INTRODUCTORY TOPICS IN LITERATURE

ENLT 2555   Animal Fables & Beastly Fantasies [3]

1030 – 1245

Mr. Sligh

This course will explore the long history of beast fables and fantasy works featuring animals as characters, from Aesop’s “Tortoise and Hare” to Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Readings will be drawn from the ancient literatures of India and Greece, medieval fabliaux, African storytelling traditions of Jamaica and the American South, and a variety of 19th- and 20th-century authors. 

Satisfies the prerequisite for the English major.  Satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

ENMD 3510 Love and Death [3]
1300-1515
Mr. Baker

In this course we'll read a selection of works from the European Middle Ages, concentrating especially on those in which the themes of love and death intersect. Works will include Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain and The Saga of Kormak the Skald as well as selections from such longer works and collections as the Mabinogion, Boccaccio's Decameron, Malory's Le Morte Darthur, and The Nibelungenlied. 

Satisfies the literature before 1700 requirement for the English major.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE

ENSP 3860 The Game of Thrones [3]
1030-1245
Ms. Woolfork

A course devoted to exploring George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones universe from the novels (book 1) and the HBO television adaptation. We will compare the ways in which HBO’s approach to the Game of Thrones phenomena both changes and cements aspects that Martin created. Since the class may coincide with the release of season 8 (rumored to be the last season of the HBO series), we may also discuss these final developments.

INTRODUCTORY SEMINARS IN LITERATURE

ENLT 2555 Short Science Fictions [3]
1030 - 1245
Mr. Ferguson

Our world – whether in its dystopian politics, climate catastrophes, or even just its driverless cars – is increasingly written of in terms once reserved for the fantastic tales of science fiction. Through short stories, films, and games, this course will survey a range of these past visions, and speculate about the futures yet to come. 

Satisfies the prerequisite for the English major.  Satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

SPECIAL TOPICS

ENSP 3300 Literary Editing [3]
1300-1515
Mr. Livingood

An introduction to modern desktop publishing and literary editing. Students will use Adobe Indesign to design a print project, publish the project using print-on-demand, and convert their work to ePub for viewing on a Kindle or other electronic device. Students will also learn the fundamentals of the Chicago Manual of Style and how to edit literary works. Students must be able to bring a PC or Mac laptop to class, and purchase a one-month rental of Adobe Indesign.

WRITING

ENWR 2700 Introduction to News Writing [3]
1030-1245
Mr. Kelly

Enrollment limited to 22 students.

Intermediate-level writing in news-media format, beginning with traditional hard-news stories and progressing to political stories and features.  Both overnight and in-class writing assignments.  Workshop environment.  

Satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

INTRODUCTORY TOPICS IN LITERATURE

ENLT 2514 American Nobodies [3]
1300-1515
Ms. Goldblatt

This course investigates the figure of the unremarkable character in 20th and 21st-century U.S. literature as he or she appears in selected prose, drama and poetry.  These stories resist the more familiar myth of the American Dream, but we will explore what these obscure characters too can tell us about our culture, and even ourselves. 

Satisfies the prerequisite for the English major.  Satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

SPECIAL TOPICS

ENSP 3559 Hacking for Humanists [3]
1030-1245
Mr. Pasanek

This course for English majors (and other students in the humanities) 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," using selected poems and short stories as our textual starting points.

GERM 2050 (3)  German Express 

10:00-10:50 MWF
Ms. Neuhaus

Intensive intermediate course in German language. The course teaches all four language skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening comprehension) and covers the same material as GERM 2010 and 2020. German Express allows students to acquire language skills at an accelerated pace, preparing them for advanced courses (3000-level and above) and study abroad in German-speaking countries. Prerequisite: students must have completed GERM 1020 with a minimum grade of B, or instructor’s permission.

GERM 3000 (3)  Advanced German 

11:00-11:50 MWF
Ms. Gutterman 

This content- and task-based advanced German course is designed for students who have  intermediate skills in German, and who wish to continue developing their ability to speak, listen, read, and write in German. In-class activities will emphasize your communicative skills and help you practice new grammatical structures, while out-of-class assignments will help you improve your writing and composition skills. Throughout the course, you will learn about cultural products, practices, and perspectives of German-speaking countries, thus increasing your inter-cultural knowledge and competence. All work will be conducted in German. GERM 3000 will assist you in achieving competence level B2.1-B2.2 of the Common European Framework. Prerequisite GERM 2020 or instructor’s permission

