Winter 2016 Courses

English Courses

ENG 107 WORLD LITERATURE

Instructor: Katya Amato

We have become citizens of the world of literature, and that means we have a library that is vast and varied. Focusing on epic tales, we will taste exotic flavors this term: Mesopotamian, Hindu, Old English, Spanish, and Chinese. These are hero stories, originally oral, written down by poets and scribes who shaped them into master narratives. We will meet gods and goddesses, demigods, demons, giants, monsters, fairies, dragons, emperors, kings, and the delightful Monkey, star of the most popular book in the history of the Far East.

The required editions/translations we will use have been ordered through the PSU Bookstore and are listed there, but for convenience here they are:

Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell (NY: Atria, 2013)
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney in a bilingual edition (NY: W. W. Norton, 2000)
The Poem of the Cid, translated by Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry in a bilingual edition (London: Penguin, 1975)
The Ramayana, translated by R. K. Narayan (London: Penguin, 2006)
Monkey, by Wu Ch'eng-en, translated by Arthur Waley (NY: Grove Press, 1984)

ENG 201 SHAKESPEARE

Instructor: John Smyth

We will read A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tempest, as well as several Sonnets. Main requirements are a mid-term and a final paper, plus an in-class presentation. Some secondary readings will also be required.

ENG 205 SURVEY OF ENGLISH LIT II

Instructor: TBD

ENG 254 SURVEY OF AMER LIT

Instructor: Sarah Ensor

In this course, we will read American Literature from the Civil War to the present with an emphasis on matters of temporality. As we study a young nation trying to make sense of what it means to have a (violent, fraught, and complex) history, we will confront the complicated dialectic between tradition and custom, on the one hand, and ferment and innovation, on the other. The texts we read will engage these dialectics – and their related questions of race, gender, class, and nationalism – both thematically and formally; one of our main concerns will involve how these works play structurally with time in the way they unfold. Some of the questions that will concern us along the way include: How do forms of collective memory (and collective amnesia) help to constitute America – and Americanness – in these years? How do technological developments, the rise of industrialization, and shifting patterns of population affect how Americans experience and understand the passage of time? What does it mean when American writers look backward? And what emotions do they (and we) feel when – at various moments, from various junctures, and in various voices – they look ahead? How is community defined – and performed – by writers of this period? Relatedly, how are questions of national and literary tradition embroiled in questions of identity, (in)equality, and power? Who determines, in other words, which stories matter, and which stories are told? As we discuss such questions, we will also develop and practice the skills necessary for effective literary analysis.

Required Texts:

Norton Anthology of American Literature (Eighth Edition): Package Two, Volumes C, D, and E
ISBN-13: 978-0393913101
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
ISBN-13: 978-1559362313

ENG 260 INTRO TO WOMEN’S LIT

Instructor: Maria Depriest

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

Maya Angelou

ENG 260 is a fully online course.

Our Introduction to American Women Writers course begins with the assumption that reading literature is also a process of reading history. The texts we will study were, have been and are being written during periods of great change, not only in the circumstances of women’s lives but also in the creative forms developed to express those changes. We will keep a close eye on the relationships between history and creative expression. We will also identify the precise uses of language summoned to illuminate what is irrepressible and outrageous: laughter, dreams, pleasures, and love.

These texts are not available at the PSU Bookstore. All are available on Amazon or at our local bookstores: Powell’s, In Other Words, Barnes & Noble, and others

Texts:

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Emily Dickinson, selected poems, to be assigned online on the first day of class
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. Please buy an edition of the play itself, NOT The Un-filmed Original Screenplay
Winona La Duke, The Winona La Duke Reader
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Please buy the version with the red cover—it is cheaper.)

Course Goals:

Practice interpretations of literary texts based on close reading.
Discuss the relationship between literature and cultural context of the times.
Use many kinds of writing from informal to formal to construct ideas and arguments.

ENG 300-002 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Michael Clark

ENG 300-005 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

"There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism"

—Walter Benjamin, 1940

The course provides a rigorous introduction to the methods, approaches and questions necessary for advanced scholarly work in English, including close reading, historicism, research and argument: consider it boot camp for English majors! This is not a survey of theoretical perspectives, though we will read and discuss some important examples of literary theory along the way. Rather, the class prepares you for upper-division scholarship by asking what it is that we “do” as readers and critics—what English is “for,” why literature matters, and how encounters with the strangeness of literary language reflect and model other sorts of strange encounters. A careful reading of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians serves as a basis for our broader consideration of the ethical and political significance of reading, interpretation, and translation; we will also put the novel in dialogue with other works of literature, including Camus’s “The Guest”; Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; Kafka’s In the Penal Colony; DH Lawrence, “Snake”; and Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians; along with theoretical perspectives from Derek Attridge, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and others. As a Writing Intensive Class (WIC), the course will also focus on the strategies, conventions and techniques of scholarly writing. Reading and responding to other students’ work; drafting, revising and polishing written assignments in response to feedback; and improving grammar, style, clarity and argument will all form part of your work in the class.

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (978-0143116929)
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (978-0140246841)
The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th Edition (860-1200663914)

ENG 300-007 WIC: INTRO TO ENGLISH MAJOR

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

The late Texan comedian Bill Hicks used to tell a joke about the time he was in a waffle house quietly reading a book, when a waitress asked him, “What you reading for?” Hicks responded, “Well I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but the main one is so I don’t end up being a waffle waitress.” This course is built on the assumption that the waffle waitress is asking a very good question. And the aim of the course is to help students come up with a better answer to the question than the one Hicks offers. It introduces you to the fundamental skill-set required of university students of literature. The official objectives of the course are:

1) to improve your ability to examine the literary and rhetorical dimensions of texts through developing close reading skills, including the ability to analyze relationships between form and meaning, identify interpretive questions, look for ways that texts attempt to invite or preclude certain readings, and explain multiple levels of meaning;

2) to introduce you to archival research methods in the field, including how to locate, interpret, and cite critical sources;

3) to familiarize you with some major critical theories used in textual study;

4) to help you compose effective and elegant interpretative essays and learn techniques of argumentation specific to the discipline;

5) to prepare you for 400-level English courses.

Required books:

Jonathan Culler. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. [ISBN 9780199691340]
M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. [ISBN 9781285465067]
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle. This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. London: Routledge, 2015. [ISBN 9781408254011]
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin Classics, 2007. [ISBN 9780141441672]

ENG 301U TOPICS: SHAKESPEARE TRAGEDIES

Instructor: Johnathan Walker

ENG 304 CRITICAL THEORY OF CINEMA

Instructor: TBD

ENG 305U-001 TOP IN FILM: IMAGINARIUM

Instructor: William Bohnaker

(Film, Popular Culture)

If, as Shakespeare suggested, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, movies are such dreams. In this course we will concern ourselves with films that brood on the peculiar nature irreal worlds–“imaginariums”—which dramatize the social structures, cultural presumptions, psychic patterns, and spiritual intuitions that are the warp and weft of our consciousness. We’ll expose ourselves to films fixated on an imaginarium, while we endeavor for an alertness to its effects to make some sense of the imaginary's role in “reality,” and what it means to be such stuff as dreams are made on. For our investigations, we’ll hope to get a little help from our friends in critical theory, film studies, and post-Jungian archetypal analysis. As important, we’ll bring our own imaginations.

