Spring 2020 Class Schedule: Department of English

Spring 2020 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Mehigan	MW 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Schlesinger	TTh 5:30-6:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Boyd	WF 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Seliy	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Barker	WF 9:30-10:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.
English 210-2	English Literary Traditions, Part 2	Lane	MW 11-11:50 plus discussion section
English 210-2 English Literary Traditions, Part 2 Course Description: This course surveys exemplary and outstanding British literature by major authors from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, putting literary texts in conversation with such historical developments as the French revolution, the industrial revolution, the rise of nationalism and imperialism, new print and transportation technologies, rapidly increasing literacy rates, and a wealth of related cultural arguments. Teaching Methods: Lectures paired with seminar-style discussions, all focusing intensively on passages and background arguments, including with clips and slides. Evaluation Methods: 1 short analysis, final paper, periodic quizzes, and participation. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors (8th ed., Vol. B: ISBN 0393928314); Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Penguin; ISBN 0141439661); George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (Oxford; ISBN 0199555052); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (HBJ; ISBN 0156628708). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions. Note: English 210-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.
English 234	Introduction to Shakespeare	Masten	MW 12:30-1:50 plus discussion section
English 234 Introduction to Shakespeare Course Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedies, histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them. We will think about Shakespeare's contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600. We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves. What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare's plays? Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays? How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era? Teaching Method: Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section. Evaluation Method: Papers, midterm, final, discussion participation. Texts include: Folger Library paperback editions of the following plays (these editions only): A Midsummer Night's Dream (978-1-5011-4621-3); The Merchant of Venice (978-1-4391-9116-3); Henry V (978-0-7434-8487-9); As You Like It (978-0-7434-8486-2); Hamlet, Updated edition (978-1-4516-6941-1); The Tempest, Updated edition (978-1-5011-3001-4); The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-0-671-72296-8); additional critical readings on Canvas. Texts will be available at: Beck's Books Evanston.
English 275	Introduction to Asian American Literature	San Diego	TTh 9:30-10:50 plus discussion section
English 275 Introduction to Asian American Literature Course Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging. This class does not presume prior knowledge of Asian American literature. Key terms and concepts we will cover include: representation, identity, authenticity, aesthetics, labor, globalization, assimilation, and canonicity. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of Asian American literature by considering a variety of genres, including short stories, documentaries, novels, speculative fictions, and memoirs. Teaching Method(s): Lecture, Discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Regular reading responses; two short essays; one long essay; active class participation. Texts (subject to change; please confirm final text list on Canvas before purchasing): Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (ISBN 978-0295993546) David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (ISBN 978-0452272590) Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888) Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (ISBN 978-1566894869). Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available in a required course packet available at Quartet Copies.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Taking Comedy Seriously	West	MW 9:30-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Taking Comedy Seriously Course Description: What is comedy? Ever since Aristotle’s promised account of comedy, written to follow his famous discussion of tragedy in Poetics, accidentally got lost, comedy has suffered from genre confusion in the shadow of its allegedly more serious double, tragedy. On the one hand, the source of comedy’s appeal seems to go without saying. On the other, maybe for that very reason, comedy has rarely gotten the same kind of serious attention as other forms of writing and performance, and some of its sharpest theorists are also its greatest creators. Is it the same as what is funny? Is it just a happy ending? What is happiness, anyway? Who knows? This two-thousand-year indecision makes comedy an ideal topic for a course to explore tactics of reading and interpretation. We will read comedies from Aristophanes to modern sit comes, and weigh against them some of comedy’s theories, including formal, historical, social, anthropological, and psychological approaches. Teaching Method(s): Mostly discussion-based. Evaluation Method(s): Several short writing assignments; final project Texts include: Aristophanes, Birds; Terence, Eunuchus; Shakespeare, As You Like It; Behn, The Rover; Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Gleason, The Honeymooners; Stoppard, Arcadia; Vogel, How I Learned to Drive Texts will be available at: Beck’s.
