Semester Course Offerings

ENGL 1210.10. Introduction to Creative Writing. WF 9:35AM-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Mary Willis.

ENGL 1210.11. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This introductory workshop course will give students an opportunity to engage, rigorously and enthusiastically, with poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction, and some mixed-genre creative work. In-class discussion will focus on published work, but we will also spend relevant time with our peers’ work and, of course, our own via the workshop component of class. We will work to build on foundations already established, while seriously honing the crafts of close reading and revision. In other words, this course will hold us to the hard work of writing and reading with intellectual care and precision.

ENGL 1210.12. Introduction to Creative Writing. 9:35AM-11:50AM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

ENGL 1210.13. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 1210.14. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Michelle Von Euw.

ENGL 1210.15. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Mary Willis.

ENGL 1210.16. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Ellicot Wood.

ENGL 1210.17. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.18. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.19. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

ENGL 1210.20. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Ellicot Wood.

ENGL 1210.21. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Michelle Von Euw.

ENGL 1210.22. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Aaron Hamburger.

ENGL 1365.10. Literature and the Environment. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Maria Frawley.

What do we mean when we refer to “the environment”? Do we mean “nature,” “wilderness,” ecology,” “the earth,” “the non-human world,” “the outdoors,” or something else? This course will explore the many ways that literary texts, art, film, and even social media respond to and shape our environmental understanding. We will read widely, starting with works of literature from writers first responding to the industrial revolution and developing an eco-consciousness and moving to more contemporary writers, many of them scientists, responding to the perils of climate change or the promises of sustainability. We will weave in chapters from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass by way of exploring indigenous ways of understanding the environment. Throughout the semester we will be alert to the many ways that our contemporary culture both heightens and mutes our environmental awareness. This course satisfied the Critical Thinking and Oral Communication general curricular requirements. Students will write two short papers, work either individually or in small groups on a presentation, and complete a final examination.

ENGL 2210.11. Journey as a Narrative. MW 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

"There are only two plots in all of literature," said writer John Gardner. "(1) a person goes on a journey (2) a stranger comes to town." This course will focus on the journey as a plot generator and cover three genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. The course will focus on original student work in these genres, in addition to the study of established writers. It will include a writing workshop component.

ENGL 2250.81. Dramatic Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Allison Stokes.

ENGL 2410W.10. Introduction to English Literature II. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 2411W.10. Introduction to English Literature II: Love and Death in the (long) Nineteenth Century. MW 3:45-5:00PM. Jennifer Green-Lewis.

This course offers an introduction to three periods of British Literature from the late eighteenth century to the early-twentieth, and it will balance close textual analysis with broad, historically-informed reflection. Focusing on authors from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods, we will examine how love and death—the lives of spirit and body—are represented in the works of each. Paper books you will need to buy: Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition, vol. B; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin 2006). Used paper copies of both editions are readily available online.

NB: electronic copies should not be used in class without prior approval. Written assignments will include close readings, research assignments, short essays, revisions, a mid-term, and a final exam. This course fulfils the WID requirement.

Jane Eyre, Penguin

ISBN-10: 9780141441146

Norton Anthology of English Literature vol B, 8th edition

ISBN-10: 0-393-92831-4

ENGL 2460.10. Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Virginia Hartman.

ENGL 2460.11. Fiction Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 2470.10. Poetry Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Chet'la Sebree.

Students will be introduced to the foundational principles of reading and writing poetry through craft-related texts and contemporary poems, while learning how to find inspiration through art, music, and the world around them. Through workshops and in-class discussions, students will not only write original poems but learn revision strategies to further develop their craft.

ENGL 2470.11. Poetry Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This foundational poetry writing class will focus on investigating fundamental poetic devices and craft skills, building sustainable writing practices, workshopping original poems, and reading and discussing parallel texts by a diverse collection of contemporary authors. In short, this class will give students an opportunity to engage, rigorously and enthusiastically, with poetry and some mixed-genre creative work.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class and at least one literature class before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 2511W.10. Introduction to American Literature II. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. David Mitchell.

ENGL 2560.11. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. Jung Yun.

Students in Intermediate Fiction will continue to build on and expand their knowledge of fiction writing craft by engaging in regular practice and experimentation, coupled with thoughtful critique of student work-in-progress and published contemporary fiction—all in a supportive and encouraging classroom environment. Prerequisites: ENGL 2460

ENGL 2570.10. Intermediate Poetry Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This is an intermediate poetry writing course for students who are interested in expanding the horizons of their creative comfort zones. Through generative activities and in-class investigations centered on structural techniques, form, and genre, we will hone our skills in the making, discussion, and formal analysis of poetry, focusing on our own work and that of a diverse range of published contemporary writers. As such, we'll do plenty of reading as well as writing.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class (ideally a poetry writing class) and at least one literature class before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 2611W.10. Intro 20th C Black Queer Writers. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Kevin Blanks.

What can we learn from the works of influential black queer writers who imagine and dream of a world where the most vulnerable of us can be whole and free? How do their voices illuminate new ways of creating identities, building community, and resisting oppressive systems of power? Beginning with literature from the 1900s and moving forward into the turn of the 21st century, this course explores the landscape of black life beyond the legacies of slavery—and it is by suturing together the works of often overlooked queer authors alongside those that are more widely known that we can imagine black liberation, a queer futurity, a pathway towards other ways of being, of surviving, and sustaining life. Through our exploration of race, identity, and equality, we'll discuss the impact of major revolutionary moments such as the Harlem renaissance, the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement of the 80s and 90s. Finally, we will turn to our contemporary present to explore how the works of black queer writers of the 21st century continue to envision a black world-making, of something more, something better. Prospective texts and authors may include James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; bell hooks; Countee Cullen; Langston Hughes; Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Essex Hemphill's Ceremonies; Nella Larsen's Passing; Alain Leroy Locke; Audre Lorde; Jenkin's Moonlight; Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets; Toni Morrison's Sula; Danez Smith's Don't Call us Dead; Richard Wright, and others.

ENGL 2711.10. What Does Colonialism Have to Do With Climate Change?. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Ananya Bhardwaj.

What are the origins of the climate crisis? How did these crises, for instance, land pollution, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, biomagnification, forest fires, etc. come into being? What does colonialism have to do with climate change?

In this course, we’ll tackle these issues head on, as a pressing question for both our historical moment and for the discipline of literary studies. In the light of the ongoing crisis of migration and the constant attempts by the first world countries to villainize migrants coming from the Global South on the pretext of them using natural resources, food, and opportunities from the native populations, this course will historicize the struggles of these communities by highlighting the role of colonization in the degradation of the planet. Through novels, films, graphic novels, non fiction writings, and even podcasts, we will attempt to create a genealogy of this crisis that we face as a generation and come up with creative solutions that intersperse academic disciplines.

ENGL 2800.11. Introduction to Critical Theory. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Antonio Lopez.

ENGL 2800W.81. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Alexa Joubin.

From Al as disruptive and assistive technologies to long-standing humanistic questions of agency, identity, and mind and body, critical theory provides essential tools to participate in current cultural discourses. Through the lens of social justice, this course equips students with critical Al literacy & fluency in feminist, trans/queer studies, disability, critical race theory.

ENGL 3210.80. Slow Reading Virginia Woolf. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Green-Lewis.

In this course we’ll slow-read three of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary novels, as well as a number of her essays and other writings. We will discuss things both tiny (such as the comma) and vast (such as human consciousness). We will consider how Woolf draws on the visual arts, her preoccupation with beauty, and the relationship in her novels between memory and identity. Assignments will be creative as well as analytical. Books you will need to buy, all by Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; The Waves (all HBJ editions); Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics); Moments of Being (Harvest); A Writer’s Diary (Harvest). Please also buy a journal in which to keep your own writer’s diary. NB: This upper-level English course is cross-listed with University Honors and capped at 15 students. Please register early.

ENGL 3240. 81. Introduction to Dramaturgy. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. William Largess.

ENGL 3360.10. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM.3 Credits. Jung Yun.

Students in Advanced Fiction will engage in three essential activities that every working writer does regularly and rigorously – reading, writing, and revising. Building on the foundations of craft covered in their prerequisite courses, students will be encouraged to experiment and take risks in order to tell their stories to greatest effect. The primary goal of this course is to help students develop the knowledge, skill, and confidence necessary to write, revise, and eventually submit their work for publication, independent of a classroom environment. Prerequisites: ENGL 2460 and ENGL 2560.

ENGL 3370.10. Advanced Poetry Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Chet'la Sebree.

In this project-oriented advanced poetry workshop, students will work on their own poetry collections, which will feature a series of interrelated poems. Over the course of the semester, they will refine the skills necessary to develop these collections through close readings, workshops, and discussions of structure, order, and revision. In the class, students will balance developing and editing work-in-progress with discussions of contemporary collections, which will help inform and guide their own projects.

ENGL 3390.10. The Writing of Fiction. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Edward Jones.

ENGL 3395.10. Creative Nonfiction. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

ENGL 3441W.10. Shakespeare on Film. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Alexa Joubin.

In the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, how do we engage with classical texts that are traditionally associated with colonial and patriarchal practices? This course will equip students with critical tools to de-colonize Shakespeare’s plays.

ENGL 3490.10. Early American Literature and Culture. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Ormond Seavey.

ENGL 3510.10. Children's Literature: Imagining the Self and the World. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

What do children's books teach about curiosity, initiative, rebellion, competition, kindness, and compassion? What do they teach about language, schooling, and national belonging? How do gods, wizards, and animals contribute to the reader's psychic world? What do we learn from travel and from travelers' tales? What exactly are classics? How can minority writers and readers create a space within this tradition? Beginning with classic children's texts from the 19th century and rushing forward to the 21st, we'll consider what Bruno Bettelheim has called "the uses of enchantment" in children's literature. Readings may include fairy tales, Little Women, The Little Princess, The Sign of Four, Kidnapped, The Wizard of Oz, The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, Whale Rider, Haroun and the Sea of Stories; and a few "realist" texts such as: Esperanza Rising; Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe; Dragonwings and Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

Prerequisite: 1000-level English course or the equivalent.

For questions, contact instructor at [email protected]

ENGL 3730.10. Topics in Global Postcolonialism Literature and Film. MW 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Joshua Lawson.

ENGL 3910.10. Disability Studies. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Natalia Rivera Morales.

Perhaps you have encountered the concept of “ableism”—discrimination based on real or perceived disability—in previous coursework, informal social settings, or daily word use. For instance, a common expression like “blind spot” is laden with ableist assumptions. This prejudicial phrase, which insinuates an absence of sound judgment, relegates those with visual and cognitive disabilities to the status of “incomplete” humans, incapable of acquiring and transmitting knowledge. Introduction to Disability Studies acquaints you with disability-conscious academic and activist literature that will empower you to unpack, challenge, and work toward eliminating ableist assumptions and practices. Our readings, discussions, and your writing assignments will engage with ideas of intersectional disability justice; how disability converges with other marginalized identities (BIPOC, queer/trans,* indigent communities, among others); and how we write about disability more generally.

By the end of this course, you will have a robust theoretical grounding for addressing the civic issue of ableism, culminating in an open-access digital storytelling research project. Specifically, your public-facing project will advance non-ableist forms of interpreting disabled embodiment in a manner accessible to non-specialist audiences. This course satisfies GPAC Tier One Critical Thinking and GPAC Tier Two Local and Civic Engagement requirements.

ENGL 3940.80. Black Women Writers 21st Century: Leaning Into the Light. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

What can we learn from Black women who “lean into the light” during dark times? “Leaning into the light” evokes a multitude of meanings. It might mean art filled with laughter, joy, love, friendship, and overcoming. It might mean art unduly dismissed as “light” reading. Or, in Audre Lorde’s words, it can mean illumination: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” Our exploration of celebrated works of literature and art by Black women creators will make the case for the power of the “light.” For example, what can “pop” fiction, such as thrillers, romances, and mysteries, tell us about society and ourselves? Can short stories and “book club” picks be as important as the so-called “Great American Novel”? How can humor and comedy point us toward serious matters? How might sci-fi or fantasy take us where might not otherwise go? How might the healing memoir illuminate and inspire? And finally, is there value in reading purely for pleasure? We will consider some of these questions and raise others. Some texts might include bell hooks, All About Love; Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown; Tembe Denton-Hurst, Homebodies; Deeshaw Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies; Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People; Morgan Parker, There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: Big Girl; Dee Rees, Pariah; Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive; Rivers Solomon, The Deep; Tracy Oliver, The Blackening, as well as work from Black women stand-up and sketch comedians. Will engage feminist, queer, cishet, disability, critical race, and diasporic perspectives.

ENGL 3960.10. Asian American Literature: Becoming Asian American. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

This course presents Asian American literature as a diasporic, postcolonial literature of social protest and dissent. We'll discuss Chinese Exclusion and the roots of anti-Asian hate; narratives and histories of the Japanese American internments; adoption and racial melancholia; coming of age and coming out; historical erasure and countermemory; mental health and disability; climate change; dissent and discipline. Prospective authors include Christina Garcia, the graffiti poets of Angel Island, Deanne Borshay Liem, Min Jin Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Malinda Lo, Elaine Castillo, Jessica Hagedorn, Fiona Cheong, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Monique Truong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen; erin Khuê Ninh, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, James Kyung-jin Lee.

This course fulfills a requirement for the Asian American Studies minor. For details, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected].

ENGL 4010.10. Digital Storytelling and Social Justice. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Emma Wu.

ENGL 4220.10. Creative Writing Senior Thesis. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

ENGL 4360.10. Independent Study. 1-4 Credits. Antonio Lopez.

ENGL 4470.10. Internship. 1-3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

ENGL 1000.10 Dean’s Seminar. What’s New About New Plays?. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Evelyn Schreiber.

This Dean’s seminar asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, do modern directors stage Shakespearean works in different political or social milieus than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? How do new plays address race, class and gender issues? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays are selected to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. The reading list includes classic plays and new plays. In particular, we will look at staged works by Eastern European writers/directors. Theaters around the world are suffering following the Covid-19 crisis. We plan to attend two plays in person. We also will view some filmed productions of new plays. Local artistic directors and actors will visit class.

ENGL 1000.11. Dean's Seminar. Literary Imaginaries of Human Rights: Caste, Race, and Gender. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Leenu Sugathan.

This course offers an introduction to the field of Literature and Human Rights with a specific focus on the experiences of marginalized communities in relation to caste, race, and gender. Drawing from critical approaches in Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race and Caste theories, Black and Dalit Feminism, and Dalit Studies, the course examines how literature reflects and
responds to human rights issues and discourses.

Through a human rights lens, which is essentially interdisciplinary, students will analyze the role of literature and literary criticism in not only uncovering power dynamics, ideological underpinnings, and the perpetuation or challenging of systems of oppression, but also building networks of solidarity. The course will also delve into the historical, cultural, and geographical contexts to explore the complex dynamics between caste, race, and gender, providing a roadmap for a more global, inclusive and intersectional understanding of the struggles for dignity and justice. Students will engage with a range of literary forms, including novels, life narratives, and graphic narratives, to develop an understanding of the ongoing socio-political and cultural
conversations about caste, race, gender, and human rights.

ENGL 1000.11. Dean’s Seminar. Literary Imaginations of Human Rights: Caste, Race, and Gender. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Leenu Sugathon.

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ENGL 1210.10. Introduction to Creative Writing. WF 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.11. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 8:00-9:15AM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.12. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.13. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.14. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.15. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.16. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

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ENGL 1210.17. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.18. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.19. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.20. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.21. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.22. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.23. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1210.24. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 1315.10. Literature and Financial Imagination. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

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ENGL 1320.10. Literature of the Americas. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Antonio Lopez.

Novels, poems, plays, movies, music, and more from the Andes to the Appalachians and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in English and English translation.

ENGL 2100.80. Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

Are Asian Americans invisible, or hypervisible?

How do the stereotypes of the geisha, the nerd, the refugee, and the model minority translate into stereotypes of massage workers, kung fu masters, spies, terrorists, and disposable laborers? How do these stereotypes lead to cultural marginalization, political invisibility, and physical attacks? Conversely, how do Asian American scholars, writers, and critics reframe the discourses of America as a land of opportunity or of entrenched racism? Given a space of our own in history, literature, film, and theory, what stories will we tell? Key topics will include gender, sexuality, race, intersectionality, imperialism, migration, exclusion, internment, interracial triangulation, melancholy, and countermemory. Readings and viewings may include Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, Peter Bacho, Thi Bui, Cristina Garcia, Mohsin Hamid, Cathy Park Hong, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nam Le, Mira Nair, Anna Deveare Smith, Jade Snow Wong, or others.

When taken as ENGL 2100, this course fulfills a GPAC Humanities/Critical Thinking requirement and fulfills requirements in the English major and the Asian American Studies minor.

For additional information, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected]

ENGL 2210.10. Techniques in Creative Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Chet’la Sebree.

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ENGL 2240.81. Play Analysis. TR 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Allyson Stokes.

This course assumes that all plays are not finished works: they exist to be performed. Each play that we will study over the course of this semester is its own world, with its own unique rhythms and rules, therefore no single analytical strategy is particularly useful. An interpretation of each play demands imaginative flexibility and intellectual rigor – a variety of critical approaches to text. Including small in-class performances in addition to written analysis and discussion.

ENGL 2460.10. Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 2460.11. Fiction Writing. MW 12:4502:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 2470.10. Poetry Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Chet’la Sebree.

Students will be introduced to the foundational principles of reading and writing poetry through craft-related texts and contemporary poetry, while learning how to find inspiration through art, music, and the world around them. Students will also have the opportunity to revise their poems through workshops in which their classmates provide feedback on drafts of their poems.

ENGL 2470.11. Poetry Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

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ENGL 2560.10. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Jung Yun.

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ENGL 2570.10. Intermediate Poetry. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This is an intermediate poetry writing course for students who are interested in expanding the horizons of their creative comfort zones. Through generative activities and in-class investigations centered on structural techniques, form, and genre, we will hone our skills in the making, discussion, and formal analysis of poetry, focusing on our own work and that of a diverse range of published contemporary writers. As such, we'll do plenty of reading as well as writing.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class (ideally a poetry writing class) and at least one literature class before enrolling in Intermediate Poetry.

ENGL 2610W.10. Introduction to Black Literature of America I. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

This introductory course surveys classic works of black American literature from the Age of the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, including poetry, essays, fiction, and autobiography. The semester’s reading is designed to shed light on the lives of Africans brought to the “New World” as enslaved commodities and to illuminate how and why they turned to the written word as a tool of self-making, liberation and resistance. We will give particular attention to the slave narrative, one of the most influential genres of the 19th century. Writers might include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois. Topics in the literature are wide-ranging: anti-slavery and abolition, slave rebellions and uprisings, early Black feminism, the Civil War, lynching and the anti-lynching movement, voting rights and citizenship, higher education and more.

ENGL 2800.10. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 9:35-10:50 AM. 3 Credits. Robert McRuer.

From AI as disruptive and assistive technologies to long-standing humanistic questions of agency, Identity, and mind and body, critical theory provides essential tools to participate in current cultural discourses.

Through the lens of social justice, this course equips students with critical AI literacy & fluency in feminist, trans/queer studies, disability, critical race theory.

ENGL 3210.10. Readings in Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

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ENGL 3360.10. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jung Yun.

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ENGL 3385.10. American Memoir. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

This course focuses on craft elements in contemporary American memoir, including persona, voice, character development, structure, setting, and style. We will analyze literary practices and students will write original nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop component.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3390.10. The Working Writer. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 3395.10. Creative Nonfiction. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Instructor TBD.

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ENGL 3430.10 The English Renaissance. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

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ENGL 3520.10. American Romanticism. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Ormond Seavey.

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ENGL 3710.10. Race, Gender, American Theater. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. James McMaster.

This course will examine how major works od contemporary theater have shaped understandings of race, gender, and other categories of social power in the United States. Students will study a range of theater artists including Lin Manuel Miranda, David Henry Hwang, Larissa Fasthorse, Jeremy O. Harris, Tony Kushner, and others.

ENGL 3810.10. Disability and Film. MW 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. David Mitchell.

Disability (the existence of, or social belief in, an impaired bodymind that is stigmatized) exists at a paradoxical crossroads in film history. First, we tend to watch disabled characters in films all the time yet screen them out of our minds as a specific minority population. Second, many of the most innovative films are based on efforts to portray disabled lives in their gritty encounters with ableist worlds. We will examine this paradox in order to make ourselves more aware of the specific cultural situadedness of people with disabilities as well as to better attend to the ways in which disability fuels filmic creativity.

ENGL 3940.10. Black Women Writers 21st Century. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

This upper-division course will survey the landscape of celebrated and award-winning
contemporary Black writers to consider newer and rising voices across a range of genres. During our course of study, we will analyze how these 21 st century Black writers are changing and challenging the African American literary tradition. Some works we might explore include Victor LaValle, The Changeling; Ross Gay, The Book of Delights; James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names; Tananarive Due, The Reformatory; Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon; Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin; Jamel Brinkley, Witness; Cameron Awkward-Rich, Sympathetic Little Monster; Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; Donika Kelly, Bestiary; Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead. The course will be inclusive of feminist, masculinist, diasporic, cis-hetero and queer perspectives, and might incorporate non-traditional literature, such as graphic narratives.

ENGL 3980W.60H. Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or bisexual or transgender people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized, however contentiously, around identity?

This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s). Please note that, pending CCAS approval, this course will travel to Prague, Czech Republic for a week in November; there will be an additional layer of registration (CCAS Global) during the summer.

ENGL 4220.10. Creative Writing Senior Thesis. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

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ENGL 4360.10. Independent Study. 1 to 4 Credits. Antonio López.

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ENGL 4470.10. Internship. 1 to 3 Credits. Antonio López.

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ENGL 1000.10. Imitations. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jane Shore.

ENGL 1210.10. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Margot Pavone.

ENGL 1210.11. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Julia Drake.

ENGL 1210.12. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Samuel Ashworth.

ENGL 1210.13. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 1210.14 Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Michelle Von Euw.

ENGL 1210.15 Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Aaron Hamburger.

ENGL 1210.16. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Michelle Von Euw.

ENGL 1210. 17. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.18. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.19. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 8:00-9:15AM. 3 Credits. Emily Holland.

ENGL 1210.21. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Mary-Sherman Willis.

ENGL 1210.22. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Mary Sherman-Willis.

ENGL 1330.10. Myths of Britain. TR 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Daniel DeWispelare.

ENGL 2100.10 Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. TR 12:45-2:00PM. James McMaster.

ENGL 2210.10. Techniques in Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jane Shore.

ENGL 2210.11. Techniques in Creative Writing: Experimental Poetry Lab. MW 3:45-5:00PM. Thea Brown.

This class will focus dually on generative poetic experiments and peer workshops. We will test the boundaries of our collective poetic imaginations by disrupting our preconceptions of sound, sense, syntax, voice, translation, narrative, and genre. Be ready to write, write, and write some more, regularly share work, build collaborative poems, and read work by culturally and linguistically diverse published authors whose methods redefine poetic possibility, including Bernadette Mayer, Harryette Mullen, Cathy Park Hong, and others.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one poetry writing class and at least one literature class before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 2240.10. Play Analysis. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Allyson Stokes.

ENGL 2460.10. Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Virginia Hartman.

ENGL 2460.11. Fiction Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 2470.10. Poetry Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This foundational poetry writing class will focus on investigating fundamental poetic devices and craft skills, building sustainable writing practices, workshopping original poems, and reading and discussing parallel texts by a diverse collection of contemporary authors. In short, this class will give students an opportunity to engage, rigorously and enthusiastically, with poetry and some mixed-genre creative work.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class and one literature class before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 2510W.10. Introduction to American Literature I. MW 11:10AM-12:00PM. 3 Credits. Ormond Seavey.

ENGL 2560.11. Intermediate Fiction. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Aaron Hamburger.

EN 2611W.10. Introduction to Black Literature of America II: The Twentieth Century. MW 11:10AM-12:45PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

This course is an introduction to the most influential Black writers and Black literary movements of the 20th century with an emphasis on the intersections between art and insurgent politics. Writers might include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Percival Everett, and others.

ENG 2800.10. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Daniel DeWispelare.

ENGL 2800.11. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Daniel DeWispelare.

ENGL 2800W.80. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Alexa Joubin.

Through the lens of social justice, this course examines critical theory in the context of cinematic representations of embodied identities. In particular, we will focus on theories of racialized bodies, performance of sexuality, trans / feminist interventions, disability, and intersectional identities in pop culture. We focus on theories that are most relevant to our contemporary political and cultural life. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with feminism, critical race, disability, and queer studies. More importantly, students will learn how to apply theoretical tools to global films in the interest of producing scholarship that instigates changes.

This WID (writing-in-the-discipline) course fulfills the critical theory/cultural studies requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3210.10. Readings in Creative Writing: Poetics and Politics (Love, War, Refuge). MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jonathan Hsy.

How is love poetry political? We will consider this question through “slow readings” of English poetry from the Middle Ages to the present. We’ll start with Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde, a much-translated story of romance and betrayal set during the Trojan War, and we’ll end with the collaboratively authored collection The Refugee Tales. How do poets repurpose ancient stories for their own time and place? What insights can love poetry bring to our understandings of gender and sexuality, race and nation, disability, environment, violence, and social justice?

We will explore the “matter of Troy” (and its themes of love and migration) in the works of medieval poets as well as contemporary poets of color and refugee writers. Poetic forms include rhyme royale, sonnet, blank verse, free verse, and spoken-word performances.

Assignments will include poetry annotations, close readings, and poetry translation exercises (from one English-language form into another). No knowledge of Middle English is required!

This course fulfills the “Readings” requirement of the Creative Writing major.

Required texts (available via GW Bookstore; listed with ISBN). Please acquire these ASAP!

Abbate, Troy, Unincorporated. ISBN: 9780226001203
Chaucer (eds. Dean & Spiegel), Troilus & Criseyde. ISBN: 9781554810055
Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus & Criseyde. ISBN: 9780393247329
Herd & Pincus (eds.), The Refugee Tales. ISBN: 9781910974230
Levin, ed. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. ISBN: 9780140589290

ENGL 3240.80. Introduction to Dramaturgy. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jodi Kanter.

ENGL 3360.10. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jung Yun.

Students in Advanced Fiction will engage in three essential activities that every working writer does regularly and rigorously – reading, writing, and revising. Building on the foundations of craft covered in their prerequisite courses, students will be encouraged to experiment and take risks in order to tell their stories to greatest effect. The primary goal of this course is to help students develop the knowledge, skill, and confidence necessary to write, revise, and eventually submit their work for publication, independent of a classroom environment. Prerequisites: ENGL 2460 and ENGL 2560.

ENGL 3370.10. Advanced Poetry Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This workshop-intensive, project-oriented writing class will center on poetry as practice and on the discussion of poetic thought by a diverse cohort of contemporary writers—including ourselves, of course. Through generative activities and in-class investigations, we will hone our skills in the making, discussion, and analysis of poetry, focusing on our own work and that of published contemporary writers.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least two creative writing classes (ideally including ENGL 2570) and two literature classes before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 3390.10. The Writing of Fiction. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Edward Jones.

ENGL 3395.10. Creative Nonfiction. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Annie Liontas.

ENG 3441W.80. Shakespeare, Race and Gender. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Alexa Alice Joubin.

In the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, how do we engage with classical texts that are traditionally associated with colonial and patriarchal practices? This course will equip you with critical tools to de-colonize Shakespeare’s plays. Taking an intersectional approach, we will analyze film adaptations of Shakespeare through theories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

Students will gain the skills to analyze Shakespeare as both literary works and films, understand directors’ language and cinematic conventions, and connect critical analysis to their professional life.

This WID (writing-in-the-discipline) course fulfills the critical theory/cultural studies requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3551.10. The English Novel II: The Nineteenth-century English novel: history and voice. MW 2:20-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Green-Lewis.

This course on the nineteenth-century novel has two primary goals: first, to give you a sense of the incredible breadth and range of novels written in England during the nineteenth century; and second, to help you develop a finer ear for the different sounds of these groundbreaking authors. To do this, we’ll balance close textual analysis with broader historical context, and we’ll also consider nineteenth-century developments in the visual arts to more fully inform ourselves about preoccupations of the day. Novels by Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy.

ENGL 3730W.80. Topics in Global Postcolonial Literature and Film. T 12:45-3:15PM. 3 Credits. Kavita Daya.

ENGL 3810.80. Sex in the 18th Century. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Rachel Canter.

In this course, we will read the concept of “sex” in 18th century media, attending to the ways that 18th century literature constructs “sex” as sexual acts, as “maleness” and “femaleness,” and in relation to gender and power. Through our examination of this topic, we will also chart “the rise of the novel” through discussing works by novelists including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, John Cleland, and Jane Austen, among other anonymous authors. To frame these 18th century readings, we will engage with fields including Black feminist and feminist of color theory, queer theory, and Black Sexuality Studies.

ENGL 3820.80. Slow Reading Virginia Wolf. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Green-Lewis.

We’ll read Virginia Woolf’s most demanding experimental novels in the context of her reflections on art and life, focusing on three areas:

The aesthetic context of Bloomsbury, and Woolf’s focus on the visual
Woolf’s representation of time and memory
Woolf’s conception of the self in relation to others

In addition to the novels, readings will include essays, diary entries, and biographical extracts. NB: This course is cross-listed, English with University Honors, and will be capped at 15 students. Please sign up promptly!

