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 432

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mark Wagenaar

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0002

    1800-1915 MW - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Carolyn Creedon

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0003

    1900-2015 MW - CABELL 432

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Paul Legault

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0005

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mark Parlette

  • ENWR 230 Poetry Writing, section 0006

    1800-2030 R - CABELL 335

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jasmine Bailey

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0001

    1830-2100 M - CABELL 331

    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

    1800-2030 T - CABELL 432

    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. The reading list
    will consist entirely of short works, with the occasional essay or
    memoir excerpt. Think Poe, Hemingway, and Tolstoy, but also think
    Denis Johnson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Hempel, Edward Jones, Haruki
    Murakami, and Raymond Carver. The workload will include: turning in
    two pieces of original fiction; critiquing the fiction of your peers;
    and participating fully in the reading discussions.

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0003

    1800-2100 T - WILSON 141A

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Amanda Cole

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0004

    1830-2100 W - WILSON 141A

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Kevin Allardice

  • ENWR 250 Fiction Writing, section 0006

    1830-2100 W - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Helen McLaughlin

  • ENWR 270 Newswriting, sections 0001 and 0002

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 203 and 0800-0915 TR - BRYAN 230

    Course Meets Second Writing Requirement
    Both sections cross-listed with MDST 270

    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 Newswriting, section 0003

    0800-0915 TR - Location TBA

    Course Meets Second Writing Requirement
    Cross-listed with MDST 270

    Instructor: Mary Niehoff

    Description unavailable.

  • ENWR 332 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0001

    1400-1630 T - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Rita Dove

    A weekly 2.5 hour class for students with some prior workshop experience in writing and critiquing poetry. Emphasis is on students' own poems, with focused writing exercises and written responses to relevant outside reading, as well as class discussions on issues of contemporary poetry. Final poetry portfolio required. ADMISSION BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY. Sample of student work (4-6 poems) to be submitted at least [one week prior] to the first class meeting to Ms. Dove's mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall; include name, year, telephone number, major, and prior workshop experience.

  • ENWR 332 Intermediate Poetry Writing, section 0002

    1100-1330 T- BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This once a week, 2 ½ hour workshop will involve reading and discussion of several texts, directed as well as free writing assignments, and regular workshop critiquing of student poems and revisions.  Permission of the instructor is required before registering.  A manuscript of 4-5 poems should be submitted at least a week before classes begin to Ms. Nystrom’s mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall (include your name, email address, phone, year and previous writing course information).   To mail a submission, send it to Debra Nystrom, Dept. of English, 219 Bryan Hall, P.O. Box 400121, UVa, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121.

  • ENWR 352 Intermediate Fiction Writing

    1530-1800 W - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Elizabeth Denton

    This workshop is for students who are serious about learning to write fiction. We will focus primarily on student work, but will also explore short stories by living writers. Revision will be required. Interested students should submit 20 pages of fiction to Ms. Denton's mailbox in the faculty lounge, Bryan Hall, a week before classes begin. The final class list will be posted on the door to 430 Bryan Hall before the first day of class.

  • ENWR 380 Academic and Professional Writing, section 0001

    1100-1215 TR - Location TBA

    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

    1700-1930 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casey

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

  • ENWR 484 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1100-1330 R - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This workshop will be focused on student poems, but will involve assigned reading also, with attention to issues of craft.  Along with a semester portfolio of poems, students will write a few short prose pieces on poetry, and will offer one in-class presentation.  Permission of the instructor is required before registering.  To apply, submit 4-5 poems at least a week before classes begin to Ms. Nystrom’s mailbox in 219 Bryan Hall (include your name, email address, phone, year and your previous writing course information).   To mail a submission, send it to Debra Nystrom, Dept. of English, 219 Bryan Hall, P.O. Box 400121, UVa, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121.

  • ENWR 532 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1700-1930 M - BRYAN 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Gregory Orr

    This will be a weekly, 2 1/2 hour workshop involving some outside reading, exercises, and assignments, but primarily centered around the generation and discussion of student poems with an eye to revision. This workshop is open to undergraduates with advanced poetry writing background, graduate students from around the university who possess the requisite writing background, and Citizen Scholars who likewise have a demonstrated background and involvement in poetry writing. Space Limited. PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED. Please note the early DEADLINE for SUBMISSION OF 4 TO 5 POEMS: JANUARY 9. Poems can be submitted by email (gso@virginia.edu) or delivered to my mailbox on the second floor of Bryan Hall BY THE DEADLINE. Include contact information with submissions.

  • ENWR 552 Craft of Fiction Workshop

    1500-1730 W - CABELL 432

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

    This advanced workshop is for students who have already put substantial effort into writing fiction and who are ready to deepen their mastery over the discrete crafts and techniques of fiction.  Based somewhat on the insights of narrative theory and on brief examinations of canonical works, this course will consist primarily of weekly writing assignments designed to help writers achieve the nuanced effects available through manipulation of narrative perspective and narrative distance, time and temporal structure, spoken discourse and representations of consciousness, narrative situation and embedded plots.  The course is built upon the precepts of contemporary realism, but many of the assignments encourage sure-handed experimentation based on a stronger grasp of narrative fundamentals.   Toward the end of the course each student will present one short story for review and class comment.

Poetry Writing Program

  • ENPW 282 The Poetics of Ecstasy

    1530-1800 W - Location TBA

    Restricted to 2nd year students

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    The Greek word ekstasis signifies displacement, trance - literally, “standing elsewhere.” It implies a foray from an ordinary to an extraordinary situation, and no human experience is beyond its reach. Religion, music, sex, politics, sports, consumerism, war, crime, and illness can all involve transformative passages into wondery, mystery, and otherness. The banner-waving politico in a thrall of conventioneering mania, Jimi Hendrix burning his Strat at the Monterey Pop Festival, and New York Giants' outfielder Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" all involve various kinds and degrees of ecstatic transport.

    In this seminar class, we will explore the poetics of fervor - erotic, visionary, psychosomatic, religious, political, mystical. When the precincts of poetry and rapture intersect, what transpires? What is possible? What is at stake and why does it matter? In addition to thinking and discussing cultural understandings and manifestations of ecstasy, 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 one’s self in the transport of ecstasy.

  • ENPW 482 Poetry Program Seminar: Poetry and Its Uses

    1215-1445 W - CABELL 432

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Victor Luftig

    This seminar is designed for students in the Department’s Undergraduate Area in Poetry Writing; other upper level English majors may occasionally be admitted, as may graduate students, who may petition for graduate credit.  It is designed as a reading class for writers of poetry, meant to encourage reflection on and study of what poetry can and can’t accomplish as social and political force.  After considering the history of poetry’s “uses” in America, we will study a few test cases, occasions when modern or contemporary poems in America, England, Ireland, and elsewhere have become engaged with crucial political events; we will consider those incidents in the light of some of the last century’s most prominent models and arguments for poetry’s efficacy.  Initial readings will be drawn from Joan Shelley Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, from the works and life of W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Carl Sandburg, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, and others, and from Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.  Each student will analyze a past incident exemplifying poetry’s participation in a political or social controversy and will make an argument for some application of poetry to a current circumstance: those arguments will be presented in class for discussion as works-in-progress.  We will end with a particular focus on the role of contemporary American poetry in a time of war, examining the originating events and subsequent development of “Poets Against War,” as well as the reception of Iraq war veteran Brian Turner’s poems.

Introductory Seminars in Literature

  • ENLT 201 Introduction to Literary Studies, section 0001

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Alison Booth

    A prerequisite for the English major, this course is intended to increase familiarity with issues of literary history, genre, and critical approaches, and to improve skills in interpretation and writing. We will gain clearer answers to the questions, “What is literature?” and “What can kinds of literature do?” We will work together on more advanced reading and writing about fiction, poetry, and drama of different periods and traditions. We will focus on particular authors, including Shakespeare, Donne, Austen, Gaskell, Conrad, James, Tennyson, Dickinson, Poe, and others, and some specific historical issues, and above all learn to recognize the forms and techniques of particular works. Many readings will come from the Norton Introduction to Literature.

