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

    1830-1945 MW - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Carolyn Creedon

    ENWR 230 is a poetry workshop. Students will study contempory poetry as well as forms and prosody, and compose original poems to be critiqued by their peers and by the instructor.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0002

    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 431

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jasmine Bailey

    In this course we will be exploring the work of contemporary American
    and international poets with a special emphasis on those affected by
    alcoholism. In addition to the literature element of this course,
    students will produce original poems to be workshopped by the class
    and turn in a portfolio of the critical and creative work they
    complete over the course of the semester.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0003

    1830-1945 MW - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mark Wagenaar

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0004

    1830-1945 TR - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mark Parlette

    The main focus of this course is the practice of writing poetry. Weekly writing assignments will be the most important ‘work.’ For the sake of improving our poetry, we will discuss and experiment with the various tools of poety: form, rhyme, rhythm, etc. We will read and discuss great poems, both contemporary and ancient, including poetry (in translation) from outside the English tradition.

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0005

    1800-1915 TR - WILSON 141A

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Paul Legault

    This course will require the writing of poetry and little else. We will function as a "workshop" and will also, hopefully, critique that formality alongside the students' poems. Class time will be focused on those works that are turned-in and on a few flexible reading assignments.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0001

    1100-1215 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Memory Peebles

    This course seeks curious, discerning, diligent, and courteous students who are interested in the craft of writing fiction.  We will read.  We will write.  We will eavesdrop.  We will stare.  We will talk.  We will listen.  We will do these things because I think they contribute to what my own undergraduate teacher called “the writing self.”  We’ll spend the semester exploring that creative self while also examining the mechanisms of good writing.  Our Tuesday and Thursday class time will be divided between writing exercises, presentations, and discussions of craft.  Readings will consist of mostly short stories and short novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Haruki Murakami, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, and Raymond Carver, to name a few.  I might throw in the occasional poem.  Expect surprises.  Expect to talk a lot, participate in writing exercises, and give at least one presentation.  Towards the end of the semester we will workshop your own stories.  These stories, along with some of the scenes and musings that arise out of our exercises will contribute to a final portfolio, which you will submit at the semester’s end.  If you are seeking an honest creative community this course is for you.  Thomas Mann said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” While this course may not make writing seem less difficult, we will work together to make the blank page seem a little less intimidating.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0002

    1830-1945 TR - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Helen McLaughlin

    Everyone starts out as a beginner. This course is for students who have what psychologists call "the willingness to engage in sustained training." We will practice writing, and then practice some more. We will develop a talent for practice. We will start out small, focusing on crafting scenes, with special attention to scenes as both jumping-off points for good stories and scenes as miniature stories in themselves. We will examine what a story is: how short and quiet it can be, how big things can happen in between the lines or even off the page. We will learn how scenes work in some of my favorite stories, including the fiction of Ann Beattie, Stuart Dybek, Adam Haslett, Amy Hemple, Janet Kauffman, Lorrie Moore, and Michael Parker, to name a few. We will read a lot. We will write a lot. We will write in class and outside of class and, in the second half of the semester, we will each workshop a story we have written. Heather Sellers says (and I agree!): "It doesn't matter where you start. If you stay with this writing thing, you will get better."

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0003

    1830-1945 TR - CABELL 432

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Kevin Allardice

    In the course we will read and write fiction.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0004

    0930-1045 TR - ASTRONOMY 265

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Amanda Cole

    This course will examine basic fiction writing elements, such as character, scene, suspense, plot development and narrative stance in order to explore what stories are, how they are made, and hopefully, why we make them at all. Students may work on either novels or short stories. Readings will include stories by Melville, Kafka, Katherine Ann Porter, Denis Johnson, Nabokov and Borges.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0005

    1830-1945 MW - CABELL 331

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Matthew Ducker

    This course will be evenly divided between reading and writing. We'll be analyzing successful stories, critiquing our own work, and trying to figure out what separates the two, if anything. While not set in concrete, the reading list will likely focus on modern and contemporary short works--with the occasional longer work or essay, as time permits. Think Flannery O'Connor, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Jones, Haruki Murakami, and Andre Dubus. The workload will include: turning in at least one piece of original fiction; critiquing the fiction of your peers; and participating fully in the reading discussions.

  • ENWR 270 News Writing, section 0001

    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 335

    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 270 News Writing, section 0002

    0800-0915 TR - CABELL 331

    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 331 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0001

    1400-1630 W - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    This is a poetry writing course for students who have had ENWR 230 or a comparable introductory poetry writing class. In addition to writing a poem a week, often in response to assignments, we will read a number of collections of poems that we will incorporate into our assignments, poems, and class discussion. The course will have an interdisciplinary bent, so be prepared to consider connections among a variety of arts, including cinematography, music, and visual and spatial grammars. 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 fall 2008 semester. E-mail submission by attachment is fine.

