Fall 2017
English Surveys
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ENGL 1500 - Masterworks of Literature
Section 001 - Tragedy and Transgression
TR 1230-145 (Ruffner Hall 175)
Instructor: Clare Kinney
To transgress is literally to “step across”; at the core of tragedy is somebody’s movement beyond and outside laws and cultural norms. This movement into the terrible unknown is what we’ll be focusing upon in this course—there’ll be passion, mayhem, and a very high body count. What new visions, what new experiences do tragic protagonists acquire as a result of going “beyond the pale”? What kind of language can claw significance from the extreme edge of suffering? What exactly is “tragic knowledge”? And why, for so many hundreds of years, have audiences and readers been fascinated by the spectacle of other people’s agony? We’ll address all of these questions (and many more) as we read works spanning over two millennia.
Readings: (all non-English works will of course be read in translation!): Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone;Euripides, Medea; Shakespeare, Hamlet and Macbeth; Akira Kurosowa, Throne of Blood; Mary Shelley,Frankenstein; Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabler; Athol Fugard, The Island; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman; Sam Shepard, Buried Child. We’ll also pay some attention to film adaptations of some of these works.
Requirements: regular attendance and active participation in discussion, a midterm, a final, and several short and relatively informal writing assignments.
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ENGL 1550 - Literature and the Professions
Section 101 - Medical Narratives
MWF 1100-1150 (New Cabell 315)
Instructor: Anna Brickhouse
This seminar is designed for students who may one day enter the medical fields, future English majors, and all students who love stories. It explores the history of the American short story from the nineteenth century through our own by focusing specifically on medical themes: ailing and injured bodies and minds; doctors, nurses, and patients; the social construction of disease and madness as well as of health and sanity. It is widely acknowledged today in the various fields of medical research and clinical training that the effective and humane practice of medicine requires what has been called “narrative competence”: the ability to recognize and interpret the stories people tell, to attend closely to the details that accumulate to make a larger meaning, to evaluate contradictory and competing hypotheses about meaning, and finally to appreciate and respond to a given narrative as an expression of humanity. But if these skills are in high demand within the medical fields, they are also skills for the future English major. The course will help students to hone their practice of close reading, attending to the formal elements of narrative (plot, character, style, tone, imagery, figures of speech, etc.) in close detail, while also investigating the fluctuating relationship between a narrative and its cultural and historical contexts. At the same time, the course will focus on writing: how to use written assignments to ask questions of stories that are worth answering, and how to respond in compelling and persuasive detail. We will discuss and write about classic stories as well as newer writers, asking what we can take with us from these narratives for use in our own lives.
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ENGL 2010 - History of European Literature I (4 Credits)
Lecture:
TR 1230-145 (Claude Moore Nursing Educ. Building, G120)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
Cross-listed with CPLT 2010, see description for requirements fulfilled by ENGL listing.
This course surveys European literature from its origins in Ancient Greece through the Renaissance. As a course in literary history, it seeks to develop an understanding of period concepts, such as Medieval and Renaissance, as well as concepts of genre, such as epic, tragedy, and comedy. Readings include (sometimes in the form of selections) the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, Oedipus, Antigone, the Aeneid, the Inferno, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Hamlet, and Don Quixote. All foreign language works will be read in English translation. Requirements: three papers and a final examination. Two lectures and one section meeting per week. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement and can be counted as a pre-requisite toward the English major in lieu of an ENLT course.
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
R 330-445 (New Cabell 489)
Instructor: Julia Fisher
Section 102
R 500-615 (Wilson 244)
Instructor: Julia Fisher
Section 103
R 200-315 (Wilson 238)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti
Section 104
F 1100-1215 (TBA)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti
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ENGL 3810 - History of Literatures in English I
Lecture:
MW 1100-1150 (Maury 209)
Instructors: Elizabeth Fowler
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ENGL 3810 History of Literatures in English I
In this course, we’ll explore the first twelve centuries of writing in English through objects, from sewn books written by hand on animal skins to a 1609 quarto of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS to the granite obelisk chiseled with T. J.’s epitaph and a print of Bill No. 82 of the General Assembly of Virginia. We’ll immerse ourselves in an epic battle with gruesome monsters, religious visions of all of creation slipping into a sphere the size of a hazelnut, a romance that starts with a rape & a clever judicial sentence handed down by a feminist Queen Guinevere, odes to spring and dark beauty, a quest by a cross-dressing knight, a prayer shaped like bird wings ready to fly, political speeches scripted for Satan, wildly erotic and gender-fluid sonnets, a map to the river of death, harrowing forced migrations and thrilling explorations, and memoirs by a free black preacher and a Mohegan. Our writers will include many of the most famous authors in English, those every educated English-speaking person might wish to encounter. If you want to lobby for your favorites, write to Professor Fowler at fowler@virginia.edu.
This is a newly redesigned 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 in all its forms. There will be quizzes, two exams, and interactive, experimental writing exercises that will help you develop yourself as a reader, but there will be no essays in literary criticism: this is a reading course.
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
W 500-615 (New Cabell 415)
Instructor: Neal Curtis
Section 102
W 330-445 (TBA)
Instructor: Evan Cheney
Section 103
W 200-315 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Evan Cheney
Section 104
R 200-315 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Samuel Lemley
Section 105
W 330-445 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Jordan Burke
Section 106
R 1100-1215 (TBA)
Instructor: Samuel Lemley
Section 107
W 200-315 (TBA)
Instructor: Valerie Voight
Section 108
W 330-445 (TBA)
Instructor: Adam Friedgen
Section 109
W 500-615 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Adam Friedgen
Section 110
F 1000-1115 (TBA)
Instructor: Rebecca Levy
Section 111
F 1100-1215 (TBA)
Instructor: Michael Vanhoose
Section 112
R 1100-1215 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Rebecca Levy
Section 113
R 330-445 (New Cabell 389)
Instructor: Jordan Burke
Section 114
R 330-445 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Michael VanHoose
Section 115
W 630-745 (Wilson 244)
Instructor: Neal Curtis
Section 116
F 1200-115 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Valerie Voight
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ENGL 4998 - Distinguished Majors Program
F 1000-1230 (Bryan 328)
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 at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/undergraduate/distinguishedmajors.
Introductory Seminars in Literature
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ENLT 2100 - Introduction to Literary Studies
Section 001 - Rewriting Shakespeare
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Claire Eager
As we explore literary reading and writing across genres and time periods, our guides will be the figure of William Shakespeare and the many ways his works intersect with acts of rewriting or artistic recreation. Focusing on three to five plays and major poems, we’ll ask: How does Shakespeare work with his sources in classical and medieval literature? How have later writers, artists, and filmmakers repurposed Shakespeare for their own times?
Section 002
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Victor Luftig
We will read poems, plays, fiction, and essays so as to introduce students to the study of literature at the college level: we’ll focus on how these types of writing work, on what we get from considering them carefully, and on what they otherwise accomplish. The texts will come from a wide range of times and places, including works by Sophocles, William Shakespeare, The Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Doty, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsburg, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, August Wilson, Alberto Rios, Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, and Sherman Alexie. The course is meant to serve those who are interested in improving their reading and writing, for whatever reason; those who seek an introductory humanities course; and thus who may wish subsequently to major in English. We’ll have the opportunity to see a couple of the plays we’ll read and to hear in person one of the poets we’ll study. We’ll discuss the works together in class, and students will write 3 papers (comprising 20 pages) and take a final exam.
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ENLT 2511 - Masterpieces of English Literature
Section 001 - Locating Jane. Or, Putting Austen in her Place
TR 930-1045 (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, geographic, and gendered. 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.
Section 002 - Great Thinkers & Their Favorite Books
MW 330-445 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Emelye Keyser
This course will track some of the ways in which literature has intersected (and continues to intersect) with intellectual inquiry. We’ll read works by writers like Coleridge and Kundera to ask why thinkers sometimes choose literature as a means of expressing philosophical ideas. What can literary forms achieve that non-literary forms cannot? And we’ll read Hegel’s and Obama’s top picks (Hamlet & For Whom the Bell Tolls) in order to theorize the effect of imaginative literature on non-literary thinkers.
