English

Fall 2018 Graduate Course Descriptions

Fall 2018 Course Descriptions

 

ENGL 525EA

Professor Higgs

 

ENGL 525 Experimental Apocalypse

 

This hybrid graduate seminar will focus on post-1900 experimental approaches to apocalypse narratives. With special attention to formal innovation, students will read, write, and think both critically and creatively about the historical, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts related to a wide range of interdisciplinary representations of catastrophe.

 

 

ENGL 638

Professor Dawahare

 

This seminar focuses on influential modern and contemporary critical approaches to literature and culture.  Participants are required to demonstrate knowledge of the seminar's subject matter through oral presentations and essays that explicate, critique, and apply several of the assigned theories.

 

ENGL 601

Professor Carassai

ENGL 601 – Transformative Scholarship: Theory and Criticism in the Age of Digital Modernity 

In ENGL 601 – Transformative Scholarship: Theory and Criticism in the Age of Digital Modernity we will cover foundational concepts and theoretical perspectives about the specific ways in which literary studies – and the humanities disciplines at large – produce knowledge. In particular, we will look at how the humanities organize meaning and build strategies for understanding, interpreting, and productively respond to a variety of texts. Students will be encouraged to investigate the relationship between various forms of representation and genres (narrative, poetry, fiction, visual art, multimodal texts) and some of the contemporary practices of reading, writing, and experiencing meaning both in print and in networked and programmable media. The course is intended to provide students with an advanced framework to think critically about research methodologies, about specific research projects, and about the paradigm shift underway towards new forms of digital literacy in the age of digital humanities.

 ENGL 652

Professor Haake

Prerequisite: Qualified standing in the Graduate Creative Writing Option or instructor consent. Introduction to the cultural, theoretical, and professional of creative writers, in and out of the academy. Intensive practice in creative writing (multi-genre). Workshop format.

 

 

ENGL 654: The Politics of Information
Fall 2018
Professor Wexler
   

This graduate seminar considers the rhetoric and materiality of information, from the rise of the European public sphere and early participatory culture to contemporary information technologies that drive global circuits of production, consumption, and exchange.

  

Some important questions to be considered throughout the semester:

  • How do information technologies influence participatory culture and social change?
  • What constitutes work in the 21st century?
  • How do new economies (e.g., service, knowledge, information) produce value?
  • What does it mean to be posthuman?
  • To what degree does new media represent a break and/or remediation of old media?
  • How have information technologies and socioeconomic shifts shaped higher education?
  • What is the relationship between information, urbanization, and risk?
  • What exactly is real and fake news?

 

Main projects include three short analysis-reflections, digital pair presentation, and final project. 

 

Potential texts:

Aronowitz. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning

Bolter and Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media
Castells. The Rise of the Network Society
Davis, Hirschl, and Stack. Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution
Floridi. The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality
Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Jordan. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society

 

Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries
Webster. Theories of the Information Society

 

 

 

 

 

400-level seminars

 

English 492: Women of the Gullah Renaissance

Professor Morris Johnson

Wednesdays, 4-6:45

 

Upon its release, Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) immediately drew comparisons to filmmaker Julie Dash’s groundbreaking Daughters of the Dust. Dash’s film (and accompanying text) was considered part of the Gullah Renaissance – an artistic movement that scholar Tracy Snipe describes as a flourishing of cultural, academic, and artistic works signaling an increased awareness, intrigue with, and study of Afro-creole Sea Islands cultures that spanned the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, Gullah/Geechee cultures and the geographical spaces that they occupied took on a place of primacy in the literary and artistic imaginaries of Black women in particular as a site of healing and diasporic ‘home.’ Participants in this course will attempt to determine the reason that contemporary artists such as Beyoncé are inspired by this period by exploring the literary and visual art that defines it, by investigating the historical, social, and intellectual phenomena that informed it, and by examining the ways that its representative texts fit into the arc of 20th-century African American literature writ large.

 

Texts will include Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Gold Bug," selections from the WPA Narratives, Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust, Ntozake Shange's Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, Carrie Mae Weems' Sea Islands Series (visual art), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Poems from Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water.