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Bad Books	Boemler	MW 12:30-1:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: Bad Books Course Description: What makes a book bad? Having a harmful moral lesson? Being poorly written? Once we decide a book is bad, what should we do with it? Is official censorship the answer? Should publishers be boycotted? How should we decide what is acceptable to teach in a classroom setting—and to what extent should this depend on the age of the students? These questions have been argued over since Plato declared that the poets should be excluded from his utopian city. They are no less pressing in our own day, when commitments to free speech run up against anger at harmful racial and other stereotypes in literature. In this course, you will have to opportunity to examine arguments about what constitutes “bad” literature from a range of historical and cultural contexts. Even as you read and analyze arguments about the literary and moral value of particular books, you will have to the opportunity to construct your own arguments in response and grapple with the real difficulties that books can present—especially when they clash with values that we ourselves hold dear. Teaching Method(s): Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Active participation in discussion, Canvas posts, one short paper, one longer paper, collaborative project. Texts include: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell, 1984, Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, and essays including Chinua Achebe, “Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” John Milton, “Areopagitica,” and selections from Plato’s Republic. Texts will be available at: Norris and Canvas
English 300	Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: James Joyce's Works and Worlds	Froula	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading and Interpretation: James Joyce's Works and Worlds Course Description: In this seminar we'll study selected works of James Joyce (1882-1941) as a field for developing and practicing close-reading and critical skills across a range of literary genres: lyric poems (Chamber Music), short stories (Dubliners), epiphanies (Giacomo Joyce), play (Exiles), the education- and artist-novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), selected episodes of the epic Ulysses, widely considered the twentieth century's most influential novel; critical and historical essays ("Ibsen's New Drama," "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages"), and a small sampling of the radical experimental language of Finnegans Wake. Alongside them, we'll study model literary historical and critical approaches to Joyce's works that engage Ireland's long colonial history and struggle for sovereignty; biographical documents and biography; modernist patronage, print culture, censorship, publication, and Joyce's ongoing world reception history, including translation; theoretical works (Freud, Althusser, Derrida, Lacan, Butler, genetic criticism); literary antecedents (Odyssey, Dante, Hamlet, Blake, Swinburne); and relations to contemporaries (Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Pound). Students will build toward designing and completing seminar projects that combine research and/or theoretical questions with critical close reading. Evaluation Method: Faithful attendance; informed, engaged participation; exercises; formal analysis of a speech, exchange, or scene (2-3 pp.); critical essay using two different approaches (5-6 pp.); class presentation; final project (8-10 pp.); self-evaluation. Texts include: TBA. Additional required and recommended readings via NUCat, Canvas, and Library Reserve. Textbooks will be available at: Norris
English 306	Advanced Poetry Writing: Theory and Practice of Poetry in Translation	Gibbons	TTh 11-12:20
English 306 Advanced Poetry Writing: Theory and Practice of Poetry in Translation Course Description: A combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate several short poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and practical accounts by literary translators. We will approach language, poems, poetics, culture and theoretical issues and problems in relation to each other. Your written work will be due in different forms during the course. In your final portfolio, you will present revised versions of your translations and a research paper on translation. Prerequisite: A reading knowledge of a second language and experience reading literature in that language. If you are uncertain about your qualifications, please e-mail the instructor at rgibbons@northwestern.edu to describe them. Experience writing creatively is welcome, especially in poetry writing courses in the English Department. Teaching Method: Discussion; group critique of draft translations; oral presentations by students. Evaluation Method: Written work ("Canvas" responses to reading, draft translations, revised translations, and final papers) as well as class participation should demonstrate students’ growing understanding of translation as a practice and as a way of reading poetry and engaging with larger theoretical ideas about literature. Texts include: Essays on translation by a number of critics, scholars and translators, in two published volumes and on the Course Management web site ("Canvas”). Note: This course is combined with COMP_LIT 311-0 and COMP_LIT 414-0.
English 309	Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: The Art of Obsession	Mun	MW 2-3:20
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: The Art of Obsession Course Description: Much of writing is made up of obsessions. We might use our obsession as catalyst and fuel, something that gets us writing and, if lucky, keeps us writing. And sometimes we write about our obsession directly, hoping (perhaps futilely) to be purged free of it, once and for all. Susan Sontag, while talking about writing and the writer’s life, said it simply: “You have to be obsessed. It’s not something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be.” In this course we’ll explore “obsession” from two main angles: personally and textually. On the personal level, and as a way to get us started, we’ll discuss and identify subjects we keep returning to—from harmless infatuations to downright obsessions. Is Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo or the soundtrack from Mama Mia playing nonstop on your headphones, for example? Is there a painting you keep seeing in your mind’s eye? What exactly is your relationship with a well-made cheeseburger? What is the chronic conflict of your life? On a textual level, we’ll read stories, essays, and books that deal with obsession in one form or another, or reveal the linguistic obsessions the author held while writing them. Students will have the option to write a creative non-fiction essay or a short story. This class is for serious writers who are unafraid of taking real risks, unafraid of true rewrites/revisions, unafraid of working hard toward turning a good story or an essay into a great one. Teaching Method: Workshop. Evaluation Method: Creative writing assignments, peer-reviews, and reading responses, workshop participation. Text Include: Coursepack and books. Coursepack will be available at: Quartet Copies Instructor Bio: Nami Mun was raised in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. She is the author of the novel Miles from Nowhere, which received a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21^st Century Award, a Hopwood Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Some of Nami’s honors include fellowships from University of Michigan, Northwestern University, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bread Loaf and Tin House. Miles from Nowhere went on to