ENG 305U-002 TOP IN FILM: WAR CULTURE

Instructor: William Bohnaker

(Film, Popular Culture, American Studies)

Almost everyone hates war, yet it remains, perpetually, one of the few constants in human behavior. War, despite our fervent hopes and efforts, is quintessentially human. In this course we will examine cinematic and other representations of war, not as battle, but as culture, seeking to understand the causes and consequences of this elemental social practice. The course will place special emphasis on the analytical strategies of cultural studies.

ENG 306U TOP: POSTMOD POP CULT

Instructor: William Bohnaker

(Popular Culture, American Studies)

Hey, whatever happened to High Culture, Western Civilization, Humanism, Reason and Truth, Marx/or Market, patriarchy, identity, the autonomous person, fixed gender, not to mention the unique work of art and the individual artist-creator? Where did Reality go (wrong)? How did Meaning lose its meaning? Is PoMo just a cheap drive-by shooting at Modernism, or is PoMo a genuine, bona fide Paradigm Shift? We'll investigate the postmodern condition for its causes and consequences, transgressing our way through places we don't belong (politics, economics, architecture, art, music), trying to win the frigid heart of theory, and interviewing PoMo's (dysfunctional?) family: post-structuralism, post-industrialism, post-Fordism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, post-ideology, post-nation state, and the family fanatic, The End of History. We'll look directly into the blinding light of PoMo's Big Bang, then examine its radiation burns on the body of popular culture (movies, TV, ads, MTV, WorldWideWeb, pop manuals). After PoMoPop, you will be a better person.

ENG 307U SCIENCE FICTION: CONTACT

Instructor: William Knight

(This course counts toward the English major Elective Requirements (Group E) as well as University Studies Cluster credit)

This course will survey the genre of science fiction through one of its most powerful and noteworthy modes: contact. We’ll look at some of the most important SF novels of (first) contact, thinking carefully about the variety of crises that these stories link to moments of encounter between mutually foreign beings, cultures, and technologies. Contact often means real crisis in science fiction, a powerful and unrepeatable moment of engagement that throws everything into a new light. It divides the present from the past, periodizing the emergence of a new moment that can never return to identity with the old. Contact is a paradigmatic narrative event, an eruption or arrival that creates crisis out of what will have been a mundane normalcy, revolution from what becomes tagged as an ancien regime.

Science fiction allows us imaginative access to the most unexpected and transformative experiences of contact— as well as to the various fantasies of autonomy, power, and domination that can capture moments of contact in their own narratives; we will wonder, among other things, why narratives of contact tend in their way towards masculine (as well as Eurocentric or American) norms and perspectives. In so many ways first contact in SF allows—or requires—us to address the role and question of the other: the “alien,” the stranger, the outsider who arrives at our door. We’ll uncover and examine the crises, responses, and responsibilities that accompany contact in these novels. And we’ll reach toward our own theories about the function and significance of contact in science fiction narratives. Above all, we’ll do this by reading some really exemplary SF novels and looking (in presentations) outward to other works (films, tv, other novels) that tell further tales of SF contact, other encounters with the unanticipated and unknown that threaten to turn everything upside down or inside out.

Assignments: group presentations, two papers, occasional short writing

Texts

Lem. Solaris. ISBN: 978-0156027601
Clarke. Rendezvous With Rama. ISBN: 978-0553287899
Sagan. Contact. ISBN: 978-0671004101
Leguin. The Left Hand of Darkness. ISBN: 978-0441007318
Card. Ender’s Game. ISBN: 978-0812550702
Watts. Blindsight. ISBN: 978-0765319647

ENG 316 THE SHORT STORY

Instructor: Maria Depriest

“She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.”

Salman Rushdie, “On Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber”

Short stories often reveal a paradox in that readers experience both what is completely unexpected and what is completely inevitable. English 316 proposes to find out what our short story writers push us to feel and see on a continuum that ranges from despair to hope, from resignation to promise, and to evaluate and discuss the history and narrative strategies of the genre. We will also examine how in the wide world the art of the short story works to fulfill its obligations to truth and pleasure.

ENG 316 is a hybrid course. That means we will meet in class on M/W. On Fridays, we will meet online for discussions and posts/replies.

Required Texts:Ann Charters, Ed. The Short Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Shorter Compact 7th edition

This text is not available at the PSU bookstore. It is available on Amazon for a very reasonable price. ~please buy the Shorter Compact 7th edition if possible.

Requirements:

Response Papers—2 per week
Canvas posts/replies each Friday
Presentations/Critical Roundtable
Midterm/Final Take-home Essays

ENG 318U THE BIBLE AS LIT

Instructor: W. Tracy DIllon

Looking for epic reading this winter? Heroes wrestling angels and monsters? Witches and wizards? Ghosts? Giants? The Walking Dead? Nations at war for their survival? Love poetry? In ENG 318U: Bible as Literature, we will examine what’s “literary” about the King James Bible, a wellhead for global traditions. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament stories, Psalms, prophecies, and proverbs and the Christian New Testament’s tenets of love and obedience have shaped social, cultural, political, environmental, and gender norms throughout the last several millennia. It is unsurprising, then, that much of the Western world’s arts and letters have also been inspired by or created in response to these sacred texts. This course examines the narratives (stories) of the Bible from a literary perspective. We will explore literary interpretation of the Bible, but acknowledge the work as a text that has had consequences far beyond literature.

In addition to being an important elective for English majors, ENG 318 counts toward the University Studies sophomore cluster “Interpreting the Past.” Questions? Contact Professor Tracy Dillon at dillont@pdx.edu

ENG 319U NORTH EUROPEAN MYTH

Instructor: Katya Amato

Come to Valhalla, the Spring of Mimir, the Lands of the Giants and of the Dark and Light Elves, and then travel south to the Celtic Otherworlds of Wales and Ireland before embarking on a mythic journey across America. We will immerse ourselves in Norse and Celtic mythologies collected and redacted in medieval Iceland, Wales, and Ireland and then see the myths at play in a contemporary text by Neil Gaiman.

Requirements include regular attendance, keeping up with the reading, a short paper, and the usual exams. The required translations/editions below are reasonably priced and available at the PSU Bookstore:

Jesse L. Byock, trans., The Saga of the Volsungs
Anthony Faulkes, trans. Edda by Snorri Sturluson
Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda
Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Tain
Jeffrey Gantz, trans., Early Irish Myths and Sagas
Patrick K. Ford, trans., The Mabinogi and other Medieval Welsh Tales
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

ENG 335U TOP: LITERATURE AND FILM: MELODRAMA, RACE, AND AUTHENTICITY

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

The melodrama—a genre of heightened emotional extremes, irrational climaxes, and sweeping gestures—has saturated contemporary popular culture; in so doing, it has found itself intervening into questions of race, nation, and culture. Melodramas, often called "weepies" or "tear-jerkers," have an exaggerated emotional intensity that makes them powerfully gripping and grotesquely unrealistic.

This course will examine melodramatic films and novels that tackle the political, cultural, and emotional complexities of race. Sentiment can be both deceiving as a way of understanding our past, and useful as a catalyst for social change. Thus, even as we remain suspicious of the melodrama's exaggerated artificiality, we will see how the genre sheds both light and heat on various issues of race and nation: "passing" and belonging, inequality and difference, authenticity and performance.

