Academic Writing

  • ENWR 1505 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 1506.

    No sections this semester.

  • ENWR 1506 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 1505. Fulfills the first writing requirement.

    Writing About Popular Music. Michael Bishop
    1100-1150 am MWF - Bryan 334, Section 0001

    Writing About Popular Music. Michael Bishop
    1000-1050pm MWF - Bryan 312, Section 0002

    Rap as an Art Form. Jason Nabi
    1230-0145pm TR - Bryan 334, Section 0003

    Superheroes: Modern Mythology. John Murphy
    0930-1045am TR - Astronomy 265, Section 0004

    Popular Music Studies. Francis Connor
    0930-1045am TR - McLeod 2008, Section 0005

    Sports Arguments. James Lawson
    1000-1050am MWF - Bryan 334, Section 0006

    Sports Arguments. James Lawson
    1100-1150am MWF - Bryan 330, Section 0007

    Hip-Hop. David Cosper
    1200-1250pm MWF - Bryan 334, Section 0008

    Heroes, Villains, and Argument. Andrew Jennison-Scheler
    0900-0950am MWF - Bryan 310, Section 0009

    Advertising. Claire Chantell
    0930-1045am TR - Monroe 113, Section 0010

  • ENWR 1510 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. Students whose ID numbers end in an even digit must take ENWR 1510 in the fall; those with an odd digit take it in the spring.

    Debates in Feminism. Nicole Cober-Lake
    0800-0850am MWF - Bryan 332, Section 0001

    Dystopian Visions. Gabriel Haley
    0500-0615pm MW - Location TBA, Section 0002

    Rock Music. Elizabeth Lindau
    0900-0950am MWF - Cabell 335, Section 0003

    No theme. Instructor TBA
    0900-0950am MWF - Bryan 332, Section 0004

    South/West Borderlands. Katie Bray
    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell 334, Section 0005

    I Love the ’80s. Zak Fisher
    1000-1050am MWF - Cabell 130, Section 0006

    Love Theories: Plato to Now. Daniel Heins
    1000-1050am MWF - Cabell 335, Section 0007

    Moral Panic. Matthew Ducker
    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell 139, Section 0008

    Moral Panic. Matthew Ducker
    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell 330, Section 0009

    American Epic. Walt Hunter
    0800-0915am TR - Bryan 312, Section 0010

    The Immigrant Experience. Jasmine Bailey
    0900-0950am MWF - Bryan 330, Section 0011

    Art and Society. Matt Norton
    1100-1150am MWF - Bryan 332, Section 0012

    Technology and Sensibility. Sonya Donaldson
    1000-1050am MWF - Bryan 332, Section 0013

    No theme. Instructor TBA
    1200-1250pm MWF - Cabell 335, Section 0014

    Local Issues. Alexander Gil
    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell 225, Section 0015

    Faith and Reason. Evan Keeling
    1200-1250pm MWF – Cabell 318, Section 0016

    Movies and Culture. Wesley King
    1100-1150am MWF – Bryan 312, Section 0017

    Religion and American Politics. James Patterson
    1200-1250pm MWF – Bryan 330, Section 0018

    (Un)Principled Ethics. Jason Eversman
    1200-1250pm MWF – Bryan 332, Section 0019

    Anarchy. Margaret Gardiner
    0100-0150pm MWF – Cabell 335, Section 0020

    Reading the Media. Peter Tschirhart
    0100-0150pmM MWF – Bryan 332, Section 0021

    Modern Love and Union. Madigan Haley
    0330-0445pm TR – Cabell 130, Section 0022

    No theme. Instructor TBA
    0100-0150pm MWF – Bryan 312, Section 0023

    Utopias and Dystopias. Ashley Faulkner
    0800-0915am TR – Bryan 330, Section 0024

    Contemporary Satire. Reed Johnson
    0500-0615pm MW – Cabell B020, Section 0025

    Jefferson and the University. William Pickard
    0200-0315pm MW – Cabell 225, Section 0026

    Introduction to Queer Studies. Rebecca Strauss
    0200-0315pm MW – Cabell 224, Section 0027

    "Mad Men". Carolyn Creedon
    0600-0715pm MW – Cabell 335, Section 0028

    Global Cold War. Harold Mock
    0330-0445pm MW – Cabell 335, Section 0029

    Bollywood and Politics. Emma Solberg
    0500-0615pm MW – Cabell 330, Section 0030

    History and Nostalgia. Dorothy Couchman
    0500-0615pm MW – Bryan 330, Section 0031

    Surveillance in Society. Memory Peebles
    0500-0615pm MW – Cabell 318, Section 0032

    Aliens. Paul Broyles
    0800-0915am TR – Bryan 328, Section 0033

    Global Medicine. Kiera Allison
    0800-0915am TR – Cabell 335, Section 0034

    The Iraq Wars. Adam Trusner
    0600-0715pm TR – Cabell 224, Section 0035

    The Harry Potter Phenomenon. PC Fleming
    0330-0445pm TR – Bryan 332, Section 0036

    Ethics of Consumerism. Mark Parlette
    0500-0615pm TR – Cabell 139, Section 0037

    Centers of Jazz. Marvin Campbell
    0500-0615pm TR – Cabell 130, Section 0038

    McCarthyism in Hollywood. Kevin Allardyce
    0500-0615pm TR – Bryan 328, Section 0039

    Vampires in Popular Culture. Heather Bowlby
    0930-1045am TR – Bryan 332, Section 0040

    Food and Culture. Emily Sandberg
    0600-0715pm MW – Bryan 312, Section 0041

    The History of Film. Mark Wagenaar
    0900-0950am MWF– Cabell 334, Section 0042

    Global Cold War. Harold Mock
    0500-0615pm MW– Cabell 139, Section 0043

  • ENWR 2150 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 1510 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.

    No themes.