ENGL 3840W. Gender and Literature: Contemporary LGBT Writing. 3 Credits. Robert McRuer.

This section of Gender and Literature will focus on work by openly LGBT writers from Stonewall (1969) to the present. In the process, we will consider the lesbian and gay male 1970s, the coming out novel as it coalesces in the 1980s, the flourishing of trans and non-binary writing in this century. The course will include literature on the AIDS epidemic, on non-urban queer locations, and on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. The syllabus will include novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose by June Arnold, Armistead Maupin, Audre Lorde, Torrey Peters, Sarah Schulman, Manuel Muñoz, Ocean Vuong, and others.

ENGL 3910.10. Disability Studies. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Natalia Rivera.

EN3940.10. Black Women Literature in the 21st Century: Leaning into the Light. MW 3:45-5:00 PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

What can we learn from Black women who “lean into the light” during dark times? “Leaning into the light” evokes a multitude of meanings. It might mean art filled with laughter, joy, love, friendship, and overcoming. It might mean art unduly dismissed as “light” reading. Or, in Audre Lorde’s words, it can mean illumination: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.”

Our exploration of celebrated works of literature and art by Black women creators will make the case for the power of the “light.”

For example, what can “pop” fiction, such as thrillers, romances, and mysteries, tell us about society and ourselves? Can short stories and “book club” picks be as important as the so-called “Great American Novel”? How can humor and comedy point us toward serious matters? How might sci-fi or fantasy take us where might not otherwise go? How might the healing memoir illuminate and inspire? And finally, is there value in reading purely for pleasure? We will consider some of these questions and raise others.

Some texts might include Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl; Stacey Abrams, While Justice Sleeps; Deeshaw Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies; Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People, Jasmine Guillory, The Wedding Date; Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown; Nnedi Okorafor, Binti; Morgan Parker, There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: Big Girl; Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals; Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver, Girls Trip. Will include feminist, queer, cishet, disability, critical race, diasporic and ecological perspectives.

ENGL 3960.10. Asian American Literature: Becoming Asian American. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

This course presents Asian American literature as a diasporic, postcolonial literature of social protest and dissent. We’ll discuss Chinese Exclusion and the roots of anti-Asian hate; narratives and histories of the Japanese American internments; adoption and racial melancholia; coming of age and coming out; historical erasure and countermemory; mental health and disability; climate change; dissent and discipline. Prospective authors include Christina Garcia, the graffiti poets of Angel Island, George Takei, Deanne Borshay Liem, Min Jin Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Malinda Lo, Elaine Castillo, Jessica Hagedorn, Fiona Cheong, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Monique Truong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen; erin Khuê Ninh, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, James Kyung-jin Lee, and Mimi Khúc. This course fulfills a requirement for the Asian American Studies minor. For details, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected].

ENGL 4010.10. Digital Storytelling and Social Justice. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Emma Wu.

In this course, we will explore the ways in which multimedia narratives on digital platforms can broaden our perception of belonging, foster dialogue and connection, and advance social justice causes. How can we reconsider narrative conventions, multimodal dimensionality, and structural mechanics to craft compelling digital stories? We will spend about half of our time together in writing workshop, providing feedback to our peers’ digital stories, and half our time in CREATE Digital Studios, gaining practical competencies and considering the capacity of various digital platforms to tell stories that amplify diverse voices, challenge dominant narratives, and advocate for social change. No previous technical experience is necessary.

This course fulfills the GPAC Arts in Creative Thinking / Tier Two Requirement and the Civic Engagement / Tier Two Requirement as clarified through GPAC.

ENGL 4220.10. Creative Writing Senior Thesis. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Annie Liontas.

ENGL 4250W. 10. Honors Thesis. 3 Credits. Tony Lopez.

ENGL 4360.10. Independent Study. 1 to 4 Credits. Tony Lopez.

ENGL 4470.10. Internship. 1 to 3 Credits. Jonathan Hsy.

ENGL 1000.10 Dean’s Seminar. What’s New About New Plays?. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays Artistic Directors select to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays. Hopefully, theaters will once again be open for live, in-person performances and we will attend two plays. I have arranged with Artistic Directors in DC and elsewhere to have filmed performances of new plays streamed to us to provide additional new plays to view.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills the critical thinking in humanities GPAC requirement; restricted to first year students only.

ENGL 1000.11. Dean’s Seminar. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Joanna Falk.

ENGL 1210.10. Introduction to Creative Writing. WF 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Margot Pavone.

In this course, we will explore the three major genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. As a class, we will determine what qualifies “good” or “bad” writing by reading a wide variety of published works, and by sharing and evaluating the original work of our classmates. We will explore lots of prompts that help us generate creative content, and will write (and revise!) several pieces of work. There is a workshop component to this class, meaning that each student will share their poem, short story, and personal essay with a peer group to discuss and critique. This may sound intimidating, but we as a class will establish ahead of time how to make feedback and criticism helpful and constructive. Our goal is to help one another become the best writers we can be!

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: GenEd CCAS:Arts, ESIA-Creative Arts Courses, SPHHS-Creative/Performing Arts

ENGL 1210.11. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 8:00-9:15AM. 3 Credits. Emily Holland.

ENGL 1210.12. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Margot Pavone.

In this course, we will explore the three major genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. As a class, we will determine what qualifies “good” or “bad” writing by reading a wide variety of published works, and by sharing and evaluating the original work of our classmates. We will explore lots of prompts that help us generate creative content, and will write (and revise!) several pieces of work. There is a workshop component to this class, meaning that each student will share their poem, short story, and personal essay with a peer group to discuss and critique. This may sound intimidating, but we as a class will establish ahead of time how to make feedback and criticism helpful and constructive. Our goal is to help one another become the best writers we can be!

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: GenEd CCAS:Arts, ESIA-Creative Arts Courses, SPHHS-Creative/Performing Arts

ENGL 1210.13. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 9:35-10:50AM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

This course is an overview of three genres: Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction. We will study the work of established writers and experiment with form through writing exercises and workshops where students share original work.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1210.14. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Aaron Hamburger.

What do Shakespeare, J. K. Rowling, George Orwell, and Amanda Gorman all have in common? At some point during their celebrated careers as playwrights, novelists, essayists, and poets, they were beginners, stumbling in the dark, struggling to express themselves with language.

Self-expression through language is a lifelong challenge faced not just by budding authors but also all human beings, and the study of creative writing provides excellent training to meet that challenge. As author Ntozake Shange says: "Language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.”

In this course, we’ll experiment with three modes of creative expression using language: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. We’ll begin by looking at examples from published authors to come up with strategies to communicate our visions clearly to readers. Also, we’ll do writing exercises to develop our own unique voices and what each of us values as a writer. From there, we'll build to create original works to share with classmates, giving and receiving supportive but rigorous feedback so we understand where we've been clear and where we're still fuzzy, both in our expressions and in our own minds. By the end of this course, you'll feel more confident and joyful as a writer, reader, and human being.

ENGL 1210.15. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Margot Pavone.

In this course, we will explore the three major genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. As a class, we will determine what qualifies “good” or “bad” writing by reading a wide variety of published works, and by sharing and evaluating the original work of our classmates. We will explore lots of prompts that help us generate creative content, and will write (and revise!) several pieces of work. There is a workshop component to this class, meaning that each student will share their poem, short story, and personal essay with a peer group to discuss and critique. This may sound intimidating, but we as a class will establish ahead of time how to make feedback and criticism helpful and constructive. Our goal is to help one another become the best writers we can be!

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: GenEd CCAS:Arts, ESIA-Creative Arts Courses, SPHHS-Creative/Performing Arts

ENGL 1210.16. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 4:45-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.17. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Virginia Hartman.

Plays, short stories, poems—what place do they have in our lives? How are they created? We’ll dip a toe into each genre, reading and practicing them for ourselves. Intro to Creative Writing is a sprint through three forms, so be prepared for a very full semester of reading and daily writing. By the end, you’ll be in touch with your own creative powers and—side benefit—you’ll be closer to knowing what you like about existing samples of each type of writing.

ENGL 1210.18. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Sylvia Jones.

ENGL 1210.19. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Michelle Von Euw.

ENGL 1210.20. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Lara Payne.

ENGL 1210.21. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Mary-Sherman Willis.

A writer is a reader, responding.

No matter what your major is and what your other coursework, during this semester you will be functioning as a creative writer. Creative writers usually have some other occupation -- a job, for instance -- and must develop work habits to support their writing. Therefore, you will need to find a place and a method to do lots of writing, lots of reading. Creative writers are note-takers and revisers. They share their work with each other to get constructive feedback. In this class, so will you.

Creative writing takes many forms, but we’ll concentrate on prose (that is, fiction and creative non-fiction or memoir) and poetry. The first part of this course will look at the basic craft issues of all three genres (image, voice, character, setting, story and revision). The second part will concern the specifics of each genre.

The classes will consist of discussion of assigned texts to explore issues of craft, short in-class writing exercises, and workshops. There will be assigned reading and writing homework to generate new work, which you’ll be taking from first draft through several revisions to a final polished poem or story.

We’ll be using one survey textbook:

Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, 4th ed. Janet Burroway. NY: Longman Press, 2015. ISBN-13: 978-0-13-405324-0. REQUIRED

Other stories and poems may be distributed in class or via Blackboard.

ENGL 1210.22. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Emily Holland.

ENGL 1210.23. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 1315.10. Literature and Financial Imagination. TR 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 1330.10. Myths of Britain. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jonathan Hsy.

This course takes the idea of “Britain” as our launching point for investigating myth-making and cultural identity, and the class is open to anyone who is interested in how to analyze texts, art, and media (including online and multimedia works). From medieval stories of London as “New Troy” (founded by refugees fleeing the Trojan War) to Arthurian legends of Stonehenge as matter magically transported from Africa by giants, longstanding foundation myths have always placed “Britain” at the nexus of global flows of culture: from Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and beyond.

In this age of post-Brexit politics and anti-immigrant xenophobia, this course invites us to consider the varied shapes that Britain’s founding myths can take across time. Some authors might nostalgically look back to the days of King Arthur and a glorious past to justify imperialism and colonial expansion, but some can find in Britain’s complex history an opportunity to challenge narrow ideas of “British” identity or white supremacy. What, then, does the idea of “Britain” actually mean for diverse people across the globe?

By exploring “Myths of Britain” from the Middle Ages to the present, we will attend to vital issues of race, gender, class, migration, decolonization, and environmentalism. We’ll examine multifaceted meanings of “Britain” (past and present) for contemporary artists, poets, and filmmakers. In our collective endeavor, will gain a fuller historical understanding of figures that loom large in anglophone literary history (such as Chaucer and Shakespeare); we will just as importantly appreciate how medieval and early modern forms of storytelling inspire Black British, Black Caribbean, Indigenous, and Jewish and Asian diaspora authors.

No prior experience with medieval or early modern literature is required! All readings will be available in modern English translation.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Critical Thinking in the Humanities Requirement. Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Global or Cross-Cultural Perspectives Requirement.

ENGL 1360.80. Fantasy and Speculative Fiction: Other Worlds, Other Selves. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. Professor Patricia Chu.

How do modern writers adapt the conventions of fantasy narration and the bildungsroman--the novel of education--to address questions of identity, class, gender, species, social dissent, and desire? We'll explore the connections between fantasy genres in the English literary canon (fairy tales, epic, myth, medieval romance), coming of age themes (in young adult fantasy, anime, magic realism), and speculative fiction.

READINGS: Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales. Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Renault, The King Must Die. Mitchell, Gilgamesh. Shelley, Frankenstein. Hartman, Seraphina. Butler, Kindred. Liu, The Paper Menagerie & Other Stories.

REQUIREMENTS: 3 papers, 1 midterm exam, up to 100 pages of reading per course meeting.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: No prerequisites, but UW20 or an equivalent course is recommended. As Engl. 1360, this has been approved as a GPAC Humanities course.

ENGL 2100.80. Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. TR 3:45-5:00PM. 3 Credits. Patricia Chu.

Are Asian Americans invisible, or hypervisible?

How do the stereotypes of the geisha, the nerd, the refugee, and the model minority translate into stereotypes of massage workers, kung fu masters, spies, terrorists, and disposable laborers? How do these stereotypes lead to cultural marginalization, political invisibility, and physical attacks? Conversely, how do Asian American scholars, writers, and critics reframe the discourses of America as a land of opportunity or of entrenched racism? Given a space of our own in history, literature, film, and theory, what stories will we tell? Key topics will include gender, sexuality, race, intersectionality, imperialism, migration, exclusion, internment, interracial triangulation, melancholy, and countermemory. Readings and viewings may include Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, Peter Bacho, Thi Bui, Cristina Garcia, Mohsin Hamid, Cathy Park Hong, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nam Le, Mira Nair, Anna Deveare Smith, Jade Snow Wong, or others.

When taken as ENGL 2100, this course fulfills a GPAC Humanities/Critical Thinking requirement and fulfills requirements in the English major and the Asian American Studies minor.

For additional information, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected]

ENGL 2210.10. Techniques in Creative Writing: Experimental Poetry Lab.. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This class will focus dually on generative poetic experiments and peer workshops. We will test the boundaries of our collective poetic imaginations by disrupting our preconceptions of sound, sense, syntax, voice, translation, narrative, and genre. Be ready to write, write, and write some more, regularly share work, build collaborative poems, and read work by culturally and linguistically diverse published authors whose methods redefine poetic possibility.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class and at least one literature class before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 2240.80. Play Analysis. TR 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Allyson Stokes.

ENGL 2411.10. Introduction to English Literature II. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Daniel DeWispelare.

ENGL 2411.11. Introduction to English Literature II. MW 2:20-3:35. 3 Credits. Daniel DeWispelare.

ENGL 2460.10. Fiction Writing. TR 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Virginia Hartman.

We tell stories every day of our lives. This morning’s story began with “You must get up,” and behind that was a why. In Fiction Writing, we will struggle toward the why of our own stories, and employ the techniques that make our readers want to go along for the ride. I’ll assume you’ve taken Introduction to Creative Writing and are already familiar with the basics of fiction writing, as well as with the principles necessary to giving insightful critiques to your peers and incorporating helpful suggestions into your own stories. You’ll refine your ability to invite readers into the dreamtime of the story. We’ll read George Saunders, Alice McDermott and other masters in our quest for role models.

ENGL 2460.11. Fiction Writing. MW 12:4502:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer Close.

ENGL 2470.10. Poetry Writing. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Chet’la Sebree.

Students will be introduced to the foundational principles of reading and writing poetry through craft-related texts and contemporary poetry, while learning how to find inspiration through art, music, and the world around them. Students will also have the opportunity to revise their poems through workshops in which their classmates provide feedback on drafts of their poems.

ENGL 2560.10. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Annie Liontas.

Fiction workshop developing foundations of craft in fiction, focusing on character, escalation, place, voice, and selective detail. Students will have taken Fiction I or Introduction to Creative Writing and will evolve their understanding of craft in 2560.

ENGL 2570.10. Intermediate Poetry. MW 4:45-6:00 PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

This is an intermediate poetry writing course for students who are interested in expanding the horizons of their creative comfort zones. Through generative activities and in-class investigations centered on structural techniques, form, and genre, we will hone our skills in the making, discussion, and formal analysis of poetry, focusing on our own work and that of a diverse range of published contemporary writers. As such, we'll do plenty of reading as well as writing.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least one creative writing class (ideally a poetry writing class) and at least one literature class before enrolling in Intermediate Poetry.

ENGL 2610W.10. Introduction to Black Literature of America I. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

ENGL 2711W.10. Postcolonialism and Migration in Global Anglophone Literature and Film. 3 Credits. Leenu Sugathan.

This course offers an introduction to Postcolonial Studies through the transmediatic, anti-racist representation of contemporary migration. We take as our focus, postcolonial comics. We will learn how to analyze comics, and we will explore how, following Art Spiegelman’s influential work Maus, we witness the flourishing historical energies and political edge of the growing global field of graphic narratives. We compare the graphic representation of world migration across different Anglophone cultures and societies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, through an intersectional feminist lens. In the process, we will map how global graphic narratives document, witness, and illuminate displacement, survival, and belonging in a cross-cultural, comparative mode.

ENGL 2800. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 9:35-10:50 AM. 3 Credits. Antonio López.

ENGL 3210.10. Readings in Creative Writing: Poetic Revolution. MW 12:45-2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Thea Brown.

What makes a revolutionary poem? In this class we’ll dig into works by poets who are shaped by and responding to their contemporaneous cultural contexts, who strive for change through artistic expression. We’ll spend relevant time with 20th century writers like Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, Gil Scott-Heron, Amiri Baraka, and Diane di Prima, as well as 21st century writers like Evie Shockley, Terrance Hayes, Cedar Sigo, and Solmaz Sharif. Students in this class will focus on poetic output (and will participate in poetry workshops) but will also spend time writing analytically and reflectively.

It’s recommended that students have taken at least two creative writing classes and at least two literature classes before enrolling in this course.

ENGL 3360.10. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 3:45-5:00 PM. 3 Credits. Annie Liontas.

An Advanced Fiction workshop that builds on students’ knowledge from Intermediate Fiction (2560). Students will develop their craft in formal apprenticeships, dive into collections of short stories, and integrate some theory.

ENGL 3385.10. American Memoir. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

This course focuses on craft elements in contemporary American memoir, including persona, voice, character development, structure, setting, and style. We will analyze literary practices and students will write original nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop component.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3390.10. The Working Writer. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Sam Ashworth.

ENGL 3390: The Working Writer is a class dedicated to teaching the skills that writers need to publish, promote, and get paid. Almost every week, the class will meet with experienced agents, editors, freelancers, journalists, ghostwriters, copywriters, and others; at the same time, students will spend the semester writing a long (50+ page) piece of original fiction or nonfiction, along with article pitches and queries. Students are strongly encouraged to begin the class with a sense of the project they want to work on. By the end, students will have a deepened sense of who they are as writers, as well as a knowledge of the industry that can take most writers years to develop, including:

· The art of pitching articles to editors

· What literary agents do and how to query them effectively

· How to craft a book proposal

· Conceiving and reporting out feature pieces

· The book publication process

· Negotiate contracts and invoice for payment

· Ghostwriting

· And much more!

ENGL 3390. 11. Poetry: Remix, Cover & Sample. MW 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Chet’la Sebree.

Students will use the musical techniques of remix, cover, and sample, as a framework through which they’ll read and write poems. Through experimentation and play, they’ll create new work using imitation, erasure, ekphrasis, and other poetic forms that allow them to engage with art, culture, and history.

ENGL 3395.10. Creative Nonfiction. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Annie Liontas.

Creative Nonfiction workshop exploring memoir and other sub-genres of the form, including profiles, the essay, and cultural criticism.

ENGL 3420.10 Medieval Literature. MW 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Jonathan Hsy.

This course examines how medieval authors represented their ever-shifting urban environments. Urban living means many things to many people, and we will encounter the city as a multiethnic melting pot, a site of crime and scandal, a space of refuge, and a venue for reinventing one’s self. Readings will include courtly romances, comic fabliaux, love lyrics, and forms of life writing such as autobiography and saints’ lives. Through a selection of diverse literary authors (Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, and Teresa de Cartagena), we will approach the Middle Ages as a time of perpetual motion and change: a world where human identity is varied, adaptive, and open to new possibilities.

Our readings will be put in conversation with contemporary critical theory, and we will explore the complexities of medieval notions of disability, race, gender, and sexuality. We will also consider how medieval storytelling inspires contemporary art such as fantasy film (The Green Knight) or spoken word poetry (The Refugee Tales). Assignments will include close readings and a comparative essay which you will write and revise in stages.

No prior experience with medieval literature is required! All readings will be available in modern English translation.

ENGL 3520.10. American Romanticism. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Ormond Seavey.

ENGL 3650.10. The Short Story. TR 2:20-3:35PM. 3 Credits. Maria Frawley.

Variety is the spice of life! In this class we’ll read a wide variety of short stories in order to gain a better understanding of the genre. To that end we’ll consider the social and historical contexts that inform the stories we read as well as the author’s approach to their craft, paying particular attention to narrative techniques, story structure, and temporal management. We will read stories now widely regarded as classics as well as very recent stories, some appearing in magazines during our semester together. We will consider theories of the genre, such as those influentially advanced by Edgar Allen Poe; particular sub-genres or modes, such as “Southern Gothic”; and related genres, such as the short story cycle. Authors will include Edgar Allen Poe, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, James Joyce, William Trevor, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. Class will be discussion based and students will have a variety of short writing assignments, including an option for creative writing at the end of the semester.

ENGL 3820W.10. Major Authors. Jane Austen: Literary Icon. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

Why does Jane Austen still matter? This course focuses on the novelist’s literary achievements, the vagaries of her reception over time, and on her continuing relevance to our own culture and historical moment. Our reading will include all of her novels, some unpublished early writing, and work unfinished at her death. Understanding the social and historical contexts that shaped Austen’s work will be a major preoccupation. Among our many topics for consideration will be the ways Austen both reflects and responds to social hierarchy and class relations in Regency England; the relationship between gender ideology, “conduct book culture,” and Austen’s representations of women’s lives; Austen and the histories and legacies of colonialism and slavery; Austen’s views of national identity in the era of the French Revolution; and her innovative narrative and linguistic techniques. Also, Austen and adaptation (esp. film, but also other media)! Students will expect to come away from this course with a solid grasp of the social, historical, and literary contexts of Austen’s fiction; with greater appreciation of the stylistic achievements of her fiction writing; and with the ability to critically assess how and why Austen’s works have been received and adapted over time. Writing assignments for this course will enable students to cultivate their analytic abilities and tap into their creativity, while also practicing writing for different audiences.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3826.10. Morrison and Faulkner. TR 11:10AM-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

Toni Morrison and William Faulkner

“Race, Memory, and Aesthetics”

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

TEXTS (subject to change):

William Faulkner: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, God Help the Child

Additional Materials posted on Blackboard

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills the Minority/Diversity requirement for English Majors.

ENGL 3980W.60H. Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures. MW 12:45-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

English 3980W: Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures: The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or bisexual or transgender people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized, however contentiously, around identity?

This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s).

Please note that, pending CCAS approval, this course will travel to Prague, Czech Republic for a week in November; there will be an additional layer of registration (CCAS Global) during the summer.

ENGL 4040.10. Honors Seminar. T 12:10-2:00PM. 3 Credits. Antonio López.

ENGL 4220.10. Creative Writing Senior Thesis. 3 Credits. Lisa Page.

ENGL 4250.10. Honors These. 3 Credits. Antionio López.

ENGL 4360.10. Independent Study. 1 to 4 Credits. Antonio López.

ENGL 4470.10. Internship. 1 to 3 Credits. Antonio López.

ENGL 6100.10. Introduction to Critical Theory. M 5:10-7:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

English 6100 will introduce and briefly overview some of the major movements in critical theory—such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, African American and Latina/o cultural theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies—that have brought us to the contemporary moment in the study of culture and society. As this list should suggest, a large part of the course will consider the “cultural turn” that literary study has taken over the past few decades. Some of the questions the class will pose are: what do we mean when we talk about such vexed terms as culture, identity, language, interpretation, meaning, theory, criticism, cultural studies? What does critical theory offer us as readers and writers, as participants in various cultures, as citizens? What does knowledge in and as democracy look like? How have the new social movements transformed knowledge in and out of the academy? How does power circulate through the production, consumption, and interpretation of culture?

ENGL 6130.10. Minitorian Performance. W 5:00-7:00PM. 3 Credits. James McMaster.

This course provides a graduate-level survey of the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. Performance studies brings attention to embodiment, the live event, and lived social relations. Its practitioners may study theatre, dance, music, film, visual culture, and other art forms. They may also study the performance of everyday life, including the performances of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, nation, indigeneity, and diaspora that constitute the social as such. This course’s adventure into performance studies will begin at the field’s founding and end at its current cutting edge. Theorists covered include Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Diana Taylor, Fred Moten, Karen Shimakawa, Richard Schechner, Alexandra T. Vazquez, and more.

Throughout the semester students will be asked to engage with the vast cultural resources of Washington D.C., its theatres, museums, clubs, monuments, political events, festivals, and so forth. The course will train students in the reading and writing of minoritarian performance theory. It will also attend to the institutional and informal infrastructures that constitute the professionalized scene of performance studies (conferences, journals, departments, cohorts, etc.) while simultaneously providing students with experience in a variety of academic genres including the abstract, the review, the panel proposal, and the conference presentation. Ultimately, however, the primary objective of this course is simple: for all involved to imagine and enact new and better worlds for minoritarian flourishing.

ENGL 6510.80. Writing, Race, and Nation. R 5:10-7:00PM. 3 Credits. Jennifer James.

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ENGL 6530.10. Conceptualizing Genders on Screen. T 4:10-6:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Alexa Joubin.

What is gender? How do ideologies make gender “perform”? Is visibility always empowering and desirable? Performance theories provide fertile soil for understanding gender practices, because gender is not a fixed identity but a set of social practices and interpersonal relationships. They evolve in the presence of other people, in social spaces, and over time.

Through the lens of social justice, this seminar examines cinematic representations of embodied identities from early modern to modern times. In particular, we will focus on gender and race, gender and sexuality, gender and disability, transfeminism, and intersectional identities in pop culture.

This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement. In examining films about early modern and modern identities, we trace their common emotional burden. Benefit: Exploring cinematic representations of early modern ideas about gender can alleviate our contemporary biases against atypical bodies and experiences.

We will learn how to apply theoretical tools to global films in the interest of producing scholarship that instigates changes.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

ENGL 6720.10. Independent Research. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 6720.11. Independent Research. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 6998.10. Thesis Research. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 6999.11. Thesis Research. 3 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 8998.10. Advanced Reading and Research. ARR. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 8999.10. Dissertation Research. 3 to 12 Credits. Holly Dugan.

ENGL 1050. Introduction to Literary Studies. TR 9:35 - 10:50 AM. 3 Credits. Professor Antonio López.

Introduces first- and second-year students to college-level literary analysis, leading to more advanced work. We will study short stories, novels, poetry, and plays, paying attention to form, genre, and meaning. Never far from our concerns will be key questions: What's literature? What defines a poem, a short story, a play, and how are these things related to and different from one another? Finally, we’ll do varieties of critical reading: close, slow, and deep readings; distant, fast, and surface readings, focusing on how literary works stage narrators and speakers, metaphors and tone, and much more.

ENGL 1210. Introduction to Creative Writing. TR 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Thea Brown.

This course offers a hands-on investigation into the practice of creative writing through multiple genres, which can include poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and playwriting. Students will explore their unique writerly voices by building and sharing original work, and they will examine the craft of published writers to bolster their own understanding.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills the GPAC requirement for creative or critical thinking in the arts.

ENGL 1210. Introduction to Creative Writing. MW 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

This course introduces the study of three genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, with a focus on literature from the inside out. It includes a writing workshop component and fulfills the GPAC Creative Thinking requirement.

ENGL 1330. Myths of Britain. TR 3:45 - 5:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare

“Myths of Britain” is an introductory course that invites all students who are interested in cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. We will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with, informed by, and often critical of the idea of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

To ground our discussion about cultural change and exchange we will consider the idea of “Britain” as a starting point for more general discussions about myth and culture. Some of the myths that we will track during the semester include, but are not limited to: mythological myths, like those pertaining to Boudica and King Arthur; dramatic myths like those surrounding Shakespeare—“the Bard;” economic myths like those undergirding the work of Adam Smith and the other grandfathers of neoliberalism; ecological myths and imperial myths, which have long provided an alibi for British expansion; and even enduring romantic myths such as one finds in the work nineteenth-century writers, all of which are complicated by changing gender formations.

The year is 2023 and so our conversations about culture’s tentacles will be informed by ongoing discussions surrounding the long histories of Brexit, decolonialism, race, gender, class, environmentalism, the cultural now, and, of course, our cultural future. Politics itself being rooted in forms of mythology, the contemporary moment offers a unique opportunity to glimpse a long period of cultural history—it happens that we will be reading, viewing, and discussing works from roughly 50 BCE to the present, with a dense focus on the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period—while also attending to the specificities of our collective and global now.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Critical Thinking in the Humanities Requirement. Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Global or Cross-Cultural Perspectives Requirement.

ENGL 1365. Literature and the Environment. TR 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

What do we mean when we refer to “the environment”? Do we mean “nature,” “wilderness,” “geography,” “ecology,” “the earth,” “the non-human world,” “the outdoors,” or something else? This course will explore the many ways that literary texts, art, and even social media respond to and shape our environmental understanding. We will read widely, starting with works of literature from writers first responding to the industrial revolution and developing an eco-consciousness and moving to more contemporary writers responding to the effects of settler colonialism on the living world, the perils of climate change, or the promises of sustainability. We will weave in chapters from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass by way of exploring indigenous ways of understanding the environment. Throughout the semester we will be alert to the many ways that our contemporary culture both heightens and mutes our environmental awareness. Students will write two short papers, work either individually or in small groups on a presentation, and complete a final examination.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Critical Thinking in the Humanities Requirement. Fulfills GPAC Tier-2 (CCAS) Oral Communication Requirement.

ENGL 2210. Techniques in Creative Writing. MW 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Novelist John Gardner said, there are only two kinds of stories: A man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. This course is dedicated to the close study of literature utilizing the journey as narrative. Selections include the novel, the short story collection, the memoir, poetry, and narrative nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop.

ENGL 2210. Techniques in Creative Writing. Around the World in 80 Poems. TR 11:10 AM - 12:25 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Thea Brown.