We will look both at examples of melodrama that explore these issues (Uncle Tom's Cabin, Birth of a Nation, Within Our Gates, The King and I, Gone with the Wind, The Imitation of Life, Q&A, Slumdog Millionaire), and at texts, such as Nella Larsen's novel Passing and John Cassavetes's film Shadows, whose treatments of race work against the grain of melodramatic tropes and clichés.

This course satisfies the Popular Culture cluster requirement, one purpose of which is "to gain control of, rather than being controlled by, the texts of popular culture." This course aims to develop critical responses to forms of expression that manipulate our raw emotional reflexes.

341U RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Instructor: Jessie Nance

ENG 352U AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT

Instructor: Maude Hines

This course is an introduction to African American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginnings of the “Black Arts” movement. It is the second in a three-part survey of African American literature. In addition to short stories, poetry, and novels, we will look at essays, journals, autobiographies, audio-recordings, fine art, photography, and performance. Students will have an active role in the class: after the first week, the classes will rely heavily on student presentations; as often as possible, these will generate class conversations.

This course fills the Group B requirement for the English major and the American Identities cluster requirement for non-majors.

ENG 360U AMERICAN LIT TO 1865

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi

This course surveys major genres and writers of the Anglo-American tradition, from Puritan settlement in New England through the Civil War. Focusing on material written before 1800, we will read the literary history of this period in relation to social and political history to examine the conflicts that shaped--and continue to define--American culture and what it means to be American. We will focus on close and careful readings of the material as we consider questions of race, gender, class or rank, religion, and region and their relation to literary representations of nation, citizenship, and personhood. This course fills the pre-1800 (Group C) requirement for the English major and the American Studies cluster requirement for non-majors.

REQUIRED BOOKS (available at PSU Bookstore)

Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Bedford)
Henry Louis Gates, ed. Classic Slave Narratives (Signet)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Dover)
Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Oxford)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (Penguin)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (Penguin)
Herman Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno (Dover)

ENG 365U AMERICAN FICTION II

Instructor: Arthur Paulson

ENG 367U-001 TOP: AMERICAN GOTHIC LIT

Instructor: Hildy Miller

Gothic literature is positioned right on the boundaries between reason and madness, mind and spirit, self and Other, natural and supernatural. Always, it reflects what haunts us in some way—and what haunts American culture. In this course we will read as widely as we can through two centuries of Gothic novels, short stories, and poetry and we’ll watch several films along the way in an effort to define for ourselves the components of the American Gothic tradition. We’ll consider the conventions, theories, and techniques of this genre and the fears and anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, urban and rural spaces, the unconscious and dreams, and death itself from both psychoanalytic and cultural perspectives.

ENG 367U-002 TOP: AMERICAN LIT & CULTURE

Instructor: Limbu Bishupal

ENG 371 THE NOVEL

Instructor: John Smyth

We will read a selection of European fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Kafka, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and Svevo, as well as commentaries by Roland Barthes and Rene Girard. The main requirements for the class are a mid-tern and a final paper, plus an in-class presentation.

ENG 372U TOP: BODIES, POWER, & PLACES

Instructor: Sara McWilliams

ENG 373 TOP: JEWISH LIT OF ARAB WORLD

Instructor: Michael Weingrad

ENG 385 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Instructor: Susan Reese

This will be AMAZING; it will be rich and exciting, so please join me. We’re going to be focusing on works that will prompt discussion of cosmopolitanism and its implications in our lives as we read and discuss The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and 2666 by Eduardo Bolanos, three of my favorite books due to the breadth and depth of what is undertaken within them and for the fresh gazes they provide. I can’t wait to get started.

Important: This course counts in B or E of the English Major.

ENG 399-001 SPST: DIGITAL GENRE

Instructor: Kathi Berens

We do cultural, interface and literary analysis of three genres of digital-born work. We begin with video games, using the textbook Understanding Video Games and canvasing a wide array of games to understand the mechanics, rules, aesthetics and cultural implications of game play. We move into electronic literature, literary experiences humans and computer collaborate to make. We’ll talk about how such work connects with the literary canon of print-based works. We end with net art, which is often conceptual and contestatory. We are likely to make at least one collaborative artwork ourselves and document the process so we can analyze how making digital art gives us a new critical purchase on criticism and scholarly writing.

ENG 399-002 SPST: COMICS HISTORY

Instructor: Diana Schutz

ENG 407H SEM: MODRNTY, CAPTLSM, SLVRY

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

This course will focus on how we remember and narrate histories of slavery and slave revolts. We will do this as a way of thinking deeply and critically about the meaning of freedom. We will not seek to be exhaustive, but rather examine a selection of texts that provoke some of the most important questions about freedom that have been and are being posed by artists, writers, and scholars of slavery and colonialism within black and postcolonial studies.

Required texts will include:

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment
Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

ENG 410 TOP: THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

Instructor: Michael McGregor

Biographies—the stories of people’s lives—are an under-appreciated part of our literary heritage. Yet much of our thinking about authors and what shaped their works comes through what others have written about them. And many biographies are literary landmarks in their own right.

In this class we’ll explore the history of biography, focusing primarily on how it has influenced writing about authors in modern times. Starting with the mythological origins of early biographical writing and representative samples from Greek and Roma writers, we’ll move forward through medieval hagiographies, Giorgio Vasari’s influential Lives of the Artists, James Boswell’s groundbreaking Life of Johnson (and Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets) to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and the foundations of 20th and 21st century thinking about biography.

Along the way, we’ll look critically at different theories about how biographies should be written; compare the writing of biographies to the writing of autobiographies; and consider the many difficulties inherent in creating an accurate portrait of another person. We’ll also consider contemporary approaches to biography and ways in which authors such as Virginia Woolf and Julian Barnes have used fiction to question the assumptions governing biographical writing.

ENG 414 CONTEMP COMP THEORY

Instructor: Greg Jacob

This course begins with the roots of modern writing instruction that dates back, for the most part, to nineteenth-century rhetorics. Current-Traditional rhetoric was the mainstay of composition theory for decades, but beginning with the process movement led by Murray, Gibson, and Elbow composition theory has gone through a variety of approaches to the teaching of writing. The composition pedagogies from process to critical explore the rich complexity of the field.

ENG 421 AFRICAN FICITON

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

This class will undertake a survey of twentieth- and twenty-first century African fiction, exploring the historical development of the African novel and other fictional forms along with the divergent geographical, political, cultural, environmental and generic contexts that shape literary production on the continent. Alongside canonical texts by some of the most famous writers of African fiction, the course will consider the influence of “popular” modes of writing and reading, from oral epics and self-help manuals to contemporary scifi, on the novel form. We will focus on questions of genre to investigate how forms like the epic, “pulp” fiction, detective stories, sci-fi, the Bildungsroman, graphic novels, and others frame African experience in different ways. Fiction writers’ engagement with colonialism and its aftermath, the politics of gender and sexuality, class struggle, language, tradition and modernity, and the environment will form intellectual touchstones throughout. Course expectations include enthusiastic preparation and participation; presentations; two papers; and online journal posts for graduate students.

