SPRING 2010
(Click Here for Fall 2009 courses)

ENG 615 Open Poetry Workshop
T 3:30-6:15
Instructor: Chris Kennedy
In this class students will write and critique one another's poems. The emphasis will be on close readings of the poems with and examination of what makes a poem communicate in the manner best suited to the author's aesthetic. 


ENG 617-1 Open Fiction Workshop
W 9:30-12:2
Instructor: Christine Schutt
Fiction Workshop: Transparency or Translucency in Prose. A fiction workshop: 2-3 stories discussed every class; line-by-line reading from instructor, as well as written comments from instructor and individual meeting times. Students will be expected to provide instructor with written criticism on the stories up for discussion, copies of which go to the writers themselves; Xerox of stories by different contemporary writers will be distributed, which stories depends entirely on the needs of the class. Emphasis on structure, the way stories are and can be made.


ENG 630-1 Graduate Proseminar: Reading and Writing the 17th Century
TH 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
This course provides a critical point of entry for students interested both in early modern texts and the disciplinary history of early modern studies. Our approach to a survey of the seventeenth century will consider how scholars of the late English Renaissance have both spearheaded developments in literary studies and at the same time claimed the study of late Renaissance English literature as a bulwark against methodological and theoretical innovation (sometimes represented as intellectual faddism). In short, this course will consider how the study of late Renaissance English literature has served both to forge an intellectual vanguard and protect an institutional old guard in English studies. We will spend as much time with the literature of the period as with the stories historiographers have come to tell about the seventeenth century specifically. Our chief investigation will be to examine the mythological structures whereby the seventeenth century has been represented as a long protracted labor that birthed the modern English subject. We will read an assortment of texts traditionally included in literary surveys of the seventeenth century (late Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton) as well as texts that, despite their literary qualities, receive greater attention by historians of science, politics and philosophy (Harvey, Hobbes). We will also read a good number of writers who fall between these anachronistically defined categories (i.e. Bacon, Browne). Our discussions will trace the representation of privacy, masculinity, sovereignty, embodiment, property and liberty (among others) as these discourses emerge out of the complex interplay between readers and writers of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.


ENG 630-2 Graduate Proseminar: Victorian Studies and After
Th 9:30-12:20
Instructor: Kevin Morrison
This course will provide an introduction to Victorian literature and culture and the field of Victorian studies itself by taking up a series of interrelated questions: Does Victorian remain a meaningful category of analysis in light of recent critiques of periodization and emerging transnational and transatlantic approaches to literature? Does studies indicate a nexus of common interests shared by different disciplines or an intellectual incoherence in which the distinctiveness of the literary has been lost? What would literary Victorian studies look like if history were not its primary interlocutor? How might our theories of interpretation change if we did not read symptomatically? Is it possible to give ideological critique its due without reducing textual objects to ideology? And how are these questions, posed as they have been in recent years by a number of Victorianists, related to pragmatic concerns over the future of the humanities and anxieties about interdisciplinarity? Our engagement with a substantial body of scholarship about the field, under such rubrics as gender, empire, sexuality, liberalism and transnationalism, will be anchored by several literary texts that have been central to these debates, including Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy , Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , George Eliot's Romola , Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and/or Great Expectations and George Meredith's Modern Love .

This course is not oriented toward the production of a seminar paper. Instead, we will focus on writing in the shorter professional genres. Although Victorian Britain is our primary concern, t he theoretical and practical matters addressed in this course will be useful to students working in other historical periods or literatures.


ENG 630-3 Graduate Proseminar: Early America
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
Designed as an introduction to US literary and cultural studies, this seminar will survey American language and writing from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and will provide a foundation for more advanced study of this period. Because this is a proseminar, the reading will be somewhat heavy, but you will need no prior knowledge of the period. For the final project, you will work on primary material from the course or closely related to it, but you will have conceptual and methodological freedom in choosing an approach.

Reflecting recent revisions in the critical conception of this field, “Early America” will be treated as a problematic rather than as a settled category. We will question the homogeneity and push the literal boundaries of “America”: what regional, racial, religious and linguistic subcultures exist within the space of America? What transatlantic and hemispheric contexts illuminate early American literary production? We will read Native American oral literature and writings from New Spain, New France and New Netherland alongside literature from the British colonies, and alongside European writings about the “New World.” The course will culminate with an examination of the rhetoric of the US Revolutionary War, which attempted to present as unified and univocal a colonial period that had been anything but.


