FALL 2009
(Click Here for Spring 2009 courses)

ENG 630-1 Graduate Proseminar:
US Modernist Fiction
Th 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to modernist fiction in the U.S. We will begin by reviewing early critical accounts of a modernist tendency to reject time-governed narrative structures and their overt engagement with history in favor of “spatial organization,” aesthetic experiment, and formal self-reflexivity. Next we will consider more recent critical efforts to understand modernist formal innovations as so many attempts to engage history in a new way: one that foregrounds the role of language and ideology in constituting lived reality and that confronts as such a crisis of representation intrinsic to the organization and experience of modern life. We then turn to fictional texts caught up in numerous social conflicts of the early twentieth century, including: the betrayed legacy of Emancipation and the fight for racial justice; sexual revolution, women's suffrage, and the creation of new sexual subcultures; capitalist expansion, labor radicalism, and the ethical role of the state; tensions and transfusions between high art and mass culture; and the pro-nationalist bid to forge a distinctly “American” voice. Modernist texts are usually difficult; class participants should be prepared to take a scholarly approach and to work hard.

ENG 630-2 Graduate Proseminar:
Reading the Early Modern
Th 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
In this class we will read a wide range of early modern texts across genres to think about the role of literature and other cultural forms in the emergence of a market economy and modern European colonialism. Beginning with Thomas More's Utopia and working our way through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we will pay particular attention to the appearance of novel or transformed institutions and practices that arise in this extended moment of “transition” to modernity, including print culture, the public playhouses, pamphlet and news circulation, pedagogy, and translation.

This course will be of particular value to those students wanting to clarify and explore a “Historical Materialist” approach to literature, those wanting to hone their understanding of the “long history” of capitalism and colonialism by studying the crucial moment of “primitive accumulation,” as well as those planning to specialize in early modern studies. 20-25 pages of writing is expected, but I am open to dividing it up into 2-3 shorter papers for students who would prefer that option, and topics are negotiable depending on the special needs/interests of students enrolled (you can write about the film version of an early modern play, for example, or nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, etc., depending upon how your study of the early modern suits your own interests).

ENG 630-3 Graduate Proseminar:
Visual Culture
T 3:30-6:15
Film Screening T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
It has become a critical commonplace to note that we live in a visually saturated world where images play a dominant role in shaping how we think, how we communicate and how we conceive of ourselves. Yet our contemporary relationship to images is profoundly complex, caught between an enthusiasm for their sensuous immediacy and a skepticism towards their potential veracity. If we ask what an image actually is and how it works, then we are asking a deeply historical question. While modernity stripped the image of the sacred power it had held in the pre-modern world, it also relied increasingly on the image's enhanced scientific functionality, which manifested itself most clearly in the new media of photography and cinema. Moreover, the complex social, economic, and cultural transformations of modernity necessitated new ways of seeing, what has come to be known as a distinctly modern visuality , in which these new media would play a particularly vital role. Visuality was also key to the development of certain modern disciplines of knowledge, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The contradictions of the image persist in the postmodern era when the ubiquity and proliferation of images, especially in television and digital media, seem only to ensure the critical challenge to their truth claims. In exploring how we can critically analyze such visual culture, this course offers an introduction to visual studies, the interdisciplinary field of scholarship that has developed around these theoretical and historical questions about visuality and the image. In our close critical engagement with some of the key thinkers in the field, we shall examine a range of visual media, particularly photography, film, television, and digital media. Since the emergence of this new interdisciplinary field has generated substantial critical debate, we shall conclude the course by considering the varieties of critical skepticism toward the field and discussing its impact on the discipline of English and the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and film studies.

ENG 631-1 Critical Theory
MW 3:45-5:05
Instructor: Donald Morton
“Theory signals ‘speculation.'” --Culler, “What Is Theory?”

“Where speculation ends. . . there real, positive science begins.”
--Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

This course will be a rigorous inquiry into a range of contemporary theoretical discourses, drawing on texts from such zones (among others) as language and rhetorical analysis, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, performance theory, race theory, queer theory, historical materialism, postcolonial and globalization theory, . . . . In addressing the fundamental question of what the term “critical” means in the phrase “critical theory,” the course will explore the significant differences between traditionalist criticism, deconstructive critique, Foucauldian genealogy as critique, Deleuzean creative critique, Marxist ideology critique, Pan Africanist critique, . . .

The course will organize these diverse inquiries by addressing several overarching issues. One such issue will be the competing claims of both (post)modernist/(post)structuralist theory and Marxist theory to constitute “materialist” critiques that provide more productive knowledges than the now “outmoded” idealist theories represented by traditionalist/humanist/modernist thought. This will lead to a sustained investigation of the divergent and incompatible meanings of “materialist” in these competing “materialist” theories and therefore into the question of the theory and politics of theory. Christopher Butler has recently argued (2002) that “Most of the French intellectuals responsible for the theoretical inspiration of postmodernism worked within a broadly Marxist paradigm.” In terms of “materialist” theory, what does such a claim amount to? Does it in fact conflate important intellectual and theoretical distinctions?

