Creative Writing

  • ENWR 5310 Advanced Poetry Writing

    0200-0430pm T - Cabell 241

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Rita Dove

    A weekly 2.5 hour class for students with some prior workshop experience in writing and critiquing poetry. Emphasis is on students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Final poetry portfolio required. ADMISSION BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY. Sample of student work (6-8 poems) to be submitted no later than Friday, January 15 to Ms. Dove's mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall; include a cover sheet with name, year, email address, telephone number, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting.

  • ENWR 5610 Advanced Fiction Writing
    0330-0600pm R - Bryan 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casey

    In this advanced fiction workshop we will continue practice in the art and craft of writing fiction.

  • ENWR 7310 Advanced Poetry Writing for the MFA

    0200-0430pm M - Bryan 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Rita Dove

    A weekly 2-1/2 hour advanced poetry writing workshop. Periodic individual conferences with the instructor, relevant outside reading, writing assignments, and a final portfolio of poems will be required. Permission of the instructor required before registering for this course.

  • ENWR 7610 MFA Fiction Workshop, section 0001

    0330-0600pm T - Bryan 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Ann Beattie

    Description unavailable.

  • ENWR 7610 MFA Fiction Workshop, section 0002

    0330-0600pm W - Bryan 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casey

    A fiction-writing workshop for MFA candidates.

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 8500 Violence in Theater and Theory

    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell 118
    Cross-listed with ENRN 8500

    Instructor: John Parker

    To read modern theories of violence together with premodern plays, especially in English, as a way of tracking (dis)continuities between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Theorists will include Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, and Girard, plus a few theologians on atonement; drama (or "dramatic" texts) from the New Testament, Seneca, Prudentius, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman and Webster, along with some anonymous cycle and saints plays.

  • ENMD 9500 Romance of Consent

    1230-0145pm TR - McLeod 2008
    Cross-listed with ENRN 9500

    Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

    This is a course in early English romance from the thirteenth to the
    sixteenth centuries -- King Horn to Shakespeare. The poems and plays chosen for the seminar are loosely related to each other by topoi: commonplaces and conventions in plot, diction, rhetorical device, motive, character, and theme. We will consider how these common elements work to offer the audience (of whatever level of literacy) a way of thinking about ideas, social structures, and political constitutions. Some goals for the course: to learn the language and poetry of Middle English romance; to gain facility in the comparison of literary texts and in the analysis of form at the
    levels of genre, topos, and rhetorical ornament; to develop a toolbox of
    useful critical strategies including arguments from speech act, habitus,
    philology, the passions, legal history, ritual, rhetoric, and the medieval
    and early modern art of memory; to develop a sophisticated vocabulary and
    method for treating the politics and philosophical contentions of fiction.

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 8500 Renaissance Word and Image

    1100am-1215pm TR - Cabell 331

    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.

  • ENRN 8500 Violence in Theater and Theory

    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell 118
    Cross-listed with ENMD 8500

    John Parker

    To read modern theories of violence together with premodern plays, especially in English, as a way of tracking (dis)continuities between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Theorists will include Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, and Girard, plus a few theologians on atonement; drama (or "dramatic" texts) from the New Testament, Seneca, Prudentius, Kyd, Shakespeare, Chapman and Webster, along with some anonymous cycle and saints plays.

  • ENRN 9500 Experimental Fictions 1516-1621

    0930-1045am TR - Randall 212

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    In a sense all early modern prose fiction is experimental fiction; the (mainly Elizabethan) works we’ll be exploring in this seminar often seem to be challenging the limits of available genres and discourses, and I’ll be emphasizing in particular the way that they interrogate or reimagine the protocols and possibilities of romance.  In the course of the semester we’ll think about the relationship between narratives of desire and the desire for narrative; about the texts’ inscription, solicitation and gendering of their own audiences; about some complicated relationships between didacticism and “proto-realism.” Some questions we’ll be considering: how do our authors explore and exploit the possibilities of the new print medium?  In what new ways do these prose fictions figure forth gender and social class?  What kind of dialogue(s) do they enter into with non-prosaic narratives (and works of non-fictional prose) of the late 16th and early 17th century?  And how might we (can we? should we?) locate these works with respect to current critical histories of “the origins of the English novel”?

