Graduate Course Descriptions | Spring 2019

M 630-900 (New Cabell Hall 068)
Instructor: Rita Felski

This course offers an overview of key arguments and debates within the field of comparative literature, transnational studies, and recent theories of world literature. It is a required course for all those enrolled for the graduate certificate in comparative literature; other students are very welcome. Topics to be discussed include the benefits and risks of thinking comparatively; the relations between comparative literature and postcolonial theory; multiple modernities; theories of translation and adaptation; comparative treatments of genre.

R 1000-1230 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

R 630-900 (Bryan Hall 310)
Instructor: Lisa Goff

“Material culture” is the stuff of everyday life: landscapes and street corners, skyscrapers and log cabins, umbrellas and dining room tables and Picassos and Fitbits. Every thing in our lives, those we choose and those that are thrust upon us, conveys meaning—many meanings, in fact, from the intentions of the creator to the reception (and sometimes the subversion) of the consumer. Interpreting objects, buildings, and places provides insight into the values and beliefs of societies and cultures past and present. In this course we will study theories of material culture, many of which now intersect with literary criticism, from a variety of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, historical archaeology, art history, geography, environmental humanities, American Studies, and literary studies. And we will apply those theories to texts and artifacts of all kinds, from novels and short stories to movies, photographs, historic sites, visual art and culture, fashion and clothing, landscapes, parks and monuments, and more. We will read theorists familiar to students of literature, such as thing theorist Bill Brown and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, but also scholars of the politics of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Paul Harvey; folklorist Henry Glassie; archaeologist James Deetz; and art and architecture historians including Denis Cosgrove and Dell Upton. The class will prepare you to interpret things in ways that illuminate texts, and to read texts in ways that reveal and cultivate the meanings of things.

F 930-1200 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: David Vander Meulen

This course in textual criticism deals with some of the fundamental problems of literary study and of reading in general: if a work exists in multiple forms, and with different wording, what constitutes "the text"?  How are such judgments made and standards determined?  How are verbal works as intellectual abstractions affected by the physical forms in which they are transmitted?  If one is faced with the prospect of editing a work, how does one go about it? How does one choose an edition for use in the classroom?  What difference does this all make? The course will deal with such concerns and will include: a short survey of analytical bibliography and the solution of practical problems as they apply to literary texts; study of the transmission of texts in different periods; and considerations of theories and techniques of editing literary and non-literary texts of different genres, and of both published and unpublished materials.  The course Books as Physical Objects, ENCR 5650, provides helpful background but is not a prerequisite.

Section 001
W 200-430 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Debra Nystrom

In this Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop for Advanced Undergraduates and Graduate Students, we’ll be examining and trying out various formal possibilities for making poems.  Poetry arose out of magic and spell: we’ll explore the ways such effects are available to us now, as we consider received forms and their contemporary variations: sonnet, ghazal, sestina, pantoum, villanelle, blank verse, terza rima, haibun, free verse and many other shapes, including formal opportunities to be found at the liminal space between poetry and prose.  The interplay between sound, rhythm and syntax in creating suspense as well as interweaving designs whose relations are registered in subliminal ways (Coleridge’s “more than usual state of emotion in a more than usual order”) will be an ongoing study.  Each student will try out a number of formal arrangements in his or her own writing, will lead a discussion on a particular poetic structure, and will write a short paper concerned with either one form’s effects in one or more poems, or one poet’s use of form in his or her work.  The class will be divided between discussion of readings and workshop on student poems.

Please submit 4-5 poems by Dec. 15 to apply for permission to enroll.  Email Prof. Nystrom at DLN8U@virginia.edu.

M 200-430 (Home of the Instructor)
Instructor: Rita Dove

Restricted to students enrolled in the MFA Poetry program. Graduate-level poetry writing workshop for advanced writing students. A weekly 2.5 hour workshop discussion of student poems.