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ENLT 2514 - Modern American Authors
Section 001 - Flannery O'Connor: Fictions of the Sacramental and the Grotesque
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Britta Rowe
This class surveys the works of Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), who said that her “subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil”. Her two novels, collected short stories, and non-fiction prose will lead us into her darkly humorous Roman Catholic take on the Bible-belt culture of her native Georgia – the “Christ-haunted South” as one scholar names it. Requirements: faithful reading and attendance; participation in class discussion; a short paper; a presentation; a longer paper; a final exam.
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ENLT 2523 - Studies in Poetry
Section 001 - Contemporary American Poetry
MW 200-315 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Jahan Ramazani
What is poetry? And what is distinctive about contemporary poetry? In this seminar, focused on contemporary American poetry, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements, whether the poetry is written in inherited forms, free verse, or avant-garde styles. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years. Among requirements are active participation; reading quizzes; your framing of discussion questions to help lead discussion; and a series of papers and revisions. Our texts will be from Contemporary Poetry, volume 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, as supplemented by newly published poetry.
Section 002 - Poetry and Place
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Megan Haury
I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home. -- Seamus Heaney, “The Tollund Man”
Taking into account the ways that poetry uses the space on the page to make meaning, “Poetry and Place” will examine how such a spatial medium as poetry offers unique ways of understanding the concepts of space and place, whether those spaces and places represented are universal, global, international, national, local, or even bodily. In this course we will consider “place” in poetry that ranges from the middle of the nineteenth century through the present day. As we read authors starting with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and moving to a conclusion in our current moment with Claudia Rankine and Ann Carson, some questions we will consider include: How do poets construct spaces of home and away in their works? What conflicts of place do the poems present? In what ways do poets suggest cross cultural and transnational roots and identities in their texts by use of place and space, and how can we interpret these geographic and cultural maps in the poems? How do racial, gender, religious, linguistic, class, and national identities (among other facets of identity offered by our poets) relate to places in the texts? What are the poetics of place and space? We will explore the poetry of places, built and natural, imagined and remembered, real and surreal in our class in hopes of delving into these and other questions we identify as the semester progresses. What forms and techniques are necessary in poetry to significantly address the complexities of space and of place in our modern world, and what does a focus on place illuminate in our study of poetry?
Section 003 - Bad Poetry
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Sarah Storti
What makes a poem good or bad? In addition to addressing the question of taste, this course will survey how poetry has been read historically. Can good poetry “go bad”? How does naughty (very bad!) poetry fit into this problem? Readings will include poems that have gained or lost critical favor over time, as well as poems bad enough to need “improving” by editorial agents (e.g. poems by Shakespeare, Byron, Emily Dickinson).
Section 004 - The Sonnet
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Matthew Davis
This course will provide an introduction to poetry by focusing on a single popular form, the sonnet. We will begin by learning some helpful techniques for making sense of poetry while reading some approachable sonnets by twentieth-century poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, and E. A. Robinson. After cutting our teeth on these twentieth-century poems, we will go back in time to read some Victorian-era sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Then we will go back in time a little further and read a number of sonnets from the Romantic Period, including poems by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. The last stop on this reverse-chronological tour will be the Elizabethan and Jacobean Era, represented by Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, George Herbert, and John Donne. Most of the readings for the class will be very short – 14 lines long, to be precise. However, I will expect students to read each poem repeatedly and closely. In addition, each student will be asked to write several short papers and memorize one or two sonnets.
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ENLT 2524 - Studies in Drama
Section 001 - Villainy on Stage
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 312)
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.
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ENLT 2526 - Studies in Fiction
Section 001 - Otherworlds
TR 200-315 (Brooks 103)
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.
Section 002 - America's Environmental Fictions
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 338)
Instructor: Mary Kuhn
Rachel Carson begins her 1962 Silent Spring with an imaginary town in which no birds sing, streams become lifeless, and vegetation withers. This “fable for tomorrow” sets the tone for the next several hundred pages of reports on the harms of DDT to communities around the United States. Like Carson, many other writers have been drawn to fiction as a powerful means of addressing environmental issues. This course considers environmental fiction in two senses. First, we’ll read fictional works that explicitly thematize environmental problems. How do these writers help us imagine, feel, and think about the world around us? How do they invite us to understand concepts like the environment—or nature—or climate? And how do these narratives position those concepts in relation to constructions of race, class, and gender? Second, we’ll investigate what kinds of fictional ideas about the environment permeate and guide our day to day lives. What kinds of narratives about the environment have we come to take for granted? How do fictions sustain certain inconvenient truths? We’ll look at a number of genres and environmental issues ranging from the nineteenth century to present day, but we’ll focus on works written in the last fifty years. Authors may include: Ruth Ozeki, Karen Tei Yamashita, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia Butler, and Hope Allison, among others, as well as a selection of films.
Section 003 - Science Fiction
T 330-600 (New Cabell 287)
Instructor: Patricia Sullivan
Space travel, time travel, apocalypses, technology and science at its best and worst, alternative pasts, parallel universes, speculative futures, human, aliens, artificial intelligences, cyborgs and more. We will read novels and short stories that are classified loosely as literary science fiction, though there may be some overlap with other genres such speculative fiction or fantasy fiction. We will also read some literary criticism that analyzes and comments on various science fictions texts. Along the way, we will consider key aspects of narrative literature, questions of social relevance (science fiction is often read allegorically) and other various ways of interpreting the past, present, and future of science fiction.
Section 004 - The Nineteenth-Century Romantic Comedy
MW 330-445 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fox
This course will examine the position of the romantic comedy throughout the nineteenth century. Beginning with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), we will trace the form’s progress across the ensuing decades, studying both its generic changes and the ways it allowed authors to engage with and comment on contemporary social issues. We will analyze, in particular, the gender and class concerns that inform each work, as well as the ways that select texts have been adapted into modern films. These focused discussions will serve as a springboard for larger theoretical questions: how do we define a genre? How have our generic expectations changed over time? In what ways do we distinguish between high and low culture? What do we really mean by the term “romantic comedy”? Possible readings include works by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and Oscar Wilde.
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ENLT 2530 - Studies in Global Literature
Section 001 - Globalization and World Literature
MWF 1200-1250 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Jordan Burke
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ENLT 2547 - Black Writers in America
Section 001 - Race, Crime, and Justice in African American Literature
MW 200-315 (Shannon House 109)
Instructor: Sarah Ingle
This course will explore the history of race, crime, and justice in African American literature and culture from Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion to today's Black Lives Matter activism. What is justice? How does the history of racial oppression in America complicate traditional ideas about the relationship between law and justice? How do African American writers both use and defy the genre conventions of traditional American detective fiction and courtroom dramas? In an attempt to answer these questions, we will spend the semester discussing portrayals of race-related crimes, criminal investigations, and legal proceedings in films and music, in popular detective fiction by writers such as Walter Mosley, and in literature by authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.
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ENLT 2548 - Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Experimenting with "Mystery"
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 209)
Instructor: Samantha Wallace
Originally referring to something that would not be disclosed or understood, “mystery” today typically refers to exactly the opposite: we expect at the end of a mystery to have cracked the code or to find out exactly what “mysterious” things have gone on. How do writers experiment with the mysterious in contemporary fiction? How do these approaches revise or return to conventions of the mystery, thriller, detective, and crime genres? In this course we’ll read, watch, and even listen to the tantalizing, the surprising, the suspenseful, the hair-raising, and the mysterious as experimental concepts to be further discussed. Texts may include Pale Fire, Gone Girl, S-Town, Hot Fuzz, and The God of Small Things.
