Creative Writing

  • ENWR 731 MFA Poetry Workshop

    1400-1630 M - CABELL 235

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Gregory Orr

    A once-weekly workshop that will focus on the discussion of student poems, craft issues, and exemplary poems by contemporary poets. Admission by PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY. For more details on the course, see Professor Orr.

  • ENWR 751 MFA Fiction Workshop

    1500-1830 W - CABELL 331

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

    A fiction workshop restricted to MFA students.

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 528 Dante & Spenser

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 328
    cross-listed with ENRN 528

    Instructor: James Nohrnberg

    This course intends to read both Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and the first three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Our object is to explore a common high-water uniqueness in the figurative and allegorical modes of two of the traditional authors likeliest to be invoked as writers of learned, extended, and potentially encyclopedic allegorical fictions. We shall hope to use each author both to introduce the other, and to un-write him, or as a window for opening beyond the confinement of each text. For the social critique, poetics, psychology, and epistemology appertaining to these two literary works are obviously very different?the first author writes a testamentary confession or conversion-narrative in the guise of a Christian’s otherworldly, sprial-shaped Passiontide pilgrimage, the second author propounds the elements a gentleman’s education or disciplining in the guise of an extended, serial and proto-colonial quest-romance. Thus the two authors have at least in common their having chosen to present their "argument" within the dissimulative veil of allegory, but also behind the apparent otherness of their chosen casts: either the shades of the dead in the Comedy, or the denizens of "faerie" in The Faerie Queene. Dante’s "hosts" are mainly historical personages and Spenser’s leading fays are subjects who serve his own courtier-glorified sovereign, and yet the narratives situate both poets’ personnel in an alternative or virtual reality where any given character’s meaning haunts his or her existence - or his or her agency or personhood - to the point of over-riding and/or arresting it in the form of his or her moral silhouette. We will be considering, in these two different cases - high medieval and high Renaissance - what it means to lead a life of allegory as a protagonist, and to be lead through an allegorical narrative as a reader. In beginning this journey by entering the dark wood of obscured yet palpable significances, you will have to consider what it means to have lost your shadow among the whispering trees - or to have merely indulged your curious natal genius for inquiry - and even if you only did this for the sake of a not altogether whimsical notion that you were acting as a free agent even when you chose to sell your soul to a text. Undergraduates and graduate students are equally welcome on the expedition to enlightenment through perplexity. Two middle-length papers, and a final exam (where the student is asked to write two essayettes, i.e., brief commentaries, on two quotes you select from a wide choice thereof).

  • ENMD 801 Old English

    1100-1150 MWF - BRYAN 312

    Instructor: Peter Baker

    In this course, the primary task will be to learn the language written in England before the year 1100 and to read a number of texts in Old English, starting with simple prose and ending with such poems as The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. Students with some experience in foreign language study will find the course easier than those without. In addition, the course is an introduction to the literature of the Old English period: we will supplement language study and reading Old English with discussion and reading in secondary sources. Written work will include bi-weekly quizzes on the language, one paper, an oral report, and a brief final exam.

  • ENMD 885 Mapping the Middle Ages

    1700-1815 MW - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: A.C. Spearing

    Using as its focus a selection of major literary texts and some important scholarly and theoretical works, this course will explore the spiritual, intel­lec­tual and cultural clim­ates of “the Middle Ages”, and will aim to develop a conceptual framework for study of this seminal period in Western civilization. The approach will be both cross-disciplinary and transnational. The topics to be explored, through the lens of artistic masterpieces produced in England and continental Europe, will inc­lude: the Middle Ages as a theoretical and critical construct; varieties of love; epic and romance; other worlds; allegory; and regional culture (East Anglia). Medieval English verse texts will be read in the original, most others in translation. Requirements: an oral presentation, two papers, a final exam.