Another larger issue will be the question of whether by the late 1990s the American academy had in fact entered into—and is perhaps still in—what some have called a “post-theoretical moment.” What is the meaning of the expression? Is theory itself now somehow irrelevant and unnecessary, or does the phrase simply refer to the passing of a specific theoretical development that has in recent times exhausted itself? In another phase, the course will inquire into the relation of critical theory to critical pedagogy.

ENG 650-1 Forms:
Poets and Collaborators
Th 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Michael Burkard
As writers/readers, we are the collaboraters. In discussion and in writing we will respond to poets in translation, including Transtromer, Syzmborska, Vallejo, and to a wide range of contemporary American poets, including Fanny Howe and Lucille Clifton. As a class, we will also write some collaborative work among ourselves. We wil explore various means of adapting to issues of translation, subject matter, and forms.

ENG 650-2 Forms:
Contemporary Poetry
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Christopher Kennedy
In this class, we will read and discuss the work of four American poets—Frank Stanford, Weldon Kees, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Hayden—whose poems represent four very different approaches to the art and craft of poetry.

The books we will read for this class are Frank Stanford's The Singing Knives , about which critic Victor Schnickelfriz wrote: "In short, The Singing Knives might be best described as: Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch collaborate to direct and write a script for a psychological thriller about fishing, hunting and butchering starring the cast of the grown up little rascals who have matured into bloodthirsty criminals;" The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees , which elicited the following comments in Poetry Magazine : “Kees was both a gifted lyric poet and a restless experimenter, whose diverse background as an abstract expressionist painter, a jazz pianist and composer, and a filmmaker enriched his sense of formal possibilities;” Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 , which prompted James Merrill to remark, "Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are poems that I love best and tire of least. And there will be no others;” and Robert Hayden's Collected Poems , about which Major Jackson wrote: “Richly humane in vision and profoundly elegant in craft, the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden reflect an American poet's commitment to the magic of language and its inherent ability to illuminate the human condition—a commitment that at times borders obsessiveness. In this sense, Robert Hayden is a poet's poet, and incarnate proof that all poets are not created equal.”

Assignments will include creative and/or analytical responses to the readings.

ENG 650-3 Forms:
The Russians
TH 9:30-12:20
Instructor: George Saunders
In this course we'll read the short fiction of Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and
Isaac Babel, alongside a sampling of that of some other Russian writers
(Turgenev, Doestoyevsky, Kharms) in an attempt to deepen our understanding
of the story story¹s techniques, aims, and history. I¹m still working on
the texts, but these will be the collected sho rt works of the four main
writers listed above, along with Nabakov's "Lectures on Russian Literature,"
and photocopied selections from other writers, as necessary.

ENG 650-4 Forms:
Research and Imagination
F 10:35-1:35
Instructor: Dana Spiotta
We will examine how different writers use research in their work.  We will look at fiction that uses historical events.  We will look at fiction that uses figures from real life.  We will look at fiction that uses the theories and language of science.  We will discuss how using newspapers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, films, diaries, letters, case studies, and interviews can inspire the writer's imagination and concentration.  We will contemplate the things that fiction can do that a biography or a book of history cannot do.

Our focus will be on contemporary fiction, but we will begin by discussing the newspaper article that inspired Dreiser's An American Tragedy and a short in-class reading from Dos Passos.

Reading :
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
Libra, Don DeLillo
The Tree of Life , Hugh Nissenson
A Mercy , Toni Morrison
Saturday , Ian McEwan
The Seal Wife , Kathryn Harrison

We will read shorter pieces by David Foster Wallace, A.M. Homes, Robert Coover, Richard Price, Peter Carey, and Richard Powers.

We will also read some primary source documents and some author interviews. There will be an average of 150 pages of reading a week.

ENG 650-5 Forms:
Art and Craft of Poetry
T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
The governing idea of this course is that a piece of writing is always a deliberate construction that uses what the writer has learned from others to generate an intense experience in the reader. We will spend several weeks on various rhythmic traditions, and stanza patterns, not because everyone should use these, but because any writer who gets the sense of these patterns has better access to most of the best poetry written in English, and greater freedom in the act of composition. Other topics will include image, diction, tone, point of view, and argument. Weekly handouts will describe principles to be studied in poems assigned as reading, and in that week's writing assignment. Prose writers as well as poets may find this course useful.

ENG 715-1 First Poetry Workshop
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
Students in this workshop will write one poem each week and revise at least four of these into carefully considered versions on the basis of workshop analysis. Reading and writing assignments will address issues that arise in workshop. Admission is strictly limited to first-year students in the MFA Program in Poetry.  