  • ENLT 201 Introduction to Literary Studies, section 0002

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL B026

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: J. Paul Hunter

    Description unavailable.

  • ENLT 214 Southern Literature

    1530-1645 MW - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Alison Caviness Gibson

    The American South is host to a regional literature that is the backbone of the twentieth-century literary tradition. We will consider how the texts on our syllabus depict typical southern themes, including racism, miscegenation, attachment to the land, familial dependence and independence, storytelling, religion, and female sexuality; then we will consider the ways in which these themes contribute to and complicate constructions of geopolitical/regional identity. Furthermore, we will investigate the ways in which our authors reflect political and cultural changes in America and the South over the twentieth century, leading us to interrogate the efficacy of the category "southern" and predict the future of southern literature.

    We will examine the parameters of southern identity through novels, plays, short stories, and film, coming to terms with the similarities and differences between these genres. We will also develop our close reading skills and strengthen our analysis of literature in both verbal and written communication through study of literary devices including plot, diction, character, metaphor, imagery, dialogue, point of view, setting, allusion, ritual, and syntax.

  • ENLT 214 Social Problem Literature in the US

    1530-1645 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Shaun Cullen

    Whether protesting a war, a social injustice, or the general malaise of everyday life, many American authors in the 20th-century have attempted to diagnose, describe, and sometimes resolve social problems.  In this class, we will discuss the form and content of American poetry, fiction, songs, films, and television shows that have dealt with social problems in the 20th-century.  What social problems did 20th-century American authors care about, and how did they think their writing might solve those problems?  What literary forms did these authors use to express their discontent, and how successful, aesthetically and politically, were their protests? Texts will range from novels by Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to the song lyrics of Bob Dylan and Nas, and from the silent films of D.W. Griffith and Oscar Micheaux to the television series The Wire and The Sopranos.

  • ENLT 214 Literature of the Americas

    1300-1350 MWF - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Nathan Ragain

    In this course, we will practice skills of close reading and literary analysis by examining several texts by major modern American authors, paying particular attention to the novel, short fiction and poetry, but also considering genres such as political writing (Garvey, Marti) and ethnography (Hurston). Drawing primarily from the U.S. South and the Caribbean, this course reads central figures in modern U.S. literature such as Kate Chopin, William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston alongside writers from the broader Americas such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karen Tei Yamashita and Derek Walcott.

  • ENLT 223 American Lyric Poetry

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    In this course we will explore the aesthetic legacies of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in contemporary American lyric poetry written primarily by poets born after 1940. We will read widely and deeply in a myriad of traditions, developing a vocabulary with which to articulate what poems say to us, and how, and why. As we delve into the work of these poets we will not only concern ourselves with poetic techniques and ruses, but also discuss the evolving self in American poetry and engage in the conversations these poets generate among themselves across time and distances cultural, geographic, and temperamental. Poets we will investigate include Charles Simic, Susan Howe, C. D. Wright, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rae Armantrout, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Brenda Shaughnessy, and many more. Students will brief weekly papers and complete a final writing project.

  • ENLT 223 Modern Poetry

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Chris Forster

    The focus of this class will be on learning to read poetry closely, with attention to form. We'll focus on the poetry written in English of the first half of the twentieth century. We'll look at writers like Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot among others.

  • ENLT 223 The Psalms

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Laurance Wieder

    The English Bible and English poetry share an origin. At the same time that 16th- and 17th-century Protestants vied with the established churches to win souls through translation, poets tried to claim the psalms for English lyric. The evolution continues.

    In this course, we’ll read those Bible books which relate the basis of the 150 Psalms: Genesis, Exodus, parts of Numbers and Deuteronomy, Samuel 1&2, and Kings 1&2. Those texts entwine cosmology, protohistory, and the establishment of the people of the Book through law, as told by the lawgiver. This mosaic of legend and precept is celebrated in song, in David’s Psalms. David’s career, depicted in Samuel, is as close as the Hebrew Bible comes to personal narrative, to an account of inner life. It reads like a family saga.

    At the same time, we’ll work our way through the Psalms, comparing certain psalms in the King James Version with poets’ renderings. It’s an opportunity to triangulate between an obscured original and living responses to the source, to figure out where the individual ends and the common ground begins. The Psalms also point the way toward learning fused with feeling, and scholarship as a variety of inspiration.

    Grade based on in-class discussion, an oral presentation, one paper of approximately 500, one of 1000, one of 1500, and one of 2000 words. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

  • ENLT 224 Studies in Drama

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This semester, we will study the political play. We will read overtly political plays but also examine more subtle plays that seem at first sight anything but political. This will enable us to explore a broad range of plays and hone our skills in exploring subtext; it will also permit us to ask how and why society tries to suppress theater. As we connect the plays historically, we will trace the history of Western drama.  In the course of the semester, you will acquire close reading skills and learn to write effective analytical essays. As often as possible, we will see the plays in performance.

    Texts: Aristophanes, Lysistrata; Shakespeare, Measure for Measure; Molière, Tartuffe; Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba; Bertolt Brecht, Galileo; Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine; Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches; Carson Kreitzer, The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

  • ENLT 224 Irish Drama in the 20th Century

    1100-1150 MWF - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Sara Bryant

    This course surveys Irish drama throughout the twentieth century. Our primary focus will be the stage, but filmic reinterpretations and interventions will also be considered. Our syllabus begins with the establishment of the Abbey Theatre (or the National Theatre of Ireland) by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, and ends with contemporary playwrights and filmmakers. The main goal of this course is to develop skills of textual analysis, including close reading, cultural and historical contextualization, and original literary argument.

  • ENLT 226 Studies in Narrative

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Karen Chase

    We will study a wide range of modern and contemporary short fiction in an
    attempt to understand the forms and techniques which characterize the
    genre. Authors from England, America, China, India, Africa, Canada (and
    more) will be represented so that we can better grasp both differences and
    similarities in the variety of attempt. Requirements include regular and
    lively class participation, 2 papers and a final exam

  • ENLT 226 Migrant Fictions

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty

    Salman Rushdie has written that, “Migration offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age.” Taking Rushdie’s claim as our starting point, this course explores the complexity of the metaphor of migration through the study of a diverse body of Anglophone novels that specifically fictionalize experiences of migration. Contemporary literary imaginings of migration are framed equally by the utopian possibilities as well as the dystopic material realities that define a uniquely migrant modernity. On the one hand, migrant cultures are seen to elide national boundaries, enable cultural encounters, and collapse fantasies of a homogeneously cohesive national narrative. In this sense, an emergent literary aesthetics of migrancy seems to celebrate flexible forms of belonging in the world: as hybrid, metro-sexual, transcultural, nomadic, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual etc. On the other, the migrant figure, liminal and ever shifting, also represents the collective phantasms of modernity working out their own scenes of inequity and exclusion. In this second sense, the migrant imaginary is also a political one concerned with those axes of belonging and non-belonging - as citizen or alien, patriot or traitor, legal or illegal, native or naturalized - that continue to stratify our societies.

    Our study will take seriously these various historical, social, and literary figurations through which recent seminal texts of world literature represent migration. We will begin with the premise that the migrant perspective is an important one in the context of new English literatures because the metaphors of journey, unrootedness, mobility, dispossession, and exile that frame it are useful to understanding the complex situation of our present world. In order to have a sense of the global scope and relevance of the topic, we will read a range of novels that focus exclusively on stories of migration. Among others, we will read works by Desai, Kureishi, Selvon, Aidoo, Kincaid, Selvadurai, Coetzee, Ali, Rushdie and Smith.

  • ENLT 226 Introduction to the Novel

    1100-1215 TR  - BRYAN 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: John O'Brien

    How do you read a novel? This course is designed to help answer that question. Together, we’ll read a number of excellent long prose narratives, with an eye toward establishing a shared vocabulary for talking and writing about the long works of fiction that literary critics have come to group under the term “novel.” I’m still working on the reading list, but it will include things like Jane Austen’s Emma, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Lots of writing, final exam. Restricted to first and second years; fulfils the second writing requirement.

