Fall 2020 Courses
Class meeting locations are subject to change. Consult the following page for an explanation of the class period abbreviations.
| Course # | Time(s) | Course title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|---|
| AML 6017 | M 6-8 | Representations of Labor in 19th and Early 20th Century American Literature | Stephanie Smith |
| CRW 6130 | T 9-11 | Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop | Camille Bordas |
| CRW 6166 | M 9-11 | Fiction Forms: The Novel | David Leavitt |
| CRW 6331 | T 9-11 | Graduate Poetry Workshop | William Logan |
| ENG 6075 | T 3-5 | Critical Disability Studies | Delia Steverson |
| ENG 6256 | T E1-E3 | Victorian Popular Novels | Pamela Gilbert |
| LAE 6947 | R 6-8 | Introduction to Writing Studies/Proseminar in English Studies | Raúl Sánchez |
| LIT 6236 | T 6-8 | Nationalism and the Novel | Apollo Amoko |
| LIT 6236 | W 3-5 | Global Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature | Malini Schueller |
| LIT 6358 | F 6-8 | Afro-European Literature and Film Culture | Mark Reid |
| LIT 6855 | F 3-5 | Cultural Studies Since 2008 | Susan Hegeman |
| LIT 6855 | R 9-11 | Sexing the Past: Critical Perspectives on Century Gender and Sexuality | Jodi Schorb |
| LIT 6934 | W 6-8 | Community Engagement | Laura Gonzales |
| LIT 6934 | W 9-11 | Narrating the French Revolution | Roger Maioli dos Santos |
Course Descriptions
AML 6017
Representations of Labor in 19th and Early 20th Century American Literature
As the “face” of labor in the 19th century was changing with respect to the influx of European immigrants, the migration of former slaves to the North, and the introduction of women into the paid work force, arguments about labor grew contentious and violent. As the United States shifted from a once-primarily agricultural and familial-based economy to a mobile and industrial one, how work was performed, by whom and for what compensation—if any—were at the heart of much public and political discussion: a situation similar to the clear shift in the late 20th to the mid-21th c. as labor is increasingly tied to digital modalities. Using a mixture of traditional and virtual pedagogical practices, this course will examine how American authors of the late 19th to early 20th c. responded to labor, and to the public wrangling over issues of work and how work was understood (or not) by authors such as Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Crane, and we will be linking those responses and/or representations to current issues and arguments about labor in a global market impacted by the 2019 Covid pandemic, world-wide political, cultural and financial volatility and the massive inequities sponsored by late-stage capitalism.
CRW 6130
Fiction Writing
This course is open to MFA candidates in fiction only.
Our workshop will be conducted in traditional workshop fashion: each week, we will discuss two short stories (or novel excerpts), by two different students. Every student will turn in two pieces of fiction over the course of the semester.
The writer whose work is being critiqued is expected to turn in a piece he or she believes to be as close to being finished as possible. The students critiquing the piece will treat it as published work, meaning they will discuss it as if the writer has deep intentions behind every line (which hopefully they do) and they, as readers, want to understand those intentions. Students are expected, each week, to write letters to those who are being critiqued: letters that describe what the piece that is being critiqued has achieved, what it hasn’t achieved, what it might achieve, etc.
Dedication to understanding what each writer is trying to do, regardless of their aesthetic preferences, is mandatory. Also mandatory: that the writers be prepared to hear what the others have to say about their work. It is hard being critiqued, but we all have to go through this.
Readings will be assigned on an individual basis.
CRW 6166
Fiction Forms: The Novel
This course will focus on two basic but tricky questions. First, What is a novel? Second, How do you write one? By way of exploring these questions, we’ll read and discuss 4-6 (shortish) novels and some essays on novel writing, including E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. In addition, each of you will put together a basic outline for a novel and then experiment with various approaches to writing the first chapter, each week looking at a different “aspect” of the process (to borrow Forster’s term) in order to see how the how of the telling determines the why of the told and vice-versa. The idea is to treat the course as a laboratory in which to experiment without having to worry about killing the patient, since the patient is hypothetical.