    Section 0001 330-445pm T, Cabell 236 - Camilla Ammirati
    Section 0002 330-445pm R, Bryan 310 - Camilla Ammirati
    Section 0003 930-1045am T, Bryan 334 - Stephanie Brown
    Section 0004 930-1045am R, Bryan 334 - Stephanie Brown
    Section 0005 1230-0145pm T, Cabell B021- Walt Hunter
    Section 0006 1230-0145pm R, Location TBA - Walt Hunter

  • ENWR 2250 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.

    No themes.

    Section 0001 1000-1050am M, Bryan 310- Laura Friedman
    Section 0002 1000-1050am W, Bryan 310 - Laura Friedman
    Seciton 0003 1000-1050am F, Bryan 310 - Laura Friedman
    Section 0004 0200-0315 T, Cabell 139 - Sarah Bryant
    Section 0005 0200-0315 R, Bryan 334 - Sara Bryant

Creative and News Writing

  • ENWR 2300 Poetry Writing, section 0001

    0530-0645pm MW - Cabell 331

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Yasmine Delana

    This course will concentrate on the reading and writing of poetry.  Students will be asked to write poems, comment on the work of their peers, and participate in discussions of the assigned readings.

  • ENWR 2300 Poetry Writing, section 0002

    0700-0815pm MW - Bryan 332

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Christa Romanosky

  • ENWR 2300 Poetry Writing, section 0003

    0600-0830pm T - Bryan 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Samuel Taylor

    In this poetry workshop, we will focus on writing as a way of intimately exploring the world and the self.  The poem will be presented as a field in which a vision of the world is enacted, a space in which indeed anything can happen.  This course requires an intense engagement with your whole being and should not be taken idly.  Beyond any concern for product, this course will prioritize each student's deepening relationship to the creative process itself--beginning with freeing him/her from inhibitions, self-censorship, fears of vulnerability, and rational control, and guiding each writer to touch the world up close with the imaginative power of language.  Throughout the semester, we will read diverse models of great poems and gradually introduce formal considerations of the craft as we share and respond constructively to each other's work.

  • ENWR 2300 Poetry Writing, section 0004

    0600-0830pm R - Bryan 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Stephen Barbaro

  • ENWR 2300 Poetry Writing, section 0005

    0600-0715pm MW - Bryan 310

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jessica Danziger

    This workshop will introduce students to poetry's fundamental craft elements through the reading, writing, and critiquing of poems. During the course we will draw inspiration from a wide range of poems and from visual art, video, audio recordings, and other media. Writing exercises and responses to assigned readings will be required, but will be designed to fuel the writing process.

  • ENWR 2500 Fiction Writing, section 0001

    0630-0900pm M - Bryan 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Gregory Seib

  • ENWR 2500 Fiction Writing, section 0002

    0630-0900pm W - Bryan 330

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lee Johnson

  • ENWR 2500 Fiction Writing, section 0003

    0600-0830pm T - Cabell 331

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Hannah Holtzman

    This course is an introduction to writing short fiction. We will study craft and technique, and we will practice careful observation. I like what William Maxwell says about fiction: "For me, 'fiction' lies not in whether a thing, the thing I am writing about, actually happened, but in the form of the writing...a story, which has a shape, a controlled effect, a satisfying conclusion?something that is, or attempts to be, a work of art." A fair amount of reading and participation will be required in addition to writing and revising original work. Bring enthusiasm, courage, and goodwill.

  • ENWR 2500 Fiction Writing, section 0004

    0600-0830pm T - Cabell 432

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Michael McGrath

  • ENWR 2500 Fiction Writing, section 0005

    0330-0600pm M - Bryan 334

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Megan Fishmann

    There are some things I’ve discovered in the writing workshops I have taken that I learned that I adored: reading short, new stories by authors I had not been exposed to yet, and coming away from a workshop feeling exuberant about the story I had just written. For our workshop that will meet twice a week, I’d like to begin the semester with reading two-four stories per week, focusing primarily on contemporary authors. Junot Diaz, Amy Hempel, John Cheever, Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, T.C Boyle, Wells Tower, and Haruki Murakami are a few examples of the authors whose style and voice we will be studying. I’m hoping to expose you (or have you revisit) authors from all over the world before we dive into writing exercises of our own.

    This class is designed to help you develop your individual strengths as fiction writers (whether you’re new to the game, or have been doing this for years) and to help strengthen your writing personalities while giving you the tools necessary to become a better critical reader of fiction.

    As the class progresses, I'd like for you to think about the patterns and themes that emerge in your writing, both stylistically and in terms of subject matter. Ideally, the final portfolio that you will turn in to me should reflect the personal discoveries you’ve made about your writing.

    What haunts you? Why are we drawn to certain images and themes again and again in our writing? I’m hoping in our reading and tackling writing themes such as sex, squeamishness, obscenity, obsession, cruelty, and humor, we can explore each other and new literary worlds in our writing.

  • ENWR 2700 Newswriting, sections 0001 and 0002

    0930-1045am TR and 0800-0915am TR - Bryan 203, both sections

    Course Meets Second Writing Requirement
    Both sections cross-listed with MDST 2700

    Instructor: C. Brian Kelly

    Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new media 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 and on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.

  • ENWR 3320 Intermediate Poetry Writing

    0300-0530pm T - Bryan 334

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Lisa Spaar

    Seamus Heaney has written that “one perceptible function of poetry is to write place into existence.” In the symbiotic, natal sea of our beginnings, where the mouth is primal mind, we may have no sense of place or personhood, but once we “fall,” once we become aware of the boundaries of our bodies as distinct entities, consciousness is born, and we realize that we are in, and that we are, a place. We are struck, too, by the forceful knowledge of an interior and an outer realm ? of an edge -- and of the necessity of discovering and knowing our desires best through the necessary transgression that is language. In this poetry writing workshop, designed for poets with previous experience, we will engage in a poetic exploration of personally crucial, resonant, haunted/haunting place or places, perhaps literal, perhaps imaginary. Students will write a poem a week, many in response to assignments. We will read a few shared texts, engage in something Marina Warner calls “memory mapping,” and generate new work about psychic, geographical, emotional, historical, nostalgic, and/or provocative places, those “flood subject” landscapes by which, as Malcolm Cowley says of childhood, “all others are reckoned and condemned.” In order to be considered for admission to the course, the interested student must request permission to enroll through SIS and submit a writing sample of 5 - 7 poems, including a cover letter detailing his or her prior poetry writing experience. This submission may come in hard copy or by e-mail Word attachment NO LATER THAN ONE WEEK before the commencement of the spring 2010 term.