Required books:

Abouet, Aya: Life in Yop City (978-1770460829)
Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (978-0435905408)
Coetzee, Disgrace (978-0143115281)
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (978-0954702335)
Ngugi, Petals of Blood (978-0143039174)
Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (978-1405849425)
Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (978-0802133632)

ENG 426 ADV TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL LIT

Instructor: Christine Rose

This course considers some significant works in the corpus of Early Medieval Literature from c. 800-1350: Anglo-Saxon works, early Middle English, and continental vernacular and Latin medieval works. We will examine the works in their literary and historical contexts and discuss the interpretive possibilities inherent in the texts and the exegetical reading model. The works are in the older dialects of English (Old English, Early Middle English) and because of the tri-lingual nature of English culture some are in Old French or Latin. One is Italian (Dante), but crucial for students of English lit to know. We will encounter most of the material in good modern translations, although students will have some opportunity to learn to read Old and Early Middle English. Format is both lecture and discussion, with students taking active responsibility for interpreting the texts. Our concerns lie not only with “literary” issues such as genre, imagery, pattern, audience, poetics, sources and structure, but also with issues of how class, gender, or ideology inform the works. Outside readings and the lectures contextualize the literature in terms of literary theory, iconography, history, the manuscript matrix and medieval culture to enrich the discussions and papers.

**Prerequisite: ENG 300; 204 or 340 are excellent backgrounds

[N.B. Fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for Graduate students and for the undergraduate major]

Some of the texts [complete list available by 12/1/2015]:

Beowulf. Howell D. Chickering Jr. (trans. and ed.) (Anchor, Doubleday) isbn= 0-38506213-3
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Penguin) isbn= 014044565X
R. Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Faber and Faber Press) isbn= 9780571228362 (used edition OK isbn=0571087655)
The Owl and the Nightingale (Penguin) isbn= 0140442456
Dante, La Vita Nuova (Rossetti translation; NYRB Classics). isbn= 1590170113
Marie de France, Fables (Toronto/MART) isbn= 080207636-x
Andreas Cappellanus The Art of Courtly Love (Columbia UP) isbn= 9780231073059
Staines, David, ed. The Complete Romances of Chretien De Troyes; ISBN: 0253207878 (Indiana)
Ancrene Wisse
Havelock the Dane
Pearl, trans. Marie Boroff. (Norton) isbn 0393976580Pearl, trans. Marie Boroff. (Norton) isbn 0393976580

ENG 445 AMER WOMEN WRITERS: 19TH C

Instructor: Elisabeth Ceppi

This course surveys novels, short stories, poetry, autobiography, and essays written by women between 1797-1900 that raise complex questions about the meaning and experience of womanhood and authorship across lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and region. We will focus on close and careful readings of the texts themselves as we consider the relationship between literary and rhetorical form (including the aesthetics of sentimentalism, romanticism, and realism) and broader themes and contexts, including labor and industrialization; slavery; domesticity and marriage; social reform; publicity and privacy; and the professionalization and gendering of authorship itself. Selected works of criticism will help us theorize and historicize these texts and issues.

Required Novels and Autobiographies

Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (Oxford)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (Penguin)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Penguin)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover)
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (CUNY Feminist Press)
Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (Penguin)

Additional readings may include poems, stories, and nonfiction by Emily Dickinson, Frances E.W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, Zitkala-Sa, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, Lydia Maria Child, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Fuller, and Fanny Fern.

ENG 448 MJR FIGURES: JOYCE

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

An in-depth study of Joyce's Ulysses, using The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a springboard into his later work. This is no ordinary novel, and I imagine will be no ordinary class. A fuller description can be found at the course Wiki page, which we will use for our work throughout the winter quarter: https://psulysses-w2016.wikispaces.com/ .

ENG 458 ADV TOP: ROMANTICISM, OR ZOOPOETICS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

Given the Romantics’ reputation for expressing their feelings about the natural world, it’s hardly a surprise that a variety of animals, in addition to any number of trees, rivers, winds, and mountains, populate their poems. Just how significant animals are to Romanticism, though, is likely to surprise its biggest fans, fiercest critics, and best readers. It’s not so much that there are a lot of animals in Romantic literature—though birds abound, especially nightingales, skylarks, and one noteworthy albatross. Out of all disproportion with the size of their population in poems, animals render readable the fundamental ambitions, methods, and predicaments of Romantic poetics. Romanticism, runs the hypothesis of this course, is a poetics of the animal, a zoopoetics.

The course will test out this hypothesis by considering how animals manifest themselves in Romantic literature at the level of both theme and form. At its most basic, this will mean looking closely at texts which features animals as images, which will include several apes, owls, mice, cats, and dogs, as well as the occasional donkey, spider, chameleon, tiger, lamb, hedgehog, badger, and raven. But we will also ask how animals provide an occasion for the poetic act itself. Why are there so many Romantic poems addressed to animals? What makes animal apostrophe a paradigmatic or unique form of lyric voice? And why do the Romantics liken poets, especially in the act of composition, to various sorts of animals? Does this mean animals can write poetry? And why are so many poems and the occasional novel figured as animals?

Bearing in mind how fundamentally the agricultural, industrial, and political revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reorganized the economy of relations between human beings and animals, we will also attend to the ethical and political dimensions of zoopoetics. How might political questions of life and death hinge on the structure of zoopoetic figures? What does zoopoetics reveals about the ways the biopolitical project to “make live and let die” (as Foucault described it) touches the lives of the creatures with whom human beings share the earth? How do animals trouble the limits of political community for many Romantic writers? And why were many Romantic writers vegetarians?

Readings will include (mostly) British Romantic-period literature: one novel, some essays and letters, and a whole lot of poems by, among others, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Anna Barbauld, Robert Burns, Charles Lamb. It will also include post-Romantic practitioners of zoopoetics, such as Wallace Stevens and Christian Bök. We will also take in selections in critical theory by Cary Wolfe, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Barbara Johnson, and Jacques Rancière.

Assignments and readings will differ for undergraduate and graduate students.

Required books:

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Longman Cultural Edition. New York: Pearson, 2007. [ISBN 978-0321399533]
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Peter Manning and Susan Wolfson, eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2011. [or some equivalent anthology]

ENG 464 ADV TOP: CATHER/READING QUEERLY

Instructor: Sarah Ensor

What does queer theory look like when it has an object – namely, a literary text – in its sights? How can the theoretical insights and critical claims of such scholars as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick inform literary technique and readerly practice? In this course, we will ask what it means to read queerly and, relatedly, what makes a text queer. Is reading (or writing) queerly a matter of theme? Of form? Of style? Of the writer’s biography? Of the characters’ habits of relation?

We will begin to answer these questions (while undoubtedly raising many others) by reading a series of texts by the American writer Willa Cather, whose oblique and complicated relationship to her characters’ – and her own – sexuality has made her work a favorite object of attention among queer theorists, even those who don’t customarily turn their attention to American literature. We will read Cather novels, short stories, and essays alongside variously queer interpretations of them, developing our own practice of “queer reading” by attending closely both to Cather’s own topics, style, and form and to the various ways in which these aspects of her writing have been engaged by queer scholars. As we proceed, we will also trace the forms of community forged between and among queer critics, considering how works of criticism respond not only to the tenets of queer theory, and not only to Cather’s writing, but also to one another. To what extent is literary criticism fundamentally a social practice? And how might we understand the forms of indirect or triangulated relation that these critics forge with each other by way of their shared engagement with Cather as themselves being quintessentially queer?

