ENG 612: Women Writers

ENG 612 01 - Trans-Atlantic Women Writers
Spring 2019
Thursdays, 6-9:20 p.m., EBERHARD
Professor Ashley Shannon

ENG 612 will focus on one of the genres most closely associated with women’s writing: the Gothic novel. Investigating this genre across time and national identity, we will examine the Gothic in three major texts: Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Morrison’s Beloved; and Butler’s Fledgling, asking how these authors used their genre to examine tensions around gender, race, social class, and disability. Various short stories as well as scholarly writing about the genre will round out our reading list.

ENG 661: Author or Topic Seminar - Thomas Hardy

ENG 661 02 - Author or Topic Seminar: Thomas Hardy
Spring / Summer 2019
W 6-9:20 p.m. ALLENDALE
Professor Jim Persoon

Thomas Hardy straddles two periods of literary history, conventionally understood, during which he had two literary careers. He was a Victorian novelist in his first career, writing a dozen or so in the 19^th Century, and then abruptly near the start of the 20^th Century he gave up novels to become a modern, if not Modernist, poet. He has a strong afterlife:  in his literary influence on modern British poetry; in translations of his novels into films; in his place in the British school curriculum (and school curriculums in most English-speaking countries); in the British tourism industry, which markets “Hardy’s Wessex”; and in such popular reinterpretations as the graphic novel by the Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds, now also turned into a film—Tamara Drewe. We’ll study all of these.

ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar

ENG 600: Graduate Literary Studies Seminar 
Fall 2019
W 6-8:50 p.m. 
Professor Sherry Johnson

This course will introduce graduate students to current literary studies by explicating historical changes in the field of English in both literary content and critical discourse. Students will explore these changes by studying key concepts in the discipline and by completing a research project.

A few neo-slave narratives will serve as the principal texts for the course.  Through their study, students will discuss principal elements in various literary theory, the goal of which is to have students practice advanced analysis.  Simultaneously, students will engage in parallel discussions regarding questions of why we read, what we read, and how we read.  Critical secondary readings will help to bring such philosophical queries to the fore.

ENG 614: Literature of American Ethnic Minorities - Black Death

ENG 614: Literature of American Ethnic Minorities - Black Death
Fall 2019
T 6-8:50 p.m. 
Professor Regis Fox

The aim of this course is to explore literary and filmic representations of black death.  Participants will assess texts produced by and about African Americans in multiple genres as they pertain to blacks’ particular vulnerability to premature death in the U.S.  As a collective, we will examine personal and collective loss of black life as it intersects with processes of racism and privilege, desire and disease.  Throughout the semester, we will interrogate artistic renderings of “passing” via avenues including, but not limited to: addiction, suicide, and homicide, as well as lynching, police brutality, and the prison industrial complex. 

Accordingly, primary questions orienting this course include:  How is death influenced by the effects of race, gender, sexuality, class, age, and/or ability?  In what ways has the prospect of inevitable demise come to be embedded in African American cultural memory and experience?  How do black communities articulate sorrow?  That is, how do they pay respect to, mourn, and grieve the dead?  What do methods of black memorialization enable for those who have been spared?  And in what sense can bereavement be mobilized to critique systems of power and generate meaningful social change?

ENG 616: World Literature in English

ENG 616: World Literature in English
Fall 2019
M 6-8:50 p.m. 
Professor Corinna McLeod

An in-depth study of selected pieces of Asian, African, or South American literature. Issues concerning the development of Third World literature and its status with regard to the canon will be addressed.