  • ENLT 226 Factual Fictions: British Autobiographical Novels

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 130

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Ashley Faulkner

    Our concepts of the life-story, of celebrity and of authors all owe a great deal to the nineteenth century, and to the early part of the twentieth. In 1898, when Oscar Wilde saw his publisher's latest advertising campaign, he said, "I feel like Lipton's Tea." The remark aptly captures a moment when writers and writing were becoming an integral part of a developing "ad culture."

    In this course, focusing on a narrow range of life-writing - autobiographical novels and poems - we will track the phenomenon of the "consumable author," and the development author-as-celebrity. We will read autobiographical novels, and ask: How did their aura of autobiography help sell copies? What do these books tell us about "identity"? What consumable authors do we see in today's world? Since when has everyone had a "life-story"?

  • ENLT 226 A Shrinking Island: British Spaces

    1300-1350 MWF - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jason Coats

    This course investigates what it felt like to be living through the final days of the British Empire by focusing on how modern fiction expresses a changing national feeling for space. At the beginning of the twentieth century the sun was always shining on a British flag somewhere around the globe. By the end of World War II, the Empire was breaking up, and the British had lost their claim to political preeminence. We will search for the effects of imperial decline in modern fictional representations of rural and urban spaces, and how the characters who inhabited those settings felt their national horizons shrinking. We will explore the ways in which British characters are newly bound to the places they inhabit, whether they live in the sprawling metropolis of London or in the open English countryside. Our syllabus ends just after World War II, when the collapse of their empire drove British writers to reexamine their roles within a diminished homeland; readings include novels and short fiction by Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, and Conrad, among others.

  • ENLT 247 Black Writers and Media

    1700-1815 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Benjamin Fagan

    In this course students will examine a key trope that permeates African American literature: media. We will approach this term in two senses. On the one hand, we will look at how texts appear in diverse mediums, be they newspapers, anthologies, audio recordings, or television coverage. On the other hand, students will read key works that place the problem of media representation at the center of their projects. Students will spend a significant amount of time with each selected text, allowing them to develop critical close reading skills. Moreover, by examining one work in multiple mediums they will be able to investigate how form and presentation inflect a text's meaning. We will read texts ranging from 18th century poetry to 21st century oratory. We will read canonical authors such as Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison, and also consider the works of lesser-known writers such as Martin Delany and Francis Ellen Watkins.

  • ENLT 247 Black Writers and Black Music

    1530-1645 MW - BRYAN 312

    Instructor: Erich Nunn

    This course traces the interrelations of twentieth-century African American literary and musical histories from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk through the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s to the present day.

  • ENLT 250 Shakespearean Treacheries

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL B029

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Bethany Mabee

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines treachery as a "violation of faith or betrayal of trust." We will draw on this definition to frame our thematic exploration of treachery in a group of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies and romances. Whether we locate treachery between friends, lovers, allies, or rulers and their subjects, our thematic focus will allow us to probe complex questions of obligation, justice and resolution. In tandem with these considerations, we will develop strategies for reading and engaging with literary texts. Our in-class discussions and writing assignments will build analytical vocabularies and close reading skills. Course requirements include two close reading assignments, three critical essays, an in-class group performance, and a final exam.

  • ENLT 255 American Film: Los Angeles in Hollywood

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Eric Lott

    Not exactly a conventional film course, this one will use Hollywood cinema as the centerpiece of an inquiry into the cultural history and imaginary geography of Los Angeles.  In addition to cultural historians and geographers such as Mike Davis, Sue Ruddick, and Eric Avila, we’ll read theorists of the so-called culture industry (e.g., Theodor Adorno), social commentators and gossips on L.A. and Hollywood (e.g., Carey McWilliams, Chester Himes, John Gregory Dunne, Kenneth Anger), and such novels as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939), Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and Michael Tolkin’s The Player (1988).  Plus, of course, the films, all of them about Los Angeles or Hollywood itself: e.g., King Vidor’s Show People (1928), Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Donnen/Gene Kelly’s Singin in the Rain (1952), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1968), Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song (1971), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Luis Valdez’s La Bamba (1987), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), Joel Schumacher’s  Falling Down (1993), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1997), Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski (1998), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002), Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004).

  • ENLT 255 Nobel Prize for Literature

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 312

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Richard Gibson

    This course will introduce students to the works of great contemporary writers and to the fundamentals of literary criticism that will help them to appreciate those works. Laureates have been chosen so that students will gain confidence reading a variety of genres. We will also consider the origins of the prize, its most controversial moments, and the laureate’s life after the award. Students enrolled in the class will be required to complete regular close reading assignments, two papers (the second examining a different genre than the first), and a final exam.

  • ENLT 255 Literature and Film Adaptation

    0800-0930 TR - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Sarah Bishop

    This course aims to improve students’ critical reading, writing, and viewing skills while simultaneously encouraging them to explore the act of adaptation and its repercussions. What does it mean to adapt a novel or a play for the big screen? Is there such a thing as an “accurate” adaptation, or are all adaptations essentially disloyal? In what ways do we use, practice, and participate in adaptation on a daily basis? These questions and others will be contemplated as students look at a variety of literature and film adaptations that run the gamut from Shakespeare plays to Victorian short stories to graphic novels. Students will be encouraged to write papers, give presentations, and participate in small-group and full class discussion in order to practice persuasive argument, close reading, and intertextual interpretation. Thinking about the adaptation of literature into film, students will come to a deeper understanding of the ways in which adaptation functions as a common form of cultural, political, and historical translation that can have both positive and negative consequences.

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 326 Chaucer

    0930-1045 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

    Chaucer wrote a lot of beautiful, intelligent, and moving poetry in addition to the famous Canterbury Tales. This course proposes that you read a broad selection of his shorter works and give special attention to the dream visions. Chaucer is interested in the virtual experience scripted by poetry, and so we will be thinking about how words on a page or in the ear produce such wildly visual, tactile, even olfactory sensations. You will learn to read Middle English and spend time on the analysis of both large and small poetic structures. Thus, this is a “close reading” course as well as a Chaucer course. And we will talk about his other ambitions -- philosophical, political, theological, aesthetic. The class is designed for beginners as well as advanced students; you need not have any previous experience with Middle English or poetry.

  • ENMD 482 The Gawain Poet

    1400-1515 MW - BRYAN 328

    Instructor: A.C. Spearing

    In this seminar we shall read the four poems attributed to an anonymous poet who was Chaucer’s most brilliant contemporary. Patience is a witty elaboration of the story of Jonah, including a full account of what it was really like inside the whale. In Cleanness violent episodes from the Old Testament, including the destruction of Sodom, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness, and Belshazzar’s feast, are used to explore sexual and spiritual defilement. Pearl is a dream of a visit to the other world, where a man encounters his dead daughter and learns how truly alien the realm beyond death is. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the most beautiful of all medieval romances, is a chivalric story of extraordinary fantasy and humour that raises intricate moral problems. The poet’s language is difficult (but we shall use an edition that translates hard words and passages); his technical sophistication and imaginative reach are incomparable.

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 311 Renaissance to Revolution

    0900-0950 MW - ASTRONOMY 265

    Instructor: Francis Connor

    Our story opens during the late years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, specifically the remarkable decade of the 1590s, when the emergence of the public theater and the ascendant literary celebrity of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and an upstart crow from Stratford asserted England’s claim to a national literature that could rival those of the Ancients and Continental Europe.  In the turbulent decades that follow, we will witness this English literary culture develop as John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and others engaged the religious, political, and social crises that ultimately led to civil war, regicide, and the abolition and restoration of the monarchy.  You may expect to contribute to the proceedings with two papers, two short research assignments, and a final exam.

  • ENRN 322 Shakespeare, section 0001

    1100-1215 TR - McLEOD 1020

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    A survey of the second half of Shakespeare's career: the major tragedies and the late plays (the so-called  “romances”).  Among the things we’ll be looking at: genre, gender, and performance; the power of love and the love of power in tragic and tragi-comic universes; alienation, transgression, “tragic knowledge”––and writing beyond tragedy.