become a national bestseller. Nami’s work can be found in Granta, Tin House, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Iowa Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, among others. Previously, she has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Science Fiction (Post 1830/TTC)	Andrews	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Science Fiction (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course provides a literary introduction to science fiction. Beginning with its 19th century origins in gothic fiction and adventure narratives, we will trace the development of science fiction through its early 20th century boom as a pulp form, its mid-century emergence as a recognizable literary genre, and its late 20th century adoption as a venue for exploring identity politics. How have longstanding genre themes like technological innovation and futuristic social progress endured or changed over time? How have explorations of race, gender, and sexuality been important to the genre’s development? How has sci-fi shaped the wider social world in realms like scientific research, political rhetoric, fan cultures, and popular media? We will consider these questions as we survey a selection of novels and short stories by major science fiction authors. Teaching Methods: short lectures, discussion, collaborative group work Evaluation Methods: participation, two analytical papers (6-7 pages each), final essay (7-9 pages) Texts Include: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; Binti by Nedi Okorafor. Short fiction selections will include work by H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, James Tiptree Jr., and Octavia Butler. Texts Will Be Available At: All novels will be available at the Northwestern University Bookstore. All short fiction will be posted on the course Canvas site. Instructor Bio: Erin Andrews’ research and teaching interests include speculative fiction and sci-fi, American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture studies. At Northwestern, she has taught in both the English and Gender & Sexuality Studies Departments on topics including 20th and 21st century literature, feminist and queer theories, and film. Her courses center interdisciplinary teaching methods, with a focus on creating opportunities for students to make connections between assigned literary and theoretical texts and their larger historical, political, and cultural contexts. Her current book project focuses on post-World War II American science fiction, and it explores the relationships between the sci-fi genre and U.S. military power.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: The Middle Ages Go to the Movies (Pre 1830/TTC)	Breen	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: The Middle Ages Go to the Movies (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: This course will set three kinds of medieval legend in conversation with their modern film treatments. We’ll start by reading examples of medieval saints’ lives alongside the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, starring Edward James Olmos as a self-sacrificing high school math teacher. We’ll then go on to read different medieval versions of the Robin Hood legend in conjunction with a series of Robin Hood films, starting with the 1922 silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks (we will probably skip the critically-panned 2018 remake, unless someone can make the case that its shortcomings are interestingly symptomatic). We’ll consider the ways authors and directors reimagine the legend for different historical moments, including as a context for examining categories such as heroism, masculinity and femininity, and the relationship between law and violence. Finally, our study of King Arthur and the Round Table will pair the anonymous La Mort le Roi Artu with Robert Bresson’s award-winning Lancelot du Lac (1974). In what ways do the modern retellings of these medieval tales give us new insight into the tales themselves? In what ways does the reconstruction of the Middle Ages serve purely modern ends? What kinds of different “Middle Ages” do these texts and their retellings imagine? In addition to this comparative work, we will pay attention to the films as films and to the medieval works as both oral performances and textual objects in order to think about the relationship between medium and message. Course texts include: The Death of King Arthur, trans. James Cable, ISBN 9780140442557; Early Christian Lives, ed. Carolinne White, ISBN 9780140435269
English 332	Renaissance Drama: Power and Commerce in Early Modern Drama (Pre 1830)	Caldwell	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 332 Renaissance Drama: Power and Commerce in Early Modern Drama (Pre 1830) Course Description: "Greed is good”: Shakespeare and his contemporaries delighted in writing plays that explored this worldview. Early modern playwrights were especially fascinated by the power that people could accrue through the world of business and commerce. In this course, we will consider key works by Shakespeare that explore the possibilities offered by the market, alongside plays by his contemporaries that celebrate and satirize the pursuit of profit. We will read specific plays for how much fun, and potentially dangerous, they consider the hunt for wealth and power to be, including: Shakespeare’s exploration of political power, justice, and debt in The Merchant of Venice; Ben Jonson’s satire of the alchemical desire to turn lead to gold in The Alchemist; and Thomas Middleton’s Ocean’s 11-style con-game in Michaelmas Term. By analysing major works of early modern drama, written just as the West was witnessing the emergence of capitalism and the modern economy, we will gain a deeper understanding of how writers were representing and questioning the basic assumptions of their culture about the role that commerce could or should have in their lives. Teaching Method(s): Seminar Discussion. Brief Lectures. Evaluation Method(s): One short paper, one medium-length paper, one long paper, individual oral presentations. Texts include: Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist; Thomas Middleton, Michaelmas Term; William Haughton, Englishmen for My Money Films (made available on Canvas): Shakespeare’s Globe Theater’s The Merchant of Venice; Cheek by Jowl/Pushkin Theater’s Measure for Measure. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. Instructor Bio: Dr. William Casey Caldwell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University. His research focuses on early modern literature, monetary history, market culture, and history of sexuality. Caldwell is co-editor of The Hare: An Online Journal of Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theater, and has published on audience laughter and dramaturgy in reconstructed early modern playhouses. A former Franke Graduate Fellow in residence at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, he has worked as Senior Research Assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and recently co-taught Shakespeare at Stateville maximum security prison. Caldwell also gives preamble talks at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and volunteers with Northwestern’s Prison Education Program. He holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Partnership with the American Shakespeare Center; an MA in Philosophy from the University of Auckland; and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
English 335	Milton (Pre 1830)	Schwartz	MW 9:30-10:50
English 335 Milton (Pre 1830) Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. Teaching Method: Class discussion and lecture. Evaluation Method: Papers, class presentation, class participation. Texts Include: Paradise Lost by John Milton.
