Graduate Courses - Fall 2009
Creative Writing
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ENWR 5310 Advanced Poetry Writing
1500-1830 R - BRYAN 334
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.
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ENWR 7310 Advanced Poetry Writing
1400-1630 M - BRYAN 233
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.
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ENWR 7610 Fiction Writing, section 0001
1700-1930 T - BRYAN 233
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Instructor: Christopher Tilghman
A fiction workshop restricted to MFA students.
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ENWR 7610 Fiction Writing, section 0002
1100-1330 W - BRYAN 233
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Instructor: Deborah Eisenberg
This workshop will focus on student work and relevant outside reading assignments. Individual conferences and class discussion of student manuscripts. Manuscript submission and permission of the instructor is required before registering for this course. Submit manuscripts to instructor's mailbox (Bryan 219) and include your name, address, phone number, year and number of course.
Medieval Literature
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ENMD 5010 Introduction to Old English
1200-1250 MWF - BRYAN 328
Instructor: Peter Baker
In this course, open to both undergraduates and graduates, you will learn to read the language of Beowulf—that is, the English language as preserved in sources from around 700 to 1100. After a brief introduction to the language (which is alarming at first glance but much easier to learn than any foreign language), readings will include prose excerpts from historical and religious sources and several verse classics, including The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, and The Wife’s Lament. Work for the course includes bi-weekly quizzes, a brief final exam, and a short paper. This course is a prerequisite for Beowulf, offered in the spring term.
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ENMD 8850 Mapping the Middle Ages
1700-1815 MW - BRYAN 330
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 (late-medieval 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.
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ENMD 9500 Chaucer and Late Medieval Religious Writing
1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 310
Restrictions
Instructor: Bruce Holsinger
Through the lens of Chaucer's religious writings, this seminar will examine the role of devotion, theology, and faith in shaping the literary culture of late medieval England. We'll look both in depth and broadly at a wide variety of religious poetry, prose, and drama from the fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries: religious lyric, biblical drama (the York cycle), hagiography (especially the South English Legendary, a neglected but riveting text), Gospel harmonies, vernacular and bilingual sermons, and many other forms and genres registering the formal and thematic complexity of religious expression in this era. Some time will also be spent on the vernacular writings of the Lollards, a heretical sect inspired by the writings of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, a contemporary of Chaucer's; heresy trials, depositions, records of interrogations, and prison writings will be some of the fare we sample here. The semester will host several leading scholars of Middle English literature as guest lecturers, and participants will be expected to read their work and engage with them during their visits as an integral part of coursework.
Renaissance Literature
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ENRN 8559 Ben Jonson
1400-1515 TR - McLEOD 2008
Instructor: Katharine Maus
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ENRN 9270 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.
Restoration & Eighteenth Century Literature
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ENEC 5559 Orders of Enlightenment
1530-1800 T - McLEOD 2007
Instructor: Brad Pasanek/Michael Wellmon
This course will consider the genealogy of a number of related eighteenth-century concepts: system, order, encyclopedia. To what extent might we understand Enlightenment as itself an organizing project? Our goal is to trace the intersections of order, system, and mediation within the Enlightenment, understood as both an historical period and a particular way of knowing. We will pay special attention to particular forms of order, including taxonomy, theodicy, economy, the novel, dictionaries and encyclopedias. Readings from Diderot and D’Alembert, Linnaeus, Sterne, Goethe, Samuel Johnson, A. von Humboldt, Grimm, Friedrich Schlegel, Pope and Leibniz. No prerequisites. Course requirements include extensive reading assignments, a formal in-class presentation and a research paper.
Nineteenth Century British Literature
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ENNC 8500 Poetry in the Age of Industrial Printing
1400-1515 MW - CABELL B030
Instructor: Andrew Stauffer
How did nineteenth-century poetry make its way within the material horizons created by the industrial evolution of print? Considering topics such as the periodical press, illustration and decoration, paper and bindings, the morphology of the book, and the history of the book trade, we will focus on Romantic and Victorian poetry as it appeared and circulated in the various venues and formats of the age. Issues of book history and bibliography will be at the fore, requiring direct examination of nineteenth-century materials in the library as well as interaction with digital surrogates. We will also be interested in poetry’s forms, themes, genres, and subjects as these things were involved with the scenes of its production and reception. Requirements: two bibliographical studies, some in-class exercises, and a final 15-25 page essay with a substantial book-historical component.