  • ENWR 331 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0002

    1100-1330 T - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This workshop is for students with some prior experience in writing and criticizing poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and assigned reading, with particular attention to such craft issues as the handling of sound and rhythm, image, syntax, drama, diction, tone and arrangement. Students will be expected to write and revise at least ten poems, to participate in class discussion, to keep a work journal, to attend poetry readings, to turn in three short essays in response to reading material, and to give an in-class presentation.

    Admission is by permission of instructor only. Students interested in taking ENWR 331 should leave in my mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall (or send to me by mail: Dept. of English, Bryan Hall, UVA, Charlottesville , VA 22904-4121 ) a submission of 4-5 poems before the first day of final registration in the fall. Include a note to let me know your name, telephone number, email address, class year, major, and previous writing courses (instructors and grades). I will post a class list on my office door or by email before the first class meeting.

  • ENWR 351 Intermediate Fiction Writing, section 0001

    1530-1800 W - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Elizabeth Denton

    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 351 Intermediate Fiction Writing, section 0002

    1400-1630 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Sydney Blair

    Sharp focus on the reading and writing of short fiction. Students will write two stories and revise one. Written responses to weekly assignments, occasional in-class writing exercises. Active classroom participation, and love of reading and writing essential. In order to be considered for this class, you must submit a manuscript to my mailbox in 422B Bryan (10-12 pp. is fine, no email submissions, please) at least one week before classes begin in August. Enclose a note saying who and what year you are, your e-mail address, what workshops you’ve taken and with whom, any other workshop you’re considering, and any other relevant information. A class list will be posted on my office door, 422B Bryan, a day or two before our first class. I will sign course action forms at our first class meeting. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. ENROLLMENT LIMITED TO 15.

  • ENWR 380 Academic & Professional Writing, section 0001

    1100-1215 R - Location TBA

    Instructors: Jon D'Errico and Gregory Colomb

    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 375 Spiritual Writing

    1530-1800 W - WILSON 141B

    Instructor: Vanessa Ochs

    Spiritual writing chronicles the quest for meaning, purpose and direction; it explores encounters with the sacred, and it makes sense of wrestling with faith and faith communities. In this course, students will study examples of spiritual writing in fiction, memoir, and journalism and will required to write about matters of the spirit in various genres. The writers whose work we will look at may include Rilke, Hesse ,Thich Nhat Hanh, Malamud, Raymond Carver, IB Singer, Alice Walker, Mark Salzman, Oliver Sacks, Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, and Diana Eck.

  • ENWR 481 Advanced Fiction Writing

    1100-1330 W - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Deborah Eisenberg

  • ENWR 483 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1100-1330 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This workshop is for students with a good deal of prior experience in writing and criticizing poetry. The class will involve discussion of student poems and of assigned reading, with particular attention to specific craft issues that will arise from our reading. Students will be expected to write and revise ten poems, to participate in class discussion, to keep a work journal, to attend several poetry readings, to turn in critical responses to three assigned readings and write one longer paper or give an in-class presentation.

    Admission to the workshop is by permission of instructor only. Students interested in taking ENWR 483 should leave a hard copy submission of 4-5 poems in my mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall no later than the week before final registration in fall (address: English Department, UVA, ss 219 Bryan Hall, P.O. Box 400121, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121). Include a note to let me know your name, telephone number, email address, class year, major, and previous writing courses. I will post a class list on my office door before the first class meeting.

Poetry Writing Program

  • ENPW 481 Area Program in Poetry Seminar: The Poetics of Ecstasy

    1230-1500 T - Location TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance - literally, “standing elsewhere.” In this seminar class (designed for students in the Department's Undergraduate Area Program in Poetry Writing but open to other students on a space-available basis by permission of instrutor), serious makers and readers of poems will explore the poetics of fervor - erotic, visionary, psychosomatic, oblivious (via negativa), religious, mystical. When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? We will read widely and deeply across cultures and time, including work by Dickinson, Blake, Carson, Hopkins, Sappho, Keats, Rilke, Rumi, Ginsberg, and many other ancient, modern, and contemporary writers who have explored the experience of being beside the self in a transport of ecstasy. Each student will engage in a semester-long project, an essay on the poetics of ecstasy (approximately 20 pages), to be conceived of, written, and at least partly revised throughout the semester, and due at the semester’s close. This essay will be comprised of original poems, commonplace book meditations, criticism, proems, intertextual quotations - even visual grammar. The aim will be to create and articulate an intertextual, poetic incarnation of each student’s evolving understanding of ecstatic poetry.

  • ENPW 491 Poetry Thesis

    1630-1900 T - Location TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Gregory Orr

    This is the first semester of a year-long creative thesis-writing project.

Introductory Seminars in Literature

  • ENLT 201 Introduction to Literary Studies

    1100-1215 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    This course for prospective English majors aims to impart and hone the skills they will need as they advance through the departmental curriculum. Analysis of literary genres in verse, prose fiction, and drama will be highlighted. As we practice reading, we'll also get lots of practice writing, in that peculiar genre the critical essay, a form with demands and pleasures of its own. We'll look closely, read deeply, think widely, and write clearly in overnight exercises, shorter and longer essays, a final exam and, above all, the focused and collaborative discussion that fills our twice-weekly meetings. You'll also have an opportunity to try out emergent digital resources for instruction in metrical prosody.