English 338	Studies in Renaissance Literature: Reading Between the Lines (Pre 1830/TTC)	Boemler	MW 3:30-4:50
English 338 Studies in Renaissance Literature: Reading Between the Lines (Pre 1830/TTC) Course Description: The English Renaissance, like our own day, was filled with new, experimental encounters with text. Where the twenty-first century has produced new forms like the Instagram poem and the Twitter saga, the sixteenth century saw the rise of the printed anthology, shape poems, and commercial playtexts. With the introduction of the printing press, the rise of literacy, and the invention of the commercial theater, more people were exposed to a greater range of writing than ever before. This explosion of printed texts led both to fresh avenues of creativity—women writing for print, ordinary people building their own custom volumes— and new challenges, including censorship and piracy. As we read the writing of the age of Shakespeare as it appeared when it was first printed, we will think about what difficulties and opportunities for creativity face us as we travel farther into our own digital age, as how we encounter texts changes once again. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Active participation in discussion, Canvas posts, one short paper, one longer paper, creative new media project. Texts include: Selections from John Donne, The Complete English Poems; George Herbert, The Complete Poetry; Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer; William Shakespeare, King Lear; Philip Sidney, The Major Works; and Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, gen. eds., The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore (some materials available online).
English 363-1	20th Century Fiction: Modern British Fiction and The First World War (Post 1830)	Lane	MW 3:30-4:50
English 363-1 20th Century Fiction: Modern British Fiction and The First World War (Post 1830) Course Description: This course explores recurring motifs in Edwardian (1901-10) fiction and beyond, providing a clear introduction to British modernism and to the “setting” of the First World War (1914-18). We’ll study the cultural and literary shift from naturalism to post-impressionism, as well as other formal changes in British fiction that writers tied to the immediate aftermath of the war and its catastrophic effects. We’ll also trace comparable arguments and shifts in painting and aesthetics, and examine related social and cultural preoccupations, among them: changing conceptions of privacy, psychology, and gender; and widespread concerns about rural change, urban decay, national cohesion, military conflict, and the ends of imperialism. Teaching Methods: Seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments, including with clips and slides. Evaluation Methods: Weekly canvas posts, one short analytical paper, final essay, and in-class participation. Texts include (available at Norris Center Bookstore and in order of use): Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (ISBN 0141441585); E. M. Forster, Howards End (ISBN 0486424545); James Joyce, Dubliners (ISBN 978-0143107453); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ISBN 0393925331); D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (ISBN 0486424588); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (ISBN 0156628708); and selected poetry in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (ISBN 9780141181905). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions.
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Indian Ocean Cultures (Post 1830/TTC)	Mwangi	TTh 11-12:20
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Indian Ocean Cultures (Post 1830/TTC) Course Description: The course will read Indian Ocean texts in the context of broader African and South Asian writing and oceanic cultural practices. Topics will include slavery, Swahili poetic forms, Indian Ocean translations, cultural translation, women’s writing, and queer representations. Engaging a broad range of critics and theorists in oceanic and diasporic studies (e.g., Paul Gilroy, Subramani, Gaurav Desai, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Françoise Lionnet), we will read, discuss, and write about such authors as Nadifa Mohamed, Abduralzak Gurnah, M.G. Vassanji, Mwana Kupona, Sofia Mustafa, and Shaaban Robert. Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, one-on-one meetings, and small group discussions. Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). Objectives Assess the merits of studying oceanic and island literatures from the global south; Produce two essays that conduct a sensitive reading the themes and techniques in select Indian Ocean works, especially with regard to form and style; Relate Indian Ocean literatures to major periods in world literary production and reception; Contextualize Indian Ocean to 20^th and 21^st centuries global colonial and postcolonial literatures; and Relate form to themes and politics in texts studied. Primary reading list (may change): Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise. Publisher: Penguin. ISBN-13: 978-0140233117. Nurrudin Farah’s Publisher: Penguin. ISBN-10:0143122533 Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN-10:9780670082032 Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy. Publisher: ISBN 0007315767, 9780007315765 Ananda Devi’s Indian Tango. ISBN-10:092404781X M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack. Anchor. ISBN-10: 0385660650 Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 301-0-20.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Insecurity (Post 1830/ICSP)	Mann	MW 11-12:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Insecurity (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: What does it mean to read major works of post-soul black literature from the standpoint of insecurity? How is black insecurity distinct from insecurity broadly conceived? What unique qualities does literature have that help critics understand black insecurity in ways other forms can’t? This class will examine essays, poetry, and fiction written in the post-soul era—that is written between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—to examine the ongoing struggle for black freedom and the conditions of insecurity that underwrite it. We will specifically examine the relationship between insecurity as an affect, and the periodization of post-soul writing, asking specific questions about the unfulfilled promises of Civil Rights era agitation and the ongoing insecurities that suffuse discourses of black activism, especially those related to police and vigilante violence of the last decade. We relate these forms of antiblack violence to the ongoing War on Terror to assess their interdependence. We will also interrogate how progressive calls for various kinds of security from food security to climate security reinforce the discourse of security. Teaching Method(s): Seminar-style Discussion. Evaluation Method(s): 3 Analysis papers; 1 Oral Presentation. Texts include: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Claudia Rankine Citizen; Colson Whitehead, Underground Railroad. *Texts will be available at:* Norris Bookstore Note: This course is combined with AFAM 3XX. More details will be available at a later date.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: 19th-C Black New World Literature	Spigner	MW 2-3:20