Section 002 - Text and Technology
TR 330-445 (New Cabell 107)
Instructor: Jordan Buysse
The 20th century saw an explosion of new technologies that rearranged our relationship to literary texts. This course will consider a history of experimental and avant-garde composition in light of these technological shifts, from Dada to poetry-writing bots. Alongside our usual reading and writing, we will run our own in-class textual experiments with pen, paper, scissors, and code (no prior experience required!)
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ENLT 2550 - Shakespeare
Section 001 - Forgiving and Forgetting
TR 930-1045 (Maury 113)
Instructor: Thomas Berenato
We will study six of Shakespeare's late plays with attention to their treatment of remembrance, forgetting, forgiveness, vengeance, mercy and justice. Two ten-page papers and one oral presentation.
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ENLT 2552 - Women in Literature
Section 001 - Global Women Writers
TR 330-445 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Annie Galvin
In recent years, Beyoncé declared herself a “Feminist” in neon lights, Chimanda Ngozi Adichie asserted that we should all be feminists, and millions of people gathered across the globe in January 2017 to march in support of women’s rights. At the same time, nations ranging from Saudi Arabia to the United States continue to enact laws that privilege gender unevenly. In this course, we will read works by women-identified writers across the globe that emerge from diverse social, political, and economic contexts. How have forces including cultural and economic globalization, migration, war, and information technology affected gender relations in both local and global contexts? Authors may include Adichie, Yiyun Li, Toni Morrison, Marjane Satrapi, Zoé Valdés, Kiran Desai, Jamaica Kinkaid, Chinela Okparanta, and Emma Donoghue. We will also read secondary works that contextualize the literature in political and human rights-based contexts, and we will work together to become stronger writers and clearer communicators.
Section 002 - Gender and the Gothic
TR 200-315 (The Rotunda Room 152)
Instructor: Cristina Griffin
In this class, we will read (and watch) stories that engage with the long tradition of the gothic: stories that are pleasurably thrilling, that structure themselves around suspense, secrecy, romance, intrigue, and even sometimes fear. We will begin the term by focusing on some of the eighteenth-century texts that established and popularized the gothic conventions that novelists, filmmakers, and television writers still use today. We will then turn to more contemporary reactions to the gothic, investigating how twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms respond to the gothic genre. Our focus as we make our way across the centuries will be on how these stories open up questions about gender. How do gothic texts represent women’s bodies? What is the relationship between gender and violence? How do gendered portrayals of the gothic change over time or embody different political and cultural crises? How do popular contemporary forms—the television show, the dystopian novel—reimagine the gothic?
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ENLT 2555 - Special Topics
Section 001 - Medicine and Culture
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Karen Chase
This is a course for students in the sciences who care about the forms of medical discourse that exist beyond the reach of professional journals, conferences, labs, or academic settings. It is also a course for those in the humanities who believe that health and disease are as much matters of literary concern, as they are fields of study or practice for those in the sciences. We meet – arts and sciences – in a common endeavor to examine the style, function, purpose and meaning of popular medical literature as it is published in fiction and non-fiction, produced in film, and as it is written by journalists, practitioners, researchers, patients, or others patient carers. Requirements include very active participation, report, one short essay which you will have a chance to revise, and one longer essay, final exam.
Section 002 - Gothic Forms
MW 200-315 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Cynthia Wall
You already know the stereotypes--the ruined castle, the ethereal music, the brooding villain, the fainting heroine--but do you know where they come from? This seminar will survey gothic literature from its origins in the eighteenth century (Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), through the classics of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), to the horror of the everyday in Stephen King; and we will explore the different genres of the gothic in poetry, plays, short stories, and novels. Active participation, weekly short commentaries, three short (5-6 pp.) papers, and a final exam.
Section 003 - Disability in Literature
MWF 1200-1250 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Christopher Krentz
How have disabled people been represented in literature over the last few centuries, how have they represented themselves, and what cultural work do such representations do? In this course we will study fiction, plays, nonfiction, and poetry that depict people with extraordinary bodies who differ from the norm. Syllabus still being finalized, but we will study such authors as Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Twain, Wells, O’Connor, Kesey, Morrison, Dunn, Walcott, Danticat, Lahiri, Mairs, Sinha, and Raine. We will probably consider a feature film or two as well. Requirements will include active, informed participation, occasional posting of brief discussion questions, three 5-6 page papers, and a final exam.
Section 004 - Highbrows, Middlebrows, and Lowbrows
TR 200-315 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Mary Dickens
During the early decades of the 20th century, the terms “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” became popular ways to label and categorize books, as well as those who wrote and read them. These were, and remain, complex labels, encompassing not only literary form and style, but also questions of social class, gender, and even publication format. In this course we will examine the “brows” as a frame for reading early 20th-century literature and for thinking about the factors that motivate literary judgments. Sample authors may include Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Anita Loos, Rose Macaulay, J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Section 005 - Beauty and Monstrosity
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Jon D'Errico
Section 006 - Global Modernisms
TR 330-445 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Jesse Bordwin
What is modernism? Is it an aesthetics? A politics? A bounded historical or cultural moment? A philosophical problem? Rather than focus on any one context, in this class we will approach the question of modernism by reading across time and space, nation and language. Because the Borgesian class that tried to contend with the global antecedents and inheritors of modernist literature could stretch on ad infinitum, we will restrict our gaze to a particular case study: the reception in Latin America of modernist literary fiction from the English-speaking world. The first half of the semester will cover some of the key texts of Anglophone modernism (likely authors include: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner). We will shift to Latin America in the second half of the semester, to consider how modernist texts in English were received, adopted, adapted, and exploded by authors of el Boom and el post-Boom (likely authors—to be read in translation—include: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolaño). Our goal, by the end of the semester, will be to use this expansive comparative framework to contextualize the modernist literary project.
Section 007 - Heroes, Sages and Saints
TR 330-445 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Mark Edmundson
What is a hero? What is a sage? What is a saint? We’ll discuss these ideal types with reference to classical, Biblical and Eastern wisdom literature. Then we’ll look to the present and near present to see if these roles are still persuasive and still viable or not.
Academic and Professional Writing
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ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch I
Section Locations Variable
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.
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ENWR 1506 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch II
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.
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ENWR 1507 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch I for Multilingual Writers
Two-semester course (1508 to be taken in spring)
Section Locations Variable
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.
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ENWR 1508 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: Stretch II for Multilingual Writers
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.
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ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry
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.
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ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing
Section 003 - Project Based Writing
TR 1230-145 (Astronomy Building 265)
Instructor: Kate Kostelnik
This course will provide a foundation into the various kinds of writing students will learn and practice in the university. We will inquire into how writing works, how we grow as writers as we progress through college, as well as how writing is a distinct form of learning. Particular attention will be paid to rhetorical awareness and writing processes. Based on their disciplinary interterests and goals, students will design their own projects.
Section 013 - Writing about Social Justice
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 368)
Instructor: Lindgren Johnson
This course will consider the rhetorical role witnessing—so central in both a legal and a religious context--plays in the movement for racial justice. Who is an effective witness, and why—and what, exactly, must be witnessed? Texts we will consider include theoretical ones such as Susan Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others, in addition to primary written, visual, sonic, and cinematic ones.
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ENWR 2610 - Writing with Style
Section 003
M 600-830 (New Cabell 036)
Instructor: Keith Driver
Develops an understanding of the wide range of stylistic moves in prose writing, their uses, and implications. Students build a rich vocabulary for describing stylistic decisions, imitate and analyze exemplary writing, and discuss each others writing in a workshop setting.
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ENWR 2630 - Writing about Work
Section 003
T 330-600 (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Devin Donovan
We will use inquiry-based writing to explore the role that work plays in the good life. We'll critically analyze how and why we write about work to refresh our thinking about real-world experiences both familiar and unfamiliar to us. We will develop as writers by generating and exploring complicated questions. Why do we do the things that we do? What work do we value, and how do we communicate that?