  • ENLT 212 Modern Masterpieces

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 337

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Michael Spiegel

    The principal aim of this course is to introduce students to reading, writing, thinking, and talking about literature. Through class discussion, e-mail responses, short writing assignments, and essays, students will develop the analytical and interpretive skills necessary to read critically and communicate effectively. We will survey British fiction and poetry from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to the ways in which these masterpieces construct, confuse, and play with notions of identity, such as race, gender, class, and nation. We will situate each work in its specific historical context, but also consider how our texts ?speak? to each other. In addition to historical context, we will pay close attention to the formal structures and narrative techniques in order to understand not only what these texts mean but how these texts create meaning.

  • ENLT 214 Modern American Authors

    1700-1815 MW - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Eric Rettberg

    ENLT 214, Modern American Authors, looks at novels, short stories, poems, and a play from across the twentieth century with the aim of giving students the critical skills and vocabulary to read, talk about, and write about literary texts. By surveying works from a variety of authors that includes Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, students will get a strong sense of literary trends in the twentieth century. Discussion of texts will focus not just on literary form and literary history, but also on questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality as they are represented in American literature. By the end of the class, students should be equipped to approach texts they might otherwise have viewed as difficult or incomprehensible with a renewed confidence and understanding.

  • ENLT 223 The Shape of a Poem: Traditional and Modern Verse Forms

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL B029

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Robert Stilling

    This course will seek to introduce traditional and modern verse forms primarily through the work of modern and contemporary poets writing in English with occasional glances back through the centuries. We will begin with the oldest Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse forms as found in modern translations and then work one-by-one through traditional European forms such as the villanelle, sestina, and sonnet as found in the work of Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Claude McKay, E. E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Rita Dove, and others. We will then study American innovations based on jazz, blues, and bebop forms in the work of poets such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, popular song lyrics from Cole Porter and contemporary artists, and extemporaneous freestyle rap forms. We will then expand our survey to non-European forms such as the haiku, pantoum and ghazal as practiced in English by Pound, Ashbery, Agha Shahid Ali and others. Finally, we will close our discussion with examples of "open" forms, free verse, language poetry and other formal experiments in work by poets including Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Alan Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Dada poets and Christian Bök.

  • ENLT 223 Poetry of Exile

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL B029

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Megan Haury

    I am thinking of an exile farther than any country
                                                  ~ Derek Walcott, “North and South”

    Throughout the twentieth century, poets grappled with divided cultural, linguistic, and geographic origins in their work as radical changes took place in the countries and cultures around them.  This class will take on the theme of “exile” as a means of exploring some of the great poetry and historical changes of the past century.  Some artists grapple with exile from real or imagined cultural origins, while others examine the geographic distance from an ancestral homeland, and many turn to literary precursors as a means for questioning and comforting the experiences of exile.  Using “exile” as a defining theme for our course, we will read authors starting with modernist poets in the early twentieth century progressing through postcolonial and immigrant poets of the late twentieth century to examine the different meanings and comforts of exile throughout the century.  What does exile mean to different poets in different cultures?  How do race and gender relate to the experiences of exile across the century?  How and why do poets rely on tropes of exile in their work?  We will study the way poets throughout the last century have represented the process of exile in their works, and what benefits and costs the types of exile and solutions to it they represent have for their development as artists.   Likely authors we will read include William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Eunice de Souza, and Agha Shahid Ali.

  • ENLT 224 Studies in Drama: Do I Laugh or Cry?

    0930-1045 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    We think we know what tragic and comic mean, but we don't. We think the terms are fixed, but they aren't. We assume, wrongly, that they are antithetical. In fact, these terms have changed meaning throughout the course of Western drama; in contemporary drama, we have trouble telling them apart. Pondering the definitions of tragic and comic will allow us to trace the major developments of Western drama and also to examine our fundamental assumptions about the human condition. You will learn about the major periods and central terms of Western drama and will gain effective techniques for writing about drama and about literature in general. Texts: Sophocles, Antigone; Aristophanes, The Birds; Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Hamlet; Moliere, Tartuffe; Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine; Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus.

  • ENLT 226 Comparative Modern Fiction

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Amanda Sigler

    This course aims to situate Modernism in its properly international context, asking how it developed with varying nuances in selected European countries. Though we will be encountering foreign texts in translation, we will be asking how Modernist writers uniquely address the question of language as it relates to national and individual identity, increasing urbanization, cross-cultural encounters, and the clash of nations brought about by colonial wars and by World War I. In the course of the term we will explore how French, German, British, and Irish texts interact with each other; for example, how Flaubert’s free indirect discourse connects to Joyce’s “Uncle Charles Principle,” how Joyce’s multilingual puns reflect on the convergence of multiple cultures, and how Woolf and Mann address the crises of identity that accompany modernity.