ENG 467 AMER LIT & CULTURE: CRIME

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

This course will examine the obsession with crime in American fiction and the popular imagination. What are the roots of this obsession? How does it manifest itself within genre and narrative form? What kinds of anxieties does it express? How has this obsession been harnessed towards various political and economic ends? In particular, we will explore the complex relation between contesting ideologies of crime that pervade American cultural production and the class struggle that Karl Marx understood as the motor-force of capitalism. Is it the destiny of crime fiction to serve conservative and reactionary aims by representing threats to the social body; to organize cross-class consensuses based on social and political exclusion of the exploited and disposable; to buttress the interests of capitalist exploitation of racialized class differences? Or is there a radical and critical edge to certain iterations of the genre? We will read a selection of American crime literature and film (including the films Dirty Harry and Touch of Evil). To what extent can American crime fiction help us rethink the relationship between our understandings of crime and the modern histories of violence against the indigenous, non-citizens, slaves, prisoners, and others thought of as enemies of the state?

Texts will include:

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

ENG 487 CONTEMP AM SHORT STORY

Instructor: Maude Hines

This course surveys contemporary American short stories in their cultural and historical contexts, exploring theories about the short story genre.

From the anthology we will be using (Best of Times, Worst of Times, NYU Press): Late twentieth and early twenty-first century America has been labeled as 'The New Gilded Age,' a phrase that embodies the glitz and glamour of one of the wealthiest countries in the world but also suggests the greed, corruption, and inequalities teeming just below the surface. Identifying some of the sparkling moments of humanity interwoven between the moments of crisis, Best of Times, Worst of Times features short stories by such renowned writers as Junot Diaz, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff, and many others, whose distinctive authorial voices lend urgency and a sense of heightened awareness to the modern moment. Commenting on and making sense of what is going on in America today, fractured as it is by two ongoing wars, the aftermath of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, these stories speak to some of the most germane issues confronting America today, from race relations, immigration, and social class to gender issues, Iraq, and imperialism. These expertly culled, emotionally powerful stories provide the perfect mirror with which to examine the real state of the union.

ENG 488 CONTEMP AMER POETRY

Instructor: Joel Bettridge

This class will focus on American poetry published during the last five to ten years. Given the fact that such a timeframe still does not sufficiently narrow our field of study, we will examine work that explicitly marks itself as, or tends toward, the “experimental.” At the same time, we will take an expansive and critical approach to that framework, looking at poetry that places itself explicitly in the avant-garde tradition as well as poetry that concerns itself with matters of politics, race, ecology and lyric form.

ENG 490 ADV TOP: WAYS OF KNOWING/WRITING

Instructor: Hildy Miller

Are you interested in learning more about yourself as a writer? This course will provide you with many (almost daily!) opportunities to be introspective. From personality studies to the dreaded writer’s block, we’ll consider a variety of ways of knowing and writing. Andrea Lunsford once said of early studies into thinking processes and writing, that they affirmed what composition teachers have always intuited—that what we were teaching students to do encompassed far more than how to arrange words on a page. Indeed, you might say, thinking IS writing.

But what kinds of thinking should we include in this sweeping statement? This course will explore that question as we consider multiple ways of knowing: nondirected or intuitive and unconscious knowing; imagistic and metaphoric knowing; directed or rationalist and conscious knowing; imagistic and metaphoric knowing; models of intellectual development in which knowing isn’t static but ever-changing; connections between language and healing that extend all the way back in rhetorical history to Gorgias; emotions, as valid a way to know as what we think of as rational intellect; and the writer’s personality and cognitive style, for we know we can never divorce the writer from the writing. All these ways of knowing affect our understanding of writing and the teaching of writing. Most of all, this is a course for learning about yourself as a writer, so be as introspective as you’d like!

ENG 492 HST LITERARY CRIT & THRY II

Instructor: Bishupal Limbu

ENG 507 SEM: PICARESQUE

Instructor: William Knight

What is the theory of the self or subject (and the accompanying relation to world) that emerges from picaresque novel across the span of modernity? This course will investigate the narrative strategies of novels that self-consciously mark themselves as part of a picaresque tradition across a range of national and historical literary modes. Picaresque novels chronicle tales of the *picaro* or *picara*, a wandering outcast who, in his or her many forms lives in intimate contact with indigence, crime, amorality, decadence, and violence. The literature of the picaresque is a literature of precarious life, providing readers with narrative exposure to the difficult role assigned for the poor, criminal, or outcast. Often this exposure comes in the form of “adventure”—the reader’s vicarious experience of hunger, survival, wandering, violence, and crime is, for the mild-mannered member of civil society, perhaps thrilling and ecstatically pleasurable. But often this exposure is far more difficult and ambivalent, a glimpse at something like the animal life implicit within human existence that disturbs and renders bourgeois normalcy itself uncanny.

We’ll try to propose theories of the power and operation of these narratives, attempting to explain their function in social life and the significance and effects of their various treatments of exile, anomie, poverty, power, hunger, and survival. We’ll also ask how picaresque narration can limit, constrain, or, alternatively, explode our conceptions of identity: does picaresque narrative perform culturally conserving functions or does picaresque narrative encourage the imagining of what we might call a *queer* narration of the self, a narrative mode marked by refusal or difference? Alongside our efforts to ask what the picaresque generic mode *does*, we’ll also ask whether recent theories and accounts of the rise of “neoliberalism” (Foucault, Brown, Butler) interact in narrative ways with the picaresque genre. Does the picaresque subject coincide with the subject imagined by theorists (or narrators) of neoliberalism? Is the picaresque a narrative mode that maps onto neoliberal political and economic subjectivity, a way of telling stories that makes sense within the cognitive map proposed by political and economic necessity in our time? Or does the picaresque provide an image of the subject now abandoned by changes in economic and political reason, foreign to our moment or standing apart as a counternarrative mode that thinks individuality, being-in-the-world, narrative form, and social attachments *otherwise*?

Assignments: presentation, final research paper, occasional short responses

Required Texts:

Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin) ISBN: 978-0140449006
Defoe. Moll Flanders (Oxford University Press) ISBN: 978-0192805355
Fielding. Jonathan Wild (Oxford University Press) ISBN: 978-0199549757
Beckett. Molloy. Grove Press, 1994. ISBN: 978-0802151360
Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oxford U. Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0199536559
Ellison. Invisible Man. Vintage, 1995. ISBN: 978-0679732761
Coetzee. Life and Times of Michael K. Penguin, 1985. ISBN: 978-0140074482
Sinha. Animal’s People. Simon & Schuster, 2009. ISBN: 978-1416578796"

ENG 514 CONTEMP COMP THEORY

Instructor: Greg Jacob

ENG 518 COLLEGE COMP TEACHING

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

ENG 519 ADV COLLEGE COMP TEACHING

Instructor: Susan Kirtley

ENG 521 AFRICAN FICTION

Instructor: Sarah Lincoln

Required books:

Abouet, Aya: Life in Yop City (978-1770460829)
Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born (978-0435905408)
Coetzee, Disgrace (978-0143115281)
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (978-0954702335)
Ngugi, Petals of Blood (978-0143039174)
Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (978-1405849425)
Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (978-0802133632)

ENG 526 ADV TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL LIT

Instructor: Christine Rose

**Prerequisite: ENG 300; 204 or 340 are excellent backgrounds

[N.B. Fulfills the pre-1800 literature requirement for Graduate students and for the undergraduate major]

Some of the texts [complete list available by 12/1/2015]:

Beowulf. Howell D. Chickering Jr. (trans. and ed.) (Anchor, Doubleday) isbn= 0-38506213-3
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Penguin) isbn= 014044565X
R. Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (Faber and Faber Press) isbn= 9780571228362 (used edition OK isbn=0571087655)
The Owl and the Nightingale (Penguin) isbn= 0140442456
Dante, La Vita Nuova (Rossetti translation; NYRB Classics). isbn= 1590170113
Marie de France, Fables (Toronto/MART) isbn= 080207636-x
Andreas Cappellanus The Art of Courtly Love (Columbia UP) isbn= 9780231073059
Staines, David, ed. The Complete Romances of Chretien De Troyes; ISBN: 0253207878 (Indiana)
Ancrene Wisse
Havelock the Dane

ENG 531-001 TOP: RHET COMP DISCUSSION GRP

Instructor: Kendall Leon

Looking for a one unit class for the winter quarter? Consider enrolling in ENG 531: Topics in English Studies/Rhetoric.