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ENWR 2700 - News Writing
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.
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ENWR 3650 - Digital Writing: Remix Culture
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Gibson 241)
Instructor: Steph Ceraso
This course explores the remix as a transformative compositional practice. Remix culture raises poignant questions about originality, creativity, and the ethical and legal implications of twenty-first century forms of composition. Students will examine remixing through theoretical, historical, aesthetic, and political lenses in order to cultivate a deep understanding of the rhetorical and affective power of this genre.
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ENWR 3660 - Travel Writing
Section 001
TR 330-445 (New Cabell 068)
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.
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ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment
Section 001
MW 500-615 (Bryan 334)
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.
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ENWR 3900 - Career-Based Writing and Rhetoric
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 001
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Jon D'Errico
Section 002
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 309)
Instructor: John Casteen
Creative Writing
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ENCW 2300 - Poetry Writing
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: Sean Shearer
Section 002
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Sasha Prevost
Section 003
MW 500-615 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Anna Tomlinson
Section 004
MW 500-615 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Michaela Cowgill
Section 005
MWF 1000-1050 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Robert Elliot
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ENCW 2530 - Introduction to Poetry Writing - Themed
Section 001 - Poetry & Memory
MW 330-445 (Monroe 114)
Instructor: Michael Dhyne
In Poetry & Memory, students will explore the personal lyric as a mode of discovery and transformation. We will focus on the creative process and the vast reservoir of material that already lies within us, while exploring critical works that challenge our notions of memory, history, linear time, and progress, to see the malleability of both our personal and collective pasts.
Section 002
MW 500-615 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Landis Grenville
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ENCW 2560 - Introduction to Fiction Writing - Themed
Section 001 - Literary Science Fiction
MWF 200-250 (Bryan 332)
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 chapters of a science fiction novel, or several stories, 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.
Section 002 - Writing Catastrophe
TR 500-615 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Adam Roux
This course will teach the writing of fiction through stories about man-made and natural catastrophes (climate change, earthquakes, nuclear war, etc.). We'll examine how writers address the anxieties of the Anthropocene, then find our own approaches to these concerns through the craft of short fiction.
Section 003 - Unearthing Fiction
MW 500-615 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Nichole LeFebvre
This introductory fiction writing course will involve research time in the UVA Special Collections Library. Throughout the semester, students will find artifacts related to their own interests, re-imagining them into fiction. One of Jefferson’s architectural plans might become a vivid setting. A skull fragment from the Revolution might lead to a plot twist.
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ENCW 2600 - Fiction Writing
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 310)
Instructor: Jeremy Townley
Section 002
MWF 1200-1250 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Robin Sarkin
Section 003
TR 500-615 (Bryan 203)
Instructor: Michael Okpanachi
Section 004
MW 630-745 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Philip Jason
Section 005
MWF 1100-1150 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Piers Gelly
Section 006
MWF 900-950 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Olivia Haberman
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ENCW 3310 - Intermediate Poetry Writing I
Section 001 - The Big Themes
R 200-430 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Lisa Spaar
This is a workshop for serious makers of poems. Admission is by instructor permission only. Students interested in the course should request permission to enroll through SIS and accompany their request with a brief note detailing prior writing experience/coursework/instructors, and giving a good working e-mail address as well. Students should also indicate whether or not they are submitting to other workshops.
In this workshop for advanced poets, the aim of our collective project will be to generate poems that dare to embody, explore, provoke, illuminate, refute, and manifest “large” traditional poetic themes--Eros, Thanatos, Truth, Beauty, God, & Time--in fresh, original ways. In addition to writing about a poem a week, students will also be responsible for choosing a trio of “core poets” to read closely throughout the semester: one poet born before 1920, one poet born after 1970, and a poet on the faculty of the University of Virginia. We will be incorporating these readings into our assignments, poems, and class discussion.
Section 002
T 200-430 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: TBA
Instructor Permission Required.
This class will be taught by another instructor, to be decided, but interested students can email manuscripts to James Livingood at jsl9z@virginia.edu for current consideration.
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ENCW 3350 - Intermediate Nonfiction Writing
Section 001
W 1130-200 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: TBA
Instructor Permission Required.
This class will be taught by another instructor, to be decided, but interested students can email manuscripts to James Livingood at jsl9z@virginia.edu for current consideration.
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ENCW 3610 - Intermediate Fiction Writing
Section 001
R 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 send a short story (up to 15 pages) to me at ed3m@virginia.edu no later than a week before classes begin. 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 as soon as possible. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION means you must submit work to be considered—see above.
Section 002
M 1130-200 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: TBA
Instructor Permission Required.
This class will be taught by another instructor, to be decided, but interested students can email manuscripts to James Livingood at jsl9z@virginia.edu for current consideration.
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ENCW 4810 - Advanced Fiction Writing I
Section 001
W 400-630 (New Cabell 187)
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 a 35 (or so) page story.
To be considered for this class, please send a short story (up to 15 pages) to me at ed3m@virginia.edu by August 1st. 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 ten days or so before classes begin. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION means you must submit work to be considered—see above.
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ENCW 4830 - Advanced Poetry Writing I
Section 001
R 200-430 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Debra Nystrom
A weekly 2.5-hour writing workshop for advanced poetry writers, focused on student poems and assigned reading for craft discussion. Along with a semester portfolio of poems, students will write short prose pieces on poetry and will offer one in-class presentation. ADMISSION BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: Sample of student work (4-5 poems) to be submitted IN A SINGLE DOCUMENT (either electronically in MS Word, or a hard paper copy), to Professor Nystrom’s email address at dln8u@virginia.edu or to her English Dept faculty mailbox in Bryan Hall; submissions should include a cover sheet with name, year, email address, telephone number, major, prior workshop experience, and other workshops to which you are submitting. Every effort will be made to notify students of acceptance during the week prior to the beginning of classes, so that students may finalize their schedules in SIS.
Poetry Writing Program
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ENPW 4820 - Poetry Program Poetics
Section 001
M 200-430 (Bryan 233)
Instructor: Debra Nystrom
Restricted to Instructor Permission.
In this craft seminar we’ll be examining the many formal possibilities for making poems. Beginning with a focus on poetry’s origins in magic and spell, we’ll explore the ways such effects are available to us now in language, considering received forms and their contemporary variations: sonnet, ghazal, sestina, pantoum, villanelle, blank verse, terza rima, haibun, free verse and numerous other shapes, including the kinds of opportunities that open up at the liminal space between poetry and prose. The interplay between sound, rhythm and syntax in creating suspense and interweaving designs whose relations are registered in subliminal ways (Coleridge’s “more than usual state of emotion in a more than usual order”) will be an ongoing study as we discuss and try out different formal arrangements. Each student will help lead a discussion on a particular poetic structure, will try out a number of formal possibilities in his or her own writing, and will write a final paper concerned with either one form’s effects in a number of different poems or one poet’s use of form across his or her work. Readings may include poems and essays by Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Cesar Vallejo, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, John Berryman, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, Agha Shahid Ali, Nick Flynn, Claudia Emerson, Terrance Hayes, Sinead Morrissey Mary Szybist, Major Jackson, Kiki Petrosino, Jericho Brown, Chloe Honum & others. ADMISSION BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR ONLY.
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ENPW 4920 - Poetry Capstone
Section 001
W 200-430 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Paul Guest
This is the first part of a two-semester project [The Capstone Course (ENPW 4910/4920)] designed for fourth-year students in the Department’s Area Program in Poetry Writing. The Capstone project is a year-long investigation of faculty and student-directed, shared texts that allows advanced poetry writing students to read widely and across disciplines in areas of individual aesthetic interest, to begin to think beyond the single poem and into ways poetry manuscripts can be organized, to become more deeply aware of their own patterns and evolving aesthetic, and to create new work. The spring semester involves a combination of weekly discussion of individual student manuscripts and one-on-one conferring with the instructor. After mid-term, students are assigned a graduate student mentor, who also offers the poetry manuscript a close reading. The course culminates in the production by each student of a manuscript of original poetry.