    Tentative List of Readings:  Sir Thomas More, Utopia; William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, George Gascoigne, Adventures of Master F.J; John Lyly, Euphues; Barnabe Riche, His Farewell to Military Profession; Philip Sidney, New Arcadia; Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde; Robert Greene, Pandosto; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury....Mary Wroth, Urania (selections) with perhaps some additional curiosities thrown in.  Our Weird Tales will be supplemented by and read in dialogue with a selection of lively historical/critical/theoretical readings.

    Course requirements: thoughtful participation in discussion, an oral presentation, a portfolio of regular e-mail responses to the readings, a 20 page paper.

  • ENRN 9500 Romance of Consent

    1230-0145pm TR - McLeod 2008
    Cross-listed with ENMD 9500

    Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

    This is a course in early English romance from the thirteenth to the
    sixteenth centuries -- King Horn to Shakespeare. The poems and plays chosen for the seminar are loosely related to each other by topoi: commonplaces and conventions in plot, diction, rhetorical device, motive, character, and theme. We will consider how these common elements work to offer the audience (of whatever level of literacy) a way of thinking about ideas, social structures, and political constitutions. Some goals for the course: to learn the language and poetry of Middle English romance; to gain facility in the comparison of literary texts and in the analysis of form at the
    levels of genre, topos, and rhetorical ornament; to develop a toolbox of
    useful critical strategies including arguments from speech act, habitus,
    philology, the passions, legal history, ritual, rhetoric, and the medieval
    and early modern art of memory; to develop a sophisticated vocabulary and
    method for treating the politics and philosophical contentions of fiction.

Restoration and 18th-Century Literature

  • ENEC 9500 Grub Street

    0200-0315pm MW - Bryan 334

    Instructor: J. Paul Hunter

    This seminar will concentrate for the first half of the term on the traditional canonical writers that have, since the mid-18th century, been considered “representative” and “the best.”.We’ll read in detail Dryden’s “MacFlecknoe,” Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and Pope’s Dunciad Variorum—all of which set up Manichean categories separating (in the author’s view) the sheep from the goats. The second half of the term, we’ll read the goats, and I’ll ask each member of the seminar to become a quick expert on one of the Grub Street (in its broad professional as well as geographical and cultural sense) “hacks” or “dunces.’

    We’ll do a lot of close reading throughout and put a lot of emphasis on locating cultural values and sorting out the processes of, well, sorting out. We’ll spend some time on ideas of canonization and standards of acceptance or value, and a fair amount of the reading early on will be on questions surrounding canonization itself. But we’ll also close read the “neglected” authors (though some of them are now “canonized” or even in vogue (Defoe and Haywood, for example), and others have been “rehabilitated” to some extent.

    Lots of oral reports on works we won’t all read together. A short writing exercise early on, and the traditional seminar paper at the end. Most of the reading will be from EEBO and ECCO, though I will ask all students to buy basic copies of the Dryden, Swift, and Pope texts. Auditors in addition to enrolled students are welcome as long as they do the basic reading and reports (but not the papers), and as long as there is room.

19th-Century British Literature

  • ENNC 8110 The Romantic Period

    0330-0445pm MW - Cabell B020

    Instructor: Paul Cantor

    A survey of British Romanticism, focusing on the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats and the critique of Romanticism developed in the prose fiction of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. Among the topics to be considered will be the Romantic redefinition of heroism and the tragic, the idea of the sublime, the development of Romantic myth, reactions to the French Revolution and in general the political context of Romanticism, the nature of Romantic irony, and Romantic orientalism and views of empire. One fifteen-page paper and a final examination.

  • ENNC 9500 George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

    0200-0315pm TR - Cabell 235

    Instructor: Stephen Arata

    We will devote most of our time to close consideration of seven novels, three by George Eliot—Adam Bede (1859), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876)—and four by Thomas Hardy—The Return of the Native (1878), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). A secondary goal of the course will be to read as widely as we can in the theory of the novel. Our source book for that endeavor will be Michael McKeon’s critical anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000). Course requirements will include a couple of relatively short bibliographical projects and one relatively long (ca. 20-25 pp) seminar essay.

