Academic Writing

  • ENWR 105 Academic Writing I

    Section Locations Variable

    Fall and Spring Semesters

    Part I of the two-semester option for meeting the first writing requirement. Finding and developing topics, building academic arguments, and organizing essays and reports. Includes a tutorial at the writing center. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Followed by ENWR 106.

  • ENWR 106 Academic Writing II

    Section Locations Variable

    Fall and Spring Semesters

    Part II of the two-semester option for meeting the first writing requirement. Audience analysis, cohesion, focus, and style. Includes a tutorial at the writing center. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Prerequisite: ENWR 105. Fulfills the first writing requirement.

  • ENWR 110 Accelerated Academic Writing

    Section Locations Variable

    Fall and Spring Semesters

    The single-semester option for meeting the first writing requirement. Framing and developing effective academic arguments, with an emphasis on essays and reports. Graded A, B, C, or NC. Special topics sections are listed on the University Registrar's course offering directory web site. Students whose social security numbers end in an even digit must take ENWR 110 in the fall; those with an odd digit take it in the spring.

  • ENWR 210 Advanced Academic Writing

    Section Locations Variable

    Fall and Spring Semesters

    Framing and developing effective academic arguments, with an emphasis on essays and reports. Designed for first-years scoring 740 or above on the SAT II subject test, those who move out of ENWR 110 via portfolio placement, and Echols scholars. Special topics sections are listed on the English department's web site at www.engl.virginia.edu. Students will write approximately 25 pages, with significant revision. Meets the first writing requirement for those who need it.

  • ENWR 220 Topics in Academic and Professional Writing

    Section Locations Variable

    Fall and Spring Semesters

    Prerequisite: completion of first writing requirement. Meets second writing requirement. Possible topics might include electronic writing, corporate communications, writing ethnography, and the like.

Creative and News Writing

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0001

    1730-1845 MW - CABELL B020

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: George Clark

    ENWR 230 Poetry Writing is a beginning poetry workshop. In this course students will write original poetry which will be critiqued in a workshop environment and in conference with the instructor. Students will be expected to develop a working vocabulary for evaluating poems technically, critically, and personally. Contemporary poems wil be studied as models. The course will culminate in the production of a manuscript of original poems.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0002

    1800-1915 MW - BRN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Evan Beaty

    This class will serve as an introduction to both the reading and writing of poetry. Students will sample a wide range poems from a varied group of poets writing in English, and will study the techniques and choices of those poets, occasionally writing short response papers on a particular poet, poem, or other topic. The workshop setting will be supportive, inquisitive, and will emphasize developing both a vocabulary of poetic discussion and critique as well as the importance of revision. In lieu of a final there will be a final portfolio of poems, with revisions, due at semester's end.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0003

    1900-2015 MW - CABELL 335

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lilah Hegenauer

    In this introductory course, students will encounter and write about a broad assortment of mostly contemporary (& a few not-so-contemporary) poets; students will develop a vocabulary with which to discuss poetry in workshop; and students will to experience, practice, refine, and enjoy the art of writing poems on a weekly basis. This class will focus on the reading of poems and the writing of poems. By reading and discussing a diverse selection of poems, writing response papers, and holding seminar classes on individual collections of poems, we will focus on articulating our responses to poems as well as on identifying various techniques and terms. Over the course of the semester, students will complete short response papers, poetry writing exercises, and responses to poetry readings. In lieu of a final exam, students will turn in a portfolio of a final paper and revised work.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0004

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL 337

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Amber Jenkins

    In this course we will study the art of poetry writing: the techniques, strategies, problems, choices, and models of poetic composition. Work will be centered on writing, reading, and workshop discussion.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0005

    1800-2030 R - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Julia Hansen

    This is an introductory course designed to expose students to a wide array of contemporary (& a few not-so-contemporary) poets; to develop a vocabulary with which to discuss poetry; and to experience, practice, refine, and enjoy the art of writing poems. This class will focus on two inseparable skills: the reading of poems and the writing of poems. By reading and discussing a diverse selection of poems, as well as writing occasional papers, we will focus on articulating our responses to poems as well as on identifying various techniques and terms. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to complete short response papers, in-class writing exercises, a brief paper on a full-length collection of poems, & six original poems along with revisions. Our classes each week will alternate between a discussion of assigned reading and a workshop of student poems. All readings will come from a course pack specifically designed for this section of ENWR 230 – including Bishop, Dickinson, Gilbert, Hass, Hayden, Plath, Rilke, Tate, Williams, & Wright (C.D., Charles, and James) – as well as from Louise Glück’s Meadowlands.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0006

    1530-1800 W - CABELL 122

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: John Schneider

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0001

    1830-2100 M - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Myung Joh

    In this course, we will examine the various craft-elements of a short story ( e.g., character, plot, dialogue) through response papers, writing exercises, and discussion of the short stories we will be reading, including ones by "classic" authors such as J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver, and those by more "unorthodox" writers such as Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, and Lydia Davis, among others. Throughout, we will also spend a lot of time in the traditional workshop format, with every student submitting at least two pieces throughout the semester. Students will be asked to participate fully in both the class discussions and the workshops, but are not expected to have prior experience with workshops.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0002

    1800-2030 T - CABELL 331

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lauren Culley

    This workshop introduces students to the art and craft of fiction
    writing with a focus on the short story. We will begin with the
    basics: plot, character, dialogue, setting and voice. Students will
    discuss how these elements are handled in their own work and in the
    work of modern and contemporary writers including Wolff, Ford,
    O'Connor, Munro, Baxter, and Brockmeier. Students will also submit at
    least two stories for workshop and are expected to critique the work
    of their peers. Other assignments include short weekly exercises and a
    final portfolio of creative work.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0003

    1900-2015 MW - CABELL 130

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Michelle Cuevas

    "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
                                                                       - Samuel Beckett