OPEN ONLY TO 4TH-YEAR STUDENTS IN THE AREA PROGRAM IN POETRY WRITING BY PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR.
Literary Prose
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ENLP 4550 - Topics in Literary Prose
Section 001 - The Fantastic
W 1130-200 (Dawson's Row 1)
Instructor: Jeffery Allen
The course will look at the fantastic as a narrative in fiction and film. We will read some representative texts, both classic and contemporary, and from here and abroad. Assignments will include short response pieces to the assigned readings and films, as well as creative exercises based on the readings and screenings. Texts will include short stories, novels, graphic novels, and films by Helen Oyeyemi, Stephen Graham Jones, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Julio Cortazar, Silvina Ocampo, David Cronenberg, Anais Nin, Larry Cohen, Juan Rulfo, Leonara Carrington, Hideo Nakata, J.G. Ballard, Anais Nin, Rene’ Depestre, Philip K. Dick, Souleymane Cisse, and Colson Whitehead. Genres will include the undead (zombies, vampires, and ghosts), shapeshifters, speculative fiction, surrealism, expressionism, magical realism, and Afro-Futurism, among others. From time to time over the course of the semester, we will draw a few critical texts to inform our discussion, including Tzevtan Todorov’s important study The Supernatural.
Medieval Literature
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ENMD 3130 - Old Icelandic Literature in Translation
Section 001
TR 200-315 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: John Casteen
* Course may be offered in Spring 2018 instead.
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ENMD 3250 - Chaucer I
Section 001
MW 200-315 (Maury 113)
Instructor: Sara Torres
This course is an introduction to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a fictional collection of stories told by pilgrims as they journey together to the shrine of St Thomas Becket. This masterpiece of Middle English literature encompasses several genres of medieval literature (romance, fabliau, beast fable) that address the dangers of illicit language and love, the fragility of friendship, the grisly effects of war. As we journey along with Chaucer’s memorable pilgrims, we will learn about the era in which the author lived—an era of widespread social and political unrest, of pandemic, of perpetual war, and of stunning cultural achievement. Our close-readings of Chaucer will be complemented by secondary criticism focused on the themes of gender, authority, counsel, and fellowship in the Canterbury Tales.
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ENMD 5010 - Introduction to Old English
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Peter Baker
In this course, open to both undergraduates and graduates, you will learn to read the language of Beowulf—that is, the English language as preserved in sources from around 700 to 1100. After a brief introduction to the language (which is alarming at first glance but much easier to learn than any foreign language), readings will include prose excerpts from historical and religious sources and several verse classics, including The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, and The Wife’s Lament. Work for the course includes bi-weekly quizzes, a brief final exam, and a short paper.
Renaissance Literature
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ENRN 3130 - Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose
Section 001
MW 200-315 (Maury 110)
Instructor: Dan Kinney
We will survey the various and curious perspectives of seventeenth-century English lyric and how it can distill, crystalize, and refract the mixed matter of everyday life in an era of pronounced cultural crisis. We will also discuss the mixed fortunes of seventeenth-century poetic styles, from contempt and neglect in the following century to a startling and long-lasting present-day vogue thanks to Eliot and the so-called New Critics. Class requirements: regular participation including brief email responses, one short and one longer paper, and a final exam.
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ENRN 3210 - Shakespeare I
Lecture:
MW 1200-1250 (Minor 125)
Instructor: Katharine Maus
This course deals with the first half of Shakespeare's career as a playwright, in which he was mainly writing histories and comedies. ENRN 3220, in the Spring, deals with the second half of Shakespeare's career, in which he was mainly writing tragedies and romances. You may take either or both courses; neither is a prerequisite for the other.
2 50-minute lectures and 1 50-minute discussion section per week.
Requirements: 3 five-page papers, a final exam emphasizing material covered in lectures and section meetings, and regular short assignments made by section leaders.
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
W 330-420 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Katelyn Durkin
Section 102
W 200-250 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Katelyn Durkin
Section 103
R 500-550 (New Cabell 415)
Instructor: Anne Marie Thompson
Section 104
W 500-550 (New Cabell 407)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fox
Section 105
R 330-420 (New Cabell 485)
Instructor: Anne Marie Thompson
Section 106
F 1000-1050 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Elizabeth Fox
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ENRN 4500 - Writing (to, by, and about) Women in Renaissance England
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (New Cabell 594)
Instructor: Rebecca Rush
In this course, we’ll read a wide range of literature written by women, from Elizabeth I’s lyrics about courtship, desire, and duty to Margaret Cavendish’s science fiction about a world in which talking bears operate telescopes and three souls occasionally occupy a single body. But we’ll also contextualize women’s writing by considering how Renaissance women engaged with the male-dominated literary field of the period. By reading Isabella Whitney’s plaint about her inconstant lover alongside Thomas Wyatt’s protestations of his fidelity or Katherine Philips’s elegy for her son alongside Ben Jonson’s commemorations of his children, we will explore how female poets challenged the social and poetic conventions of their male contemporaries. Importantly, however, we will also discover that Renaissance women did not always act as agents of reform. Indeed, one of the aims of the class is to reckon with the disconnect between narratives of progress and the complex lives of writers like Philips and Cavendish, who were pioneers of feminism and lesbianism on the one hand and defenders of political absolutism and social hierarchy on the other. Authors include Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, Walter Raleigh, Mary Sidney, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Thomas Middleton, Katherine Philips, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish.
Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature
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ENEC 3500 - Eighteenth-Century Topics
Section 001 - Literature and Social Media, 1650-1800
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: John O'Brien
Social media existed long before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a lot of literature could be defined as social media, works initially intended to circulate within defined groups, or was produced to constitute community. In this course, we will survey the literature of the period from 1650 to 1800 with an eye towards the way that writers used their works to build communities large and small. Authors will include Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Pepys, Katherine Philips, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, James Boswell, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Susanna Rowson. Our reading will also give us the opportunity to think about digital social media in our own time and its effects on culture and community. Students will write two papers (one short, one longer), take a midterm and final exam, and also collaborate on a digital project where we will edit works to contribute to an open-access digital anthology: www.virginia-anthology-org, a project that stands itself as a form of social media.
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ENEC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature I
Section 001 - Writing in the Age of Revolution
TR 930-1045 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: John O'Brien
The era from the 1770s through the 1820s was an age of revolutions, as political, cultural, and literary convulsions swept across the western world: in America, in France, in Haiti, and in Britain. In this course, we will read some of the amazing literary texts of that period from both sides of the Atlantic. We'll read across a wide variety of genres, including speeches, essays, letters, plays, poems, and novels. We will analyze the themes, images, and literary tropes that writers called upon to come to terms with the unprecedented events through which they were living. Writers will include Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams, Toussaint L’Ouverture, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Thomas Jefferson. Requirements: active class participation, two short papers, one longer paper, and a final, take-home exam.
Nineteenth Century British Literature
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ENNC 3210 - Major British Authors of the Earlier Nineteenth Century
Section 001 - Austen, Gaskell, Eliot
TR 1100-1215 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Cristina Griffin
Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot: these three authors’ voices rang loud through the nineteenth century. Collectively, their novels explore love (and its discontents), marriage, loss, sex, rebellion, and death. These three women writers composed their novels in very different financial and familial circumstances, but their texts all investigate gender and class amidst a changing social landscape, as they represent women and men at work, newly emerging unions, and the gritty reality of poverty. Moreover, Austen, Gaskell, and Eliot were not strangers to one another: Austen published her novels earlier in nineteenth century, and Gaskell and Eliot wrote in the wake of her influence. How did Gaskell and Eliot respond to Austen’s earlier work? How do these writers converge and where do they disagree with one another? As we read this trio of writers, we’ll also consider the ways in which their works continue to influence our twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional forms. How do our contemporary adaptations link and unlink these major writers? How did Austen, Gaskell, and Eliot shape the form of the novel as we know it today?