An important note: although I don’t expect you to come out of this class with a novel on its way to completion, I certainly won’t mind if you do.
Novels to be read may include some of the following:
Camille Bordas, How to Behave in a Crowd
Gregoire Bouillier, The Mystery Guest
Colette, The Vagabond
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
Rachel Cusk, Outline
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E. M. Forster, Howards End
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
Irmgard Keun, Child of All Nations
Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. McKenzie
Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Declares
Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk
Alejandro Zambra, Multiple Choice
CRW 6331
Graduate Poetry Workshop
Keep your mind off the poetry and on the pajamas and everything will be all right.
Gregory Peck, Roman Holiday
Alexandre Dumas fils, the health-obsessed son of a famous father, . . . agonizes over half a sentence for a year, “and then his father arrives from Naples and says: ‘Get me a cutlet and I’ll write your play for you,’ writes the scenario, brings in a whore, borrows some money, and goes off again.”
New York Review of Books, 15 February 2007
Carmichael: It’s awfully hard to live poetry, ma’am.
Dove: Goodbye, Mr. Carmichael.
Barbary Coast
“I have two acting styles. With and without a horse.”
Robert Mitchum
“Dang! This is the worst doughnut I ever did eat!”
Country-and western singer Bill Monroe, eating his first bagel
Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker, May 14, 2007
Within the high seriousness of verse, we’ll find a place for absurdity and laziness, hoping that between out serious studies cheerfulness will keep breaking in. The workshop will include readings in the poetry of the past century as well as the poetry of the age—that is, modern American, British, and Irish poetry, all in service of meticulous discussion of your own delightful work. Also, philosophical dentistry and fan-dancing.
You will need to show some sand, as Americans in the day of General Grant would have said.
reading list
R.S. Gwynn, ed., Contemporary American Poetry
Amy Clampitt, Collected Poems
Henri Cole, The Visible Man
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
ENG 6075
Critical Disability Studies
This course will consider critical disability studies not just as a subject-oriented field of inquiry but rather as Julie Minich defines, “a methodology that proceeds not from narrowly-defined notions of what ‘counts’ as a disability but one that seeks to radically disrupt the multiple sociopolitical ideologies that assign more value to some bodies and minds than to others”. Students will be introduced to Critical Disability Studies as methodology through an interdisciplinary approach that explores issues of access, care, illness, impairment, trauma, and other subjects in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship among others. The course will also highlight key debates in the field of disability studies as well as consider how critical disability studies as a methodology can serve as a tool of social justice for all people.
ENG 6256
Victorian Popular Novels
This course will explore “popular” and emerging genres in the nineteenth century novel, especially between 1840 and 1900. We will also interrogate the notion of the popular and the history of “taste.” There is such a variety of material and ways to approach it in this period that I have organized the course around a selection from a few genres, and have arranged the course so as to allow a certain amount of exploration on your own of those that intrigue you. The reading is divided between novels, the history of reading, and some theoretical materials on genre and dissemination. By the end of the semester, you will have read a number of novels that were quite influential in their time (though often unknown now) and thought about their placement vis a vis the more canonical texts of the period. One advantage of studying these novels is that many have not received much critical attention, and thus provide fertile ground for publishable inquiry. You will also have learned a good deal of history of reading and of the period, and you will have had opportunities to think from an informed perspective about ideas of taste, genres and the popular in the development of the novel, as well as to sample some recent scholarship. This course is about working through questions as much as gaining a specific kind of knowledge; sometimes we won’t walk away with “answers” so much as a more sophisticated understanding of the conversations and the issues they entail.
