Spring 2023 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 6027 | R 3-5 | Refugees, Aliens, and Other Impossible Subjects | Malini Schueller |
| CRW 6130 | M 6-8 | Fiction Workshop | David Leavitt |
| CRW 6166 | T 9-11 | Fiction Forms | Camille Bordas |
| CRW 6331 | M 9-11 | Poetry Workshop | William Logan |
| ENC 7760 | R 6-8 | From Paper to Publication: The Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in English Studies and Related Fields | Jodi Schorb |
| ENG 6138 | T 9-11, SCR R 9-11 | The Movies and Philosophy | Robert B. Ray |
| ENG6932 | W 9-11, SCR M E1-E3 | Originality and Adaptation in Film | Trevor Mowchun |
| ENL 6256 | T 6-8 | Victorian Technologies | Rae X. Yan |
| LIT 6586 | W 3-5 | Queer Comics | Margaret Galvan |
| LIT 6934 | T E1-E3 | Hip Hop Rhetorics | Victor Del Hierro |
Course Descriptions
AML 6027
Refugees, Aliens, and Other Impossible Subjects
Malini Schueller
What constitutes a refugee? How do we think of refugees? Who is an illegal alien? What do refugees reveal about the Nation-State? What do we learn from refugees? Wars, displacements, and nationalist and racial anxieties about refugees in Europe and the US in the twenty-first century have once again made the issue of the refugee a central one. This course will center the field of critical refugee studies in order to foreground the refugee not as a victim but as a source of knowledge. What kinds of critiques of the nation-state, militarized violence, imperialism, humanitarian and human-rights discourse does a refugee epistemology enable? How do refugees work out their subject-positions through cultural productions and how do these productions work as sites of critique?
This course will address the above questions through theoretical texts as well as contemporary fiction, memoirs, and films by and about refugees created by US colonial and imperial wars. Beginning with the classic America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, the course will move on to twenty-first century cultural productions. Possible texts will include Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) or The Refugees (2017), Aimee Phan’s They Should Never Meet (2004), Loung Ung’s Lucky Child (2005), Timothy Linh Bui’s Green Dragon (2001), Ocean Vuong’s, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), David Grabias and Nicole Newnham’s SentencedHome (2006) and Dina Nayeri’s,The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). Because refugee studies and Asian American studies are interdisciplinary, we will be drawing on fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, as well as cultural studies as well as engaging with U.S. empire studies, postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and collective memory studies. We will also read the works of theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Yen Le Espiritu, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Michael Schudson, Michael Rothberg, and Lisa Lowe.
Requirements: seminar paper, oral presentation, reading responses.
The course will be of interest to students in contemporary US literature and film, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies.
CRW 6130
Fiction Workshop
David Leavitt
This is an intensive fiction writing workshop for graduate students in the MFA program in Creative Writing.
‘Reading will consist of short novels, stories, and essays by a variety of writers, including (probably) James Baldwin, John Cheever, Penelope Fitzgerald, Grace Paley, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, Glenway Wescott, and Alejandro Zambra. All first- and second-year fiction MFA students will be automatically enrolled in this workshop, which is also open to poetry MFAs and English PhDs if space is available. If you are not a fiction MFA and are interested in taking the course, please contact me.
CRW 6166
Fiction Forms
Camille Bordas
In this class, we will focus on things happening on the page. Action scenes. Characters doing stuff. The author tracking their movements. Big events unfolding. Situations escalating. We will look closely at how movement, crowds, violence, and action have been dealt with by such authors as Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, Padgett Powell, Katherine Dunn, Agota Kristof, and Isaac Babel, among many others.
CRW 6331
Poetry Workshop
William Logan
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
Donald Justice, Collected Poems
W. H. Auden, Selected Poems
Louise Glück, The First Four Books of Poems
Robert Lowell, Life Studies/For the Union Dead
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century.
Vol. 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker.
.
ENC 7760
Multicultural Early American Literature
Jodi Schorb
Publishing peer-reviewed articles is one the most valuable methods for participating in professional conversations and for establishing one’s voice in those conversations. Having published articles is also helpful to academic job placement and promotion in the humanities and for possible careers in the public humanities. This proseminar demystifies the publication process and provides strategies for successful academic writing through hands-on experience.