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: 19th-C Black New World Literature Course Description: This course introduces students to a variety of works by black writers of the long nineteenth century. In this class, we will concentrate on the poetry and fiction of this period and explore the central themes, styles, commonalities, and differences within these works. For instance, we will consider how dialect and geography change our understanding of the subject matter. We will confront our preconceived expectations of what “black literature” means in the nineteenth century and consider the implications of this process throughout the semester. The course is reading and writing intensive, and every class will require preparation of a primary text and supplementary reading through which we will explore central issues in the assigned reading, including issues of class and citizenship, identity formation, and gender. Texts will include works by Florence Hall, Harriet E. Wilson, Mary Prince, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and others, in addition to companion critical and theoretical articles. Evaluation Method(s): Assignments will include regular online discussions, leading an in-class discussion, and mid-term and final papers. Students will be evaluated on their performance in these assignments as well as class attendance and participation. This class depends on discussion and participation of every member of the class. Come to class prepared to enthusiastically tackle, through discussion and our own literary criticism, issues of gender, class, sexuality, and race as they figure in our readings and other materials. Required texts: Our Nig, Harriet E. Wilson ISBN-10: 0143105760 ISBN-13: 978-0143105763 Imperium In Imperio, Sutton E. Griggs ISBN-10: 0812971604 ISBN-13: 978-0812971606
English 368	Studies in 20th Century Literature: Woolf and Bloomsbury (Post 1830)	Froula	TTh 2-3:20
English 368 Studies in 20th Century Literature: Woolf and Bloomsbury (Post 1830) Course Description: TBA
English 378	Studies in American Literature: Visionary Women Writers (Pre 1830)	High	MW 12:30-1:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: Visionary Women Writers (Pre 1830) Course Description: This course explores major touchstones of women’s lives and writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, paying particular attention to women’s disobedience and radical expression. How, why, and with what success did visionary women challenge the structures of power in the early Americas? To answer these questions, we will consider poems, novels, journals, and other manuscript writings, tracing women’s mark on religion, literature, and revolutionary politics in the American colonies. There will be a significant archival component in this course and students will have the opportunity to pursue original research in small writing groups. Texts include: Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America; Coosaponakeesa’s march on Savannah; Mary Dyer, “Petition to the Massachusetts General Court”; Anne Hutchinson’s court records; Toni Morrison, A Mercy; Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes”; Lucy Terry Prince, “Bars Fight”; Mercy Otis Warren, “Observations on the New Constitution”; and Phyllis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Teaching Method(s): Discussion, collaborative group work. Evaluation Method(s): Participation and preparation; one exploratory essay (3-5 pages); short weekly writing; and a final collaborative archival project with in-class presentation. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 378	Studies in American Literature: The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP)	Savage	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 378 Studies in American Literature: The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Literature (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city. Teaching Method: Discussion, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour. Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths. Texts Include: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Neon Wilderness; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; journalism by Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, Call Northside 777, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call. Note: Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.
English 383	Studies in Theory and Criticism: Black Vernacular as Theory (Post 1830/ICSP)	Bey	TTh 2-3:20
English 383 Studies in Theory and Criticism: Black Vernacular as Theory (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: This course will take as fundamental that black vernacular—the dialects and slang and folk language found in black communities—is a form of theory and theorizing. This theory, though different from the capital-T Theory of notable philosophers, will be shown to also possess intellectual sophistication, simply in, as Barbara Christian has said, “the form of the hieroglyph.” If we assume, rightly, that black people have always theorized, only in different and alternative ways, how might we examine the nuances of that theory? What does it look like? Where, and it what forms, can it be found? “Black Vernacular as Theory” will traverse myriad discursive genres—from novels to poems to music to social media to personal lives. It will put, say, the conversations between black women in the kitchen on par with the intellectual status of literary theorists, dismantling implicit hierarchies between “high” and “low” theory. Students will read the work of Barbara Christian, Geneva Smirtherman, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and others; listen to the corpus of Kendrick Lamar and Big L; and reflect on community conversations from family reunions and barbershops. Ultimately, we will begin to rethink what “counts” as theory, and how we might come to understand various marginalized communities within black cultural production as doing substantive work in terms of knowledge production. Teaching Method(s): Primarily discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Mandatory attendance and participation. Brief weekly responses and one longer final paper. Texts include: Readings will include Barbara Christian's “A Race For Theory,” the fiction of Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, the critical work of Geneva Smitherman on black English, hip-hop, and other work. Texts will be available at: Norris. Note: This course is combined with AFAM 3XX. Details will be available at a later date.
English 385	Topics in Combined Studies: Information Overload! Text Technologies from the Printing Press to the Smartphone	Ladd	MW 3:30-4:50
English 385 Topics in Combined Studies: Information Overload! Text Technologies from the Printing Press to the Smartphone Course Description: This course explores the anxiety, exhaustion, and unease brought on by information technologies. We will trace emotional responses to technological change, from the shock of the printing press to the malaise of the present "information economy." How did new text technologies reshape language and society? Who is permitted access to certain kinds of information and why? We will take a hands-on approach to these questions by pairing literature that addresses the anxieties of technology, like the scifi linguistics of Arrival and the postapocalyptic Shakespeare of Station Eleven, with book history and digital humanities techniques designed to manage information. Students will learn how books are made, how search algorithms work, and how to analyze text with code. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Class participation, presentations, 1 midterm paper, several short responses, final project. Texts may include: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life (ISBN 1101972122); Ben Jonson The Staple of News (PDF provided); Emily Dickinson poetry (excerpts provided); Safiya Noble Algorithms of Oppression (ISBN 1479837245); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (excerpts provided); Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven (ISBN 0804172447). Note: This course is combined with Humanities 325-6-20.