M 200-430 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: Christopher Tilghman

MW 330-445 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Cynthia Wall

This course will range over the vast goodly fields of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama: tragedies, she-tragedies, heroic, gothic, and colonialist, along with samples of other popular stage entertainments such as operas, adaptations, pantomimes, farces.  We’ll research contemporary biographies of the principal actors and managers, acting manuals, descriptions of theatres, sets, and costumes, accounts of the audiences, and the rise of Shakespeare as a national icon. Core texts will include Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675), Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676), Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689), Congreve, The Way of the World (1700), Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703), Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), Lillo, The London Merchant (1731), Cumberland, The West Indian (1771), Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1771), and Lewis, Castle Spectre (1798).  Added fun will be found in Nahum Tate’s happy version of King Lear (1688), Henry Fielding’s truly wonderful The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731), Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes (1756), Robert Porrett’s truly dreadful adaptation of Clarissa; or, The Fatal Seduction: A Tragedy in Prose (1788), the pantomime Omai, or,  A Trip Round the World (1785), and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) (yes, the one in Mansfield Park). Weekly analytical commentaries, a presentation or two, and your choice of two 8-10pp. papers or one article-length paper.

MW 200-315 (New Cabell 038)
Instructors: Alison Booth and Brandon Walsh

Is reading of prose texts different in 2018 than in 1918? In 1818? A century or more ago, texts would only reach you in print or manuscript, or read aloud. Braille and sound recording as well as performed adaptations might give non-readers access to narratives. Today, you could also read a novel or a biography, even texts produced in the intervening century, on a computer or handheld screen, and we could find every instance of a word in that text without a concordance or index. With the right tools, you could have at your disposal vast quantities of textual data, on all sorts of subjects, drawn from the many corners of the Internet. What else could you learn to do with all these different forms of textuality, with all this data?

This course will include readings (about 2 articles per class during the first part of the semester) that introduce the various approaches to digital textual studies current today; pairs of readings will also highlight fictionality and the fiction/nonfiction divide; the questions of gender and African American studies in Digital Humanities and outside it.

Some umbrella questions we will raise: can computers help us differentiate the narrative techniques and forms of third-person biography?  What difference does the gender of the subject of a biography make in the various structures and patterns that our data reveal?  Can we visualize data about changes over time in the representations of gender and social networks? Our research collaboration and training in software and methods will focus on the corpus of texts in http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu, a database and bibliography.  You will gain training and experience in textual analysis, including topic modeling, and other ways to mine and visualize data from digitized text.  You will also work in pairs to learn the basics of XML and TEI markup and to join teams of faculty and students who “read” short biographies of women with the Biographical Elements and Structure (BESS) system of terms of parts of the narratives. The biographies of women are as varied as you can imagine, including queens, women in medicine, adventuresses.  Do the close or “mid-range reading” methods of the CBW project, as demonstrated in our training set of BESS analysis, correlate or diverge from the data on the entire set of books? 

In addition to open-ended opportunities to suggest other approaches to the CBW texts, you are encouraged to develop your own small data or textual corpus to compare the discoveries in studies of narrative through different methods. Assignments: readings, digital project, presentation, and 8-10-pp. essay. Goals: coding skills, teamwork, and informed perspective on literary DH.

TR 330-445 (Ruffner Hall 123)
Instructor: Caroline Rody

In this course, designed for graduate students and upper level undergraduates (and which fulfills a requirement for the World Religions, World Literatures M.A. program), we will reflect on matters of art and spirit as we retrace the development of Jewish American literature. The reading includes short stories, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as scholarly essays.  We will also view several short videos clips and a film as we survey the diverse literary and popular cultural production of American Jews.  We start in the milieu of the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side of New York, reading works composed in English and some translated from Yiddish, by immigrant writers such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as a number of Yiddish poets, whose work we’ll read in translation. Among the next generation, heirs to Yiddish culture with hugely American aspirations, we will read writers such as Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. Toward the end of the course we will read fiction from the currently booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new American literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to Jewish religious practice and to traditional Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; uses and workings of Jewish humor; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, several short reading responses, a short and a long paper, and a final exam project.

TR 200-315 (New Cabell Hall 038)
Instructors: Kevin Hart and Walter Jost

In his book Colors of the Mind the literary theorist and critic Angus Fletcher identifies a relatively untilled field in literature study that he calls “noetics.” “Noetics names the field and the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem.”  This must be a very large field indeed, so that a graduate course given to it needs some way of delimiting its interests to deal with five American poets: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery.  And of course “thinking” has many possibilities—among them opining, believing, conceiving, inferring, imagining, reflecting, musing, meditating, as well as deliberating, speculating, reasoning, and arguing.  In this course we will focus on select philosophical and religious/theological matters to give point to these various aspects of thinking the poem.