    Students will be encouraged to write, write, and write some more. Emphasis will be placed on taking chances and making "mistakes" in order to improve. In addition to writing short fiction for workshop, this course will also focus on helping students explore a different writing topic each week through various activities, ranging from narrative time and form to the use of humor and dialogue. Students will be treated to stories by Jincy Willett, Lorrie Moore, Ha Jin, Amy Hempel, Joyce Carol Oates, David Schickler and more.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0004

    1830-2100 W - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Aja Gabel

    This course is meant to introduce students the craft of creative writing through examination of several short stories and the practice of writing stories to be critiqued in a workshop setting. We will study the elements of fiction writing in stories by established authors such as John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley. We will also examine the techniques of more contemporary writers such as Kevin Brockmeier, Julie Orringer, and Curtis Sittenfeld. Each student will be expected to submit two original stories to workshop. This class will incorporate rigorous class discussion, reading assigments, writing exercises, and each student's creative input.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0005

    1530-1800 M - CABELL 318

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Sierra Bellows

    This course will introduce students to the craft of writing short fiction. Readings will be drawn from a variety of authors - from Scott Fitzgerald to Amy Bender - with a range of artistic intentions. Students will learn to identify, analyze and critique the essential elements of the short story and will have opportunities to apply these skills to each other’s work as well as the work of established writers. In-class writing exercises will allow students to experiment with different formal properties in preparation for writing their own short stories, which will be discussed and critiqued by their classmates. Students will learn the decorum of a supportive workshop environment, literary terms, and revision techniques. It is the goal of the class to help students to develop an understanding of the contemporary short story, advance their proficiency in narrative and poetic technique, and instill in them a writer's understanding of how form and content work together to create literary meaning.

  • ENWR 270 Newswriting, sections 0001 and 0003

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 310 and 0800-0915 TR - WILSON 141A

    Course Meets Second Writing Requirement

    Instructor: C. Brian Kelly

    Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new newspaper stories. Workshop setting. Readings from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, to use of narrative an on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Fair to good typing or word processing skills required. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.

  • ENWR 332 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0001

    1100-1330 T- BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This workshop will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned outside reading, with particular attention to craft issues that will arise from our reading. Students will be expected to write and revise at least ten poems, as well as a few short prose pieces, and possibly to give an in-class presentation. Permission of the instructor is required before registering. A manuscript of 5 poems should be submitted, at least a week before classes begin, to the instructor's mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall (include your name, email address, phone, year and previous writing course information).

  • ENWR 332 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0002

    0930-1200 F - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casteen IV

    This course will focus on reading, editing, and writing strategies for poets.  Its purpose is to help build habits of mind that cultivate the best conditions for the poet’s work; its method is discussion and group process.  Each class session will include discussion of assigned readings (poems, criticism, essays on craft) and a workshop session for peer review of student poems.  Topics for readings include: prosody & music, poetic modes, the lyric & narrative traditions, composition & revision, and poet- or school-focused selections from The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition.

  • ENWR 352 Intermediate Fiction Writing

    1530-1800 W - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Caroline Preston

    This workshop is for students with some experience in writing short fiction, who have been introduced to techniques of structuring and character development. During the semester class members will discuss their own stories as well as assigned reading, perform in- and out-of-class writing exercises to develop craft, and work on revisions of their stories.

    Admission to the class is by instructor permission only. Interested students should leave a fiction submission of ca. 15 pages in my box (219 Bryan Hall) no less than ten days before the start of classes. Include a note to let me know your name, email address, class year, major, and previous creative writing courses and grades. I will post a list on the creative writing office door (422 Bryan Hall) before the first workshop meeting class. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. ENROLLMENT LIMITED TO 15.

  • ENWR 380 Academic and Professional Writing, section 0001

    1400-1515 TR - CHEMISTRY 304

    Instructors: Gregory Colomb and Jon D'Errico

    Prerequisites: successful completion at UVa of at least one 300-level course in the student's major. Prepares student for professional, corporate, or advanced academic writing. Also prepares student to manage the writing of others. Fulfills second writing requirement.

  • ENWR 482 Advanced Fiction Writing

    1400-1630 T - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

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

  • ENWR 484 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1215-1445 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This workshop will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned outside reading, with particular attention to craft issues that will arise from our reading. Permission of the instructor is required before registering. A manuscript of 5 poems should be submitted, at least a week before classes begin, to the instructor's mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall (include your name, email address, phone, year and your previous writing course information).

  • ENWR 532 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1230-1515 T - CABELL 334

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    In this workshop for advanced poets, the aim of our collective project will be to generate poems that dare to embody, explore, provoke, illuminate, refute, and manifest “large” traditional poetic themes—Eros, Thanatos, Truth, Beauty, God, & Time—in fresh, original ways.  In addition to writing about a poem a week, students will also be responsible for choosing a trio of “core poets” to read closely throughout the semester:   one poet born before 1920, one poet born after 1970, and a poet on the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Virginia.  We will be incorporating these readings into our assignments, poems, and class discussion.  To be considered for admission to this class, please submit 5 – 7 poems and a brief cover letter detailing your prior workshop experience to Lisa Russ Spaar no later than one week before the start of the spring 2008 semester.  E-mail submission by attachment is fine.

  • ENWR 552 Advanced Fiction Writing

    1730-2000 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casey

    A workshop for narrative writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. There will be some assigned reading from exemplary writers, but most of the time we will concentrate on our own efforts. There will be 4 places for Continuing Ed participants aka "Citizen Scholars", 3 for graduate studnts and 5 for particularly capable undergraduate writers. In that way the mix of ages will be from 20 to 70, and the range of experience and knowledge will be beneficial. Admission to the course requires submission of a short sample manuscript by early January--December would be appreciated.