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Celebrity Culture (Post 1830)	Nordgren	MW 2-3:20
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Celebrity Culture (Post 1830) Course Description: In 2007 Stephen King opined “I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy…I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f------ Congressmen are.” This course will ask students to take up King’s call, discussing seriously the origins of celebrity culture in America and its proliferation in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. To this end, we will read literature and watch films that address Hollywood filmmaking, connections between “the American Dream” and celebrity status, the relationship between stars and their fans, the consequences of intense media scrutiny, and the racial and gendered structures that shape fame. Recognizing that the divisions between celebrity culture, politics, and other media forms have long been blurred, this course will also prompt students to delve into the dark sides of American culture, asking questions about our obsessions with crime, corruption, and Hollywood glamour. Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: participation, short writing assignments, weekly reality TV journal, presentation and final paper. Texts include: James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon. We will watch and analyze a range of films on celebrity culture, including three versions of A Star is Born; Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder; All About Eve, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz; Misery, dir. Rob Reiner; and The Bling Ring, dir. Sofia Coppola; as well as music and music videos by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and through Canvas. Instructor Bio: Todd Nordgren specializes in British and American modernist literature and culture, queer and feminist theories, life writing, and genre studies. At Northwestern, he has designed and taught courses on poetry and poetics, modernist fiction, and life writing in minority communities. His recent work includes a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism on the intersections of autobiography and celebrity culture in the early 20th century. His current book project, “Taking Form: Writing Queer Lives in the Early Twentieth Century,” examines how modernist literature inaugurated a new optimism about expectations of what a queer life could entail. “Taking Form" explores the period between Oscar Wilde’s trials for “gross indecency” in 1895 and the formation of large-scale gay and lesbian movements after World War II, highlighting how authors challenged, eluded, and exceeded the sexual constraints and codes of the school story, the marriage plot, the imperial romance, and autobiography to make writing about queer life possible in an era of increasing medical and legal categorization.
English 387	Studies in Literature and Commerce: Love and Money from Shakespeare to Crazy Rich Asians (Post 1830)	Caldwell	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 387 Studies in Literature and Commerce: Love and Money from Shakespeare to Crazy Rich Asians (Post 1830) Course Description: “Love is like money…hard to find and easy to lose.” Writers through the ages have long mined uncanny similarities between the pursuit of love and money, though not always in such a melancholy note, for their plots and poetic language. In this course, we will ponder the entertainment value of certain potent combinations of romance and riches, as these are presented through the lives of literature’s best known and most complex characters. Characters such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Kevin Kwan’s extravagant Singaporeans, confront us with fascinating questions about erotic desire and wealth that play upon our hopes and fears: how do we know if we love someone for themselves or for their money? What is the difference between a romantic and financial bond? What does it mean to experience passion through the filter of financial language and metaphors? Can we really have it all??? As we consider the relationship in these texts between romance and riches, jealousy and insolvency, we will challenge our basic assumptions about what it means to be in love, in debt, flush with money, and trapped in poverty. Teaching Method: Seminar Discussion. Evaluation Method: Two short papers, one medium-length research paper, one long paper, one discussion-leading assignment. Texts include: Guy de Maupassant, “The Necklace”; Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores; Jonathan Dee, The Privileges; Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians. Movies (made available on Canvas): Indecent Proposal (1993), Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore. Instructor Bio: Dr. William Casey Caldwell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University. His research focuses on early modern literature, monetary history, market culture, and history of sexuality. Caldwell is co-editor of The Hare: An Online Journal of Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theater, and has published on audience laughter and dramaturgy in reconstructed early modern playhouses. A former Franke Graduate Fellow in residence at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, he has worked as Senior Research Assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and recently co-taught Shakespeare at Stateville maximum security prison. Caldwell also gives preamble talks at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and volunteers with Northwestern’s Prison Education Program. He holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Partnership with the American Shakespeare Center; an MA in Philosophy from the University of Auckland; and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
English 388	Studies in Literature and Religion: Saints and Rebels (Post 1830/ICSP)	Boemler	MW 9:30-10:50
English 388 Studies in Literature and Religion: Saints and Rebels (Post 1830/ICSP) Course Description: The religious life is not always one of peace and consolation. Anger, despair, apathy, and doubt also have their place—and these emotions have created some of the greatest religious poetry in the world. In this course, you will experience the poetry of the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as it wrestles with these darker emotions. The resources of poetic language allow space for ambiguity and doubt to coexist with hope and faith; the tools that poets use to craft emotion can powerfully explore conflict and resolution. You will have the opportunity to sample from a wide variety of poetic genres, from the verse of the ancient world to contemporary American rap. The goal of this course is not to map any particular poem neatly onto a spectrum of religious faith, but rather to explore the ways in which men and women from widely disparate backgrounds have experienced and expressed conflicts in their spiritual lives. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Active participation in discussion, Canvas posts, one short paper, one longer paper, class presentation. Texts include: Coursepack including selected poetry from poets including: the Psalms, Job, Hildegard von Bingen, Rumi, Yehuda Halevi, George Herbert, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickenson, Yehuda Amichai, Kendrick Lamar, and Mona Haydar. Texts will be available at: Quartet Copies and Canvas.
