Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Fall 2018

MWF 1200-1250 (New Cabell 383)
Instructor: Christopher Krentz

This class offers a wonderful way to sample some of the accomplished writers of American fiction since 1840.  We will read about one short novel a week, exploring whatever topics come up, including language and narrative form; the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States; gender relations; love and its complications; small towns and urbanization; our relationship with the natural environment; and notions of Americanness.  Syllabus is still being finalized, but we may read authors such as Melville, James, Jewett, Crane, Wharton, Larsen, Faulkner, Bradbury, Roth, Reed, MacLean, Smiley, and Otsuka.  Requirements will include thoughtful preparation and participation, two 6-page essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

MW 200-315 (New Cabell 032)
Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Combined section with AAS 3500-003.

TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 132)
Instructors: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Richmond.

TR 200-315 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Emily Ogden

"Do's and Don'ts for the Unmarried Woman" would be a fitting subtitle for many of the best-selling novels of nineteenth-century America.  The texts we study in this course point out the paths that lead to Christian virtue, matrimony, and a happy home, and warn against the transgressions—especially sex out of wedlock—that lead to prostitution and the grave.  Why do these novels matter now, when sexual morals have changed so much? Of course, they tell us something about the limitations on women's lives in an earlier period.  But they also have a lot to say about what it means, more generally, to be a human being with some freedom of choice. They ask how we know when to act on our desires, and when to refrain; they wonder how much willpower we need to get by; they ask how to make a good life when cast out in the wide, wide world. Nineteenth-century stories of women's lives are about more than what women should do with their virginity; they are about what anyone should do with his or her free will.

Lecture:
MW 100-150 (Minor 125)
Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

Combined Section with AMST 3880.

Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Americans negotiating the transformations of modernity and postmodernity have turned to literary representations of the South to get their bearings.  In imagining the South we seek a rooted, enduring culture in a sea of commercialism and mobility; we confront the persistence of racial and economic inequality at odds with the ideals of the United States; we insist upon the importance of locality in our increasingly global consciousnesses.  We also consume “the South” as a commodity, invoke it as an excuse or alibi for the nation’s ills, and enjoy its ostensible perversity as a guilty pleasure.  In this course we will read some of the most challenging, startling, and beautiful American prose fiction of the past 100 years, while attending as well to the broader cultural field of film, image, and music of which it is a part.  We will think in particular about questions of nationalism and literature (the role of “folk” culture; the location of poverty; place and race); questions of representation and representativeness (“identity” of writers; authenticity; production and presentation of Southern stuff); and questions of performance (of class, gender, race, and region).  Major authors will include Chesnutt, Faulkner, Caldwell, Porter, Wright, Welty, Hurston, Percy, and O'Connor.

Discussion Sections:

Section 101
W 200-250 (New Cabell 411)
Instructor: Julianne McCobin

Section 102
W 330-420 (Kerchof 317)
Instructor: Joseph Wei

Section 103
W 330-420 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Julianne McCobin

Section 104
W 500-550 (New Cabell 042)
Instructor: Joseph Wei

Section 105
R 1100-1150 (New Cabell 187)
Instructor: TBA

Section 106
R 1230-120 (Kerchof Hall 317)
Instructor: TBA

Section 107
R 330-420 (New Cabell 036)
Instructor: Dionte Harris

Section 108
R 500-550 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Dionte Harris

Section 109
W 200-250 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Nathan Frank

Section 110
F 1100-1150 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Nathan Frank

R 5:30-8:00 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Marlon Ross

Combined Section with AMST 4500-002.

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about. Because Du Bois’s intellectual and activist contributions range across the fields of history, sociology, education, fiction, philosophy, political theory, literary theory, biography, and autobiography, we’ll sample works by him in each of these fields. In addition to examining his major texts — including The Souls of Black Folk (philosophy), Philadelphia Negro (sociology), Black Reconstruction in America (history), John Brown (biography), Dark Princess (novel), Dusk of Dawn (autobiography), The World and Africa (African studies) — we’ll sample his influential essays from the journal he edited, The Crisis. Du Bois’s phenomenal impact will be further understood by examining the work of his interlocutors, those with whom he had an intense public dialogue on major issues of the day, including Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Oswald Garrison Villard. We’ll contextualize influential theories like the color-line, double consciousness, the Talented Tenth, art as propaganda, liberal education as uplift, Pan-Africanism, etc. in light of the movements he championed, including the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, the Pan-African Congresses, the anti- lynching campaign, the Harlem Renaissance, anti-World War II activism, the United Nations movement, anti-colonialism, and democratic socialism. How did a man whose fierce idealism over decades end in a decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and retreat to Ghana in the final years of his life?

TR 930-1045 (Bryan Hall 334)
Instructor: Timothy Griffiths

In the now-essential critical anthology Black Queer Studies (2005), scholars like E. Patrick Johnson, Mae G. Henderson, and Dwight A. McBride announced three primary reasons for the formalization of black queer cultural studies: the need for a usable past in African American culture for black queer people, the traditionally patriarchal and heterosexist tendencies of African American cultural studies, and a perceived inhospitality in women’s and gender studies toward research on race as it intersected with gender and sexuality. When Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, it was a sign to some that at least some minor progress had been made in the cultural representation of queer people of color. “Intersectionality,” though not always adequately defined, is now an acknowledged conceptual keyword of liberal and leftist culture. And in women’s and gender studies and African American studies, it is now becoming a given that critiques of race, gender, and sexuality are not hermetically sealed discourses, that the elevations and devaluations of certain identitarian markers are constellated in both deliberate and latent fashions. Given the progress being made in all three of the needs Black Queer Studies addressed, what are the primary critical problems faced by black queer cultural studies now and in the future? How can we continue to expand the usable past of black queer culture, opening up African American cultural production across its history to a black queer critical audience? Where have increases in black queer cultural representation succeeded and what are the discontents of cultural representation as a primary ethic of black queer liberation? How can or should we understand the relationship between the discursive histories of black feminism and black queer culture, and what conflicts have arisen in their mutual (but not always well-mapped) related growth? And finally, how do the anthologizing practices and theorizations of black queer culture elevate or exclude various iterations of black queer cultural expression, identity, or history? To answer these questions, we will engage a very broadly defined canon of black queer literature from Harriet Jacobs to Uzodinma Iweala, constellating black queer identity with other forms of black transgressive sexuality. Other cultural figures may include Alice Dunbar Nelson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheryl Dunye, Samuel R. Delany, Janelle Monae, and Berry Jenkins.

TR 1230-145 (Bryan Hall 312)
Instructor: Mary Kuhn

This course explores an unconventional literary history of environmental thinking in America from the late eighteenth century to the present. We’ll move beyond the traditional environmental canon, showing how writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir are part of a much broader tradition of environmental writing—one that gives us diverse perspectives on humanity’s connections to land and nature. We’ll focus on how writers have cultivated different forms and scales of environmental thought, and how they have positioned environmental thinking in relation to issues of social and environmental justice, including land dispossession, slavery, imperialism, and labor exploitation tied to resource extraction. Tragedy seems the usual mode of environmental writing, but we’ll also ask how writers have approached nature through hope, care, wonder, and love. Authors include Lydia Maria Child, Maria Ruiz de Burton, Rachel Carson, Lucille Clifton, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jesmyn Ward, Robin Wall Kimmerer and filmmaker Spike Lee.