Poetry Writing Program

  • ENPW 482 Stevens and Pound

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL B029

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Stephen Cushman

    We will spend the semester reading these two modern poets. Although they will take up most of our time, we can also sample other modern and contemporary poets whose work strikes members of the seminar as contributing to our larger understanding and discussion of issues raised by reading Stevens and Pound. Among many other topics, we will consider what these two modernist poets still contribute to our sense of what poets and poems are and do.

    Prerequisite    : some working famililarity with (though not necessarily an expertise in) meter and poetic form. Students who do not feel familiar with meter and form should read a manual or handbook, such as Stephen Adams's Poetic Designs, before coming to the first class.

  • ENPW 492 Poetry Thesis

    Time/Day/Location TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    This is the first semester of a year-long creative thesis-writing project. In the first semester, students meet as a group and in individual conferences to begin to think about assembling a book-length collection of original poetry and an accompanying brief essay. We will read a number of poetry collections, looking at the ways in which poets choose to organize their poems into books. Students will bring in "constellations" of their own current work for group consideration and discussion. By the end of the semester, students will turn in 20 pages of poetry likely to be in the thesis, as well as an annotated list of ten aesthetic influences.

Introductory Seminars in Literature

  • ENLT 201 Introduction to Literary Studies

    1400-1515 MW - WILSON 141B

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Christopher Krentz

    Designed for prospective English majors and other interested students, this seminar will explore a wide sampling of significant poetry, fiction, and drama (precise syllabus will be posted on Toolkit by January). Through class discussions and papers, students will develop skills in critical thinking and analytical writing that will serve them well in upper-level English courses and beyond. Expect a decent but not overwhelming amount of reading and writing. Thoughtful preparation and participation will be essential in this discussion-based course.

  • ENLT 214 20th Century Southern Women's Literature, section 0001

    1000-1050 MWF - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Claire Raymond

    This course will trace in 20th century fiction set in the South modes of maternity, paying particular attention to the ways that a racialized discourse plays through literary portrayals of nurturing behavior. We will apply post-colonial theory to interpretations of nurturing behavior, taking into consideration the multiple colonial experiences in the south. The course's primary texts include Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away, Eudora Welty's short fictions, Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God. Course requirements include writing exercises and three shorter papers.

  • ENLT 214 Southern Literature, section 0002

    1200-1250 MWF - ASTRONOMY 265

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Claire Raymond

    This course will trace in 20th century fiction set in the South modes of maternity, paying particular attention to the ways that a racialized discourse plays through literary portrayals of nurturing behavior. We will apply post-colonial theory to interpretations of nurturing behavior, taking into consideration the multiple colonial experiences in the south. The course's primary texts include Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away, Eudora Welty's short fictions, Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God. Course requirements include writing exercises and three shorter papers.

  • ENLT 223 Studies in Poetry

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    “A poem freezes life, yanks a bit out of life's turbulent stream, and holds it up squirming for view, framed by the white margins of the page.  Poetry is an art of distillation.  It takes contingency samples, is selective.  It telescopes time.  It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur” (Diane Ackerman).  That’s just one poet’s definition of her own art, just one of many starting points students in this seminar will use in expanding their enjoyment and understanding of poetry.  Readings will be varied and challenging and will range widely across many centuries as the class addresses the multifarious ways in which writers can create “infinite riches in a little room” (or, alternatively, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”).   We’ll talk about poetic form, about the creation of voice and tone, about the audiences poems imagine for themselves, about the power of imagery, about the ways in which poetry can seduce, beguile, argue, deceive, celebrate and console.  We will, I hope, end up intoxicated by the possibilities of language.  At the same time, class members will hone their analytical and critical skills and learn how to write thoughtfully and persuasively about literature.

    Course requirements: ideally, wit, passion and intelligence.  Regular attendance and enthusiastic participation in class discussion (non-negotiable); three 3 page papers, two 6-7 page papers, some e-mail “response postings”; an in-class presentation; final examination.

  • ENLT 223 Modernist Poetry

    1400-1515 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jason Coats

    This course surveys British and American poetry from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of World War II, one of the most exciting periods in literary history. Although modernist poems are often considered daunting and even antagonistic to their readers, we will tackle their eccentricities by discovering the context of their efforts: With whom did they view themselves to be in dialogue? Which older poets did they critique, and why did they critique them so violently? To which readers did they suppose they were writing? From more conventional early works to radically shorter imagist poems to larger epics that combine elements of the two, we will learn to appreciate what W. B. Yeats calls “the fascination of what’s difficult” and translate the methods and goals of modernist poetry.

  • ENLT 224 Stage to Screen

    1830-1945 TR - CLEMONS 322A

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: James Cocola

    Until quite recently, those who studied drama studied the stage. But with the advent of motion pictures the dramatic arts assumed an added dimension, even as most audiences lost a dimension in shifting their attention from the three-dimensional performance to the two-dimensional projection. While the theater remains a vibrant presence today, modern and contemporary drama is as much an affair of the cinema as of the playhouse. To chart this transition we shall study the dramatic arts in three acts, ranging from stage to screen, with a brief interval dedicated to filmic adaptations of stage plays. Our methodology will be decidedly historical, with close attention given to the aesthetic, cultural, geographical, material and political forces shaping our chosen authors and our chosen texts. We will cover some basic principles in drama theory and film theory, while also attending to a variety of critical keywords and research methods of general relevance to the English major. Beyond active participation in weekly discussions, seminar members will be responsible for two essays, a collective web presence, and shorter writing assignments including proposals and reviews. At semester's end there will be an essay-based final exam.

  • ENLT 226 Studies in Fiction, section 0001

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Karen Chase

    This course will examine various forms of the novel as it has developed
    over time, in different countries, and in the hands of very different
    writers. We will not pursue one particular theme, but certain
    pre-occupations will concern us: the nature of art and the invention of
    ‘reality,'; narrative perspective; the construction of character; and the
    problem of closure. Thematically, we will look at issues of gender, class,
    the constitution of self and other (as well as self in society), and the
    representation of personality. Requirements include participation, 2 papers
    and a final exam.