ENG 650-1 Forms: Teaching Creative Writing in the Community
T 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Michael Burkard
We will meet weekly as a group and will discuss possible writing assignments connected to visits to different sites in the community.  We will have approximately four or five meetings on our own in class before Pam Heintz visits and gives us more specific information about site possibilities.  The classes will focus on trying out different writing exercises ourselves.  We will do this to get a feel as to whether the exercise stands a good chance of working or not.  We will do most of these assignments in class, and I will be handing out materials to you by different poets and fiction writers each week to see what we might use for a "trigger."

Once everyone has chosen a site, we will meet when necessary as a class to report on how specific site visits and writing exercises are going.  We may have theses meetings in conference as well, or in place of some of the class time.  Your time with the site visits will count as class time used.

The grading for the course roughly translates into these categories and percentages:
20% of the grade for the quality of participation in the class discussions and the writing assignments
20% of the grade for the quality of interest you demonstrate in the inclass writing assignments and assignments you suggest for our group
60% of the grade for the quality of your teaching at the site you choose.  I will attend at least one of your sessions at the site.

This course is taught in collaboration with photographer Stephen Mahan. You may also register for this course under TRM 300 or TRM 500. Experience with photography is not a requirement.

Text: Kenneth Koch, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?


ENG 650-2 Forms: Literary Hoodoo: The Oral Tradition in African American Literature
Th 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
The griotic tradition in African American literature; narrative orations in the works of Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Gayle Jones, John Wideman, Patrick Chamoiseau, Zora Neale Hurston and so forth. Novels, excerpts and shorts. Blues, Jazz, Mythwork and Magic.


ENG 650-3 Forms: Fiction and Poetry: Best Versions
Th 12:30-3:20
Instructor: Chris Kennedy
This class will provide students with an opportunity to read and compare different versions of stories and poems by established authors. Additionally, students will bring original work for discussion about editing and revision. We will read several authors with an emphasis on the stories of Raymond Carver.


ENG 650-5 Forms: Visions Interrupted: Five Poets
W 12:45-3:35
Instructor: Brooks Haxton
We will read five poets from the early into the late twentieth century, starting in English, with W.B. Yeats, whose work departs from the moody symbolism of post-romantic sensibility to help define the mindset of early moderns. Rilke (in translation) has an equally visionary project which faces similar obstacles. We return to English with D.H. Lawrence, whose vision of natural vitality and variety leads with eerie logic into the masterpieces that anticipate his early death. Anna Akhmatova (also in translation) begins with misty vignettes of personal encounters, and we follow her writing through historic upheavals which transform her into a chronicler of Russia in her time. We end with the poetry of Hayden Carruth, a naturalist, thinker and celebrator of culture tried by intermittent bouts of addiction and madness, and by the wars and injustices of a century which confirms him as an anarchist and an atheist.


ENG 650-6 Forms: Groove and Break: Music as Metaphor and Practice
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Bruce Smith
“Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” --Pound  

The first half of the course will examine music we've received in various verse forms. We will investigate the “bound speech” that compounds form and compacts language. We will look at structures and effects in several verse forms. Rhyme, meter, stanza, repetition of sounds will be the special interest of the first half. Students will be asked to write examples of their own in these forms, for example, ghazals or blank verse.  

The second half of the course will involve looking at the music (and by extension the consciousness and emotional order) of four books by poets, exhibiting the range and scope of contemporary practice. Students will be asked to write responses to each of these poets, either in poetic or prose forms.

Texts:
The Making of a Poem, by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland; Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities, by Olena Kalytiak Davis; Cocktails , by D.A. Powell
Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith; and Jelly Roll: A Blues, by Kevin Young or Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Harryette Mullen.


ENG 730-1 Graduate Seminar: Home and Diaspora: Reading Transnational Arab America
M 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey
In a poem commemorating the passing of the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, one of the most renowned poets of the Arab world, wrote: “I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here.” Reflecting on Said's long career as a Palestinian intellectual living in exile in the US, these lines also capture the essence of transnational in-betweenness marking the lives of Arab communities living in the diaspora. This course will focus on contemporary Arab-American literary and cultural productions, emphasizing the ways in which they portray the negotiation of Arab-American belonging in the US while at the same time delineating the strong roots that link these texts and the communities they represent to the Arab world. The aim of this seminar is to highlight, through literature, the effects of national and global political repercussions on dual Arab and American identities. This seminar is also geared toward helping students understand Arab identity in a cross-cultural context by investigating the nature of the attachments linking Arab Americans to their Arab homelands, whether these attachments are political, cultural, religious or nostalgic. To do so, students will read an array of Arab-American literary texts (including novels, poetry, critical essays and non-fiction) that handle issues of transnationalism, dual citizenship, diasporic identity and biculturalism. These texts serve to add a necessary level of complexity to the East vs. West binary that has dominated depictions of Arabs and Muslims, especially after 9/11.