GERM 3010 (3)  Texts and Interpretations

2:00-3:15 MW
Ms. Gutterman

 “Texts and Interpretation” is designed a) to introduce students to the practice of reading and interpreting texts, and b) to further students' overall German language proficiency in reading, writing, and speaking. Students will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with different literary genres, as well as with the technical terms necessary to discuss and analyze different forms of literature. Each module will focus on a theme. Students will engage in class discussions and group work, which will take the form of creative tasks such as short performances of a scene, recitations (Lesetheater), or transformations of a text into a different genre in order to explore the interdependency of letter, sound and meaning. Guided reading and writing assignments will exercise students’ critical thinking skills. Active participation is required throughout the course. All work will be conducted in German. Prerequisite GERM 2020 or instructor’s permission

GERM 3230 (3) Intermediate Composition & Conversation I 

2:00-3:15 TR
Mr. McDonald 

Improve your German communication skills through an innovative German conversation and writing method that draws on contemporary online resources, spanning culture, politics, sports, and technology. (Among these resources are Deutsche Welle, Tagesschau, German online newspapers, and online dictionaries.)  Students develop and refine writing and conversation strategies through weekly writing assignments modelled on texts from streaming-media sites. Daily conversation and comprehension exercises build vocabulary and introduce students to idioms. Select grammar review at student initiative.  No textbook is required.

GERM 3250 (3) German for Professionals  

1:00-1:50 MWF 
Ms. Parker

Prepares students to communicate and interact effectively in the business environment of German-speaking countries. Emphasis is placed on practical, career-usable competence. Prerequisite: GERM 3000 or equivalent

GERM 3290 (1) German Roundtable  

5:00-5:50 W
TBA 

The German Conversation class is designed for students who wish to improve their ability to express themselves in German. In a small-group setting, we will focus on communications skills and discuss topics ranging from personal interests to current events. This course is open to all language levels.

GERM 3330 (1) Language House Conversation 

6:00-7:00 W
TBA 

This course is mandatory for the residents of the German House, but open to other students as well. 

GERM 3510 (3) Topics in German Culture                          

9:30-10:45 TR
TBA

GERM 3510 (3) German Cinema                        

11:00-12:15 TR
Mr. Dobryden

This course introduces the history of German cinema. In studying films from 1895 to the present against the background of Germany’s complex history, we will discuss the medium’s diverse potentials: as entertainment, propaganda, and art; as a means of identity formation, historical memory, and political agitation. We will also read key texts of German criticism and practice the fundamentals of film analysis. Materials and discussion in German.

GETR 3505/HIEU 3505 (3) History in History and Fiction                           

2:00-3:15 MW
Ms. Achilles

Who was Adolf Hitler and what explains our enduring fascination with the Hitler phenomenon? Was his rise to power an aberrant historical accident or a logical outcome of German history? What was more decisive in shaping the catastrophic course of events under Hitler's regime: his personality or deep structural historical factors? Would history have turned out better (or worse) if Hitler had been accepted into art school or died in infancy? Do melodramatic depictions of his last days normalize or even trivialize the Holocaust? Is it acceptable to laugh about or even empathize with Hitler today? 

This course investigates Hitler's life and afterlife on the basis of a broad variety of sources. Course materials range from scholarly articles to Nazi propaganda, films, novels, counterfactual histories and Hitler representations on the internet. Throughout this course, we will combine an interest in the personal dimensions of Hitler's rule with the study of power structures, social interests, aesthetic forms, generational shifts, and national frames. We will pay particular attention to the affective logics and representational regimes that shape our understanding of the past (and present). 

Requirements include regular attendance, active participation, one oral presentation, and short written assignments. There will be no midterm or final examinations. Fulfills the historical and second writing requirements. Counts towards the History and German Studies majors.

HIEU 3352 (3) Modern German History

12:00-12:50 MW

Ms. Achilles

How do fascist movements emerge and what helps them to gather steam? Can we discern historical patterns by which democracies devolve into fascist dictatorships? What are the limits of tolerance in a pluralistic society? Should anti-democratic ideologues and movements enjoy the freedoms of speech and association even if they use these rights to attack the foundations of democracy? 

This class looks to German history for lessons about some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Among the topics that we will explore are the origins of fascism; the brutal realities of war and genocide; the Cold War and its legacies (including the East German nostalgia for life under Communism); and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism in response to European integration and broader migration flows. Finally, we will investigate whether Germany's ongoing struggle with its troubled past provides a useful guide for other societies to engage in constructive dialogue about historical truth, justice, and reconciliation. 