The focus of the winter section of this course will be on rhetoric and web authoring, with hands-on practice in developing website content. The class meets every other Friday morning from 9-10:50.

ENG 531-002 TOP: THE FIELD OF ENGLISH

Instructor: Bishupal Limbu

ENG 531-003 TOP: THE FIELD OF ENG COLLOQ

Instructor: Bishupal Limbu

ENG 548 MJR FIGURES: JOYCE

Instructor: Joshua Epstein

ENG 558 ADV TOP: ROMANTICISM, OR ZOOPOETICS

Instructor: Alastair Hunt

Assignments and readings will differ for undergraduate and graduate students.

Required books:

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Susan Wolfson. Longman Cultural Edition. New York: Pearson, 2007. [ISBN 978-0321399533]
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Peter Manning and Susan Wolfson, eds. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2011. [or some equivalent anthology]

ENG 564 ADV TOP: CATHER/READING QUEERLY

Instructor: Sarah Ensor

ENG 588 CONTEMP AMER POETRY

Instructor: Joel Bettridge

ENG 590 ADV TOP: WAYS KNOWING/WRITING

Instructor: Hildy Miller

ENG 592 HST LITERARY CRIT & THRY II

Instructor: Bishupal Limbu

Writing Courses

WR 115 INTO TO COLLEGE WRITING

Instructor: Julian Barker-Hill

This class introduces you to college writing and gives you writing and thinking skills to aid you in your college journey. We'll focus on making claims that are supported by evidence.

WR 121 COLLEGE WRITING (SECTIONS 001-010)

Instructor: Loretta Rosenberg

Students will read essays, poetry and fiction about the environment and respond in both informal and formal writing assignments. We'll develop critical thinking abilities, increase your rhetorical strategies, practice writing processes, and learn textual conventions. We'll share writing with other students, reflect on writing, and revise individual pieces. Students will keep an on-going journal as part of the course.

WR 199 SPST: WRITING FOR COLLEGE

Instructor: Daniel DeWeese

WR 210 GRAMMAR REFRESHER

Instructor: TBD

WR 212-0011 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Suman Mallick

In this introductory course on fiction writing, you will develop your creative writing and critical reading abilities through careful study of works by established authors, your peers, and yourself. By exploring the various aspects of craft through readings, workshop and revision, you will train your critical eye in order to better evaluate your own work and those of others. Through exercises such as free flow writing, class discussion, and revision, you will build and fine tune your "Process" of writing. During this course you will, ideally, explore new approaches to writing that expand your ideas of fiction and create a solid foundation on which to improve your craft.

WR 212-002 INTRO FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Lily Brooks-Dalton

WR 213-001 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Erin Perry

WR 213-002 INTRO POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Heather Hodges

WR 214 INTRO NONFICTION WRITING

Instructor: Mackenzie Myers

WR 222 WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS

Instructor: Amy Harper

This course will cover the process of writing research papers. We will discover how to find a worthy topic for research, how to formulate a working thesis, how to write a research proposal, how to find and evaluate sources, and how to synthesize these sources into cohesive and informative research papers. This course will also cover correct citation for MLA, APA, and Chicago Style documentation.

In this course we will focus on creating “new research” or new ideas demonstrated by focused research based on the worth of previous reliable sources. We will also cover plagiarism and how to avoid it.

One of the course requirements is collaborative feedback, peer edits, and reviews. The purpose of this format is to allow a collective learning style that is designed to improve all research-based writing.

Required texts:

Author: Richard Bullock/Francine Weinberg

Title: The Norton Field Guide to Writing

Edition: Third edition

ISBN: ISBN: 0393-91956-0 ISBN 13: 978-0393-91956-1

Publisher: ISBN: 0393-91956-0 ISBN 13: 978-0393-91956-1

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Format: paperback

Author: Kate L Turabian

Title: A Manual For Writers of Research Paper, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago Style)

Edition: Eighth Edition, 2010

University of Chicago Press

WR 227 INTRO TECHNICAL WRTG

Instructor: TBD

WR 228 MEDIA WRITING

Instructor: TBD

WR 300-001 TOP: WRITING ABOUT FILM

Instructor: Daniel DeWeese

Writing About Film is an upper-division writing course that offers strategies and techniques for describing, interpreting, and evaluating film via writing. Students practice and enhance critical approaches to film by viewing and writing about challenging material, refining their rhetorical strategies, and exploring multiple forms and processes through which writers can respond to film. The course includes practice with both formal and informal pieces of writing, sharing writing with other students, and preparing a final portfolio of work.

WR 300-002 TOP: WRITING AND HEALING

Instructor: Susan Reese

WR 312-002 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Diana Abu-Jaber

WR 312-001 INTERMED FICTION WR

Instructor: Leni Zumas

This course is a fiction laboratory—a place for experiments and discovery. I’ll ask you to take risks, try on different voices, test new angles of vision, adhere to and violate formal constraints, and use words in ways you’ve never used them before. Expect to respond in depth to fellow students’ writing; to receive rigorous feedback on your own work; and to look closely at published texts that may inform, enrich, and complicate your inventions-in-progress. WR 212 or equivalent is recommended as a prerequisite.

WR 313 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WRITING

Instructor: Michele Glazer

WR 323 WRITING AS CRITICAL INQUIRY

Instructor: Cooper Lee Bombardier

“Difficult Conversations” From the Course Intro:"When do we become so safe and careful that we lose these ways of actually touching and reaching each other?” – Sarah Huddleson

“What, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war?” – Judith Butler

“Love as transformational is not an uncritical love” – TL Cowan

Trigger warnings and safe spaces, call-outs and callings-in, take-downs and “tone policing” are prevalent ideas in conversations across marginalized, minority, activist, queer, feminist, and other communities, and in recent years they have found their way into the college classroom. In this section of Writing As Critical Inquiry, we will explore a selective swath of titular “difficult conversations” in the form of academic articles, blog posts, podcasts, and other media, and attempt to find out for ourselves if these types of discourse are beneficial or detrimental in helping people truly hear and respect differing viewpoints. The readings and media that we will examine are a loose collection works which have sparked my own discomfort, curiosity, and yearning to understand how we “talk” to and with other people in 2015. We will explore some current thinking and research around shame and vulnerability and investigate how these personal elements might play into conflict-based conversations. The works we'll examine explore topics from the debate of trigger warnings in academia, to white privilege and racism in America, to how artists and writers earn their chops and honor (or don't) their creative elders. How have these difficult conversations been shaped, helped, or hindered by social media and internet based, device-based communication? I hope that these conversations will challenge, excite, inspire, and ignite curiosity. As Birkenstein and Graff say in our course textbook, “...the best academic writing has one underling feature: it is deeply engaged in some way with other people's views,” and we will explore ways in which to engage with other views that best fit our values and support the ideas we wish to communicate in our own writing.