  • ENLT 226 The Short Story Collection

    0930-1045 TR -

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Sean Borton

    In this course we will consider the short story and the short story collection as genres. Reading works by twentieth-century American authors, we will focus first on the individual story, analyzing the ways that authors use fictional techniques (character development, point of view, setting, irony, etc.) to create meaning. We will also consider short story collections as whole, investigating the meaning that takes shape across stories, and the ways individual stories enhance and inform the meaning of the other stories around them, whether the collections are intended to add up to a "novel" or are collected according to a looser, more vaguely defined sense of thematic relationship.

    In addition to reading individual stories from an anthology (tbd), we will read collections by Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Flannery O’Connor, Bernard Malamud, Tim O’Brien, and Jumpha Lahiri.

    Course Requirements include participation, a group presentation, three formal essays (6-7 pages), and a midterm and final exam.

  • ENLT 226 Indian and Indian-Diaspora Fiction

    TR 1100-1215 - Cabell 235

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: John Murphy

    An introductory survey, this course provides a chance to gain essential skills in close reading and critical discussion of fiction.  Its focus will be on the different paths that have been taken by Indian and Indian-Diaspora fiction in English since Independence from the British Empire in the aftermath of World War Two.  The course begins with The Guide by R. K. Narayan, a founding father of Indian Anglophone fiction.  It goes on to treat two novels that are paradigmatic for emerging Anglophone literatures around the world:  V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.  It concludes with novels from three recent authors whose work shows the ongoing strength of Indian and Indian-Diaspora fiction:  Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, and Jhumpa Lahiri.  The course’s emphasis will be on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the ways it has given shape to imagination in the midst of a complex history.  We’ll do our reading from many points of view, but always with an eye toward understanding how fiction works at the fundamental level of the writing itself.  Our meetings will consist of conversation, so it will be assumed that everyone will come prepared to contribute, whenever we meet.  Other requirements include:  daily quizzes, two essays, a group presentation, and a final exam.

    Texts:

    R. K. Narayan, The Guide; V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake.

  • ENLT 247 Black Writers in America

    0930-1045 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Rosemary Millar

    This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of Black prose. We will examine both canonical and non-canonical texts and a variety of genres-spiritual autobiographies, speeches, short stories, and novels. We will explore a number of themes including the uses of folk/oral tradition, heroism, alienation, class, gender and colour consciousness. Possible texts include Maria S Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality”; Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children; Paule Marshall Praise Song for the Widow. We will also examine the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black formal text as well as political, cultural and critical issues of the writers’ time and our own. To continue to hone our reading and writing skills, active class participation, presentations and three essays (5-7 pages) are required. A final exam is also required.

  • ENLT 250A Shakespeare on Love

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Orysia Mack

    The witty comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) turned to an imagined back story from Shakespeare’s personal life to “explain” why his tragedy of Romeo and Juliet moves audiences. But the popular conception of a tale of “star-crossed lovers” hardly makes up the sum of the playwright’s explorations of the complex subject of human love. Shakespeare doesn’t just tell a great love story: he shows how love works. Love is a subject that he examines throughout his career, dramatizing its many facets through characters and situations that are by turns moving, ridiculous, delightful, or terrifying - as love is. In this course we will be reading a selection of plays (in their entirety) and sonnets that show the range and resonance of Shakespeare’s treatment of love. As we read, we will note the theme’s centrality, but also how it is intertwined with other major concerns, including (but not limited to) questions about law, society, sex, identity, imagination, poetry, death, and time.

  • ENLT 250 Shakespeare's Women

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 134

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: John Bugbee

    We will use the question of "Shakespeare's Women" (primarily those in the plays rather than in his life!) as a launching point for reading a selection of the Bard's greatest works. We spread the net widely: early plays and late; comedy, tragedy, history, and at least one that resists classification. What can be learned by approaching the plays with special attention to the female characters? How do the plays "read" differently through that lens than if approached with no such direction? Do coherent themes and attitudes concerning women emerge from studying a number of Shakespeare's works, or is the "chameleon poet" as purely multifarious here as elsewhere? Do the answers to these questions vary predictably according to the genre or period of the plays considered? Expect very close attention, of course, to Shakespeare's incomparable language; also expect attention to the difference between reading the plays and seeing them performed. If logistics permit, we will experience the latter difference first-hand via a trip to a performance of Macbeth at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia.

    Requirements: Three substantial papers of roughly six pages each; several shorter written assignments; final exam; short midterm. A high premium will be set on active engagement with the plays in class; most often this will take the form of enthusiastic discussion, but sometimes of enthusiastic amateur Shakespearean performance.

  • ENLT 250B Shakespeare on Love

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Margaret Simon

    This course introduces the beginning student of Shakespeare to the plays through a thematic rather than generic grouping. We will read comedies, tragedies and romances all united by their common and complicated exploration of love and desire. Perhaps no playwright has so exhaustively considered that “evil angel” love. Illicit desire, madness, jealousy, violence, forgiveness, power, the closure and foreclosure provided by marriage: these are all issues central to the plays this course encompasses. The goal of this course is to use the complex theme of love as a way to encourage students to develop complex and nuanced ways of reading. Each of the plays selected presents certain understandings or conventions of love only to question or even subvert them. This course will instruct the beginning student of literature on how to become comfortable with complex and often dichotomous readings and to understand negotiating ambiguity as one of the keystones of literary endeavor.