Authors and texts may include Dickens, Charles The Old Curiosity Shop, Corelli, Marie The Sorrows of Satan, Wood, Mrs. Henry East Lynne, Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins, Yonge, Charlotte Mary The Heir of Redclyffe, **Ouida (Marie de la Ramee) Under Two Flags/Moths, Ainsworth, Harrison Jack Sheppard Broadview, GWM Reynolds and others. Scholarship may include Kate Flint, Richard Altick, Nancy Armstrong, Pierre Bourdieu, Daniel Hack and others.
The course will likely require a turn at discussion leading, eight short response papers, and a seminar paper of 21-25 pages.
LAE 6947
Introduction to Writing Studies/ Proseminar in English Studies
This course has two separate but closely related purposes.
The first is to introduce you to contemporary and enduring issues in the field of Writing Studies (or Composition Studies, or Composition & Rhetoric, or etc.). The second is to introduce you to issues of professionalization in English Studies generally.
In both cases, we will focus on questions about race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and disability. This course assumes that such questions are central rather than peripheral to humanistic inquiry, and to Writing Studies especially, in this third decade of the 21st century.
In addition, this course assumes that, should you remain in academia, Writing Studies will likely take up a substantial portion of your professional life. Regardless of specialization, you will teach—and your research may encompass—some form of writing, rhetoric, and literacy. With this in mind, you should have a good working knowledge of the aforementioned issues.
We will read and discuss a wide range of texts that address familiar Writing Studies topics such as first-year writing, writing assessment, writing program administration, writing centers, technical and professional writing, histories of writing instruction, multimodal writing, multilingualism, global Englishes, and more. These texts will center the perspectives of writers, students, teachers, and scholars from marginalized communities.
Our reading will focus on recently-published journal articles and book chapters more so than on monographs (though there may be a few of these). This approach will give you a more synoptic view of the field as well as exposure to its most recent developments.
Journals from which we will likely draw, and which you might begin perusing, include:
- College Composition and Communication
- College English
- Research in the Teaching of English
- Composition Studies
- Enculturation
- constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space
- Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
- LiCS: Literacy in Composition Studies
- Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics
- Composition Forum
The major project of the course will be a panel presentation or roundtable discussion suitable for a local, regional, or national conference. You will coordinate your individual contribution with those of 2-5 other students. This project has two major components: a written proposal of the panel presentation or roundtable discussion, and the presentation or discussion itself, which you will “test drive” in class.
There will also be minor assignments that contribute to the major project, including an annotated bibliography or a short bibliographic essay in which you map the portion of the field you wish to enter. You may do this work individually or collaboratively.
LIT 6236
Nationalism and the Novel
This course explores the relationship imagined between “nation” and “narration.” In Imagined Communities, a landmark study on the origins and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson appears to suggest that the novel (along with the newspaper) was central to the possibility of imagining the modern nation. The aesthetic of the novel made it possible to think and narrate the nation in “homogeneous empty time.” Further, Anderson seems to contend that the canonization of literary texts through the school system was instrumental for enabling the intelligentsia to “take the nation to the people.” From this perspective, it is not surprising that literature has historically conceived of its objects of study in fundamentally nationalist terms. In Cultural Capital, a landmark study on the logic of literary canon formation, John Guillory contends that the effect of nationalist legitimation cannot be understood as a property inherent in the aesthetic of the novel (or the newspaper), but rather, is the product of a certain context of reading, “a pedagogical imaginary.” Specific literary works, Guillory insists, must be seen as “the vector of ideological notions which do not inhere in the works themselves but in the context of their institutional presentation, or more simply, in the way in which they are taught.” He makes a firm distinction between pedagogical and national imaginaries, between school and national cultures. In his argument, school culture “does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of artifact-based knowledge an imaginary cultural unity never actually coincident with the culture of the nation-state.” While for Anderson, the novel enables the emergence of national culture, for Guillory, the cultural institutions of the novel reflect a highly restrictive school culture. Which of these two theorists presents the more persuasive argument regarding the connection between nation and narration? We will attempt to answer this question by looking at a range of canonical texts from a variety of national and continental contexts.