The pedagogy informing the textual and thematic selections in this seminar is meant to help students address the current culture of Arabo/Islamophobia pervading the US, one that inhibits a more complex knowledge of the Arab world as well as an understanding of Arab and Muslim identities within a US framework. Writers whose work will be featured in this course include Edward Said, Rabih Alameddine, Laila Halaby, Mohja Kahf, Khaled Mattawa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad, Samia Serageldin, Randa Jarrar and Lisa Suheir Majaj, among others. The list of literary works will be accompanied by a selection of theoretical texts that will engage students in contextualizing Arab-American literature within specific theoretical traditions such as transnational and diaspora studies. Such readings will include, for instance, works by Khatchig Tölölyan, Aihwa Ong, William Safran, Pnina Werbner, James Clifford, Inderpal Grewal, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Ella Shohat.


ENG 730-3 Graduate Seminar: Film Noir and the Cultural Politics of Gender
T 12:30-3:20
Film Screening
T 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Steven Cohan
Some critics call it a genre, others a historical movement, and still others a visual style: the term film noir refers to a group of films made in the decade after World War II which addressed, in the convoluted narrative terms of the thriller, some of the cultural problems facing American society, not the least of which were questions about the instability of gender as a regulation of sexualities and social identities. Examples of film noir are Double Identity, Laura, The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, Gilda, Crossfire and Sunset Blvd. As a term identifying the cohesion and status of this particular cycle, which also has a source in the economic state of the film industry at that time, film noir is in many respects an academic categorization postdating the initial circulation of these films. Their celebrated example, furthermore, supplied aesthetic and thematic conventions as well as marketing strategies for a so-called revival of noir in the last three decades of the past century: films such as Chinatown, Body Heat and Basic Instinct. The objective of this seminar will be to study the representation of sexual difference in film noir and the noir revival from the linked perspectives of cultural studies and feminist and queer film theory. The concern with gender and sexuality will mean that we examine the films both for their representations of masculinity and femininity in a historical context while considering what the narrativizations of sexual difference efface—in what ways the gender plots function as cover stories of other ideological and historical conflicts (such as those related to class, race and ethnicity; to urban experience and modernity; to political activism and state regulation; and so on). Film noir continues to attract the notice of scholars, and the reading assignments for the seminar will consist primarily of this body of criticism, as amplified by additional work in gender theory and cultural history. On some occasions the films shown at the required screenings will be supplemented by some documentary material (for instance, Mildred Pierce coupled with The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter). I have not yet set the syllabus but will be designing the course so that, as well as a study of film noir in particular, it will have applications for students doing gender studies, American studies, film studies or cultural studies, and at the same time, for students without much background in those areas, it will provide them with an introduction to these interdisciplinary connections.


ENG 730-4 Graduate Seminar: Black Prison Writing, USA: Theory and Practice
T 3:30-6:20
Instructor: Greg Thomas
Nowadays, many in and outside US circles refer to “the prison industrial complex,” a phrase which literally comes from Wall Street itself. Before imprisonment was defined according to recent economics, however, it had already been defined by Black Radical Tradition in terms of colonial-imperial enslavement—the material and symbolic reduction of enslaved Africans to “chattel” for a white world capitalist hegemony. The pre-industrial plantation context paves the way for the “prison [and military] industrial complex” of contemporary times. The large-scale transfer of Black people from yesterday's plantations to today's prisons (where “old,” official slavery remains perfectly legal) must be recognized in part at least as an “internal slave trade” as opposed to slavery's actual “abolition.” This course, “Black Prison Writing, USA: Theory and Practice” confronts the racial-cultural/political-economic problematic of prisons without losing sight of the connection between imprisonment and enslavement, past and present. Some figures to be engaged: George Jackson, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Elaine Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur and Evelyn Williams, not to mention Nat Turner, Claudia Jones, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Haile Gerima, Safiyah Bukhari and Donald Goines as well as assorted music, video and film texts in the tradition.


ENG 799-1 MFA Essay Seminar
Th 3:30-6:20
Instructor: Dana Spiotta Each student will write an essay of approximately five thousand words.  The essay will address a specific aspect of a major writer's formal technique.