WR 327 TECHNICAL REPORT WR

Instructor: TBD

WR 333 ADVANCED COMPOSITION

Instructor: Susan Reese

Our text will be The Best American Essays of 2015, edited by Robert Atwan and Ariel Levy; an article written by Ariel Levy will be distributed the first day of class. This juxtaposition will not only provide a excellent reading but will provide insight into Levy’s choices for the anthology as we become familiar with some of her own work before embarking into those choices. You will have a good deal of latitude in selection of essay topics and I can’t wait to hear your voices as we all work to imbue them with greater clarity and power. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Important: Essay writing with particular attention to student’s area of specialization. Advanced practice in essay writing. Recommended: Freshman Inquiry or two writing courses.

This course counts in “D” or “E” of the English major and in the Minor in Writing.

WR 399 SPST: WRITING FOR COMICS

Instructor: Brian Bendis

WR 407-001 SEM: READING FOR WRITERS

Instructor: A.B. Paulson

The point of this course is read published fiction in order to see how the gears of technique mesh beneath the surface of the text.

Most advanced writers learn to read this way—with one eye on the machinery back-stage.

But most readers don’t—simply because the things to look for are supposed to be transparent.

Simply reading for enjoyment—or even the close-reading taught in English courses—won’t generate the technical insights young writers need to know.

In other words, you’ll enjoy this class only if you harbor a passionate interest in the nuts and bolts of writing. This way of reading—the way writers read—should stick with you, beyond the limits of the course, so that you can choose to learn from whatever you read.

We’ll comb short stories and two very different novels for technical knowledge.

Required texts:

Williford & Martone, Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2007) ISBN: 978141653227
Ann Tyler, The Accidental Tourist (Ballentine, 2002) ISBN: 9780345452009
Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (Ballentine, 2010) ISBN: 9780345476036

WR 407-002 SEM: POETRY

John Beer

This seminar course will concentrate on contemporary African-American poetics. We will read selections from several prominent writers, spanning a variety of aesthetic approaches. Central questions that we’ll be thinking about include: the relation of poetry to social action, the nature of the lyric, and the connection of poetry to other art forms (music, dance, performance). Assignments will include both critical and creative work.

Required texts:

Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World
Nathaniel Mackey, Blue Fasa
Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard
Terrence Hayes, Lighthead
Dawn Lundy Martin, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life
Claudia Rankine, Citizen

WR 410-003 TOP: RSRCHNG BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

You will conduct research projects designed to contribute to the scholarly conversation about publishing studies, and you will write scholarly journal articles presenting your research. You will also conduct research projects designed to contribute to the publishing industry’s knowledge of itself and of its best practices, and you will produce a variety of documents presenting your research (e.g. a white paper, a news article for an industry publication like Publishers Weekly, a news article for the general media, an infographic, and a PowerPoint presentation). The research you conduct and the documents you produce in this course will be worthy of publication, and the goal will be to actually get you some publication credits. There will be both individual research projects and group research projects. Any and all publishing-related topics that are of interest to you (e.g., ebook pricing, the role of social media in book sales, the role of cover design in book sales, the rapidly morphing responsibilities of the literary agent, estimating sales of a potential acquisition, how readers discover a given book, etc.), we will learn how to identify, collect, and analyze the relevant data/evidence in order to provide answers to these questions.

WR 410-002 TOP: DITA INFO ARCHTCTR XML

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

WR 410-005 TOP: DIGITAL SKILLS

Instructor: Kathi Berens

This is a hands-on lab course in which students learn by doing. Students will learn the basics of HTML and CSS, make websites, modify images, and learn how to write for various web environments (blog post, Twitter, Instagram, other platforms.) We are likely modify some javascript to make a digital poem in order to learn how javascript operators work, and how the ethos of learning code by copying and modifying is very different from print-based notions of plagiarism. We'll talk about the Creative Commons and how its protection for rights holders differs from all-rights-reserved copyright.

WR 412 ADV FICTION WRITING

Instructor: Charles McLeod

WR 416 SCREENWRITING

Instructor: Kyle Aldrich

Introduction to the theory and craft of screenwriting for short and feature-length films. Topics include: screenplay structure and formatting; creating characters with depth and purpose; writing effective dialogue; the difference between plot and story; structuring filmic scenes and sequences; solving the second act droop. This course is for both beginning and continuing students.

WR 425 ADV TECHNICAL WRIT

Instructor: Tracy Dillon

WR 457 PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Michael McGregor

Essays come in many shapes from many perspectives, most of them (especially those required in college classes) formal in structure, tone and approach. The personal essay is a different animal altogether. Reflecting its author's preoccupations and often highly idiosyncratic view of the world, the personal essay tells us as much about the one writing it as it does about the subject it addresses. While it is not memoir or autobiography per se, it almost always includes intimate information about its author's life while at the same time connecting to some underlying element common to people in general.

In this class we will explore the history of the personal essay in English, looking at its classical roots and studying works by the father of the modern essay, Michel de Montaigne, before crossing the Channel to England and journeying on to America. Once we have some idea of where the personal essay comes from, we'll study several well known modern essay writers, paying particular attention to how they have made the personal essay their own. We will also look at contemporary writing by new American writers from different cultural backgrounds with an eye toward finding the particular cultural, social, economic, ethnic, philosophical, experiential or political positions from which we ourselves might write.

While our reading will give us a better idea of what a personal essay is or can be, the main focus in this class will be on writing personal essays of our own that break new ground by expressing unique individual viewpoints. You will be expected to write and revise two personal essays during the term, one focusing primarily on a personal incident or characteristic, the other focusing on an issue, idea, situation or object that you are or have been preoccupied with, perhaps to the point of obsession.

WR 460 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Provides a detailed overview of the publishing process, organized around the division of labor, including introductions to contemporary American publishing, issues of intellectual commerce, copyright law, publishing contracts, book editing, book design and production, book marketing and distribution, and bookselling. Based on work in mock publishing companies, students prepare portfolios of written documents, i.e., book proposals, editorial guidelines, design and production standards, and marketing plans. Guest speakers from the publishing industry and field trips provide exposure to the industry.

WR 461 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Dongwon Song

Provides a comprehensive course in professional book editing, including editorial management, acquisitions editing, substantive/developmental editing, and copyediting. Issues specific to both fiction and nonfiction books will be covered.

WR 462 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

Provides a strong base in the software used in the book publishing industry, focusing on Adobe InDesign. Also explores Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat, as well as XHTML and ebook design. The class considers audience expectations through a range of hands-on design projects.

WR 463 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Kathryn Juergens

Comprehensive course in professional book marketing and promotion. Issues specific to the promotion of fiction and nonfiction books in a variety of genres and markets will be covered. Students will do market research, interview authors, produce marketing plans, write press releases, write advertising copy, and develop related marketing materials for actual books in progress at the teaching press.

WR 464 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

Comprehensive course in the business of book publishing. Topics covered include publications management, accounting, book production, distribution, and bookselling. Students learn how a variety of agents, including publishers, publishing services companies, distributors, wholesalers, bookstores, etc., are organized and function in the marketplace.