  • ENLT 226 Religion and American Fiction

    1000-1050 MWF - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Ryan Cordell

  • ENLT 226 Villainy and Fiction

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL B029

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Stephanie Brown

    Why are bad guys often so fascinating? Why do we love heroes who are also bad guys? Why have cadres of actors been able to make careers out of brooding and melancholy? This course will examine our cultural obsession with villainy, beginning with two of history’s most impressive and influential villains--Shakespeare’s Richard the Third and Milton’s Satan--and then jumping forward to the 20th century in order to survey the effects that fascinating villains have on the form of fiction and modes of storytelling. Some questions the course will address: what types of transgression do we find alluring or culturally acceptable? How can evil acts generate humor and even joy? Do the histories of modernism and postmodernism render the categories of good and evil obsolete for contemporary authors? Do any taboos remain that puts the offender irrevocably beyond our sympathy or empathy? How do irony and different types of narrators affect our readings of these characters? The objective of this course is to use the type of the ‘bad guy’ to frame discussions of how authors pose moral, cultural, and narrative problems for themselves and their readers. In doing so, the class will also help students develop critical reading practices and interpretive skills. The reading list will include (but not be limited to) Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes, Raymond Chandler, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, John Cheever, and Dorothy Allison. Three 6-8 pages papers, occasional email responses and in-class writing, and a final exam. This course is designed to meet the second writing requirement.

  • ENLT 247 Black Women Writers

    0930-1045 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

  • ENLT 247 Black Writers in America

    1700-1815 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Scott Selisker

    This course will survey some representative highlights of the rich tradition of African American literature, with an emphasis on the major works, debates, and historical contexts of the twentieth century.  We will learn how to read in and around the literary dimensions of these important American works, considering artistic movements, generic conventions, issues of interpretation, and the different formal concerns that confront fiction, poetry, autobiography, oratory, drama, and the essay.  Our readings will prompt us to think in sophisticated ways about race, identity, representation, and community.  Our work in the course will equip you with tools for reading further, in the African American and other literary traditions.  The syllabus will likely include works by: Douglass, Du Bois, Washington, Chesnutt, Hughes, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, King, Malcolm X, Brooks, and Morrison.  Course requirements: active engagement with the materials and your peers, occasional response papers, three critical essays (5-7 pp.), an informal presentation, and a final exam.

  • ENLT 247 “Coming to America”: Narratives of Black Migration

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Sonya Donaldson

    The term “migration narratives” has been used by author Farah Jasmine Griffin to describe certain texts (post 1950 novels, music, art) that embody the African-American experience of migration from the South to the North (and West). This course will engage the term and expand upon the concept to examine texts that address the migration experience of the African Diaspora to and within the United States. As such, we will develop definitions of terms such as “migration,” “America” and “home” within the context of the course; we will address issues such as language and culture, work, discrimination, assimilation, gender and sexuality, and education through a variety of texts (novels, drama, poetry, music, art, film, and the Internet). Students will further develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills while examining the historical period of the “Great Migration,” which saw African Americans flee the south in massive numbers, and consider the role of juridical and sociocultural factors in shaping Diasporic movements.

  • ENLT 250 Shakespeare

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Keicy Tolbert

    This course will introduce students to the work of William Shakespeare. We will read a selection of plays and poems, thinking about them in relation to each other, to his historical context, and to his place in English literary history. Required: weekly short interpretive exercises, two performances of a monologue or scene with accompanying 3-page paper, one 5-7 page paper, and a final exam.

  • ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others

    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 118

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Hallie Smith

    How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?  How others in the United States see you?  In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.  Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger “American” culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.  Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins—Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on—and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.  Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.”)  We will see that it is not only the ethically “other” citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.

    In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.  We will discuss and critique the terms “mestiza” and “halfie,” among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.  For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a “straight” take on identity and history?  What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?  Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.

    Possible texts include:

    Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage)
    Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
    Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
    Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin)
    Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead)
    Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
    Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton)

  • ENLT 252 Writing Women's Lives

    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 432

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Deandra Little

    Introducing a collection of loosely autobiographical essays, Tony Earley writes, “While it is necessary for our sanity to keep the line between fiction and nonfiction clearly drawn, that particular boundary, as with the boundaries between nations, is more arbitrary than we care to think.” In this course, we will examine the generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction as we read and discuss memoirs, essays, short stories, poems, and longer works written by and about women writers. Questions we’ll examine include: What does it mean to write a life? How do these women writers see their gender, class, or ethnic identity in relation to their writing? What boundaries do they draw or negotiate for their own (or their readers’) sanity?

    Course readings will primarily include works by American women from the 19th and 20th centuries, including such authors as Dorothy Allison, Sylvia Plath, Anne Patchett, Maxine Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, and Fanny Fern, among others.

    This course serves as an introduction to the major and as a second-writing requirement. In it, you’ll hone your skills for close reading and interpretive analysis as we discuss such topics as narrative structure, audience, and the construction and presentation of the self through tone, diction and imagery. Course assignments include three 6-7 page papers, short response papers, and a group presentation.