    BY PERMISSION ONLY

  • ENWR 3559 Writing

    1230-0145pm TR- McLeod 1003

    Instructors: Gregory Colomb and Jon D'Errico

    This new class is designed for students whose career plans include addressing public issues for public audiences. It helps students learn to write documents, speeches, presentations, web sites and other texts intended for public consumption. It has been created for students who are currently engaged in JPC projects or classes, who expect to engage in other service learning projects, or who plan careers involving public communication. Topics include

    * clear and effective style and organization
    * creating digital documents
    * writing for oral delivery
    * producing slides for public presentations
    * writing for the media (news releases, public notices, newsletters, etc.)

  • ENWR 3610 Intermediate Fiction Writing

    0330-0600pm W - Bryan 310

    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 3800 Academic and Professional Writing, section 0001

    0330-0445pm R - Minor 125

    Instructors: Gregory Colomb and Jon D'Errico

    Prerequisites: successful completion at UVa of at least one 3000-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 4810 Advanced Fiction Writing

    0300-0530pm M - Cabell 236

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

    This advanced workshop is for students who want to continue writing stories
    but who recognize that they need to deepen their command over the discrete crafts and techniques of fiction. The first few weeks of this course will consist primarily of weekly exercises 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.
    From there we will proceed to presentation and discussion of full length
    student manuscripts. Students who wish to apply for the course should
    submit a writing sample to the instructor by January 10. Students accepted
    into the course will be notified before the beginning of the semester.

  • ENWR 4830 Advanced Poetry Writing

    1100am-0130pm T - Cabell 318

    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 5310 Advanced Poetry Writing

    0200-0430pm T - Cabell 331

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Rita Dove

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

  • ENWR 5610 Advanced Fiction Writing

    0330-0600pm R - Bryan 233

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: John Casey

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

Poetry Writing Program

  • ENPW 4820 Poetry Program Poetics

    1100am-0130pm R - Cabell 318

    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Debra Nystrom

    This seminar for advanced poetry-writing students will explore the question
    of poetry's relation to politics by considering the work of a number of
    modern and contemporary American poets whose work has illuminated distinct issues of health and health care. We'll do a good deal of close reading, but will also look at the various environments each poem responds to and affects. Preliminary texts will include some earlier poetry and essays from other cultures as well as our own, but our primary reading will be poetry by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Etheridge Knight, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Shapiro, Dionisio Martinez, Sherman Alexie and Fady Joudah. Williams and Joudah, both poet-doctors, will receive particular attention. There will be at least one visiting writer to the class, and two or three readings or talks to attend outside of class. Students will be expected to keep a"Poetry and Politics" journal, to write three short papers, participate in a small-group presentation on a particular poet, and engage in a semester-long individual writing project involving poetry, health and society.

Introductory Seminars in Literature

  • ENLT 2523 Studies in Poetry: The Poetry of Place

    0200-0315pm MW - Location TBA

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Megan Haury

    I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home.
    ~ Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man”

    In this course we will consider place in poetry from the mid nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries.  How do poets construct spaces of home and away in their works?  What are the poetics of place and space?  How have poets in the past century considered places, both built and natural, imagined and remembered, real and surreal?  What forms and techniques are necessary in poetry to address the complexities of space and of place, and what does place mean to different authors across the century?  In the necessarily spatial medium of poetry, which uses the space of the page and formal techniques to explore and examine space, what is the relationship between poetic devices and places in poetry?  Likely authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Seamus Heaney, Eunice de Souza, Agha Shahid Ali, and Eavan Boland.

  • ENLT 2524 Contemporary Women Playwrights

    0930-1045am TR - Bryan 328

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    This course celebrates the long overdue emergence of women playwrights in the contemporary period. We will find that centuries of silence have only made them more bold and innovative. In addition to perusing the plays, we will master effective techniques for discussing literature and writing analytical essays. We will read plays by Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, Naomi Wallace, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and others.

  • ENLT 2526 Realist Fiction and Social Class

    0200-0315pm MW - Bryan 328

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Peter Capuano

    This course is designed to introduce students to reading, thinking, and writing about works of fiction which focus on issues related to social class.  In discussions we will consider the genre of fiction in its most basic terms ranging from the formal structures of narrative to the social and ideological contexts of the works themselves.  As a means of organizing our study, we will concentrate on a diverse set of authors, styles, and historical contexts in an attempt to stake out some common ground that all works of fiction share.  Readings will include works by Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy.  Short writing assignments; class participation; two papers; final take-home exercise.

  • ENLT 2526 Modern Narrative

    0930-1045am TR - Cabell 338

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Victoria Olwell

    This course examines modernist transformations in Anglo-American narrative fiction, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. Students will practice techniques of formal analysis and learn to couple them with historical inquiry. We’ll study work by Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The course is designed for students considering an English major, but is open to all. Requirements include several short papers, a mid-term, a final, and lively participation in discussion.

  • ENLT 2526 Experimental 20th Century Fiction

    0500-0615pm MW  - Cabell 320

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Kristin Gilger

    This course focuses on experimental prose compositions that were written during the 20th century, a long history in which radical innovation (and often alienation) became a kind of triumph to the energy of art.  For each individual text, we will examine its formal structure and technique, temporal scope and narratorial subjectivity, as well as the visual style of the written page, all in an effort to answer challenging questions, such as: what happens when an author breaks the “rules” of conventional writing?  Were experimental compositions simply a matter of creative play?  Or was this “rebellion” politically, socially, or economically motivated?  What impact do difficult books have on our practices of reading?  What sorts of communities and industries do experimental works help sustain? Course requirements include active participation, one oral presentation, four short response papers, three essays and a final exam.

  • ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America

    0500-0615pm MW - McLeod 2008

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Sarah Ingle

    This course aims to familiarize you with the interpretive practices of English as a discipline while also introducing you to fiction, essays, poetry, plays, and autobiographies by African American authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. Our syllabus will include works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson, among others. We will discuss how the texts on our syllabus interrogate concepts such as race, gender, justice, and nationhood and how they explore the complex web of history, memory, and myth that ties us to our past. We will also learn how the formal aspects of the texts?from verse forms to kinds of narration?shape the ways that texts make meaning for their audiences, and we will also look for ways in which the texts are in conversation with each other and with broader social trends. Class requirements include three essays, response papers, an oral presentation, a final exam, and active participation in class discussions.

  • ENLT 2548 Postcolonial Form and Genre

    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell 338

    Instructor: Robert Stilling

  • ENLT 2550 Shakespeare: Love and Heroism

    0330-0445pm TR - McLeod 2008

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Mark Edmundson

    Careful reading of at least eight of the plays, paying careful attention to the playwright's attitude toward honor, manliness, and the heroic code. We'll read all the Roman plays, including Titus Andronicus, then Othello, Henry IV, Hamlet and more. Three papers, perhaps an exam.

  • ENLT 2550 Shakespeare and Politics

    0200-0315pm TR - Cabell 245

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Francis Connor

    We associate politics with concepts such as nationhood, democracy, constitutional rights, and so on.  Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought of politics as something more personal and local: political theory often involved debates about proper character, virtue, how to be a good counselor, the duties of the citizenry, etc.  Shakespeare wrote during a period of political uncertainty and distress, and he was sometimes, willingly or not, a participant in some of the attendant power struggles (most notably, a performance of Richard II heralded the unsuccessful Essex rebellion.)  Because of his proximity to such political affairs, and because of his renown for writing historical dramas with complex, conflicted characters, Shakespeare offers us a rich body of work from which we can identify and discuss his own ideas about politics and think about how they have resonated throughout the emergence of the modern state.

    Politics, broadly defined, will be the focus of this introductory Shakespeare course.  We Will begin with some of his more overtly political history plays (probably 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VIII), but we will also study a few works in other genres where Shakespeare grapples with broader social and economic issues (I’m considering Cymbeline, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, and a few sonnets.)  The class Will be historicist in approach--we’ll spend a lot of time thinking about the social and material circumstances that influenced Shakespeare--but we Will also devote some time to discussing Shakespeare’s place (or lack thereof????) in our contemporary political discourse. Along the way, we Will sharpen our writing and close reading skills, do a bit of research, and read an article or two to see what professional Shakespeareans are up to nowadays.  Your contributions: three papers, a performance assignment, a final exam, a handful of small research projects, attentive reading, and informed in-class commentary.

  • ENLT 2550 Shakespeare

    0330-0445pm MW - Bryan 328

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Bethany Mabee

    What assumptions about "Shakespeare" do we bring to our study of the plays? How does our experience of the plays shift from page to stage to screen? We will explore these questions by learning to analyze the formal elements of the plays, investigating early modern theatrical practices, and considering the interpretive choices made by contemporary film directors. Readings (and screenings) will include Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo & Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Twelfth Night, and Othello.

  • ENLT 2555 America's Greatest Hits

    1230-0145pm TR - Maury 115

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Eric Lott

    One of the promises of democracy in America has been the prospect of a truly democratic aesthetic, one both accessible to millions and of high artistic quality. This course will survey the fact and idea of the massively popular American text over the last two centuries in order to explore the notion of a democratic or popular aesthetic. Bestsellers in many genres (and we'll do at least literature, film, music, sports, and television) are the meeting ground of commerce, popular will, and, often, artistic merit--though debating and defining that last will be part of the burden of the course. We'll read such thinkers as James Agee, Leslie Fiedler, Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael, Stuart Hall, and Armond White, and we'll examine such texts as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Thriller, Michael Jordan, Titanic, maybe even Mad Men. What is, or what happens at the site of, the popular? When and how do we know if something is "good"? Is there any one definition of the good? Is it even possible to speak of a popular text in a commercial context in which we're always being sold?

  • ENLT 2555 Poetry's Graveyard School

    1100-1150am MWF - McLeod 2008

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Andrew Stauffer

    For its past 250 years or so, lyric poetry in the English tradition has shown a recurrent interest in landscapes marked by the dead: literal graveyards in some cases, figurative ones in others. What is it about such places that be-muse the poet, and what does it say about ideas of poetry’s origins and ends in the modern era? In this class, we will be reading works in the long wake of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” going through the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist eras to end with the twentieth century. We will think about genre (e..g, elegy, pastoral, ode), about form (e.g., meter, rhyme, structure), and about language (e.g., diction, imagery, allusion), while also asking broader literary-historical questions about the terms of poetry’s engagement with history, nature, emotion, faith, and loss. Requirements: discussions, exercises, three papers, mid-term and final exams.

  • ENLT 2555 Special Topics in Literature

    0330-0445pm TR - Minor 130

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Joley Wood

  • ENLT 2555 Speaking Selves

    0330-0445pm MW - McLeod 2008

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Jessica Barrett

    This course is designed to help you identify and develop the skills involved in the study of literature, beginning with active, critical reading. You will be asked to propose and evaluate a variety of interpretations through discussion and regular reading responses, as you consider the ways in which written works create meaning. Each of these assigned texts adopts one or more specific standpoints, using first-person perspective to perform a particular rhetorical strategy. Throughout the semester, we will examine the effects of such choices, by considering the relationship between form and content in a range of works of both poetry and prose.