  • ENLT 252 Contemporary Women's Texts

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Susan Fraiman

    An introduction to close reading and critical writing focused on recent works by women across a range of genres and ethnic cultures.  In addition to novels and short fiction, we will also consider such narrative forms as memoir and film.  Possible authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Deborah Eisenberg, Katha Pollitt, Toni Morrison, Mira Nair, Gloria Anzaldúa, Mary Gaitskill, Arundhati Roy, Alice Munro, Gish Jen, Buchi Emecheta, and others.  Our discussion of these texts will address basic formal issues: modes of narration; the difference between “story” and “discourse”; the use of framing and other structural devices; the constraints of genre; the handling of images, tone, and diction.  Likely thematic concerns include the effects of colonialism and migration on women; the relation of women and girls today to the legacies of second-wave feminism; depictions by women of such topics as growing up, growing old, marriage, diverse sexualities, racism, generational ties and tensions, violence, and work; meditations by women on globalization and a post 9-11 world.  We will work not only on becoming attentive readers but also on learning to conceive and organize effective critical essays.  This writing intensive course (three papers totaling 20 pages) satisfies the prerequisite for the English major as well as the second-writing requirement.

  • ENLT 252 Women’s Literature in American Spaces

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL 340

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Margaret Gardiner

  • ENLT 252 Fantasy, Imagination, Girlhood Century Drama

    1400-1515 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lindsay Wright

    This course examines how girlhood has been imagined through the literature of the Victorian period to the present. We will focus on nineteenth century British fiction as a period of remarkable flowering of both children's literature and literature in which the child becomes the focus of the adult writer and reader's desires. These complex and lyrical works were written with a double audience, child and adult, in mind. These texts also provide rich ground for unearthing subtexts about gender, race, and social class. We will discuss how and why fantasy literature frees authors and readers to consider taboo subjects. Authors will include Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, among others. At the end of the semester, students will research contemporary literature for young girls and consider how present works reflect and revise Victorian values. This course is a prerequisite for the English major and will also focus on literary terms and techniques. Requirements include 3 papers (5 pages each), an oral research report, and a final exam.

  • ENLT 252 Women and Drama: "The Role of Women"

    0800-0915 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Keicy Tolbert

    The aim of this course is to give students an introduction to various issues in drama through looking at the role of women in some of the most interesting plays of the Western world. This course will equip the students with a better understanding of the history of drama, its genres, and the practical aspects of performing a play. We will also discuss the gender issues raised in the plays. What is gender's relationship to performance? What does it means to be a play's “subject”? And what happens (aesthetically and ethically) when a marginalized character takes center stage? Requirements: regular attendance, performances of scenes, one 5-7 page paper, and a final exam.

  • ENLT 255 Gothic Obsessions

    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Rivka Swenson

    The literary spaces of the Gothic in later eighteenth century Britain are inhabited by villains, heroes, distressed damsels, wayward women, haunted castles, gloomy dungeons, ancient feuds, and specters of the grotesque. We will read novels, verse, plays, and pertinent cultural documents to explore the obsession with the Gothic across genres. This seminar is designed for the delectation and erudition of prospective majors who wish to develop their critical thinking and writing skills, and their command of terminology and methods, with respect to a compelling body of texts. The course is also appropriate for non-majors who bring interest and enthusiasm to the critical study of literature and its contexts. Requirements: a surfeit of verbal participation, a conscientious approach to crafting a substantial amount of writing, exams, quizzes.

  • ENLT 255 Restoration and 18th Century Drama

    1700-1815 MW - CABELL 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Rivka Swenson

    A more appropriate title for this course would be “The Dramatic Restoration and Eighteenth Century.” In 1660, the theaters opened after eleven years of Puritan lockdown, and women were seen on the London stage for the first time. The decades that followed dazzled with theatrical output; in 1737, when the majority of theaters were put out by business by the Stage Licensing Act and playwrights such as Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding defected to the spaces of the novel, the possibilities, challenges, and anxieties that the contemporary stage helped focus did not simply disappear. Thus, we will read plays, but also prose fictions, verse, and pertinent cultural documents to explore the place of the theater across genres. This course is designed for the delectation and erudition of prospective majors who wish to develop their critical thinking and writing skills, and their command of terminology and methods, with respect to a compelling body of texts. The course is also appropriate for non-majors who bring interest and enthusiasm to the critical study of literature and its contexts. Requirements: a surfeit of verbal participation, a conscientious approach to crafting a substantial amount of writing, exams, quizzes, presentation.

  • ENLT 255 Latino/a Studies

    0930-1045 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Michael Engle

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 326 Chaucer

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 132

    Instructor: Patrice Calise

    This course does not presuppose fluency in the reading of Middle English or require Chaucer I as a prerequisite.  We will, however, be reading Chaucer’s works in their original language, with the intention of sailing away from the safe haven of The Canterbury Tales and exploring some of the most fantastic and challenging works of Chaucer that you’ve most likely never read. The shorter poems—see the Complaint poems in the Riverside Chaucer—will help us flex our prosodic and linguistic muscles in preparation for the longer, richer, and more complex House of Fame and the doubly so Troilus and Criseyde. Our focus will be primarily on the beauty and workings of the language and poetry, and the exploration of the technical and poetic aspects that build the literary worlds in these works.  I will bring my special interest in vision (both physical and metaphysical) to lecture and discussion of these texts, but will by no means limit the scope of our work to this one topic.

    Required Text: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson.  We will be looking at one or two of The Canterbury Tales this semester, so it will all right to bring your shorter text from Chaucer I for these, if you have it.

    Recommended Text: A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams (this especially if you are continuing your study of literature beyond this class).

    I will occasionally make articles available to you online that you will be responsible for printing out, reading, and marking up.

    Requirements: Meaningful Attendance; commitment to the reading schedule; ability and desire to work hard at reading and comprehension (remember that this work will be foreign to you, even if you have taken Chaucer before—you will need time to sit down and Be with Chaucer, if you know what I mean).

    2 short papers, approximately 5-7 pages each; a midterm and a final exam; translation assignments and quizzes.