English 393-3	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Mehigan	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-3 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-3	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Abani	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-3 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-3	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Bouldrey	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-3 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: The Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages	Breen	TTh 11-12:20
English 397 Research Seminar: The Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages Course Description: What does the Unite the Right rally, held in Charlottesville, VA on August 11-12, 2017, have in common with J. K. Rowling’s well-received Harry Potter novels? Despite their obvious ideological differences, both are instances of medievalism, defined as the “adoption of, adherence to, or interest in medieval ideals, styles, or usages” in the modern world. Indeed, both draw on the same conception of the Middle Ages as the so-called “Age of Chivalry,” with its values of courage, faithfulness, and fighting ability, centered on the masculine and aristocratic figure of the knight. In this course we will examine this and other conceptions of the Middle Ages, including the “Dark Ages,” the “Site of Origin,” and “The Mirror of Post-Modernity,” investigating the modern uses and abuses associated with each. As we do, you will learn how to identify and narrow a research topic, navigate electronic databases, identify and evaluate pertinent critical articles, and produce article abstracts, an annotated bibliography, and a project proposal. The course will culminate in a 12-15 page research paper that investigates a single instance of medievalism, analyzing the ways it seeks to use the Middle Ages to change the modern world. Broadly defined research areas might include, but are not limited to, romantic medievalism, the relationship between medievalism and nationalism, the role of medievalism in international relations, medievalism in role-playing and online gaming, and queer and trans medievalisms. Course texts: Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, 4^th ed., ISBN 9780226239736. Prerequisites: Open to juniors and seniors only. Students must successfully complete 5 300-level English courses before taking English 397.
English 403	Writers' Studies in Literature	Miles	W 6p-9p
English 403 Writers' Studies in Literature Course Description: In the early 1960s, the author James Lord and the painter Alberto Giacometti took part in an extraordinary artistic interchange. Over the course of 18 sittings, Giacometti painted a portrait of the writer, while Lord crafted a literary portrait of the artist. Using Lord's A Giacometti Portrait as a jumping-off point for discussion, we'll examine works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry that have resulted from the close study of a single subject--a person, a group of people, a place, an object, an experience, or a physical sensation. We'll also examine how the assigned texts blur the borders between observer and observed. And finally, we’ll conclude the course with a close examination of the self, with participants probing the events and experiences that formed them as writers and offering an in-depth exploration of their own artistic challenges and goals. In addition to A Giacometti Portrait, we’ll read works by Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Cusk, Mark Doty and Wisława Szymborska, among many other authors.
English 435	Studies in 17th-Century Literature: The Renaissances We Earn	West	M 2-4:50
English 435 Studies in 17th-Century Literature: The Renaissances We Earn Course Description: The great scholar of early modernity Aby Warburg declared, “Every age has the Renaissance of antiquity that it earns.” That is, different times have found different things to admire or to deplore in the Renaissance, and have framed their own cultural projects accordingly. There is thus not one Renaissance, and not just because the period itself was multiple There have been many Renaissances, and they have served different purposes in different cultural moments. The Renaissance has been asked to stand for the rise of science and the decline of faith; an upwelling and channeling of powerful, ancient forces; a point of resistance to industrialism, capitalism, and modernity; the very opening of modernity. Taking its cue from reception studies in Classics, this course will consider how the Renaissance as a cultural and historical phenomenon has been framed and reframed for various ideals in various eras. Case studies may include Italy in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, when the Renaissance declared itself a Renaissance of ancient culture; the 19^th century, when historians like Burckhardt and Michelet and artists like William Morris, Ruskin, and the pre-Raphaelites imagined a Renaissance that opposed the industrialization that they saw marring Europe; the later 19^th century, when Pater and Symonds used the Renaissance to explore sexual desires that their own culture did not sanction; and the early 20^th century, when Warburg and Walter Benjamin imagined an apocalyptic Renaissance that shattered the linearity of history itself. Students will be asked to research another moment in the history of the reception of the Renaissance.
English 451	Studies in Romantic Literature: Lyric Environments	Wolff	W 2-4:50
English 451 Studies in Romantic Literature: Lyric Environments Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to the “greater romantic lyric,” as well as an abbreviated survey of lyric theory. While tracking the sequence and dialogue of a handful of key critical paradigms from the last half century (and more), we will investigate how lyric poetry situates its reader in a universe of discourse through rhetorical address, affective cues, and social disposition. The “environments” in question thus connote familiar Romantic scholarship on “nature poetry,” and the relations of language to nature; but we will do so always bearing in mind that for the Romantics, natural environments implicate social and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from intersections of phenomenology, theories of voice, sound ecologies, social theory, and linguistic anthropology. We end the course with a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure the conventions of romantic lyric. Poets include Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Anna Barbauld, John Clare, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans and John Keats (depending on student interest, this list may extend farther forward into the C19); contemporary poets: Claudia Rankine, Ed Roberson, Tommy Pico, Lisa Robertson and Daniel Borzutzky.