TR 200-315 (The Rotunda Room 152)
Instructor: Susan Fraiman

An introduction to US feminist criticism and theory. This course pairs novels and other works by women with critical and theoretical essays in order to contrast diverse feminist approaches. The syllabus is also informed by queer and critical race theory as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. I expect to explore such themes as mobility and migration, mother-daughter relations, the “male gaze,” incarceration/escape, female masculinity, and conflicts/commonalities among women. We will also broach such theoretical issues as how to periodize the development of feminist theory, the contributions of queer theory, the logic of canon formation, and the way gender intersects with other axes of identity (race, sexuality, disability, class, etc.). Possible primary texts (still tentative) include Jane Eyre (1847), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), The Well of Loneliness (1928), Mona in the Promised Land (1997), a contemporary film, graphic narrative, and popular romance. Probable theorists include Laura Mulvey, Eve Sedgwick, Susan Stanford Friedman, Chandra Mohanty, and Judith Butler, among many others.  Students should be prepared for some challenging materials and heavy reading load. 5-page paper, 10-page paper, and a final exam.

T 530-800 (Bryan Hall 310)
Instructor: Kenrick Grandison

This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest).  We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars.  With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy.  You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from  accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled.  We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region.  In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar.  Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of  universal standards for public restroom pictograms.  Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester.  Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.

TR 330-445 (Bryan Hall 332)
Instructor: Walter Jost

This course invites students to “think about thinking” across several disciplines—law, literature, psychology, sociology, and religion.  Focused particularly on persuasive reasoning (what was once called the liberal art of “rhetoric”), we consider activities of creativity, argument, interpretation and judgment in particular law cases, poems, novels, and non-fiction.  This course works well for those who are interested in reading widely, thinking carefully, and writing well across disciplines.  Several papers; four or five texts (these change from year to year).

MW 1100-1215 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: David Vander Meulen

Instructor permission required.

We know the past chiefly through artifacts that survive, and books are among the most common of these objects. Besides conveying a text, each book also contains evidence of the circumstances of its manufacture, how its producers viewed it, and how its readers might have received it.  In considering what questions to ask of these mute objects, this course might be considered the "archaeology of printing"—that is, the identification, description, and interpretation of printed artifacts surviving from the past five centuries, as well as exploration of the critical theory that lies behind such an approach to texts. With attention to production processes, including the operation of the hand press, it will investigate ways of analyzing elements such as paper, typography, illustrations, binding, and organization of the constituent sections of a book.  The course will explore how a text is inevitably affected by the material conditions of its production and how an understanding of the physical processes by which it was formed can aid historical research in a variety of disciplines, not only those that treat verbal texts but also those that deal with printed music and works of visual art.  The class will draw extensively on the holdings of the University Library's Special Collections Department, as well as on its Hinman Collator (an early version of the one at the CIA).  Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.  While first- and second-years are the primary audience for ENCW 2300 and should register for the course using SIS, third- and fourth-year students can request to be added manually. For the add procedure (as well as other creative writing policies) see this page.

Section 001
MW 630-745 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Emily Lawson

Section 002
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Caleb Nolen

Section 003
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Emily Nason

Section 004
MW 500-615 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Aimee Seu

Section 005
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Helena Chung

Section 006
TR 330-445 (Dell 1 104)
Instructor: Sean Shearer

Section 007
MW 500-615 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Sasha Prevost

MW 330-445 (New Cabell 032)
Instructor: James Livingood

This class introduces you to the techniques and craft involved in fiction writing, but with a focus on the subgenre of science fiction. We’ll examine whether the labels “literary” and “science fiction” are mutually exclusive, or if they can overlap. By the end of the class, you will produce two stories or chapters of a science fiction novel, and revise one chapter/story extensively. You will also read a good deal of fiction, ideally becoming a more insightful consumer of stories and other narratives, and more aware of the various strategies and tactics authors use to create, as best they can, a piece of art—that is, a literary object that helps us understand what it is to be human—and also science fiction, an object that explores the tensions of our present time and our possible futures.

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.  While first- and second-years are the primary audience for ENCW 2600 and should register for the course using SIS, third- and fourth-year students can request to be added manually.

For the add procedure (as well as other creative writing policies) see this page.

Section 001
TR 500-615 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Jessica Walker

Section 002
MWF 1200-1250 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Cassie Davies

Section 003
TR 500-615 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Katherine Rice

Section 005
MW 500-615 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Juan Suarez Encalada

Section 006
MWF 900-950 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Anna Martin Beecher

Section 007
TR 500-615 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Philip Jason

Section 008
MW 500-615 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Olivia Haberman

Section 001
R 200-430 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Paul Guest

Intermediate poetry workshop is a stepstone creative writing workshop in which increasing focus will be placed on your creative work.  In addition, we will read extensively, seeking to expand our sense of the potential and possible in your writing and that of others. Emphasis is placed on critical skills and generative strategies.

Instructor Permission Required.

Section 001
T 200-430 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Jeffery Allen

Instructor Permission Required.

Section 001
T 400-630 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Denton

Instructor Permission Required.

Read short fiction.  Write your own.  Students will write two stories and revise one. Creative responses to weekly reading assignments encourage students to focus on the most fundamental building block of the short story:  scene making.   Active classroom participation and love of reading and writing are essential.

To be considered for this class, please request enrollment through SIS and send a short story (up to 15 pages) to me at ed3m@virginia.edu.  Attach a note telling me who and what year you are, your email address, what workshops you’ve taken and with whom, and whether you’re applying to other workshops. I will alert you through SIS no later than ten days before classes begin.  INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION means you must submit work to be considered—see above.

Section 003
R 200-430 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: Micheline Marcom

In this course, we will read together, write new work inspired by the texts we read, share ideas, discuss literature and form, and submit short story or novel excerpts for critique. Students will spend the first part of the semester reading a novella or short stories and writing a new 2-3 page creative piece in response, plus a 1 page craft response. Everyone will also have the opportunity to bring 2 longer pieces for workshopping and revision. Together we will think about the elements of fiction as we read closely. Texts will include Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Hemingway’s Short Stories, Juan Rulfo’s story collection The Plain in Flames, and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.

Permission is required to enroll, contact instructor at mam5du@virginia.edu.

Section 001
R 400-630 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Elizabeth Denton

Instructor Permission Required.

An advanced class for ambitious students who want to extend their exploration of crafting literary fiction. We’ll examine how writers have worked within the long story's more leisurely scope—contracting and expanding time, structuring and restructuring (architecture and shape), shifting among points of view, creating spaces, controlling tensions, crystalizing characters—with the aim that what you read could inspire your own longer stories. The class will revolve around your writing and published texts that may include works by Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Zadie Smith, Wells Tower, Gina Berriault, George Saunders, Adam Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Lauren Groff, Raymond Carver, and others.  By the end of the term, you will have drafted and revised one 40 (or so) page story or two 20 (or so) page stories. 

To be considered for this class, please request enrollment through SIS and send a short story (up to 15 pages) to me at ed3m@virginia.edu. Attach a note telling me who and what year you are, your email address, what workshops you’ve taken and with whom, and whether you’re applying to other workshops. I will alert you through SIS no later than ten days before classes begin.  INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION means you must submit work to be considered—see above.  

Section 001
W 330-600 (New Cabell 415)
Instructor: Nathaniel Perry

This advanced poetry workshop will have students writing poems nearly every week. We will supplement our writing with useful (I hope) and substantial reading of books of poetry, books on poetics and maybe even some more seemingly tangential things.  Our reading will be broad – some brand new work and some much older work – in the hopes that we all, instructor included, will be reminded of the scope of the tradition as we work our way into it.  Along the way, students will be asked to read closely and participate weekly in discussion.  All students in the workshop will also turn in a portfolio of revised poems at the end of the semester and a book review.

Please request permission to enroll through SIS, and send 5 - 7 poems to LRS9E@virginia.edu

Section 001
T 200-430 (Bryan Hall 330)
Instructor: Paul Guest

Instructor Permission Required.