Every week we will be close-reading a variety of poems, and after analyzing how these poems work, you will write your own poem; and then, as a class, we’ll “workshop” your poem. I’ve designed this course as a reading and writing workshop. It is not a survey course. Over the semester, we will explore my own idiosyncratic world anthology of poems including those by Amorak (Inuit) and First Nation Swampy Cree, Haiku Masters, Neruda’s Odes Elementales, Cortazar’s “Instructions on How to Climb Stairs,” and Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” the most famous poem written about the Holocaust. Most poems are in translation; but some are by poets from the English-speaking world—Heaney, Boland, Walcott. On occasion, we’ll travel across centuries and cultures: Li Po (6 th- century China) and Wyatt (16 th -century English Metaphysical.) I have wanted for decades to make these amazing poets the centerpiece of their own course, in which we explore their eclectic cultures, poetic styles, and sensibilities. GW has a large multi- cultural and international student body, and surely there are other poets whose work you may already know and want to share.

ENGL 2411W. An Introduction to English Literature: Love and Death. MW 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis.

This course offers an introduction to two major periods of British Literature from the late-eighteenth century to the early-twentieth, and it will balance close textual analysis with broad, historically-informed reflection. Focusing primarily on one author from each of the Romantic and Victorian periods, we will examine how love and death—the life of the emotions and the realities of the body—are represented in the works of each. Chosen authors for Spring 2023 are John Keats (poems and letters), and Charles Dickens (David Copperfield). We will end with a study of war poetry of the period, including poetry from the Great War (1914-18). This course fulfills the WID requirement. Written assignments will include close readings, research assignments, short essays, and revisions.

ENGL 2460. Fiction of Writing. TR 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Johannes Litchman.

Fiction workshop dedicated to writing, reading, and understanding fiction. Over the course of the semester, we will read published short stories to improve our understanding of craft, complete writing exercises to sharpen our storytelling tools, write our own short stories, and discuss our works-in-progress as a class.

ENGL 2470. Poetry Writing. MW 11:10 AM - 12:25 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Chet’la Sebree.

Students will be introduced to the foundational principles of reading and writing poetry through craft-related texts and contemporary poetry collections, while learning how to find inspiration through art, music, and the world around them, using the DC landscape as a creative playground. Students will also have the opportunity to revise their poems through workshops in which their classmates provide feedback on drafts of their poems.

ENGL 2560. Intermediate Fiction. TR 2:20 - 3:35 PM/ TR 11:10 - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Aaron Hamburger.

"Every time we sit down at the page, we’re beginners." Claire Vaye Watkins

What do Virginia Woolf, J. K. Rowling, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King all have in common? At some point during their celebrated careers as fiction writers, they were beginners, stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out how to tell a compelling story.

Novelist E. M. Forster traces the storytelling impulse to the beginnings of human existence: “Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience gaped around the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or wooly-rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.”

We’ll take a look at three modes of fiction writing: flash fiction, short stories, and novels. Along the way, we’ll analyze samples from published authors for strategies to keep our readers awake, not just with easy plot twists, but also with the more complex and rewarding suspense of dynamic characters, vivid settings, and surprising yet satisfying uses of language.

ENGL 2800. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 11:10 AM - 12:25 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

This survey course introduces students to argumentative writings that are commonly grouped under the hybrid heading “literary theory and cultural criticism.” On one level, this is a course in the history of ideas. One can even say that it is a course in the history of one very persistent and knotty philosophical problem: what, if any, is the nature of the relationship between cultural “representation” and empirical “reality?” Put another way, what if any amount of “truth” resides in the artistic, linguistic, and especially literary representations that we make of objects, individuals, communities, or the world? Some more specific versions of this question include: does language bear any relationship to the reality it purports to describe? Is there some “engine” or “spirit” at the heart of culture that generates art independent of any one artist’s intentions? What autonomous cultural work do representations of communities and individuals do? What is the relationship between aesthetics and politics? We will discuss these and other questions, and students will gain familiarity with trenchant answers as proposed by thinkers from Plato to the Postmodernists.

On another level, this is a course in specific methods that are often deployed in literary and cultural criticism. Students will gain fluency in the terminology and conceptual frameworks associated with aesthetics, idealism, materialism, psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, new historicism, affect theory, ecocriticism, as well as critical race, gender, sex, and

disability studies. By mastering the basic contours of these diverse ways of interpreting artistic and cultural phenomena, students will be equipped to pursue more advanced courses in literature, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and even political theory. In terms of literature in particular, our readings will allow us to talk at length about the history of form, genre, language, and aesthetics.

This course asks that students engage with readings that are short but frequently quite difficult, both linguistically and conceptually. In addition to the texts on criticism, we will also be reading two works of fiction on which students will practice their new critical knowledge.

ENGL 2800W. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Alexa Joubin.

Through the lens of social justice, this course examines cinematic representations of embodied identities. In particular, we will focus on racialized bodies, performance of sexuality, trans / feminist interventions, and intersectional identities in pop culture. We focus on theories that are most relevant to our contemporary political and cultural life. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with feminism and critical race, and queer studies. More importantly, students will learn how to apply theoretical tools to global films in the interest of producing scholarship that instigates changes.

Highlights: Theories and creative works by people of color, women, and disability / LGTBTQ-identified writers

ENGL 3210. Readings in Creative Writing: The Politics of Form (Translation and Betrayal). MW 11:10AM - 12:25 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jonathan Hsy.

How is poetic form political? We will consider this question through “slow readings” of English poetry across time, from the Middle Ages to the present. Our focus will be Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde, a much-translated story of love and betrayal set against the backdrop of the Trojan War. How do poets across time repurpose this ancient story for their own time and place? What insights do poet-translators bring our understandings of gender, race, disability, environment, the ethics of violence, and social justice? We will explore adaptions of the “matter of Troy” by medieval poets as well as contemporary feminists and poets of color. Poetic forms include rhyme royale, sonnet, blank verse, free verse, spoken-word performance, and musical genres. Assignments will include poetry annotations, close readings, and poetry translation exercises (from one English-language form into another). No knowledge of Middle English is required!

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills the “Readings” requirement of the Creative Writing major.

ENGL 3370. Advanced Poetry Workshop. MW 2:20 - 3:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Chet’la Sebree.

In “What’s the Difference? Chapbooks vs. Full-Length Poetry Collections,” Lindsay Lubsy explains that “[i]f a full-length collection is a house, a chapbook wouldn’t be a Barbie Dreamhouse version. It would be a single room within the life-size house, maybe even the doll room—a small space where the walls are lined with a single obsession.” In this project-oriented advanced poetry workshop, students will work on their own chapbooks, which will feature a series of interrelated poems. Over the course of the semester, they will refine the skills necessary to develop these collections through close readings, workshops, and discussions of structure, order, and revision. In the class, students will balance developing and editing work-in-progress and discussion contemporary chapbooks, which will help inform and guide their own.

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ENGL 3390. The Writing of Fiction. MW 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Edward Jones.

This is a fiction writing workshop, with class meeting twice a week. The 75 minutes of each class are devoted primarily to discussion of students’ work. Before class, in my office, I will meet individually with the one or two students whose work will be discussed during that day’s class. From time to time, our classes will discuss published stories, but our focus during the semester will be primarily on student stories.

ENGL 3395. Creative Nonfiction. TR 12:45 - 2:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Creative Nonfiction workshop exploring memoir and other sub-genres of the form, including profiles, the essay, and cultural criticism.

ENGL 3400. Topics in Literature and Finance. MW 11:10 AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Holly Dugan.

How do we talk about money? Is there an art to it? And what do great artists have to say about this topic? In this course, we'll read a wide variety of literary texts (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature). Our goal will be to explore how money functions in these texts as an index of value, a measure of power, a part of our identity, and as a tool to create change. We'll then apply these insights and connect them to our own queries about art and economics, including our own personal and cultural investments in money. Students will practice analyzing, writing, and speaking about these topics at the very highest levels, honing their skills by working together to produce a podcast that explores literary and economic themes in these books.

The reading list includes: contemporary poetry, Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Ma’s Severance, Norris's McTeague, and Ellis's American Psycho.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills GPAC for Humanities & Oral Communication.

ENGL 3441W. Shakespeare, Race and Gender on Screen. TR 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Alexa Jubin.

Through the lenses of critical race and gender theories, this course examines cinematic representations of Shakespeare’s plays, with a focus on the themes of sexuality, class, and colonialism. In particular, we will focus on racialized bodies, performance of gender and sexuality, disability narratives, feminist interventions, religious fault lines, class struggle, and intersectional identities. Collectively we will reflect on our embodied vulnerability. Students will learn textual and film analytical skills and make evidence-based arguments.

ENGL 3650. The Short Story. TR 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Antonio López

Designed for upper-level students to study the genre, history, and key texts of the short story in different historical periods and national literary traditions. We'll read theories of narrative, fiction, and genre, and we'll enjoy a variety of examples of the short story, from the early tale and the novella to the micro form of flash fiction.

ENGL 3800. Hawaiian Literary Renaissance. T 2:20 - 3:35 PM. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

In many ways, 1898 competes with 1776 as a critical transition in U.S. History for it was in that year the U.S. set off on a frenzy of imperialism by annexing Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico. We will focus our primary attention on the revival of indigenous practices spawned by the “Hawaiian Literary Renaissance” during the 1970s and ‘80s. These writers’ experimental genres, oral storytelling, and archeological investigations formed a resistance literature on behalf of continuing struggles with corporate graft, tourism-based dispossessions, toxic pesticides, military weaponry, oceanic waste drift, volcanic eruptions, foreign diseases, anti-Asian movements, internal secession efforts, as well as the genocide of sea life and the death of coral reefs. Key works include: O.A. Bushnell’s Return of Lono (1956); Kazuo Miyamoto’s Hawaii: The End of the Rainbow (1964); Milton Murayama’s All I Asking For Is My Body (1975); Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980); Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997); Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes (2011).

Course Attributes: This course fulfills GenEd Critical Analysis Humanities; Oral Communication; Global Cross-Cultural; fulfills an elective in Micro-Minor in Asian American Studies.

ENGL 3810. Victorian Gothic. MW 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Rachael Lynch.

This seminar will examine classic gothic and horror figures such as the vampire, the mummy, the immortal being, and the doppelgänger in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, including but not limited to Shelley’s Frankenstein, selected works of Brontë sisters, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Stoker’s Dracula. Additionally, this course will interrogate how queerness, disability, colonization, xenophobia, and national identity inform the development of the gothic as a literary genre.

ENGL 3820. Slow Reading Virginia Woolf. MW 11:10 AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis.

In this course we’ll slow-read three of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary novels, as well as a number of her essays and other writings. We will discuss things both tiny (such as the comma) and vast (such as human consciousness). We will consider how Woolf draws on the visual arts, her preoccupation with beauty, and the relationship in her novels between memory and identity. Assignments may be creative as well as analytical. Books you will need to buy, all by Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; The Waves (all HBJ editions); Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics); Moments of Being (Harvest); A Writer’s Diary (Harvest). NB: This upper-level English course is cross-listed with Honors, and capped at 15 students. Please register early.

ENGL 3840W. Gender and Literature: Contemporary LGBT Writing. MW 12:45 - 2:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

This section of Gender and Literature will focus on work by openly LGBT writers from Stonewall (1969) to the present. In the process, we will consider the lesbian feminism and gay male music scene of the 1970s, the coming out novel as it coalesces in the 1980s, the emergence of trans and non-binary writing in the early 1990s into the present. The course will include literature on the AIDS epidemic, on non-urban queer locations, and on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. The syllabus will include novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose by June Arnold, Andrew Holleran, Audre Lorde, John Fox, Torey Peters, Sarah Schulman, Manuel Muñoz, Jordy Rosenberg, and Garth Greenwell.

ENGL 3910. Intro to Disability Studies. R 12:45 - 3:15 PM. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

Since disability cuts across all social categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and age those who occupy “peripheral embodiments” are approached as products of globally systemic practices of exclusion rather than “faulty” bodies. Pursuing a more expansive range of disabled experiences (racialized, cognitively disabled, psychiatric survivors, queer/trans sexualities, mobility disability, as well as those with non-apparent disabilities) provides access to forms of interdependent living that do not register as viable or even as “life” on the radar of the normative world. In other words, we will collectively seek to understand the world from disability perspectives that experience, critique, and navigate the world as creative acts of non-normative knowledge.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: Fulfills GenEd Critical Analysis Humanities; ESIA-Humanities; fulfills the mandatory requirement in the Disability Studies micro-minor.

ENGL 4220. Advanced Fiction: Screening the Novel. TR 11:10AM - 12:25 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

In this advanced hybrid workshop, students write towards their own novels, building on foundations of craft explored in Intermediate and Advanced Fiction. The class additionally examines exemplary novels and their adaptations in film and media.

English 6120. Advanced Literary Theory: Queer/Crip Wastelands. W 6:10 - 8:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

Queer/Crip Wastelands is situated at the intersections of contemporary queer theory, disability studies, and ecotheory. Examining the ways in which waste, devastation, and destruction have emerged as the backdrop for our present, the course will begin with a consideration of queer theory’s contestatory relationship with futurity, spotlighting in particular cip/queer responses to the queer antisocial or antifutural thesis. From there, we will consider foundational work in environmental studies and ecotheory before moving to a thick consideration of how crip and queer theorists have intervened in those conversations. We’ll read a wide range of books and essays, including but not limited to work by Rob Nixon, Mark Fisher, Bruno Latour, Stacy Alaimo, Lee Edelman, José Muñoz, J. Jack Halberstam, Eli Clare, Alison Kafer, Anna Tsing, and Amitav Ghosh.

ENGL 6350. Nineteenth Century I: Slippery Metaphors and Novel Forms. R 6:10 - 8:00 PM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

This course invites graduate and advanced undergraduate students who are interested in reading deeply in the global context of nineteenth century literature, a vast body of writing that has bequeathed to contemporary readers enduring innovations in form, metaphor, material culture, and crucially, storytelling. Made up of one part history from below (cf. Rediker), one part study of nineteenth-century publishing and translation history, and one part slow, attentive reading of diverse literary representations, this course will equip students with a wide knowledge of the primary and secondary sources that occupy the center of literary conversation about the period today.

As a way in, we will highlight formally cleft terms like “revolution” (a continuation of normal orbit, but also, a total remaking of the world), “riot” (a disturbance of the peace and a successful comedic performance), “asylum” (prison and sanctuary), “sensation” (popular hit, lurid trick), “law” (a force of order, the force of the state), “uncanny” (tantalizing, repellent), etc. Readings from Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Germaine de Staël, De Quincey, Carlisle, the Brontës, Marx, Collins, Dickens, Darwin, Multatuli, George Elliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy and Émile Zola will be supplemented by secondary readings by scholars like E.P. Thompson, John Plotz, Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Eugenie Brinkema, and others.

Participants in this course will also master some of the genres of professional scholarly writing: constructing an abstract, crafting a book review, proffering editorial feedback, compiling varied paratexts, and drafting a scholarly, or public-facing argumentative article, depending on the student’s own interests and professional goals.

ENGL 6510. Writing, Race, and Nation: Life Writing and Disability Justice. 3 Credits. Professor Jonathan Hsy.

Disability justice is an intersectional framework, created by queer disabled activists and disabled people of color, which centers communities who experience concurrent systems of oppression (such as racism, ableism, and queer phobia) with the aim of achieving collective liberation. This seminar focuses on contemporary life writing by disabled and/or queer people of color. We will consider how disabled people of color use literary forms and performance genres to challenge Eurocentric conventions of the “memoir” or Bildungsroman and thereby craft new ways of theorizing lived experience and social transformation. We will consider multiple intellectual lineages for disability justice, including intersectional feminism, crip theory, and even psychoanalysis (via queer theory and disidentification). The course focuses primarily on Asian American and Asian diaspora writing in the US, informed by scholarship in allied areas of Black Studies and Latinx Studies. Authors and theorists may include Anne Anlin Cheng (The Melancholy of Race), David L. Eng & Shinhee Han (Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation), Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings), Shayda Kafai (Crip Kinship), erin Khuê Ninh (Passing for Perfect), James Kyun-Jin Lee (Pedagogies of Woundedness), José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications), Sami Schalk (Black Disability Politics), Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias), and Alice Wong (Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life).

ENGL 1000-10. Dean’s Seminar. What’s New About New Play? TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays Artistic Directors select to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays. Attending plays will depend on the status of social distancing in DC and MD. I have arranged with Artistic Directors in DC and elsewhere to have new play readings/rehearsals/performances streamed to us if live performances are not available. Hopefully, if we are all fully vaccinated and boosted, theaters will once again be open for live, in-person performances.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Critical Thinking in the Humanities.

ENGL 1000-11. Dean's Seminar: Century Shakespeare. 3 Credits. MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM. Instructor Emily MacLeod.

By looking at modern performances and adaptations of his plays and reading diverse perspectives on his work from theatre artists and scholars, we will investigate how Shakespeare has evolved as an icon in the four hundred years since his death and how his plays have been used in the past ten years to explore issues of politics (Julius Caesar), race (Othello), gender and sexuality (Twelfth Night), and the pandemic (Richard II).

Fulfills GPAC Requirement of Critical Thinking

ENGL 1210-13. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. MW 09:35AM - 10:50AM. Professor Lisa Page.

This course is an overview of three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will study the work of established writers and experiment with form through writing exercises and workshops where students will share original work.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1315: Literature and Financial Imagination. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Holly Dugan.

Is there a difference between art and economics, between writing well for its own reward and writing for monetary gain? And, if so, can you spot that difference in your own work and in others? In this course, we’ll begin to answer these questions by practicing our skill at observing great writing at its very highest level (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature). We’ll then work towards applying these observations in our own writing. Along the way, we’ll explore different and often competing systems of value, including aesthetic, cultural, political, psychological, and monetary. Some authors, for instance, seem to agree with Le Guin: not everything should be monetized. Others argue the reverse:
everything has a price. Our goal will be to understand not only how these authors stylistically represent the relationship between art and economics but which ones we value the most and why.

Texts include: Utopia, The Hunger Games, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The Great Gatsby, 1984, How to Get Rich in Rising Asia, and The Wolf of Wall Street

ENGL 1320. Literature of the Americas. T 03:30PM - 06:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell

American literature considered in a global framework as writing that probes and spans the boundaries of the nation, connecting the United States to the rest of the Americas and to other parts of the globe.;

ENGL 1330. Myths of Britain. TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

“Myths of Britain” is an introductory course that invites all students who are interested in cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. In particular, we will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with, informed by, and often critical of the idea of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

In order to ground our discussion about cultural change and exchange we will consider the idea of “Britain” as a starting point for more general discussions about myth and culture. Because the exportation of the English language has accompanied British and American imperial practice over the past five centuries, British myths and mythmaking have attended the story of anglophone globalization as well as global cultural history itself. Some of the myths that we will track during the semester include, but are not limited to: mythological myths, like those pertaining to Boudica and King Arthur; dramatic myths like those surrounding Shakespeare—“the Bard;” economic myths like those undergirding the work of Adam Smith and the other grandfathers of neoliberalism; ecological myths and imperial myths, which have long provided an alibi for British expansion; and even enduring romantic myths such as one finds in the work nineteenth-century writers, all of which are complicated by changing gender formations. The year is 2020 and so our conversations about culture’s tentacles will be informed by ongoing discussions surrounding the long histories of Brexit, decolonialism, race, gender, class, environmentalism, the cultural now, and, of course, our cultural future. Politics itself being rooted in forms of mythology, the contemporary moment offers a unique opportunity to glimpse a long period of cultural history—it happens that we will be reading, viewing, and discussing works from roughly 50 BCE to the present—while also attending to the specificities of our collective and global now.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 1360.80. Fantasy and Speculative Fiction: Other Worlds, Other Selves. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu

How do modern writers adapt the conventions of fantasy narration and the bildungsroman--the novel of education--to address questions of identity, class, gender, species, social dissent, and desire? We'll explore the connections between fantasy genres in the English literary canon (fairy tales, epic, myth, medieval romance), coming of age themes (in young adult fantasy, anime, magic realism), and speculative fiction.

No prerequisites, but UW20 or an equivalent course is recommended.

Approved as a GPAC Humanities course.

Requirements: 3 papers, 1 midterm exam, up to 100 pages of reading per course meeting.

Readings: Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales. Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Renault, The King Must Die. Mitchell, Gilgamesh. Shelley, Frankenstein. Hartman, Seraphina. Butler, Kindred. Liu, The PaperMenagerie & Other Stories.

ENGL 2100.80. Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu.

Gender, Race, the Gaze, and Countermemory

Are Asian Americans invisible, or hypervisible?

How do the stereotypes of the geisha, the nerd, the refugee, and the model minority translate into stereotypes of dragon ladies, kung fu masters, spies, terrorists, sex workers, and disposable laborers? How do these stereotypes lead to cultural marginalization, political invisibility, and physical attacks? Conversely, how do Asian American scholars, writers, and critics reframe the discourses of America as a land of opportunity or of entrenched racism? Given a space of our own in history, literature, film, and theory, what stories will we tell? Key topics will include gender, sexuality, race, intersectionality, imperialism, migration, exclusion, internment, interracial triangulation, melancholy, and countermemory. Readings and viewings may include Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, Peter Bacho, Thi Bui, Cristina Garcia, Mohsin Hamid, Cathy Park Hong, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nam Le, Mira Nair, Anna Deveare Smith, Jade Snow Wong, or others.

When taken as ENGL 2100, this course fulfills a GPAC Humanities/Critical Thinking requirement and fulfills requirements in the English major and the new Asian American Studies minor.

For additional information, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected]

ENGL 2240 Play Analysis. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Allyson Stokes.

Traditional and nontraditional (Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian) approaches to the analysis of dramatic literature; literary and theatrical techniques used by playwrights.

ENGL 2410W. Introduction to English Literature I. MW 02:20PM - 15:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jonathan Hsy

Travel, Transgression, Transformation

This course explores travel writing by medieval and early modern authors. How do writers in transit cross the boundaries of religion, race, gender, sexuality, or disability? What role does literature play in creating social change? Major authors include Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, William Shakespeare, Olaudah Equiano, and Phillis Wheatley.

This course is open to non-majors and fulfills the WID requirement!

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2460.10 Fiction Writing. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits.

The writing of fiction. Recommended preparation: ENGL 1210 and two semesters of literature courses.

ENGL 2460.11 Fiction Writing. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Louis Bayard.

The writing of fiction. Recommended preparation: ENGL 1210 and two semesters of literature courses.

ENGL 2470-10. Poetry Writing. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits.

This is the initial creative writing course at GW devoted solely to poetry. We will read poems, talk widely about poetry, sample various approaches and devices, and work towards a common critical vocabulary to help us think about poems more accurately and sensitively. Above all you will write poems. Most of our class time will be devoted to close examination of both established work and student poems; learning to read and talk about poetry more successfully should enable you to write poems with a better appreciation for your readers’ probable experience of your work, and your peers’ direct feedback should prove invaluable.

ENGL 2510 Introduction to American Literature I. MW 03:45 – 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

Historical survey of early American writing through Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson.

ENGL 2560. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Fiction workshop developing foundations of craft in fiction, focusing on character, escalation, place, voice, and selective detail. Students will have taken Fiction I or Introduction to Creative Writing and will evolve their understanding of craft in 2560.Prerequisite: ENGL 2460 .

ENGL 2610-10. The Literature of Black America I: Race & Resistance. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. Professor Jennifer James.

This introductory course surveys classic works of black American literature from the Age of the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, including poetry, essays, fiction, and autobiography. The semester’s reading is designed to shed light on the lives of Africans brought to the “New World” as enslaved commodities and to illuminate how and why they turned to the written word as a tool of self-making, liberation and resistance. We will give particular attention to the slave narrative, one of the most influential genres of the 19th century. Writers might include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois. Topics in the literature are wide-ranging: anti-slavery and abolition, slave rebellions and uprisings, early Black feminism, the Civil War, lynching and the anti-lynching movement, voting rights and citizenship, higher education and more.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 2711W-80. Postcolonialism and Migration in Global Anglophone Literature and Film. W 12:45PM - 03:15PM. Professor Kavita Daiya.

Migration and politics as represented in world Anglophone literature and film; theories and histories of migration, feminist theory, and ethnic studies engaged in conversation with cultural texts. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 2800W. Introduction to Critical Theory. TR 11:10-12:25. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel Dewispelare

Topics and techniques of literary and cultural analysis. Introduction to major schools of critical theory, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3360. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

An Advanced Fiction workshop that builds on students’ knowledge from Intermediate Fiction (2560). Students will develop their craft in formal apprenticeships, dive into collections of short stories, and integrate some theory. Prerequisite: ENGL 2560 . May be repeated for credit with departmental approval.

ENGL 3385. American Memoir. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

This course focuses on craft elements in contemporary American memoir, including persona, voice, characterization, structure, setting, and style. We will analyze literary practices, and students will write original creative nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop component.
COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3395. Creative Nonfiction. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Creative Nonfiction workshop exploring memoir and other forms of the genre, including profiles, case studies, and cultural criticism.

ENGL 3440W Shakespeare, Race and Gender on Screen. TR 02:20PM-03:35PM. Professor Alexa Alice Joubin

This WID (Writing-in-the-Discipline) course introduces students to Shakespeare through the lenses of critical race and gender theories. We will examine cinematic representations of Shakespeare’s plays, with a focus on the themes of sexuality, class, and colonialism. In particular, we will focus on racialized bodies, performance of gender and sexuality, disability narratives, feminist interventions, religious fault lines, class struggle, and intersectional identities. Collectively we will reflect on our embodied vulnerability.

ENGL 3460. Milton. MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Holly Dugan

In this course, students will study John Milton's literary career by exploring the influence--and limitations--of his legendary work Paradise Lost. How have artists engaged with this epic poem? What can we learn by studying these reimagined versions of Milton's vision of Paradise? And how do these adaptations change how we read Milton as a canonical author?

Students will read Milton's works including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and selections of his prose and poetry, alongside Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, William Blake's illustrations, Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series, and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

ENGL 3520. American Romanticism. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

The shaping of America’s literary and cultural traditions as shown by significant writers of the Romantic era: Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.

ENGL 3621. American Poetry II. MW 12:45-02:00pm. 3 Credits.

This course examines important books by twelve American poets from throughout the twentieth century who collectively disrupt the continuity and traditions of English-language poetry, starting with the Georgian, even Horatian lyrics of Robert Frost (just before WW I), through the Modernist constructions of Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes, and on through the post-WW II socially-conscious, Confessionalist, and Postmodern poetries of Brooks, Ginsberg, Plath, Bishop, Ammons, and Ashbery.

ENGL 3650 The Short Story TR 15:45-17:00. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

An extensive survey of short fiction by a wide variety of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, about half of them American; readings on the art of the short story by writers and literary critics.

ENGL 3810W.80. Disability & Film. R 15:30-18:00. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

Topics vary by semester. May be repeated for credit provided topic differs. See department for more details. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3820W: Hemingway & Fitzgerald TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

In-depth studies of a single figure or two or three authors (of British, American, or other nationality) who have written in English. Topics announced in the Schedule of Classes; may be repeated for credit provided the topic differs. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3826. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. Professor Evelyn Schreiber

"Race, Memory, and Aesthetics" This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

This course fulfills the Minority/Diversity requirement for English Majors.

TEXTS
William Faulkner: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, God Help the Child
Additional Materials posted on Blackboard

ENGL 3915. Mad Literature Live. MW 1545-1700. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer

The interdisciplinary field of disability studies has arguably taken what might be understood as a “mad turn” over the past decade, turning from a focus on physical disability to a consideration of mental disability, or mental illness, or madness. This course will examine how so-called “madness” has been represented in literature and film, with a particular attention to memoir; it will also consider how work in disability cultural studies has theorized the representation and reality of mental disability. Students will learn about a range of different cultural moments or movements, include anti-psychiatry, Mad Pride, neurodiverse or neuroqueer movements among others. We will attend throughout to how mental disability intersects with other facets of identity, included sexual and gender identity, race, and class. Over the course of the semester, we will have will four virtual visits from some of the writers we will be reading.

ENGL 3940.80 Contemporary Black Queer Literature and Film. TR 1420-1535. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer James

Contemporary Black Queer Literature and Film will explore late 20th and early 21st century memoirists, filmmakers, fiction writers, poets, comics creators, and cultural theorists who write and make art about Black LGBTQIA+ lives and experiences. We will consider topics such as as queer coming of age and coming out; queer kinship and community; the complexities of identities; the navigation of personal and political backlash; queer sci-fi and speculative thought; the importance of queer creativity, futurity and joy. Possible texts might include some of the following: Danez Smith, Some of Us are Not Dead; Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir; Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood; Rodney Evans, Brother to Brother; Barry Jenkins, Moonlight; Jenn St. Onge and Joy San, Bingo Love; Dee Rees, Pariah; Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts; Akwaekae Emezi; PET; Larry Duplechan, Blackbird; Brandon Taylor, Real Life; Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits. If time permits, we will consider queer Black musical art such as Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer and Lil Nas X's Montero.