    Course Requirements: Regular attendance at lectures and lively participation in discussion sections; two 6-8 page papers, midterm, final.

    Please note that you will not be able to enroll in a discussion section immediately: section sign-up will be sorted out in the first class meeting.

  • ENRN 340 Elizabethan Drama

    1530-1645 TR - CABELL 338

    Instructor: Keicy Tolbert

    This course studies the rich tradition of English drama from the 1580s-1630s, during the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), James I (1603-1625), and Charles I (1625-1649). We will read works by Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Beaumont, Webster, Massinger, and Ford (and perhaps one Shakespeare play). The textbook will be the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama (ed. Bevington). Students will also be encouraged, though not required, to attend 2 performances at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

  • ENRN 482 Reinventing Shakespeare

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 130

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    Shakespeare’s works have often been appropriated by both literary critics and creative artists to serve very different cultural agendas at various historical moments.  Our own focus will be somewhat more limited: we’ll look carefully at four plays and in each case explore the resonance of their reshaping and revision in a variety of media (with particular emphasis on drama and film but with some additional attention to the critical reception of the works).   Why is Shakespeare such a malleable cultural icon?  What do these creative re-productions suggest about the cultural forces underlying the apparently unceasing need to remake and/or “correct” and/or supplement “Shakespeare’s genius”?

    Tentative list of plays whose metamorphoses we will explore:  A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry V; Hamlet; King Lear.

    Course requirements:     regular attendance and lively participation in discussion, an oral presentation, one short and one long paper, a portfolio of e-mail responses.

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature

  • ENEC 384 Satire

    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 340
    Cross-listed with ENGN 384

    Instructor: J. Paul Hunter

    Sometimes it seems as if writers of the 18th century forgot about beauty altogether and concentrated on ugliness instead. Why is there, in the texts written between the Restoration and the Romantics, so much indignation, anger, denunciation, lampoon, and caricature? Why is there so much attention to deviant and anti-social behavior, so much portrayal of stupidity, violence, depravity, and villainy? Why do the major writers of the period feel compelled to concentrate on satire and the rhetoric of attack rather than the literature of praise, celebration, and elegant description?

    We'll concentrate on the texts -- in both prose and poetry -- that define the period as the age of satire, famous ones like Gulliver's Travels, The Rape of the Lock, Absalom and Achitophel, The Way of the World, Three Hours after Marriage, The Beggar's Opera, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, and The Dunciad, and some lesser known ones (by, for example, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, Matthew Prior, Mary Lady Chudleigh, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Leapor), as well as visual satires (Hogarth, Rowlandson). But first, we'll explore more recent satires -- prose, poetry, film, and cartoons -- to get our tonal bearings and to suggest the aims, strategies, social assumptions, and outcomes of satire. And we'll look briefly, too, at classical and earlier English precedents. Emphasis throughout will be on the close reading of texts.

    Each member of the class will keep a "Satire Notebook" (more than just a journal or critical commentary). The notebook will include examples of contemporary satire (poems, stories, editorial cartoons, accounts of films or TV shows) that individual students find and explore on their own (as well as comments on some of the common readings). Oral reports and two short papers in addition to the Satire Notebook.

  • ENEC 482 The Literature of Houses

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 255

    Instructor: Cynthia Wall

    To what extent are we defined and shaped by the spaces we inhabit? What means this door, this window, this staircase? The eighteenth century witnessed the professionalization of architecture, the popularity of house design books, and a profusion of novels, poems, and plays that push houses - great and small - front and center. In this seminar we will learn to visualize with historical clarity the cottages, farmhouses, inns, great estates, and castles in works such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington,” Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, William Cowper’s The Task, William Wordsworth’s “The Female Vagrant,” Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and Matthew Lewis’s Castle Spectre. Students will research and present on eighteenth-century house and garden theory. The course will also require weekly analytical commentaries, one short close-reading paper, and one longer research paper. (As well as profound discussion, of course.)

Nineteenth Century British Literature

  • ENNC 312 19th Century Poetry and Prose II

    1300-1350 MWF - Location TBA

    Instructor: Andrew Stauffer

    A survey of some of the major figures of the Romantic movement in England, with an emphasis on the poets. Reading key works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats, we will trace the emergence of Romantic modes of art and their counterforces. And we will pay close attention to the material forms of print in England from 1770-1830 to aid our understanding of Romanticism as a set of historical cultural procedures. Requirements include active participation, two papers, a mid-term and a final exam.

  • ENNC 325 Victorian Poetry

    1400-1510 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    After the great outburst of Romanticism, and pending the postwar hustle of Modernism, poetry for most of the 19th century suffered semi-eclipse by the new genre on the block, the Victorian novel. Yet interesting things happened in that long twilight, where realism trysted with romance, celebrity trafficked with perversity, the worship of nature had to deal with Darwin while the soul got street-smart downtown, women poets became a force to be reckoned with, and one man (the Queen's laureate) made more money in verse than any bard before or since. We'll work from an eclectic anthology -- chiefly Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, but numerous others too -- and study a couple of book-length poems, with excursions into relevant Victorian prose on topics in poetics and culture. Informal lecture mixed with discussion. Several essays stringently read, and a final exam comprehensively conceived.

  • ENNC 482A Family Plots in Victorian Fiction

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Susan Fraiman

    This course kicks off with Jane Austen before advancing several decades to explore mid-century British novels by Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell as well as works by two, somewhat less familiar Victorian figures, Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant.  All of our texts fall loosely into the category of “domestic fiction,” typically characterized by small town settings, middling characters, everyday objects and events, an emphasis on private life and personal relationships, the primacy of the domestic sphere, and a central courtship plot culminating in marriage.  Heterosexual romance is ostensibly paramount, but ties and tensions involving parents, siblings, friends, and rivals are also crucial elements.  And while domestic fiction is usually distinguished from industrial novels, novels of development, and gothic novels, the works we read may nevertheless thematize industrialization and class conflict, the challenges of growing up, and the nightmarish aspects of daily life.  Some may largely support reigning Victorian notions about gender, marriage, and family, while others may offer dissenting views.  All of these issues and more will be on the table for discussion.  Our syllabus will include some recent criticism but will consist primarily of extremely long Victorian novels.  We will proceed at a careful, patient pace, but you should be prepared for a rather heavy reading load.  Other requirements: short paper, long paper, and a final exam.

  • ENNC 482B Turn-of-the-Century Literature

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 328

    Instructor: Jessica Feldman

    Literature written in England between 1880 and 1914 will be our principal subject, although we will also study visual art and French literature of the period. During this turn-of-the century period "high" Modernism developed in England, but we'll also hear a cacaphony of voices as Old Guard writers, New Woman novelists, Sensationalists, and Decadents explore such varied topics as anarchy, sexuality, empire, advertising and fame, and spirituality. Authors and artists will include Charles Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley, Rachilde, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, J.K. Huysmans, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, Sarah Grand, Alice Meynell, Richard Marsh.

  • ENNC 482C Austen in Print and Film

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Alison Booth

    We will aim to enhance critical understanding of each of Jane Austen's six novels and to gain familiarity with Austen’s life and times as well as the reception history of her works. What is the shape of her career, and how has the acclaim of Austen modified across the generations? What significant cultural issues do her novels confront and temporarily resolve? Why is Austen such ripe material for film in the later twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries? From the level of the sentence on out to the myriad of paperbacks and generations of film adaptations, we will cultivate an acute perspective on Austen’s works, scholarly and general responses to them, and adaptations of them. While our course will include concentrated viewing of several films, we also will browse through the Austeniana of tourism, “sequels” in print, and Web sites.