  • ENMD 382 Religion, Mysticism, and Heresy

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 132

    Instructor: A.C. Spearing

    Much of the most imaginative, challenging and exciting medieval writing, including the earliest writing in English by women, deals with religious issues; and medieval religious literature, to the surprise of many modern readers, contains much that is comic, much that is blasphemous, and much that verges on heresy. In this course we shall read some of the finest medieval religious writing in poetry, drama, and prose. Works to be studied will include (in poetry) some of Chaucer’s tales and extracts from Piers Plowman; (in drama) selections from the York and Towneley cycles of mystery plays; and (in prose) devotional and mystical texts, including Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the English version of the work for which Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. Topics discussed will include antisemitism, homosexuality, the devil, and the Lollard heresy. Most texts will be read in modern translation, but Chaucer will be read in the original and Piers Plowman in an edition where the original runs parallel with a modern version. Requirements: two papers, midterm and final exams, and group oral presentations.

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 313 Seventeenth-Century English Literature

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 338

    Instructor: Daniel Kinney

    We will survey the various and curious perspectives of seventeenth-century English lyric and how it can distill, crystalize, and refract the mixed matter of everyday life in an era of pronounced cultural crisis. We will also discuss the mixed fortunes of seventeenth-century poetic styles from contempt and neglect in the following century to a startling and long-lasting 20th-century vogue thanks to Eliot and the New Critics. Class requirements: regular participation including brief email responses, one short and one longer paper, and a final exam.

  • ENRN 322 Shakespeare, section 0001

    0900-0950 MW - WILSON 402

    Instructor: Katharine Maus

    This course deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career, 1601-1613, during which time he was mostly writing tragedies and romances. ENRN 321 is not a prerequisite though you are welcome to take both courses. Reading: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest. Writing assignments: three 5-page papers, a final exam. Two fifty minute lectures, one 75-minute discussion section (during the first week of classes, you will be assigned to a discussion section that fits your schedule; to register for the course just sign up for the lecture now.)

  • ENRN 482A Milton: Paradise Lost

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 312

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    This seminar will be primarily dedicated to a detailed exploration of Milton’s enormous and embattled epic of origins, but we’ll also be examining several of his earlier poetic experiments, glancing at his political writings on censorship and divorce, and looking at some provocative literary criticism on Paradise Lost.  Among the issues I hope the course will address: Milton the revolutionary (the politics and poetics of rebellion); Milton the rewriter of Scripture (inspired re-creation or Satanic supplementation?); Milton and gender (is Edenic bliss really conditional upon female secondariness?); Milton and literary history (how can we digest the poetry that tries to swallow all its predecessors?).

    Requirements: enthusiasm, stamina, regular attendance and lively participation in class discussion, regular e-mail response postings; a 7 page paper, a 15 -18 page paper.

  • ENRN 482B Renaissance and the Epic

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 332

    Instructor: Daniel Kinney

    What becomes of the epic, especially (but not only) in Renaissance England? Where has it been, and where does it still have to go? Why does the most elevated of literary modes in traditional reckonings end up seeming passe or impossible to so many moderns? Works to be read include Homer's epics, The Aeneid, The Inferno, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, The Dunciad, and The Waste Land. Class requirements: regular participation including brief email responses, a term paper, and a final exam.

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature

  • ENEC 312 Gothic Obsessions

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 122

    Instructor: Rivka Swenson

    In this intermediate course, we will read novels, verse, plays, and pertinent cultural documents to explore the obsession with the Gothic (and the obsessions *of* the Gothic) in later eighteenth-century Britain across genres. We will encounter villains, heroes, distressed damsels, wayward women, haunted castles, gloomy dungeons, ancient feuds, and specters of the grotesque. This course is appropriate for majors and non-majors who bring interest and enthusiasm to the critical study of literature and its contexts. Requirements: a surfeit of verbal participation, a conscientious approach to writing (with the opportunity to craft and revise), exams, quizzes.

  • ENEC 482 Satire

    1530-1645 MW - MINOR 130

    Instructor: Paul Hunter

    The “Golden Age” of British satire extended over the 17th and 18th centuries, and we will spend most of our reading and class time there. But we’ll start with some modern and contemporary examples—a novel by Evelyn Waugh, films such as Dr. Strangelove and Being There—and will continue to monitor contemporary satirical practices by collecting cartoon, television, and journalistic examples (such as The Onion) in a satire “Notebook”: all members of the class will be asked to clip, photocopy, and comment on examples they find individually and sometimes report on them orally. And we will take some time to trace, briefly, the earlier history of satire, especially in Greece and Rome. But the concentration will be on “classic” examples from the 17-18C in poems, plays, essays, and prose fiction: Dryden, Rochester, Swift, Chudleigh, Pope, Gay, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Garrick, etc. We’ll also do a fair amount of reading in satire criticism and theory, with group oral reports. Two short papers plus twice-weekly commentary in the Notebook.

Nineteenth Century British Literature

  • ENNC 311 19th Century Poetry and Prose

    1230-1345 TR - MAURY 113

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    “Romanticism” is the odd but indelible name that literary history bestows on British writing from the long, noisy turn of the nineteenth century.  It was a time when the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars burned up old Europe’s social structures like tinder, while underneath that eye-catching political bonfire the inexorable force of early industrialism made for slower but surer changes in the way we modern heirs of the Romantics continue to live, argue, dream – developments partially entailed on us by the period’s remarkable literature.  Our readings will strike a balance between verse and prose, nonfiction and fiction (Jane Austen plus another novelist), men’s and women’s writing; our class meetings will mix informal lecture with group discussion.  Each student will write three shorter essays, one longer one, and a final exam.

  • ENNC 324 Victorian Poetry

    1200-1250 MWF - CAUTHEN 134

    Instructor: Russell Schweller

    This course will survey the major poets of the Victorian era, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Augusta Webster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Along with our investigation of the major lyrics, dramatic monologues, and other shorter forms, we will pay particular attention to three long experimental poems: Tennyson's In Memoriam, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. Topics for consideration include Victorian poetry's characteristic and enriching ambivalences, its self-conscious, inquisitive, and often contentious locations between Romantic belatedness and Romantic irony, private utterance and public voice, market ethos and aesthetic value, feminism and the feminine ideal, faith and doubt. Requirements: a term essay, a journal assignment, and a final exam.