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ENNC 3240 - Victorian Poetry
Section 001
MW 200-315 (New Cabell 485)
Instructor: Herbert Tucker
After the great outburst of Romanticism around 1800, and pending the postwar hustle of Modernism after 1900, poetry for most of the nineteenth century lived in shadows cast by the big new genre on the block, the bourgeois realist novel. And curious things happened in those shadows. Shockingly new industrial facts of life trysted with the life of creative imagination. The poetic matrix expanded beyond classical mythology to embrace, under imperial pressure, new reaches of global history and geography. The impulse towards faith – nature-worship included – learned to deal with Darwinian science. Women poets were a force to be reckoned with, and one man (the Queen's Laureate) made more money in verse than any bard in print before or since. We'll work from an eclectic anthology – starring Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, the Rossettis, Swinburne, and Hopkins, but enrolling numerous others too – that offers excursions into Victorian prose on topics in poetics and culture. Informal lecture mixed with discussion focussed on the open book. Several essays stringently read, and a final exam comprehensively conceived.
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ENNC 3500 - Nineteenth Century Topics
Section 001 - Gothic Spaces
MW 330-445 (Bryan 235)
Instructor: Alison Booth
How does a genre like Gothic “travel”? What are some of the spaces and social themes of Gothic since the eighteenth century, from novels to film? Tensions over authority and nationhood, class and gender, and both the confinement of space and its invasion or disintegration play out in the various works we study. A wilderness, a mountaintop or “sea of ice,” a haunted house or ruined abbey, an ancestral secret, a border and exile, a hunt, a pilgrimage, an invasive species—all settings and orientations for narrative—have taken different forms in literature in different times and countries. Although centered in nineteenth-century British and American literature, the course includes a range of fiction, travel narrative, poetry, and visual forms; readings selected from Walpole, Austen, Mary Shelley, Irving, Bronte, Poe, Hawthorne, Stoker, James, and others. Presentations, two essays, a research project, tests and a final.
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ENNC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature I
Section 001 - Poets Reimagining the World: Blake, Wordsworth, Byron; Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Williams
TR 1230-145 (New Cabell 407)
Instructor: Jerome McGann
Cross-listed with ENAM 4500
Between 1790 and 1920 English and American poetry underwent a massive transformation of its basic theoretical and expressive premises. The changes came in response to the attack on imaginative writing that emerged out of Enlightenment commitments to rational and informational discourse. Poets responded to the challenge of Enlightenment by a series of radical explorations into the medium of language itself and how it reflects and transforms the social world.
Section 002 - Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 283)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
This course will study the impact of science on nineteenth-century literature and in particular the development of science fiction as a genre, with emphasis on the epoch-making works of H. G. Wells. We will examine the ways in which science posed a challenge to literature and called into question the very notion of artistic truth. But we will also consider the ways in which science served as a new form of inspiration for fiction writers, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. One of the main subjects of the course will be the impact of Darwin and Darwinism. We will discuss the relation of science to the Victorian crisis of faith and also explore the interrelation of science and the British Empire. Writers studied will include Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edwin Abbott, and Arthur Conan Doyle. One class presentation, one long paper, and class participation.
Modern and Contemporary Literature
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ENMC 3500 - Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Jewish-American Literature
TR 1100-1215 (Location TBA)
Instructor: Caroline Rody
In this course we will trace the development of Jewish American literature, reading short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway song lyrics, and a few complete novels, as well as viewing several short film clips, a vintage TV show, and a film, surveying the diverse literary and popular cultural production of American Jews. We start in the milieu of the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side of New York, reading works composed in English and some translated from Yiddish, by immigrant writers such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as a number of Yiddish poets, whose work we’ll read in translation. Among the next generation, heirs to Yiddish culture with hugely American aspirations, we will read writers such as Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Lore Segal. Toward the end of the course we will read fiction from the currently booming field of contemporary Jewish fiction, including authors such as Art Spiegelman, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss.
The course will focus on the ways writers shape and reshape a new American literature with roots in a formidable textual, cultural, and religious tradition. We will observe an evolving relationship to Jewish religious practice and to traditional Jewish texts, to Yiddish and the culture of Yiddishkeit; to memory and inheritance as burdens or as creative touchstones. We will also consider changing conceptions of Jewish identity, of American identity, and of gender roles; the transformations wrought by assimilation and social mobility; uses and workings of Jewish humor; socialist, feminist and other political commitments and visions; forms of engagement with history including the Holocaust, the founding of Israel and its ongoing conflicts; and life in multiethnic America.
Requirements: reading, active class participation, co-leading of a class discussion, several short reading responses, a short and a long paper, and a final exam.
Section 002 - Spirituality in Jewish Fiction
R 200-430 (Fayerweather Hall 206)
Instructors: Caroline Rody, Vanessa Ochs
Crosslisted with RELG 3559-002.
Reading a range of contemporary Jewish memoirs, short stories, and novels, this seminar will consider the spiritual dimension of literary works.
Requirements: active reading and class participation, leading (in pairs) of one class discussion, several papers.
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ENMC 3800 - Concepts of the Modern
Section 001
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Jessica Feldman
In order to understand notions of modernity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we’ll study the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who wrote in literary ways—dramatic, poetic, fictional. We’ll also read works by Franz Kafka, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov, considering them in light of Nietzsche’s methods and ideas. Nietzsche and these writers wondered about such questions as: What is an ethical life? How does religion function? How do we know what we know? How do people communicate with one another? In a world filled with what we might summarize as "bad behavior," what are the roles of art and beauty? This is a lecture and discussion course, and there will be a take-home midterm and final, along with a paper.
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ENMC 4500 - Advanced Studies in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Section 001 - Contemporary American Poetry
MW 330-445 (Bryan 330)
Instructor: Jahan Ramazani
In this seminar we will explore contemporary American poetry. Our aim will be to understand the array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements, whether the poetry is written in inherited forms, free verse, or avant-garde styles. We will work to appreciate the primary achievements and vociferous debates in contemporary poetry. We will ask how recent poets have responded to literary modernism, other art forms, other discourses, globalization, changing gender relations, the environment, and social and political movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years. Among requirements are active participation; reading quizzes; co-leading of discussion, including your framing of discussion questions; and two 8-10 page papers. Our texts will be from Contemporary Poetry, volume 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition, as supplemented by recently published poems.
Section 002 - Oceanic Connections: Indian Ocean and Black Atlantic Worlds
T 330-600 (142 Wilson Hall)
Instructor: Debjani Ganguly
If the ‘Sea is History,’ as the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott famously declared, the ocean is an archive. The ocean has emerged as an exciting new frontier in contemporary global and transnational approaches to literary studies. This course will introduce students to this emergent paradigm. Specifically, it will trace connections across Indian Ocean and Black Atlantic worlds through the contemporary novels of Amitav Ghosh and Abdul Razak Gurnah, and the creative non-fiction of Paul Gilroy. The course will also include excerpts from works by Edouard Glissant, the famous exponent of Caribbean Creolite, and from an anthology of black narratives that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade.
We will study the interconnectedness of the Atlantic slave trade and the movement of labor on Indian Ocean trade routes, and the consequent entanglement of the literatures of slavery and indenture. The Atlantic has featured as a major paradigm in the humanities since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. The making of Euro-America on the back of the slave trade provides a powerful and sobering counterpoint to the triumphant theatricality of Franco-British maritime domination in the same era, while simultaneously connecting literary discourses and literary themes previously understood as territorially and culturally distinct. Atlantic Studies has revolutionized the way we study the emergence of modern French, British and American literatures today.