ENG 716-1 Second Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Bruce Smith
Students in this course will be asked to write twelve poems, one “free” poem to push back against the world with the imagination per week. The emphasis will be both on the craft—the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination—the vision that's unique to each individual. Classroom work will consist primarily of workshop-style discussion of student work, although each class will begin with poems, ancient and modern, as models or targets for discussions of technique as well as examples of tapping the resources available to the writer. This term I'll begin class with what I call an “exemplary” poet—avoiding the more proscriptive term “essential.” Exercises will include ways to locate the source of your poems as well as ways to "music" them, to shape them, and to revise them.

ENG 717-1 First Fiction Workshop
T 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Dana Spiotta

ENG 718-1 Second Fiction Workshop
Th 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Second year workshop for students in the MFA Program in Fiction.

ENG 719-1 Third Poetry Workshop
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Mary Karr
This class is based almost entirely on revision, so your notes on each other's poems should be detailed and serious. I'd also like to see your revisions fairly regularly in conference, and for you to keep different drafts of the same poems. What I value first and foremost is a) clarity in communication and b) strong feeling (in the reader NOT the writer).

We'll also be looking at entire books with an eye to building a thesis. In the first class, you'll bring in copies of tables of contents and actual, physical first books that you like a lot. Also at the first class, you'll bring in a poem each, but thereafter, one poet will bring in groups of 6-8 poems, rather than our looking at one per human. 

ENG 721-1 Third Fiction Workshop
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: George Saunders
This course, required of and restricted to third-year students in the MFA Fiction program, is a workshop-based critique course, designed to prepare the student for his/her spring thesis work.

ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar:
Colonialism and Cultural Formation: The West Indies
Th 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Erin Mackie
Concentrating on British colonialism in the West Indies from 1655 to 1834, this seminar will examine West Indian cultural formations whose production begins in the early modern period and, in many cases, continues through to the present. The guiding topics of the course include: the discursive production of the West Indies; the establishment of central colonial institutions, especially the plantation and the merchant navy; the notion of creolization as a cultural process; the formation of Caribbean countercultures, such as Maroon and pirate societies; and the production of modern ethnic categories. These topics will be approached through readings in historical ethnography; novels and poems; biography; travel narrative; and contemporary cultural theory. Primary texts include: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes ; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne , Oroonoko: A Tragedy ; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe ; A General History of the Pirates ; Bavia, or, The Jamaican Lady ; Inkle and Yarico narratives; Richard Cumberland, The West Indian: A Comedy ; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano ; and The Life of Mary Prince.

ENG 730-2 Graduate Seminar:
The Red Progressives: Pan-Indianism and theNative American Public Sphere, 1875-1934
M 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Scott Lyons
In this course we will read Native American literature from the Assimilation Era, a time when boarding schools and other such assimilation policies ironically created possibilities for the emergence of a new, and often critical, public sphere in Native America. It is a complicated period. The term “progressive” is typically understood in the context of this age to refer to the emergence of left-wing politics; its opposite is “conservative.” But in Native American circles, the word was synonomous with “assimilated,” and its opposite was “traditionalist” (also “conservative”). Making matters all the more confusing, race was ascribed to these monikers; a “red progressive” was typically called a “mixedblood,” while a “traditionalist” was a “fullblood,” regardless of one's so-called “blood quantum.” In this seminar we will sort out these kinds of complexities and in so doing perhaps come to appreciate writers who, while occupying the now-unattractive position of assimilated mixedbloods, were in their own time important critical intellectuals and writers. We will read Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Francis LaFlesche, Luther Standing Bear, E. Pauline Johnson, and others who offered some devastating critiques of white society and colonization, even though they didn't sound very much like Crazy Horse.

ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar:
Conspiracy and Crime in Long Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Tu 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Mike Goode
British criminal law has long localized and individuated responsibility through the figures of the criminal and criminal conspirator. This course examines how various novels from Britain 's long nineteenth century (1789-1914) critiqued and helped to construct the notions of individuated historical responsibility upon which the modern criminal justice system relies. To focus our own historical inquiry, we will be paying particular attention to the questions of how, why, where, to what ends, and with what effects the genre of the mystery novel came to be. Part of the historical task of the course, then, will be to identify the particularity of the mystery as a genre by looking at a wide variety of writings about mystery, secrecy, conspiracy, the law, and detection drawn from every corner of British culture during the long nineteenth century: everything from late eighteenth-century Gothic novels and conspiracy-mongering political pamphlets; to early nineteenth-century Newgate novels, historical novels, realist novels about secrecy and mystery, and serial potboilers like The Mysteries of London ; to later nineteenth-century “sensation” novels, newspaper crime blotters, journalistic accounts of urban poverty and underworlds, detective novels, and vampire novels. But our broader task—as much a theoretical as an historical one—will be to think about the relationship between historicism and legal inquiry by studying how different genres of nineteenth-century crime, mystery, and conspiracy literature constructed and critiqued different notions of historical responsibility, determination, and cultural systematicity. Primary texts covered will include a variety of non-fiction materials, as well as fiction by Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Walter Scott, Harrison Ainsworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, G. M. Reynolds, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, and Joseph Conrad. Writing assignments will be bi-weekly Blackboard posts, a critical literature review, and a longer seminar paper.