ENGL 3965: Asian American Cultural Studies: Art and Activism. MW 1110-1225. 3 Credits. Professor Jonathan Hsy

How can art promote social change and advance justice? This course explores the powers of art and activism through key works by Asian Americans (including journalism, poetry, graphic novels, and stand-up comedy). We consider how artists and activists expand the meanings of “America” to encompass the Americas and the Pacific Rim. Topics include race, gender, sexuality, and disability; civil rights, queer identities, environmental justice, decolonization, and critical refugee studies. Authors include David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Esmé WeijunWang; works include George Takei’s graphic novel They Called Us Enemy; and performances by Asian American stand-up comedians: Akwafina, Margaret Cho, Ken Jeong, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong. This course fulfills the minority requirement of the English major.

ENGL 3980W: Transnational Queer Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures. MW 1245-1400. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer

The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or bisexual or transgender people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized, however contentiously, around identity?

This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s). Please note that this course will travel to Prague, Czech Republic for a week in November; there will be an additional layer of registration (with the Office for Study Abroad) during the summer.

ENGL 4040. Honors Seminar. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

This course is intended only for those senior English majors who have been selected for the English Honors Program. The seminar will help you get started on writing your honors thesis by focusing on basics of research in literary and cultural studies and on the broader work of writing and reading in the humanities. Over the course of the semester students will develop a thesis proposal, outline, and first chapter; we will begin with seminar discussions on the practice of research and move midway through the semester to conducting writing workshops in which we’ll exchange and comment on drafts in small groups.

ENGL 4250. Honors Thesis. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

Under the guidance of an instructor, the student writes a thesis on an approved topic. Open only to senior honors candidates in English.

ENGL 4360.10 – Independent Study. 1-4 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley

For exceptional students, typically majors, whose academic objectives are not accommodated in regular courses. Students must obtain departmental approval and arrange for supervision by an appropriate member of the faculty.

ENGL 4470.10 – Internship. 1-3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

Position of responsibility with a publication, educational project, firm, or cultural organization offering practical experience in research, writing, editing, etc. May be repeated for credit; a maximum of 3 credits may be counted toward the English major. Permission of the supervising faculty required prior to enrollment. P/NP grading only. Restricted to juniors and seniors in the English program.

ENGL 1000-10. Dean’s Seminar. “Imitations”. 3 Credits. Professor Jane Shore TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM.

This course is designed as a reading and writing poetry workshop. Weekly, we will be close-reading a variety of modern and contemporary poems, and after analyzing how these poems work, you will write your own “imitation” of it, and then, as a class, we’ll “workshop” your “imitation.” You’ll add a two-page prose explanation (a gloss) in which you compare your poem and the original, making note of, among other things, the tone, syntax, language choices, patterning, music, and voice of the original. You are, of course, encouraged to subvert, refute, and play off the poem you choose to imitate, which may include odes, elegies, and persona poems, and other traditional verse forms. Poets this semester may include: Lowell, Bishop, Pound, Brainard, CK Williams, Neruda, Jarrell, Pinsky, Lockwood, Hong-Kingston, Harjo, Hayes, etc.

Think about this question: What can you, a young poet, learn from these poets? What can you steal and be influenced by? Writers serve apprenticeships, much the way that painters in the past studied in the atelier and studios under master painters. Your atelier is located in the world of books, reading, listening to, and studying poets living and dead.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Critical Thinking in the Arts.

ENGL 1050-10. Introduction to Literary Studies. 3 Credits. MW 09:35AM - 10:50AM. Professor Tony Lopez.

How to read and interpret literature at the college level and beyond. Close readings of poetry, fiction, and drama, emphasizing genre and form.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities

ENGL 1210-10. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. MW 09:35AM - 10:50AM. Professor Lisa Page.

This course introduces the study of three genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, with a focus on studying literature from the inside out, and generating original work.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1210-11. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. TR 04:45PM - 06:00PM. Professor Jung Yun

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative nonfiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1330. Myths of Britain. TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

“Myths of Britain” is an introductory course that invites all students who are interested in cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. In particular, we will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with, informed by, and often critical of the idea of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

In order to ground our discussion about cultural change and exchange we will consider the idea of “Britain” as a starting point for more general discussions about myth and culture. Because the exportation of the English language has accompanied British and American imperial practice over the past five centuries, British myths and mythmaking have attended the story of anglophone globalization as well as global cultural history itself. Some of the myths that we will track during the semester include, but are not limited to: mythological myths, like those pertaining to Boudica and King Arthur; dramatic myths like those surrounding Shakespeare—“the Bard;” economic myths like those undergirding the work of Adam Smith and the other grandfathers of neoliberalism; ecological myths and imperial myths, which have long provided an alibi for British expansion; and even enduring romantic myths such as one finds in the work nineteenth-century writers, all of which are complicated by changing gender formations. The year is 2022 and so our conversations about culture’s tentacles will be informed by ongoing discussions surrounding the long histories of Brexit, decolonialism, race, gender, class, environmentalism, the cultural now, and, of course, our cultural future. Politics itself being rooted in forms of mythology, the contemporary moment offers a unique opportunity to glimpse a long period of cultural history—it happens that we will be reading, viewing, and discussing works from roughly 50 BCE to the present—while also attending to the specificities of our collective and global now.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 1360. Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM. 3 Credits. Instructor Matthew Stigler

This course explores the critical foundations of several contemporary speculative texts to map out a history and theory of speculative fiction from folk tales to space operas. We will examine novels, short fiction, poems, films, and games that imagine different worlds and different ways of being. Why do we speculate? How do we imagine in support of and against majority feelings? What do we get from imagining the world other than how it is? And when does the speculative feel realer than realism?

Possible Texts: Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death; Taika Waititi, Thor: Ragnarok; Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate; N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season; R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War; Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow; Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth; Manuel Gonzales, The Regional Office is Under Attack; Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 1365-10. Literature and the Environment. TR 12:45 - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

What do we mean when we refer to “the environment”? Do we mean “nature,” “wilderness,” “geography,” “the earth,” “the non-human world,” “the outdoors,” or something else? This introductory course will explore the many ways that literary texts respond to and shape our understanding of the natural world. We will read widely, starting with writers responding to the industrial revolution and developing an eco-consciousness and moving to contemporary writers responding to the perils of climate change, the promises of sustainability, and the urgent needs for environmental justice. We will also weave in chapters from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass by way of exploring indigenous ways of understanding the environment. Through a range of short, creative assignments, students will practice writing clear and compelling prose for a variety of audiences; will develop their analytic skills through close-reading exercises; and in small groups will have opportunities to develop capacities for public presentation. Recognizing that students from all majors may have interests in the environment and in environmental literature, creative final projects will be designed to facilitate making connections, exploring the value of literary study and the humanities more generally to other fields, whether in the sciences, the world of policy and business, engineering, law, or in medicine.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills Critical Thinking and Oral Communication GCRs, and counts toward either Pillar One or Pillar Three of the Sustainability Minor.

ENGL 1500-10. American Political Fictions. T 05:10 - 07:00PM 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

This class delves into a Movement known as New Journalism (NJ) that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s. NJ spawned what came to be called “the Non-fiction novel”. These works foreground the idiosyncrasies of subjectivity as a value rather than a failure of empiricism. The writers we will study placed their private visions as a framework for interpreting the political life of the nation. Its leading practitioners wrote some of the most important cultural commentaries of the latter half of the 20th century including: In Cold Blood (Truman capote, 1966), Hell’s Angels (Hunter S. Thompson, 1967), Armies of The Night (Norman mailer, 1969), Electric Koolaid Acid Test (tom Wolfe, 1968), The White Album (Joan Didion 1979), The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984), and others. Each writer cultivated their public presentation as an extension of their private visions of America; they worked to show how they actively filter stimulus and events of substantive note for the nation’s politics.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2210-10. Techniques in Creative Writing. “Around the World in 80 Poems”. TR 11:10 - 12:25PM 3 Credits. Professor Jane Shore.

Every week we will be close-reading a variety of poems, and after analyzing how these poems work, you will write your own poem; and then, as a class, we’ll “workshop” your poem. I’ve designed this course as a reading and writing workshop. It is not a survey course. Over the semester, we will explore my own idiosyncratic world anthology of poems including those by Amorak (Inuit) and First Nation Swampy Cree, Haiku Masters, Neruda’s Odes Elementales, Cortazar’s “Instructions on How to Climb Stairs,” and Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” the most famous poem written about the Holocaust. Most poems are in translation; but some are by poets from the English-speaking world—Heaney, Boland, Walcott.

On occasion, we’ll travel across centuries and cultures: Li Po (6th- century China) and Wyatt (16th-century English Metaphysical.) I have wanted for decades to make these amazing poets the center piece of their own course, in which we explore their eclectic cultures, poetic styles, and sensibilities. GW has a large multi-cultural and international student body, and surely there are poets whose work you may already know and want to share.

This class will be capped at 15 students.
Recommended: One ENGL1210 course and two literary courses of any level.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 2210-11. Techniques in Creative Writing, "Crafting Characters in Fiction". MW 02:20 - 03:35PM 3 Credits. Professor Elizabeth Gutting.

In this course we will read short stories and one novel with a central question in mind: how do fiction writers craft compelling characters? We will study how writers reveal character through dialogue, action, and tension with other characters. And we’ll ask: How are plot and character intertwined? How do writers draw from life to create their characters?

This class is a reading and writing workshop. Students will not only close read texts but will also create original pieces of fiction and share their writing in a workshop setting. Our readings will come from a wide array of writers, both contemporary and classic, American and international. Authors will include Marilynne Robinson, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Shobha Rao, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 2250.80 Dramatic Writing. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Allyson Stokes.

In Introduction to Dramatic Writing, each student will write an original play for the stage, will work to create a personal body of new dramatic work based on writing prompts and exercises, will learn the language and techniques of new play dramaturgy, and will gain a deep understanding of the shape and challenges of a career in dramatic writing through collaboration and workshops of student work. Same As: CTAD 2250.

ENGL 2460.10 Fiction Writing. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jung Yun.

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, voice, setting, and style. In this course, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction across numerous genres, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2460.11 Fiction Writing. TR 09:35PM - 10:50AM. 3 Credits. Professor Louis Bayard.

The writing of fiction. Recommended preparation: ENGL 1210 and two semesters of literature courses.

ENGL 2470-10. Poetry Writing. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Thea Brown

This poetry writing class will focus on investigating fundamental poetic devices and craft skills, building sustainable writing practices, workshopping original poems, and reading and discussing parallel texts by a diverse collection of contemporary authors.

ENGL 2510W-10. Introduction to American Literature I. MW 12:45 - 02:00PM 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Oral Communication.

ENGL 2560. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

This course is designed for writers seeking to improve their craft as writers of short fiction, and those who are prepared to tackle longer, sustained narratives. Each week students will be presented with examples of published works, which will be used as inspiration and models for their own writing. Students will become more autonomous readers in small-group collaborative settings and will become stronger writers, honing their craft. Students will write, revise, and workshop new and original fiction. Prerequisite: ENGL 2460.

ENGL 2570. Intermediate Poetry Writing. TR 12:45 - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel Saalfeld.

The writing of poetry. Recommended preparation: ENGL 1210 and two semesters of literature courses.

ENGL 2800W. Critical Methods and Literary Theory. TR 11:10-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

“The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque left theory […] write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public.”
—Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2002), p. 130.

This course studies the influential body of writing called “literary and cultural theory,” a form of writing that addresses the following question: “How can a researcher account for a particular cultural object or pattern at a particular moment and in a particular context?” By “cultural object,” I mean books, films, architecture, photography, visual art, digital expression, and other examples of aesthetic practices, as well as their specific forms and technologies of circulation and dissemination. By “context,” I mean those varied economic, historical, and political conditions that make possible a given object’s visibility.

Students who complete this course will become familiar with canonical and emergent paradigms of thought that interrogate the premises of culture, whether in terms of race, gender, language, class, or embodiment. In this spirit, students can expect to excerpts from canonical figures of the critical theory tradition, thinkers like Wollstonecraft, Marx, Freud, Saussure, Woolf, Adorno & Horkheimer, Derrida, Foucault, Spivak, Said, Butler, and Rich and also expect to read and debate parts of recently heralded works by scholars like Sianne Ngai, Édouard Glissant, Sophie Wahnich, Ian Baucom, Achille Mbembe, Arif Dirlik, Hortense Spillers, Lauren Berlant, Sarah Ahmed, Saba Mahmood, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Paul B. Preciado, and others. Several works of contemporary fiction and one film will also be assigned.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3210. Readings in Creative Writing “Life Stories”. MW 11:10-12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Life Stories is a Readings in Creative Writing course focused on the close reading of literature, pulled from lived experience. The course will include the roman a clef, the memoir, the prose poem, and the autobiographical novel, among other forms. It includes a writing workshop component.

ENGL 4000. Advanced Fiction Writing “Screening the Novel”. TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Each week, we discuss novels, how they are built, and how they are reimagined in film and multimedia. In our critique of texts translated to the big (or small) screen, we will apply theories of adaptation. Students must have access to both anchor texts and films, as we will view texts both synchronously and independently. This course is an advanced hybrid workshop designed for students who have a strong background in fiction writing and who are curious about writing novels.

Prerequisite: ENGL 2560.

ENGL 3240.80 Introduction to Dramaturgy. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jodi Kanter.

Fundamentals of classical and contemporary dramaturgical practice, including analyzing plays, doing research, supporting directors and actors in rehearsal, writing program notes, and leading post-show discussions.

Same as TRDA 3240.

ENGL 3370.10 Advanced Poetry Writing. MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Thea Brown.

This workshop-intensive, project-oriented poetry writing class will center on writing as practice and the discussion of poetic thought by a diverse cohort of contemporary writers (including ourselves, of course).

Prerequisite: ENGL 2570

ENGL 3390. The Writing of Fiction. MW 02:20 - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Edward Jones.

This course is a creative writing workshop. It is devoted almost exclusively to discussion of student work in fiction. Generally, we do two stories a class, and that usually works out to a little more than 30 minutes of discussion for each story. In addition to the 30 minutes of class time for each story, I meet individually, one-on-one with each student before class. These conferences can sometimes last up to an hour, depending upon the length and complexity of a student's story. These sessions plus the 30 minutes of class time afford the student a good idea of what has worked and what has not worked in a student's piece. My belief is that giving as much discussion as possible to students' gives them of where their writing development is. We cannot resolve all their writing concerns in one semester, but if a student comes away from the course knowing more about even one topic-- whether dialogue, plot, character development, etc. -- then we have something of a success.

From time to time, we will also discuss in class the short story work of various authors, from Frank O'Connor to Alice Walker.

ENGL 3395. Creative Nonfiction. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

First and foremost, in this workshop we concern ourselves with the "authorial stance of the lived experience." We will engage in a relationship that Phillip Lopate likens to a friendship that “confides everything from gossip to wisdom” and is “based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.” Sub-genres explored include autobiography & memoir, the personal-political essay, profiles, case studies, feature writing, and narratives that intentionally (sometimes dangerously) straddle the worlds of fiction and nonfiction. Students from all disciplines and levels are encouraged to join.

ENGL 3410W. Chaucerian Storytelling, Then and Now. MW 02:20 - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jonathan Hsy.

Why does “The Father of English Poetry” matter today? This course offers an introduction to the life and works of multifaceted English author Geoffrey Chaucer and his diverse legacy in contemporary popular culture (including such media as spoken word performances, graphic novels, children’s books, films, and digital media). Not only will we enjoy the beauty, humor, and depth of Chaucer’s poetry in the original Middle English language, but we will also explore some of his lesser-known writings in prose (including legal and scientific treatises). Can Chaucer’s medieval texts challenge modern-day assumptions about gender, race, justice, scientific knowledge, and religious difference? How did Chaucer’s literary experiments in an emergent literary language influence generations of later writers, artists, and activists?

Requirements: class participation, translation exercises, close reading, final essay with revision, and one in-class presentation. One option for the final essay is to examine a modern Chaucer adaptation (such as a work of visual art, film, music recording, or work in some other medium). No previous knowledge of Middle English is required!

This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3441. Shakespeare II. TR 03:45 - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Emily MacLeod

Shakespeare’s status today as a major English poet and playwright makes it easy to forget that he was also an actor and a shareholder in his theatre company. Over the past fifty years, attention to Shakespeare as a theatremaker and businessman has engendered new discoveries about theatrical practice in early modern London and how the play texts can serve as blueprints for performance. Reconstructions of playhouses like Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia have also served as valuable tools for the study of Shakespeare in its “original” performance conditions. By reading Shakespeare’s plays as plays, this class will explore the journey that a play in early modern London took from the stage to publication, and how the printed texts might not always reflect what was seen in the playhouse. Recordings of modern productions from Shakespeare’s Globe and other theatres (as well as a possible live theatre visit in DC) will help us in our analysis. Students will not only learn how to read a Shakespeare play with knowledge of early modern staging conditions, but they will also engage with longer histories of Shakespeare and performance and myths of Shakespearean “universality” and “authenticity.” Course texts will range from plays performed frequently today (Romeo and Juliet) to ones rarely seen (Two Noble Kinsmen).

ENGL 3490W. Early American Literature and Culture. MW 03:45 - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

The shaping of America’s early literary and cultural traditions as shown by significant writers of the colonial and early national periods: Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, Edwards, Franklin, Crevecoeur, and others. Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3510.10. Children’s Literature. TR 11:10 - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu

What do children’s books teach about curiosity, initiative, rebellion, competition, kindness, and compassion? What do they teach about language, school, and national belonging? How do gods, wizards, and animals contribute to the reader’s psychic world? What do we learn from travel and from traveler’s tales? Can stories about minority children be classics? Beginning with classic children’s texts from the 19th century and rushing forward to the 21st, we’ll consider “the uses of enchantment” in children’s and young adult fiction.

Readings may include: Fairy tales; Little Women; Little Princess; The Sign of Four; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle; The Golden Compass; Dragonwings; and Whale Rider.

No prerequisites, but a previous 1000-level English course is recommended as preparation for the course.

ENGL 3610.10. Modernism. MW 02:20 - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis

The early decades of the twentieth century saw dramatic change in all kinds of cultural and literary production, as realism, with its promise of a world that might be represented through language, increasingly gave way to a focus on language itself as world.
In our discussions of novels and poems from the period with which Modernism is associated (roughly 1900-1930), we will focus on the following topics: vision and knowledge; the idea of character; nostalgia, loss, and the concept of home; beauty; and urban culture. We will also consider the ways in which painting, photography, and music responded to the same questions with which Modernist literature was preoccupied.

Authors: Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, and others.

This is an upper-level course for students who enjoy challenging material!

ENGL 3641W. American Novel II. MW 03:45-05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

Continuation of ENGL 3640. In this course, we will first focus on literary modernism in the context of the development and transformation of the American novel during the first decades of the twentieth century. A rejection of the values and experience of World War I, modernism was an artistic movement of extraordinary experimentation. Turning to the novels of later decades, we will explore in particular the second-generation naturalism which was a literary response to the Great Depression, World War II, and McCarthyism, among other critical sociocultural events. Then we will turn to the latter part of the century, focusing on the radical literary experimentation of postmodernism, which called into question the philosophical and literary realism associated with the novel since its18th-century formation. Taking a psychobiographical and sociocultural approach, we will examine the ways in which various American writers shaped their novels, and the ways in which the writers and their novels were "written" or encoded by American culture. We will also employ other theoretical approaches that will enable us to interrogate these novels in useful and significant ways. The books we will read are the following: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3650. The Short Story. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

An extensive survey of short fiction by a wide variety of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, about half of them American; readings on the art of the short story by writers and literary critics.

ENGL 3810.10 - Irish & African American Lit: James Joyce/Edward P. Jones. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Tony Lopez

Comparative study of the novels and short stories of two of the greats, James Joyce and Edward P. Jones. Topics include the art of modernist and postmodernist fiction; Dublin and DC in literature; race, colonialism, and diaspora; and more. Readings include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulyssees by Joyce and Lost in the City, The Known World, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Jones.

ENGL 3810.11 – Coming Out & The Literary Closet. TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Ian Funk

Pop stars, sports figures, actors, and politicians: everyone is coming out!

This course will think about coming out, the closet, and related issues of (in)visibility as historical phenomena that take many shapes across time and space during the long 20th century. In bringing literature, theory, and cultural production together, we will explore a variety of ways, including passing and masquerade, that people of color, queers, and people with disabilities, among others, have been motivated to manage personal, social, economic, and legal relationships to (in)visibility. Together, we will engage texts from people like Eve Sedgwick, James Baldwin, Dan Levy, and Alison Bechdel.

ENGL 3810.12 - Trans Literature: Memoirs, Short Stories, Novels and Poetry on Rebellious Gender Nonconformities. TR 09:35PM - 10:50PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Zara Richter

While some critics believe trans issues emerged in the 21st century, the 20th century is filled with novels, short stories, memoirs and poetry about and by trans people and gender nonconforming people. To avoid a form of literature that would privilege an unnamed bias toward characters and stories that match their gender assignment, trans literature opens the door for people of marginal genders and sexes to learn more about their own history and for people who match their gender assignment a chance to learn about a forgotten part of the library. This course will use a mix of theoretical readings and as well as novels and short stories and poetry to teach the story of transgender people in the American 20th century and contemporary era as well as show how trans people have found our own voices long before many recognized we existed.

Some of the texts that will be taught include: Christine Jorgenson: A Personal Autobiography, The Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama, Black Trans Prayerbook by Dane Edidi, Elsie John by Herbert Huncke and City Of Night by Jon Rechy

ENGL 3820W.11 – Major Authors: Shooting Melville. TR 09:35-10:50pm. 3 Credits. Instructor Jaime Campomar.

Who is Herman Melville? And why are we still talking about him? There’s the books he wrote and there’s the fascinating life he led, but most of all there are the movies and tv shows that adapt, discuss or are inspired by his work and his life. Students taking ENGL3820W will read Moby-Dick and two other novels by Melville in conjunction with the movies and shows that were sparked by them. This course will introduce students to elementary concepts of literary and film analysis, and will guide them through the challenges of understanding adaptation as a process of cultural revision. ENGL3280W is a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) course and is designed to build students’ writing skills. Students will be expected to write extensively throughout the semester.

This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3820W.80 – Major Authors: Virginia Woolf. MW 11:10-12:25pm. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green Lewis

This course offers a chance to read three of Virginia Woolf’s most demanding experimental novels in the context of her reflections on art and life. In addition to our primary emphasis on Woolf’s prose, we will focus on three areas:

Woolf’s interest in all things visual, including paintings by her sister. Vanessa Bell, and others
Woolf’s representation of the passage of time and the workings of memory
Woolf’s conception of the self in relation to others, and her interest in what it means to represent another human being in words or paint.

Reading may also include essays, diary entries, and biographical extracts. There will be frequent writing assignments of varying lengths.

This course is cross-listed with University Honors and will be capped at 15 students, with 7 seats reserved for Honors students. Please sign up promptly.

This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3840W.10 – Gender and Literature: Contemporary LGBT Writing. MW 12:45-02:00pm. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer

This course will explore some of the ways in which bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and gay people have imagined identities and communities since the beginning of the contemporary gay liberation movement. Focusing on LGBT novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose written during the past four decades, we will consider in particular what is made possible and impossible by literary representation. Gay film theorist Richard Dyer writes that “representation is the organization of the perception of difference into comprehensibility, a comprehensibility that is always frail, coded, in other words, human.” Taking Dyer’s assertion as both a promising point of departure and a caution, we will ask a series of overlapping questions: how and why have writers used literary representations to explore what it means to be lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgender? What historical and cultural conditions have encouraged such writing? If every way of perceiving is simultaneously a way of not perceiving, what identities, communities, and political possibilities have been constrained by available literary forms? How have certain writers responded to those constraints? We will attempt to remain attentive throughout to the cultural and political contexts from which these texts emerge and in which they are read.

This course fulfills a WID requirement.

ENGL 3912.10 – Disability and The Holocaust R 05:10-07:00pm. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell

How many ways are there to witness an atrocity when there are no survivors? Do you know where the idea for the Holocaust’s “final solution” came from? Ever wonder why Jewish deportees were met by physicians at the Holocaust train spurs? Do you know how the perpetrators of the European genocide were hired? This course will answer these questions and many more while featuring visits to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and culminate in a study abroad trip during spring break 2022 to Berlin, Germany (including day trips to Potsdam, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Wittgenstein, Dresden, and Pirna). We will tour famous German sites and visit memorials to the victims of the secret Nazi killing program authorized by Hitler and codenamed: Aktion T4. As disability remains a heavily stigmatized form of difference and a subpopulation designated as disposable humanity, our study will unveil the historical roots of contemporary attitudes and treatments of people living in bodyminds designated as “non-normative.” The course will also involve students in the making of a feature-length documentary film that explores this history and its impact on attitudes about disability today. Come join us and be part of a new generation of historians and storytellers seeking to bring about awareness of this erased history. Now is the time!

This is a short-term abroad course. Overseas component in Short-Term Abroad Course. Overseas course component in Berlin, Germany - Travel March 14-19, 2022. Must contact the Office of CCAS Global Initiatives to register.

ENGL 3940.80 – Black Women Writers in 21st Century. TR 11:10-12:25pm. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer James

Audre Lorde famously wrote: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” In that spirit, we will read a new generation of Black women writers who choose to break silences around difficult issues. The readings may cover a range of topics: beauty and the body; sex and sexuality; illness, wellness and mental health; religion and spirituality; trauma and memory; racial justice; family, community and belonging; art as a tool Black women use to survive and thrive.

Possible primary texts include Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive; Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body; Dee Rees, Pariah; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People; Morgan Parker, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce; Deeshaw Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies; Patrice Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir; Bettina Judd, Patient; Britt Bennett, The Vanishing Half.

ENGL 3950.10 – Cultural Theory and Black Studies. TR 02:20-03:35pm. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer James

Critical race theory has recently become a social and political flash point in the on-going U.S. “culture wars.” But what is critical race theory? Why and how did it emerge? How has it been utilized? Why has it been weaponized? This class will examine this “hot topic” from multiple perspectives. We will first investigate “critical race theory” and the controversies surrounding it including reading and considering the New York Times’s 1619 project. We will then shift focus to some of the most significant and enduring contributions to racial and anti-racist Morrison, Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Charles Mills, Hortense Spillers, The Combahee River Collective, Stokley Carmichael, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, Martin Luther King, Roderick Ferguson, Cathy Cohen and others. The readings will intersect with feminist, queer, disability and whiteness studies.

ENGL 3960.80 – Asian American Literature. TR 03:45-05:00pm. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu

"One Nation, Indivisible," Dorothea Lange's wartime photo of Japanese American and other children pledging allegiance to the flag together raises the question of why Asian Americans, having passed from “yellow peril” to the “model minority,” are still treated as outsiders by so many Americans. We’ll address the means and causes of Asian Americans’ political marginalization and cultural erasure, and explore the 120-year-old literary traditions addressing experiences of migration, the melancholy of race, and the creation through imagination of counter memories: stories that resist official erasure, memorialize Asian American experiences, and pose new questions about “One Nation, Indivisible.” With special attention to gender performance, family, portrayals of sexuality; transnational migration, memory, and theories of melancholia. Prospective authors and filmmakers to be studied: Carlos Bulosan, Anita Desai, Alex Gilvarry, Mohsin Hamid, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Deanne Borshay Liem, Ken Liu, John Okada, Monique Truong, Ruth Ozeki, Alice Wu, and Jung Yun. Fulfills English major requirements for minority/diversity and requirements for the Asian American minor. Recommended preparation for this course: Engl. 2100 or any GW English course.

ENGL 4220.10 – Creative Writing Senior Thesis. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page

Under the guidance of an instructor, students compose an original manuscript of poetry or short fiction accompanied by an essay situating their work in the contemporary context. Restricted to seniors in the BA in English and and BA in creative writing and English programs.

ENGL 4250W.10 – Honor Thesis. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis

Under the guidance of an instructor, the student writes a thesis on an approved topic. Open only to senior honors candidates in English.

ENGL 4360.10 – Independent Study. 1-4 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley

For exceptional students, typically majors, whose academic objectives are not accommodated in regular courses. Students must obtain departmental approval and arrange for supervision by an appropriate member of the faculty.

ENGL 4470.10 – Internship. 1-3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

Position of responsibility with a publication, educational project, firm, or cultural organization offering practical experience in research, writing, editing, etc. May be repeated for credit; a maximum of 3 credits may be counted toward the English major. Permission of the supervising faculty required prior to enrollment. P/NP grading only. Restricted to juniors and seniors in the English program.

ENGL 1000-10. Dean’s Seminar. What’s New About New Play? TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays Artistic Directors select to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays. Attending plays will depend on the status of social distancing in DC and MD. I have arranged with Artistic Directors in DC and elsewhere to have new play readings/rehearsals/performances streamed to us if live performances are not available. Hopefully, if we are all fully vaccinated, theaters will once again be open for live, in-person performances.

ENGL 1210-12. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. TR 04:45PM - 06:00PM. Professor Jung Yun.

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative nonfiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1210-13. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. MW 09:35AM - 10:50AM. Professor Lisa Page.

This course is an overview of three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will study the work of established writers and experiment with form through writing exercises and workshops where students will share original work.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

English 1315: Literature and Financial Imagination. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Holly Dugan.

Is there a difference between art and economics, between writing well for its own reward and writing for monetary gain? And, if so, can you spot that difference in your own work and in others? In this course, we’ll begin to answer these questions by practicing our skill at observing great writing at its very highest level (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature). We’ll then work towards applying these observations in our own writing. Along the way, we'll explore different and often competing systems of value, including aesthetic, cultural, political, psychological, and monetary. Some authors, for instance, seem to agree with Le Guin: not everything should be monetized. Others argue the reverse: everything has a price. Our goal will be to understand not only how these authors stylistically represent the relationship between art and economics but which ones we value the most and why.

