Haldane “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), James Watson’s The Double Helix (1968), Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1992), Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (1996), Zadi Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2003), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). Films will include Island of Lost Souls (1932), Blade Runner (1982), and Gattaca (1997).

ENGL 355-03 Special Topics in English & American Literature
Topic: "Poetry & Place: The Epic of the Americas"
Vera Kutzinski
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)

Is there such a thing as an epic of the Americas? One might argue that there are many examples of the epic that take the shape of the novel, but what about poetry? How has this particular actual and symbolic geography inflected poetry? What has happened to the traditional project of epic poetry in the twentieth-century Americas? In this course, we will focus on examples of the long poem, all of which concern themselves with different places (“residences,” as Neruda might have it) in the Americas. With one important exception, our readings are from across the twentieth century. Readings: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Pablo Neruda, Canto General (trans. Jack Schmitt), Jay Wright, Dimensions of History, Fred D’Aguiar, Bill of Rights, Frederick Turner, The New World, Hart Crane, The Bridge, Derek Walcott, Omeros, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants, Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama (1961); Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C.”