  • ENLT 2555 Special Topics

    0200-0315pm MW - McLeod 2008

    Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

    Instructor: Evan Rhodes

Medieval Literature

  • ENMD 4500 Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxonism

    0200-0315pm MW - Cabell B029

    Instructor: Peter Baker

    This course will examine some of the classics of Anglo-Saxon culture, both literary and material, together with modern responses to them. Anglo-Saxon works (to be read in translation) may include poems such as The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon, historical works such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and religious works such as homilies and saints’ lives. We will also study several monuments of art and material culture such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, The Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, the Sutton Hoo treasure, and the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard. As important as this early component of the course will be our study of modern treatments of Anglo-Saxon works and themes. These will include Thomas Jefferson’s observations about the Anglo-Saxons, one or more nineteenth-century popularizations, several recent film adaptations of Beowulf, and a number of non-scholarly web sites. Themes to be explored will include the adaptation of medieval narrative practices for modern works, the construction of American racial identities, and the appropriation of Anglo-Saxon themes by white supremacist and other extremist groups. Note: Beowulf will not be on the reading list, but it will be assumed throughout the course that everyone has read it.

  • ENMD 4500 Lyric Poetry, Medieval to Renaissance

    0930-1045am TR - Cabell 122
    Cross-listed with ENRN 4500

    Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

    So much of the most brilliant poetry in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll study lyric in English from Geoffrey Chaucer to George Herbert (devotional, amorous, elegaic, etc.), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, and sweet moments. There will be quizzes, two written exams, a presentation, and a research paper that evolves in four stages.

Renaissance Literature

  • ENRN 3130 The Seventeenth Century

    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell 216

    Instructor: Daniel Kinney

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

  • ENRN 3220 Shakespeare, section 0001

    1230am-0145pm TR - Maury 209

    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.

    Plays we’ll read: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.

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

  • ENRN 4500 Lyric Poetry, Medieval to Renaissance

    0930-1045am TR - Cabell 122
    Cross-listed with ENMD 4500

    Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

    So much of the most brilliant poetry in English is brief, intricate, emotional, musical, and written between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’ll study lyric in English from Geoffrey Chaucer to George Herbert (devotional, amorous, elegaic, etc.), refining our sense of what language can do in its most intense, witty, ornate, gorgeous, and sweet moments. There will be quizzes, two written exams, a presentation, and a research paper that evolves in four stages.

  • ENRN 4500 Renaissance Drama

    0200-0315pm TR - Cabell 130

    Instructor: John Parker

    To examine some of Shakespeare's greatest contemporaries and rivals, in particular Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, with special attention to the London theater's sub-genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy and tragi-comedy.  Other authors will include Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster.

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature

  • ENEC 4500 Gothic Narratives, Gothic Spaces

    0200-0315pm MW - Bryan 330

    Instructor: Cynthia Wall

    You already know the elements--the ruined castle, the dark villain, the disembodied music, the overembodied heroine--but do you know where they come from? This seminar will study fashions in eighteenth-century art and architecture (the sublime and the picturesque, grottoes and rent-a-hermits); in linguistics, history, and archeology (fragments, relics, antiquities, genealogies); and in various kinds of politics (revolutionary, religious, and sexual), in order to contextualize our readings of, for example, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve’s rewriting of Otranto, The Old English Baron (1777); Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1785); Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1797); Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817); and that great parody, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Requirements: a lot of reading, attendance, participation, short weekly commentaries, a presentation, and a research paper.

Nineteenth Century British Literature

  • ENNC 3110 Romanticism

    0200-0315pm MW - Cabell 138

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    Romanticism is the odd, indelible name that literary history bestows on European writing from the long and noisy turn of the nineteenth century. It was a time when the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars burned up old Europe's social structures, while underneath that eye-catching bonfire the inexorable force of early industrialism made for slower but surer changes affecting the way we modern heirs of the Romantics continue to live, argue, and dream. In the anglophone world these changes were performed first in Britain, and most conspicuously in poetry. Our readings will strike a balance between verse and prose, men's and women's writing, and nonfiction and fiction: as a way of absorbing the latter, we'll read together serially across the semester a novel by Walter Scott. Each student will write one shorter and one longer essay, with a comprehensive final exam. Class meetings will mix informal lecture with group discussion; should discussion flag, quizzes and even a midterm exam may be invoked as spurs to attention.

  • ENNC 3500 Science and Literature

    1230-0145pm TR - Maury 113

    Instructor: Peter Capuano

    This course focuses on the unique intellectual dialogue between science and literature in the nineteenth century.  We will examine the ways in which science pressured the very notion of artistic truth, but we will also consider how science served as a new form of creative inspiration for poets and novelists alike.  The course will resist interpreting literary texts as responses to or applications of scientific knowledge.  Instead, we will investigate how literary and natural morphologies unfurled together in the Victorian imagination: how questions about the boundaries in nature and culture inhere in debates about geology and species evolution, women and sexual selection, vivisection and sympathy, mathematics and social reform, ethnicity and race.  We will pay special attention to aspects of nineteenth-century print culture, principally the periodical magazine, which placed scientific and literary subjects side by side.  We will investigate how new categories ultimately raise the same questions about literary value that science poses about imaginative speculation.  Texts will include The Principles of Geology, The Origin of Species, In Memoriam A. H. H., “Caliban Upon Setebos,” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Flatland, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. Requirements: 2 papers; emails response; individual presentation; final exam.

  • ENNC 4500 Narrative and Travel

    1100am-1215pm TR - Bryan 312

    Instructor: Alison Booth

    This seminar will focus on quests, journeys, travel, and tourism in relation to literature, primarily British and American prose works of the past two hundred years (ENNC is convenient, but not the historical limit of the course).  Why is movement across a landscape or between countries a driving force in narrative?  What happens to men or women of different social positions as they travel through space?  How do such genres as travel narrative, autobiography, the novel, short fiction, or guidebooks evolve from the eighteenth century through the present?  What are the effects of changing designs for buildings, cities, and public spaces on the literature of travel?  What were the technologies and customs of travel at different times, as reflected in our readings?  When does tourism become commercial, and how does it affect the expectations of readers who travel?  What becomes of the literary world in the era of Google Maps?  Readings, mostly of essays, short fiction, poetry, or other brief pieces, with two or three novels and some criticism and theory, will include Mary Shelley, Byron, Equiano, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene.  Students will conduct original research in library and digital materials and produce a shared project/presentation; write one short and one longer essay; and take several quizzes and tests.