Texts include: Utopia, The Hunger Games, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The Great Gatsby, 1984, How to Get Rich in Rising Asia, and The Wolf of Wall Street

ENGL 1330. Myths of Britain. TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

“Myths of Britain” is an introductory course that invites all students who are interested in cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. In particular, we will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with, informed by, and often critical of the idea of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

In order to ground our discussion about cultural change and exchange we will consider the idea of “Britain” as a starting point for more general discussions about myth and culture. Because the exportation of the English language has accompanied British and American imperial practice over the past five centuries, British myths and mythmaking have attended the story of anglophone globalization as well as global cultural history itself. Some of the myths that we will track during the semester include, but are not limited to: mythological myths, like those pertaining to Boudica and King Arthur; dramatic myths like those surrounding Shakespeare—“the Bard;” economic myths like those undergirding the work of Adam Smith and the other grandfathers of neoliberalism; ecological myths and imperial myths, which have long provided an alibi for British expansion; and even enduring romantic myths such as one finds in the work nineteenth-century writers, all of which are complicated by changing gender formations. The year is 2020 and so our conversations about culture’s tentacles will be informed by ongoing discussions surrounding the long histories of Brexit, decolonialism, race, gender, class, environmentalism, the cultural now, and, of course, our cultural future. Politics itself being rooted in forms of mythology, the contemporary moment offers a unique opportunity to glimpse a long period of cultural history—it happens that we will be reading, viewing, and discussing works from roughly 50 BCE to the present—while also attending to the specificities of our collective and global now.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 2100. Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu.

Are Asian Americans invisible, or hypervisible?

How do the stereotypes of the geisha, the nerd, the refugee, and the model minority translate into stereotypes of dragon ladies, kung fu masters, spies, terrorists, sex workers, and disposable laborers? How do these stereotypes lead to cultural marginalization, political invisibility, and physical attacks? Conversely, how do Asian American scholars, writers, and critics reframe the discourses of America as a land of opportunity or of entrenched racism? Given a space of our own in history, literature, film, and theory, what stories will we tell? Key topics will include gender, sexuality, race, intersectionality, imperialism, migration, exclusion, internment, interracial triangulation, melancholy, and counter-memory. Readings and viewings may include Thi Bui, Anita Desai, Jessica Hagedorn, Mohsin Hamid, Cathy Park Hong, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mira Nair, John Okada, Anna Deveare Smith, Jade Snow Wong, and others.

When taken as ENGL 2100, this course fulfills a GPAC Humanities/Critical Thinking requirement and fulfills requirements in the English major and the Asian American Studies minor (pending CCAS approval).

For additional information, contact Prof. Chu at [email protected]

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course is designed to fulfill a Humanities/Critical Thinking GPAC requirement.

ENGL 2240 Play Analysis. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Allyson Stokes.

Traditional and nontraditional (Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian) approaches to the analysis of dramatic literature; literary and theatrical techniques used by playwrights.

ENGL 2410W. Introduction to English Literature I. MW 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey

If you speak or write English, your words are themselves a storehouse or archive packed with ideas and images developed over a long period. Access to that archive of language can be found in the complex, contradictory development of English literature from 650 to 1800. Both familiar and alien, writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Johnson contribute to the complications you will disentangle. This is also a WID class with continual writing opportunities.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2411W. Introduction to English Literature II. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Rachael Nebraska Lynch

This introductory survey course will focus on British literature, rhetoric, drama, and film from the 1780s to present. This course will introduce you to a broad range of texts and themes, with specific focus on major authors studied in their historical context. We will consider how authors responded to literary, social, cultural, political, and philosophical trends, attending closely to questions of power, progress, and constructions of national and individual identities. Our primary focus will be to trace the evolving definitions of British national identity and its intersections with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability from the French Revolution to Brexit. Authors and directors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Steve McQueen. This course satisfies a WID requirement.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2460.10 Fiction Writing. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3-4 Credits. Professor Jung Yun.

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, voice, setting, and style. In this course, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction across numerous genres, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2460.11 Fiction Writing. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Louis Bayard.

The writing of fiction. Recommended preparation: ENGL 1210 and two semesters of literature courses.

ENGL 2470-10. Poetry Writing. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits.

This is the initial creative writing course at GW devoted solely to poetry. We will read poems, talk widely about poetry, sample various approaches and devices, and work towards a common critical vocabulary to help us think about poems more accurately and sensitively. Above all you will write poems. Most of our class time will be devoted to close examination of both established work and student poems; learning to read and talk about poetry more successfully should enable you to write poems with a better appreciation for your readers’ probable experience of your work, and your peers’ direct feedback should prove invaluable.

ENGL 2511W.80 Introduction to American Literature II. Post-Civil War to Postmodernism TR 2:20 – 3:35 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland.

When the Civil War had drawn to its bloody end after four long years, America was enabled, indeed required, to redefine itself. That redefinition resulted not in a stable identity, however. Instead, it introduced ongoing transformations of American society that accelerated throughout the 20th century. Relationships were negotiated and renegotiated with regard specially to race and gender. But so too were relationships to nature, spirituality, and technology. The identity of the self itself also went through various changes. For example, the concept of free will was complicated by the concept of forces working, often unrecognized, upon the individual—notably psychological, economic, and biological. Eventually even the concept of reality itself was called into question. Was it an absolute entity, an entity to which we have only mediated access, or a fiction that we construct? In this course we will address all these fascinating issues along with others that are identified by students as worthy of exploration.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2560. Intermediate Fiction Writing. TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Fiction workshop developing foundations of craft in fiction, focusing on character, escalation, place, voice, and selective detail. Students will have taken Fiction I or Introduction to Creative Writing and will evolve their understanding of craft in 2560.Prerequisite: ENGL 2460.

ENGL 2610-10. The Literature of Black America I: The Literature of Resistance. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. Professor Jennifer James.

This course surveys significant works of black American literature from the Age of the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. We will read a range of forms: poetry, essays, fiction, and autobiography, with a particular emphasis on the slave narrative, which stands as the single most influential American literary genre of the 19th century. Collectively, this reading will shed light on the lives of Africans brought to the “New World” as enslaved commodities and will explore the literature and politics of their descendants. We will consider why these figures chose the written word as a tool of resistance: a way reclaim their humanity, to prove their intellectual capacities, and to disrupt the Western constructions of “race” that European empires used to justify black bondage and subjugation. Writing, in other words, became a tool of subversion and self-making. Writers might include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois. Topics in the literature include anti-slavery and abolition; slave rebellions and uprisings; early Black feminism; the Civil War; lynching and the anti-lynching movement; voting rights; higher education; political coups.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 2800W. Introduction to Critical Theory. MW 9:35-10:50. 3 Credits. Professor Tony Lopez.

Study of foundations and current practices of literary and cultural criticism. Readings from antiquity to the present focusing on the philosophy of literature, art, culture, identity, society, the environment, and more.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3210. Readings in Creative Writing. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Life Stories is a Readings in Creative Writing course focused on the close reading of literature, pulled from lived experience. The course will include the roman a clef, the memoir, the prose poem, and the autobiographical novel, among other forms. It includes a writing workshop component.

ENGL 3360. Advanced Fiction Writing. TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

An Advanced Fiction workshop that builds on students’ knowledge from Intermediate Fiction (2560). Students will develop their craft in formal apprenticeships, dive into collections of short stories, and integrate some theory. Prerequisite: ENGL 2560 . May be repeated for credit with departmental approval.

ENGL 3385. American Memoir. MW 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

This course focuses on craft elements in contemporary American memoir, including persona, voice, characterization, structure, setting, and style. We will analyze literary practices, and students will write original creative nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop component.
COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3390. Creative Nonfiction. TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Creative Nonfiction workshop exploring memoir and other forms of the genre, including profiles, case studies, and cultural criticism.

English 3430: The English Renaissance. MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits. Professor Holly Dugan.

In this course, we’ll study Renaissance books as material objects and as literary works of art. Reading works by Tyndale, More, Pizan, Spenser, Burton, Bacon, Cavendish, Phillips, and Milton, we’ll examine how the book as an object came to define the Renaissance and its influence, while also learning how book history shapes our interaction with these creative—and radical—works of art. Students will spend time researching in GWU’s special collections, learning about the history of early printed texts alongside the study of Renaissance literature. Students will then work together to apply this knowledge to one of our holdings in special collection. The course culminates in a semester-long research project, writing a “biography” of one of GWU’s Renaissance rare books, tracing its history of authorship, publication, readership and ownership (especially in terms of how it came to be part of our university’s collection). Students will learn how these Renaissance books reflect centuries of engagement, connecting their arguments about literacy, politics, and reform to contemporary issues of activism and accessibility.

ENGL 3520. American Romanticism. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Entering a period beset by national divisions over slavery and westward expansion, American writers between 1830 and 1865 sought to generate a national literature that might claim the independence which had been politically secured in the previous century. American writers like Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson do succeed in generating a literature that adapts Romantic literary ideas to American political and cultural issues. It is a literature considering the intersections of inspiration, self-reliance, community solidarity, and personal responsibility. The legacy of these writers resonates with writers and readers down to our own time.

ENGL 3551. The English Novel II. MW 02:20-03:35pm. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis.

The Culture of Realism: Painting, Photography, and the Nineteenth-century British novel
A fast-paced and challenging course on four great works by Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
Be prepared for a LOT of reading, lively discussion, juicy literary gossip, and frequent forays into painting and photography as we delve into the visual context of the Victorian novel.

ENGL 3621.10. American Poetry II. MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM. 3 Credits.

This course examines important books by twelve American poets from throughout the twentieth century who collectively disrupt the continuity and traditions of English-language poetry, starting with the Georgian, even Horatian lyrics of Robert Frost (just before WW I), through the Modernist constructions of Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes, and on through the post-WW II socially-conscious, Confessionalist, and Postmodern poetries of Brooks, Ginsberg, Plath, Bishop, Ammons, and Ashbery.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3641: American Novel II: American Dreams and National Fantasies. TR 9:35-10:50. 3 Credits. Instructor Matthew Stigler.

This course explores the legacy of the American Dream in the 20th and 21st century as a source of both hope and disappointment. Casting a net out to a broad collection of novels from a multitude of genres and authors, we will interrogate the novel as a space for dreaming, fantasizing, and imagining America. What kind of American Dreams are there and how do writers use novels to build some and trouble others? What characters, settings, and narratives shape the American novel and what can it not allow itself to imagine? How do the conventions and restraints of genre give depth to these fictions? How have historical and cultural conditions shaped what American novels do and are expected to do? In an increasingly global market, how do these novels preserve America as a dream and to what end? These questions will guide our group discussions, papers, and their revisions as we unpack the baggage of this literary tradition.

Possible authors/texts covered: Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water; John Rechy, City of Night; James Baldwin, Just Above My Head; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Stephen King, Carrie; Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man; Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea; Neil Gaiman, American Gods; C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station; Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

ENGL 3720. Contemporary American Literature. TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

In this course, we will focus on the revolutionary school of literary postmodernism, reading novels from the 1970s onward. Early postmodernist writers especially tended to question the existence of reality, proclaiming that we ourselves create reality because of our need for a structure that provides us with a sense of security and meaning. Later postmodernist writers especially tended to question not the existence of reality but instead the impossibility of our having an unmediated view of reality. Postmodernism is revolutionary because it broke the strangle-hold of realism on fiction extant since the rise of the novel itself in the 18th century. This revolutionary break enabled the exciting development of new types of fiction that were transformative. We will read postmodernist texts that are examples of the Literature of Exhaustion, Magical Realism, Revisionary Novels, and Post-Historical Novels. We will also explore postmodernist techniques such as self-reflexivity, intertextuality, plot discontinuity, and language play.

ENGL 3800. The Literature of Hawaii. T 05:10-7:00pm. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

In many ways, 1898 competes with 1776 as a critical transition in U.S. History for it was in that year the U.S. set off on an” orgy of imperialism” and annexed Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico (Vowell). Before that time the islands (which represent some of the oldest landmasses on planet Earth) developed as a crossroads of Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, and Philippine cultures with a strong oral tradition. In 1820 Christian missionaries from Boston arrived on the islands and established schools as a hegemonic infiltration of Hawaiian mindsets by European cultural beliefs. The literacy rate rapidly reached 90% by 1832 (reportedly the highest literacy rate in the world). This class will study some of the most important non-fiction and fictional accounts of the Hawaiian Islands including the first settlers from Tahiti and Tuamotu almost 2,000 years ago, Cook’s journals, the development of Moloka’i as a prison colony where more than 8,000 people were segregated with leprosy, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. In addition to the study of imperialist history on the islands that Kiana Davenport describes as “Our history -- forced and illegal annexation, imprisonment of our queen, total destruction of our kingdom, and mass theft of our native lands by the white sugar oligarchy—is a unique story in all the world” -- we will focus the majority of our attention on Hawaii’s literary renaissance occurred during the 1970s and 80s. These writers experimental genres, oral storytelling, and recent archeological investigations to pursue the islands continuing struggles with corporate seed grafting, toxic pesticides, military weaponry experimentation, nuclear waste drift, volcanic eruptions and vog, integration struggles of the Hawaiian diaspora, secession efforts, as well as the mass death of sea life.

ENGL 3810: Selected Topics in Literature: READING THE MARGINS. MW 03:45PM - 05:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Joanna Falk.

No text exists in a vacuum, whether it be a literary text, a fictional text, an academic text, etc. Instead, texts exist in relation to one another. Often, those relations are apparent in the text’s paratexts: its cover, title, introduction, footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and all other “productions” that “surround,” “extend,” and “present” the text (Genette 1). By definition, paratexts are subordinate to the main texts they frame, and they often appear on the borders of those texts. As such, paratexts negotiate the boundary between the main text and the publics that receive it. In “ENGL 3810: Reading the Margins,” we will attend to these borders and analyze “the effects of margins as a form of cultural ‘discourse’” (Greetham 2). Our analysis will extend to writings that appear marginal – structurally – but are actually central – conceptually.

We will think about paratexts, borders, boundaries, and margins bibliographically and metaphorically. That is, we will focus on writings to, from, and about the margins, especially those that play with or challenge the hierarchical relationships in our political and sociocultural world that such textual marginalization evokes. As a result, much of what we will read in ENGL 3810 will engage with postmodernist theory and art.

Possible Texts Include:

Abrams, J.J. and Doug Dorst. S, 2013.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 2007.
Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, 1993.
Fell, Alison. The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro, 1994.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 1997.
Greetham, D. C., editor. The Margins of the Text, 1997.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture, 1994.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction, 1987.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire, 1962.
Rosenberg, Jordy. Confessions of the Fox, 2018.

ENGL 3826. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner.

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

TEXTS:

William Faulkner: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, God Help the Child

Additional Materials posted on Blackboard

ENGL 3840.10 Gender and Literature: Masculinity, Queerness, and Disability. MW 04:45PM - 06:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Ian Funk

Masculinity, queerness, and disability often come together in contradictory and contested ways. Through critical engagements with a broad range texts — popular, medical, legal, and academic — we will explore some of the cultural sites where crip/queer masculinities emerge in twentieth-century American culture. Together, we will employ a crip/queer lens in thinking through the ways that American masculinity is, and has been, saturated with disability and queerness.

May be repeated for credit provided the topic differs.

ENGL 3840W.11 Gender and Literature: Women's Wilderness Writing. TR 04:45PM - 06:00PM. 3 Credits. Instructor Elizabeth TeVault.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the concept of wilderness has figured in western culture as an idealized retreat for the white, wealthy, urban male. In Women's Wilderness Writing (ENGL 3840-11), we will interrogate those assumptions about the natural world through readings about the designation and devaluation of wastelands, the creation of wilderness spaces, and the restrictions of those spaces to specific groups. We will read fictional and biographical femme narratives of engagement with nature, considering the ways that women resisted and reified centerings of whiteness, able-bodiedness, colonialism, and masculinity. Women's Wilderness Writing meets on Tuesday and Thursdays, 4:45- 6:00 pm, during Fall of 2021. This course fulfills a WID requirement.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3910. Disability Studies. R 05:10-7:00pm. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

Disability Studies’ main object of study is to analyze the myriad forms of segregation that separate disabled from non-disabled people. Disability is recognized as a globally systemic practice of exclusion whose punitive practices are traded across national boundaries. Consequently, disability rights movements have argued that their primary social goal is to live life as non-disabled people do: having access to non-segregated education systems, participating in the wage-labor market, experiencing sexuality, getting married, reproducing children, etc. Yet, underlying these claims are complicating factors of having to occupy ‘cis hetero’ normative patterns of existence. Yet, in addition to measuring the nondisabled world for its inbuilt shortcomings of architectural and attitudinal exclusion, Disability Studies seeks to imagine worlds that “could be” and how to realize them through political action and interdependent living. Thus, more recent work in Disability Studies pursues inclusive efforts to examine lives that defy normative, ableist conventions of mere inclusion by pursuing disabled lives (racialized, cognitively disabled, psychiatric survivors, trans sexualities, and those with non-apparent disabilities) as alternative ethical maps for existence. In other words, to further break down globalized hierarchical barriers within disability itself.

ENGL 3980W. Queer Studies. MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM. 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

English 3980W provides an introduction to and an overview of the contested field of “queer studies,” and attempts to get you thinking, reading, and writing in queer ways. Over the course of the semester, we will consider queer temporality, spatiality, and embodiment. We will consider the ways in which queer theories and cultures grow out of, intersect, contradict, or interrogate various other critical movements and theories, such as lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies, feminism, critical race studies, disability studies, and AIDS theory. Over the course of the semester, we will pose a series of overlapping–and hopefully queer–questions (and many of the questions we will pose will emerge from the discussions and concerns of our particular class): what connection does, or should, queer cultural studies have with queer communities and queer cultural production outside the academy, or with lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender communities outside the academy? Who is, or can be, queer? What kinds of critical practice does queerness or queer theory enable or forestall? What does or should the future of queerness look like, in a sometimes receptive and often increasingly hostile cultural climate?

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 4040. Honors Seminar. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis.

This course is intended only for those senior English majors who have been selected for the English Honors Program. The seminar will help you get started on writing your honors thesis by focusing on basics of research in literary and cultural studies and on the broader work of writing and reading in the humanities. Over the course of the semester students will develop a thesis proposal, outline, and first chapter; we will begin with seminar discussions on the practice of research and move midway through the semester to conducting writing workshops in which we’ll exchange and comment on drafts in small groups.

ENGL 1000-11. Dean’s Seminar. “Imitations”. 3 Credits. Professor Jane Shore.

Prof. Jane Shore

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? How do new plays address race, class and gender issues? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays are selected to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays as well as attend at least one new play among several we will attend.

ENGL 1210-10. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Prof. Page

This course is an overview of three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will study the work of established writers and experiment with form through writing exercises and workshops where students will share original work.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1210-11. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Jung Yun.

Prof. Yun

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative non-fiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Arts.

ENGL 1365-10. Literature and The Environment. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

Prof. Frawley

What do we mean when we refer to “the environment”? Do we mean “nature,” “wilderness,” “geography,” “ecology,” “the earth,” “the non-human world,” “the outdoors,” a “sense of place,” or something else? This introductory course will explore the many ways that literary texts, art, and even social media respond to and shape our understanding of environments and our environmental understanding. Throughout we will be on alert to the many ways that our contemporary culture both heightens and mutes our environmental awareness.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course fulfills Critical Thinking and Oral Communication GCRs.

ENGL 1500. American Political Fictions. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

Prof. Mitchell

This class delves into a Movement known as New Journalism (NJ) that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s. NJ SPAWNED what came to be called “the Non-fiction novel”. These works foreground the idiosyncrasies of subjectivity as a value rather than a FAILURE of empiricism. The writers we will study placed their private visions as a framework for interpreting the POLITICAL life of the nation. Its leading practitioners wrote some of the most important cultural commentaries of the latter half of the 20th century including: In cold blood (Truman capote, 1966), hell’s angels (Hunter S. Thompson, 1967), armies of the night (Norman mailer, 1969), electric kool aid acid test (tom Wolfe, 1968), the white album (Joan Didion 1979), among others. Each writer cultivated their public presentation as an extension of their private visions of America; they worked to show how they actively filter stimulus and events of substantive note for the nation’s politics.

ENGL 2210-10. Techniques in Creative Writing. “Around the World in 80 Poems”. 3 Credits. Professor Jane Shore.

Prof. Shore

In “Around the World in 80 Poems” we will close read from an eclectic and idiosyncratic anthology of International Poetry and writing your OWN poems in response to them. Including poems from 20th and 21st century poets: Amorak (Inuit), Heaney, Boland, Celan, Walcott, Neruda, Cortazar, Vallejo, Szymborska, Rilke, Hikmet, Cavafy, Montale, Brutus, Bei Dao, Darwish, etc.

ENGL 2250-80. Dramatic Writing 3 Credits. Professor Allyson Stokes.

Prof. Stokes

In Introduction to Dramatic Writing, each student will write an original play for the stage, will work to create a personal body of new dramatic work based on writing prompts and exercises, will learn the language and techniques of new play dramaturgy, and will gain a deep understanding of the shape and challenges of a career in dramatic writing through collaboration and workshops of student work.

ENGL 2410W. Introduction to English Literature I: Riot & Resistance. 3 Credits. Instructor Emily Lathrop

Inst. Lathrop

This course serves as an introduction to medieval and early modern English literature, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the Abolition movement, with a primary focus on the idea of resistance. This survey will cover how resistance appears across a variety of genres (poetry, prose, drama), as well as historical documents such as speeches and letters. What might each genre tell us about how medieval and early modern writers used literature to resist or uphold societal expectations and political systems?"

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2411W. Introduction to English Literature II: Women at Home, Work & War. 3 Credits. Instructor Emily MacLeod

Inst. MacLeod

This introductory survey course will focus on English texts written in the period from the French Revolution to the First World War, also known as the long nineteenth century. We will cover that vast expanse of history with attention to themes of gender, race, class, national identity, and postcolonial critique. The syllabus is divided into three interrelated units: Women at Home, at Work, and at War. We will read novels, poetry, autobiographies, and other selected writings by women from the United Kingdom and throughout the British Empire, and trace the shifting societal roles of women at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, through the Industrial Revolution, and into the suffrage movement (1790s to 1920s). Authors of major texts will likely include Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf. Students will also work on a final project that engages with a historical film adaptation and/or historical novel of their choice.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2460-11. Fiction Writing. 3-4 Credits. Professor Jung Yun.

Prof. Yun

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, voice, setting, and style. In this course, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction across numerous genres, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2460-10. Fiction Writing. 3-4 Credits. Professor Louis Bayard.

Prof. Bayard

Fiction Writing encourages students to become better writers and readers of fiction and to build a deeper appreciation for the writer’s craft. The heart of the course is the writer’s workshop, where students read and critique each other’s work, but students will also be assigned targeted readings as well as in-class writing exercises.

ENGL 2460-12. Fiction Writing. 3-4 Credits. Professor Aaron Hamburger.

Prof. Hamburger

In this course, we’ll explore three modes of fiction writing: flash fiction, short stories, and novels. Along the way, students will create their own original works of fiction to submit for review in workshop. We’ll also analyze samples from published authors and do writing exercises to come up with strategies to tell compelling stories with clear and satisfying plots, complex and dynamic characters, vivid settings, and surprising, evocative uses of language.

ENGL 2470-10. Poetry Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Chang.

Prof. Chang

This course will ask and answer the following questions: What is a poem? How are poems made? Where do we find poems? Why read and write poems? We will look at examples of poetry from the past and present, in other art forms, and in everyday life. Writing assignments will be modeled on these texts and cultural works. There will be in-class writing experiments, opportunities to attend readings by poets whose work we read, and regular workshops of student writing. Balancing rigor and play, this course is designed for beginners and welcomes readers, adventurous thinkers, and writers of other genres.

ENGL 2510W-11. Introduction to American Literature I. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Prof. Seavey

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of

the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Oral Communication.

ENGL 2511W. Introduction to American Literature II: TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE 20th & 21st CENTURIES. 3 Credits. Instructor Joanna Falk.

Inst. Falk

What is the relationship between reading and writing? How do we understand constructions of fictional universes, and how do we build our own arguments about those literary constructions? ENGL 2511W addresses both levels of textual construction – creative and academic – as a hybrid literature and composition course, with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first century American texts. (Note that ENGL 2511W is a WID course.)

The phrase “textual construction” is intentionally broad, not only to signal our work with creative and academic texts but also to indicate this course’s interest in the construction of texts and the idea of construction within texts. Therefore, we will focus on pieces of American writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that lend themselves well to metafictional readings. That is, each of the assigned texts somehow reflects upon its own status as a textual construction, self-consciously and/or self-reflexively. Moreover, these texts often rely upon spatial metaphors to convey metafictional points. We will draw largely from narrative theory in our analyses.

How do literary depictions of edifices – of the erecting and navigating of houses, buildings, and other material structures – comment upon the act of writing? How do post-1900 American writers draw from gothic tale conventions in such depictions? How do we construct our own identities and realities, when we read and write? How do we establish a sense of place and mark our existence on the cultural and historical records of time, when we read and write? What tools are at the creative writer’s disposal? What tools do academic writers have? How do textual representations of space, place, and displacement build a sense of Americanness? How do Americans construct America? In “ENGL 2511W: Introduction to American Literature II – Textual Construction in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” we will read graphic memoirs, poems, short stories, plays, and novels to help us answer these questions and to sharpen our own academic writing.

Possible Texts Include:

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room, 1956.
Barth, John. “Lost in the Funhouse,” 1968.
Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral,” 1983.
Chast, Roz. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, 2014.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street, 1984.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves, 2000.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!, 1936.
McGuire, Richard. Here, 2014.
Merrill, James. “The Broken Home,” 1966.
Morrison, Toni. Home, 2012.
Okubo, Miné. Citizen 13660, 1946.
Plath, Sylvia. “The Hermit at Outermost House,” 1959.
---. “Old Ladies’ Home,” 1959.
Rich, Adrienne. “The Fact of the Doorframe,” 1974.
Roethke, Theodore. “Root Cellar,” 1948.
Shepard, Sam. True West, 1980.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2560-10. Intermediate Fiction Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Prof. Liontas

This course is designed for writers seeking to improve their craft as writers of short fiction, and those who are prepared to tackle longer, sustained narratives. Each week students will be presented with examples of published works, which will be used as inspiration and models for their own writing. Students will become more autonomous readers in small-group collaborative settings and will become stronger writers, honing their craft. Students will write, revise, and workshop new and original fiction. Prerequisite: ENGL 2460 .

ENGL 2570-10. Intermediate Poetry Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Thea Brown.

Prof. Brown

This is an intermediate poetry writing course for students who are interested in expanding the horizons of their creative comfort zones. Through generative activities and in-class investigations, we will hone our skills in the making, discussion, and formal analysis of poetry, focusing on our own work and that of published contemporary writers. As such, we'll do plenty of reading as well as writing.

ENGL 2610-10. Intro to Black American Literature I. Professor Jennifer James

Prof. James

Influential black writers and literary trends of the twentieth century. How the Great Migration altered black American life and how black literature registered the concerns of the Civil Rights, Black Power, feminist, and anti-war movements.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 2800W-80. Introduction to Critical Theory. 3 Credits. Professor Alexa Joubin.

Prof. Joubin

The world needs good question askers as much as it needs good problem solvers. Before solving problems, we need to first identify the problems.

How does literature function in civil society? This course introduces students to major schools of critical theory and to new ways of asking questions about culture and literature through a carefully curated selection of key writing—from influential, classic articulations to more current works. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with structuralism, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-colonialism, and feminism, with an emphasis on critical race, gender, sexuality, queer, and disability studies.

More importantly, students will learn how to apply theoretical tools to films and literary works in the interest of producing scholarship that instigates changes. Taking an intersectional approach, we will examine modern theoretical perspectives, a body of knowledge that continues to evolve in new directions.

Specifically, we will explore challenging theoretical questions through a key figure in literary history, William Shakespeare, and his place in visual, filmic, and popular culture, on which students will practice their new skills. Contrasting modes of interpretation generate new ways of understanding of early modern and postmodern cultures.

Since the theoretical texts are challenging enough, we anchor our study in one single author to make the number of variants more manageable. For many reasons, Shakespearean films and texts have historically been used as test cases in continuing philosophical debates over the nature of the humanistic enterprise. This seminar examines important theoretical developments in relation to modern culture (films) and premodern texts (Shakespeare).

Through critical theories we will collectively reflect on our embodied vulnerability. No previous experience with film studies or Shakespeare is expected.

This WID (writing-in-the-discipline) course fulfills the critical theory/cultural studies requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3210-10. Readings in Creative Writing: Life Stories. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Prof. Page

Public Poetries is a Readings in Creative Writing course focused on the work of poets who’ve cultivated a public life for their poems for political, cultural, and/or artistic ends. We will immerse ourselves in the oeuvres of four major poets – W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Anne Sexton (1928-1974) – to mark aesthetic and theoretical signposts of what constitutes “public poetry.” In investigating what constitutes and, indeed, instigates the public in writing and reading poems, my hope is that we’ll consider what role poetry plays in culture and society and what responsibilities poets can conceivably take on as artists, citizens, and private individuals. This course places equal importance on developing excellent close reading skills and on cultivating an ongoing inquiry into poem-making, self-making, and culture-making.