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 528 Dante & Spenser

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 328

    cross-listed with ENMD 528

    Instructor: James Nohrnberg

    This course intends to read both Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and the first three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Our object is to explore a common high-water uniqueness in the figurative and allegorical modes of two of the traditional authors likeliest to be invoked as writers of learned, extended, and potentially encyclopedic allegorical fictions. We shall hope to use each author both to introduce the other, and to un-write him, or as a window for opening beyond the confinement of each text. For the social critique, poetics, psychology, and epistemology appertaining to these two literary works are obviously very different?the first author writes a testamentary confession or conversion-narrative in the guise of a Christian’s otherworldly, sprial-shaped Passiontide pilgrimage, the second author propounds the elements a gentleman’s education or disciplining in the guise of an extended, serial and proto-colonial quest-romance. Thus the two authors have at least in common their having chosen to present their "argument" within the dissimulative veil of allegory, but also behind the apparent otherness of their chosen casts: either the shades of the dead in the Comedy, or the denizens of "faerie" in The Faerie Queene. Dante’s "hosts" are mainly historical personages and Spenser’s leading fays are subjects who serve his own courtier-glorified sovereign, and yet the narratives situate both poets’ personnel in an alternative or virtual reality where any given character’s meaning haunts his or her existence - or his or her agency or personhood - to the point of over-riding and/or arresting it in the form of his or her moral silhouette. We will be considering, in these two different cases - high medieval and high Renaissance - what it means to lead a life of allegory as a protagonist, and to be lead through an allegorical narrative as a reader. In beginning this journey by entering the dark wood of obscured yet palpable significances, you will have to consider what it means to have lost your shadow among the whispering trees - or to have merely indulged your curious natal genius for inquiry - and even if you only did this for the sake of a not altogether whimsical notion that you were acting as a free agent even when you chose to sell your soul to a text. Undergraduates and graduate students are equally welcome on the expedition to enlightenment through perplexity. Two middle-length papers, and a final exam (where the student is asked to write two essayettes, i.e., brief commentaries, on two quotes you select from a wide choice thereof).

  • ENRN 821 Shakespeare's Histories

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 130

    Instructor: Katharine Maus

  • ENRN 881 Masks of Desire: Gender, Genre and Performance in Elizabethan England

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 130

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    This course will focus upon the sexual politics (the representation of gender and the gendering of representation) and the experimental poetics of early modern lyric, narrative and drama.  We'll discuss and historicize our authors’ complicated negotiations with the period’s culturally privileged discourses;  we will also explore the staging of their variously didactic and transgressive agendas as they reshape  Petrarchan lyric, chivalric and pastoral romance, and the Ovidian master-narratives of transforming desire.

    Readings will probably include Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Book III of The Faerie Queene; Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and New Arcadia; Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. and Shakespeare’s As You Like It; we will also dip into Ovid and Petrarch (in translation) and certainly consider a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to our primary texts.

    Course requirements: participation in discussion; a series of short e-mail responses to our primary and secondary readings, an oral report; a 12-14 page paper; a final examination.

  • ENRN 927 Milton

    1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 310

    Instructor: James Nohrnberg

    This course offers a running commentary on the twelve books of Paradise Lost, after brief readings of the poet’s later and earlier poems as propaedeutic. Beginnings and re-beginnings are implicit in the triple cycle of Paradise Lost, but we'll be starting from a sketch of the retrospective on Milton’s career provided by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, and then turn to the dawn of Milton's vocation as poet in the Nativity Ode, "L’Allegro," "Il Penseroso," and "The Passion," and to his discovery of his dramatic subject in "Comus," and likewise of his narrative rhythm--and of his relation to the "body" of European literature--in "Lycidas." Thereafter the twelve books of Paradise Lost must themselves supply our form, then read as the (anxious) narrative of concern, or the aristocratic (retro-) epic of defeat, and the domestic (proto-) novel of (re-)beginnings. The concerns are: how to be happy, how to live, how the world came into the world as world and as earth (as a primeval basis for "foundation epic"), the autonomy and potentiality of man (and that as compared to the experience of the woman), the invention of the absolutist state and the bureaucratization of power (parabolically the kingship of God and the princedom of Satan), the Renaissance extensions of the dominion of man’s mind and habitus, the mechano-materialist-experimentalist annexation of the physical and causal orders (as a kind of colonization of the future), the loneliness or unhappy consciousness of the Cartesian subject, and the social burden of bourgeois marriage (as the telos of much novelistic narrative). The epics form a circle: the foundation epic, which may fail to contain the rebellion episode; the strife or siege epic, but it may fail to contain the raid episode; the quest epic, which may fail to contain the research episode; and the wisdom epic, which may fail to contain the survey episode, and which therefore leads back to the foundation epic. Miltonic combinations cutting across the four quarters of the circle produce the vectors of temptation, experiment, colonization, campaign, and creation. We will ask if built into this anatomy of epic, and into its outgrowing of forms, there is also the supercession of epic itself. Yet as we would not cut across the circle prematurely, and as the twelve books of the poem must necessarily supply our form seriatim and longitudinally, we will also be asking how Milton conceived of history in relation to salvation; or, in less exalted terms, how to produce a single longish term paper.