MW 200-315 (Bryan Hall 328)
Instructor: John O'Brien

This is a course in literature in English in the last decades of the seventeenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth century, roughly the years 1660 to 1740. There was a lot of interesting writing produced in those years, and we’ll be digging into it with gusto; our first order of business is to figure out how to read, understand, and appreciate these works that were written for readers who were in some ways like us, but in other ways very different from us. This period saw a fascinating split between high-brow writing designed to appeal to the elite and educated and the works that came out of Grub Street, the place in London where publishers of sensationalist biographies, scandalous news sheets, cheap ballad poems, and inexpensive works of fiction were produced by hack writers who were paid by the word (if at all). This split between the “literary” and what was called the “literatory,” the factory of writing, inaugurates the split between high and low, elite and popular writing that has been a familiar part of our culture ever since.

What also interests me about this period are the tremendous changes in the way that the written word was produced and distributed in these years. For example, the explosion in printed works partly displaced, but also partly developed out of a rich culture of manuscript circulation. To help mark the transformational character of these decades, in this course we will experiment with books in new forms. The literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was profoundly affected by the spread of print; while print was itself hardly a new technology, printed material nonetheless became much more widely available in this period for a variety of reasons that we will be exploring in this course. We are in some ways at a similar moment, as digitization is revolutionizing our relationship to language and literature. In this course, we will edit digital editions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts for our use, and for the use of others. While using and making digital texts, we will be able to reflect on the kinds of difference technology makes and should help us understand the challenges faced by people who wrote in the past, and give us the opportunity to think about the possibilities offered by the new technologies of our moment. Authors will include Katherine Philips, William Wycherley, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding.

Associated optional Digital Lab section is ENEC 3559.  Enrollment restricted to instructor permission.

Section 001
MW 330-445 (Bryan Hall 328)
Instructor: John O'Brien

Novels are respectable now, but to many people in the eighteenth century they were illegitimate, suspect, potentially immoral reading material that threatened to lead their readers astray into world of fantasy that threatened to unsettle the stability of the real world. But these books thrived because they created virtual worlds for readers to imagine how to deal with crucial issues: how to grow up, how to know what is right and what is wrong, how people unlike you really live. Our authors will include Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others. Requirements: critical essays, participation, midterm and final exams.

MW 330-445 (New Cabell 209)
Instructor: Cynthia Wall

Syllabus

To what extent are we defined and shaped by the spaces we inhabit? What means this door, this window, this staircase? This neighborhood, this city, this nation?

The eighteenth century witnessed the professionalization of architecture, the popularity of house and garden design books, and a profusion of novels, poems, and plays that push houses – great and small – front and center. At the same time, improvements in roads and coaches, expanded trade routes, the explorations of science, and the thrust of empire meant that more and more people of all classes could travel more easily at home and abroad, visiting other houses, other cities, other cultures, and writing about them.  In this seminar we will learn to visualize with historical clarity the cottages, farmhouses, inns, and country seats, as well as the roads, cities, and seas, of eighteenth-century domesticity and exploration. We will read poems, letters, novels, travel narratives, country house guides, garden theory, pirate biographies, and ship’s logs, by Jane Austen, Captain Bligh, James Boswell, John Bunyan, Frances Burney, Lord Chesterfield, William Cowper, Daniel Defoe, Oliver Goldsmith, Eliza Haywood, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Humphry Repton, Jonathan Swift, and Gilbert White. Requirements: weekly analytical commentaries, a presentation, a short close-reading paper (5-7 pp.), a longer research paper (12-15 pp.),  and, of course, profound discussion.

TR 1100-1215 (Shannon House 107)
Instructor: Mark Edmundson

What immediate use might literary texts be to the conduct of daily life?  In this course, we’ll traverse a day in a student’s life, beginning with breakfast and ending with sleep and dreams.  We’ll consider nutrition; medications, especially those associated with ADD; classes; entertainment; cell phones and the Internet; exercise; friendship; music; shopping; the party life; drugs; love; sex; sleep and death. We’ll be guided in our discussion by some contemporary sources: Gabor Mate, D.R. Lenson, Claudia Rankine, etc. But we’ll also be reading some well-established authors: among them (perhaps) Freud, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, Beauvoir, Shakespeare, etc.  Frequent quizzes and short papers—one major paper at the end.

Lecture: Beowulf to TJ with Professor Elizabeth Fowler & friends
MW 1100-1150 (Wilson 402)
Instructors: Elizabeth Fowler

In this course, you’ll explore the first twelve centuries of English by looking at beautiful objects with writing on them.  We’ll start with heroic poems and prayers written by hand on animal skins and end up with the granite obelisk chiseled with T. J.’s epitaph.  The UVa archives will open its vaults for a special visit, and you’ll see priceless treasures you’ll never forget up close. Our writers will include many of the most famous authors in world history, those every educated person should encounter: the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, Chaucer, Malory, Shakespeare, Wroth, Milton, Behn, Pope, Locke, Equiano, Wheatley, Jefferson. We’ll read epic battles, dirty jokes, odes to spring and dark beauty; we’ll meet Satan and cross the river of death; we’ll dip into the memories of free African and Mohegan preachers, follow a woman who becomes a knight errant and another who becomes a visionary theologian, and wrestle with Enlightenment thinkers and their notions of art, race, and liberty.

This is a course meant for majors and non-majors. First-year students will be comfortable in it and are encouraged to view it as a good place to begin their education; English majors are urged to seek it out early as a tasting menu; non-majors are invited to see it as a way to cultivate their life-long reading; for all it will be a treasure hunt in the fabulous English “word hoard.” We’ll focus on encountering and enjoying great writing. There will be pass/fail writing experiments and sections that will help you develop yourself as a reader, a couple of tests, and competitions and prizes from Professor Fowler (the second annual sonnet games!!), but there will be no “papers”: this is a reading course.

Discussion Sections:

Section 101
W 500-615 (New Cabell 209)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti

Section 102
W 200-315 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Micah Holmes

Section 103
W 200-315 (The Rotunda Room 150)
Instructor: Grace Alvino

Section 104
R 200-315 (New Cabell 411)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti

Section 105
W 330-445 (Shannon House 108)
Instructor: Neal Curtis

Section 106
R 1100-1215 (Ruffner Hall 125)
Instructor: Kathryn Webb-Destefano

Section 107
R 1230-145 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Michael VanHoose

Section 108
R 930-1045 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Micah Holmes

Section 109
W 500-615 (Shannon House 108)
Instructor: Neal Curtis

Section 110
F 1000-1115 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Natalie Thompson

Section 111
W 3:30-4:45 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Grace Alvino

Section 112
R 1100-1215 (Ruffner 123)
Instructor: Stephen Hager

Section 113
R 330-445 (Kerchof 317)
Instructor: Stephen Hager

Section 114
R 330-445 (Nau 241)
Instructor: Michael VanHoose

Section 115
W 630-745 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Kathryn Webb-Destefano

Section 116
F 1200-115 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Natalie Thompson

F 1000-1230 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Karen Chase Levenson

Directed research leading to completion of an extended essay to be submitted to the Honors Committee.  Both courses are required of honors candidates.  Graded on a year-long basis.  For more details on this class, please visit the department website.

TR 930-1045 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Kevin Hart

This seminar seeks to develop a close reading of major religious poetry by two major religious poets.

W 1000-1230 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Thomas Pierce

In this class, we'll be reading and examining contemporary creative works (novels, short stories, and more, all published within the last five years) that are explicitly engaged with the present moment; that is, works that are wrestling with ideas of social change, climate change, human migration, technology, et al.  Works might include Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Ali Smith's Autumn, Paul Betty's The Sellout, Tommy Orange's There There, Claire Vaye Watkins' Gold Fame Citrus, Dave Eggers' The Circle, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, and Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue.  We will look at the decisions these writers have made vis a vis structure, form, genre, and voice.  Questions we will consider: What are the obligations (if any) of fiction and the fiction writer to address the "present?"  What even is the "present?"  Note: This class will also include creative writing exercises and prompts.

MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Devin Donovan

TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 303)
Instructor: James Ascher

The prominence of digital remixing reminds us that all writing is inscribed on another text.  A venerated text may be classically glossed--words inserted between lines or in the margins to explain passages--and these glosses may be collected into a separate glossary.  These glossaries can detach from their original text; and, a later writer may lift the techniques from these free-floating glossaries into what may seem new, but is really a second-level glossary.  Literature, in a certain sense, is a text we huddle around and gloss together in these chains of inscription.  In practicing writing with, against, about and into literature, we are also studying glossography.

This course proposes to teach basic literary research methods, but to reimagine them as a form of glossing.  We will come together around texts from several centuries and develop a glossography for humanities laboratories in literature.

The tasks will include reading and writing, within a collaborative digital humanities laboratory environment.  Students will learn basic literary methods and digital techniques that make old ways of looking at texts prominent once again.  Each student will develop a portfolio of their work that they can use to demonstrate their literary and digital skills to potential teachers, employers, granting agencies,or anyone else.

TR 1230-145 (Bryan Hall 203)
Instructor: Jesse Bordwin

This course will survey the literary movement known as modernism as it developed in Britain, from the start of the 20th century to the beginning of the Second World War. Though this is an introduction, we will quickly move beyond the introductory, investigating the particular aesthetic, political, and philosophical problems that define this historical and cultural moment. Key modernists will likely include Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, E.M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett.

TR 1100-1215 (Bryan Hall 312)
Instructor: Herbert Tucker

This course aims to impart and hone the skills that prospective English majors will need as they advance through the departmental curriculum. The syllabus varies from year to year, but analysis of literary genres in verse, prose narrative, and drama will be faithfully highlighted.  As we practice reading, we'll also get lots of practice writing that peculiar genre the critical essay, a form with demands and pleasures of its own. We'll look closely, read deeply, think widely, speak boldly, and write clearly in overnight exercises, shorter and longer essays, midterm and final exams and, above all, the focussed and collaborative discussion that fills our twice-weekly meetings. A group visit to a local theater is likely. A digital resource, “For Better for Verse,” will help to improve acquaintance with the metrics of poetry.  The course is open to all interested parties, but casual registration with a view solely to the Second Writing Requirement is discouraged: there are many easier options out there.

TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Alison Hurley

Jane Austen is everywhere – in college classrooms, at movie theaters, on the Internet, in myriad sequels, parodies, and re-imaginings of her novels.  How is it that an author whose works are so deeply embedded in her own time remains a contemporary phenomenon? How is it that novels depicting a remarkably thin slice of a society enjoy such broad appeal?   In this course we will try to answer these questions by “putting Austen in her place.” We will carefully situate Austen’s novels within a number of specific but overlapping interpretive terrains – literary, political, social, and critical.  By contextualizing Austen we will be in a better position to assess her significance in both her world and in our own. In order to perform this work we will need to acquire the vocabulary and develop the skills necessary for reading and writing effectively about texts.  Specifically, we will read closely, write precisely, argue persuasively, ask good questions, employ strong evidence, and take interpretive risks.

MW 200-315 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Jahan Ramazani

TR 930-1045 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Matthew Davis

This course is an introduction to poetry, intended for students who have little or no previous experience reading poetry.  I want to teach you to read poetry because poetry can be a source of joy and insight and solace throughout your life, but I also maintain that reading poetry is much more relevant and “applicable” than most people think. Many of the best jobs available nowadays involve reading and making sense of things that are initially hard to understand, and if you can read and make sense of poetry you can probably read and make sense of just about anything. In this class we will study 6-9 poets who have written accentual-syllabic verse in English in the past 250 years. Some possible authors include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, T.S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Phillip Larkin. My plan is to begin with some easier and more accessible poets (Frost? Housman? Millay?) and eventually build up to some more challenging poets (Dickinson? Eliot? Yeats?) We will focus mostly (though not exclusively) on short poems, especially lyric poems and sonnets. Students will learn to scan poems (marking stressed and unstressed syllables) and write two or three short papers analyzing poems we have read. At least one of the papers will be drafted, workshopped, and revised.  This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

TR 1230-145 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Anne Marie Thompson

What are politics? What is poetry? What’s the connection between living together and literature, the people and the press? This course is for students who are excited to contemplate questions about poetry’s place in history and society. We will interrogate the terms “politics” and “poetry,” taking a broad view of poetry in English and its relation to the political from Philip Sidney’s famous “Defence of Poesy” to the present. You will learn the technicalities of how to read poetry while engaging with ever-contentious questions about aesthetics and politics, the "I" and the community, identity and expression, and, above all, why we read poems. Enthusiastic participation, rigorous attention to writing, and a willingness to think deeply are expected.

Tentative Reading List:

Sidney, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Yeats, Marinetti, Hughes, McKay, Auden, Plath, Ginsberg, Walcott, Rich, Boland, Heaney, Rankine

TR 930-1045 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Kelli Shermeyer

This course examines the intersections of theater and politics in a diverse body of dramatic works. We will talk about the way drama represents political conflict, examine the theater's role in political action (and in the theorizing of political action), and discuss the ways that performance and spectacle are activated in our contemporary political arena. Be prepared for lively discussion and performance possibilities within our own classroom.

MW 200-315 (Dell 2 102)
Instructor: Gretchen York

This course will introduce students to the study of dramatic literature by focusing on the villains audiences love to hate. What do contemporary anti-heroes owe to medieval representations of Lucifer, to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, or to Shakespeare’s Iago? What makes these characters so compelling—and, to those who (still) worry over who and what ought to be performed on the public stage, so potentially dangerous? Readings will focus on the development of the villain in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but we will also use the works of more modern playwrights—like Henrik Ibsen, Lillian Hellman, or Tony Kushner—to explore differing notions of where evil comes from and how it can be managed.

TR 1100-1215 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Peter Baker

An “Otherworld” is an alternative world parallel to ours. In ancient times it could be Mount Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, or the Underworld, the land of the dead. In the Middle Ages it was “Faerie,” the land of fairies. In modern literature, the most famous example is the magical world that exists alongside the Muggle world of the Harry Potter series, but elsewhere it can be a distant galaxy, a parallel universe, a virtual reality, or any isolated location where the usual rules don’t apply. In this course we’ll look briefly at several ancient and medieval Otherworlds and then move on to three popular novels: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. Work for the course will include frequent in-class writing assignments, in-class presentations, three papers, and a final exam. 

MW 330-445 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Lara Musser

This course looks at the way fiction continues to be used as a vessel for parsing anxieties of science, “progress”, and the shifting boundaries of how we define “humanness”. We trace an arc from Mary Shelley's proto-science-fictive Frankenstein and the scientific romances of the 19th century to the rise of SF's "golden age" in the mid 20th. We question fiction’s efficacy as a moral “thought-experiment”, the limits of the scientific imagination, and what stakes arise in deciding who or what is alive--and how we behave when those lines are drawn. Cast of characters includes: Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, and Stanislav Lem, with some supplementary appearances from the scientific texts, writers, and ideas that provoked these 'fictions of anxiety'.

TR 200-315 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Dan Kinney

How does the fictional representation of upbringing reflect on the cultural uses of fiction in general as well as the actual work of becoming adult? Works to be studied: Jane Austen, Emma; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Michael Malone, Handling Sin. Class requirements: Lively participation including including 8 brief email responses, one short and one longer essay, and a final exam.