Requirements include regular attendance and participation, short weekly responses (to be collected in a portfolio), and two short papers. This class fulfills the historical and second writing requirements. Counts towards the History and German Studies majors.

GETR 3372/HIEU 3372/RELJ 3372 (3) German Jewish Culture and History

5:00-6:15 TR

Mr. Finder and Mr. Grossman 

This course provides a wide-ranging exploration of the history and culture of German (-speaking) Jewry from 1750 to 1945 and beyond.  It focuses especially on the Jewish response to modernity in Central Europe, a response that proved highly productive, giving rise to a range of lasting transformations in Jewish life in Europe and later in North America, in particular, and in European society and culture, more generally. 

Until the mid-eighteenth century, Jewish self-definition was relatively stable. From that point on, it became increasingly contingent and open-ended.  Before the rise of Nazism in 1933, German Jewish life was characterized by a plethora of emerging possibilities. This course explores this vibrant and dynamic process of change and self-definition. It traces the emergence of new forms of Jewish experience, and it shows their unfolding in a series of lively and poignant dramas of tradition and transformation, division and integration, dreams and nightmares. The course seeks to grasp this world through the lenses of history and culture, and to explore the different ways in which these disciplines illuminate the past and provide potential insights into the present and future.

This course is intended to acquaint students with the study of German (-speaking) Jewish history and culture and assumes no prior training in the subject. Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion. Readings will be drawn from both primary and secondary literature. Represented in the primary reading will be central figures in the annals of German-speaking Jewry, including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Heinrich Heine, Arthur Schnitzler, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, and Inga Deutschkron.

GETR 3562 (3) New German Cinema

3:30-4:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden

In 1962, a group of young West German filmmakers at the Oberhausen Film Festival declared: “The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.” In a brief manifesto, important figures of what would come to be called the New German Cinema rejected the kitschy, formulaic filmmaking that had dominated West Germany after World War II. They and others who followed, such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Margarethe von Trotta produced a rich body of films during the 1960s and ‘70s that rehabilitated the image of German cinema internationally. In accomplishing this, the New German Cinema wrestled with questions that remain crucial to cultural production in a time of media transition: what are the formal and social possibilities of moving image media? How can one create something new in the face of entrenched economic and political interests? What alliances, institutions, or compromises are necessary?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Republic of Germany was democratic, prosperous, and seemingly stable—a set of conditions that had never been true of Germany since its foundation as a nation-state a century earlier. This was especially remarkable given the aftermath of WWII, which left major cities in ruins and brought to light unimaginable crimes. West Germany nonetheless found itself in the midst of a cultural upheaval, as various groups tested the limits of governmental institutions and civil society through new lifestyles, generational rebellion, political action, protest, and, sometimes, violence. In this context, film became a vehicle for remembering the past and challenging the present. Studying the New German Cinema will thus allow us to explore fundamental problems of art, historical memory, and politics.

GETR 3464 (3) Stories of Love and Adventure

3:30-4:45 TR

Mr. McDonald 

King Arthur, Joseph Campbell––and more! Trace the origin of the ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Star Trek, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Encounter the stories that inspired Richard Wagner's music. A multi-media course that follows heroes and heroines of medieval fiction through the stages of the heroic quest: the call to adventure, meeting the mentor, tests and trials, symbolic death and rebirth, the road back (to civilization), and the return to society with a boon. Among the stories read are ‘Parzival’ and ‘Tristan and Isolde.’   Grade based on active classroom discussion, oral reports, a mid-term paper,  content quizzes, and a creative concluding project. No textbook required.

Those choosing the Second Writing Requirement-option have a final written exercise.

GETR 3590 (3) Serial Media

12:30-1:45 TR

Mr. Schmid

Have you ever binge-watched a show on Netflix? Have you ever not been able to put down a book? You had to know what was going to happen in the next episode or the next chapter. In this class we will not only reflect on and analyze this experience, we will also investigate its history: the history of serial media. 

Over the past 20 years we have witnessed in a revolution in serial media: The medial possibilities made available through online streaming have inspired a trend away from the theater in favor of the laptop, and the primacy of feature length film has been upset by the advent of the so-called second golden age of television. Together we will explore the history of serial forms, particularly through its German tradition beginning with the 19^th century serial journal projects of the Romantics and culminating with the contemporary German Netflix show “Dark,” a show that, like the American hit “Stranger Things,” involves parallel dimensions and supernatural elements. Finally, with the help of the work of German intellectuals such as Paul Kammerer and Carl Gustav Jung, we will explore the connection between seriality and coincidence.