  • ENLT 255 Mommy Dearest: Motherhood and Literature

    0800-0915 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Carolyn Tate

    In this class, we will read plays, novels, poetry, and visual media that explore, challenge, and complicate representations of idealized motherhood, maternal desire, and fictions of nurturance. The texts will be wide ranging in both generic terms and the historical terrian they cover. The syllabus includes, though is not limited to,  William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and very interesting episodes of the Gilmore Girls. Also, this class will provide students with the critical reading skills to engage a variety of texts and it also fulfills the second writing requirement.

  • ENLT 255 Literature and Sexuality

    1200-1250 MWF - CABELL B020

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

    Instructor: Michael Lewis

    What we would now term queer desires have been represented in Western literature since antiquity. Prohibitions and celebrations of homosexual practices have competed and / or coexisted in the same era, author, and text. In the first third of this course, we will look at literature written before the “invention of sexuality” at the end of the nineteenth century, reading canonical works and authors such as the Bible, the Greeks (Sappho and Plato), Shakespeare, Donne, Whitman, C. Rossetti. We will then turn to both the work and the trial of Oscar Wilde before entering into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where we will examine texts by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, Audre Lorde, Tony Kushner, and Annie Proulx. Because this is an introduction to the English major, we will pay a good deal of attention to the formal aspects of literature, reading a variety of genres (novel, short story, non-fiction prose, poetry, film). Thus, we will read both formally (grappling with what literature is made of) and politically (asking what’s at stake in the literary representations of gay, lesbian, and transgendered identities). In order to assist our endeavor of establishing the kinds of questioning, reading, and writing that English majors perform, the course will also digest a bit of literary criticism that will serve as models for your own developing writing and thinking.

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 311 Medieval and Renaissance Romances
    1530-1645 MW - MINOR 130

    Instructor: Elizabeth Spearing

    We shall read narratives of adventure from the 12th century to the 17th, translated from a number of different European languages, giving special attention to the parts played in them by women. The works to be studied are likely to include selections from: The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, Beroul’s Tristan, lays by Marie de France and romances by Chrétien de Troyes, the Nibelungenlied, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Amadis of Gaul, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Works in languages other than English will be studied in translation, and the selections from Amadis of Gaul will include extracts from this European bestseller never previously translated into English. Requirements: an oral presentation, two papers, a midterm, and a final.

  • ENMD 325 Chaucer

    1830-1945 TR - CABELL 118

    Instructor: Alan Baragona

    A general study of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, read in the original Middle English, considering Chaucer's sources, his artistry, and his significance as a representative of his time and as a subject of modern critical controversy. Special attention will be given to pronunciation, translation, and the study of the literary, historical, and philosophical background of Chaucer’s work.

  • ENMD 381 Illicit Love

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 118

    Instructor: A.C. Spearing

    In this course we shall read a variety of medieval stories of adulterous and otherwise forbidden love, translated from medieval English, French, and German, including tales of famous pairs of lovers such as Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, and Troilus and Criseyde. Requirements: a group presentation, two papers, a mid-term, and a final exam.

  • ENMD 382 Violence in Medieval Literature

    1300-1350 MWF - ASTRONOMY 265

    Instructor: Peter Baker

  • ENMD 483 The Medieval & Renaissance Love Lyric

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL B028
    cross-listed with ENRN 483

    Instructor: Gordon Braden

    A study of the main traditions of love poetry in European literature and of some of the best poems in those traditions up to the mid-17th century. We will start with some of the most important classical precedents (Sappho, Catullus, Ovid), familiarize ourselves with both the Latin and the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages (especially the troubadours of southern France), read extensively in Petrarch and Renaissance Petrarchism, and end up with the strong reactions to Petrarchism by John Donne and the English Cavalier poets. Much of this poetry is written in languages other than English; we will be reading it in translation, but the original text will always be in front of us. Course requirements will be vigorous class participation, a few short papers, a longer final paper, and a final exam.

  • ENMD 528 Dante and Spenser

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

    Instructor: James Nohrnberg

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

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 311 Literature of the Renaissance

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 215

    Instructor: Gordon Braden

    We will read works by most of the major and some of the minor writers of the English Renaissance, up to the first years of the 17th century. We will also look at some of the continental literature that helped set the tone for the age as a whole, and explore what is meant (and not meant) by “Renaissance” as a period concept. Most of what we will be reading will be poetry, and most of that will be love poetry, from Petrarch to John Donne. There will be several short papers and a final exam.

  • ENRN 321 Shakespeare I, section 0001

    0930-1045 TR - MAURY 209

    Instructor: Katharine Maus

  • ENRN 481 Renaissance and the Epic

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 330

    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.