  • ENRN 981 Renaissance: Word and Image

    1100-1215 TR - CLARK G054

    Instructor: Daniel Kinney

    Taking Renaissance comparisons of arts as a principal point of departure, we will survey the verbal and visual preoccupations of Early Modern Europe and the often tense dialogues between them in the realms of instruction, invention, demonstration, and credal debate. We will study a range of text-image encounters from Petrarch to Spenser to Shakespeare to Herbert and Milton, reckoning with emblematics and other symbolic conventions as they inform reckonings with texts. Course requirements: lively participation including weekly email responses, a class presentation, and a final exam.

Restoration & Eighteenth Century Literature

  • ENEC 850 The Eighteenth Century Novel

    1530-1645 MW - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Cynthia Wall

    Other than that they are (mostly) long to very long prose fiction narratives, eighteenth-century English novels have little in common formally, though arguably much in common conceptually and historically. From Bunyan’s allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress, through Haywood’s amatory fiction, Defoe’s circling first-person narratives, the epistolary drama of Richardson, the epic comedy of Fielding, the digressions of Sterne, to the gothic’s labyrinths, each new instance defines itself differently, and none bears much similarity to the nineteenth-century inheritors. We will look at the historical, cultural, and literary conditions that produced this peculiar stuff, and at the legacy of criticism from Samuel Johnson to the present that tries to make sense of it all. Participation, short analytical commentaries, two 10-page papers, presentations on criticism and culture, and a take-home exam (due the last day of class).

Nineteenth Century British Literature

  • ENNC 857 The Greater Lyric

    1400-1515 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    The greater modern lyric, that is: the lengthened genre of exploratory verse meditation which literary history has associated chiefly with the Romantic period but whose roots clutch at antique forms of ode, psalm, and elegy, and whose offshoots burgeon still in poetry by our contemporaries. A couple of weeks apiece with 17th- and 18th-century generic heralds and with 20th-century pursuivants will frame our central inquiry into the fortunes of the greater lyric from the 1790s to the 1890s. Major figures will include Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne; expect side trips to visit the Brownings, the Rossettis, and the Americans, among others. Along the way we'll practice the close-reading arts of tropic and metric analysis, always with a view to how the the forward momentum of career-defining poems has, under increasingly secular conditions, performed interpretations of increasingly constrained human time. In essay assignments of varying scope you'll cultivate an interest in creative impediment, poetic breakthrough, and what the relation between the two may show about more than literary history. Fat anthologies you already own will probably serve daily needs, with raids as needed on websites you'll readily discover. I'll commend to you right here Stephen Adams' prosody handbook Poetic Designs, which will be on order at the bookstore.

  • ENNC 883 Narrative Theory & Life Writing

    1530-1645 TR - WILSON 141B
    cross-listed with ENCR 883

    Instructor: Alison Booth

  • ENNC 981 Austen & Brontë

    0930-1200 F - Location TBA

    Instructor: Karen Chase

    "Reader, I married him." There's this, yes, but also much more. We will be
    concerned with the lives, times and, above all, the works of these two
    great writers. The course will examine a range of texts, from juvenilia to
    mature fiction, paying particular attention to issues of gender, social
    representation, narrative form, and cultural reception. Re-read Pride and
    Prejudice     over the summer since I will presume that everyone knows it well.
    I intend to omit it from the reading list so that we can become as familiar
    with some other works as we are with this most famous of them all. Apart
    from the fictions themselves our conversations will consider biography,
    social and cultural history, and literary criticism. I have high
    expectations for committed conversation. Don't take this class if you are a
    determined wall-flower.