GETR 3590 (3) Fairy Tales

9:30-10:45 TR

Mr. Schmid 

In fairy tales, everything is possible: throw a frog against the wall, it may well turn out to be a prince in disguise; go visit your grandmother and you may realize that she has been eaten and replaced by a wolf; and if you have plans for the next hundred years, you better beware of being pricked by a spindle. Entering the world of fairy tales often feels like passing into an elaborate dream: it is a world teeming with sorcerers, dwarves, wondrous objects, and animals that speak. In this seminar, we focus on fairy tales and dream narratives from the romantic period into the present. Why did the Grimm brothers bother to collect fairy tales? What does all this have to do with Germany’s emergence as a nation? How does Disney depict the fairy tale in film? –  These are some of the questions that our seminar addresses. Authors to be discussed include: Goethe, the brothers Grimm, Bettelheim, Hoffmann, Freud, Saint-Exupéry, Tolkien, and others. Requirements include regular attendance, active participation, and short written assignments.

GETR 3590 (3) Course to be Announced

3:30-4:45 MW

TBA

GETR 3692/HIEU 3692 (3) The Holocaust

11:00-12:15 TR and 12:30-1:45 TR

Mr. Finder

In this course we study the encounter between the Third Reich and Europe’s Jews between 1933 and 1945. This encounter resulted in the deaths of almost 6 million Jews.  The course aims to clarify basic facts and explore competing explanations for the origins and unfolding of the Holocaust—in Hebrew, Shoah. We also explore survivors’ memories after the Holocaust, postwar Holocaust-related trials, and the universal implications of the Holocaust.

This course is intended to acquaint students with the historical study of the Holocaust and assumes no prior training in the subject.  We will read studies by important historians, including Saul Friedländer, Christopher Browning, and Peter Hayes, contemporary documents, and memoirs. Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion. Course requirements include three written assignments and conscientious participation in class discussion.

GETR 3710/ENGL 3560 (3) Kafka and His Doubles

11:00-12:15 TR

Ms. Martens

The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka:  stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables.  But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles":  the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition.  Thus:  Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka:  Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges.  Readings will center on four principal themes:  conflicts with others and the self (and Kafka's psychological vision);  the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals.  A seminar limited to 17 participants.   Requirements include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages) and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).

GETR 3720/ENGL 3559 (3) Freud and Literature

2:00-3:15 TR

Ms. Martens

In formulating his model of the psyche and his theory of psychoanalysis, Freud, a scientist with a vast humanistic education, availed himself of analogies drawn from various fields, including mechanics, optics, philosophy, politics--and not least, literature.  Freud textualized the human mind, turning the stories generated by its different levels into an object of analysis.  But if literature was formative for psychoanalysis, Freud's ideas in turn captured the imagination of many twentieth-century literary writers.  After introducing Freud's theories through a reading of his major works, including 

The Interpretation of Dreams, the course will turn to literary works by post-Freudian writers, including Kafka, Schnitzler, Breton, Lawrence, and Woolf, that engage with Freud's masterplot.

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.

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.

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

ENGL 3810 - History of Literatures in English I

Lecture:
MW 1100-1150 (Maury 209)
Instructors: Elizabeth Fowler

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ENLT 2530 - Studies in Global Literature

Section 001 - Globalization and World Literature
MWF 1200-1250 (New Cabell 364)
Instructor: Jordan Burke

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.

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!)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

CPLT 4998 - Fourth Year Thesis

Location and Time TBA
Instructor: Paul Cantor

GERM 1015/5015 (3) German for Reading Knowledge   

1:00 - 1:30 MWF

Ms. Schenberg

GERM 3000 (3)  Advanced German  

2:00 - 3:15 MW

Mr. Wellmon 

GERM 3290 (1) German Studies Round Table  

5:00-5:50 W

TBA

GERM 3300 (1) Language House Conversation  

TBA

TBA
 

For students residing in the German group in Shea House. May be taken more than once for credit. Departmental approval needed if considered for major credit. Prerequisite: instructor permission."

GERM 3559 (3)  Rediscovring the GDR (German Democratic Republic) through Literature, Art, and Film      

11:00 - 11:50 MWF 

Ms. Parker

GERM 3600 (3) Lyric Poetry: From Minnesang to Mic Drop

3:30 - 6:00  T   

Ms. Gutterman 

What role does poetry play in our lives—and what can you do with a poem? In this course, we’ll explore how German poetry has shaped and responded to the world, from medieval love songs to contemporary voices tackling migration, memory, and resistance.