TR 330-445 (Cocke Hall 115)
Instructor: Carol Guarnieri

MWF 100-150 (Bryan Hall 310)
Instructor: Indu Ohri

Lafcadio Hearn insists “[t]he poet and storyteller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or great thinker.” This course will expand beyond the Western canon and focus on supernatural tales by “great” international authors. We will explore the aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts of the supernatural worldwide, from the eighteenth century to today. Tentative authors include Pu Songling, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Isabel Allende, and Margaret Atwood.

MW 330-445 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Alyssa Collins

This course will explore the ways in which black authors use the generic elements of science fiction and fantasy. Through our survey of over a century of black fantastic literature, this course will approach several questions: What is Afrofuturism? What do popular fantasy and sci-fi conventions offer readers that we don’t see in other genres? How might the writing of speculative “black futures” address the problems of race and racism in the U.S.? Lastly, what might we identify as the political efficacy of these genres?

W.E.B. DuBois, “The Princess Steel,”
Charles Chesnutt, “ The Goopherd Grapevine”
George Schuyler, Black No More
Samuel Delaney, “Time as Considered a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”
Octavia Butler, Fledgling
Nnedi Okorafor, “The Popular Mechanic”
Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
N.K. Jemison, “Non-Zero Probabilities"
Ta-nehisi Coates, Black Panther

TR 1100-1215 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: Sherif Abdelkarim

Our course studies contemporary literature through the lens of McSweeney's, a San Francisco-based publishing house (mcsweeneys.net). First, we'll focus on the novels, short stories, and short short stories of its founder, Dave Eggers. Then we'll branch out to explore other McSweeney's titles and genres. We'll round out our studies of contemporary literature when we take up non-McSweeney's material in our class's final couple weeks.

TR 1230-145 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Zachary Stone

This class explores the representation of power and political authority in Shakespeare's first and second tetrologies.

MW 500-615 (New Cabell Hall 032)
Instructor: Anne Galvin

Perceiving gender always involves an act of interpretation: we read bodies, gestures, relationships, personal and public histories every day. This course will examine how gender presents itself in literary forms, specifically in novels (alongside the occasional memoir and essay). Reading across centuries and genres, from folktales to social realism to YA, we will grapple with the concept of feminism, an orientation and political movement that changes with context, and how women-identified writers portray gender and sexuality in their work. Authors will include Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nella Larsen, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Maxine Hong Kingston, Angela Carter, Alison Bechdel, Gaby Rivera, and Carmen Maria Machado.

TR 200-315 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Grace Vasington

Spanning a transformative decade (1847-57) for female authorship and women's legal rights in Great Britain, this course takes as its primary subjects four women who, prior to 1847, had never published a novel: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Using Gaskell’s extraordinary biography of Charlotte and her sisters as a pivot, we will explore the capacity of fiction to imitate, but also to reassess, critique, and alter, the social and political realities of their time. In asking how literary realism intersects in these novels (and, all too briefly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-poem hybrid, Aurora Leigh) with gender, we will puzzle over the question of what it means, according to these accounts, to live as a woman? To think as a woman? To write as a woman? And, for that matter, what is this mysterious category, “woman”? Other topics may include political rhetoric and the legal debate surrounding women's rights.

TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 168)
Instructor: Carmen Lamas

Cross-listed with AMST 2321.

This course explores the diverse and also converging experiences of different Latinx groups in the US. We will read contemporary novels and poetry by Latinx authors from different Latinx groups (Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American and South American). We will discuss the migration of different groups, concepts of the “border” and the impact of race and language on Latinx communities.

MW 200-315 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Cynthia Wall

Syllabus

Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and fainting heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre, from the classic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959); through the poetry of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, weekly short commentaries, writing workshops, three short papers (5-7pp), and a final exercise.

TR 930-1045 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Elizabeth Dickens

Why do we like what we like? Why are some books (and movies, TV shows, bands, etc.) “elite,” “prestigious,” or “classics” while others are “popular” or “guilty pleasures”—who decides, and how do we know? And is it cooler to like something elite or to like something popular? During the early twentieth century, questions like these felt especially pressing to readers, writers, and publishers. Cultural commentators coined the terms “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “middlebrow” in an effort to organize conversations about what people were reading, what they should be reading, and how to judge literary quality. The “brows” were, and remain, complex labels, referencing not only literary form and style, but also class, gender, and publication format. In this course we will examine these early twentieth-century categories, as well as their lasting effects on English as a discipline and on how we continue to think about what we read, watch, and listen to. Authors will include Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Anita Loos, T. S. Eliot, and Raymond Chandler.

TR 200-315 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Lindgren Johnson

What does it mean to mourn the deaths of animals in a culture that insists that their deaths, except in rare cases, are unmournable? Can this radical mourning move us towards intersectional justice? The starting point of this class is the grievability of animal death, a locus that assumes the value of animal life. We will think through the nascent and diverse field of vegan theory as we apprehend representations and states of radical mourning—as well as refusals of it—in literature, visual culture, and activism.

TR 330-445 (New Cabell 027)
Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Combined Section with AAS 2657.

How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with Bob Marley’s song “One Love” and his album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? This course traces the history of reggae music and its influence on Jamaican literature. Framed by readings on Jamaican history, Marcus Garvey’s teachings, and Rastafari philosophy, at the heart of the course is an intensive study of Marley’s lyrics and the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae. Armed with these tools, we will apply the ‘reggae aesthetic’ to Jamaican poetry, fiction and film, including The Harder They Come and the Booker Prize novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Assignments such as album reviews,‘diss’ tracks, and critical essays will allow you to engage controversial issues including: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and yes, marijuana in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and reggaetón.

TR 330-445 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Mark Edmundson

This will be largely a course on Walt Whitman, both as author and exemplary individual. We’ll try to use him to compound some ideas about democracy that could be of value in our current situation and in the future. We’ll discuss “Song of Myself” in extreme detail and then focus on Whitman’s experience visiting the hospitals during the Civil War. Did he then become a version of the democratic individual his greatest poem prophesies?   Besides Whitman, we’ll probably read some Emerson, Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin. Two papers: one short, one longer, a quiz or a short piece of writing for almost every class.

TR 1230-145 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Ethan Reed

What is a protest novel? What does it mean to protest with a novel, and how do writers go about doing so? Pairing classic protest novels with critically-acclaimed novels from the present, this course hopes not only to contemplate the institution of radical social literature in modern and contemporary America, but to introduce students to the prickly intersections of aesthetics and politics from which these texts draw their significance.

MWF 1100-1150 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Jon D'Errico

In this class we will read a selection of texts illuminating tensions between beauty and monstrosity. The publication dates on the readings range from the 1600’s to the present, and the genres will include poetry, short fiction, drama, and novels. Although we will, in passing, consider some literary theory, our focus in this class will be on your close readings of the texts, both in class discussions and in your papers.

This class has four main goals:

• Provide guided practice in literary close reading
• Provide guided practice in managing elements of academic argument and style
• Develop and deepen our discussions of beauty and monstrosity as literary themes
• Introduce a set of critical tools for analyzing texts and narrative, useful to English majors and non-majors alike

Drama and Novels:

Note: In most class meetings, we will analyze and discuss relatively brief works. But if you'd like a head start on the semester's longer readings, they will be the following:

The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

TR 1100-1215 (Bryan Hall 235)
Instructor: Madeline Zehnder

What does it mean to be free? This course will trace debates about freedom and bondage in American writing from colonial settlement until the Civil War, exploring how authors navigate changing definitions of freedom in conversation with the history of slavery, gender studies, and the law. It will also invite participants to think about practices of authorship, editorship, and readership, and to consider how literary genres themselves both confine and offer opportunities for rebellion. We’ll read captivity narratives by authors like Mary Rowlandson, slave narratives by authors like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and poems, novels, short stories, and fiery manifestos by authors including David Walker, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Brockden Brown.