Modern and Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 9500 Henry James and Joseph Conrad

    1230-0145pm TR - Wilson 141A

    Instructor: Michael Levenson

    The late novels of Henry James and the early / middle fiction of Joseph Conrad give the content - and provocation - of the course. Within the bounds of a single decade, these two novelists produced complex work of ongoing critical interest, revised central assumptions of novelistic structure, and engaged deeply with the conditions of their modernity. Our concerns will include problems in narratology alongside questions of nihilism and religious belief, politics and empire, masculinity and femininity, individualism and collectivity. Among the novels to be considered are The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, Lord Jim, and Nostromo.

  • ENMC 9500 Ethnic American Fiction

    1100am-1215pm TR - McLeod 2008
    Cross-listed with ENAM 9500

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    This course in ethnic American literature will focus on the interethnic nature of the contemporary literary imagination. In the wake of the globalizing changes that have made the U.S. a multi-diasporic society, contemporary fiction is increasingly animated by an urge toward encounter across multiple ethnic differences. Many texts evoke a complex, ironic sense of participation in a hybridized culture despite persistent failures of social justice and an ongoing need for reparative cross-ethnic dialogue. This course will consider how an interethnic impulse shapes contemporary fiction, from its deepest psychic structures and literary ambitions; to its social vision and conceptions of history and identity; to its patterns of literary borrowing and influence; to its competing tonalities of wariness and hope, ambivalence and desire; to aspects of its aesthetic form--including narrative structures, plots, characterizations, and uses of language(s).

    Writers may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Gus Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Lore Segal, Galina Vromen, Jiro Adachi, Louise Erdrich, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidwha, and Chang-Rae Lee. We will also read theorists of race, ethnicity, globalization, and cultural hybridity. Students are expected to be very active class participants; to write several brief compositions, a short paper, and a long paper; and with a partner or group, to lead a class discussion.

American Literature to 1800

  • ENAM 8559 Early Americas Studies

    0930-1045am TR - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Anna Brickhouse

    This course will explore a wide range of pre-1800 literature from and about the Americas, from writings by conquistadors and Puritans through the eighteenth-century rise of the novel. Topics will include empire and colonialism; borderlands and contact zones; slavery and revolution; literature’s uses of history and history’s uses of literature; the problem of (and the proposed solutions for) accessing indigenous perspectives in histories written by the colonizers; and the emergence of transatlantic literary cultures.

  • ENAM 8559 American Vernacular Modernism

    0600-0845pm W - Bryan 334

    Instructor: Jennifer Wicke

    This graduate seminar explores American modernism as a uniquely “vernacular” phenomenon, one that is bound up in the use of 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 Henry James, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston and especially to William Faulkner.  Our parallel track will follow what Miriam Hansen describes as artifacts of “vernacular modernism,” a modernist experimentalism that appears in a non-literary form, particularly film, in exploring 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 seminar 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—in essays by North, Wald, Benn Michaels, Seltzer, Lowe, Sollers and others-- that are shaping the understanding of a modernist American vernacular in two senses:  the use of heretofore marginalized vernaculars, languages, and subjects to create American modernism, and the presence of a “home-made” modernist vernacular above and beyond the page.  Graduate students will get rich background in 20th century American literary and cultural studies across multiple genres, and will develop critical frameworks for assessing this period and its transnational elements in particular.  Requirements include a presentation, regular participation, and a project that places a vernacular artifact, author, or literary work into the context of multiple voicing and mediation.

  • ENAM 9500 The Harlem Renaissance

    0200-0315pm TR - Bryan 332

    Instructor: Deborah McDowell

  • ENAM 9500 American Ethnic Fiction

    1100am-1215pm TR - McLeod 2008
    Cross-listed with ENMC 9500

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    This course in ethnic American literature will focus on the interethnic nature of the contemporary literary imagination. In the wake of the globalizing changes that have made the U.S. a multi-diasporic society, contemporary fiction is increasingly animated by an urge toward encounter across multiple ethnic differences. Many texts evoke a complex, ironic sense of participation in a hybridized culture despite persistent failures of social justice and an ongoing need for reparative cross-ethnic dialogue. This course will consider how an interethnic impulse shapes contemporary fiction, from its deepest psychic structures and literary ambitions; to its social vision and conceptions of history and identity; to its patterns of literary borrowing and influence; to its competing tonalities of wariness and hope, ambivalence and desire; to aspects of its aesthetic form--including narrative structures, plots, characterizations, and uses of language(s).