  • ENNC 381 The Industrial Novel

    1300-1350 MWF - CAUTHEN 134

    Instructor: Russell Schweller

    This course will examine a genre of mid-century Victorian novels -- here called "industrial," but often referred to as "Condition of England" or "social-problem" novels -- that addressed working-class suffering and urban squalor caused by the dislocations of industrialism. Awkwardly poised between sympathy for the laboring poor and fear of Chartist agitation, the industrial novel enabled its middle-class readers to identify imaginatively with the
    impoverishments of the laboring poor while at the same time offering them wistful fantasies of class unity and containment -- contradictory positions that tested both the possibilities and limits of Victorian novels as agents of change. Our readings will include works by Carlyle, Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Kingsley, Eliot, and Gissing; we will discuss, among other things, the conflict between working-class subjects and middle-class readers, the unbounded political imagination and the imperatives of narrative, the concept of Labor and the existence of laborers, individual sympathies and
    collective fears, realism and sentimentality. Course requirements: a daily journal assignment, two papers, and a final exam.

  • ENNC 482 Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL B021

    Cross-listed with ENAM 482

    Instructor: Claire Raymond

    This course will focus in depth on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, tracing the theme of what Wallace Stevens called "desire without an object of desire" in the poets' work--desire, that is, when the object of desire has been denied the lyric speaker. The course will focus on Rossetti's Goblin Market, Dickinson's Master Letters and Dickinson poems thematically related to the Master Letters. We will look at Rossetti's and Dickinson's complex sounding of the problematic of gender and voice in 19th century lyric. Course requirements include a mid term exam and a longer final paper.

  • ENNC 492B Dramatic Monologue in Modern Poetry

    1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 332

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    A seminar devoted to the modern genre of the dramatic monologue – where poets dress up, carry on, throw the voice, and generally act out in drag their own ruling passions and those of their era.   We’ll see how impersonative poetics came into their own with the first Victorian generation (Tennyson, the Brownings), then trace what they started across the fin-de-siècle into modernist (Pound, Eliot) and mid-century poetry (Jarrell, Bishop), finishing up with such contemporary masquers as Richard Howard, Pamela Hadas White, Ai, Frank Bidart, Carol Ann Duffy.  We’ll also find a week somewhere to hear how the song-in-character has fared in popular music among Randy Newman and company.  Though we draw the line at greasepaint and dance steps, registrants should expect to do a fair amount of reading aloud.  Four essays of gradually increasing length will put into practice the English major’s main skills of textual analysis and interpretation.

Modern and Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 330 Contemporary American Poetry

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL 423

    Instructor: James Cocola

    This survey course, which will mix lecture and discussion, is intended primarily for English majors, and will focus on the styles and themes of recent and contemporary American poets. Beginning with the epic scope of Charles Olson and the lyric condensation of Lorine Niedecker, we will proceed to cover major movements and traditions including beat poetry, confessional poetry, deep image poetry, language poetry, the Black Arts Movement, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance, drawing also on currents in hemispheric and multiethnic American poetry. We will depend heavily on multimedia materials, accessing many poems not only in their published forms but also in their recorded versions, and turning at semester's end to movements beyond print culture such as digital poetry and spoken word poetry. Beyond representative figures we will look to lesser-known individuals from a wide range of traditions. Beyond the poems themselves we will consider related documents including letters and prose manifestos. Course requirements will include class participation, a series of short writing assignments, a pair of essays, a web presence, and a final exam.

  • ENMC 351 Transnational Texts and Gender

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 122

    Instructor: Victoria Olwell

    This course examines contemporary literature and film from the combined perspectives of feminist and transnational literary theories. Focusing on such issues as decolonization, migration, work, violence, sexuality, romance, education, and social justice movements, we’ll read literary works and watch films that contribute will help us to conceptualize transnational social and cultural formations. Literary readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dengarembga, Marjane Satrapi, Zadie Smith, and Karen Tai Yamashita, and we’ll watch at least one film, Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade. We’ll ready theory by Chandra Mohanty, Franz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, among others. Coursework includes several short papers, and a final exam. Our format will mix short lectures and discussion. Your class participation is crucial to this course. Really.

  • ENMC 382 Asian-American Fiction
    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 222
    Cross-listed with ENAM 382

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    Recent decades have witnessed a surge in literary publications by Asian Americans as well as the development of a lively body of scholarship on Asian American literature as a cultural phenomenon and as a literary tradition. This course will introduce students to the field, presenting a range of twentieth-century fictions by authors of enormously diverse backgrounds, immigrants or their descendants from countries including India, Pakistan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines, who have made North America their home and English their primary literary language. These will include authors such as Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, John Okada, Bapsi Sidwha, Gish Jen, and Karen Tei Yamashita. We will also view a film or two and read critical articles. Requirements: active class participation, group leading of class discussion, short paragraph essays, a short and a long paper, final exam.

  • ENMC 482A Advanced Studies in the Novel: Realisms

    1230-1345 TR -

    Instructor: Karen Chase

    Beginning with Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1849), and ending with
    (or somewhere near) Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005), this course
    will examine the breadth and range of the novel by analyzing its dominant
    mode, literary realism. We will see that realism is best considered in the
    plural rather than in the singular, and that it has as many forms as there
    are novels to express them. Sometimes it will seem as if the only thing our
    texts will have in common is a rejection of a simple-minded confusion
    between literary realism and actuality. Indeed, because it more closely
    resembles familiar scenes and characters, realism may be the most elusive,
    the most deceptive and the most difficult literary mode to comprehend. We
    will make every effort to do so, in particular cases and with general
    questions in mind. If realism is not mimetic, what is the best way to
    characterize its relation to the actual world? How does realism accommodate
    so many different styles within a single text and among different texts?
    How can we compare works by such authors (perhaps) as different as Dickens is from Tolstoy, E.M. Forster from Junot Diaz, William Trevor, Alice
    Hoffman, Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing and Nicole Krauss? We will not try to
    make realism hold fast to any set definition; rather, we will attempt to
    find its reach and explore its grasp. Requirements include a love of
    reading, writing, and speaking about novels, and a commitment to doing all
    of these for this class. There are also reading quizzes, one long essay,
    and a final exam.