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ENNC 8500 Charles Dickens
0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 312
Instructor: Karen Chase
The career of Charles Dickens, from its early to its later stages,
establishes the rich wide field of our seminar. The reading is not yet
certain, but we will study exemplary novels - such as Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations - alongside some of the author's shorter works and important non-fiction writings. We might examine films of some novels as a way of considering the after-history of the career, and we will consistently engage notable critical approaches to Dickens, both classic and contemporary. The goal of the course is to stage an ambitious
encounter with a writer still known as ‘the Inimitable,' and to prepare
students to enter the ongoing scholarly conversation provoked by his work.
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ENNC 9500 The Strain of Keats
1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 332
Instructor: Herbert Tucker
“Happy melodist, unwearied, / For ever piping songs for ever new.” The toll it took to pay that long-winded piper will furnish our theme: the Keatsian strain, in a double sense comprising both a melodic pitch aimed through greedy ears at the whole imaginative sensorium and a burden carried forward, with ever heavier feet, across the 19th century by the gifted successors Keats’s muse had in thrall. We’ll cram Keats for four weeks, then advance through Tennyson and a brush with the Brownings to the Spasmodist phenomenon of the 1850s, with special attention to its outriders Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman. Then the Pre-Raphaelites as Post-Keatsians: the Rossettis and Morris, with that Jesuit scapegrace Hopkins in time for Thanksgiving. The fin de siècle will round us off with poetry by Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, and the latter’s Gothic ekphrastics in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Students will make at least one presentation to the seminar; several shorter papers will serve as etudes towards a major paper that close-reads as though literary history depended on it.
Modern & Contemporary Literature
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ENMC 8559 American Vernacular Modernisms
1530-1645 TR - CABELL 215
Instructor: Jennifer Wicke
This graduate course explores American modernism as a uniquely “vernacular” phenomenon, one that is bound up in the multiple voices, common tongues, dialects and material idiolects that swirl around a fragmented vox populi. The course will engage with pivotal literary works seen through the lens of the vernacular culture that surrounds and pervades them, with special attention paid to James, Cather, Anderson, Toomer, Hemingway, Hurston and especially Faulkner. Our parallel track will follow what Miriam Hansen describes as artifacts of “vernacular modernism,” particularly film, in the vernacular idioms of D.W. Griffith, Alice Guy-Blache, Oscar Micheaux and Dorothy Arzner. Tracing an arc that starts with the parrot’s shriek in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and ends with the “graphophone” playing in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the course will offer a thorough survey of an inflected and divergent American modernism that is literary, popular, and mass mediated, along with exposure to the key critical questions -- from North, Wald, Benn Michaels, Seltzer, Lowe, Sollers and others -- that are shaping the understanding of a modernist American vernacular.
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ENMC 8559 Joyce's Ulysses and the Poetry of T. S. Eliot
1530-1645 MW - Location TBA
Instructor: Michael Levenson
A study of High Modernism by way of two prominent, though strikingly different, examples: one, a formidable text, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, an acknowledged masterwork of the movement, and the other, T.S. Eliot’s long and complex career in poetry, criticism and the drama. The convergence and also the dissonance of these examples will generate foundational questions concerning the definition of Modernism and Modernity.
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ENMC 9500 Studies in Modern/Contemporary Literature: Modern Forms
1700-1815 TR - BRYAN 312
Instructor: Jerome McGann
Although Literary Modernism often saw itself as a break with the literary inheritance of the previous century, some of its most characteristic features appear, often in even wilder forms, in works written 30, 40, or even 50 years earlier. This course will be examining various works--they range from George Meredith at one end to Flann O'Brien at the other--to show these different kinds of changes.
American Literature to 1900
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ENAM 8559 Formations of U.S. Cultural Studies
1530-1800 R - CABELL 225
Instructor: Eric Lott
This course plays double with the “formations” of its title: it will examine several key cultural and social formations in the unfolding of the United States since the Revolution (possibilities include antebellum urbanism, post-bellum class war, the Popular Front, the Cold War, and the 1970s) in the context of notable debates in and constellations of Americanist cultural studies scholarship, so serving as an advanced introduction to both. We’ll study primary texts of many kinds (literary, cinematic, musical, and more) as well as scholarship from several disciplines; ultimately it will be our business to explore the historical and institutional links between American Studies and cultural studies, to think about where key debates in the field may be tending in the years ahead, and to develop an engagement with American Studies professional practices - conferences, lectures, panels, journals - in which students will be encouraged to begin to participate.