MW 1000-1050 (New Cabell Hall 032)
Instructor: Stephen Railtion

Our focus will be on American literature between the two World Wars, that is, the 1920s and 30s, as represented by major writers from each decade.  Poets will include Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hughes.  Novelists will include Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, West, Steinbeck and Hurston.  The class will meet Monday and Wednesday in a lecture format, where I will do most of the talking, and two discussion sessions that meet Thursday, where you and I will get to hear each other's voice.

Discussion Sections:

R 330-420 (Bryan Hall 312)

R 430-520 (Bryan Hall 312)

TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 291)
Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Cross-listed with AAS 3645.

Why do we mourn so deeply and collectively when our favorite musician passes away? Why do we form Hives and Navies to publicly, collectively, and obsessively follow and fawn over our favorite performers? Over the course of this semester, we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel as we interrogate why writers and readers are so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope. Pairing close listening and music theory with close reading of important blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, calypso and rock novels set in the U.S., U.K, Jamaica, Trinidad, France, and Germany, we will consider how novelists attempt to record the soul, lyrics, and structure of music, not on wax, but in novelistic prose, and what kinds of cultural baggage and aesthetic conventions particular music forms bring to the novel form. Assignments include presentations on music and critical response papers that push against the “fictions” and assumptions of musicians and novelists alike.

TR 1230-145 (New Cabell 383)
Instructor: Kevin Hart

This seminar introduces students to a range of poetry written in England in the second half of the twentieth century. We will attend to regional differences with regard to subject matter and language, as well as to the different projections of what “England,” “English,” and “Englishness” mean over a period in which England deals with loss of Empire, an increasingly insecure sense of “Britain,” class struggle, immigration, and its ambiguous relationship with Europe. Our main focus will be poems by Basil Bunting, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath. We will also take notice of other voices, seldom heard in the United States, such as Helen Dunmore, U. A. Fanthorpe, Elizabeth Jennings, Peter Porter, and Stevie Smith.

MW 500-615 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Stephen Arata

MW 200-315 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Victor Luftig

MW 200-315 (Bryan Hall 332)
Instructor: Stephen Railton

We'll look closely at about a dozen of the best American plays from the period between World War II and the present.  It's a seminar, so it will be up to all of us as an intellectual community to define the discussions.  But one of my abiding interests will be in the way that texts we'll read are also scripts expressed or embodied in live performance, so we'll do as much as we can to recover their performance history.  Authors will include O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Wilson, Albee, Shange, Henley, Guare, Kushner and Letts.

TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 411)
Instructor: Karen Chase

This course will examine a wide variety of forms and themes associated with the fiction of the last few decades. We will not try to find a theory that can unify all types so much as we will respect the differences and still trace the commonalities by looking at the way authors depict character, express theme, and construct circumstance. We will examine the literary palate, and scrutinize the brushstrokes employed. Where are the spaces, gaps, and peculiarities in the narrative? Is there play or tension between harmony and dissonance? Have the early modern experiments in fiction renewed an interest in literary realism? Is there point to talking about sub-genres like life-writing or historical fiction? What are we to make of the contemporary division between popular fiction and ‘literary’ fiction? To what extent do politics inevitably infiltrate the novel? These are some of the questions we will explore in the works by such authors as Ian McEwan, Mohsin Hamid, Jennifer Egan, Nicole Krauss, Tayari Jones, Alice Hoffman, Edward P. Jones, Magda Szabo, Haruki Murakami. Requirements: engaged participation, seminar paper, final exam.

TR 330-445 (New Cabell Hall 066)
Instructor: Ed Barnaby

Instructor Permission Required.

This seminar explores the premise that the visual culture of post-industrial society has transformed us into alienated spectators of reality.  We will examine novels, plays and films in which characters' individual encounters with architecture, landscape, painting, photography, pageantry, freak shows, cinema and museums alert the audience to the transformation of social relationships by imperialism, urbanism, tourism, aestheticism, materialism, rationalism, voyeurism, realism and commodification.  By depicting the frustrated pursuit of authentic interactions and consciousness within a mass culture mediated by images, do these texts allow us to inhabit our realities more fully or do they, instead, inscribe us further in the role of spectator?  Authors include Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Bernard Pomerance, Brian Friel, Yasmena Reza, Edward Carey and Julian Barnes.  Films include Fight Club, Lost in Translation, Zelig, The Elephant Man, Shadow of the Vampire, Memento, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche, NY.

TR 1230-145 (New Cabell Hall 389)
Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty

What is “queer” about the novel?  Our course will grapple with this question by examining the rich legacy of non-normative sexual expressions and orientations in the literary arts.  The aim of the course is—

1. To understand what constitutes ‘queer literature’ as a meaningful  genre or archive.  Is the queer novel unique in its expressivity, in terms of style and content?  Does the queer novel have its own canon?  Should this canon be more open to revision than others given the constant evolutions in how we understand gender?
2. To see how novels engage political ideas of sexuality germane to thinking about queerness, such as of ‘homophobia,’ the ‘closet,’ 'inversion’ ‘gender bending,’ ‘cis-acting,’ ‘coming out,’ ‘failure,’ ‘deviance,’ ‘camp,’ ‘cruising,’ ‘queer futurity,’ ‘queer feeling,’ ‘homonationalism,’ ‘disidentification,’ ‘performitivity,’ ‘flamboyance,’ etc.  
3. To confront radical questions about subjectivity and embodiment that the analytic of sexuality enables us to ask about the worlds we inhabit and the texts that represent these worlds.  

To accomplish these goals, we will read sweepingly across the whole breadth of the queer canon.  We will begin with early classics (by Sapho, Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, E.M.Forster) of queer literature and then shift our attention to more contemporary transnational contexts concerned with representing queerness as a part of, and not apart from, affiliations of race, culture, religion, geography, class etc. Our reading may include works by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, Patricia Highsmith, Ali Smith, Suniti Namjoshi, Leslie Feinberg, Sarah Waters, Michael Cunningham, Shyam Selvadurai, Alison Bechdel, Hoda Barakat, Saleem Haddad, Shaani Mootoo, Abha Dawesar, and Vikram Seth.  In other words, we will think of the important ways that the evolution of the queer novel involves a perpetual re-queering of the genre itself by the insistent heterogeneity of racial, transnational, and transgender contexts.  While most of the novels we read will come from the Anglophone tradition, some will be translated from other languages.

This course will require that students be prepared to engage directly and fearlessly with the field of queer theory.  Queer theory will inform how we contextualize the subcultures of queerness (from Bloomsbury or Stonewall to Queer-of-Color activisms), as well as understand why notions of reproductive normality, eroticism, pleasure, kinship, and indeed queer identity have been transformed in recent literary and aesthetic works.  Ultimately, we will ask how queer aesthetic works speak to, revise, and must be re-evaluated given the shifting dynamics of queer thought.  Here our reading will include work by Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani, David Halperin, Judith Butler Jasbir Puar, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Judith Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman, Jose Munoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Martin Manalansan, Marlon Ross, and others.  Finally, a selection of salient films, poems, and short stories will allow us to see useful connections between the aesthetic and political charge—often one of transgression—that the sign of the “queer” carries. 

You will be required to write two short papers and one long one that engages both imaginative and theoretical texts.

MW 330-445 (Bryan Hall 312)
Instructor: Jahan Ramazani

How does poetry articulate and respond to the globalizing processes that accelerate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In this seminar, we will consider modern and contemporary poetry in English in relation to theories of globalization. The writers we will explore range from modernist poets like Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, and McKay to postcolonial poets of Ireland, India, Africa, Britain, and the Caribbean, such as Walcott, Heaney, Goodison, Philip, Kolatkar, Okot p’Bitek, Okigbo, and Daljit Nagra. Requirements include active participation; co-leading of discussion; and two papers involving research. Our texts will be from volumes 1 and 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, as supplemented by other poems and critical and theoretical texts.