Modern and Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 317 Contemporary Ethnic American Fiction

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA
    Cross-listed with ENAM 317

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    This semester's theme will be Contemporary Interethnic Fiction. In the wake of the globalizing changes that have made the U.S. a multi-diasporic society, contemporary fiction is increasingly animated by a drive toward encounter across multiple ethnic differences and an ironic consciousness of imbrication in a hybridized culture, even amidst persistent, acutely felt failures of social justice and longing for reparative cross-ethnic dialogue. This course will consider how an interethnic impulse shapes contemporary fiction, from its deepest psychic structures and literary ambitions; to its social vision and conceptions of history and identity; to its patterns of literary borrowing and influence; to its competing tonalities of wariness and hope, ambivalence and desire; to aspects of its aesthetic form - including narrative structures, plots, characterizations, and uses of language(s).

    An exciting feature of this course will be the appearance of novelist Karen Tei Yamashita at UVa in late March; two of her novels will be read in advance of her talk and class visit. Other writers may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Gus Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Lore Segal, Galina Vromen, Jiro Adachi, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidwha, and Chang-Rae Lee. We will also read theorists of race, ethnicity, globalization, and cultural hybridity. Students are expected to be very active class participants; to write several brief compositions, a short paper, and a long paper; and with a group, to lead a class discussion.

  • ENMC 330 Modern and Contemporary Poetry

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 312
    Cross-listed with ENAM 330/2; Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Jost

    This course gives an overview of major 20th-Century British and American verse as, in good part, a struggle over and investigation of the possibilities of language and communication in a fractured age. What is a modern poet and how should she speak to a public "in eclipse?" Does poetry make anything happen? If so what, and if not what's the point? How does poetry fit into what is still called a liberal education? In this course we'll read closely and think intensely: two papers, a mid-term and a final.

  • ENMC 342 Transnational Texts and Gender

    1530-1645 TR - MAURY 113
    Cross-listed with CPLT 342

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This is the second half of a two-semester course on modern and contemporary American and European drama (with a few forays into other regions), covering post-Absurdism to the present. The first half is not a prerequisite.  We will examine postwar quests for dramatic and theatrical structures relevant to a socially and morally chaotic world.  From a study of reactions to the Theatre of the Absurd, we move to an investigation of contemporary drama, celebrating the success of women and minority playwrights in our own period. These playwrights, earlier deprived of a voice, have transformed theater of the past fifty years. We will read plays by Ntozake Shange, Tom Stoppard, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

    Course requirements: two short papers, a long paper or a project (one option is to write your own play), a final exam.

  • ENMC 372 South Asian Film and Literature
    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 119

    Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty

    This course will examine the politics of desire and dissent in South Asia through the intertextual lens of their representation in film and literature. That the violent and non-violent protest movements against colonialism in South Asia emerged through the management of bodies, sexuality, and gender, is well known. In our study of the overlay of visual and textual representations of social and political dissent, we will revisit questions about the relationship between aesthetic movements, national resistance, and the production of certain gendered cultural and social norms. Specific cinematic movements will be placed in dialogic relation to literary ones so that a new sense can emerge of how normative as well dissident sexual identities are consolidated through dominant fields of representation in the South Asian context. Spectacular moments of socio-political dissent will be framed for us by films ranging from the social realism of art house cinema to the absurd excesses of bollywood melodrama, to more contemporary hyper-realistic and diasporic films. Some of the directors whose work we will view include Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Ligy Pullapally, Mani Ratnam, and Santosh Sivan. Alongside these, we will engage with salient protest novels that represent South Asia in realist, modernist, surrealist, pulp, and magically real terms such as those by Rao, Desai, Rushdie, Roy, Sidhwa, Selvadurai. Historically, we will cover a lot of ground - considering moments of gendered socio-political unrest within the freedom struggle, the partition, and in postcolonial South Asia. In querying the ways in which desire, and certain limits posed on desiring bodies, propel economies of socio-political struggle in this region, this course aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the ways in which popular and literary culture have negotiated the restrictive binds of “tradition” and “modernity,” “purity” and “abjection,” “caste” and “outcast,” that have become a commonplace shorthand in thinking about South Asian modernity. This course will require weekly attendance for screenings of long, fanciful, and at times, riveting, films.

  • ENMC 382 The Celtic Revival

    1200-1250 MWF - MINOR 130

    Instructor: Jason Coats

    This course introduces students to Irish modernism from the aestheticism of the decadent 1890s to the high modernism of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, with particular attention paid to the Celtic Revival of the Irish National Theater, with plays by Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Lady Gregory. We will study works of literature representing the struggle for Home Rule, the establishment of the Free State, the Irish Civil War, and the eventual Irish Republic through the lens of postcolonial theory. By doing so, we will try to distinguish between the ideal Ireland authors tried to create and the actual Ireland artists had to inhabit.

  • ENMC 482A The Lyric Sequence in Contemporary American Poetry

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA
    Restricted to 4th-year English majors, instructor permission

    Instructor: Lisa Russ Spaar

    This seminar class, designed for advanced English majors, will focus on the lyric sequence in American poetry written since 1980. We will begin by exploring pointed gatherings of poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but the focus of the course will be on contemporary poets working in series, both within and across embodiment in “the book,” including Anne Carson, Charles Wright, Kevin Young, Claudia Emerson, Nick Flynn, Mary Ann Samyn, D. A. Powell, Tom Andrews, and many others. As we read, we will examine ways in which these contemporary sequences “talk back” to American poets working in earlier traditions and schools, both mainstream and counter-cultural. What poems had to have been written in order for these late twentieth and early twenty-first-century lyric sequences to exist? How has the gestalt of the fragment in modernism and post-modernism evolved in recent work? Or devolved? What attracts poets to serial thinking? Is there a poetics of the lyrical sequence? We will have the pleasure of hearing from visiting poets and guest lecturers, and may make forays into Special collections from time to time, as well. Course work will involve a substantial seminar paper or a semester-long creative project: the writing of a poetic sequence.

  • ENMC 482B Ethnic American Drama

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 330
    Cross-listed with ENGN 482

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This seminar celebrates the richness, diversity, passion, and sophistication of contemporary ethnic American drama. We will read plays by African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American dramatists. We will examine their shared concerns and their cultural particularities, and explore how all groups negotiate traditional dramatic forms and even fundamental definitions of theater to express their own visions. Our work with these plays will challenge old methods of interpretation and our own cultural assumptions. We will try to understand how these plays are and are not uniquely American by examining the plays themselves and reading a selection of theoretical works. We will explore some of the political challenges to and ramifications of ethnic American drama. We will read plays by David Henry Hwang, Ntozake Shange, Thomson Highway, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wakako Yamauchi, Cherrie Moraga, William Yellow Robe, and others.

  • ENMC 482C British Modernism

    1400-1515 MW - Location TBA

    Instructor: Jason Coats

    In this seminar we will consider modernism from a national British perspective, as poets and novelists rethought the relationship between the British Isles and the imperial holdings they had come to dominate. While some young artists distinguished themselves from their predecessors with abrupt avant-garde flourishes, others focused on England's literary continuity with its national tradition and cultural distinctiveness. In many ways British modernism reimagined England both as a center for international innovation and as the origin of a uniquely English literary expression, even though the tension between these two impulses sometimes drove their literature into difficult and ambiguous terrain. Our course will gauge the relative success of such experiments by Conrad, Forster, Woolf, and Lawrence, among others.

  • ENMC 484 Advanced Studies in Short Fiction

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 335

    Instructor: Karen Chase

    This course will examine ‘the collected short story,' that is, stories which have been written or selected as part of a series of others intended to form a single entity. Is this a new literary hybrid, something other than a story and other than a novel though retaining elements of each? What happens to the genre when these new forms are admitted? How best to define them, understand them, evaluate them? In addition to these formal questions, we will scrutinize the form and explore the treatment of certain recurrent themes: the instability of sexual relations and gender identifications, the awakening conscience, the growth of an artistic sensibility, globalism, assimilation. Participation in each class discussion is essential. Other requirements include a long paper and a final.