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ENAM 9500 Mark Twain in His Times
1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 332
Instructor: Stephen Railton
We'll look closely at Samuel Clemens' various performances as "Mark Twain," from his major literary works to his live performances as an entertainer. Because this is a seminar, students will help determine the topics of our discussions, but one particular focus will be on what "Mark Twain" and "America" said about each other, and what that reveals about the processes by which identities -- personal and cultural, racial and national -- are constructed.
In addition to leading a class and writing a seminar essay, students will be expected to work together with each other and with the materials in the library's Barrett Collection to create an exhibit that will be displayed in Special Collections during 2010, the centennial of Clemens' death.
Criticism
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ENCR 5650 Books as Physical Objects
1100-1215 MW - Byrd Rm, Harrison-Small Special Collections Library
Instructor: David Vander Meulen
We know the past chiefly through artifacts that survive, and books are among the most common of these objects. Besides conveying a text, each book also contains evidence of the circumstances of its manufacture. In considering what questions to ask of these mute objects, this course might be considered the "archaeology of printing"--that is, the identification, description, and interpretation of printed artifacts surviving from the past five centuries, as well as exploration of the critical theory that lies behind such an approach to texts. With attention to production processes, including the operation of the hand press, it will investigate ways of analyzing elements such as paper, typography, illustrations, binding, and organization of the constituent sections of a book. The course will explore how a text is inevitably affected by the material conditions of its production and how an understanding of the physical processes by which it was formed can aid historical research in a variety of disciplines, not only those that treat verbal texts but also those that deal with printed music and works of visual art. The class will draw extensively on the holdings of the University Library's Special Collections Department, as well as on its Hinman Collator (an early version of the one at the CIA). Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
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ENCR 8100 Introduction to Literary Research, section 0001
0900-1200 MTWRF - Location TBA
Instructor: Gordon Braden
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ENCR 8100 Introduction to Literary Research, section 0002
1300-1430 MTWRF - Location TBA
Instructor: Gordon Braden
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ENCR 8610 Modern Literary & Critical Theory
1530-1645 MW - McLEOD 2007
Instructor: David Golumbia
This course provides an advanced introduction to issues and topics in contemporary literary and critical theory, with particular attention paid to topics that are of current interest to literary scholars. Perspectives to be covered include structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and new historicism, among others. We will read texts by writers including some or all of Derrida, Spivak, Butler, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Spillers, Althusser, Hall, Bhabha, and 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. Intended for PhD students, but some MA students are admitted with instructor's permission.
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ENCR 9500 Studies in Philosophy and Literature
1530-1645 TR - CABELL 340
Instructor: Walter Jost
Throughout the history of literary theory and criticism the term 'rhetoric' has periodically gained prominence and sometimes even 'architectonic' status, much as it has done over the past several decades in much American and European thought. Not surprisingly "rhetoric" is intrinsically ambiguous and shifty because it is ineluctably wedded to different approaches to philosophy, literature and language. This course studies a few of the more salient problems in what has been called "the linguistic turn" in philosophy and literature. We will be particularly interested in the possibilities of a serious and principled pluralism regarding a variety of matters, among them "skepticism," the many varieties of contemporary literary/ cultural theory and criticism, and possibilities for the ethical reading of literature. We consider various thinkers, among them Aristotle and Plato, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Dewey, Derrida, and others.
Special Topics in Literature
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ENSP 5559 Studies in the Short Story
1530-1800 T - BRYAN 334
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Instructor: Deborah Eisenberg
In this course, we will closely read a selection of short stories, noting structure and form as it relates to the meaning of the story, and the choices writers make with regard to language and image.
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ENSP 5810 Film Aesthetics
1100-1215 TR - CABELL 132
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.
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ENSP 5910 Literary Editing & Desktop Publishing
1830-2100 T - BRYAN 203
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 a book review, 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 MFA students, but there will be spaces reserved for other graduate students and upper-level undergraduates.