ENGL 3240-80. Introduction to Dramaturgy. 3 Credits. Professor Jodi Kanter

Prof. Kanter

Fundamentals of classical and contemporary dramaturgical practice, including analyzing plays, doing research, supporting directors and actors in rehearsal, writing program notes, and leading post-show discussions. Same as TRDA 3240.

ENGL 3360. Advanced Fiction Writing. “Screening the Novel” 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Prof. Liontas

Each week, we discuss novels, how they are built, and how they are reimagined in film and multimedia. In our critique of texts translated to the big (or small) screen, we will apply theories of adaptation. Students must have access to both anchor texts and films, as we will view texts both synchronously and independently. This course is an advanced hybrid workshop designed for students who have a strong background in fiction writing and who are curious about writing novels.

Prerequisite: ENGL 2560 .

ENGL 3370. Advanced Poetry Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Chang.

Prof. Chang

This creative writing workshop considers poetry as an invitation for intensive engagement with experimentation, inquiry, and language. To this end, we will take seriously as poems not only received forms (from sonnets to free verse) but forms that steal from and hybridize other genres in prose, film and visual art, and performance. This course is designed for writers committed to developing their craft and knowledge of poetry and poetics collectively and individually and open to exploring what a poem can be. Students should expect to write and workshop weekly. In addition, we will read recently published collections of poetry, meeting their authors whenever possible. Texts will include Teri Cross Davis’s a more perfect union, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, and Tiana Nobile’s Cleave.

Prerequisite: ENGL 2570.

ENGL 3390-10. Topics in Creative Writing. “The Writing of Fiction” 3 Credits. Professor Edward Jones.

Prof. Jones

This is a creative writing workshop, with class meeting twice a week. The 75 minutes of class time are devoted primarily to discussion of students’ work. Before class, in my office, I will meet individually with the students. From time to time, the class will discuss published stories, but our focus will be on student stories.

ENGL 3390-11. Topics in Creative Writing. “Creative Non-Fiction” 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Prof. Liontas

First and foremost, in this workshop we concern ourselves with the "authorial stance of the lived experience." We will engage in a relationship that Phillip Lopate likens to a friendship that “confides everything from gossip to wisdom” and is “based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.” Sub-genres explored include autobiography & memoir, the personal-political essay, profiles, case studies, feature writing, and narratives that intentionally (sometimes dangerously) straddle the worlds of fiction and nonfiction. Students from all disciplines and levels are encouraged to join.

ENGL 3390-12. Topics in Creative Writing. “Creative Non-Fiction” 3 Credits. Professor Cutter Wood.

Prof. Wood

This is a course about how we tell the truth. For thousands of years, human beings have been writing nonfiction, and we’ll read widely from this history—everything from ancient Sumerian complaints to satirical Amazon reviews, from 18^thcentury listicles to contemporary accounts of race riots. But this is also a course about why we tell the truth, which is to say it’s a course about what it means to be a curious and conscientious human being. As we create our own works of nonfiction, we’ll try to understand how a seemingly simple act—describing the world—can be a powerful tool for social and political change.

ENGL 3481. The 18th Century II. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Prof. Seavey

Continuation of ENGL 3480. Readings in significant eighteenth-century English and Continental writers—Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others—with emphasis on tracing the ways in which literary texts contain, perpetuate, and subvert social and political ideologies.

ENGL 3640. The American Novel I. “The Nineteenth-Century American Novel and The Commitment to Writing the Great American Novel” 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

Prof. Moreland

In the 19th century, the first mature American novels were published. American writers thereby proclaimed their independence from the English novelistic tradition that had first emerged in the 18th century. By the 19th century, American novelists had largely overcome their lack of confidence, finally becoming convinced that it was pre-eminently important to focus on specifically American characters in clearly American settings.

When William De Forest referenced in 1848 “The Great American Novel,” the very term itself insisted that American novels could indeed be great, indeed that some were already great—a concept that American novelists embraced. It was accepted that a novel in likely competition for that term would focus not only on American characters in American settings, but even more importantly on the American national character. De Forest suggested some novels as possible contenders, but he also acknowledged that the Great American novel might not yet have been written. Although the criticality of this term is demonstrated by its continued use in the 20th and 21st centuries, its foundation in the 19th century demonstrated a commitment to representing the country that American novelists perceived as “great” in its strengths but also its flaws. Indeed, the greatest American novelists necessarily focused on both in their pursuit of writing The Great American Novel.

ENGL 3810-80. Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Cinema. 3 Credits. Instructor Turni Chakrabarti.

Inst. Chakrabarti

This course will examine the contemporary representation of gender, sexuality, and politics in Bollywood cinema. We will historically investigate the various challenges that the Indian postcolonial feminist movement has had to face through the lens of Bollywood cinema.

The course will examine how Bollywood cinema has, in the last two decades, addressed or neglected key issues of gender-based violence, LGBTQIA+ rights, and patriarchal nationalism. What solutions have they offered, and what alternatives have they imagined? These films will be read as texts that are attempting to take on and grapple with these issues with varying degrees of success.

We shall watch a selection of popular Hindi cinema such as Raazi, Dangal, and Pink that have portrayed these issues within the parameters of melodrama and other generic conventions (and limitations) that dominate Bollywood cinema. The course will also engage with some alternative films such as My Brother…Nikhil, Aligarh, and Margarita with a Straw that pressure the boundaries of mainstream Bollywood cinema as they address topics such as HIV/AIDS, LGBTQIA+ experience, disability, and desire. We will take an intersectional approach that takes into account other modes of difference such as caste, class, and religion. Topics we will explore include: modern Indian masculinity, gender equality, sexual agency, and patriotic nationalism.

We will also engage these film representations with the works of postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Ania Loomba, Nivedita Menon, Ruth Vanita, Ulka Anjaria, and Gayatri Gopinath, among others.

This course is offered as a cross section with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Listed as WGSS 3170-80

ENGL 3810W. Selected Topics in Literature. “The Beat Generation: Rebellion, Rage, and Road Trips” 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland.

Prof. Moreland

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked
Angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

—Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Take a ride on the wild side through 1950s America. Your companions? The Beats and their fellow travelers: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Baldwin, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath.

In this course, we will explore the “howling” literature of 1950s and early1960s America. Post-World War II America was intent on a return to pre-War “normalcy,” which was inevitably very narrowly defined. Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and John Updike in Rabbit, Run present the costs paid by a female and a male protagonist, respectively, who attempt to fit into normative society while simultaneously resisting its pressures. Feeling constrained by these pressures to adjust their identities to the norm, they struggle mightily because they have no models or community to validate their resistance and offer a new way of being.

In contrast, those who chose explicitly to deviate from the norm and to consciously resist social pressures accepted and even celebrated their ejection from the center into the margins of a society that they themselves largely rejected, perceiving themselves as “Beat” in the sense of the beatific and holy, while also perceiving themselves as “Beat” in the sense of being beaten down by normative society.

These marginalized “others” were defined widely, for example in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, sexual practices, use of drugs and alcohol, psychological state, socioeconomic class, and public and even private behavior, or combinations therein.

Rendered invisible by normative society, the Beats, created a subculture in which they supported each other’s work and life choices, serving as models for each other and creating a supportive community. They gave themselves voice by means of literature, howling “No!” to the strictures of 1950s and early-1960s American society.

In this course we will focus on the sub-culture of the Beats, exploring the literature that expressed their social marginalization and their expression of life lived on the margins. And we will locate the Beat movement in its historical context, focusing on the post-World War II return to normalcy on the one hand, while recognizing the counter-cultural movement of the Anti-Vietnam War movement on the other.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3840W. Gender and Literature. “Contemporary LGBT Writing” 3 Credits. Professor Robert McRuer.

Prof. McRuer

NOTE: this course will include a “live” element, meaning three of the writers we read will visit our class (virtually) and provide a public (virtual) reading of their new work.

This course will explore some of the ways in which bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and gay people have creatively imagined identities and communities since the beginning of the contemporary gay liberation movement. Focusing on LGBT novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose written during the past four decades, we will consider in particular what is made possible and impossible by literary representation: how and why have writers used literary representations to explore what it means to be lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgender? What historical and cultural conditions have encouraged such writing? If every way of perceiving is simultaneously a way of not perceiving, what identities, communities, and political possibilities have been constrained by available literary forms? How have certain writers responded to those constraints? We will attempt to remain attentive throughout to the cultural and political contexts from which these texts emerge and in which they are read.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3920. U.S LatinX Literature and Culture. 3 Credits. Professor Antonio López.

Prof. López

This course considers the fictional and non-fictional narratives, poetry, and drama of U.S. Latinx literature. It takes a historical view that stretches from the 17th century and an account of Spanish-colonial violence, travel, and imagination in what becomes Florida, the Sunshine State, to a volume of contemporary Chicanx poetry in which sounds, ideas, and typography represent human and even non-human desires for something we can call “the land.” This is to say that we will debate, propose,

and range across the possible and very much messy periods of U.S. Latinx literature. In so doing, we will explore just how it is that the conjunction of Latinx and literature makes sense: how this organism, Latina/o literature, can manage to stage identities, turn the shape and force of words, and twist the plots of time and space, even as it bears and enjoys the burdens of being an “American” literary tradition. Latinx can mean something or someone in the United States (even before there was such a thing) of Mexican, Dominican, or Puerto Rican descent (even before there was such a thing); it can mean the way a short story, lyric poem, or dramatic performance behaves in creative, social ways toward (and especially against) these kinds of ethnic-racial-national signs. How does the poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes,” say, or the novel Nilda offer us up examples of such literary behavior? How are the verbal, artistic materials of these texts sometimes sympathetic to, sometimes hostile to the very stories they tell and the very feelings they front? How are the frames we bring them (in history and theory), not to mention the frames they themselves offer up, maybe meaningful and superfluous all at once? These questions, unpacked, their pieces thrown around the room to see what intrigues, will inform the papers we will write and, crucially, revise, plus the group work we will do.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3940-80. Black Women Writers in the 21st Century. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer James.

Prof. James

This course is an exploration of award-winning and best-selling black women’s literature produced in the 21st century. For the purpose of our study this semester, we will consider works published in English from writers who live and work in the United States. While our primary focus is on fiction—both in traditional and experimental forms—we will also examine film, memoir and poetry. The readings will cover a range of topics: history and memory; sex and sexuality; beauty and the body; nature and the environment, and others. In addition, drawing on the current political moment, we will read selected literary texts related to black women and the Black Lives Matter movement.

As we investigate this work, we will keep key questions in mind: What are the stories this newest generation of black women writers are telling? Why, from a cultural, historical, and sociopolitical point of view, are they telling them? What are the legacies and interventions? What choices are they making in the telling—in terms of form, content and structure? How do these writers explain their own projects? What is their literary philosophy? What does this work tell us about the futures of literary landscapes for black women? How and where is their work being interpreted and received? How does the reception of their work offer insight into how the publishing industry perceives and promotes ideas and expectations about black women and black women’s literature (for example, what the literature should or should not “do,” who the audiences are or are not).

Possible authors/texts covered: Roxane Gay, Hunger; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X; Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing; Dee Rees, Pariah; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Deesha Philyaw; The Secret Lives of Church Ladies; Patrisse Cullors; When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give; Morgan Parker, There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce; Margaret Wilkerson Sexton; The Revisioners; DaMaris Hill; A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing.

ENGL 4220. Creative Writing Senior Thesis. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

Prof. Page

Under the guidance of an instructor, students compose an original manuscript of poetry or short fiction accompanied by an essay situating their work in the contemporary context. Restricted to seniors in the BA in English and BA in Creative Writing and English programs.

ENGL 4250W. Honors Thesis. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

Prof. Frawley

Under the guidance of an instructor, the student writes a thesis on an approved topic. Open only to senior honors candidates in English.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement. Same As: ENGL 4250.

ENGL 4350. Independent Study. 1-4 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

Prof. Frawley

For exceptional students, typically majors, whose academic objectives are not accommodated in regular courses. Students must obtain departmental approval and arrange for supervision by an appropriate member of the faculty. Permission of the supervising faculty required prior to enrollment

ENGL 4350. Internship. 1-3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Prof. Seavey

Position of responsibility with a publication, educational project, firm, or cultural organization offering practical experience in research, writing, editing, etc. May be repeated for credit; a maximum of 3 credits may be counted toward the English major. Permission of the supervising faculty required prior to enrollment. P/NP grading only. Restricted to juniors and seniors in the English program.

ENGL 1000-11. Dean’s Seminar. 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

Dean’s Seminar: What’s New About New Plays? This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays Artistic Directors select to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays. Attending plays will depend on the status of social distancing in DC and MD. I have arranged with Artistic Directors in DC and NYC to have new play readings/rehearsals/performances streamed to us if live performances are not available.

ENGL 1210-13. Introduction to Creative Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

This course is an overview of three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We will study the work of established writers and experiment with form through writing exercises and workshops where students will share original work.

This course fulfills the G-PAC requirement of Arts

ENGL 1330. Myths of Britain. 3 Credits. Professor Daniel DeWispelare.

“Myths of Britain” is an introductory course that invites all students who are interested in cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. In particular, we will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with, informed by, and often critical of the idea of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 1360-10. Growing Up in Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu.

How do modern writers adapt the conventions of fantasy narration and the bildungsroman--the novel of education--to address questions of identity, class, gender, species, social dissent, and desire? We'll explore the connections between fantasy genres in the English literary canon (fairy tales, myth, medieval romance, and the gothic novel), coming of age themes in young adult fantasy, anime, magic realism, and speculative fiction.

This course has been approved as a GPAC Humanities course.

ENGL 2100. Introduction to Asian American Studies through Literature. 3 Credits. Professor Patricia Chu.

This course addresses major issues in Asian American culture and history through literary and cinematic texts. Topics include identity, gender, race, and intersectionality; stereotyping, exclusion laws, miscegenation, the internment of Japanese Americans; immigration, assimilation, and return; stereotyping, adoption, mixed-race families, transpacific families; racial melancholia; history, memory, and counter memory. Readings include texts by and about Asian Americans with ancestry from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Philippines.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course is designed to fulfill a Humanities/Critical Thinking GPAC requirement.

ENGL 2240. Play Analysis. 3 Credits. Professor Allyson Stokes.

Traditional and nontraditional (Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian) approaches to the analysis of dramatic literature; literary and theatrical techniques used by playwrights.

ENGL 2410W. Introduction to English Literature I. 3 Credits.

Study of British authors from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. These may include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Swift, Gay, Johnson, and Gray.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2411W. Introduction to English Literature II. 3 Credits. Professor Farisa Khalid

This course provides a survey of British literature from the Romantic period to the twenty-first century. We will examine how writers from across more than 200 years responded to the major historical and cultural developments of their time, including imperialism, industrialism, democracy, urbanization, decolonization, and globalization. The course will cover fiction, non-fiction essays, plays, and poetry. In addition to familiarizing ourselves with literary history, we will study the significant developments that shaped the social and cultural map of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, which, in turn, shaped our contemporary position in history: the rise of the modern “individual,” class conflict, immigration, the growth of multiculturalism in Britain, changing gender norms, and the changes in global capitalist culture from the end of the French Revolution to Brexit. This is a reading intensive course. Students will have the chance to strengthen their close reading, discussion, editing, and revising skills, and to enhance their knowledge and use of literary-critical and cultural-studies terminology. Ideally, they will be able to apply the methods and labors of close-reading into a productive outlet for analyzing and writing about literary artifacts.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2460. Fiction Writing. 3-4 Credits. Professor Jung Yun.

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, voice, setting, and style. In this course, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction across numerous genres, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2470-10. Poetry Writing. 3 Credits. Professor David McAleavey.

This is the initial creative writing course at GW devoted solely to poetry. We will read poems, talk widely about poetry, sample various approaches and devices, and work towards a common critical vocabulary to help us think about poems more accurately and sensitively. Above all you will write poems. Most of our class time will be devoted to close examination of both established work and student poems; learning to read and talk about poetry more successfully should enable you to write poems with a better appreciation for your readers’ probable experience of your work, and your peers’ direct feedback should prove invaluable.

ENGL 2510W. Introduction to American Literature I. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Oral Communication

ENGL 2511W. Introduction to American Literature II. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland.

Reading of significant works by modern American authors such as Wharton, Chopin, Crane, London, Frost, Morrison. Hughes, and Faulkner.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities.

ENGL 2560. Intermediate Fiction Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Intermediate Fiction Writing is a workshop-based course that builds and expands upon students' prior study of the foundational elements of fiction writing craft. Prerequisite: ENGL 2460.

ENGL 2610-10. The Literature of Black America I: Race and Revolt. Professor Jennifer James.

This course surveys significant works of black American literature from the late eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with black writing produced in the age of the American Revolution, we will shift to the eras of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, early feminism, and conclude with the Great Migration to the North. The selections include a range of forms: poetry, essays, fiction, and autobiography. We give particular emphasis to the slave narrative, which stands as the single most influential black American literary genre of the 19th century.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Humanities and Global or Cross Cultural.

ENGL 2800. Introduction to Critical Theory. 3 Credits. Professor David Mitchell.

Theory provides an interpretive framework for understanding how the process of meaning-making works as a cultural product. How is meaning made? What interests does it disguise? How can we become discerning interpreters of culture and the arts that reflect it deepest concerns and values? By theorizing we expose the conditions in which others (and ourselves) live. Readings will primary focus on works produced during the period of late capitalism dominated by technological surveillance, the privatization of public commonwealth, information overload, historical amnesia, catastrophic human-made disasters. Books include: Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Stephen best’s None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, & HBO’s limited television series “Chernobyl”.

ENGL 3210. Readings in Creative Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Jennifer Chang.

Public Poetries is a Readings in Creative Writing course focused on the work of poets who’ve cultivated a public life for their poems for political, cultural, and/or artistic ends. We will immerse ourselves in the oeuvres of four major poets – W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Anne Sexton (1928-1974) – to mark aesthetic and theoretical signposts of what constitutes “public poetry.” In investigating what constitutes and, indeed, instigates the public in writing and reading poems, my hope is that we’ll consider what role poetry plays in culture and society and what responsibilities poets can conceivably take on as artists, citizens, and private individuals. This course places equal importance on developing excellent close reading skills and on cultivating an ongoing inquiry into poem-making, self-making, and culture- making.

ENGL 3360. Advanced Fiction Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Further workshop study of the writing of fiction. Prerequisite: ENGL 2560 . May be repeated for credit with departmental approval.

ENGL 3385. American Memoir. 3 Credits. Professor Lisa Page.

This course focuses on craft elements in contemporary American memoir, including persona, voice, character development, structure, setting, and style. We will analyze literary practices, and students will write original creative nonfiction. This course includes a writing workshop component.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement area of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3390. Topics in Creative Writing. 3 Credits. Professor Annie Liontas.

Topics announced prior to the registration period; may be repeated for credit provided the topic differs. Topics may include poetry and poetics; forms and methods in fiction; forms and methods in poetry; memoir and personal narratives; creative nonfiction; "Literature, Live"; avant-garde and experimental writing.

ENGL 3420W. Medieval Literature. Professor Daniel Atherton.

This course covers a wide variety of texts across many genres from approximately the eighth

through the fifteenth centuries, including religious and secular poems, riddles, romances, saints’ legends, mystical narratives, lyrics, civic drama, and social satires. While we will occasionally take a look at the original medieval languages and read some Middle English, we will typically read modern English translations. A particular theoretical emphasis on ecocriticism, the history of emotions, and affect theory will help guide our discussions, but students will have the freedom to range widely with theoretical lenses of their choosing, as well as to engage with texts outside of the traditional medieval European canon. Exploring what “the medieval” means in our contemporary consciousness and its importance to cultural discourse will also inform our class discussions. The goal of the course will not only be to gain the confidence to read and enjoy medieval texts but also to compose a solid portfolio of literary analyses by the end of the semester.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3440W. Shakespeare, Film, Race and Gender. 3 Credits. Professor Alexa Joubin.

Through the lenses of critical race and gender theories, this course examines cinematic

representations of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, Roman plays, histories, tragedies, and comedies, with a focus on the themes of race, gender, sexuality, class, and colonialism. These narratives have been screened--projected on the silver screen and filtered by various ideologies—since 1899. In particular, we will focus on racialized bodies, performance of gender and sexuality, disability narratives, feminist interventions, religious fault lines, class struggle, and intersectional identities.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3520. American Romanticism. 3 Credits. Professor Ormond Seavey.

Entering a period beset by national divisions over slavery and westward expansion, American writers between 1830 and 1865 sought to generate a national literature that might claim the independence which had been politically secured in the previous century. American writers like Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson do succeed in generating a literature that adapts Romantic literary ideas to American political and cultural issues. It is a literature considering the intersections of inspiration, self-reliance, community solidarity, and personal responsibility. The legacy of these writers resonates with writers and readers down to our own time.

ENGL 3620.10. American Poetry I. 3 Credits. Professor David McAleavey.

This is the first half of a broad survey of Anglophone American poetry from its beginnings to the present. In 3620, we will read from the 17th century up into the very early 20th century. The poets we will examine most closely in 3620 are the 19th-century writers Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, both of whom did crucial work from mid-century through the Civil War and in the decades after. However, we will start with earlier poets whose work has continuing artistic appeal and historical relevance, Anne Bradstreet (17th century) and Phillis Wheatley (18th century) among them. From the earlier part of the 19th-century, we will consider William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier; later poets will include Emma Lazarus, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

COURSE ATTRIBUTES: This course addresses the G-PAC requirement areas of Oral Communication.

ENGL 3641W. The American Novel II. 3 Credits. Professor Kim Moreland

Continuation of ENGL 3640. In this course, we will first focus on literary modernism in the context of the development and transformation of the American novel during the first decades of the twentieth century. A rejection of the values and experience of World War I, modernism was an artistic movement of extraordinary experimentation. Turning to the novels of later decades, we will explore in particular the second-generation naturalism which was a literary response to the Great Depression, World War II, and McCarthyism, among other critical sociocultural events. Then we will turn to the latter part of the century, focusing on the radical literary experimentation of postmodernism, which called into question the philosophical and literary realism associated with the novel since its18th-century formation. Taking a psychobiographical and sociocultural approach, we will examine the ways in which various American writers shaped their novels, and the ways in which the writers and their novels were "written" or encoded by American culture. We will also employ other theoretical approaches that will enable us to interrogate these novels in useful and significant ways. The books we will read are the following: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3820W. Major Authors: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. 3 Credits. Prof. Kim Moreland

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald each named the period of their young manhood, Hemingway by reference to “our time” and Fitzgerald by reference to the “jazz age.” Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald reflected personal and historical realities. Whereas Hemingway’s fiction of the 1920s and beyond are marked by disillusionment, pain, and trauma, Fitzgerald’s is marked first by the new freedoms seized by young people in the 1920s, and then by their cost in the 1930s. Hemingway’s personal experience of World War I and then the expatriate society inflected many of his works, sometimes by their presence and sometimes by their omission, as explained in his “Iceberg Theory” of writing. Fitzgerald, who did not fight in the war, felt that he had missed the most significant experience of his generation, and the war appears always in his fiction, if often by means of indirection. Fitzgerald chose, however, to focus his attention on the independence of young people, who rejected their parents’ strictures and relished the freedom and privacy granted by the automobile.

Both writers are most famous for their novels, and we will read two by each writer: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also superb short story writers, a number of which we will read, along with Fitzgerald’s resonant essays.

In this class, you will discover how timely their work was to their own present when writing, and how timeless their work is in terms of their continuing significance.

Includes a significant engagement in writing as a form of critical inquiry and scholarly expression to satisfy the WID requirement.

ENGL 3826. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. 3 Credits. Professor Evelyn Schreiber.

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

ENGL 4040. Honors Seminar. 3 Credits. Professor Maria Frawley.

This course is intended only for those senior English majors who have been selected for the English Honors Program. The seminar will help you get started on writing your honors thesis by focusing on basics of research in literary and cultural studies and on the broader work of writing and reading in the humanities.

Over the course of the semester students will develop a thesis proposal, outline, and first chapter; we will begin with seminar discussions on the practice of research and move midway through the semester to conducting writing workshops in which we’ll exchange and comment on drafts in small groups.

ENGL 1000.10 Dean’s Seminar: Writing on Washington, DC

Prof. Sten

TR 12:45-2

This Dean's Seminar will look at writing based in Washington, DC, by nationally prominent authors in pivotal periods in U.S. history: Early Years (Abigail Adams, Charles Dickens); the Civil War (Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott); the Gilded Age (Henry Adams and Mark Twain); the 1920s (Jean Toomer and Sinclair Lewis); the Great Depression and WWII (Langston Hughes; Gore Vidal); and the contemporary period (Edward P. Jones, George Pelecanos, among others). Students will read and discuss these works each week in seminar fashion and also explore the history, culture, and visual landscape of the city, through museum visits, walking tours, and on-site research. Requirements include two essays, occasional quizzes and questionnaires, a collaborative oral report, and a take-home final exam.

Readings:

Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel
Gore Vidal, Washington, DC: A Novel
Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (stories)
George Pelecanos, editor, DC Noir
Christopher Sten, editor, Literary Capital: A Washington Reader

ENGL 1000.11 Dean’s Seminar: Imitations

Prof. Shore

TR 11:10-12:25

ENGL 1000.12 Dean’s Seminar: The Austen Phenomenon

Prof. Wallace

MW 11:10-12:25

ENGL 1210.10 Introduction to Creative Writing

Prof. Page

MW 9:35-10:50 a.m.

This course will analyze elements of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction and will include three creative writing workshops. Peer review and literary analysis are key components of the course.

ENGL 1210.11 Introduction to Creative Writing

Prof. Yun

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative non-fiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

ENGL 1320W.10 Literature of the Americas

Prof. Mitchell

R 3:30-6 p.m.

This class examines the history of developments in the representation of indigenous peoples and other minorities in the Americas. We will begin with the Spanish invasion of South America and Mexico (New Spain) and move to stories of encounters with Americans Indians during the European colonization of New England, Asian immigrant experiences in the South Seas and the American West, African slavery along the midwestern Fugitive Slave line, and Latino/a queer diasporas in the Southwest. Theories of racial subjugation and nationalist exclusions will form the analytical framework for our deliberations including: Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature, Stephen Greenblatt’s New World Encounters, Gerald Home’s The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. We will also center our interests in the second half of the class on four influential novels that reteach American history from the perspective of indigenous and racialized immigrant experience: William Vollmann’s Fathers and Crows, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, James Michener’s Hawaii, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Our goal will be to recognize the significant counter-histories that challenge dominant narratives of American nation identity as forming in the vacuum of a “waste and howling wilderness.”

ENGL 1360.10 Fantasy and Speculative Fiction

Prof. Chu

TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.

How do modern writers adapt the conventions of fantasy narration and the bildungsroman--the novel of education--to address questions of identity, class, gender, species, social dissent, and desire? We'll explore the connections between fantasy genres in the English literary canon (fairy tales, myth, medieval romance, and the gothic novel), coming of age themes in young adult fantasy, anime, magic realism, and speculative fiction.

The course has no prerequisites, but UW20 or a similar course is recommended.

This course has been approved as a GPAC Humanities course.

Requirements: 3 papers, 1 midterm exam, up to 100 pages of reading per course meeting.

Required Primary Texts (subject to change): Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales; Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Renault, The King Must Die; Mitchell, Gilgamesh; Shelley, Frankenstein; Hartman, Seraphina; Butler, Kindred. Liu, The Paper Menagerie.

ENGL 2210.11 Techniques in Creative Writing

Prof. McAleavey

TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.

In the Bulletin, ENGL 2210 is described as focusing on the “craft and technique of creative writing and/or theories of creative writing,” and it satisfies a 3-credit-hour requirement for the major in Creative Writing and English. It is open to all interested students, not just majors.

For Spring 2020, we will approach that agenda by studying “prose poetry,” reading and writing “prose poems” or “poems in prose.” In the family of imaginative brief prose forms, prose poetry, flash (or “sudden”) fiction, and short works of creative nonfiction (including memoir, personal essay, etc.) are siblings. Cousins to this immediate family are the joke, the news item, the dream narrative, the autobiographical anecdote, and the letter (among others). But we’re looking at poems. In prose.

“Prose,” in this context, refers to writing that is presented using the whole width of a physical column of type (usually the width of the page, minus margins on both sides), often justified on its right margin as well as its left. Poetry, in contrast, traditionally depends on lines (or stichs) whose length, determined by other means, is independent of the printed page. Traditionally, poems have been lineated.

The rebellion which has become the genre (or sub-genre) of prose poetry engages with a challenge: how can a mere chunk of writing, a block of continuous prose, be considered poetry, since it is not lineated? We will address that question historically and inductively, by reading examples from the history of the prose poem, as well as practically and creatively, by writing our own defiant prose poems.

ENGL 2411W Introduction to English Literature II: Rebellious Women / Writing Resistance

Prof. Chakrabarti

MW 2:20-3:35 PM

This is a survey course that provides an introduction to the Romantic and Victorian Periods of British Literature. In this course, we will read essays, novels, and poetry which were written by and/or talk about rebellious women. How does literature propagate rules as well as subvert them? What does the literature of these time periods tell us about the fast-changing ideas about ideal British femininity, and how were these ideals challenged? The course covers a broad range of texts, both canonical and non-canonical, which deal with issues of gender, class, race, and nationality. We will pay special attention to the ways in which these texts engage with rebellious femininity. This course will satisfy the WID requirement.