    Writers may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Gus Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Lore Segal, Galina Vromen, Jiro Adachi, Louise Erdrich, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidwha, and Chang-Rae Lee. We will also read theorists of race, ethnicity, globalization, and cultural hybridity. Students are expected to be very active class participants; to write several brief compositions, a short paper, and a long paper; and with a partner or group, to lead a class discussion.

Genre Studies

  • ENGN 9500 Narrative and Travel

    0330-0445pm TR - McLeod 2007

    Instructor: Alison Booth

    This seminar will focus on quests, journeys, travel, and tourism in relation to literature, primarily British and American prose works of the past two hundred years.  Students interested in the history of genres and publishing, in narrative theory, in life writing, and in geospatial approaches to literature and literary history should find this seminar a good way to pursue these interests in collaboration.  Why is movement across a landscape or between countries a driving force in narrative?  What happens to men or women of different social positions as they travel through space?  How do such genres as travel narrative, autobiography, the novel, short fiction, or guidebooks evolve from the eighteenth century through the present?  What are the effects of changing designs for buildings, cities, and public spaces on the literature of travel?  What were the technologies and customs of travel at different times, as reflected in our readings?  When does tourism become commercial, and how does it affect the expectations of readers who travel?  What becomes of the literary world in the era of Google Maps?  Readings will include Mary Shelley, Byron, Equiano, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, Ursula LeGuin, and short essays or memoirs from Irving to Theroux.  We will also read samples of theories of tourism, narrative, and cultural geographies (MacCannell, Bal, Moretti, Dimock, etc.)  Students will conduct original research in library and digital materials (in collaboration or solo), offer a presentation, write one short “review” and a seminar paper.

Criticism

  • ENCR 5620 History of Literary Criticism

    0200-0315pm TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Walter Jost

    Much if not all of what currently goes under the name of “cultural studies” and “critical theory,” not to mention concepts like genre, period, author, literature, imagination, poetry and so on, cannot go far without feeling the tug of the extensive root system in which they are grounded in the “history of literary criticism” (terms whose meanings are themselves multivalent and historical). One cannot study everything at once, to be sure; but judicious selection among the major critical texts of our changing traditions can serve both to make one feel at home in his or her culture, and to help de-mystify (as well as organize) large swatches of contemporary literary thinking. Along with a range of poems, we read a variety of short primary works, from a Platonic dialogue and Aristotle’s Poetics to Sidney’s “Defense of Poetry” to Pater, Eliot, Greenblatt and Cavell; and selections from an extremely useful secondary volume, M. A. R. Habib’s A History of Literary Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, paperback). Our reading load is manageable, though it requires hard thinking; our reading list is exciting and varied; and our class discussions about our readings and how they might be applied take primary place in the design of the class. We will write papers, present research, gather examples, and learn to "go on" from others in new ways.

  • ENCR 8559 Book History for Literary Historians

    0400-630pm R - Alderman Library Rm 114

    Instructor: Michael Suarez

    This seminar is not about the exegesis of texts, but it is very much about the interpretation of printed artifacts; about the transmission and dissemination of texts; about physical embodiments as interpretative acts; about the fascinating relationships between materiality and meaning; about the production of cultural capital and the forging of canons; about the complex and often fascinating relationships between authors and printers, publishers, literary agents, and editors; about readerships, marketing, and the making of literary reputations.  Moreover, we will carefully consider the historiography of book history; evaluate models and methods; reflect on the historicity of book history and what makes for (all-too-frequent) bad practice; think about books and the transmission of literature as commercial, profit-driven enterprises; and attempt to come to a deeper understanding of how you as literary historians might best incorporate book-historical scholarship into your future research.