American Literature to 1900

  • ENAM 314 African-American Literature

    0930-1045 TR - CABELL 118

    Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

    A continuation of ENAM 313, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and several contemporary authors. Mandatory assignments include response paragraphs, papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

  • ENMC 315 The American Renaissance

    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 324

    Instructor: Christopher Krentz

    The decades leading up to the Civil War have often been acknowledged as
    among the richest in American literary history. Dubbed the "American Renaissance" by critic F. O. Matthiessen, this period saw authors produce
    exceptional works that introduced the patterns and themes much of the
    nation's literature would follow. Syllabus has yet to be finalized, but in this course we'll probably read some of Emerson's essays and Poe's tales, Melville's Moby-Dick, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Thoreau's Walden, Douglass' Narrative of the Life, and poetry by Whitman and Dickinson, along with lesser-known works such as Fern's Ruth Hall and
    social tracts by William Apess and John Burnet. We'll approach these works on their own terms, but also try to put them into conversation with each other to see what collectively they reveal about the relationship of the individual to society, conflicts over liberty and equality, ideas of community and national identity, attitudes toward nature, religion, the imagination, and other topics. Classes will typically begin with lecture and then move into discussion or small group activity, so thoughtful preparation and participation are essential. Written requirements will include occasional short responses, a midterm, two essays, and a final exam.

  • ENAM 317 Contemporary Ethnic American Fiction

    1230-1345 TR - Location TBA

    Cross-listed with ENMC 317

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

    This semester's theme will be Contemporary Interethnic Fiction. In the wake of the globalizing changes that have made the U.S. a multi-diasporic society, contemporary fiction is increasingly animated by a drive toward encounter across multiple ethnic differences and an ironic consciousness of imbrication in a hybridized culture, even amidst persistent, acutely felt failures of social justice and longing for reparative cross-ethnic dialogue. This course will consider how an interethnic impulse shapes contemporary fiction, from its deepest psychic structures and literary ambitions; to its social vision and conceptions of history and identity; to its patterns of literary borrowing and influence; to its competing tonalities of wariness and hope, ambivalence and desire; to aspects of its aesthetic form - including narrative structures, plots, characterizations, and uses of language(s).

    An exciting feature of this course will be the appearance of novelist Karen Tei Yamashita at UVa in late March; two of her novels will be read in advance of her talk and class visit. Other writers may include Leslie Marmon Silko, Gus Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Lore Segal, Galina Vromen, Jiro Adachi, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidwha, and Chang-Rae Lee. We will also read theorists of race, ethnicity, globalization, and cultural hybridity. Students are expected to be very active class participants; to write several brief compositions, a short paper, and a long paper; and with a group, to lead a class discussion.

  • ENAM 322 Faulkner

    1000-1050 MW - CABELL 122

    Instructor: Stephen Railton

    An intensive study of most of the novels Faulkner set in Yoknapatawpha County, that fictional place where the Old South and its many ghosts meet the Modernist Novel and its experimental quest for order and meaning. We'll read Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! The Unvanquished, Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, and possibly selections from the Snopes Trilogy. Most of these texts make great demands on their readers, so please don't sign up for the class unless you're prepared to tackle the challenge of appreciating them.

    We'll meet two hours a week (Monday/Wednesday)in lecture, and one in discussion groups. You'll write two 6-7 page papers and take a final exam.

  • ENAM 330 American Poetry to World War II

    1000-1050 MWF - MAURY 110

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

    This course will begin in the nineteenth century with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, then follow their peculiar methods through a number of major twentieth century poets - Frost, Williams, Eliot, Bishop, O'Hara, and others. Some attention will be given to both the social and cultural contexts of the poetry, as well as to its art.

    Two papers and a final exam.

  • ENMC 330 Modern and Contemporary Poetry

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 312
    Cross-listed with ENMC 330; Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Jost

    This course gives an overview of major 20th-Century British and American verse as, in good part, a struggle over and investigation of the possibilities of language and communication in a fractured age. What is a modern poet and how should she speak to a public "in eclipse?" Does poetry make anything happen? If so what, and if not what's the point? How does poetry fit into what is still called a liberal education? In this course we'll read closely and think intensely: two papers, a mid-term and a final.

  • ENAM 382 Black Protest Narrative

    1400-1515 TR - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Marlon Ross

    This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film, narrative poetry) from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, focusing on the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of Black Power.  As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we’ll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, war and military service, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change.  We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son, then study other narratives, many of which challenge Wright’s forms and ideas.  Other writers include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Bobby Seale, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science.  Requirements include heavy reading schedule. midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

  • ENAM 482A “Out There Somewhere”: Pilgrims and Exiles in the American West

    0930-1045 TR - WILSON 141B

    Instructor: Frank Papovich

    Simon Ortiz, Acoma poet and American wanderer, writes in the Preface of Out There Somewhere, “Out there somewhere could be a translation of the Acoma phrase hauchaw tyah haati.  It’s a phrase spoken as a reply to a query by someone who is looking for another person, perhaps a parent looking for a child or a friend looking for his or her friend.  Upon entering a room in a house, the parent or friend might ask, ‘Where is so-and-so?’ and someone will reply, ‘Oh, he’s out there somewhere.’”   As in Ortiz’s poetry, the work of many of the best writers of the American West tracks the travels of characters, “out there somewhere.”    Movement across the land, whether as pilgrimage or exile or escape, distinguishes not only the literature of the West but also many cultural constructions of “the West.”  In this course we’ll explore some of the representative narratives of wandering from contemporary Native- and Euro-American authors.  We’ll likely read from works by Larry McMurtry, Jim Welch, Leslie Silko, Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stegner, Ed Abbey, and Simon Ortiz supplemented by selections from Scott Momaday, Judy Blunt, Joy Harjo, Willa Cather, and Jon Krakauer.

  • ENAM 482B Literature of the South

    0930-1045 TR - BRYAN 330

    Instructor: Anna Brickhouse

    Description unavailable.

  • ENAM 482C African-American Speculative Fiction

    1100-1215 TR - CABELL 335

    Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

    This class focuses on a genre of African American literature that is best described as "speculative." While all literature can be said to "speculate" about different topics, themes or events, the literary offerings in this class will venture into imagined worlds of horror, science fiction, fantasy as crafted by African American authors. Writers include Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due and others. We will use these primary texts and other sources from film and television to question the racial markings and motives of "mainstream" speculative literatures and to consider the implications of the genre for African American literature and culture.

Genre Studies

  • ENGN 342 Contemporary Drama

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This seminar celebrates the richness, diversity, passion, and sophistication of contemporary ethnic American drama. We will read plays by African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American dramatists. We will examine their shared concerns and their cultural particularities, and explore how all groups negotiate traditional dramatic forms and even fundamental definitions of theater to express their own visions. Our work with these plays will challenge old methods of interpretation and our own cultural assumptions. We will try to understand how these plays are and are not uniquely American by examining the plays themselves and reading a selection of theoretical works. We will explore some of the political challenges to and ramifications of ethnic American drama. We will read plays by David Henry Hwang, Ntozake Shange, Thomson Highway, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wakako Yamauchi, Cherrie Moraga, William Yellow Robe, and others.

  • ENGN 384 Satire

    1530-1645 MW - CABELL 340

    Cross-listed with ENEC 384

    Instructor: J. Paul Hunter

    Sometimes it seems as if writers of the 18th century forgot about beauty altogether and concentrated on ugliness instead. Why is there, in the texts written between the Restoration and the Romantics, so much indignation, anger, denunciation, lampoon, and caricature? Why is there so much attention to deviant and anti-social behavior, so much portrayal of stupidity, violence, depravity, and villainy? Why do the major writers of the period feel compelled to concentrate on satire and the rhetoric of attack rather than the literature of praise, celebration, and elegant description?

    We'll concentrate on the texts -- in both prose and poetry -- that define the period as the age of satire, famous ones like Gulliver's Travels, The Rape of the Lock, Absalom and Achitophel, The Way of the World, Three Hours after Marriage, The Beggar's Opera, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, and The Dunciad, and some lesser known ones (by, for example, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, Matthew Prior, Mary Lady Chudleigh, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Leapor), as well as visual satires (Hogarth, Rowlandson). But first, we'll explore more recent satires -- prose, poetry, film, and cartoons -- to get our tonal bearings and to suggest the aims, strategies, social assumptions, and outcomes of satire. And we'll look briefly, too, at classical and earlier English precedents. Emphasis throughout will be on the close reading of texts.