LIT 6236
Global Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance and Contemporary Literature
One of the most important global connections of the twenty-first century is that of indigenous resistance against settler colonialism. North American Indian, Hawaiian, Palestinian, Maori, and Kashmiris speak a similar language of dispossession and activism and are often involved in advocacy campaigns that connect different indigenous spaces. This course focuses on a number of sites and a range of writers from across the globe in order to understand the connections among resistances to settler colonial extractivism. We will study the specific constructions of race in different settler colonial contexts and the intersection of colonial racism and gender. We will read fiction (novels, short stories, memoirs and poetry) and essays by both the colonized and settlers and the in order to understand questions of indigeneity, sovereignty, racial politics, occupation, nationalism, the politics of recognition, and revolutionary solidarity. We will study the current, often contentious theoretical debates about the different politics of settler colonial studies and indigeneity studies and the conversations between indigenous and environmental studies. We will also follow present-day activism against settler colonialism and see how settler colonial and indigeneity studies continue to develop tactics against forms of oppression today.
The course will begin with a brief foray into nineteenth-century literature of settler colonialism and native resistance in the US which will serve as a foundation to reading the contemporary literature and theory. We will put into conversation twenty-first century contemporary global literature of resistance to settler colonialism including Kristina Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013), David Truer’s Prudence (2015), Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation (2013), Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2007), Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and twentieth century literature such as Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World, Simon Ortiz’ Fight Back and short stories of Sherman Alexie and Ghassan Kanafini. We will also read the works of theorists such as Patrick Wolfe, Jodi Byrd, Craig Womack, Kehaulani Kanui, Achille Mbembe, Rob Wilson, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Ghassan Hage, and Eyal Weizman. The course will be of interest to students interested in multicultural literature, US literature and empire studies, twentieth and twenty-first century global literature, postcolonial literature and theory, indigeneity, ecocriticism, and transnationalism.
LIT 6358
Afro-European Literature and Film Culture
This seminar introduces students to the literature and films that dramatize the experiences of Afro-Europeans and African American expatriates in Western Europe. Weekly readings cover literature, critical theory, philosophy, political essays, and films that treat the socioeconomic and cultural experiences of the African Diaspora (European citizens and immigrants) from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
REQUIREMENTS:
Ten weekly reaction papers to readings and film screenings
30%
Two oral presentations on weekly readings and film screenings
20%
One ten-page conference paper (rough draft of a conference paper)
20%
One annotated bibliography of the conference paper
20%
One oral presentation of the conference paper
10%
LIT 6855
Cultural Studies Since 2008
Susan Hegeman
This course will provide a grounding in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, which takes as its object of study the totality or whole way of life of a group of people, crossing lines of social, political, aesthetic and historical analysis. In particular, we will turn our attention to the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008, which brought a number of issues to popular consciousness and academic reconsideration. These include financialization, debt, and economic precarity. Additionally, in the wake of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter, we see the emergence of new attention to questions of political praxis and the creation and maintenance of community. We will study academic work that has emerged since 2008 that takes up these and other related topics. We will also consider the general problem of periodizing cultural and artistic movements using 2008 as a touchstone.
This course is intended to introduce graduate students to the field of cultural studies, explore recent contributions to the field, and present examples of a range of interpretive strategies that may be useful in the development of the students’ own research. Students will be required to write 25-30 pages for the course, with assignments tailored to students’ academic goals and interests.
LIT 6855
Sexing the Past: Critical Perspectives on Century Gender and Sexuality
This seminar is for those who want to better understand and analyze gender and sexuality prior to the 20th century. We begin with post-Foucaultian debates on how to “do” the history of gender and sexuality (Foucault’s History of Sexuality; Laqueur’s Making Sex, Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Goldberg and Menon, “Queering History”). We review how more recent work revises this formative work and offers new paradigms for understanding sex and gender of the past.