Texts will include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Lady Susan by Jane Austen, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, among others.

ENGL 2460.11 Fiction Writing

Prof. Yun

TR 4:45-6 p.m.

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, setting, and style. In this section, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2470.10 Poetry Writing

Prof. Chang

MW 11:10-12:25 p.m.

This course will ask and answer the following questions: What is a poem? How are poems made? Where do we find poems? Why read and write poems? We will look at examples of poetry from the past and present, in other art forms, and in everyday life. Writing assignments will be modeled on these texts and cultural works. There will be in-class writing experiments, opportunities to attend readings by poets whose work we read, and regular workshops of student writing. Balancing rigor and play, this course is designed for beginners and welcomes readers, adventurous thinkers, and writers of other genres.

ENGL 2510W.11 Intro to American Literature I

Prof. Seavey

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

ENGL 2560.10 Intermediate Fiction Writing

Prof. Liontas

TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.

Workshop developing foundations of craft in fiction, focusing on character, escalation, place, voice, and selective detail.

ENGL 2570.10 Intermediate Poetry Writing

Prof. Shore

TR 12:45 - 2:00PM

ENGL 2611.10 Introduction to Black Literature of America II

Prof. James

TR 11:10-12:25 p.m.

This is a course designed to provide students with an introduction to some of the most influential African American writers of 20^th century. Beginning with selected works from the 1920’s and 30’s, we will explore how the Great Migration north altered African American life and facilitated a “modern” black literature. We will end with the self-consciously political writing of the 1960’s and 70’s to examine how African American literature registered the concerns of the Civil Rights, Black Power, feminist and anti-war movements. Writers might include Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Loraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison.

ENGL 2800.10 Introduction to Critical Theory

Prof. Joubin

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

How does literature function in civil society? This course introduces students to major schools of critical theory and to new ways of asking questions about culture and literature through a carefully curated selection of key writing—from influential, classic articulations to more current works. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with structuralism, ecocriticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, post-colonialism, and feminism, with an emphasis on critical race, gender, sexuality, queer, and disability studies.

More importantly, students will learn how to apply theoretical tools to literary works in the interest of producing scholarship that instigates changes. Taking an intersectional approach, we will examine modern theoretical perspectives, a body of knowledge that continues to evolve in new directions.

ENGL 3210.10 Readings in Creative Writing: Life Stories

Prof. Page

MW 12:45-2 p.m.

This course will examine life stories in literature, including the roman a clef, the prose poem and the memoir, as well as autobiographical aspects of fiction. Craft, style, and content are the focus. It is both a literature course and a creative writing course, with a writing workshop component.

ENGL 3210.11 Readings in Creative Writing

Prof. Chang

MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.

Raymond Williams claims that “’nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language.” An introduction to modern and contemporary environmental literature and writing, this course embraces the complexity of nature as a language and explores how writers have defined and figured nature as aesthetic tool and model, as sociocultural phenomenon, and as an ethical dilemma. What is nature and why do writers turn to nature? How does literary form absorb, reflect, and engage with the Anthropocene? What is our environment and where and when do we recognize nature in our own lives? We will read poems and prose that document the environment, grapple with climate change, and consider the sociocultural dynamics of environmental literature. We will also write often and variously and venture out into the “nature” of DC

ENGL 3390.10 Topics in CW: The Writing of Fiction

Prof. Jones

MW 2:20-3:35

ENGL 3390.11 Topics in CW: Creative Non Fiction

Prof. Liontas

Workshop exploring memoir and other forms of the genre, including profiles, case studies, and cultural criticism.

ENGL 3390.12 Topics in CW: Screening the Novel

Prof. Liontas

MW 2:20-3:35

Hybrid workshop/literature course. Students will have the opportunity to write toward their own novels, in addition to examining exemplary novels and their adaptations in film and media.

ENGL 3400.10 Topics in Literature and Finance: Writing Money

Prof. Dugan

MW 11:10-12:25 p.m.

How do we talk about money? Is there an art to it? And what do great artists have to say about this topic? In this course, we'll read a wide variety of literary texts (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature). Our goal will be to explore how money functions in these texts as an index of value, a measure of power, a part of our identity, and as a tool to create change. We'll then apply these insights and connect them to our own queries about art and economics, including our own personal and cultural investments in money. Students will practice analyzing, writing, and speaking about these topics at the very highest levels, honing their skills by working together to produce a podcast that explores literary and economic themes in these books.

The reading list includes: a selection of contemporary poetry, Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Butlers Parable of the Sower, Rowling's Harry Potter, Eggers' The Circle, Norris's McTeague, and Ellis's American Psych

ENGL 3440W.80 Shakespeare I: Shakespeare, Race and Gender

Prof. Joubin

TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.

Shakespeare, Race and Gender: Ideologies about race, gender, and class shape Shakespeare’s plays and their afterlife on stage and on screen. We will do close readings of racial tensions and gendered representations in the plays and select performances. The class will reflect on the meanings of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, identity formation, nationalism, and the distribution of power in societies.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

Explore concepts of difference and their implications
Learn skills of close reading and critical analysis
Hone library research skills
Evidence-based argumentation
Connect critical analysis to your professional life beyond the classroom

ENGL 3460.10 Paradise Reimagined: Milton in Adaptation

Prof. Dugan

MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.

In this course, students will study John Milton's literary history by exploring the influence--and limitations--of his literary epic Paradise Lost. How have artists engaged with this epic poem? What can we learn by studying these reimagined versions of Milton's vision of Paradise? And how do these adaptations change how we read Milton as a canonical author? Students will read Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and a selection of his prose and poetry alongside of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, William Blake's illustrations, Feldman's 2017 play Amanuensis, Or The Miltons, Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens, and Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series.

ENGL 3560.10 American Realism

Prof. Seavey

MW 3:45-5 p.m.

By the end of the Civil War, American Literature had achieved a position as a national literature of international importance so the writers who would emerge into prominence in the following decades faced the challenge of sustaining the achievement of American literature in an era when their work could enjoy a new promise of prominence. The writers of that period are noteworthy for their diversity—Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Adams, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather. Out of their work would come a new-found confidence mixed with longstanding national anxieties. In their view, they had departed from the more secure and limited achievement of earlier American writers and launched forth into a variety of interlinked directions. Their own past claimed their attention and invited a literature of self-reflection somehow combined with modes of depiction some of them would characterize as Realism.

ENGL 3610.10 Modernism

Prof. Green-Lewis

MW 11:10-12:25 pm.

The Great War (1914-18) is often considered the catalyst for high modernism, but in its attention to the ordinary beauties of daily life, and its skepticism of such novelistic fundamentals as plot and character, modernism also had notably pre-war roots. In our discussions of (mostly) British works from c. 1900-1930, we will focus on the following topics: national, public, and private identity; vision and knowledge; the idea of “character”; nostalgia, loss, and the concept of home; beauty; and urban culture. Authors will include Henry James, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.

ENGL 3621.10 American Poetry II

Prof. McAleavey

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

BULLETIN DESCRIPTION: Close examination of major American poems since the early 20th century:Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Bishop, Hughes, Ashbery, and others

PREREQUISITES: None. However, the English Department strongly recommends a literature course,such as ENGL 1050 or one of the courses numbered in the 1300s through the 1800s, as a prerequisite upper-division English courses, such as this one.

OVERVIEW: This course examines books by ten American poets from throughout the 20th century who collectively disrupt the continuity and traditions of English-language poetry, starting with the somewhat Georgian lyrics of Robert Frost (starting before WW I), through the Modernist constructions of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes, and on through the post-WW II socially-conscious,Confessionalist, and Postmodern poetries of Brooks, Plath, Bishop, Ammons, and Ashbery.

ENGL 3660.10 20th Century Irish Literature

Prof. Alcorn

TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.

This course will focus on the literature and culture of Ireland from early myth to the present. Assigned readings will analyze major literary works while giving particular attention to the transformation of Irish culture, politics, and identity from the 18^th to the 20th century. Major authors include Heaney, Joyce, Yeats, O’Connor, O’Casey, Synge, and Farrell.

ENGL 3720W.10 Contemporary American Lit

Prof. Moreland

ENGL 3810.10 Select Topics in Lit: Riotous Forms

Prof. DeWispelare

MW 9:35-10:50 a.m.

The philosopher Jacques Rancière identifies a relationship between politics and aesthetics. Politics only changes when some breach or insurrection causes it to change. Similarly, aesthetic ideas and criteria only change when there is a deliberate break with and reordering of what has come before.

This course is organized around the term “riot,” which is an evocative noun with complexly interlaced referents. In the domain of the social and the economic, “riot” refers to “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd.” In the domain of the aesthetic, the term “riot” has long named “a roaringly successful show, performer, etc” as well as “a person […] or thing which is extremely popular or makes a big impression.” In contemporary anglophone vernacular, riot occurs in streets, in prisons, in protests, and in spaces of exceptional social combustibility—spaces that are nowadays increasingly “common” in three senses: recurrent, popular, and public. Riot also occurs in aesthetic space: there are riots of color, riotous performances, riotous behavior, and riot as aesthetic judgment, as in, “the book was a riot.” This issue zeroes in on the varied meanings of riot in the period, as well as now.

In order to approach these questions, over the course of the semester we will read eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts that attempt to describe or thematize popular mass movements, including riots. We will also read contemporary texts that that rethink literary form in ‘riotous’ ways. Taken together, we develop ways to speak about the relationship between aesthetic form and political content.

Books may include the following, among others: Carlyle, The French Revolution, C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins, Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and excerpts from Barnaby Rudge. Brontë, Shirley, Zola Germinal, Conrad The Secret Agent. A variety of cutting-edge contemporary experiments in form will also be included like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Vol. 1, Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, Christa Wolf’s One Day a Year, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, among others.

This course will fulfill the 1700-1900 distribution requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3810.11 Select Topics in Lit: British & Global Science Fiction and Film

Prof. Khalid

TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.

With the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 2019, we reflect on the various ways in which we relate to the cosmos and the world beyond our immediate physical reality. Science fiction helps us expand our conception of humanity’s place within the universe. This course will cover science fiction literature and film mostly from Britain and the global Anglophone 2 world produced between the late nineteenth-century and the present. This course will pay special attention to changing trends within the genre’s development over the past century. The course will examine how science fiction contends with significant political, historical, and social issues, notably war, militarization, climate change, reproductive rights, human rights, and the ethics of scientific experimentation. The course’s focus on science fiction texts and films will focus on how science fiction as a genre addresses issues of empire, imperialism, and race. In our study of various texts and films, we will pay attention to how the interpretation of science fiction texts is situated within a specific history of distribution and consumption of material by science fiction readers, writers, and publishers, from the earliest science fiction pulps to the massive convergence culture of sci-fi that encompasses books, film, television, internet fandom, and fandom culture and conferences across the globe. Readings will include works by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and John Wyndham, as well as works by science fiction writers from across the globe, such as Keki Daruwalla (India), Cixin Liu (China), and Nnedi Okorafor (Nigeria), among others. The course will also include some films, notably Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), among others, which students will be required to watch and discuss in class. The course format is mixed lecture and discussion with one test, two formal papers, and regular informal writing due in class as part of the course’s participation grade. This course will train students to think and write critically about literature and film. The goal of the course is to help students learn about the evolution of science fiction as a genre and to understand how this genre offers important cultural and scientific commentary on our contemporary moment.

ENGL 3810.80 Literature and Culture of World War One

Prof. Green-Lewis

MW 3:45-5 p.m.
(Cross listed with Honors 2054W)

This course focuses on the unanticipated horrors of World War One in order to show how writers and artists of the early-20^th century attempted to give new shape to new knowledge. We’ll read poetry, memoir, letters, and fiction: we’ll look at paintings, photographs, and war memorials; we’ll listen to music by Stravinsky, Britten, and working-class soldiers. We’ll talk about mud, rats, gas, and barbed wire. And we’ll also talk about love. We’ll be guided throughout by the question: What is the place of art and literature in an age of war?

ENGL 3820.10 Major Authors: Melville and Hawthorne

Prof. Sten

MW 2:20-3:35 p.m.

This course will explore themes of cultural conflict, border crossing, and transgressive behavior in the short stories and novels of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Melville’s Typee, or A Peep at Polynesian Life and “Benito Cereno,” the cultural conflict occurs when an innocent American enters a foreign world; in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables the conflicts are gendered and generational; and in Moby-Dick and The Blithedale Romance they are personal, ideological, or based on class and gender. In each case, we will seek to establish the historical context of these conflicts and explore whether the author suggests any solutions. As the semester progresses, we will also discuss how the thinking of Hawthorne and Melville (who became close friends in the early 1850s) might be compared and contrasted. Finally, since several of these works are known as “romances” (gothic, demonic, historical, utopian) we will work to develop an understanding of these popular genres as well.

In addition to weekly readings, assignments include three papers and a take-home final examination.

Readings: Melville: Typee, or a Peep at Polynesian Life; Moby-Dick, or The Whale; The Piazza Tales. Hawthorne: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales; The Scarlet Letter; The House of the Seven Gables; The Blithedale Romance

ENGL 3830.10 Topics in Literary Theory: Vikings, Mongrels, Moors: A Global Middle Ages

Prof. Hsy

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

Game of Thrones, Black Panther, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter: in popular media, tales of heroism, romance, and magic set in a mythic past have enduring appeal. What are the literary origins that gave rise to such contemporary media? How do fantasies about the medieval past inform contemporary culture and global geopolitics?

This course will examine how medieval storytelling traditions shape popular media (including film and TV, visual art, spoken word poetry, political activism, and fandom communities). We will read works of medieval literature and discover how these texts inform present-day cultural issues as wide-ranging as religious conflict, racial and ethnic identity, and the mysteries of love.

Major texts include Beowulf, Vinland Sagas, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Shakespeare’s Othello.

Contemporary media in this course will include Game of Thrones and Black Panther. We will consider how the Western medieval past is appropriated across Anglo-American, Indigenous, Asian American, Jewish, and Black diaspora contexts.

Assignments include a close reading, a review of a work of popular media (such as a TV series, film, or graphic novel), and a final project that integrates literary analysis and contemporary scholarship.

No previous experience with medieval literature is required. All medieval texts will be provided in modern English (or bilingual) translation.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement of the English major.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Puchner, Akbari, et al., eds. Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. B, 4th Edition (2018).
Kunz, trans. Vinland Sagas (2008).
Pollard and Rosenberg, eds. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A Companion Reader, Vol. 2, 2nd Edition (2016).
Shakespeare (ed. Thompson). Othello, Revised 2nd Edition (2016).

ENGL 3840W.10 Gender and Literature: Contemporary LGBT Writing

Prof. McRuer

MW 12:45-2 p.m.

This section of Gender and Literature will focus on work by openly LGBT writers from Stonewall (1969) to the present. In the process, we will consider the lesbian feminism and gay male music scene of the 1970s, the coming out novel as it coalesces in the 1980s, the emergence of trans and non-binary writing in the early 1990s into the present. The course will include literature on the AIDS epidemic, on non-urban queer locations, and on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. The syllabus will include novels, short stories, and nonfiction prose by June Arnold, Andrew Holleran, Audre Lorde, John Fox, Kate Bornstein, Sarah Schulman, Manuel Muñoz, Jordy Rosenberg, and Garth Greenwell.

ENGL 3912.10 Disability and the Holocaust

Prof. Mitchell

MW 3:45-5 P.M.

ENGL 3915.10 Literature and Madness

Prof. Alcorn

TR 12:45-2 p.m.

The course explores madness as a condition of culture, as an adaptive cognitive style, and as a cognitive challenge. Attention is given to concepts of psychosis, hysteria, trauma, loss and depression from a descriptive, medical, historical and socio-critical perspective. An emphasis is given to literature before and after WWI which we will read as both a response to the madness of culture and a uniquely informative expression of oppression and suffering.

ENGL 3930.10 Topics in US Latino Literature: Florida Fictions

Prof. López

TR 2:20-3:35 p.m.

We will study the invention of Florida from the 16^th century to the present in travel narratives and novels, popular music and film—and more. The course’s spirit is that it’s in art and writing that the “Sunshine State” emerges powerfully as a metonym for the living, beautiful, and criminal place that is America in and beyond the eras of European settler colonialism, African slavery and resistance, and indigenous creativity and uprising. We’ll watch how 2016’s Moonlight and 2017’s The Florida Project cinematically imagine race, class, beaches, and amusement parks, and we’ll travel back to 19^th-century accounts of how enslaved people used swamplands to invent new languages and destroy white supremacy. Narratives of the Everglades will invite us to theorize how that thriving space of indeterminate water-land mixtures has resisted and housed human and nonhuman “travelers” like hurricanes, alligators, and Christian missionaries. And more: autobiographies by Miccosukee people, novels by Cuban Americans, and freestyle and Miami bass music from the 1980s and 1990s will all contribute to a classroom environment of conversation and projects that will demonstrate how literary and other cultural representations of Florida invoke this state of “metaregional” proportions: What happens in and around Florida has indeed never not just stayed there, within its conventional region, but has, in fact, also determined possibilities for compromising, critiquing, and creating well beyond its environmental, political, and aesthetic boundaries.

ENGL 3940.80 Topics in African American Lit: Black Women Writers in the 21st Century

Prof. James

TR 3:45 - 5:00 pm

This course is an exploration of award-winning black women’s literature produced in the 21^st century. For the purpose of our study this semester, we will consider works published in English from writers who live and work in the United States, and who have roots from across the African diaspora, including The U.S. South, Ghana, Nigeria, The Caribbean, California and New York City. These writers also identify across the spectrum of sexualities and gender embodiments: straight, queer and non-binary. The writers’ diasporic origins and diverse sexual/gender identifications will require that we complicate dominant understandings of what constitutes blackness and black “womanhood” and “femininity,” and think about the authors and their works through an intersectional lens. While our primary focus is on the novel—both in traditional and experimental forms—we will also examine film and memoir as narrative modes.

As we investigate this work, we will keep key questions in mind: What are the stories this newest generation of black women diasporic writers are telling? Why, from a cultural, historical, and sociopolitical point of view, are they telling them? What are the legacies and interventions? What choices are they making in the telling—in terms of form, content and narrative structure? How do these writers explain their own projects? What is their literary philosophy? What does this work tell us about the futures of literary landscapes for black women? How and where is their work being interpreted and received? How does the reception of their work offer insight into the publishing industry perceives and promotes ideas and expectations about black women and black women’s literature (for example, what the literature should or should not “do,” who the audiences are or are not).

Possible authors/texts covered: Roxane Gay, Hunger; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X; Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing; Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun; Dee Rees, Pariah; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Tayari Jones, An American Marriage; Toni Morrison, A Mercy.

ENGL 1000.10 - Dean's Seminar:

Prof. Evelyn Schreiber

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45 pm to 2:00 pm.

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? How do new plays address race, class and gender issues? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays are selected to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays as well as attend at least one new play among several we will attend.

Highlights of the Fall 2018 Course:

Attend Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, where we will meet with Artistic Director Maria Goyannes. According to theater critic Mark Abramson, the play “has made a big splash and has appeared on many critics’ best-of-the-year lists.” Last summer, it had sold-out runs at the Soho Rep off-Broadway and was a great success at Berkeley Rep and received the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn prize given annually to a female dramatist. Fairview, based on a true story, reveals “the notion of how whites view middle-class black family life [with] scathing scrutiny.”
Several actors will visit our class to discuss their acting method and experiences in current performances.
We will participate in a Master Class in Directing.
We will read, discuss, and act out scenes from: Oedipus the King by Sophocles; Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro; At Home at the Zoo by Edward Albee; Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; Othello by William Shakespeare; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris; and Escaped Alone by Carly Churchill.

ENGL 1210.14 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Prof. Jung Yun

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45 pm - 2:00 pm.

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative non-fiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

ENGL 1315.10 - Literature and the Financial Imagination

Prof. Holly Dugan

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:10 am - 12:25 pm.

Is there a difference between art and economics, between writing well for its own reward and writing for monetary gain? And, if so, can you spot that difference in your own work and in others?

In this course, we’ll explore these questions by observing great writing at its very highest level (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature) and by connecting these observations to our own writing. Along the way, we’ll explore different and often competing systems of value, including aesthetic, cultural, psychological, and monetary. Some authors on our syllabus, for instance, argue strenuously that not everything that has value can be monetized. Others argue the reverse: everything has a price. Our goal will be to understand not only how these authors stylistically represent the relationship between art and economics but which ones we value the most and why.

Along the way, students will learn how to write short, elegant, clear, persuasive, and passionate arguments about art by practicing the art of reading: learning how to appreciate difficult literature (ie books we recognize as having value even though we may not like or enjoy them) and to use these works of art as prompts to examine our own beliefs about money and art.

Works will include: Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Thomas More’s Utopia, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

ENGL 1330.10 - Myths of Britain

Prof. Daniel DeWispelare

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:35 am - 10:50 am.

This introductory course invites all students who are interested in the ways we study cultural artifacts—things like books, music, drama, song, photographs, film, painting, sculpture, and even social media. In particular, we will be reading and consuming works by a diverse array of individuals, past and present, who are associated with or informed by ideas of “Britain,” an idea that casts a long shadow over the present.

Specifically, we will consider the idea of “Britain” as a starting point for more general discussions about myth and culture. Because the exportation of the English language has accompanied British and American imperial practice over the past five centuries, British myths and mythmaking have influenced the story of anglophone globalization as well as global cultural history itself. Some of the myths that we will track during the semester include, but are not limited to: mythological myths, like those pertaining to Boudica and King Arthur, dramatic myths like those surrounding Shakespeare and the stage more generally, economic myths like those undergirding the work of Adam Smith and the other grandfathers of neoliberalism, not to mention ecological imperial myths, which have long provided an alibi for British expansion. The year is 2019 and so our conversations about culture’s tentacles will be informed by ongoing discussions surrounding the long histories of Brexit, decolonialism, race, gender, class, environmentalism, the cultural now, and, of course, our cultural future.

The books that will be assigned for the course are included below. Be advised: you will not be required to purchase all of these texts. Instead, you will choose to engage with six of the nine texts, as well as two of four films, depending on your interests.

Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Fletcher Christian and Robert Bligh, Mutiny on the Bounty
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

ENGL 1365.10 - Literature and the Environment

Professor Maria Frawley

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm.

What do we mean when we refer to “the environment”? Do we mean “nature,” “wilderness,” “geography,” “ecology,” “the earth,” “the non-human world,” “the outdoors,” a “sense of place,” or something else? This introductory course will explore the many ways that literary texts, art, and even social media respond to and shape our understanding of environments and our environmental understanding. We will read widely, starting with works of literature from writers first responding to the industrial revolution and moving to more contemporary essayists responding to the perils of climate change or the promises of sustainability. Throughout we will be on alert to the many ways that our contemporary culture both heightens and mutes our environmental awareness. Through a range of short, creative assignments, students will practice writing clear and compelling prose for a variety of audiences; will develop their analytic skills through close-reading exercises; and in small groups will have opportunities to develop capacities for public presentation. Recognizing that students from all majors may have interests in environmental literature, creative final projects will be designed to facilitate making connections, exploring the value of literary study and the humanities more generally to other fields, whether in the sciences, the world of policy and business, engineering, law, or in medicine. Meeting on the Mount Vernon Campus will enable us to on occasion get outside together to experience for ourselves some of the observational techniques we’ve identified in the writers and artists we are studying. We will meet twice a week in a discussion-based, active learning format, and the course fulfills Critical Thinking and Oral Communication GCRs.

ENGL 2210.10 - Techniques in Creative Writing

Prof. David McAleavey

Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:35 am - 10: 50 am.

Bulletin information: Focusing on the “craft and technique of creative writing and/or theories of creative writing,” this course satisfies a requirement for the major in Creative Writing as well as the G-PAC Arts requirement for CCAS. It is open to all interested students, not just majors.

Prerequisites: None. Prior experience in a college-level Creative Writing or literature course might admittedly be advantageous, since every student must produce both critical and creative writing. That said, this course nonetheless offers a valid way to begin the study of Creative Writing.

General description: This is a hybrid course, being both a Creative Writing course which will require you to compose original works whose merits will certainly affect your grade, and a readings course designed to foster close reading skills that will assist you not only in this but also in other Creative Writing and literature courses – and in all your future writing. This is not a general introduction to creative writing, but rather an investigation of the large topic of genre, in particular from the writer’s standpoint, through a consideration of work done in an innovative and even revolutionary mode.

We will be studying “prose poetry,” reading and writing “prose poems” or “poems in prose.” In the family of brief imaginative prose forms, prose poetry is the sibling of both flash fiction and numerous varieties of short creative nonfiction (including memoir, personal essay, etc.). Related to these are the joke, the news item, the dream narrative, the autobiographical anecdote, and the letter (among others). But we’re looking at poems. In prose.

“Prose,” in this context, refers to writing that is presented using the whole width of a physical column of type (perhaps the printable width of the page), often justified on its right margin as well as its left. Poetry, in contrast, traditionally depends on lines (or stichs) whose length, determined by other means, is independent of the printed page. Traditionally, poems have been lineated. The rebellion which has become the genre of prose poetry engages with a challenge: how can a mere chunk of writing, a block of continuous prose, be considered poetry, since it is not lineated? We will address that question historically and inductively, by reading examples from the history of the prose poem, as well as practically and creatively, by writing our own defiant prose poems.

ENGL 2460.10 - Fiction Writing

Prof. Jung Yun

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:45 pm - 6:00 pm.

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, setting, and style. In this section, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 2470.10 - Poetry Writing

Prof. Jennifer Chang

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:10 am - 12:25 pm.

This course will ask and answer the following questions: What is a poem? How are poems made? Where are poems found? Why read and write poems? We will look at examples of poetry in the past and present, in music and visual art, and in everyday life. Writing assignments will be modeled on these texts and cultural works. There will be in-class writing experiments, occasional visits with poets whose work we've read, and regular workshops of student writing. Balancing rigor and play, this course is designed for beginners and welcomes readers, adventurous thinkers, and writers of other genres.

ENGL 2800W.10 - Introduction to Critical Theory

Prof. Alexa Alice Joubin

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:20 pm - 3:35 pm.

How does literature apply to your life, values, and goals beyond the classroom? This course introduces students to major schools of critical theory and to new ways of asking questions about culture and literature. Students will gain fluency in the conceptual frameworks associated with psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism, and ecocriticism, with an emphasis on critical race, gender, sexuality, queer, and disability studies.

This course invites you to explore these urgent questions through a key figure in literary history, William Shakespeare, and his place in visual, filmic, and popular culture, on which students will practice their new critical knowledge. For many reasons, Shakespearean texts have been used as test cases in important theoretical developments. We will discover how Shakespeare helps us rethink notions of race and gender, among other issues of identity. Contrasting modes of interpretation generate new ways of understanding of early modern and postmodern cultures.

Since the theoretical texts are challenging enough, we anchor our study in one single author to make the number of variants more manageable. Short assignments may include concept papers, scene analyses, a research presentation, and an annotated bibliography.

No previous experience with Shakespeare is expected, but note that this is a WID course. This course fulfills the critical theory/cultural studies requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3210.10 - Readings in Creative Writing

Prof. David McAleavey

Monday and Wednesdays, 12:45 pm - 2:00 pm.

An examination of the folk and fairy tales collected and manipulated by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of the mature Modernist poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and of Float, a postmodern collection of disparate writings by Anne Carson (poet, essayist, classicist). This course will expand the student’s close reading abilities, will consider a variety of narrative strategies and touch on theories of narrative, and will ask what we mean by “savvy,” that knowledge or wisdom or way of behaving that so empowers (almost as if by magic!) whoever possesses or displays it, and what connections it might have to what we usually consider “savage,” that brutal, blunt, and somehow “earlier” stage of “civilization” – though perhaps savagery is more ubiquitous and quotidian than we like to admit. By juxtaposing these very different texts, we will investigate their common features, find terms for their uniqueness, and experiment with the creative writing strategies which they suggest.

Official Bulletin description of ENGL 3210: Intensive reading of one to three texts selected by the instructor with the goal of learning to read as a writer and developing close reading skills. Authors and texts vary. May be repeated for credit provided course coverage differs.

This course satisfies a requirement for the Creative Writing and English major. Both critical and creative work will be expected of all students. There are no prerequisites; the course is open to all.

ENGL 3370.10 - Advanced Poetry Writing

Prof. Chang

Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:20 pm - 3:35 pm.

This creative writing workshop considers poetry as an invitation for intensive engagement with experimentation, inquiry, and language. To this end, we will take seriously as poems not only received forms but forms that steal from and hybridize other genres in prose, film, and visual art. This course is designed for those committed to developing their craft and knowledge of poetry and open to exploring what a poem can be. Students should have taken at least one previous creative writing workshop and should expect to read and write weekly and workshop bi-weekly. The course culminates in a final project of the student’s design. In addition, we will read poems across cultures and history, as well as recently published collections of poetry, meeting their authors whenever possible.

ENGL 3420.10 - Getting Medieval: Sex, Self, Society

Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:10 am - 12:25 pm.

This course examines travel narratives and life-writing by medieval authors (women and men) with an emphasis on identity transformations. How did medieval people transgress boundaries of language, culture, religion, gender, or sexuality? How did authors in Britain (writing in Latin, English, French, and Welsh) adapt to a dynamic world of perpetual change? Major authors include Marie de France, Gwerful Mechain, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Sir Thomas Malory, and conversion narratives by Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Assignments include close readings, comparative analysis, and a final essay integrating literary analysis and theory.