  • ENNC 4500 British Poetry 1830-1900

    0200-0315pm TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Jerome McGann

    The course will examine the different stylistic and cultural transformations that shaped British poetry from the early work of Tennyson to the publication of Hardy's first book of poetry. This is a history that tracks a shift from late Romanticism to various forms of experimental and innovative poetry, some proto-Modernist, others with much closer affinities to what we would now call "post-Modern" work.

  • ENNC 4500 Romanticism and Desire

    0330-0445pm MW - Cabell B021

    Instructor: Mark Edmundson

    An enquiry into what makes Romantic poets Romantic poets. We'll focus on Shelley, Blake, and Keats, with side-trips into Wordsworth and Coleridge; then on to America--Whitman and Hart Crane. The focus with be the poets' renderings of love and imagination. Two papers, perhaps an exam.

  • ENNC 4500 Autobiography

    0500-0615pm MW - Cabell 234

    Instructor: Herbert Tucker

    Prose and verse, male and female, diary and epic, black and white, truth and fiction, British and American and cosmopolitan too: everywhere the protean modern self has ventured to find itself, the genre of autobiography has been quick to follow.  This seminar will follow the genre, in turn, from its origins in confessional or captivity narrative, across major Romantic and Victorian developments (among them writings by both Wordsworths, J. S. Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Darwin, Ruskin) into the muttering retreats of the fin-de-siècle (Henry Adams, Gosse), and thence out to a couple of twentieth-century classics (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation).  Along the way we’ll appreciate how the genre gets embroiled with some abiding, interlocking questions: Describe or narrate? Am I still now who I was back then?  How, short of dying, can I bring this book to an end?  Students will write at least three critical essays and have at least two chances to practice writing autobiography on their own.

Modern and Contemporary Literature

  • ENMC 3110 Modernist Britain

    0200-0315pm MW - Cabell 123

    Instructor: Jason Coats

    In this course we will consider international modernism from a British cultural 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 ambiguous terrain. Likely authors include Auden, Conrad, Eliot, Rhys, West, Woolf, and Yeats.

  • ENMC 3420 Modern Drama II

    1230-0145pm TR - Maury 110

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    We will conduct a survey of Western drama from the emergence of realism to the present. We will explore responses to realism, such as expressionism, surrealism, epic theater, and absurdism. We will examine the emergence of new voices (African American, women, other ethnic minorities, post-colonial playwrights, gays, etc) after the 1960s and investigate how those contemporary works both reinvent drama and return to the folds of realism. We will read plays by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Susan Glaspell, Garcia Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Amiri Baraka, Derek Walcott, Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

  • ENMC 3600 World Literature in English

    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell 319

    Instructor: Christopher Krentz

    This course will explore anglophone fiction and drama from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean over the last half century. In what ways do these authors use English like their British and American counterparts, and in what ways do they appropriate it to represent their unique cultural positions? Drawing on postcolonial theory, we will consider how the continuing legacy of colonization shapes meaning in these works; the impact of language, culture, race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and disability on identity formation; what these narratives have to teach us about globalization, hybridity, and cultural exchange; and the brilliantly inventive ways in which these authors represent particular experience to readers who are often far beyond their nation's borders. I am still putting the syllabus together, but probable works include Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Wole Soyinka, Collected Plays 2; Nadine Gordimer, Six Feet of the Country; J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace; R. K. Narayan, The Painter of Signs; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Anita Desai, In Custody; V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State; Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John; and Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory.

  • ENMC 4500 Post-Colonial Drama

    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell B026

    Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

    In this course, we will conduct a tour of post-colonial drama around the world, investigating the plays’ responses to the (post) colonial condition and their attempts to create “authentic” drama in an inauthentic world. We will examine their troubled relationship to the Western and indigenous theatrical traditions. We will explore our own cultural and aesthetic biases and read a number of theoretical works on post-coloniality. We will read plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Athol Fugard, Girish Karnad, Manjula Padmanabhan, Chin Woon Ping, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Tomson Highway, and others.

  • ENMC 4500 Ethnic American Fiction

    0200-0315 TR - Minor 130
    Cross-listed with ENAM 4500

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

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

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

  • ENMC 4540 Novel Modernities

    1230-0145pm TR - Bryan 312

    Instructor: Victoria Olwell

    This course is reserved for students in the Modern Studies Area Program For information about the program, refer to the MSA site.

    In this seminar, we’ll consider modernist innovations in the novel, from the turn of the twentieth century through roughly 1930. Daring experiments in form in this era forever changed the way novels were written and read. We’ll examine how these experiments took part in and helped to define modern experience. In particular, we’ll investigate how novelistic writing intersected with the dizzying transformations of social and cultural modernity, particularly in such areas as theories of consciousness, the traumas of war, urban and mass culture, sexuality, race, and gender. Authors will include Edith Wharton, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner. One short paper, one long paper, and a zealous approach to class participation are required.

  • ENMC 4559 'that long shadow': Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Poets

    1230-0145pm TR - Bryan 233
    Restricted to 4th-Year English Majors

    Instructor: Lisa Spaar

    Writing daringly experimental, original, and ground-breaking poems largely below the radar in nineteenth-century America, Emily Dickinson left a significant legacy for future poets that would not be widely accessible until the publication of the Johnson edition of her poems in 1955. In this course, we will read extensively in Dickinson ? the letters, the poems ? and in some critical texts and articles (Sharon Cameron, for example), looking briefly, too, at poets who will have had access to her work in the interim -- Frost, Williams, Moore, Bishop, Plath -- but focusing our attention chiefly on writers born after 1945 who have been influenced in significant ways by ED's work, life, and aesthetic: Alice Fulton, Susan Howe, Charles Wright, Mark Doty, Mary Ann Samyn, Charles Simic, Kay Ryan, Eric Pankey, Jessica Garratt, Anne Carson, Lucy Brock-Broido, and others. What formal, subjective, historical, and linguistic “presentiments” did Dickinson’s work cast into late twentieth and early twenty-first-century poetry? How did her poetry live, in her century? how does it live in ours? Why does it matter and why should we care? In addition to guest lecturers and visits to Special Collections, we will enjoy visits by contemporary poets on our reading list and forays into the making as well as the reading of the work of this inspired and inimitable poet, whose intrepid, complex, and boldly transgressive investigations of the languages of Eros, religion, and poetry itself have much to reveal to discerning readers of any generation.