Across the semester, students will revise a classroom paper, conference paper, or dissertation chapter into a peer-reviewed article and prepare to submit it for publication. The seminar provides structure, accountability, and a supportive environment for participants to make progress across on semester and is recommended in lieu of research credit hours.
The class is part lecture (and guest lecture), part workshop—a combination of learning and doing. Topics include: clarifying your argument and crafting an abstract, locating journals and targeting your publication for an intended audience, choosing a journal (including information on publishing metrics), all aspects of the journal submission process (writing query letters, working with editors, revise and resubmits), streamlining arguments and evidence, strengthening writing style, and developing a long-term professional ethos. While our readings focus on publishing in academic journals, the class will also share success stories for publishing in other public forms.
Secondary reading is brief and designed to facilitate your focus on making weekly progress on your article. Readings are likely to include Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (2019) and Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (2014). Grading will be based on participation and progress getting your paper finalized and ready for submission.
The proseminar emerged from conversations with graduate students on the professional development and hands-on opportunities they would find most useful for mid- to late-stage scholars in the program. The course can be used to finalize a dissertation chapter that has strong potential to work as a standalone article, so long as you have completed all chapter research and narrowed down your specific chapter argument and main evidentiary claims prior to the start of the semester. ABD students (those who have completed qualifying exams) have priority enrollment, but any student in the program may request the course. A reminder that this seminar does not count as one of the required department seminars in our English degree program, but its three credit hours do count towards the minimum 90-credit hours required for the English PhD.
ENG 6138
The Movies and Philosophy
Robert B. Ray
The philosopher Stanley Cavell, who wrote a lot about the movies, once described philosophy “as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them.” While, as Cavell acknowledged, “there may be no satisfying answers to such questions, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover.”
This course will ask us to think collectively about certain questions related to the movies: How can we tell when someone is acting? How do we understand the difference between acting and pretending, pretending and lying? What happens if an actor (or an ordinary person) says one thing while thinking the opposite? If someone tells you that he is no longer your friend, but behaves towards you in all other ways exactly as he did before, does it matter what he thinks? What’s the difference between doing something by accident or by mistake? How do we learn to follow a rule? As you watch a movie, when do you stop seeing the star and begin seeing the character?
Philosophical readings will include Plato, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Emerson, and Cavell. We will also read about acting in the cinema and the differences between literature and film. Movies will include People on Sunday, two by Buster Keaton, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, The Rules of the Game, Blow-Up, Close-Up, and Anatomy of a Murder.
Assignments: bi-weekly two-page papers responding to prompts, and a final 6-page paper.
ENG 6932
Originality and Adaptation in Film
Trevor Mowchun
It is no secret that some of the most compelling and enduring films throughout history are adaptations. What this means is that the coveted heights of film art are often reached through the embrace of other art forms (predominantly literature)—an embrace of what we might call the “non-cinematic.” We will attempt to untangle this apparently paradoxical phenomenon in a number of ways: by exploring some general theories of artistic originality that grapple with the highly subjective and often indescribable mysteries of “the creative process”; by identifying the concept of adaptation as a mode of creativity that is specific to the pursuit of originality in film, arguably more instrumental than for any other artform; by studying theories of film adaptation from scholars and practitioners, so as to help pave the way for the development of our own ideas concerning the complex interrelation between originality and adaptation in film. Throughout these investigations we will continually ask ourselves if and how “the spirit” of a literary (and, in some cases, non-literary) text can be adapted such that its ideal form is found in film.
The proposition, that adaptation is the most vital path to originality in film, will be put to the test using these two methodologies: “case studies” and “filmmaking.” Case studies: Most weeks will feature a comparative study of a film adaptation and its source text(s), one which tracks the transformative journey of the film from literary source to script (in some cases) to screen. Adaptation methods of particular interest to us are as follows: faithful vs. transgressive adaptation, modernization, piecemeal adaptation, multiple source adaptation, and interdisciplinary adaptation. Short and feature-length films will be screened to exemplify both the possibilities and pitfalls of cinematic adaptation. Films with no ostensible ties to outside source material (i.e., films which are, or claim to be, “totally original”) will also be considered for the sake of comparison. Filmmaking: Students will embark upon their own process of cinematic adaptation by choosing a yet un-adapted literary work—ideally a short story, prose piece or poem (novellas may also be suggested, albeit with caution)—and composing a filmable screenplay based on it, one that remains true to the “spirit” of the source, or betrays it, or transforms it, or perhaps some sublime alchemy of all three acts of creation. The source material will become raw material to be molded into something new—something that surpasses the original in some way and rethinks it for the present age. One of these projects will then be made into a short/medium-length film, inviting students to experience the various phases or “internal adaptations” of the filmmaking process beyond screenwriting.