  • ENRN 481 Renaissance Drama

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 130

    Instructor: Katharine Maus

    Between 1570 or so and 1642, the newly established commercial theaters in London created the first literary market in England. Shakespeare was only one of many who wrote plays for the commercial theater. This class will focus on drama written by playwrights roughly contemporary with Shakespeare. I haven't yet drawn up a syllabus for the class but we will most likely be reading plays by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger. Some prior acquaintance with Shakespeare is helpful but not required. Assignments will probably include a 4-5 page paper, a midterm exam, an 8-10 page paper, and a final.

  • ENRN 483 The Medieval & Renaissance Love Lyric

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL B028
    cross-listed with ENRN 483

    Instructor: Gordon Braden

    A study of the main traditions of love poetry in European literature and of some of the best poems in those traditions up to the mid-17th century. We will start with some of the most important classical precedents (Sappho, Catullus, Ovid), familiarize ourselves with both the Latin and the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages (especially the troubadours of southern France), read extensively in Petrarch and Renaissance Petrarchism, and end up with the strong reactions to Petrarchism by John Donne and the English Cavalier poets. Much of this poetry is written in languages other than English; we will be reading it in translation, but the original text will always be in front of us. Course requirements will be vigorous class participation, a few short papers, a longer final paper, and a final exam.

  • ENRN 528 Dante and Spenser

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

    Instructor: James Nohrnberg

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

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature

  • ENEC 312 Late Eighteenth-Century Literature: "Discoveries and Explorations"

    1400-1515 MW - MAURY 113

    Instructor: Cynthia Wall

    By the second half of the eighteenth century, the British were practically zooming around their island and the world. Improvements in roads and coaches, expanded trade routes, the explorations of science, and the thrust of empire meant that more and more people of all classes could travel more easily at home and abroad, visiting other houses, other cities, and other cultures, and writing about it. We will explore the rhetorics of exploration in letters, diaries, journals, biographies, travel narratives, country house guides, ship’s logs, poems, plays, and novels, reading works by James Boswell, Frances Burney, Mary Delany, Jane Austen, Humphry Repton, William Cowper, Gilbert White, Samuel Johnson, Olaudah Equiano, Lord Chesterfield, Matthew Lewis, William Bligh, and Captain Cook. Two short papers (40%), a group presentation (20%), biweekly commentaries (10%),* and a final exam (30%)

  • ENEC 350 The Eighteenth-Century Novel

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 215

    Instructor: John O'Brien

    The novel and modernity arguably arrived together in the course of the eighteenth century, and they’ve been intricately interwoven ever since.  In this course, we will read some of the landmark works of fiction of this period as a way of exploring the relationship between the novel and the modern world that it described, heralded, mocked, celebrated, and helped bring into being.  The reading list is not finished yet, but we will surely be reading from a list that includes Eliza Haywood’s racy romances, Daniel Defoe’s pseudo-autobiographical “histories,” Samuel Richardson’s compulsively-readable epistolary fictions, Henry Fielding’s “comic-epics in prose,” Anne Radcliffe’s sensational Gothic fictions, and Jane Austen’s wry social satires.  We might screen a film based on one of these works as well.  Requirements:  2 papers, midterm, final, and possibly participation in a collaborate digital project to be determined.

  • ENEC 481 The Pre-Postmodern Novel

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 330

    Instructor: Brad Pasanek

    In this course we move back and forth between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in order to gauge how texts are written and rewritten, one against another. Laurence Sterne poses our central question: "Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?"

    Theory proposes the Enlightenment and Postmodernity as antagonist paradigms, but the student may find, by term’s end, that eighteenth-century and postmodern writers overlap almost as much as they disagree.

    Fiction and meta-fiction are two red threads; our reading, a braid or knot. The course begins at the beginning with Don Quixote - or rather, with a 1755 translation of Quixote. The history of the novel, it has been suggested, may be no more than one sustained rewriting of Quixote. We focus next on what has been called “the Pamela media event.” Sterne’s anticipation of twentieth-century formal innovations is considered at midterm. Finally, our treatment of three paired authors - Defoe and Coetzee, Pope and Nabokov, Austen and a contemporary bestselling novelist - explores a field of possibilities.

    Course requirements: attendance, in-class presentation, online discussion, short paper based in the Eighteenth Century Collection Online, longer research paper.

Nineteenth Century British Literature

  • ENNC 311 Romanticism

    1100-1215 TR - MAURY 113

    Instructor: Marlon Ross

    This course samples the literature of the British romantic period, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution (1789) to the crowning of Queen Victoria (1837).  We’ll focus on the genres that predominate during these decades: the political and philosophic tract, the narrative poem, the lyric and sentimental poem, the domestic novel, the familiar essay, gothic, the stage play, the “closet” play, and the political and literary memoir. We’ll consider how individuals negotiated revolutionary desire and social unrest by adapting, rejecting, or reaffirming everyday conventions and structures, including class hierarchy and decorum, political institutions, economic practices, religious rituals, social fashions, and literary forms.  How did writers respond to such explosive issues as the French Revolution, regicide, homelessness, the slave trade, warfare, patriotism, censorship, machine-breaking and labor unrest, marriage versus free love, natural childrearing and education, and the limits of human nature and historical change?  Authors covered include, among others, Edmund Burke, Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hemans, “Monk” Lewis, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Austen.  Requirements are two short essays, a midterm, and final exam.