Modern & Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 817 Disability Studies

    1700-1815 MW - BRYAN 312
    cross-listed with ENMC 817

    Instructor: Christopher Krentz

    From Shakespeare's Richard III to Melville's Ahab, from Rushdie's cracking
    Saleem to Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in Rain Man, our literature and culture contain many central figures of disability. Yet scholars have only recently begun to explore such complex representations of physical difference. This course will provide an introduction to the newly emergent, interdisciplinary field of disability studies. We will examine a variety of creative works from the last two centuries that deal with physical difference. I'm still developing the syllabus, but in response to student requests our readings will include American literature from the South (by Faulkner, McCullers, and O'Connor) and postcolonial literature (by authors like Rushdie or Coetzee). We also may investigate short fiction by Hawthorne, Twain, Steinbeck, and Carver; novels such as Shelley's Frankenstein and Morrison's Sula; autobiographical writings like Nancy Mairs' Waist-High in the World and Simi Linton's My Body Politic; and films such as Freaks, Gattaca, and Murderball. To frame our discussions, we will read pioneering critics in disability studies like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis, Shelley Tremain, Michael Bérubé, and Ato Quayson, who in turn extend and revise such classic theorists as Fiedler, Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and Rich. Among other topics, I expect to consider the meanings that "disability" and "normality" assume in these texts; the ways that narratives depend on disability to advance their plots; what disability reveals about identity formation, including social constructivist versus essentialist models; how disability complicates and enhances our understanding of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, colonialism, and power structures; disability and passing; controversies surrounding medicine and cures; disability's relation to such pressing concerns as cloning, genetic engineering, war, and euthanasia; physical versus cognitive disabilities; and disability pride, anger, and activism. This class should give you a good sense of some current theoretical debates as well as fresh perspectives on canonical literature, culture, and issues of social justice.

    Requirements: periodic e-mail responses; an oral presentation; a short paper; a longer seminar paper, and a take-home final exam.

  • ENMC 840 Twentieth Century Drama

    1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 312
    cross-listed with ENGN 840

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This course surveys the major plays of major innovators of the twentieth century, dipping into the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, in the United States and abroad. After anchoring our journey in realism, we will focus on the various responses to and reactions against realism throughout the period and examine the political and aesthetic implications of these innovations to dramatic form. We will hear the new voices that begin to emerge in the 1960s, of African Americans, women, ethnic Americans, post-colonial playwrights, among others. We will examine the relationship between text and performance, and ponder how this relationship changes throughout the period. We will conduct a survey of historical and contemporary theater theorists, and other theorists whose works are applicable to theater.

  • ENMC 882 James & Conrad

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Michael Levenson

    The late novels of Henry James and the early and middle fiction of Joseph Conrad give the content – and provocation – of the course.  Within the bounds of a decade, these two novelists composed complex work of ongoing critical interest, revised central assumptions of novelistic structure, and engaged deeply with the conditions of their modernity.  Transformations in narrative form (and in narrative theory) will offer one broad area of conversation; another wide zone of concern will be mapped by questions of nihilism and religious belief, politics and empire, masculinity and femininity, individualism and collectivity.  Among the novels to be considered are The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove,  The Golden Bowl, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and Nostromo.

  • ENMC 983 The Global South

    1700-1930 T - BRYAN 233

    Instructor: Eric Lott

    Following the lead of the “new southern studies,” this course will remap the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We’ll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing political economy (antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South: that low-wage losing player in today’s international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a tall order, and we’ll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I’d like to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the “mind” of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South’s various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the “Spanish-American War,” U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, Faulkner’s influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae’s transformation of American R&B, Derek Walcott’s Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright’s reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965 Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, “Toyotization” in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and cultural influence of Wal-Mart).

American Literature to 1900

  • ENAM 572 American Film

    1700-1815 MW - CABELL 242

    Instructor: Jennifer Wicke

    This course surveys key works of American film and links them with critical methods and critical debates that place these films in the context of cultural studies, American studies, film theory, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global studies. More than a survey or a history of 20th century American film, the class intends to provide graduate students with an overview of the debates and questions that inform the study and teaching of film within English departments, tracing their relation to informing issues of mass culture and mediation, vernaculars and value, the circulation and reception of culture, aesthetic form and the ideologies of art, the notion of cultural borders and boundaries, and the articulation of American "identity" in and through its cinema. Filmmakers include D.W. Griffith, Alice Guy-Blache, Dorothy Arzner, Oscar Micheaux, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Ida Lupino, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Maya Deren, Melvin Van Peebles, Francis Ford Coppola, Gregory Nava, Susan Seidelman, Martin Scorsese and Ang Lee, among others. Critics and theorists include Miriam Hansen, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Jane Gaines, Stuart Hall, Richard Slotkin, Jan Radway, Constance Penley, Paul Smith, Gil Perez and others. Students will encounter films that have demarcated particularly resonant cultural or critical moments or transitions, and will develop a critical "dossier" on that current conversations that have emerged in the nexus of important film artifacts with cultural studies, critical theory, and a globalized understanding of the dissemination of U.S. film.