WR 465 INTELLECTUAL PROP & COPYRIGHT

Instructor: Michael Clark

Outlines the opportunities and pitfalls faced by the writer (or editor, graphic designer, or artist) in the legal and ethical spheres. Copyright law, U.S. First Amendment law, defamation, right of privacy, trademark, and trade secret law. Will discuss the importance of the Internet in rethinking many copyright and intellectual property rules.

WR 471 TYPOGRAPHY, LAYOUT, PRODUCTION

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Comprehensive course in professional book design and production. Issues specific to the design of fiction and nonfiction books in a variety of genres and markets will be covered.

WR 473 DEVELOPMENTAL EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

Explores the relationship between an editor, a writer, and the work in the process of developmental editing—also known as global, substantive, or comprehensive editing. Examines historically significant editor/author relations, how the editorial process and relationships have changed over time, and how editorial expectations shift based on the expectations of the publisher, the constantly changing global marketplace, and the introduction of new technologies.

WR 474 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Perform the work of a real publishing house, from acquiring manuscripts to selling books. Gain publishing experience by participating in the various departments of a student-staffed publishing house, Ooligan Press.

WR 475 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

WR 507-002 SEM: DEFAMILIARIZATION

Instructor: Leni Zumas

The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky urged writers to “defamiliarize” their subjects in order to portray them more powerfully, echoing a remark by Flannery O’Connor about Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: “The truth is not distorted here, but rather distortion is used to get at the truth.” This course will explore innovative fiction that imagines the world in ways rivetingly askew—books that rupture formal and stylistic conventions and thereby rip the gauze of habituation from readers’ eyes. We’ll consider historical debates about literary experimentation and strangeness, starting with Samuel Johnson’s dismissal of Tristram Shandy (“Nothing odd will do long”). Writing assignments will include both creative and critical responses.

Required Texts:

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. 978-0375701290
Stanley Crawford, The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. 978-1564785121
Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book of Words. 978-0811217064
John Keene, Counternarratives. 978-0811224345
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star. 978-0811219495
Han Shaogong, The Dictionary of Maqiao. 978-0385339353
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 978-0141439778
Virginia Woolf, The Waves. 978-0156949606
This course satisfies the following requirements:
MFA: Seminar, Writing Elective
MA/MS: Writing Elective (with advisor approval)

WR 507-001 SEM: SYNTAX!

Instructor: Michele Glazer

George Oppen defined syntax as “A careful packing of a poem to avoid a deadening; to avoid destroying a word by its relationships.” The meaning of a poem, he said, “is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.”

Syntax is tied to elasticity, to muscle, music, tone, tension, meaning. How does syntax shape and extend voice? How can syntax be said to enact the movement of the mind? How is its movement, which is its manner of saying, made to mean? How does syntax enact discovery, uncertainty, change? As syntax carries meaning, what sort of authority does a writer draw from different syntactic movements?

We will devote much of the term to reading, annotating, inhabiting and imitating the syntactical movements of poets and prose writers whose usages are distinct and various, in order to deepen our understanding of the expressive possibilities of syntax and enlarge the tonal complexity of our own work.

Students will extend their thinking by developing an analog to syntax from a field or discipline of their choosing, and presenting that analog, along with a writing exercise, to the class. The analogical possibilities are wide open — drawn from architecture, astronomy, biology, business, dance, gastronomy, music, sports, weaving, etcetera.

Texts:

The Art of Syntax, Ellen Bryant Voigt
The Art of the Line, James Longenbach
Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry excerpts, which may include works by Amy Hempel, Noy Holland, Mark Levine, Linda Gregerson, Sarah Manguso, George Oppen, Gertrude Stein, Jean Valentine, Emily Dickinson, C. K. Williams, Donald Justice, Carol Snow, Carl Phillips, and Virginia Tufte (Artful Sentences: Syntax as Structure), as well as others.

This course satisfies the following requirements:

MFA: Seminar, Writing Elective

MA/MS: Writing Elective (with advisor approval)

WR 510-005 MFA CRAFT COLLOQUIUM

Instructor: Michele Glazer

Designed for all MFA students, this one-credit course asks writers to investigate an element of craft that's particularly troublesome, enthralling, and/or bewildering to them. Students will read 3 to 5 texts (novels, poetry collections, memoirs, short stories, essays, articles, etc.) that illuminate this element in some way, then write a 5 to 8 page reflective essay that connects the reading to their own writing projects.

WR 510-006 MFA THESIS AND POST-GRAD WORKSHOP

Instructor: Michele Glazer

Designed for MFA students in their second year (or beyond), this one-credit course focuses in two directions: one is on the drafting and revision of theses projects. Students will present brief informal talks on their thesis as it coalesces, while offering and receiving feedback and support. We will have as a guest one day a representative from the Grad Office. The other direction we’ll look is at life after the MFA, and for this, we’ll have a series of guests in to talk about such subjects as applying for grants and writers/artist residencies, establishing and running a free-lance writing business, and publishing. This is a one-credit course for MFA in Creative Writing students only. Held every other Tuesday, starting January 12th.

WR 510–003 TOP: RSRCHNG BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Per Henningsgaard

WR 510-002 TOP: DITA INFO ARCHTCTR XML

Instructor: Bryan Schnabel

WR 510-001 TOP: DIGITAL SKILLS

Instructor: Kathi Berens

WR 514 POETRY WRITING

Instructor: John Beer

This poetry workshop will concentrate on the consanguinities and disaffiliations of poetry and prose, which will also lead us to focus intensely on the metrical properties of language. Exercises and models will supplement our discussions of student work.

Texts:

Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry
D.A. Powell, Useless Landscape
Linda Gregerson, Prodigal
Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieu
WR 521 MFA CORE WORKSHOP FICTION
Charles McLeod

WR 522 MFA CORE WORKSHOP POETRY

Instructor: TBD

WR 523 MFA CORE WORKSHOP NONFICTION: THE HIDDEN CITY

Instructor: Paul Collins

Sometimes the most compelling settings are hidden within your own city, in the interplay of little-noticed businesses, unusual urban spaces, and unsung citizenry. The Hidden City will workshop writing and discuss such authors as Susan Orlean and Ian Frazier to explore the overlooked settings and characters of city life.

Texts: Portland Hill Walks (Laura Foster), Gone to New York (Ian Frazier), Talk Stories (Jamaica Kincaid), The Telephone Booth Indian (A.J. Liebling), My Kind of Place (Susan Orlean), Exiles in Eden (Paul Reyes).

WR 525 ADV TECHNICAL WRIT

Instructor: Tracy Dillon

WR 557 PERSONAL ESSAY WRITING

Instructor: Michael McGregor

WR 560 INTRO TO BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

WR 561 BOOK EDITING

Instructor: Dongwon Song

WR 562 BOOK DESIGN SOFTWARE

Instructor: Kelley Dodd

WR 563 BOOK MARKETING

Instructor: Kathryn Juergens

WR 564 BUSINESS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

Instructor: Kent Watson

WR 565 INTELLECTUAL PROP & COPYRIGHT

Instructor: Michael Clark

WR 571 TYPOGRAPHY, LAYOUT, PRODUCTION

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

Comprehensive course in professional book design and production. Issues specific to the design of fiction and nonfiction books in a variety of genres and markets will be covered.

WR 573 DEVELOPMENTAL EDITING

Instructor: Adam Rodriguez

WR 574 PUBLISHING STUDIO

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud

WR 575 PUBLISHING LAB

Instructor: Abbey Gaterud