W 600-830 (Bryan Hall 328)
Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

In this seminar we will trace the key concerns and texts that have shaped postcolonial Caribbean literary aesthetics, through reading a range of historical documents from Columbus to Lady Nugent; literary manifestos from Brathwaite to Glissant; and seminal contemporary Caribbean poetry, drama, and fiction by Maryse Condé, NourbeSe Philip, Marlon James, Nalo Hopkinson, and Derek Walcott, among others. Topics include: interrogating the canon; narrating an often traumatic history; the politics of language; narrative form (magical realism, sci-fi, créolité); postcolonial, anti-colonial, and postmodern narration; the place of music, orality, and folk forms in literary narration; and depicting the hybrid and shifting identities that define the region.

T 630-900 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Sandhya Shukla

Cultural theorist Michel de Certeau wrote “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”  The story for de Certeau (anthropologist + geographer + philosopher) was a way of understanding representation and social life, space and symbol, and how different kinds of power shaped what could be expressed at any given historical moment.  This course takes up that expansive rendering of the story to develop an interdisciplinary exploration of literature, culture, and spatiality. 

We will explore representations of Harlem from the early twentieth century to the present, including works by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, Nella Larsen, and Mat Johnson.  Our task will be to employ the language and structure of globality to open up a prototypical American place, and paradigmatic case of race and class division in the United States.  In the spirit of de Certeau, we attend to Harlem stories, as much about narrativization and experience as cartography.  Most of all, our study over the course of the term shall foreground the conflicts and intimacies that emerge through racial and ethnic exchange, and center those encounters, and Harlem itself, in discourses of modernity.

Each week of the course will pair a specific genre with critical materials, under topics such as: autobiography and otherness, the Harlem Renaissance novel and global blackness, radical political discourse and cross-culturality, ethnography and loss, and performance and newness.  We will be reading both canonical and non-canonical (even peripheral) works by Harlem writers and cultural producers, as well as social theory on spatiality, urbanity, and multiculturalism by scholars such as de Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Saskia Sassen, Michael Keith and Kenan Malik.  Staging dialogues between literature and theory in our conversations should facilitate the writing projects students will be undertaking in this class and afterwards.

There are two ways in which this course directly addresses issues regarding professionalization that should be of interest to students in the English graduate program.  First, we will unpack the process of converting an academic paper, or master’s thesis, or dissertation chapter, into a journal article.  By considering the form, content and mechanics of a critical essay on a text we have read in class, we will enter into debates about the relative weight of close reading, historicization, and theorization.  Second, we will address (and interrogate) the construction of fields such as African American, multiethnic or multicultural literature, as they are developed in orals lists, or teaching specialties.  For this and more, I suggest, Harlem – global capital of blackness and its expressions, site of legendary ethnic enclaves, flashpoint of anxieties about urban space – is an excellent point of departure.

W 1000-1230 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

This is a course in early English romance from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries -- King Horn to The Tempest. The romances chosen for the seminar are related to each other by topoi: conventions in plot, diction, rhetorical device, motive, character, and theme that work as hard in philosophy as they do in fiction to test and develop notions of contract and consent. We will consider how these common elements offer the audience (of whatever level of literacy) a way of thinking about persons and social structures. We’ll worry about what holds communities together with modern scholars like Austin, Pateman, Rawls, Cavell, Butler, Scarry, C. Mills.  Some goals for the course: to learn the language and poetry of Middle English romance; to develop a toolbox of useful critical strategies including arguments from speech act, habitus, philology, the passions, legal history, ritual, rhetoric, and the medieval and early modern art of memory; to develop a sophisticated vocabulary and method for treating political thought in fiction.

