List of English MA courses for Fall 2017
Please note that all hybrid courses count for either option designated within the hybrid (that is, a Hybrid Lit/CW class counts either as a literature course or a creative writing workshop).
CORE COURSES (required for all students)
ENGL 604: Linguistics
Professor Evelyn McClave
Thursdays, 4-6:45PM
An introduction to linguistics for graduate students.
ENGL 638: Seminar in Critical Approaches to Literature: Applied Rhizomatics
Professor Chris Higgs
Mondays, 7-9:45PM
This course guides graduate students through a system (or network) of critical approaches to literature predicated on disruptive interventions in the fields of conventional reading, thinking, and writing practices. By utilizing many of the important theoretical concepts articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s most ambitious collaborative work of philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 original French; 1980 English translation), as our guiding methodology, we will endeavor to cultivate more expansive critical and creative capacities. Each week a chapter from A Thousand Plateaus will accompany a cluster of intersecting interdisciplinary materials: other more canonical and less canonical critical texts (ranging from Aristotle to Sianne Ngai), narrative texts and poetry (ranging from Gertrude Stein to Paul Beatty), videos, images, artworks, audio, etc. Each meeting will include lecture and discussion with a different pairing of students offering individualized reading encounters with the material. Other responsibilities include weekly reading reports and two major writing assignments. Required textbook: Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ISBN-10: 9780816614028). All other materials will be provided.
ENGL 638: Seminar in Critical Approaches to Literature: Transformative Literary Studies: Rethinking Criticism from the Late Age of Print to Digital Modernity
Professor Mauro Carassai
ENGL 638 engages students in an in-depth study of the major schools of contemporary literary and critical theory. The course focuses on the complex interconnections among readers, writers, and texts in what Jay Bolter defines as “the late age of print” and on the transformations operated by digital technologies on literature’s status and value as well as on the nature of reading and interpretation. Students will read a selection of theoretical writings from various schools of thought including liberal humanism, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonial, race, gender, and queer theory, and posthuman studies. In applying such theoretical frames to significant works of literature in English, the course will pay particular attention to the evolutionary interplay between expressive and critical innovations along a critical tradition that culminates with the current debate over emerging forms of digital textuality. This course will encourage students to investigate and critically rethink some of the main practices of reading, writing, and experiencing meaning both in print and in networked and programmable media.
CORE LIT COURSES
ENGL 525BB: Black British Culture
Professor Beth Wightman
Tuesdays, 4-6:45 PM
When the Empire Windrush docked in Britain in June 1948 and its 482 West Indian passengers disembarked, no one knew that this event would become the cultural sign of a "new," multi-racial nation. Thousands of immigrants from the West Indies, Africa, and southeast Asia came to Britain during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, looking for jobs, for education, for a better life in the imperial mother country. Not everyone was pleased about what they saw as the changing face of Britain. But Black Britain didn't actually arrive or begin with the Empire Windrush: Africans and Indians—both East and West—had been in Britain for centuries. This class will look examine what “Black Britain" has meant, how that meaning has changed, and how Britain's racial Others have represented themselves and their experiences. The class will use a cultural studies lens, looking at literary forms of representation alongside photography and pop culture.
ENGL 525GT: Global Trade and American Print Culture
Professor Colleen Tripp
Mondays, 4-6:45 PM
Beginning with the fictive forty winks of Rip Van Winkle, this class broadly considers fictions of transoceanic trade and migration in the U.S., looking from the so-called “Black Atlantic” to the Old China Trade and Opium Trade to help us clarify the sense of African, British, and Asian Diasporas in 19th-century America. Reading the first African-American mystery story to contemporary novels of empire, we will consider how authors responded to the non-homogeneous world of sea-faring laborers and its troubling effects at home, particularly in the development of whiteness and class.
Texts include: The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy, Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott,
“The Haunted Valley” by Ambrose Bierce, Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende, and
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
ENGL 620LE: Louise Erdrich
Professor Scott Andrews
Wednesdays, 4-6:45 PM
Anishinaabe (Ojibway) author Louise Erdrich frequently is mentioned as the next American candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature. She is a prolific writer who, like William Faulkner, has imagined a particular place in the American landscape and filled it with generations of complicated characters and compelling plots; Faulkner invented a rural county in Mississippi, and Erdrich has invented an American Indian reservation on the Northern Plains, writing about the native people who live on it and the non-native people who live near it. This class will read some of her novels about that place, her non-fiction about the history and landscape of her home region, and some of her award-winning young-adult novels set in the same location.
ENGL 623: Novel/Style/Theory
Professor Lauren Byler
Mondays, 4-6:45 PM
This course will focus on the works of three nineteenth-century novelists known for their distinctive prose styles: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. Alongside works including Emma (1816), Little Dorrit (1857), and What Maisie Knew (1897), we will investigate theories of novelistic style as well as major theories of the novel. Assigned critical reading will in turn allow us to reflect upon various styles of academic writing, including our own.
CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS
ENGL 525COM: Comedy In/For Performance: From Alfred Jarry to Louis CK (Hybrid Lit/CW)
Professor Rick Mitchell
Thursdays, 7-9:45 PM (note that this is a schedule change as of 5/9/2017)
In this advanced hybrid course, which can be taken for either creative writing or literature credit, students will have the opportunity to develop different types of comic performance texts, including but not limited to comic plays and sketches, stand-up comedy monologues, one-person shows, puppet shows, performance art pieces, vaudeville bits, and even anti-comedy. While reading comic writing—beginning with the work of Alfred Jarry, and then moving on to more modern times, including the present—and also viewing comedy performances, particularly of comedians, we'll explore the underpinnings of both comedy and laughter in order to enhance 1) our own creative attempts at making people laugh (and perhaps think), and 2) our scholarly engagement with comedy. Also, please note that students will not be compelled to write and/or perform work that's laugh-out-loud funny, although such work will certainly not be discouraged.
ENGL 525WW: Women and Writing (Hybrid Lit/CW)
Professor Kate Haake
Thursdays, 4-6:45PM
This course will examine women’s literature and feminist theory as a framework and context for new writing by women and others from the contact zone. Proceeding from a sustained investigation of female difference—what Elaine Showalter called “gynocritical discourse” in what is now the prior century—this class further adopts gender as an inclusive metaphor that speaks to other marginalized groups as well. If students are generally trained to write the way they think they are supposed to write, what might happen, this class asks, in the absence of prescription? And if the models are generally drawn from patriarchal traditions, what might happen in the presence of other models—theoretical and literary—out of which something like a female aesthetic, or an autoethnographic discourse, might emerge? Additionally, as the class revisits, and updates, a similar course from the 90’s, it takes up the present historical moment to wonder how we find ourselves here, again, even as it embraces, the potential new power of this time.
ENGL 622: Seminar in Aspects of Poetry (Hybrid Lit/CW)
Professor Dorothy Barresi
Tuesdays, 7-9:45 PM
Intensive critical study of the province of poetry, providing opportunity for the scrutiny of individual poets as well as for concentration on the wider historical perspective.
ENGL 652: Creative Writing Studies: The Writer in the World (Core CW: only offered fall semesters)
Professor Leilani Hall
Tuesdays, 4-6:45 PM
Creative writing engages us in both making and remaking--not always merely as an act of "revision" but often as the simultaneity of vision itself. We are, as writers, agents of potential. This course will explore various theories of creative writing through investigating the writer in the world, the text, the reader, and the history of creative writing in the academy. What, for example, is the relationship between the author and the text? Culture and the text? The text and the reader? Put another way, what is happening between you and what you write? What is it that you write? Is there more than one “it”? Who names the “it”? Whose “it” is it? And what is the value of "it"? Perhaps the fact that we can engage such a line of questioning illustrates the vast nature of creative writing. Its intellectual, professional, and philosophical concerns span centuries. This course will explore these questions with particular understanding that “creative writing” is much older than the MA or MFA or Ph.D. Yet the existence of any such degree is testament to a certain cultural currency.
This course will be divided into two parts. The first half of each class session will run as a literary salon insofar as we will use our own individual reading experiences to discuss aspects of creative writing. In other words, not only are you figuring out something for yourself as you read, but you are sharing that insight with others who have not read the text. Each week, you will be responsible for a minimum of 50 pages of reading. Based on that reading, you will write a short summary (no more than 200 words) and a creative/critical response (approx. 250 words) which will be passed out each week. (We may decide as a class to post these to Moodle, although you must turn them in hard copy to me.)
During the last half of each class session, we will turn our attention to peer work. Students will be assigned to submit creative work to the group for discussion. This is called your weekly risk. (The focus of this work will address some aspect of yourself as a writer in the world.) This portion of the class is not meant as a traditional workshop but as an extension of our literary salon. In other words, during this time, you are not providing suggestions for change. You will, however, be tasked to discuss the work at hand through observations about the topics, techniques and traditions you see in it. The author of the piece will participate in this discussion. The culminating document will be turned in at the end of the semester.
This coming fall, we will partner with the MFA Seminar in Visual Arts (taught by Professor Michelle Rozic) to participate in a call and response between visual artists and writers. This collaboration will culminate in a gallery exhibition of text paired with images called: (Re)composition: A Call and Response between Artists and Writers.
RHET/COMP
ENGL 600B/F: College Composition: Theory and Pedagogy and Field Experience
Professor Irene Clark
Mondays, 12:30-3:15
Prerequisite: ENGL 600A and ENGL 600B/F are restricted to teaching associates or at the discretion of the director of composition. Corequisite: ENGL 600B. Study of theoretical and pedagogical issues that impact the teaching of writing at the college level. Review of current studies in rhetoric, composition and literacy. ENGL 600B also entails faculty observation of student teaching.
ENGL 654 (Hybrid Lit/RC) : Local English, Global Rhetoric
Professor Iswari Pandey
Wednesdays, 4-6:45 PM
What is global English? Or are there multiple global Englishes? How does the spread and indigenization of English account for the globalization of Anglo-
American culture and capitalism? Conversely, what is the function of English in the changing world? How does changing (and changed) English figure in various contestations over identity, citizenship, resistance, and social change? English 654 will address these questions through an analysis of literary and critical texts, as well as the rhetoric of global Englishes. Students will write short responses to seminar readings and produce a final project.