    Each member of the class will keep a "Satire Notebook" (more than just a journal or critical commentary). The notebook will include examples of contemporary satire (poems, stories, editorial cartoons, accounts of films or TV shows) that individual students find and explore on their own (as well as comments on some of the common readings). Oral reports and two short papers in addition to the Satire Notebook.

  • ENGN 482A The Contemporary American Short Story

    1100-1330 W - BRYAN 233

    Instructor: Ann Beattie

    Description unavailable.

  • ENGN 482B Ethnic American Drama

    1230-1345 TR - BRYAN 330

    Cross-listed with ENMC 482B

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This seminar celebrates the richness, diversity, passion, and sophistication of contemporary ethnic American drama. We will read plays by African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American dramatists. We will examine their shared concerns and their cultural particularities, and explore how all groups negotiate traditional dramatic forms and even fundamental definitions of theater to express their own visions. Our work with these plays will challenge old methods of interpretation and our own cultural assumptions. We will try to understand how these plays are and are not uniquely American by examining the plays themselves and reading a selection of theoretical works. We will explore some of the political challenges to and ramifications of ethnic American drama. We will read plays by David Henry Hwang, Ntozake Shange, Thomson Highway, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wakako Yamauchi, Cherrie Moraga, William Yellow Robe, and others.

Language Studies

  • ENLS 303 History of the English Language

    1400-1515 TR - CABELL 215

    Instructor: Peter Baker

    This course will cover the history of the English language from several perspectives: we will be concerned with the language’s “internal history” (what actually happened to its sounds, grammar and vocabulary). But we will also study how and why languages change and, more specifically, the “external history” of English (the cultural and historical contexts that have produced change). The course begins with the Indo-European and Germanic background of English, and we will spend some time with the language as it developed in the British Isles. In the second half of the term we will study the development of American English: its divergence from British English, the development of regional, racial and ethnic varieties, and the emergence in the twentieth century of a national “standard.” Work for the course will include regular exercises, mid-term and final exams, and a final project.

Criticism

  • ENCR 300 Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory in a Global Age

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 311

    Instructor: Jennifer Wicke

    This course explores the main currents in twentieth- through twenty-first century literary theory, as a series of questions in a global framework that transform the understanding of language, voice, and representation in general, and literature in particular. We will trace an unfolding conversation within literary theory about the meaning and use of words and their relationship to images and the forms that mediate them, the nature of language and the extent of its power to create our world, the significance of beauty and the value of art, the role of emotion and individual subjectivity, and the part that group identity plays in giving voice to cultural representations including literature. The conversation begins with issues from literary criticism but expands to a broad dialogue with contributions from philosophy, political theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, cultural studies, history and anthropology among other fields. Our course will survey landmarks in literary theory, including structuralism and post-structuralism, cultural and political critique, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, postmodernism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and postcolonial thought, and will examine closely how these debates have changed the questions we ask about literature and representation in general, and its very definition. Students taking the course will emerge with a solid introduction to the most prominent areas of contemporary theory, but also with the critical tools to pose their own enthusiastic questions, their own thoughtful arguments, and their own probing theories of literature and language, especially in light of the new-found prominence of global awareness as a factor in all cultural representations. This lecture/discussion class involves a commitment to reading complicated materials carefully, and to faithful attendance and participation; there will be a take-home midterm essay exam and a final exam, as well as one paper, a 7-10 page project that fuses a theoretical approach (made with passion and imagination) with a student's own chosen work of literature, or another cultural artifact or event in culture.

Special Topics in Literature

  • ENSP 315 New Media
    1400-1515 TR - CABELL B031
    Cross-listed with MDST 315, ARTH 368

    Instructor: David Golumbia

    First and foremost, this class will survey the variety of media objects that are often referred to as "new media." We will focus in particular on creative and cultural objects, paying special attention to those forms that appear to be most influential and/or popular today, including (1) games; (2) digital animation and special effects in feature films and television; (3) the web itself as a cultural medium; (4) new media art. Most of our time will be spent looking at examples of these forms and discussing their place as works of culture, art, and their relation to earlier related forms. A secondary theme of the class will arise from the new media criticism we will read, in which we will consider not just the question of the appropriate methods for new media criticism, but also try to understand what might be meant by the idea of new media itself. Media we will study include games like The Sims, Half-Life, and World of Warcraft; films like Transformers, AI: Artificial Intelligence, 300, Toy Story, and the Star Wars films; art by figures like ze frank, Yael Kanarek, jimpunk, jodi.org, Annie Abrahams, 0100101110101101.org, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Shelley Jackson, Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman; and criticism by writers like Lev Manovich, Christiane Paul, Michael Rush, Mark Hansen, and Oliver Grau. Taught primarily via discussion with some brief lectures and student presentations. Two short papers and a final paper or project, which may be based in new media in consultation with the instructor. Prerequisites: one prior class in English, Media Studies, Art History, or an appropriate topic in another discipline, or permission of instructor. Open to second years and above.

  • ENSP 387 Framing the Environment

    1500-1730 W - BROOKS HALL

    Instructor: Sean Borton

    In this course we will explore the depiction of environmental crisis (destruction of wilderness, radical strip mining, toxic waste spills, global warming, nuclear war, etc.) in American novels from the 1970s to the present. Reading works of realism, magical realism, and postmodernism, and drawing on supplementary readings in ecocriticism, genre theory, and contextual cultural material, we will ask the following sorts of questions: how does environmental degradation, vulnerability, and crisis, enter the consciousness of characters and narrators? How do the social concerns in these novels - issues of power, justice, race, class, and gender - ntertwine with environmental concerns? How do (some) novels inspire real-world activism? How do they anticipate political and ethical dilemmas and solutions to environmental problems? What role does environmental precariousness play in the increasingly global vision of contemporary literature?

    A perk of this course includes an in-class visit from author Karen Tei Yamashita.

    Requirements of the course include active participation, one-page response papers to each novel we read, attendance at one of Ms. Yamashita's readings, and a 10-12 page research paper.

    Texts:
    Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
    Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
    Don DeLillo, White Noise
    Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest
    Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
    Ann Pancake, Strange as the Weather Has Been
    Cormac McCarthy, The Road

  • ENSP 419 Global Indigenous Media
    1700-1930 T - CABELL B031
    Cross-listed with MDST 419

    Instructor: David Golumbia

    In this class we will look closely at the media productions of members of groups that we today know under difficult categorizations such as "aboriginal," "indigenous," "tribal," "First Nations," "Native Americans," and "Indians." We will look first and foremost at media created by members of these groups, and secondarily at media, literature and theory about them. Our attention will be double: we will look at these media objects to learn from and about them, and we will at the same time discuss what we find in this media tells us about the idea of modernity. We will look at media produced by indigenous cultures from around the globe, in hopes of seeing commonalities and differences in them. The class will focus mostly on feature and short films such as Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), Ten Canoes, Smoke Signals, and Whale Rider, along with a selection of written texts (including works by writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Amos Tuotola, Yang Erche Namu, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mahasweta Devi, Rigoberta Menchu, and others). We will also look briefly at new media and also visual art in the Kluge-Ruhe collection. Readings in the emerging area of media studies criticism of indigenous media and anthropology of media, including Media Worlds (ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin) and Global Indigenous Media (ed. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart). Taught primarily via discussion. Presentations, short papers, and a longer final paper. Fulfills second writing requirement. Prerequisites: one prior class in English, Media Studies, Anthropology, or an appropriate topic in another discipline, or permission of instructor. Open to third years and above.