ENL 6256
Victorian Technologies
Rae X. Yan
By engaging with a diverse range of Victorian literary works that address technological innovations of the age, this seminar on Victorian literature and culture will speak to persistent anxieties about—and enthusiasm for—a changing world shaped by the influence of Victorian technologies including (1) railway travel, (2) the microscope, (3) the telegraph, (4) the bicycle, and (5) the typewriter, among others. Along the way, we will explore the history of the book and technologies of printing and publishing that have materially shaped the development of the Victorian literary texts we will analyze. Possible primary readings include works by Grant Allen, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Mary Seacole, Bram Stoker. Possible secondary readings may include work by Isobel Armstrong, Jonathan Crary, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, Lewis Mumford, and others. Assignments for this course will include regular weekly responses, discussion leading, a conference paper to be presented during the semester for class, and a course syllabus design with assignments. Workshops will be held on using digital platforms such as Discord, Twitch, and YouTube, for both pedagogical and professional purposes.
LIT 6856
Queer Comics
Margaret Galvan
In the past several years, there’s been a surge in publishing of queer comics—that is, “comic books, strips, graphic novels, and webcomics that deal with LGBTQ themes from an insider’s perspective,” as cartoonist Justin Hall puts it. These contemporary works are part of a genealogy that stretches over four decades, reaching back before the Stonewall Riots in 1969 that catalyzed the modern LGBTQ movement. This course will introduce students to this rich and often overlooked history of queer comics in America and Europe from the 1960s through the present. We will consider how these works represented various identities and current events over time and how and where these comics were published and circulated.
While this course will focus on understanding comics through queer, trans, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies approaches, students will receive a grounding in the field of comics studies, as well. This course will also be useful for students with an interest in contemporary American literature, cultural studies, marginalized histories and creators, book history, grassroots publishing, memoir studies, visual and popular cultures, etc. Scaffolded professionalization activities and digital approaches to scholarship will accompany the completion of a seminar paper.
LIT 6934
Hip Hop Rhetorics
Victor Del Hierro
The origin story of Hip Hop tells us that despite our Western tendencies to name names, the culture was built from and continues to sustain itself through practices. Jamaican sound machines lead to block parties that lead to innovative DJ techniques like looping. These practices are situated and performed in close relation with communities that continue to help Hip Hop evolve and remain relevant to its practitioners. The ongoing story of Hip Hop tells us that it is a powerful movement capable of being simultaneously literary, multilingual, multimodal, transnational, and migratory. Hip Hop was birthed and has always been this incredibly dense rhetorical site of communication. While academics work to parse out these layers and complex sites of meaning making, Hip Hop asks us to understand them in concert.
This course will take up the rich site of inquiry that resides between Hip Hop and Cultural Rhetorics. With an emphasis on studying the rhetorical histories, practices, and implications of Hip Hop, over the course of the semester, we will work to understand what the world looks like through Hip Hop. While important conversations in Hip Hop Studies have helped preserve the history and thought critically about the pedagogical implications of Hip Hop applied in K-16 settings, this course will build upon that work to think about the epistemological possibilities of Hip Hop, asking questions such as: What if Hip Hop is the point of invention? Point of analysis? Point of understanding? Drawing on Jacqueline Royster’s argument for reimagining the disciplinary landscape of Rhetoric, we will also ask, what does Rhetoric look like with Hip Hop as its center? Students in the course are encouraged to take up this question for their own respective fields, areas, and disciplines. In the spirit of Hip Hop, all relationships are valid starting points, whether you already center Hip Hop or orbit it from a distance. As this course engages with Hip Hop’s complexity, we might think about how it can show us to engage in complex discourses and navigate academic tensions around interdisciplinarity. Furthermore, through this course, we will work to answer the question: how might Hip Hop historiography practices, like sampling, teach us to think across time and space?
Readings in the course will include texts by Tricia Rose, Gwendolyn Pough, Elaine Richardson, Joan Morgan, Regina Bradley, Bettina Love, Toni Blackman, Kyle T. Mays, Kermit Campbell, Bakari Kitwana, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, Emery Petchauer, and Todd Craig.