  • ENAM 810 Early American Literature

    TBA

    Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

    This course has two main goals:  to provide a broad survey of literature written in English from the vantage of North America, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries; and to provide an introduction to the current critical debates in early American literary studies.  In our primary readings, we will range across historical periods and genres, including accounts of early contact and discovery, narratives of captivity and enslavement, sermons, poems, pamphlets, political documents, travel writing, essays, autobiographies, and novels.  We will give particular attention to descriptions of the New World imperial project; the writing of American colonial selves; the rhetoric of the Revolution; and the fictions of the early Republic, in all their gothic weirdness.  While we consider each primary reading in its immediate historical context, it will also be our concern to trace the development—in conversation with current criticism—of the diverse forms and modes of expression upon which subsequent U.S. writers have drawn.  Fundamentally, in other words, this is a course in the origin myths of U.S. culture.  At what point can we identify distinctively American literary registers, styles, genres—and what is it that makes them “American”?  How do the politics of tradition-building dovetail with the politics of nation-building?  If we get rid of the “Puritan origins” mythos, what are we putting in its place?  What must early American studies learn from postcolonial studies, and how can we do it without wholesale appropriation?  And so on.  Major authors likely will include Harriot, John Smith, Bradford, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Taylor, Kemble Knight, Cooke, Edwards, Paine, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, Equiano, Franklin, Occom, Foster, Rowson, Tyler, and Brockden Brown.  Requirements include reading a lot, writing occasional short reading responses, occasionally co-leading class discussion, designing an annotated syllabus for an undergraduate survey course, and writing a proposal for an independent research project based on the amazing holdings in the Small Special Collections Library.

  • ENAM 817 Disability Studies

    1700-1815 MW - BRYAN 312

    cross-listed with ENMC 817

    Instructor: Christopher Krentz

    From Shakespeare's Richard III to Melville's Ahab, from Rushdie's cracking
    Saleem to Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in Rain Man, our literature and culture contain many central figures of disability. Yet scholars have only recently begun to explore such complex representations of physical difference. This course will provide an introduction to the newly emergent, interdisciplinary field of disability studies. We will examine a variety of creative works from the last two centuries that deal with physical difference. I'm still developing the syllabus, but in response to student requests our readings will include American literature from the South (by Faulkner, McCullers, and O'Connor) and postcolonial literature (by authors like Rushdie or Coetzee). We also may investigate short fiction by Hawthorne, Twain, Steinbeck, and Carver; novels such as Shelley's Frankenstein and Morrison's Sula; autobiographical writings like Nancy Mairs' Waist-High in the World and Simi Linton's My Body Politic; and films such as Freaks, Gattaca, and Murderball. To frame our discussions, we will read pioneering critics in disability studies like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis, Shelley Tremain, Michael Bérubé, and Ato Quayson, who in turn extend and revise such classic theorists as Fiedler, Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and Rich. Among other topics, I expect to consider the meanings that "disability" and "normality" assume in these texts; the ways that narratives depend on disability to advance their plots; what disability reveals about identity formation, including social constructivist versus essentialist models; how disability complicates and enhances our understanding of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, colonialism, and power structures; disability and passing; controversies surrounding medicine and cures; disability's relation to such pressing concerns as cloning, genetic engineering, war, and euthanasia; physical versus cognitive disabilities; and disability pride, anger, and activism. This class should give you a good sense of some current theoretical debates as well as fresh perspectives on canonical literature, culture, and issues of social justice.

    Requirements: periodic e-mail responses; an oral presentation; a short paper; a longer seminar paper, and a take-home final exam.