Secondary readings likely to include Stoler’s, Race and the Education of Desire; Arondekar’s, “Without a Trace: Sexuality in the Colonial Archive,” Coviello’s, Sex and the Untimely in the Nineteenth Century; Traub’s, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns; Rohy’s Anachronism and its Others; La Fleur’s, A Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Ferguson’s, “Of Our Normative Strivings,” Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,” etc. Topics include “continuity vs. alterity” debates, historic vs. queer time, biopolitics and race, the archive as a site of pleasure and violence, etc. Students will exit the course familiar with influential texts, trends, and debates in sexual historiography, with a special emphasis in pre 20th-century queer studies.
While primary texts will be drawn from literary, medical, and cultural archives of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the course welcomes students with textual or archival interest in diverse pre-20th century culture and/or literatures (Ibero-American, Caribbean, indigenous, etc).
Assignments include periodic reflection papers (to help synthesize information and give you space to deepen your points of engagement) and a seminar or conference paper on a primary text or archive relevant to theorizing pre-20th century sexuality.
This course will also be cross-listed in WST.
LIT 6934
Community Engagement
Emphasizing the role of humanities professionals as public intellectuals, this course provides frameworks, methods, and strategies for practicing community engagement not as service, but as reciprocal research. This course will ask students to consider what communities they belong to, what audiences fuel their work, and how our research in English studies can contribute to the good work that is already taking place in communities outside the ivory tower. Drawing on frameworks and methodologies that thread together Chicana feminism, Black womanist epistemologies, and decolonial theory (among others) with emerging practices in information and technology design, this course will ask students to consider who the communities and publics that we are all accountable to as members of the academy. Particular emphasis will be placed on developing public-facing materials and portfolios that demonstrate students’ preparation for both academic and pubic-facing work in community organizations, justice-driven businesses, and other public venues. No prior experience with community engagement is required, as we will all begin the course by learning about each other and the communities we currently inhabit. Course projects will include a research-driven community researcher positionality statement, digital materials demonstrating community commitments, as well as a literature review based on community-engagement research.
LIT 6934
Narrating the French Revolution
In 1789, when Britain was still dealing with the repercussions of the American Revolution, a different upheaval erupted closer to home. In its egalitarian principles and troubled development, the French Revolution evoked both excitement and revulsion among British observers. For some, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, the revolution in France provided an opportunity for finally bringing the rights of men and women to the forefront of British political debate. For others, like Edmund Burke and Hannah More, the Revolution was a threat to the moral and religious fabric of British society. In waging war on one another, each side in this debate developed a different narrative of the events taking place in France, portraying the revolution either as the triumph of progressive values against centuries of oppression, or the catastrophic end of institutions that had slowly evolved through the wisdom of the ages. The issues at stake in narrating the French Revolution were many: Is there such a thing as universal human rights that cut across class boundaries? Should women share space with men in the public sphere? Should the ideal of freedom be extended to African slaves? What is the role of religion in modern secular societies? Is violence justifiable in the name of a greater good? These questions lie at the center not only of the political pamphlets of the age but also of its imaginative literature. In this course we will engage with narratives of the French Revolution in various genres — philosophy, history, plays, letter writing, poetry, and the novel — to consider how a variety of French and British authors helped to shape the values we broadly identify as conservative and progressive today. We will read foundational interpretations of the French Revolution by Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Tom Paine, as well as fictional accounts of the events by authors including Beaumarchais, Frances Burney, Robert Bage, the Marquis de Sade, Helen Maria Williams, and Amelia Opie. Looking beyond Europe, we will consider the parallel revolution taking place in Haiti, as narrated by Toussaint Louverture himself in his Memoir. The course will also engage with secondary scholarship by Lynn Hunt, Marilyn Butler, and Joanna Innes among others.