An equally resonant oceanic world – the Indian Ocean – lay at the heart of European maritime expansion from Africa to the Middle East and Asia, a world that Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis novels bring powerfully into view. Through his novels we will trace lives across the opium trade route between British India and Southern China, and study the importance of the Indian Ocean in the making of capitalist modernity. Gurnah’s novels will allow us to explore transoceanic connections across East Africa, West Asia, India and England. Lives in Zanzibar, the famous Indian Ocean port, are at the heart of his novels.
Core texts:
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke
Abdul Razak Gurnah, By the Sea
Abdul Razak Gurnah, Paradise
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpts will be circulated)
Vincent Caretta ed. Unchained Voices (excerpts from the anthology will be circulated)
Section 003 - Thinking the Poem: 5 American Poets
TR 330-445 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Walter Jost
In his book Colors of the Mind the literary theorist and critic Angus Fletcher identifies a relatively untilled field in literature study that he calls “noetics.” “Noetics names the field and the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem.” This must be a very large field indeed, so that a graduate course given to it needs some way of delimiting its interests to deal with five American poets: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery. And of course “thinking” has many possibilities—among them opining, believing, conceiving, inferring, imagining, reflecting, musing, meditating, as well as deliberating, speculating, reasoning, and arguing. In this course we will focus on select philosophical and religious/theological matters to give point to these various aspects of thinking the poem.
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ENMC 4530 - Seminar in Modern Literature and Culture
Section 001 - The Dystopian Novel
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 332)
Instructor: Mrinalini Chakravorty
“We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies,” Joseph Conrad wrote at the beginning of the 20th C. This course will explore the emergence of dystopia as a genre for the modern novel. If utopias are concerned with conjuring the perfect society—a ‘good place’ that is yet ‘no place’—dystopias imagine the opposite. Celebrated dystopian novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handsmaid’s Tale, Yevgeny Zamiantin’s We and more recent others distill the terrors of modern life onto a terribly estranged future. Dystopias, in other words, offer apocalyptic visions; they summon an aesthetic of speculation, pessimism, horror, and dysfunction to caution against modern developments that are generally seen as benevolent.
It is notable that dystopia often takes the form of political and science fiction. In our study, we will seek to understand why that is the case. What elements cohere the genre of dystopian fiction? What dimensions are borrowed from other forms? What invented anew? And finally, what is peculiar to dystopia as a genre all its own? It is commonly thought that a singular feature of dystopian fiction is that it interrogates the rise of various state forms, both totalitarian and democratic, in the post-industrial age. What happens, dystopian works ask, if we distort modernity’s most exalted achievements to an extreme? Do conditions of modern living such as of surveillance, conformity, comfort, milatarism, immunity, mechanization, mobilty, reproductive facility, incarceration, medicalization, and scientificity lead to better futures? The bleak worlds that dystopias imagine starkly suggest that they do not. Instead, dystopian novels ask that readers contemplate, and even critique, the ethical cost of our acceptance of modern social conditions. They demand that we query the depletion of freedom, autonomy, and humanity in modern times. It is this non-mimetic, socially responsive dimension of dystopian novels that this course will ultimately probe.
The seminar will survey major works of dystopian fiction from the late-19thC onward. Alongside such classics as Wells’ The Time Machine, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, and Delaney’s Babel-17, we will also read work by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Amitav Ghosh, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Indra Sinha, Han Kang, Peter Carey and others. The syllabus will include brief philosophical and critical readings on utopia (Thomas More), science (Francis Bacon), satire (Jonathan Swift; John Dryden), feminism, race, capitalism, and modernity. We will also view a few films (Blade Runner; Babadook) and analyze some graphic novelas (Adriane Tomine; Joe Sacco; Keiji Nakazawa).
Requirements: active reading and participation, short response papers, 2 major papers, class leading (in groups).
American Literature
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ENAM 3180 - Introduction to Asian American Studies
Section 001
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 323)
Instructor: Sylvia Chong
Cross-listed with AMST 3180.
The historical experiences of Asian Americans—a broad, panethnic category inclusive of Americans with roots in the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more—shed light on issues of immigration, citizenship, education, war, labor, and assimilation which have affected all Americans to differing degrees. This "multi-media" cultural history will draw heavily on American visual and popular culture to situate, visualize, and define Asian Americans at various historical moments against and alongside African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and white Americans. Some of these moments involve intense conflict and division, while others gesture towards camaraderie and affiliation. This class will be neither a simplistic celebration of ethnic pride and diversity, nor a condemnation of American history as singularly oppressive, although we will acknowledge both these strands. Rather, the eclectic materials of this class will replicate the heterogeneous history and make-up of Asian America, and establish Asian America as a relationship with itself and with America, rather than a “thing” to isolate and analyze.
This is an introductory course that assumes no prior knowledge of American Studies or Asian American history. During the semester, we will concentrate on developing close reading skills for visual, cinematic and textual materials that may prove useful to future courses you might take in American Studies, History, English or Media Studies. Our readings will include political cartoons, graphic novels, documentary films, fictional films, and musicals. We will engage with a number of primary texts from various genres, spanning the mid-19th century to contemporary times. While obviously not an exhaustive overview of Asian Americans in American cultural history, we will try to touch upon a diverse range of historical moments and cultural and political issues, so as to gain insight into the interconnectedness of multi-ethnic America.
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ENAM 3559 - Hemispheric Latinx Literature and Culture
Section 001
TR 930-1045 (New Cabell 389)
Instructor: Carmen Lamas
Combined secton with AMST 3559-003.
This course offers a survey of Latinx literature and film from a hemispheric perspective. Engaging texts from pre-colonial times to the present day, we will ask ourselves how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce Latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality impact Latinx literature, film and other artistic forms. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English.
Section 002 - Sex Politics in African-American Literature
TR 930-1045 (Minor Hall 130)
Instructor: Timothy Griffiths
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
Since the time of slavery, blackness has emblematized, in dominant American culture, licentiousness and sexual primitiveness. While some African American cultural figures would argue against this racist perception and work to counter-narrativize or constrain black sexual propriety, others saw their sexually libertine reputations as empowering and worked to subversively appropriate them. From Harriet Jacobs and W.E.B. Du Bois to Audre Lorde and Samuel R. Delany, African American writers have held important and diverse relationships to the idea that the erotic is powerful. This course engages the long relationship between African American culture and sex and gender politics, considering in particular the notion that, as Marlon Ross puts it, "black has always been the permanent queer." Subjects will include sex and slavery, the representation of marriage, "miscegenation" and amalgamation, the specters of the black male rapist and the especially libidinous black woman, women-of-color feminism and the sex wars, and queer-of-color critique. Authors and artists may include those mentioned above, as well as Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Joseph Beam, and Berry Jenkins. Assignments include two short discussion papers, a midterm paper, and a final exam.
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ENAM 3750 - Sex and Sentiment
Section 001
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. Course texts may include tales of sentiment like Catharine Maria Sedgwick's A New-England Tale and Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter; and narratives of scandal, sex, and seduction like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, George Thompson's City Crimes, and William Wells Brown's Clotel.
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ENAM 3880 - Literature of the South
Lecture:
MW 100-150 (Minor 125)
Instructor: Jennifer Greeson
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 (TBA)
Instructor: Aaron Colton
Section 102
W 330-420 (TBA)
Instructor: Aaron Colton
Section 103
W 330-420 (TBA)
Instructor: Karen Huang
Section 104
W 500-550 (New Cabell 211)
Instructor: Karen Huang
Section 105
R 1100-1150 (New Cabell 183)
Instructor: Sarah Winstein-Hibbs
Section 106
R 1230-120 (Maury 113)
Instructor: Sarah Winstein-Hibbs
Section 107
R 330-420 (New Cabell 407)
Instructor: Simon Sarkodie
Section 108
R 500-550 (New Cabell 068)
Instructor: Julianne McCobin
Section 109
F 1000-1050 (TBA)
Instructor: Julianne McCobin
Section 110
F 1100-1150 (Bryan 334)
Instructor: Simon Sarkodie
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ENAM 4500 - Advanced Studies in American Literature
Section 001 - Major Works of Nineteenth-Century American Literature
TR 1230-145 (Bryan 312)
Instructor: Mark Edmundson
We’ll start with Emerson who sets many of the terms for 19th century American literature, both for those who endorse him and those who oppose. Possible writers: Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Stowe and Douglass. What exactly is American about American literature?