TR 500-615 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Stephen Arata

Six novels comprise the primary texts for this course: Bleak House, North and South, Middlemarch, The Way We Live Now, The Portrait of a Lady, and Hester. Our primary goal will be to engage at close quarters with these capacious, complex, contradictory, stimulating, often puzzling, sometimes maddening, more than occasionally exhausting works of Victorian fiction. Our equally primary goal will be to engage at close quarters with, and to put our novels in productive conversation with, key works of novel theory. I have provisionally gathered our inquiries under the loose, baggy heading of “Victorian Realism” because the term “realism” was first applied to literary narrative in the 1850s; because attempts to define realism are central to early and mid-twentieth theories of the novel; because characterizing the term as critically meaningless, as many do, is at once justifiable and beside the point; and because some of the best and most innovative work on novelistic realism has been published in the past twenty-five years.

Requirements will likely include 2-3 short responses to designated works of theory or criticism, 1-2 short class presentations, and a 15-20 pp essay. If you plan to enroll in this course, you can get a jump start by reading read Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and Oliphant’s Hester over Winter Break: these will be the first two novels we take up in the opening weeks of the semester.

TR 330-445 (New Cabell Hall 209)
Instructor: John Parker

This course will offer an introduction to two major issues in scholarship on Shakespeare: the study of his sources and the bibliographical study of his texts.  In other words, we will explore how the earliest printed editions of Shakespeare's plays serve as the basis for our contemporary editions while reading the texts from which Shakespeare borrowed most heavily.

TR 200-315 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Rebecca Rush

A graduate-level introduction to the theory and practice of verse-making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a focus on the history of lyric. We will read sonnets, satires, shepherd songs, and Civil War odes alongside early modern poetic manuals and modern poetic theory. Authors include Thomas Wyatt, Isabella Whitney, Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Katherine Philips, and Robert Herrick, among others.

W 330-600 (Bryan Hall 203)
Instructor: Jane Alison

This studio-seminar will examine literary nonfiction that focuses upon explorations, both inward and out. We’ll study how writers have taken their senses, passions, scientific minds, and literary bloodlines upon ventures into unknown parts—places, objects, and other people, as well as deep inside unknown regions of themselves. We’ll see how authors convert observation, speculative thinking, fact, and not-quite-fact into living, compelling narratives, to help you craft your own.

T 230-500 (Bryan Hall 334)
Instructor: Gregory Orr

MW 330-445 (The Rotunda Room 150)
Instructor: John Unsworth

A graduate-level introduction to the history, theory, and methods of the digital humanities, and a required course for the new graduate certificate in digital humanities.

TR 330-445 (Ruffner Hall 123)
Instructor: Caroline Rody

In this course, designed for graduate students and upper level undergraduates (and which fulfills a requirement for the World Religions, World Literatures M.A. program), we will reflect on matters of art and spirit as we retrace the development of Jewish American literature. The reading includes short stories, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as scholarly essays.  We will also view several short videos clips and a film as we survey the diverse literary and popular cultural production of American Jews.  We start in the milieu of the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side of New York, reading works composed in English and some translated from Yiddish, by immigrant writers such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as a number of Yiddish poets, whose work we’ll read in translation. Among the next generation, heirs to Yiddish culture with hugely American aspirations, we will read writers such as Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. Toward the end of the course we will read fiction from the currently booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss.

The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new American literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to Jewish religious practice and to traditional Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; uses and workings of Jewish humor; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America. Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, several short reading responses, a short and a long paper, and a final exam project.

Time & Location TBA
Instructor: Elizabeth Fowler

A 1-credit forum for MA and doctoral students from any department to share work in literature and religion concerning any historical and geographical area.  The new World Religions, World Literatures master’s degrees (based in English or Religious Studies) are designed to connect students across areas and disciplines; this comparatist proseminar, required for masters candidates in WRWL but open to all, will be a forum for ongoing thought and conversation, some common reading, and sharing of work in progress.  Feel free to contact Prof. Elizabeth Fowler (fowler@virginia.edu) with questions.  We’ll find a time to meet when as many as possible can come.

M 630-900 (Ruffner 179)
Instructor: Hallie Smith and Maggie Thornton

W 1200-1250 (Bryan Hall 330)
Instructor: Jeb Livingood

This course prepares first year doctoral students for the teaching they will do here at UVa in both literature classes and the writing program. Covers topics such as classroom management, leading discussion, grading papers. Limited enrollment.