  • ENNC 336 Poetry From Blake to Yeats

    1700-1815 MW - MAURY 110

    Instructor: Jerome McGann

    The course will read a set of the most significant poems, poets, and poetic theories that were written in a period that saw great cultural changes, from the emergence of Romanticism to the beginnings of Modernism.  The readings will be trans-Atlantic British and American, starting with William Blake and including Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Poe, D. G. Rossetti,  Whitman, Swinburne, Dickinson, Meredith, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens.

  • ENNC 352 The Lives of the Victorians

    1230-1345 TR - MAURY 113

    Instructor: Alison Booth

    The Victorian period has been called “an age of biography,” and it was certainly a time when many forms of “lives” were published.  But there was no agreement on how much of private life could be revealed in public, let alone how far a person might rightly or wisely go from the birthplace, lot, or station in life.  Many of the conditions of personal development and career and the conventions of writing auto/biography that we take for granted today began to be recognized during Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1901 and into the early twentieth century.  This course focuses in Britain during that period, but takes a broad and long perspective on the ways that lives may be represented now as well as then.  Themes include the lives of writers; travel and exploration; self-made men; religious crisis; gender, love, and sexuality.  We will read shorter as well as longer works, fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction prose, first- and third-person works about one or more people.  Texts include the most recent edition of The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2B (The Victorian Age), Gaskell’s  The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Penguin), Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh  (Norton), Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis and George Eliot’s “Brother Jacob,” Gosse’s Father and Son (Penguin), and selected short essays on biography and autobiography, as well as short biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online) and other databases.  Requirements include attendance and participation (“lecture” is interactive); two research assignments (one in new media, the other in Special Collections); a short essay and a longer essay; a final exam.

  • ENNC 356 Late Victorian Fiction

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 216

    Instructor: Stephen Arata

    We will study fiction-mostly British, though with some influential works from the Continent brought in to provide context and contrast-from the period 1860-1900. Texts likely to appear on the syllabus include George Eliot, "The Lifted Veil"; Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"; J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature; Rachilde, Monsieur Venus; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Gertrude Dix, The Image Breakers; George Gissing, New Grub Street; Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim; and James Joyce, "The Dead." Requirements include two essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

  • ENNC 481 Austen and Brontë

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Karen Chase

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

Modern and Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 312 The American 1920s

    1000-1050 MWF - ASTRONOMY 265

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

  • ENMC 330 Modern & Contemporary Poetry

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 320

    Instructor: Walter Jost

  • ENMC 341 Modern Drama

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 132
    cross-listed with ENGN 341

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This is the first half of a two-semester course on modern and contemporary Western drama, with brief forays into other regions. This course surveys the modern period from the end of the 19th century through the post-World War II period. It first examines the emergence of realism, then moves through various reactions against realism, such as expressionism, surrealism, Epic Theater, and Absurdism. We will ponder the relationship between text and performance and place the plays in their theatrical and political environments. We will read plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Glaspell, Treadwell, Pirandello, Brecht, Lorca, Beckett, and others. Course requirements: two shorter papers; one longer paper or a project (one option is to write your own play); a final exam.

  • ENMC 355 Asian-American Cultural History

    1700-1815 TR - CABELL 323

    Instructor: Sylvia Chong

    The historical experiences of Asian Americans-a broad, panethnic category inclusive of Americans with roots in the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more-shed light on issues of immigration, citizenship, education, war, labor, and assimilation which have affected all Americans to differing degrees. This "multi-media" cultural history will draw heavily on American visual and popular culture to situate, visualize, and define Asian Americans at various historical moments against and alongside African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and white Americans. Some of these moments involve intense conflict and division, while others gesture towards camaraderie and affiliation. This class will be neither a simplistic celebration of ethnic pride and diversity, nor a condemnation of American history as singularly oppressive, although we will acknowledge both these strands. Rather, the eclectic materials of this class will replicate the heterogeneous history and make-up of Asian America, and establish Asian America as a relationship with itself and with America, rather than a "thing" to isolate and analyze.

    This is an introductory course that assumes no prior knowledge of American Studies or Asian American history. During the semester, we will concentrate on developing close reading skills for visual, cinematic and textual materials that may prove useful to future courses you might take in American Studies, History, English or Media Studies. We will engage with a number of primary texts from various genres (fiction, poetry, graphic novel, political cartoon, theater, narrative film, documentary, news media, sociological texts, Supreme Court cases), and spanning the mid-19th century to contemporary times. While obviously not an exhaustive overview of Asian Americans in American cultural history, we will try to touch upon a diverse range of historical moments and cultural and political issues, so as to gain insight into the interconnectedness of multi-ethnic America.

    Preference for ENMC 355 will be given to English majors, and to potential AMST majors and APAS minors, although others are welcome to enroll if space is available. This course is cross-listed as AMST 201 (25 additional spaces).