  • ENAM 981 Whitman & Dickinson

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 334

    Instructor: Stephen Cushman

    We will read all the verse written by these two colossi and much of their prose (Whitman's prefaces, essays, memoirs; Dickinson's letters). For other resources we can draw on the extensive collection of Whitman manuscripts here in Special Collections, as well as on the electronic archives of each poet's work. All textual and contextual matters will be fair game; the time we devote to any particular matter will reflect the interests of the members of the seminar.

    Prerequisite: basic knowledge of poetic form, available in any one of a number of manuals, guides, or handbooks. For the first class please read and bring with you Emerson's essay "The Poet" (in any edition) and Whitman's Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass.

  • ENAM 983 The Global South

    1700-1930 T - BRYAN 233

    cross-listed with ENMC 983

    Instructor: Eric Lott

    Following the lead of the “new southern studies,” this course will remap the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We’ll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing political economy (antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South: that low-wage losing player in today’s international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a tall order, and we’ll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I’d like to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the “mind” of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South’s various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the “Spanish-American War,” U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, Faulkner’s influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae’s transformation of American R&B, Derek Walcott’s Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright’s reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965 Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, “Toyotization” in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and cultural influence of Wal-Mart).

Genre Studies

  • ENGN 840 Twentieth Century Drama

    1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 312

    cross-listed with ENMC 840

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This course surveys the major plays of major innovators of the twentieth century, dipping into the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, in the United States and abroad. After anchoring our journey in realism, we will focus on the various responses to and reactions against realism throughout the period and examine the political and aesthetic implications of these innovations to dramatic form. We will hear the new voices that begin to emerge in the 1960s, of African Americans, women, ethnic Americans, post-colonial playwrights, among others. We will examine the relationship between text and performance, and ponder how this relationship changes throughout the period. We will conduct a survey of historical and contemporary theater theorists, and other theorists whose works are applicable to theater.

Criticism

  • ENCR 562 History of Criticism

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Jost

    Even bus tours have their pleasures and rewards: one may learn the lay of a new land and enjoy sites one may be unable to revisit in the immediate future. More importantly, we intellectual inhabitants of our highly-theorized world might benefit from being helped to discover our roots in Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Horace and Virgil, the Medieval “arts of discourse” and the empirical method of Hume, up through Romantic neo-Platonism, Nietzschean rhetoric, and 20c “neo-Aristotelianism.” This course uses a clear heuristic of four philosophical approaches to locate and explain the intellectual traditions standing behind contemporary literary theory and criticism. Formerly a lecture course, it is now half-lecture, half-discussion as we move through primary and secondary readings. Our texts are Habib, A History of Literary Criticism; and The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Three papers.

  • ENCR 801 Introduction to Literary Research, section 0001

    0900-1200 MTWRF and 1400-1700 MTWRF - Locations TBA

    Instructor: David Vander Meulen

  • ENCR 801 Introduction to Literary Research, section 0002

    1400-1700 MTWRF - Location TBA

    Instructor: David Vander Meulen

  • ENCR 861 Literary & Critical Theory

    1530-1645 MW - BRYAN 332

    Instructor: David Golumbia

    This course provides an introductory survey of issues and figures in contemporary literary and critical theory (roughly from 1960 to the present day), with particular attention paid to topics that are of current interest to literary scholars. Theories to be covered including structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and historicism, among others. We will read texts by writers such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Hortense Spillers, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Stuart Hall, Luce Irigaray, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Gilroy, Fredric Jameson, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others. Students will be expected to prepare class exercises and response papers addressing the theoretical readings, and to write a final paper that deploys theoretical material in the service of interpreting literary and/or cultural texts of the student's choice. No prior background in literary or critical theory is assumed, although at least some familiarity with one or more of the perspectives covered will certainly prove helpful.

  • ENCR 867 Feminist Theory

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Susan Fraiman

    An introduction to American feminist theory, considered in relation to cultural texts from nineteenth-century novels to contemporary movies.  In addition to work in such subfields as transnational feminism and feminist cultural studies, we will also read essays spawned by feminist theory in the areas of queer and film studies.  Most units juxtapose older (late 70s/early 80s) foundational texts with more recent scholarship building on and revising these; others assemble pieces suggesting divergent feminist approaches or positions.  The idea is to trace the development of thinking about gender, sexuality, and culture over the last three decades, to identify major concerns and delve into formative debates.  Primary texts will be engaged in their own right but will serve primarily to launch our exploration of such theoretical topics as the canon and questions of literary value, feminist theory versus queer theory, the uses/dangers of identity politics, the male/white gaze, epistemologies of the closet, hybrid identities, the gendering of race, and more. Figures likely to appear on our syllabus include Robyn Wiegman, Barbara Smith, Susan Stanford Friedman, Chandra Mohanty, Janice Radway, Sharon Marcus, Laura Mulvey, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, and Ann Cvetkovich.  Requirements: short paper, longer seminar paper, and a final exam.