Section 002 - Poets Reimagining the World: Blake, Wordsworth, Byron; Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Williams
TR 1230-145 (New Cabell 407)
Instructor: Jerome McGann
Cross-listed with ENNC 4500
Between 1790 and 1920 English and American poetry underwent a massive transformation of its basic theoretical and expressive premises. The changes came in response to the attack on imaginative writing that emerged out of Enlightenment commitments to rational and informational discourse. Poets responded to the challenge of Enlightenment by a series of radical explorations into the medium of language itself and how it reflects and transforms the social world.
Genre Studies
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ENGN 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Genres
Section 001 - The Lyric
W 330-600 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Andrew Stauffer
In this advanced seminar, we will examine the long tradition of lyric poetry in Western literature, from Sappho to the present. What are the resources of the lyric? How has the genre changed over time, and how have readers (and listeners) responded to it in different eras? The class will feature discussion, recitation/memorization, weekly written work adding up to a portfolio, and two exams.
English Pedagogy
Criticism
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ENCR 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism
Section 001 - Feminist Theory
TR 200-315 (Bryan 310)
Instructor: Susan Fraiman
An introduction to American 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. I expect to explore such themes as mother-daughter relations, the “male gaze,” mobility and migration, incarceration/escape, 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, the meanings of third-wave feminism, 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 a fairly heavy reading load. 5-page paper, 10-page paper, and a final exam.
Section 002 - Visual Culture in Literature, Drama and Film
W 330-600 (Maury 110)
Instructor: Edward Barnaby
Cross-listed with AMST 4500.
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.
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ENCR 5650 - Books as Physical Objects
Section 001
MW 1100-1215 (TBA)
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.
Special Topics in Literature
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ENSP 2610 - Point of View Journalism
Section 001
TR 330-445 (Bryan 328)
Instructor: Lisa Goff
This course examines the history and practice of “point-of-view” journalism, a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of “objectivity” on the part of the news media. Not to be confused with “fake news,” point-of-view journalism has a history as long as the nation’s, from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to Ida Tarbell, the original “muckraker,” in the nineteenth, and “New Journalism” practitioners like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion in the twentieth. Current point-of-view practitioners include news organizations on the right (Fox News, Breitbart News Network) and left (MSNBC, Democracy Now), as well as prominent voices like author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who continues to blog for The Atlantic. We will also consider types of media outside the traditional definition of journalism, such as citizen journalism; and examine the rise of “fake news.” A term previously used to indicate the work of entertainers such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, who pilloried the news (and newsmakers) in order to interpret them, “fake news” is now a vehicle for “alternative facts” promulgated by so-called alt-right publications.
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ENSP 3559 - New Course in Special Topics in Literature
Section 001 - Plants and Empire
TR 1230-145 (New Cabell 338)
Instructor: Mary Kuhn
This course examines how botanical projects and their cultural representations shaped the material and political landscapes of empire. In particular, it focuses on the English, French, and American imperial states in global context. Combining literary analysis with environmental history and the history of science, we'll explore the intertwined social and ecological impacts of imperialism. A wide range of sources, from poems and novels to seed catalogues, herbariums, and UVa’s gardens, will help us to see how the workings of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shaped today's ideas about the environment.
Section 002 - H͕̤͙̮a̷c̝̯̮̰k̮i͙͓̲ṋ̱̻̭̬͠g͖̯̟̺ ̪f̥̗͞o̪̫̟̝̝̮͖r̤͓̰̼͖̥ ̞̜H̺̭͖͍͈um̰̙a̺n̲͕̤i̸s̹̪̞t̙̗͉̟͡s̪̻̺͎̝̗
MW 330-445 (New Cabell 332)
Instructor: Brad Pasanek
This is a course for English majors (and other students) that introduces the basics of computer programming, text analysis, text encoding, and statistics as experimental methodologies that promote new kinds of reading and interpretation. The aim is to move from "computation into criticism." We'll work, primarily, with a Shakespeare play, poetry by William Blake, and a Jane Austen novel. Students will find these works at the bookstore alongside manuals on Text Analysis in R. No prior familiarity with coding required; indeed, advanced computer science majors are discouraged from applying, as they will likely find the professor's halting and lame way with the algorithmic course content comic, at best. The term hacking, the humanist will note, has two apposite senses at least.
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ENSP 3610 - Narratives of Illness and Doctoring
Section 001
Time & Location TBA
Instructor: Marcia Childress
The experience of illness and the practice of medicine alike are steeped in stories, narrative being a fundamental way human beings make sense of ourselves, our experiences (including illness, loss, and healing), and our world. This course inquires into the intersection of narrative, literature, and medicine, looking especially at (1) stories of patients, families, and physicians about illness and doctoring; (2) interpretation of illness experience, narrative, and medicine; and (3) the growing significance of narrative in American medicine. We study narratives of many genres, styles, and voices that cover a range of illnesses/conditions and address issues in contemporary medicine and culture. Students participate in class discussion and outside events, write response papers, propose in writing and prepare a substantial paper/project, and write midterm and final exams.
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ENSP 5820 - The Culture of London Past and Present
Location and Time TBA
Instructors: Clare Kinney, Michael Levenson
Restricted to Instructor Permission
Contact crk4h@virginia.edu or michael.levenson@virginia.edu. The Culture of London: Past and Present" offers an interdisciplinary approach to metropolitan culture, as an historically embedded object of inquiry. Located in London, it runs for a month each year from early June to early July. Faculty members from the University direct, teach and lead the class; they are complemented by London-based specialists in architecture, art history, religious studies and contemporary politics.
Related Courses in Other Departments
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CPLT 2010 - History of European Literature I (4 Credits)
Lecture:
TR 1230-145 (Claude Moore Nursing Educ. Building, G120)
Instructor: Paul Cantor
Cross-listed with ENGL 2010, see description for requirements fulfilled by CPLT listing.
This course surveys European literature from its origins in Ancient Greece through the Renaissance. As a course in literary history, it seeks to develop an understanding of period concepts, such as Medieval and Renaissance, as well as concepts of genre, such as epic, tragedy, and comedy. Readings include (sometimes in the form of selections) the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, Oedipus, Antigone, the Aeneid, the Inferno, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Hamlet, and Don Quixote. All foreign language works will be read in English translation. Requirements: three papers and a final examination. Two lectures and one section meeting per week. This course satisfies the Second Writing Requirement and can be counted toward the English major for 3 hours of "Literature in Translation."
Discussion Sections:
Section 101
R 330-445 (New Cabell 489)
Instructor: Julia Fisher
Section 102
R 500-615 (Wilson 244)
Instructor: Julia Fisher
Section 103
R 200-315 (Wilson 238)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti
Section 104
F 1100-1215 (TBA)
Instructor: Ankita Chakrabarti
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CPLT 3710 - Kafka and his Doubles
Section 001
TR 1100-1215 (Cocke Hall 101)
Instructor: Lorna Martens
Cross listed with GETR 3710.
Introduction to the work of Franz Kafka, with comparisons to the literary tradition he worked with and the literary tradition he formed.
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CPLT 3740 - Narratives of Childhood
Section 001
TR 200-315 (Gilmer 225)
Instructor: Lorna Martens
Cross-listed with GETR 3740.
Childhood autobiography and childhood narrative from Romanticism to the present.
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CPLT 4998 - Fourth Year Thesis
Location and Time TBA
Instructor: Paul Cantor
Humboldt-Universitat Berlin
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Universitat Rostock Institut fur Germanistik
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Humboldt Universitat Berlin
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Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
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