We’ll read poets like Walther von der Vogelweide, Goethe, Brecht, Else Lasker-Schüler, May Ayim, and more, diving into themes of love, nature, animals, crisis, and personal experience. Along the way, you'll sharpen your reading and speaking skills through in-depth discussion and close reading—all in German.

This course is especially suited for students looking to expand their vocabulary, strengthen conversational fluency, and discover the power of poetry. Prerequisite GERM 3000. (If you haven’t taking GERM 3000 but are interested in the course, please email me!)

GERM 3559 (3) Contemporary Literature

10:00 - 10:50  MW    

Ms. Zuerner 

GETR 1559 (3) Fairy Tales

3:30 - 4:45  TR  

Mr. Schmid

GETR 3360 (3) The Art of Dreaming

3:30-4:45 MW 

Ms. Gutterman

What do our dreams mean—if anything? Are they just brain static, or windows into our deepest selves? In this course, we explore how dreams have fascinated thinkers for centuries. From Freud’s groundbreaking Interpretation of Dreams to dystopian fiction, political nightmares, surrealist films, and your own dream journal, we’ll examine how dreams shape and reflect human experience.

Texts include works by Descartes, Freud, Charlotte Beradt (“Dreams under Dictatorship”), Ursula Le Guin, and the anime film Paprika. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your skills in literary and cultural analysis, creative writing, and interdisciplinary thinking through vibrant discussions and hands-on activities.

GETR 3420 (3) German Intellectual History from Nietzche to the Present

3:30-4:45 MW 

Mr. Wellmon  

GETR 3462 (3) Neighbors and Enemies 

2:00 - 3:15 MW

Ms. Achilles

GETR 3464 (3) Medieval Stories of Love and Adventure

2:00-3:15 TR  Sec. 1

3:30-4:45 TR  Sec. 2 

Mr. McDonald 

An interactive course, involving reading, discussion, music, and art, that seeks, through selected stories of the medieval period, to shed light on institutions, themes, and customs. At the center is the Heroic Circle, a cycle with connections to folklore, the fairy tale, and Jungian psychology—all of which illuminate the human experience. Discover here the genesis of Arthurian film, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and more. All texts on Collab.

Second Writing Requirement

Cultures and Societies of the World

GETR 3472 (3) Hollywood Exile: German Filmmakers Flee Fascism  

12:30 - 1:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden

In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by Nazism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascism and reflecting on the trauma of forced migration these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S.. 

GETR 3559 (3) Refugees and the Holocaust  

 3:30 - 6:00 T

Mr. Grossman 

GETR 3559 (3) Body Horror: From Kafka to Cronenberg and Beyond 

 3:30 - 4:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden

This course explores the terrifying and thrilling experience of being (in) a body through the film genre of “body horror.” Beginning with early influences (Kafka, German expressionism), we will examine ‘80s classics (The Thing, The Fly) and more recent examples (The Skin I Live In, The Substance). Readings in psychoanalysis, disability studies, and gender studies will help us grapple with the question of what makes bodies so fascinatingly scary. 

GETR 3710 (3) Kafka and His Doubles

11:00 - 12:15 TR

Ms. Martens 

The course will introduce the enigmatic work of Franz Kafka: stories including "The Judgment," "The Metamorphosis," "A Country Doctor," "A Report to an Academy," "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; one of his three unpublished novels (The Trial); the Letter to His Father; and some short parables. But we will also look at Kafka's "doubles": the literary tradition he works with and the way in which he, in turn, forms literary tradition. Thus: Kafka: Cervantes, Kafka: Bible, Kafka: Aesop, Kafka: Dostoevsky, Kafka: Melville; Kafka: O'Connor, Kafka: Singer; Kafka: Calvino, Kafka: Borges. Readings will center on four principal themes: conflicts with others and the self (and Kafka's psychological vision); the double; the play with paradox and infinity; and artists and animals. A seminar limited to 20 participants. Requirements include a short midterm paper (5-7 pages) and a longer final paper (10-12 pages).

GETR 3780 (3) Memory Speaks 

2:00 - 3:15 TR

Mr. Martens

Memory is a crucial human faculty. Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human. Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self. Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future. Remembering has its delights. Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate. Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium. Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control. It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes. Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive. It is demonstrably suggestible. It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives). We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras. We will also study two films on the theme of memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out. Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory. Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well.

Two short papers, presentations, exam.

GETR 4559 (3) Faust

2:00 - 3:15 MW

Mr. Grossman