TR 1230-145 (Bryan Hall 328)
Instructor: Dan Kinney

In this course, reading non-English texts in translation and Middle English texts in the original, we'll explore how medieval Christianity bedevils traditional heroics and how medieval authors recast the heroic in and outside the genre of epic. Texts explored include epics like Beowulf and The Songs of Roland and the Cid, Dante's underworld reckonings with Virgil and Virgil's heroics, and the Matters of Troy and of Britain in epic as well as romance. One short, one longer paper, regular class participation, and a final exam.

MW 200-315 (Bryan Hall 330)
Instructor: Sara Torres

A medieval reader nods off in a garden, slumped over a desk, or lying in bed...and the adventure begins. Dream-visions abound in medieval literature: they provide a conceptual frame for literary explorations of the nature of textual authority, of the epistemology of dreams, and of the relationship between Reason and spiritual revelation. In this course we will read a wide selection of Middle English and French (in translation) dream-visions and discuss how these texts use imaginative landscapes to represent and debate the major social and philosophical issues gripping the late medieval world. Readings will include Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy; the alliterative poem Pearl; Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Legend of Good Women; Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies; and John Lydgate’s Temple of Glass. Short contextual readings from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides, Virgil’s Aeneid, Guillaume de Mauchaut’s Fountain of Love, and Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose will complement these texts and expand our understanding of the literary traditions major authors such as Chaucer and Christine de Pizan engage with in their own writing. In the final weeks of the course we will also encounter selections from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to view how heroic ascents are parodied in the Renaissance epic; the class will culminate in a Renaissance “coda” as we consider the thematic (and erotic) significance of dreams and imagination in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Critical readings will focus on the development of medieval allegory, the arts of memory, the history of emotions, and the genre of debate literature.

TR 330-445 (Bryan Hall 328)
Instructor: Herbert Tucker

“Romanticism” is the odd but indelible name that literary history bestows on British writing from the long, noisy turn of the nineteenth century.  It was a time when the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars burned up old Europe’s social structures like tinder, while underneath that eye-catching political bonfire the inexorable force of early industrialism made for slower but surer changes in the way we modern heirs of the Romantics continue to live, argue, dream – developments partially entailed on us by the remarkable cultural stamina of the period’s best literature.  Our readings will strike a balance between verse and prose, nonfiction and fiction (Walter Scott, Jane Austen), men’s and women’s writing; our class meetings will mix informal lecture with group discussion. Each student will write three shorter essays, and a collaborative mock-midterm in October will tone us up for the final exam at the end of it all.

TR 330-445 (Monroe Hall 111)
Instructor: Jerome McGann

Do not take this course unless you would like to read works committed to turning the ordinary world upside down and, in William Blake’s words, “revealing the infinite which is hid” within it.  Nearly all of the works to be read are imaginative fictions -- though there will be some poetical works -- and most of them were written a long time ago, which makes them especially rich and strange (“The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there”: L. P. Hartley).  The infinities we’ll encounter can be heavenly or hellish, frightening or funny, but in every case they are given to help us cherish our everyday worlds by seeing them in new ways.  Some of the authors we will read will be William Blake, Charles Maturin, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Edgar Allan Poe, Isadore Ducasse, Flann O’Brien, Angela Carter, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

TR 1230-145 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Christina Griffin

This course delves into the works of the three Brontë sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Brontë enthusiasts and those new to their works are welcome to join. In total, these sisters wrote seven of the most important novels of the nineteenth century—novels that have spawned spin-offs and adaptations, plays and films, homages and parodies. Their lives, too, have become the stuff of myth: to this day, readers frequently wonder how three of the most influential novelists could emerge from the same family in a remote Yorkshire village. In addition to diving into some of the Brontës’ major novels, we will also reach out to their poetry, juvenilia, letters, and afterlives. How did the social, historical, and artistic contexts of the mid-nineteenth century influence their work? How did their novels shape the future of fictional forms? How do more recent adaptations write and rewrite the myth of the Brontë sisters?

MW 330-445 (Shannon House 111)
Instructor: Kate Kostelnik

In this course, we’ll look at a variety of texts, from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures.  Topics will include contrastive rhetoric, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers.  A service learning component, in partnership with Madison House, will require students to volunteer with the LAMA or ESOL programs.   We will discuss pedagogies and practical strategies in working with multi-lingual learners on their writing, tutor members of the Charlottesville community, and create a writing project that conveys learning from this experience.

M 200-430 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Stephen Cushman

Restricted to Instructor Permission.

Edgar Allan Poe said there is no such thing as a long poem.  Was he right?  Our reading may include Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (facsimile edition with drafts edited by Ezra Pound); William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (first two books, along with Jim Jarmusch’s recent film Paterson); Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred; A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year; Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”; Claudia Emerson’s Pinion; Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon; and Carmen Gillespie’s The Ghosts of Monticello.  How are these works built?  Are they really sequences of shorter poems, as Poe claimed they could only be?  Students may choose to work on their own long poems or to write prose about any of the long poems they have read.  During spring 2018 course registration, APPW students will have enrollment priority; others are welcome as space allows.  TWO PREREQUISITES: Over the summer please read, and then bring to our first class, (1) any handbook about poetic forms (Stephen Adams’s Poetic Designs is a good one, but there are many others) and (2) any edition of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and the 1855 preface to the poem.

Lecture:
MW 1200-1250 (Minor 125)
Instructor: John Parker

Shakespeare arrived in London and started work as an actor and playwright sometime in his late twenties, around the year 1590.  Over the next decade he transformed himself from a complete unknown to one of the most celebrated poets in town.  We'll cover this half of his career, when he was mainly writing comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor) and English histories (Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V), though we'll also look at an early tragedy (Romeo and Juliet) and a somewhat later "problem play" (Measure for Measure), as well as his sonnets.  We'll read one play per week, for the most part letting its particular concerns dictate the course of our conversation, even as certain questions will loom especially large: what determines your personal identity — is it something inherent and stable or externally imposed and constantly changing, a series of dramatic roles rather than a durable essence?  What does it mean to have a gender?  Is it an essential attribute or also malleable and open to performative interpretation?  When people are attracted to each other sexually what attracts them — particular attributes in the person they love or an imaginary set of qualities that lovers project onto their beloved?  Should marriage be a matter of the heart or is it primarily a social contract?  What is the role of the individual in national politics?  Is English history specifically the history of one or many peoples?  How does a king legitimate his claim to rule — through violence, artifice, wealth, providence or some combination of all these?  There will be two papers (around 6pp. each), a midterm and final.

This course does not automatically fulfill the Second Writing Requirement, but it may be tweaked to do so.  See me in the first few weeks of the semester if you are interested in this option.

Discussion Sections:

Section 101
R 500-550 (Kerchof 317)
Instructor: Lara Musser

Section 102
W 200-250 (Kerchof Hall 317)
Instructor: Lara Musser

Section 103
R 500-550 (New Cabell 036)
Instructor: Evan Cheney

Section 104
F 100-150 (Bryan Hall 233)
Instructor: Daniel Zimmerman

Section 105
R 330-420 (New Cabell 411)
Instructor: Evan Cheney

Section 106
F 1000-1050 (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Daniel Zimmerman

MW 200-315 (Bryan Hall 312)
Instructor: Katharine Maus

John Milton is one of the most profound and influential poets in the English tradition, as well as a unorthodox polemicist who led a life of intense revolutionary engagement during a very turbulent period in English history. However, the very qualities that make him formidable can also make him seem difficult to access casually: he is an author who rewards extended study of his entire oeuvre. In this seminar we will read and discuss a lot of Milton’s poetry, including his sonnets, his early masque Comus, his great epic poem, Paradise Lost, and his closet tragedy, Samson Agonistes. We’ll also most likely dip into some of  the prose, reading and discussing excerpts from his notorious “divorce tracts,” his tract on the freedom of the press, and his tract defending the trial and execution of King Charles I. Assignments will likely include a short paper due around the middle of the semester, and a longer one due at the end.