  • ENCR 8600 Critical Methods

    0330-0600pm T - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Rita Felski

    Is literary history possible? How have critics applied concepts such as author, reader, or genre? What are the possible ways of linking text and context, and which are most persuasive? What exactly is formalism? What is meant by a hermeneutics of suspicion? What do we make of the new interest in affect and phenomenology? “Critical method” is the point at which general philosophical or political claims intersect with specific techniques of interpretation. The aim of this course is to give students a thorough introduction to current debates in the methodology of literary and cultural studies in ways that will aid their own future thinking and writing.

  • ENCR 9500 Theories of Race and Ethnicity in American Studies

    0500-0745pm W - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Sylvia Chong

    This course, designed as a critical intellectual history, traces the genealogy of a number of theories regarding race and ethnicity that originated in the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) but have spread into interdisciplinary American Studies: biological essentialism, phrenology, eugenics, race as social construct vs. culture, ethnicity and ethnic communities, assimilation and integration, national/ethnic traits, primordial attachments, primitivism vs. modernity, discrimination, race prejudice, racial performativity, etc. While many of these concepts have been disavowed and function mainly as objects of critical inquiry in contemporary scholarship, a residue of these ideas continues to animate and structure scholarly work on ethnic literatures and social history. Our readings will be a mixture of primary texts from the social sciences (anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, sociologists Robert Park and Erving Goffman, W.E.B. DuBois's sociological work The Philadelphia Negro, Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological collection of African American folklore, Mules and Men, social psychologist Kenneth Clark), contemporary scholarship (Henry Yu's Thinking Orientals, Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color, Werner Sollors' Beyond Ethnicity, Hortense Spiller's Black, White and in Color, Philip Deloria's Playing Indian, Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race, Antonio Viego's Dead Subjects), and films, documentaries, and performance pieces that play with these social scientific, ethnographic constructs (Nanook of the North, Bontoc Eulogy, Cannibal Tours, The Couple in the Cage).

  • ENCR 9500 Time, Space, and Encounter

    0300-0600pm T - Cabell 224

    Instructor: Sandhya Shukla

  • ENCR 9650 Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing

    0930am-1200pm F - Bryan 233

    Instructor: David Vander Meulen

    This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study and of reading in general: if a work exists in multiple forms, and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"? how are such judgments made and standards determined? how are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted? if one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it? how does one choose an edition for use in the classroom? what difference does this all make? The course will deal with such concerns and will include: a short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts; study of the transmission of texts in different periods; and considerations of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials. The course in Books as Physical Objects, ENCR 5650, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

Special Topics in Literature

  • ENSP 5830 Literature and Film

    1100am-1215pm TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 4th-Year & Graduate Students, Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Korte

    A study of the relationship between film and the novel, with an emphasis on the nature of verbal and visual languages and the problems of translation from novel to film. Eight novels will be analytically contrasted with cinematic "performances" of these texts. Source texts include works by Kafka, Burgess, Mann, Wharton, O'Connor, Banks, McEwan.

    Screenings are on Sundays at 2:00 p.m.

    Requirements: regular attendance and active participation; short informal response papers; final exam and paper. The course has a weekly two hour screening session.

  • ENSP 5910 Literary Journal Editing

    0630-0900pm T - Bryan 203

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    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 Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing software, and then publish the project using print-on-demand. To apply for the class, please e-mail a letter of introduction to Jeb Livingood, jsl9z@virginia.edu, giving your name, year, phone number, e-mail, and experience with literature. Attach a sample of your writing (3-5 pages of poetry or 6-10 of prose fiction or essay). Preference will be given to MFA students, but there will be spaces for other graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergraduates.

Pedagogy

  • ENPG 8800 Pedagogy Seminar

    0900-1130am W - Location TBA

    Instructor: Victor Luftig

    This course prepares first year doctoral students for the teaching they will do here at UVa in both literature classes and the writing program. Required of - and limited to - first year PhD students in English. Requirements include attendance, participation, and selection among presented materials so that they are readily available at the time of your initial teaching.

  • ENPG 8850 Literature Surveys

    TBA

    Instructors: Clare Kinney, Stephen Cushman, Michael Levenson

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