  • ENMC 4559 Vernaculars

    0500-0615pm M - Cabell 132

    Instructor: David Golumbia

    This class explores the role of so-called nonstandard or vernacular languages in contemporary worldwide texts and media, largely from the US and locations outside the US where English is one of the spoken languages. Vernaculars include languages and "dialects" that are widespread in culture but usually not taught in schools. Examples of vernaculars that we will touch on include African-American English, Appalachian English, Hawaiian "Creole" English, Haitian Creole, Taglish, and others. In many cases, these practices, while full and complete languages in every diagnostic and linguistic sense, remain the target of intense cultural prejudice. We will explore commonalities and differences in the presentation of these linguistic practices across several genres and places, using the fault lines between languages as a way to see in to the stakes of other cultural and political divisions. Short theoretical readings by Bakhtin, Labov, Ngugi, Lott and others; novelist such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka, R. Zamora Linmark, Toni Morrison, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Patricia Powell, and Ken Saro-wiwa; and television and film such as The Wire, Havoc, Chan Is Missing, Clockers, and Boyz n the Hood. This class is conducted primarily through vigorous student discussion that reflects thorough preparation before class sessions. Two short response/review papers and a final research paper. Intended for advanced English, Media Studies, or Linguistics majors, though others with appropriate background will be admitted.

American Literature to 1900

  • ENAM 3140 African-American Literature

    0930-1045am TR - Cabell 123

    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.

  • ENAM 3150 The American Renaissance

    1000-1050am MW - Maury 113

    Instructor: Stephen Railton

    In this course we will look closely at the period 1835-1855 in American literature. We'll study canonical masterpieces like Emerson's essays, Poe's tales, Thoreau's Walden, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby-Dick Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass and Dickinson's poetry. We'll also study some of the most popular works of this period: Longfellow's poetry and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance. In the twice-weekly lectures and once-weekly discussions, we'll consider each work on its own terms, in terms of its relationships to the other works, and in the context of the preoccupations of the period. During these decades there was, as Emerson said later, "a new consciousness." We'll try to figure out what that means.

  • ENAM 3300 American Poetry

    1000-1050am MWF - Minor 130

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

  • ENAM 4500 Mark Twain

    0200-0315pm MW - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Stephen Railton

    2010 is the centennial of Sam Clemens' death. "Mark Twain," on the other hand, remains very much alive, not just as a writer, but also as one of the iconic figures of American culture. In this class we'll study him as humorist and entertainer, as major author, as international celebrity, as a continuing (and often controversial) presence in the national consciousness. Our focus will be on locating "Mark Twain" and his various performances in the context of his era: on what he and America made of each other during the period in which the nation moved toward taking center stage as a world superpower. At least, that will be one focus of the class. Because it's a seminar, we'll all have parts to play in creating the conversation.

  • ENAM 4500 Black Speculative Fiction

    1100am-1215pm 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.

  • ENAM 4500 America's Greatest Hits

    0500-0615pm TR - Cabell B028

    Instructor: Eric Lott

    One of the promises of democracy in America has been the prospect of a truly democratic aesthetic, one both accessible to millions and of high artistic quality. This course will survey the fact and idea of the massively popular American text over the last two centuries in order to explore the notion of a democratic or popular aesthetic. Bestsellers in many genres (and we'll do at least literature, film, music, sports, and television) are the meeting ground of commerce, popular will, and, often, artistic merit--though debating and defining that last will be part of the burden of the course. We'll read such thinkers as James Agee, Leslie Fiedler, Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael, Stuart Hall, and Armond White, and we'll examine such texts as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Thriller, Michael Jordan, Titanic, maybe even Mad Men. What is, or what happens at the site of, the popular? When and how do we know if something is "good"? Is there any one definition of the good? Is it even possible to speak of a popular text in a commercial context in which we're always being sold?

  • ENAM 4500 Scriptures for New Societies

    1200-1250pm - Cabell 139

    Instructor: Raymond Nelson

  • ENAM 4500 Literature of the West: The Great Plains

    0930-1045am TR - Cabell 134

    Instructor: Frank Papovich

    This semester we’ll focus on the literature of the American Grasslands known as the Great Plains.  We’ll start with readings on the physical and cultural geography and then move to modern and contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction inspired by this remarkable yet overlooked region. We’ll read a range of writers including Richard Manning, Barry Lopez, Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, Scott Momaday, Larry McMurtry, Kent Haruf, Gretel Ehrlich, Dan O'Brien, and Judy Blunt.   Expect to read widely, to speak regularly, to write often, to present your ideas collegially, and to complete the semester with an extended written project.

  • ENAM 4500 Ethnic American Fiction

    0200-0315pm TR - Cabell 335
    Cross-listed with ENMC 4500

    Instructor: Caroline Rody

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

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

Genre Studies

  • ENGN 4500 The Contemporary American Short Story

    1100am-0130pm W - Bryan 233

    Instructor: Ann Beattie

    Description unavailable.