  • ENSP 482A Writers in Paris

    1400-1630 R - BRYAN 233
    Restricted to 4th-Years

    Instructor: Sydney Blair

    We will read -- with a writerly eye -- selections of the fiction (and in some cases non-fiction) of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and others, in order to gain not only a greater understanding of their individual artistic sensibilities but also to distinguish -- if indeed it exists -- any defining characteristics of their work as they relate to the particular experience of living and writing in France between the World Wars. Requirements: weekly response papers, classroom presentations, final paper. Active classroom participation is a must. (This course is restricted to Fourth year students).

  • ENSP 482B Scripture for New Societies

    1300-1350 MWF - BRYAN 332

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

    This course examines the characteristics of utopian/scriptural visions of the good community and the new persons who will be its citizens. Readings will include several classical models -- e.g., Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Chuang Tzu, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, Marx's history of the civil wars in France -- and several modern reinventions of them. The modern instances might include such authors as Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Theodorl Herzl, Maxine Kingston, Ursula Le Guin.

  • ENSP 482C Advanced Special Topics in Literature

    TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Michael Levenson

    UVa summer study in London. You must have gone to England already (summer 2007) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 482D Advanced Special Topics in Literature

    TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Cynthia Wall

    UVa summer study in London. You must have gone to England already (summer 2007) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 482E Advanced Special Topics in Literature

    TBA

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Clare Kinney

    UVa summer study in London. You must have gone to England already (summer 2007) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 545 Narrative and Time

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 224

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

    This is an introduction to the complicated, but intimately interdependent relationship between narrativity and temporality.  We’ll engage in some phenomenological speculations into the nature of time, but the real emphasis of this course will fall on the narrative devices, strategies and structures used to create what has been called “an illusion of sequence” in plot.  This is a craft-oriented course but not one designed primarily for fiction writers.   The reading list includes all the usual suspects on the topic – St. Augustine, Ricoeur, Genette, Bakhtin, Poulet, Bal - as well as a few forays into linguistics, metaphysics, cinema theory, and cosmology.  The underlying hypothesis of this course is this:  that narrative’s boldest claim is that it is possible to create an ending;  that storytellers’ greatest service is to project, out of the continuous and unending, a whole and complete piece of time.  Generally we will begin each new topic with selections of theory and criticism, which we will then test and examine in an eclectic selection of literary readings.

  • ENSP 552 Sex, Death, Ecstacy, and Madness

    1400-1630 T - Location TBA
    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Gregory Orr

    After a brief historical contextualizing of the rise of the personal lyric with Romanticism, we will explore the poems of Whitman and Baudelaire, and Emily Dickinson. These three masters of lyric form dramatize the heights and depths of consciousness. For some it’s a wild, ambiguous ride; for others, a visionary ethical project. And for us?

    An (established) interest in the reading and writing of (lyric) poetry is a definite plus for prospective members of this class.

  • ENSP 583 Literature and Film

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 310

    Restricted to Fourth-Year and Graduate Students, Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Walter Korte

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

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

  • ENSP 592 Literary Editing and Desktop Publishing

    1830-2100 T - BRYAN 203
    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Jeb Livingood

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

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

Miscellaneous English

  • ENGL 382 History of Literatures in English I, section 0001

    1000-1050 MW - WILSON 402

    NOTE: Students MUST register for a dependent section of this course, but only AFTER they are assigned to one during the first lecture.

    Instructors: Michael Levenson and Stephen Cushman

    IMPORTANT: Students in this course must register both for the lecture & for a discussion section (which will meet twice a week). Discussion sections will be closed for registration until the first scheduled meeting of the course; at that meeting students will fill out section request forms & on that basis be assigned to a section.

    A literary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spanning the period between the epic of Milton and the rise of Modernism. The course is a study in landmark events - including the rise of the novel, the epoch of Romanticism, the age of Victoria, and the emergence of American literature as collaborator (and competitor) with the English tradition - and of notable writers, among them Fielding, Austen, Blake, Keats, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot and Wilde. The method of the course will be to ask students to concentrate on a limited number of evocative texts and to offer wider contexts within the lecture. Each week there will be two lectures and two discussion sections.

Related Courses in Other Departments

  • CPLT 202 History of European Literature

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 138

    Instructor: Paul Cantor

    This course surveys European literature from the seventeenth century to the present day. Although it builds upon work in CPLT 201, 202 is a self-contained course and can be taken by students who have not taken 201. Among the topics to be discussed will be the rise of the novel, the nature of the Enlightenment, the Romantic revolution in poetry, the new role of women in literature, responses to revolution and imperialism, nihilism and modern literature, and the issue of postmodernism. Readings will include Tartuffe, Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Faust, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights, Notes from Underground, and Waiting for Godot, as well as poetry by Blake, T. S. Eliot, and Rilke and short stories by Kafka and Mann. Two lectures and one section meeting per week. Sectioning will not be available on ISIS, but will be done at the first class meeting; be sure to attend that first class if you plan on taking the course. We will require three papers and a final examination, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion sections. The course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.

  • CPLT 300 Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory

    1400-1515 MW - CABELL 311

    Cross-listed with ENCR 300

    Instructor: Jennifer Wicke

    This course explores the main currents in twentieth- through twenty-first century literary theory, as a series of questions in a global framework that transform the understanding of language, voice, and representation in general, and literature in particular. We will trace an unfolding conversation within literary theory about the meaning and use of words and their relationship to images and the forms that mediate them, the nature of language and the extent of its power to create our world, the significance of beauty and the value of art, the role of emotion and individual subjectivity, and the part that group identity plays in giving voice to cultural representations including literature. The conversation begins with issues from literary criticism but expands to a broad dialogue with contributions from philosophy, political theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, cultural studies, history and anthropology among other fields. Our course will survey landmarks in literary theory, including structuralism and post-structuralism, cultural and political critique, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, postmodernism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and postcolonial thought, and will examine closely how these debates have changed the questions we ask about literature and representation in general, and its very definition. Students taking the course will emerge with a solid introduction to the most prominent areas of contemporary theory, but also with the critical tools to pose their own enthusiastic questions, their own thoughtful arguments, and their own probing theories of literature and language, especially in light of the new-found prominence of global awareness as a factor in all cultural representations. This lecture/discussion class involves a commitment to reading complicated materials carefully, and to faithful attendance and participation; there will be a take-home midterm essay exam and a final exam, as well as one paper, a 7-10 page project that fuses a theoretical approach (made with passion and imagination) with a student's own chosen work of literature, or another cultural artifact or event in culture.

  • CPLT 342 Contemporary Drama

    1530-1645 TR - Location TBA

    Cross-listed with ENGN 342

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This is the second half of a two-semester course on modern and contemporary American and European drama (with a few forays into other regions), covering post-Absurdism to the present. The first half is not a prerequisite.  We will examine postwar quests for dramatic and theatrical structures relevant to a socially and morally chaotic world.  From a study of reactions to the Theatre of the Absurd, we move to an investigation of contemporary drama, celebrating the success of women and minority playwrights in our own period. These playwrights, earlier deprived of a voice, have transformed theater of the past fifty years. We will read plays by Ntozake Shange, Tom Stoppard, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

    Course requirements: two short papers, a long paper or a project (one option is to write your own play), a final exam.

  • CPLT 346 Marx

    1530-1800 M - CABELL 225

    Instructors: Volker Kaiser and Renate Voris

    Description unvailable.

  • CPLT 351 Apocalypse Now

    1230-1345 TR - CABELL 118

    Instructor: Benjamin Bennett

    Description unavailable.

  • CPLT 482 Turn of the Century Literature

    1100-1215 TR - BRYAN 328
    Cross-listed with ENNC 482

    Instructor: Jessica Feldman

    Literature written in England between 1880 and 1914 will be our principal subject, although we will also study visual art and French literature of the period. During this turn-of-the century period "high" Modernism developed in England, but we'll also hear a cacaphony of voices as Old Guard writers, New Woman novelists, Sensationalists, and Decadents explore such varied topics as anarchy, sexuality, empire, advertising and fame, and spirituality. Authors and artists will include Charles Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley, Rachilde, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, J.K. Huysmans, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, Sarah Grand, Alice Meynell, Richard Marsh.