  • ENMC 482B Modern Painters and Writers

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 332

    Instructor: Jessica Feldman

    When the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire created a poetic manifesto of Modernism entitled "The Painter of Modern Life," he imagined a kind of art, a mode of  criticism, and an ideal artist which to this day illuminate efforts to make and appreciate art. Taking this document and the questions it raises as our inspiration, we'll consider a wealth of beautiful, fascinating, and disturbing works, exploring the genesis of Modernism through the interactions among painters and writers in Paris of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We'll look at relations of many sorts across paintings and literary texts by  Manet, Kandinsky, Rilke, Cézanne,  Flaubert, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Stein, and Picasso –as well as others more briefly as we deem them helpful.  This course does not require prior knowledge of either French literature or art history, although both will be welcomed and cultivated. This course may be taken for NC or MC credit.

    Required: class participation, a few brief papers and one substantial project.

  • ENMC 482C Contemporary African-American Drama

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 331

    Cross-listed with ENGN 482

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. Along the way, we will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. We will read works by James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

  • ENMC 482D Contemporary Ethnic American Women Writers

    1230-1345 TR -

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    In this advanced seminar, we will read intensively the work of just five great contemporary writers: Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Grace Paley, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Reading two novels or multiple stories by each, we will have an opportunity to think together about developments in these writers’ art and in their thematic preoccupations, the latter of which include rewriting histories of women, families, ethnic groups, cities and regions, the United States, and the larger world. Students will need to bring to the class a love of reading fiction and a commitment to collective engagement with writing. Requirements will include energetic participation, the leading (in pairs) of one discussion, several short response essays, a short paper, and a final seminar paper.

  • ENMC 484 Gender and Modernity

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 424
    Restricted to Modern Studies Program students, Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Victoria Olwell

    Enrollment in this seminar is restricted to students in the Modern Studies Area Program. This semester, our readings will follow a syllabus determined by students’ interdisciplinary areas of focus. Course requirements include class participation, a class presentation, and a 15-page paper in which you interpret a work of literature in light of your particular program focus.

American Literature to 1900

  • ENAM 314 African-American Literature

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

  • ENAM 322 Reading American Fiction, section 0001

    1100-1150 MW - MINOR 130

    Instructor: Stephen Railton

    The fictions we'll read include The Scarlet Letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Awakening and Their Eyes Were Watching God. These are among the most frequently read and taught American novels, but each has been interpreted very differently at different times, and along with the novels we'll also read representative critical interpretations. We'll study both the stories these novels tell, and the ways in which they've been retold at different cultural periods by various interpretive communities, how they've been read, re-read, mis-read. Our goal will be to explore how both writers and readers make meaning, and if it works, by the end we'll be much better, or at least more self-aware readers ourselves.

  • ENAM 358: Science, Identity and American Literature

    0930-1045 TR -

    Instructor: Deandra Little

    This course explores the relationship between science and identity in nineteenth-century America as depicted in novels, essays, and short stories primarily written between the 1830s and 1870s—a time when the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, and technology, as well as those separating differing branches of science (and pseudoscience) had not yet solidified into their modern form. Course readings will include such authors as Hawthorne, Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, and a few of their now lesser known contemporaries. We’ll examine how these authors depict new scientific theories and applications and what implications they view science having on personal, civic, and social identities in the United States.

    Questions we will examine include: How do these authors envision the relationship between science, nature and art? How do they depict the impact of scientific theories on individual freedom, on public and private spaces, or on personal or social identity? What is at stake in their various representations of science? Course requirements: active participation, twenty pages of writing (five response papers, two 5-7 papers), and a group project using the Special Collections archives.

  • ENAM 382 Asian American Fiction

    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 222
    Cross-listed with ENMC 382

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    Recent decades have witnessed a surge in literary publications by Asian Americans as well as the development of a lively body of scholarship on Asian American literature as a cultural phenomenon and as a literary tradition. This course will introduce students to the field, presenting a range of twentieth-century fictions by authors of enormously diverse backgrounds, immigrants or their descendants from countries including India, Pakistan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and the Philippines, who have made North America their home and English their primary literary language. These will include authors such as Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, John Okada, Bapsi Sidwha, Gish Jen, and Karen Tei Yamashita. We will also view a film or two and read critical articles. Requirements: active class participation, group leading of class discussion, short paragraph essays, a short and a long paper, final exam.

  • ENAM 482A Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL BO21

    Cross-listed with ENNC 482

    Instructor: Claire Raymond

    This course will focus in depth on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, tracing the theme of what Wallace Stevens called "desire without an object of desire" in the poets' work--desire, that is, when the object of desire has been denied the lyric speaker. The course will focus on Rossetti's Goblin Market, Dickinson's Master Letters and Dickinson poems thematically related to the Master Letters. We will look at Rossetti's and Dickinson's complex sounding of the problematic of gender and voice in 19th century lyric. Course requirements include a mid term exam and a longer final paper.

  • ENAM 482B/0001 African-American Speculative Fiction

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 335

    Restricted to 4th-Year English Majors

    Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

  • ENAM 482B/0002 Contemporary Ethnic American Women Writers

    1230-1345 TR -
    Cross-listed with ENMC 482

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    In this advanced seminar, we will read intensively the work of just five great contemporary writers: Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Grace Paley, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Reading two novels or multiple stories by each, we will have an opportunity to think together about developments in these writers’ art and in their thematic preoccupations, the latter of which include rewriting histories of women, families, ethnic groups, cities and regions, the United