MW 200-315 (Bryan Hall 310)
Instructor: John Parker

To examine some of Shakespeare's greatest contemporaries and rivals, in particular Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, with special attention to the London theater's sub-genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy and tragi-comedy.  Other authors may include Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Ford and Philip Massinger.  We will try to get a sense of what it means to speak of a "Renaissance" at this moment in English history; how the playtexts were printed and subsequently edited; and how the documents we read relate to early modern stage productions we can only reimagine on this textual basis.

MW 330-445 (Bryan Hall 330)
Instructor: Christopher Krentz

What does deafness signify, especially in a western civilization centered upon speech? In this course we will study some of the contradictory ways that deaf people have been depicted over the last three centuries. Our approach will be contrapuntal; canonical texts or mainstream films will be juxtaposed with relatively unknown works by deaf artists. We will read fiction, short and long, by authors like Defoe, Haywood, de Musset, Turgenev, Melville, Maupassant, Twain, Bierce, McCullers, Welty, O'Connor, and Thon, along with prose by such deaf writers as John Burnet, Douglas Bullard, and Sotonwa Opeoluwa. We will also view feature films like Johnny Belinda, Immortal Beloved, Beyond Silence; documentaries such as Sound and Fury; and movies by deaf filmmakers like Charles Krauel. Finally, we will quickly look at selected poetry, drama, and storytelling in American Sign Language (in translation) by deaf performers. Requirements will include informed participation, team-teaching exercises, two 6-page papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

TR 330-445 (New Cabell 058)
Instructor: Mary Kuhn

This course explores literature written for children over the past two centuries—from picture books to young adult fiction. Beyond fables, short stories, novels, and comics, we’ll look at a range of children’s films, toys, and games. Some questions we’ll consider include: how have ideas of childhood developed over time, and across cultures? What makes society consider some literature appropriate for children? And what can these stories tell us about the experience of growing up? In particular, we’ll ask about controversies over children’s books. The list of books people have tried to keep out of children’s hands can teach us about the cultural work that children’s literature does, and the way that we collectively imagine childhood.

Fall Semesters

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

Fall 2018:

Section 001, TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 038)

Section 002 TR 1230-145 (Shannon House 108)

Section 003 MWF 100-150 (Bryan Hall 310)

Section 004 MWF 1200-1250 (New Cabell 0660

Section 005 MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan Hall 235)

Section 006 MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan Hall 332)

Section 008 TR 930-1045 (Bryan Hall 310)

Section Locations Variable
Spring Semesters

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

Two-semester course (1508 to be taken in spring)

Fall Semesters

Offers instruction in academic writing, critical inquiry, and the conventions of American English for non-native speakers of English. Space is limited, and priority is given to students who are required to take the sequence by recommendation of the admissions office, the transition program, or the writing program.

Fall 2018:

Section 001 TR 1100-1215 Jane Boatner

Section 002 TR 200-315 Jane Boatner

Section Locations Variable
Spring Semesters

Offers instruction in academic writing, critical inquiry, and the conventions of American English for non-native speakers of English. Space is limited, and priority is given to students who are required to take the sequence by recommendation of the admissions office, the transition program, or the writing program.

Section Locations Variable
Fall and Spring Semesters

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

Section 001 - Writing about Science and Technology
MW 500-615 (New Cabell 068)
Instructor: Thomas Fountain

Section 002 - Writing about Culture & Society
MWF 100-150 (Bryan Hall 312)
Instructor: Kevin Smith

Section 003 - Writing about Identities
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan Hall 334)
Instructor: Tamika Carey

Section 004 - Writing about Culture & Society
TR 330-445 (Maury Hall 110)
Instructor: Keitih Driver

Section 005 - Writing about the Arts
MW 500-615 (Bryan Hall 334)
Instructor: Charity Fowler

TR 1230-145 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Marcus Meade

MW 330-445 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Sarah O'Brien

M 600-830 (New Cabell 036)
Instructor: Annie Kim

MWF 100-150 (Brooks 103)
Instructor: Kiera Allison

Section 001
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Brian Kelly

Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new media stories. Workshop setting. Readings from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, to use of narrative and on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.

Section 002
TR 800-915 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Brian Kelly

Development of basic writing skills, with craftsmanship the emphasis. Study, discussion and rewrite of old and new media stories. Workshop setting. Readings from texts and various other sources. Progress from short hard-news pieces through speech stories, legislative and political coverage, to use of narrative and on to features in general. Repeated writing drills. Essential to follow current events as well. Satisfies second writing requirement.

An inquiry-based approach to the development of a confident, engaging, and ethical public speaking style. Beyond practical skills, this course emphasizes rhetorical thinking: what are the conventions of public speaking? Where are there opportunities to deviate from convention in ways that might serve a speech's purpose? How might we construct an audience through the ways we craft language and plan the delivery of our speech?

Section 001
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Kiera Allison

Section 002
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Kiera Allison

Section 003
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Megan Haury

MW 500-615 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Patricia Sullivan

This small seminar course explores the history of writing as a cultural phenomenon, with particular attention to the function of writing, the role of the writer in cultural context, the process of learning to write (inside and outside of educational institutions) and the impact of materials and technologies on approaches to writing. We will read several diverse histories of writing dating back to its invention and consider geographical and cultural variations, e.g. China, Africa, the Middle East, as well as historical and contemporary innovations. The course offers a broad overview of some key histories and theories of writing, punctuated by case studies (for example, ancient scribal culture, the function of letter writing, the relation of writing to government/law, the role of families and peers in learning to write, fan fiction, creative writing workshops, editor-author relationships, community writing projects, machine writing [yes, it's a thing!] and more) and supplemented by students' specific research interests. This seminar is discussion-oriented and writing-intensive. Students will write a mix of short academic analytical essays and have the option to compose longer creative research projects such as curated online exhibitions, web pages, short videos, interviews, etc. In general, we will also experiment with different writing technologies, processes and genres.

Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Shannon House 108)
Instructor: Steph Ceraso

This course trains students to become attuned, thoughtful listeners and sonic composers. In addition to discussing key works on sound from fields such as rhetoric and composition, sound studies, and journalism, we will experiment with the possibilities of sound as a valuable form of writing and storytelling. Students will learn how to use digital audio editing tools, platforms, and techniques for designing and producing sonic projects.

Section 001
TR 330-445 (New Cabell 489)
Instructor: Kate Stephenson

This course will explore travel writing using a variety of texts, including essays, memoirs, blogs, photo essays, and narratives. We will examine cultural representations of travel as well as the ethical implications of tourism. Students will have the opportunity to write about their own travel experiences, and we will also embark on local travel of our own.

Section 001
T 330-600 (Maury Hall 113)
Instructor: Cory Shaman

This class examines the ethics and rhetoric of environmental writing in the age of the anthropocene (a contested term we'll investigate) to explore how we might engage more meaningfully with the natural world. We'll consider how current environmental discourse could be re-invigorated to address ecological conditions and human responsibilities more effectively while challenging seductive forms of "greenwashing" or pseudo-environmentalism.

Develops proficiency in a range of stylistic and persuasive effects. The course is designed for students who want to hone their writing skills, as well as for students preparing for careers in which they will write documents for public circulation. Students explore recent research in writing studies. In the workshop-based studio sessions, students propose, write, and edit projects of their own design. (Meets second writing requirement.) 

Section 002
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 168)
Instructor: John Casteen