  • ENMC 380 Concepts of the Modern

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 216

    Instructor: Jessica Feldman

    Modernist writers have often thought of themselves as living in a time of endless crisis. Since "crisis" literally means a turning point, their conceptual and aesthetic worlds favored movement, uncertainty, even vertigo. Artistic responses to modernity pulsed between two poles: the work of art as an escape to dream, gesturing toward the mysterious and the sacred; and the work of art as a reflection of social needs, embedded in history and meant to show us how to live together. What is the self and its relation to (in W.H. Auden's terms) crowds, societies, and communities? What is the significance of ordinary life to affairs of the spirit? For answers to questions such as these, we'll consider Rousseau, Poe, Valéry, Proust, Kafka, Babel, Beckett, Nabokov, Bishop, and Murikami , along with a few selected works of visual art and a film.

  • ENMC 481A Jewish-American Fiction

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 312
    cross-listed with ENAM 481A

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    In this course we will trace the development of Jewish American fiction, drawing upon the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature for short stories, essays, and extracts from memoirs and novels, and reading several complete novels as well. We start in the milieu of the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side of New York, reading works composed in English and some translated from Yiddish, by immigrant writers such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Among the next generation, heirs to Yiddish culture with hugely American aspirations, we will read writers such as Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Art Spiegelman. At the end of the course we will read fiction from the currently booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, authors to be announced.

    The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new American literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to American literary and cultural traditions; to Jewish religious practice and to traditional Jewish texts; to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; and to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; uses and workings of Jewish humor; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; relations to African Americans, their culture and history; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, several short reading responses, a short and a long paper.

  • ENMC 481B Anglo-American Modernism

    1400-1630 T - BRYAN 233
    cross-listed with ENAM 481B

    Instructor: Jennifer Wicke

    This course follows the transatlantic and transnational traffic of modernist literature from 1900 to the 1930s, as it travels through the U.S. and the Americas, the Caribbean and the British Isles, and makes a circuit of the globe. We will concentrate on major authors and canonical works of fiction that look very different when seen as part of a cross-cultural movement of modernism, and also will explore and discover less well-known or non-canonical modernisms that become visible when their traveling value is recognized. Among the important Americanists we'll consider in this light are Kate Chopin, Henry James, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and William Faulkner, while investigating the circulating modernism of such figures as James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, in such works as "The Awakening,""The Golden Bowl," "The Portrait of an Artist," "Nostromo," "The Voyage Out," and Cane." The class will focus on a geography of modernism that tracks the relationship between Anglo-American modernist works and authors when the meaning of both terms on either side of the hyphen is in question, and will use the lens of movement and space to ask what defines modernism on the page and in its cultural passages. This seminar will require extensive reading of wonderful material, a commitment to class participation, two short papers (one 3-4 pages, the other 5-7 pages) and a third and final longer one (15 pages) that casts a fresh eye on modernism in motion.

  • ENMC 481C Cross-Cultural Poetries

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Jahan Ramazani

    In this seminar, we will explore the cross-cultural dynamics of modern and contemporary poetry. We will read individual poets in the contexts of globalization, transnationalism, migration, diaspora, and postcolonialism. To frame our analysis of  creolization and hybridization in twentieth-century poetry, we will read essays on modern travel, transnationalism, mobility, globalization, and intercultural affiliation by James Clifford, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Neil Lazarus, and others. We will also pause over Picasso’s appropriation of African art in inventing Cubism. Reading poetry and critical essays, we will examine the appropriations by such Euromodernist poets as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound of East Asian and South Asian cultural forms and vocabularies, which have been seen as acts of inventive assimilation and imperial theft. Conversely, we will ask what happens to Euromodernist texts and forms when postcolonial poets from Africa, India, and the Caribbean hybridize them with indigenous cultural resources. We will consider similar questions with regard to other cross-cultural and transnational poetries, including African American, Black British, Native American, Latino, and Asian American. Euromodernist poets will include Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Mina Loy. Harlem Renaissance poets, McKay, Toomer, L. Hughes, and Melvin Tolson. Later African American poets, Brooks and Dove. Caribbean poets, Louise Bennett, Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Lorna Goodison. Indian poets, A. K. Ramanujan and Agha Shahid Ali. African poets, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p’Bitek, and Wole Soyinka. Black British poets Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, and Bernardine Evaristo. Teaching strategies will require active class collaboration, cooperative engagement, and co-leading of discussion. An abstract and a seminar paper will also be required. Our primary texts will be volumes 1 and 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition.

  • ENMC 481D American Writers & World War II

    1200-1250 MWF - BRYAN 312
    cross-listed with ENAM 481C

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

  • ENMC 481E James Joyce

    1530-1645 MW - BRYAN 312

    Instructor: Stephen Arata

    A seminar on the major works of James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and as much of Finnegans Wake as we can manage. Requirements include an essay, a substantial research project, and a final exam.

  • ENMC 481F The Current American Novel

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 310

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

    This