English 465	Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Forms and Ecology	Mwangi	Tu 2-4:50
English 465 Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Forms and Ecology Course Description: This course will examine experimental texts from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that treat environmental concerns, paying particular attention to the interface of form and ecology in postcolonial literature. We will also discuss the relationship between “new” forms and what are considered traditional modes of expression. We will read work by such contemporary thinkers as Jahan Ramazani, Meg Ahrenberg, and Liz Alexander on new forms of minority writing and their relationship to the traditions they respond to. What is the role of literature and the environmental humanities in addressing ecological questions in the Global South? How well have postcolonial artists used avantgarde aesthetics to respond to ecological disasters? How does ecology intersect with other social justice questions (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) through form in postcolonial literary texts? What do the texts tell us about human-animal entanglements? As we respond to these questions, we will explore and critique ideas on postcolonial ecocritical thought (e.g., work by Elizabeth Deloughrey, Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Byron Caminero-Santangelo). Literary texts will include fictions and poetry by Nnedi Okorafor, Shani Mootoo, Warsan Shire, Nalo Hopkinson, Indra Sinha, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Shailja Patel.
English 471	Studies in American Literature: The Poetics of Dissolution	Wilson	Th 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: The Poetics of Dissolution Course Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations put additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration will include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey and Harriet Mullen; turntablists DJ Spooky, Jazzy Jeff, and Premier; songs by musicians from Ella Fitzgerald to Rahzel; and pieces by visual artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. In addition to material by ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists, theoretical texts include work by Barthes, Freud, Saussure, Lacan, and Fred Moten.
English 496	MFA Poetry Workshop	Abani	T 6p-8:50p
English 496 MFA Poetry Workshop Course Description: A graduate class is a master class, so with that in mind, this class aims to combine the creative workshop approach with an analytical approach aimed at understanding the process of composition at both poem and manuscript levels. How do we approach the construction of our work? What is our core aesthetic – and what do we mean by that? How are we moving beyond the “recording” of experience, which is essentially a passive form of writing (regardless of the content of the experience and the individual value that we bring to it) to the idea of “using experience as the template for an intervention of inquiry,” itself a much more active approach? How to translate the much-needed theoretical positions that undergird our work into poems that transcend them? Students will select a photographer or other visual artist whose work they think shares the same core aesthetic as theirs (and no it cannot be another writer), pick a series from that artists work (no more than 5 (five) paintings, photographs or any other “forms”) and write a short one page explanation speaking to why this artist, this work and this sequence. Then students MUST submit a sequence of 15 pages of poetry assembled as an arc (the typical chapbook is 25-30 pages of poetry, so this is less than that). The poems will be placed in a manuscript style format with a title page etc. The two items (artist selection and poems) will be submitted on the first day of class so that we can begin work almost immediately. We will offer each other constructive critiques, a catalog of the work submitted spanning a set of 19 points that will be laid out in the syllabus (like Themes, Style, Syllabic Structure, Form vs Content etc.), creating a critical and creative catalog of the work. The outcome is a thorough workshop of a sequence of our poems advancing us towards the skills needed for a full-length thesis and later, a full-length book for publication.
English 498	MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop	Biss	M 6p-8:50p
English 498 MFA Creative Nonfiction Workshop Course Description: This course will investigate how writers use research to generate new ideas, propel a draft forward, and facilitate revision. Students will be encouraged to work with research as an integral component of their creative process. Class discussions of readings will be augmented by visits from archivists and presentations by librarians, but this is not a research skills course. As a writing workshop, this course will be devoted to supporting and discussing student work. Students will have the option of working on one long project for the entire course or writing three shorter works. The primary genre under discussion in this course will be the personal essay, but students will be free to write in other genres. We will approach the essay as a record of the movement of the author’s mind over her subject, a process aided and augmented by research. Research takes many forms in the personal essay, from informal conversations to meandering walks to the consultation of archival documents and photographs. Accordingly, our working definition of research will be expansive, and students will be encouraged to engage in research that is not text-based. Readings will be drawn from a broad range of contemporary nonfiction as well as some poetry. Authors under discussion will include: Cathy Park Hong, Michael Ondaatje, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Kevin Young, John McPhee, Ariana Kelly, Layli Long Soldier, Joan Didion, Wendy Walters, Jazmina Barrera, and others.
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	M 10a-12:50p
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: In this course, we will engage with a wide range of possible approaches to the instruction of creative writing. To begin, we will look at the history of Creative Writing programs and the models of teaching that have traditionally guided MFA programs. We will then move on to discuss theories of learning as they apply to fine-arts courses. We will take into consideration intersectional challenges (race, gender, class, disability, etc). And we will think about the differences between teaching undergraduates and graduate students. In the second half of the course we will move into the practical work of designing creative writing courses that have a beginning, middle, and end, and also a clear set of achievable learning objectives. You will do the practical work of drafting syllabi, generating exercises, and selecting reading material for introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.