ENG 624: Genre Studies - Climate Fiction

ENG 624: Genre Studies - Climate Fiction
Fall 2019
R 6-8:50 p.m.
Professor Brian Deyo

Whether we refer to it as global warming, climate change, the Anthropocene, or the end of the world as we know it, there’s something about the language we use to refer to environmental crisis that feels inadequate, imprecise, or abstract. Words often fail to capture the scale, complexity, and gravity of our situation vis-à-vis this thing called the climate—and yet we may sometimes sense that something terribly strange, unprecedented, and monumental is afoot. Setting the problematic limitations of language aside, some may be given to wonder whether there’s something within human nature that is irrationally (fatally?) bound to deny the numerous and multifaceted challenges of climate change. In this graduate seminar, we’ll survey a diverse group of authors working across various categories of genre fiction—science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, the New Weird fiction—to address one of the most pressing issues of our time. As we’ll discover, language, coupled with the creative force of the imagination, can indeed drive the reality of climate change home, inspiring us to change and embody our species’ best potentials.

ENG 605: American Literature and the Holocaust

ENG 605: American Literature and the Holocaust
Winter 2020
M 6-8:50 p.m.
Professor Rob Franciosi

For seven decades American writers have faced a representational dilemma: how to depict an historical event whose significance continues to grow, even being termed a metaphor of our times, yet which challenges the imagination’s very limits? How to confront the Holocaust? This course will explore the history of American literary engagement with Auschwitz, what has been called the Americanization of the Holocaust. We will study the entire sweep of this response, from the immediate post-war years to the present, giving particular attention to the complex cultural dynamics which have impacted these works and their receptions.

ENG 624: Genre Studies - Horror Fiction

ENG 624: Genre Studies - Horror Fiction
Winter 2020
W 6-8:50 p.m. 
Professor Kathleen Blumreich

This semester, our focus will be on horror, a current in literature that is not easily defined but that is, sadly, often viewed as low-brow, unworthy of serious critical attention. Among our aims will be to:

• become familiar with the themes, images, and characteristics unique to horror;
• better understand the complex nature of horror as a genre;
• better appreciate the ways in which horror functions as social/moral commentary;
• engage in thoughtful discussion in an academic environment where all questions, issues, and views are welcome.

Course readings will include short stories as well as novels, with particular emphasis on works by modern writers such as Jackson, King, Rice, and Lavalle.

ENG 651: Literary Period Seminar: The Roaring 1790s—American Federalist Literature

ENG 651: Literary Period Seminar: The Roaring 1790s—American Federalist Literature
Winter 2020
R 6-8:50 p.m.
Professor Avis Hewitt

When the American colonies moved into civic autonomy by signing the Treaty of Paris in 1783, our writers rallied to the cause of new nationhood, a new cultural life, and a new set of literary perceptions. Suddenly our propensity for literacy met a commensurate bounty of good reads: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1791) answered the keen public interest in his iconic legacy; Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794) and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797) garnered bestseller status; and Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787) wowed the public as our first American-authored stage production. From drama to epistolary novel to autobiography to melodrama, American literary life suddenly flourished far beyond the confines of historical, political, and theological documents. The religiosity of canonical texts from the 1600s gave way to more secular considerations in the 1700s. But the same questions compelled us: How should we live? How should we love? American readers were ready to be seduced. Not only did Franklinian "rags to riches" notions engage us, but so did purebred heroines, shady suitors, and scandalous scheming. Engage with these late Eighteenth Century explosions of comedy, perfidy, integrity, and redemption—in short, with life lived fabulously large.

ENG 661: Author or Topic Seminar - Migration and Borders

ENG 661: Author or Topic Seminar - Migration and Borders
Winter 2020
T 6-8:50 p.m. 
Professor David Alvarez

This course will delve into a multinational corpus of contemporary world literature that maps the dangerous journeys that millions of refugees, displaced persons, and “economic migrants” are undertaking in search of safety or of a better future. Availing themselves of literature’s capacities for artful storytelling, the narratives we will read give faces, names, and voices to human beings who in government discourse and mass media reports are often rendered faceless, nameless, and spectral. Ranging widely in geographic origin and scope, the readings will be contextualized with a variety of media, including film, music, and maps.

For more information, please contact Professor David Alvarez at [email protected].