Language Studies

  • ENLS 3030 History of the English Language

    1100-1150am MWF - Cabell 216

    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 4500 Race in American Places

    0430-0700pm W - Cabell 134

    Instructor: Ian Grandison

    How do assumptions about race operate when we consider the idea of an “American Place?”  This interdisciplinary seminar interrogates this question by exploring place in America within the context of the “Culture Wars,” especially as these are catalyzed by the notion of race.  We consider, for instance, how place is embroiled in the ideological work of distinguishing people according to identity and, then, of fixing identity groups within unyielding hierarchies.  Consider, for example, how the seemingly innocuous story of The Three Little Pigs leads us to assume racial attributes of each pig based on materials and architectural styles.  Thus, it seems so natural, so correct to identify groups of people as “primitive” and “destitute” versus “civilized” and “successful” based on assumptions about their housing.  What are the implications of our culture’s insistence on promoting the notion that “Africans,” say, live in huts of mud or straw.  We are interested in how such assumptions linking race and place are reinforced by planning, design, and preservation concepts and practice.  How does the increasing popularity of Homeowners’ Associations maintain racial territories against the spirit of legal desegregation?  Does the concurrency of homelessness and home-owners-associations in American society suggest anything about prevailing assumptions about a relationship between the right to privacy and racial and class identity?  We study these questions with the help of targeted discussion of readings, required field trips to places around Charlottesville, informal workshops especially to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places, and student delivered presentations in class.  Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project.  The last requirement is presented in a symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

  • ENCR 4500 Rason, Criticism, and Culture

    0330-0445pm TR - Cabell B028

    Instructor: Walter Jost

    This course invites the serious student to “think about thinking” across several disciplines—law, literature, psychology, sociology, and religion.  Though interested particularly in persuasive reasoning (that is, in “rhetoric”), we consider alternatives and variants through the specifics of particular law cases, poems, social actions in a time and place, and differing notions of “identity.”  This course works well for those who try hard to read widely, think carefully, and write well.  Several papers; four or five texts (these change from year to year).  Instructor Permission.

  • ENCR 5559 Queer Race Theory

    0630-0900pm - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Marlon Ross

    How have subjects identified as queer been constituted and understood in relation to racial formations and ideologies?  Focusing especially on African American same-gender loving men and women and others viewed as outside of gender or sexual norms, this course investigates the emerging theories developed to address the intersection of race and sexual orientation in structures of cultural identity, psychic subjectivity, artistic production, political economy, and social history.  The course is divided into four topics: 1) We begin with the queer body politic, examining political coverage of the Proposition 8 controversy as a way of seeing how different racial groups (blacks, Latinos, whites) are currently positioned in dominant discourses related to sexual orientation. 2) We move backward to examine the historical representation of minoritized sexuality through the concept of the queer token, focusing on the writings by and about three celebrated figures: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga. 3) The next section takes up the emergence of black queer theory in concert with related minoritized sexual orientations, particularly Asian-American and Chicano/a, focusing on readings from the following volumes: E. Patrick Johnson’s Black Queer Studies, Dwight McBride and Jennifer deVere Brody’s Plum Nelly, Syliva Molloy and R. M. Irwin’s Hispanisms and Homosexualities, Phil Harper’s Private Affairs, Jose Muñoz’s Disidentifications,and David Eng’s Racial Castration. 4) Finally, we examine mass media representations (especially film and t.v.) of minoritized queerness, focusing on Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, David Henry Hwang and David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly,and Partik-Ian Polk’s Logo tv series Noah’s Arc.  Requirements include several brief commentary papers, an annotated bibliography, and a 20-page term research paper.

  • ENCR 5620 History of Literary Criticism

    0200-0315pm TR - Location TBA

    Instructor: Walter Jost

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

Special Topics in Literature

  • ENSP 4500 Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Race

    0330-0445pm TR - Bryan 330

    Instructor: Peter Capuano

    This course explores how nineteenth-century conceptions of race influenced fiction of the period.  Reading works by Shelley, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Collins, Stevenson, Doyle, and Stoker, we will trace the novel's concern with racial difference as represented by the African slave, the Celt, the Gypsy, the Jew, the Hindu, and other non-white racial and ethnic groups.  Texts will include: Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, Daniel Deronda, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula. Requirements: 2 papers; email response; individual presentation; take-home final exam.

  • ENSP 4500 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 2009) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 4500 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 2009) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 4500 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 2009) in order to register for this course.

  • ENSP 5830 Literature and Film

    1100am-1215pm 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.

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

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

  • ENSP 5910 Literary Journal Editing

    0630-0900pm T - Bryan 203
    Restricted to Instructor Permission

    Instructor: Jeb Livingood

    The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the process of editing a literary journal--everything from screening manuscripts to reviewing books to graphic design--as you assist in the production of Meridian, a nationally-distributed literary magazine. Students give a class presentation, write a book review, create a magazine design project using Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing software, and then publish the project using print-on-demand. To apply for the class, please e-mail a letter of introduction to Jeb Livingood, jsl9z@virginia.edu, giving your name, year, phone number, e-mail, and experience with literature. Attach a sample of your writing (3-5 pages of poetry or 6-10 of prose fiction or essay). Preference will be given to MFA students, but there will be spaces for other graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergraduates.

Miscellaneous English

  • ENGL 3820 History of Literatures in English I, section 0001

    1000-1050am MWF - 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: Bradley Pasanek and Jennifer Greeson

    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

    1230-0145pm TR - Cabell 138

    Instructor: Paul Cantor

    This course surveys European literature from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Although it builds upon work in CPLT 2010, 2020 is a self-contained course and can certainly be taken by students who have not taken 2010. 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. 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, and 3 hours of it can be counted toward the English major under the "literature in translation" option.

  • CPLT 3590 Tragedy and Modernity

    0330-0600pm M - Bryan 310

    Instructor: Renate Voris

    Description unvailable.

  • CPLT 3590 Problematics of Revolution

    1200-1250pm MWF - Cabell 138

    Instructor: Benjamin Bennett

    Description unvailable.

  • CPLT 3590 The Idea of the University

    1230-0145pm TR - Wilson 301

    Instructor: Michael Wellman

    Description unavailable.

  • CPLT 3850 Fiction of the Americas

    0330-0600pm T - Cabell 324

    Instructor: Gustavo Pellon

    Description unvailable.