  • ENCR 883 Narrative Theory & Life Writing

    1530-1645 TR - WILSON 141B

    cross-listed with ENNC 883

    Instructor: Alison Booth

  • ENCR 981 On Power & Postcoloniality

    1700-1815 TR - CABELL 432

    Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty

    What is power? How does it discursively and materially affect our understanding of the critical possibilities of postcoloniality? In Power/Knowledge Foucault makes the claim that "...in a society such as ours...there are manifold relations of power that permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse." This course will evaluate discourses of power based in postcolonial, cultural, and critical theories as they relate to discursive formations of race, class, and gender and their vexed claims to modernity. In addition to instrumentalizing power as pervasive in the production of our epistemes, Foucault also points to the ways in which power as discourse itself forms the constitutive basis of our materiality. The contradictory experiences of modernity written under the sign “postcolonial” arguably contest, as well at times comply with this idea that all resistance is produced within the power-knowledge bind. This course will explore the complex and fraught links between the conceptualization of power within western critical thought, and its reinventions and circumventions within postcolonial theory and literature. Among others, we will examine the tension between Nietzche’s ideas on power as desire and dominance, and the ideas of Kant and Marx that conceive power as rational sovereignty, and capitalized labor respectively. Alongside these thinkers we will also read theorists such as Mohanty, Butler, Hall, Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bhabha, Fanon, Said, and members of the Subaltern Collective whose work is seminal to our thinking on the postcolonial response. Finally, through the interjection of select postcolonial narratives into this list we will explore the difference between power and (dis)empowerment and its relevance to the political investments of postcoloniality as social practice

Special Topics in Literature

  • ENSP 551 Studies in the Short Story

    1530-1800 T - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Deborah Eisenberg

  • ENSP 581 Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, & Freud

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Mark Edmundson

    The course is an introduction to four related thinkers of considerable scope and originality. We'll consider their thoughts on knowledge, interpretation, health, sanity, art and creation. Two or three papers, benignly sadistic quizzes from time to time.

  • ENSP 581 Film Aesthetics

    1100-1215 TR - CLEMONS 201

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Korte

    Beginning with the proposition that there exist uniquely cinematic elements of meaning and structure, the course lays the foundation for "visual thinking" in film--a sensitivity to the aesthetic elements intrinsic to the cinema. The course examines structure, modes of expression and varieties of visual coherence in narrative film. Weekly film screenings (2:00 p.m. Sunday), informal response papers, final examination, final paper (15 pages). Texts: Braudy, Cohen Film Theory and Criticism anthology (Sixth Edition), Lehman: Defining Cinema; selected essays.

  • ENSP 591 Literary Editing & Desktop Publishing

    1830-2100 T - Location TBA

    Instructor: Jeb Livingood

    The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the process of editing a literary journal--everything from screening manuscripts to reviewing books to graphic design--as you assist in the production of Meridian, a nationally-distributed literary magazine. Students give a class presentation, write book reviews, and create a magazine design project using Quark's desktop publishing software, and then publish the project using print-on-demand.

    To apply for the class, write a letter of introduction to Jeb Livingood giving your name, year, phone number, e-mail, and experience with literature (especially creative writing courses and editing or magazine experience). Attach a sample of your writing (3-5 pages of poetry or 6-12 of prose). Please place a print copy of this work Mr. Livingood's faculty mailbox in Bryan 229 or send via e-mail to jsl9z@virginia.edu. Preference will be given to M.F.A. students, but there will be spaces reserved for other graduate students and upper-level undergraduates.

Pedagogy

  • ENPG 885 Literary Surveys

    TBA

    Instructor: Bruce Holsinger

    Individually scheduled presentations/seminars on the teaching of literature at the university level.