All texts will be read in (or provided with) modern English translations. No previous experience with medieval literature is required.

This course can fulfill the pre-1700 requirement of the English major.

This course is open to English majors as well as non-majors.

ENGL 3430.10 - The English Renaissance

Prof. Holly Dugan

Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:20 pm - 3:35 pm.

In this course, we’ll study Renaissance books as material objects and as literary works of art. Reading works by Tyndale, More, Pizan, Spenser, Burton, Bacon, Cavendish, and Milton, we’ll examine how the book as an object came to define the Renaissance and its influence, while also learning how book history shapes our interaction with these creative—and radical—works of art.

Students will spend time researching in GWU’s special collections, learning about the history of early printed texts alongside the study of Renaissance literature. Students will then work together to apply this knowledge to one of our holdings in special collection. The course culminates in a semester-long research project, writing a “biography” of one of GWU’s Renaissance rare books, exploring its history of authorship, publication, readership and ownership (especially in terms of how it came to be part of our university’s collection).

ENGL 3481W.10 - The Eighteenth Century II: The Theater of Politics, Sex, and Sentiment

Prof. Tara Ghoshal Wallace

Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:20 pm - 3:35 pm.

This course looks at a selection of playtexts produced during the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). While we will certainly consider what might be called purely ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’ elements, we will read these texts as part of the culture that produced them, and the culture they produced. These include military and political conflicts, ideological conflicts (especially regarding gender and class), and conflicts about what could or should be represented on stage. In other words, 18^th-century theatre engages in the political and cultural polemics expected of popular media.

In part, these plays trace the trajectory from Restoration libertinism to Georgian domesticity, and perhaps from aristocratic to bourgeois values, but our discussions will also address the limitations of those dichotomies.

This course satisfies WID and Oral Communication requirements.

ENGL 3826.10 - Major Authors: Toni Morrison and William Faulkner

Prof. Evelyn Schreiber

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:10 am - 12:25 pm.

"Race, Memory, and Aesthetics"

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

TEXTS:

William Faulkner, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, God Help the Child
Additional Materials posted on Blackboard

ENGL 3860.10 - Bad English: Language, Society, Politics

Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:45 pm - 6:00 pm.

What is English? What does it mean to be an English speaker in a particular time and place? This course explores the internal variety of the English language from Old English riddles and epics to forms of digital storytelling in global Anglophone media. Surveying thousands of years in the history of English and its users, we will explore how language ideologies intersect with gender, class, regional identity, race, and disability. We will also be mindful of how technological change over time alters the creation, transmission, and interpretation of texts. Literary authors (in chronological order) include Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldúa, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Amy Tan.

This course is open to English majors as well as non-majors.

Assignments include translation exercises, close reading, literary annotation, and a personal language memoir.

This can fulfill the literary theory and/or cultural studies requirement of the English major.

This course is open to English majors as well as non-majors.

ENGL 3910.10 - Disability Studies

Prof. Robert McRuer

Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:45 pm - 2:00 pm.

“Disability studies” describes a diverse array of projects, located primarily in the humanities but speaking to and with the social sciences, that challenge the ways in which “normalcy” and “abnormalcy” have been deployed to conceptualize physical and mental difference. Speaking back to medical models of disability that would position people with disabilities as only objects of knowledge, disability studies considers not only how disability functions symbolically in culture but also how people with disabilities have themselves been shapers of culture.

This course serves as an introduction to this field. We will examine a wide variety of texts in order to pose a series of overlapping questions: how does disability studies complicate and extend theories of embodiment, including (centrally) feminist and queer theories? How have specific subcultures (people living with AIDS, Deaf subcultures) appropriated, contested, or expanded the meanings of “ability” and “disability”? What cultural forces and what uses of language have served to unite disparate groups such as the blind, people who use wheelchairs, and people with chronic diseases? How have discourses of sympathy, compensation, and accommodation been deployed to constrain or empower people with disabilities? How does disability studies challenge our current sense of what it means to live in a multicultural society?

ENGL 3960.10 - Asian American Literature

Prof. Patricia Chu

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45-2:00 p.m.

Asians have been coming to the U.S. since 1849, but remain a minority in this country. Why?

In 1878, the U.S. Congress created a new legal category, "aliens ineligible to citizenship," for the sole purpose of excluding Chinese from entering the U.S. or gaining citizenship on the basis of their race. Consequent legal maneuvers extended these and similar exclusions to others of Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Filipino descent. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, perceptions of Asian Americans in America have been shaped by U.S. foreign policy, by the Orientalist perception of Asians as unassimilable aliens, by a suspicion of "orientals" borrowed from European colonialism and re-framed for American use.

This course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicity and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences. We'll discuss the roots of the term "Asian American"; the Chinese exclusion acts; Japanese American internment; feminist, national, and postcolonial influences; transnational migration and adoption; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, melancholia, and loss.

Texts will be a subset of these:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters or Carlos Bulosan, America Is In the Heart.
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly; Dance and the Railroad
Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.
John Okada, No No Boy
Bui Thi, The Best We Could Do
Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood or Deann Borshay Liem, First Person Plural. (film)
H. T. Tsiang, And China Has Hands.
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Alice Wu, Saving Face. (film)

CRN: 97479

ENGL 3980W.1 - Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures

Prof. Robert McRuer

Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:45 pm - 5:00 pm.

The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or bisexual or transgender people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized, however contentiously, around identity?

This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s). Please note that this course will travel to Prague, Czech Republic for a week in November; there will be an additional layer of registration (with the Office for Study Abroad) in November.

ENGL 1210.11: Introduction to Creative Writing

Prof. Jung Yun

Introduction to Creative Writing explores the art and craft of two or more genres of writing. In this section, we will focus on fiction, creative non-fiction, and the narrative connections between these genres.

ENGL 1320W.10 - Literature of the Americas

Prof. David Mitchell

This class examines the history of developments in the representation of indigenous peoples and other minorities in the Americas. We will begin with the Spanish invasion of South America and Mexico (New Spain) and move to stories of encounters with Americans Indians during the European colonization of New England, Asian immigrant experiences in the South Seas and the American West, African slavery along the midwestern Fugitive Slave line, and Latino/a queer diasporas in the Southwest. Theories of racial subjugation and nationalist exclusions will form the analytical framework for our deliberations including: Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature, Stephen Greenblatt’s New World Encounters, Gerald Home’s The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War,and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. We will also center our interests in the second half of the class on four influential novels that reteach American history from the perspective of indigenous and racialized immigrant experience: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, James Michener’s Hawaii, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Finally, we will conclude with a work of award-winning poetry pertaining to Latino/a experience, Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficult World, that returns us full circle to the Mexican world in the U.S. Our goal will be to recognize the significant counter-histories that challenge dominant narratives of American nation identity as forming in the vacuum of a “waste and howling wilderness.”

ENGL 1340W.10 - Essential Shakespeare on Screen (Essential Shakespeare)

Prof. Alexa Joubin

Introduction to Shakespeare’s romance play, histories, tragedies, and comedies and their adaptations on screen. Explore themes such as travel, race, gender, sexuality, colonialism. Acquire essential tools for enjoying Shakespeare as both literary works and films. Learn textual and film analytical skills. Understand Shakespeare’s and directors’ language and cinematic conventions.

Plays include Coriolanus, Macbeth, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear.

ENGL 1510.10 - Introduction to American Literature I

Prof. Ormond Seavey

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

This course is also a writing course, specifically a Writing in the Disciplines (WID) course, so issues of composition both of these texts and of the students are foregrounded.

ENGL 2210.10 - Writing about Music (Techniques in Creative Writing)

Prof. Gayle Wald

Someone—we are not sure who—once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The "problem" of music, it would seem, is that, unlike a building or a poem, it does not "represent" anything. In this course, which is aimed at creative writing majors and minors but open to interested students, we will confront this conundrum head on, by reading and writing about music, and sometimes even reading about writing. We’ll pay attention to the “musical detail,” or the language we have to invent to represent sound and its particular affective power.

Primarily we’ll focus on creative non-fiction, but we will also examine some fiction and poetry. We will begin by thinking about how and what we hear, and then move on to examples of how various writers, most contemporary but some not, have attempted to write about music. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and in occasional workshops, as well as to perform at least one “Critical Karaoke” during the course of the semester. Readings may include works by the following: Ellen Willis, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Ellison, Bob Dylan, David Hadju, Carl Wilson, Will Friedwald, Gina Arnold, Jessica Hopper, Alexandra Vazquez, Doreen St. Felix.

ENGL 2460.11 - Fiction Writing

Prof. Jung Yun

Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, setting, and style. In this section, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction, and discuss student work-in-progress.Fiction Writing focuses on the foundational elements of craft, such as point of view, character development, setting, and style. In this section, we will practice writing original fiction, read and analyze published fiction, and discuss student work-in-progress.

ENGL 3210.11 - Savvy/Savage: From Folk Tales to the Postmodern (Readings in Creative Writing)

Prof. David McAleavey

An examination of the folk and fairy tales collected and manipulated by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of the mature Modernist poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and of Float, a postmodern collection of disparate writings by Anne Carson (poet, essayist, classicist). This course will expand the student’s close reading abilities, will consider a variety of narrative strategies and touch on theories of narrative, and will ask what we mean by “savvy,” that knowledge or wisdom or way of behaving that so empowers (almost as if by magic!) whoever possesses or displays it, and what connections it might have to what we usually consider “savage,” that brutal, blunt, and somehow “earlier” stage of “civilization” – though perhaps savagery is more ubiquitous and quotidian than we like to admit. By juxtaposing these very different texts, we will investigate their common features, find terms for their uniqueness, and experiment with the creative writing strategies which they suggest.

Both critical and creative work will be expected of all students. Three books must be purchased (two paperbacks, and one which is an assemblage of 22 chapbooks held in a plastic sleeve).

ENGL 3410.10 - Chaucer: Medieval and Modern

Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Why does “The Father of English Poetry” matter today? This course offers an introduction to the life and works of multifaceted English author Geoffrey Chaucer and his diverse legacy in contemporary popular culture (including such media as spoken word performances, graphic novels, children’s books, and musical adaptations). Not only will we enjoy the beauty, humor, and depth of Chaucer’s poetry in the original Middle English language, but we will also explore some of his lesser-known writings in prose (including legal and scientific treatises). Can Chaucer’s medieval texts challenge modern-day assumptions about gender, race, justice, scientific knowledge, and religious difference? How did Chaucer’s literary experiments in an emergent literary language influence generations of later writers, artists, and activists?

Requirements: class participation, translation exercises, close reading, final essay with revision, and one in-class presentation. One option for the final essay is to examine a modern Chaucer adaptation (such as a work of visual art, film, music recording, or work in some other medium).

No previous knowledge of Middle English is required.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement of the English major.

ENGL 3510.10 - Imagining the Self and the World in Children's Literature

Prof. Patricia Chu

What do children’s books teach about curiosity, initiative, rebellion, competition, kindness, and compassion? What do they teach about language, schooling, and national belonging? How do gods, wizards, and animals contribute to the reader’s psychic world? What do we learn from travel and from traveler’s tales? Can stories about minority children be classics? What exactly are classics? Beginning with classic children’s texts from the 19^th century and rushing forward to the 21^st, we’ll consider what Bruno Bettelheim has called “the uses of enchantment” in children’s literature. No prerequisites, but Engl. 40 or any introductory-level English course offered by this department is recommended. Avid reading required. Authors may include Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C.S. Lewis, Hugh Lofting, Philip Pullman, Witi Ihimaera, Maria Tatar, and Laurence Yep.

ENGL 3481 The Self in the Public Sphere

Prof. Ormond Seavey

As an age of political and intellectual revolutions breaks out, writers in the Eighteenth Century move to identify the self’s tenuous position in relation to society in essays, fiction, drama, and poetry. It is a story extending beyond Britain to France and the new United States. Narratives of social complication, self-discovery, cultural variation, and class consciousness appear to herald the coming of a newly modern world. Dialogue and drama infuse the literary expression of the period. Writers consist of Defoe, Sheridan, Fielding, Diderot, Johnson, Laclos, and Foster. In addition, this course satisfies CCAS requirements for oral competency, so assignments keyed to oral competency are incorporated into the requirements.

ENGL 3520W - American Romanticism

Prof. Christopher Sten

This course focuses on American literature's "coming of age" in the period 1825 to the end of the American Civil War in 1865. At this time U.S. authors had to compete with well-known English and European authors, while at the same time trying to establish a separate literary identity, one with "American" cultural roots and expressive of "American" issues and values (freedom, independent-mindedness, experimentation, the embrace of everyday language and new forms). We will explore what is distinctive about some of the best of the writings from this period--by Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Jacobs, Whitman, and Dickinson--and see how the authors helped to shape or contributed to the literary and cultural controversies of the day. In addition, we will examine how these writings reflect important historical and cultural developments, from the rise of Jacksonian democracy and efforts at reform--in education, gender relations, social and political theory, and spiritual life--to the deeply divisive conflicts over race and slavery leading up to the Civil War and after. This is a WID course requiring three papers and a take-home final exam.

ENGL 3610 - Modernism

Prof. Jennifer Green Lewis

The early decades of the twentieth century saw change in all kinds of cultural and literary production, as realism, with its promise of a world that might be more or less accurately represented through language, increasingly gave way to a focus on language itself as world. The Great War (1914-18) is often considered the chasm marking off the Victorian from the modern world, but in this class we will see that literary modernism also had pre-war roots.

In our discussions of (mostly) British works from about 1900-1930, we will focus on the following topics: national, public, and private identity; vision and knowledge; the idea of “character”; loss, nostalgia, and the concept of home; beauty; and urban culture. There will be challenging readings, varied writing assignments, and some poetry and prose you may want to keep for the rest of your life . . .

ENGL 3912.10 - The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Disability and the Holocaust)

Prof. David Mitchell

In the 1980s, nearly four decades after the formal end of World War II, a group of German and American historians began connecting the genocide of 6 million Jewish (as well as Romany, Russian, and gay) people in the Holocaust to the mass killings of 300,000 disabled people in psychiatric hospitals, clinics, and institutions. The “euthanasia murders” began in October 1939 nearly a year and a half before the advent of the “final solution” in Nazi death camps. The research caused a great deal of debate amongst Holocaust scholars due to the fact that medical killings were treated separately from those prosecuted for Nazi war crimes during the Nuremburg trials. Many believe that physician-supervised killings in medical institutions counted as "treatment" for those classified as “lives unworthy of life” (i.e. those diagnosed with physical, cognitive, and sensory disorders and, in the terms of the time, incapable of productive labor). In 2011, following decades of disability activism, the first state-supported memorial to those killed in the T4 program opened in Berlin. The class will grapple with questions of the relationship of medical murders to Holocaust genocide, the struggle to publically memorialize the T4 killings in Germany, as well as consider how this history affects the lives of German disabled people today. The highlight of our reflections will be a visit to Berlin during spring break to experience the historical sites about which we have been reading: the Topography of Terror, the Jewish Museum, Otto Weidt’s Blindenwerkstatt, The Wannsee Konferenz Haus, the Brandenburg Gedenkstatte, the Psychiatriemuseum, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Bernburg Psychiatric Hospital.

ENGL 1000 – What's New About New Plays

Tuesday and Thursday, 12:45 - 2:00 pm
Prof. Evelyn Schreiber

This Dean’s seminar takes advantage of the theater offerings in Washington and asks the question: What is new about new plays? Are contemporary playwrights reworking classical themes or are their works entirely new entities? What themes reappear and how are they presented? The course also considers how classical plays are re-imagined for modern audiences. For example, is a Shakespearean work staged in a different political or social milieu than the original production? Why would directors make these types of artistic decisions? What does it mean for plays to be culturally relevant? Students will consider who attends the theater and who will be in the audience in the future. These questions form a large part of decisions about what plays are selected to be produced each year and the nature of those productions. We will read at least three classical plays and three new plays as well as attend two new plays.

ENGL 1315 – Literature and the Financial Imagination

Monday and Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:00 pm
Prof. Holly Dugan

Is there a difference between art and economics, between writing well for its own reward and writing for monetary gain? And, if so, can you spot that difference in your own work and in others?

In this introductory course, we’ll begin to answer these questions by practicing our skill at observing great writing at its very highest level (deemed by many to be canonical works of literature) and we’ll then work towards transferring these observations to our own writing. Along the way, we’ll explore different and often competing systems of value, including aesthetic, cultural, psychological, and monetary. Some authors, for instance, argue that not everything that has value can be monetized. Others argue the reverse: everything has a price. Our goal will be to understand not only how these authors stylistically represent the relationship between art and economics but which ones we value the most and why.

Students will learn how to write short, elegant, clear, persuasive, and passionate arguments about literature. We will do this by practicing the art of reading: learning how to appreciate difficult literature (ie books that we see have value even though we may not like or enjoy them) while examining a personal point of view about the links between financial and artistic imagination.

Texts include: Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Jordan Belfort’s Wolf of Wall Street, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World, and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

ENGL 1360 – Fantasy and Speculative Fiction

Monday and Wednesday, 2:20 - 3:35 pm
Prof. Patricia Chu

How do modern writers adapt the conventions of fantasy narration and the bildungsroman--the novel of education--to address questions of identity, class, gender, species, social dissent, and desire? We'll explore the connections between fantasy genres in the English literary canon (fairy tales, myth, medieval romance, and the gothic novel), coming of age themes in young adult fantasy, and dystopian and magic realist fiction.

Texts include: Maria Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales, Brian Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Mary Renault, The King Must Die, Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Rachel Hartman Seraphina, George Orwell, 1984: A Novel, and Ruth Ozeki A Tale for the Time Being.

ENGL 1411W – Introduction to English Literature II

Tuesday and Thursday, 9:35-10:50 am
Prof. Tara Wallace

This course surveys texts from two of the traditional units of British Literature: the Romantic period (roughly 1785 to 1832) and the Victorian period (1832 to 1901). We will read some of the major poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats among the Romantics, Tennyson and Browning among the Victorians); three novels (Austen’s Persuasion from the Romantic period, Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Gaskell’s North and South from the Victorian period); essays on the British Empire and on the Woman Question; and two late-Victorian plays by Anglo-Irish writers Wilde and Shaw. We will finish the semester with a look at a few poems from the World War I period. Our discussions will consider the political, social, and cultural context of these works, including the Napoleonic wars, the industrial revolution, and the British empire. This course satisfies the WID requirement.

ENGL 1510W – Introduction to American Literature I

Tuesday and Thursday 3:45 - 5:00 pm
Prof. Ormond Seavey

Introduction to American Literature I offers an overview of significant literary and cultural texts from 1492 to approximately 1865. Proceeding into a barely imaginable territory that Europeans began to investigate in 1492, the writers of the various periods in this course witnessed what has been called “the last and greatest of all human dreams.” A portion of the Americas settled by English speaking immigrants gained political independence near the end of the Eighteenth century. The efforts of these writers to secure intellectual and literary independence and to deserve the world’s attention for their imaginative accomplishments constitute the greatest achievement of the United States. Always beset by ethnic and cultural conflicts, the writers of these periods foreground an array of problems and resolutions living with one another. Their issues remain our issues.

ENGL 1712 – Bollywood Cinema

Wednesday 12:45 - 3:15 pm
Professor Kavita Daiya

This course is a selective, historical introduction to the industry of popular Hindi film known as Bollywood. Bollywood is today the world’s largest producer of films; since the fifties, its consumption beyond India, in places from Pakistan to Kenya, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Russia, UK, and North America, suggests that it is also the most widely consumed popular cinema. Based in Mumbai, India, Bollywood, despite its name, has its own generic conventions, identity, and visual codes, distinct from Hollywood. Bollywood films are musicals well-known (and sometimes criticized) for their formulaic and “unrealistic” storylines, their simple moral codes (good vs. evil), and their typical happy endings.

This lecture course will introduce students to Bollywood through screenings of a range of films from the 1950s until today. We will place individual films within their larger political, social, and aesthetic contexts; simultaneously, we will develop a set of reading practices that allow us to find meaning in melodramatic texts which often appear resistant to interpretation. Topics discussed will include rebellion, politics, nationalism, modernity, religion, gender, sexuality, globalization, cinephilia, heroism and villainy. At the same time, we will consider how technologies of filmmaking, practices of visual representation, and generic features such as stars, storylines, and song-and-dance sequences contribute to the centrality of popular film in Indian life. While the overall approach will be multi-disciplinary, literary and filmic methodologies will be the primary lens through which the class is conducted. There are no pre-requisites for the course.

Required Texts:

Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A guidebook to popular Hindi cinema
Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction

ENGL 2210 – Techniques in Creative Writing: The Prose Poem

Tuesday and Thursday, 3:45 - 5:00 pm
Prof. David McAleavey

In the Bulletin, ENGL 2210 is described as focusing on the “craft and technique of creative writing and/or theories of creative writing,” and it satisfies a 3-credit-hour requirement for the major in Creative Writing and English. It is open to all interested students, not just majors.

For Fall 2018, we will approach that agenda by studying “prose poetry,” reading and writing “prose poems” or “poems in prose.” In the family of imaginative brief prose forms, prose poetry, flash (or “sudden”) fiction, and short works of creative nonfiction (including memoir, personal essay, etc.) are siblings. Cousins to this immediate family are the joke, the news item, the dream narrative, the autobiographical anecdote, and the letter (among others). But we’re looking at poems. In prose.

“Prose,” in this context, refers to writing that is presented using the whole width of a physical column of type (usually the width of the page, minus margins on both sides), often justified on its right margin as well as its left. Poetry, in contrast, traditionally depends on lines (or stichs) whose length, determined by other means, is independent of the printed page. Traditionally, poems have been lineated.

The rebellion which has become the genre (or sub-genre) of prose poetry engages with a challenge: how can a mere chunk of writing, a block of continuous prose, be considered poetry, since it is not lineated? We will address that question historically and inductively, by reading examples from the history of the prose poem, as well as practically and creatively, by writing our own defiant prose poems.

ENGL 2800 – Critical Methods: Why Read Literature

TIME
Prof. Jonathan Hsy

What’s the point of literature, or any form of art? Can reading a novel change your understanding of the world? How can poem inspire violence or social transformation? How does literature apply to your life, values, and goals beyond the classroom?

This course invites you to explore urgent questions through a key figure in literary history: Geoffrey Chaucer. Although he is known to most people as a comic poet, the author wrote in a surprising array of genres: epic, romance, saint’s life, love lyric, elegy, and scientific treatise. In this class, we’ll discover how Chaucer helps present-day readers rethink notions of gender, sexuality, social class, and identity (including race, ethnicity, and disability). We will trace how varied modes of reading—feminist, crip, queer, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial, to name a few—generate new ways of understanding all aspects of culture (past and present).

Short assignments include response papers, an analytical essay, and an annotated bibliography. The final paper (which you will write and revise in stages) requires you to synthesize more than one critical perspective to discuss a literary work.

No previous experience with Chaucer is expected, but note we will read Chaucer’s works in the original Middle English. This course fulfills the critical theory/cultural studies requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3210 – Readings in Creative Writing: Slow Reading Virginia Woolf

Monday and Wednesday, 2:20 - 3:35 pm
Prof. Jennifer Green-Lewis

This course is for students who want to hone their reading skills through intense close analysis of Woolf’s experimental work of the 1920s. We’ll slow-read three of her novels, focusing on their formal accomplishment and overlap. We will also consider their debt to other disciplines, such as painting and music. Although the focus of study will be narrow, our range of discussion will be wide. Topics of discussion will include Woolf’s representation of beauty; the cultural influence of World War One; and the relationship in the novels between memory and identity. Written assignments will include journal writing, critical analyses, and creative projects drawing on Woolf’s work.

ENGL 3390 – American Memoir

Monday and Wednesday, 11:10 - 12:25 pm
Prof. Lisa Page

American Memoir is a course designed for students with an interest in creative writing and narrative structure. It is both a literature course and a creative writing course, examining structural elements of contemporary American Memoir. It includes a writing workshop component as well as a history of the genre. Students will utilize literary strategies, constructing their own memoir material. Oral presentations on memoirists are also required. No prerequisite.

ENGL 3490W – Early American Literature and Culture

Monday and Wednesday 3:45 - 5:00 pm
Prof. Ormond Seavey

Alien but familiar also, the writers of Early American Literature begin but do not complete the exploration of all the central preoccupations of American literature. A brave new world separated by the ocean from other regions, early America posed considerable interpretive challenges for writers between the early seventeenth century and 1830. There might be treasure to discover, or there might be other cultures to decipher. It might serve as a refuge for Puritans and other adventurers. The indigenous inhabitants of this multicultural gumbo of a place greeted those who arrived with a mixture of diplomatic caution, acceptance, and hostility. The physical world of the new world offered a level of variety and novelty unfamiliar to European settlers. Eventually the advent of political independence for part of British America required adaptation into new social practices which would both derive from and depart from English and European practice. Writers treated include Cabeza de Vaca, Bradford, Winthrop, Sewall, Saffin, Pain, Church. Franklin, Crevecoeur, Jefferson, Irving, Cooper.

ENGL 3530W – The British Romantic Period: Gothic Literature and Mass Literacy

Tuesday and Thursday, 11:10-12: 25 pm
Prof. DeWispelare

2018 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In order to celebrate Shelley’s provocative contribution to cultural life, this class on British Romantic writing will study the mass popularity and long afterlife of the literary tradition with which Frankenstein is most often associated: the Gothic. The central question of the Gothic is why audiences take pleasure in aesthetic objects that provoke fright. From ghost stories to hauntings to abductions to occultism to monstrous composites like Frankenstein’s creature: where can one locate the source of aesthetic pleasure in novels, poetry, and plays that stage these things? Is it suspense, exoticism, terror without danger? As we study examples of gothic literature from the period between roughly 1750 and 1850, and set in a wide variety of global locales, we will learn that the gothic was one of the most popular and common types of fictive writing. Indeed, not only was the Gothic a very lucrative section of the book market, as the success of the Minerva Press and its mostly female authors show, Gothic literature also created a certain hysteria regarding reading practices and cultural consumption. Should impressionable young readers really be reading frightful and scandalous texts like these?

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1763)
Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
…and more…

ENGL 3551 – The Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Monday and Wednesday, 11:10 - 12:25 pm
Prof. Jennifer Green-Lewis

This fast-paced and demanding course will give you a sense of the breadth and range of novels written in Britain during the nineteenth century. It will also help you develop an ear for the different sounds of these authors by examining the stylistic peculiarities that differentiate each author from the rest. Most important, it will answer your question: If you could read only five novels in your life, which five should you choose?

In addition to reading works by Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Hardy, we will look at developments in the visual arts to inform ourselves about preoccupations of the nineteenth century. All students should come to class the first day having read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or, at a bare minimum, seen the movie. The first book we’ll read will be Jane Eyre. Please note this course has a heavy reading load; if you can read one or two of the works over the summer, please do so.

ENGL 3560 – American Realism

Monday and Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:00 pm
Prof. Ormond Seavey.

By the end of the Civil War, American Literature had achieved a position as a national literature of international importance so the writers who would emerge into prominence in the following decades faced the challenge of sustaining the achievement of American literature in an era when their work could enjoy a new promise of prominence. The writers of that period are noteworthy for their diversity—Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Adams, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather. Out of their work would come a new-found confidence mixed with longstanding national anxieties. In their view, they had departed from the more secure and limited achievement of earlier American writers and launched forth into a variety of interlinked directions. Their own past claimed their attention and invited a literature of self-reflection somehow combined with modes of depiction some of them would characterize as Realism.

ENGL 3810 – Protest and Resistance in American Literature

Tuesday and Thursday, 2:20 - 3:35 pm
Prof. Liz Moser

America is a country born from protest. Yet, as much as we might claim that protest and resistance is our birthright, it is easy to miss calls from the many marginalized voices within our society. In order to explore this alternate cannon, this course will approach contemporary American literature on the subject of protest and resistance from a wide variety of minority perspectives. Together we will address literary protests along lines of racial discrimination, gender politics and non-binary sexuality, class conflict, immigration and nationality, and antiwar movements. Texts include Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Colson Whitehead’s alternative history novel The Underground Railroad, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Vietnam War spy novel The Sympathizer among others.

Required Texts:

Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale
Beatty, Paul, The White Boy Shuffle
Erdrich, Louise, The Round House
Feinberg, Leslie, Stone Butch Blues
Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Lowland
Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Sympathizer
Whitehead, Colson, The Underground Railroad
Yamashita, Karen Tei, Tropic of Orange

ENGL 3826 – Major Authors: Toni Morrison and William Faulkner

Tuesday and Thursday, 11:10 - 12:25 pm
Prof. Evelyn Schreiber

"Race, Memory, and Aesthetics"

This course links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other. Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style. We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies, trauma studies, and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.

Texts include: Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, God Help The Child.

ENGL 3830 – Vikings, Mongols, Moors: A Global Middle Ages, Yesterday and Today

Monday and Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:00 pm
Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Vikings, Harry Potter: in popular media, tales of heroism, romance, and magic set in the medieval past have enduring appeal. What are the literary origins that gave rise to such contemporary media? How do fantasies about the medieval past influence contemporary culture and global geopolitics?

This course will examine how medieval storytelling traditions shape popular media (including film and TV, visual art, spoken word poetry, political activism, and fandom communities). We will read works of medieval literature and discover how these texts inform present-day cultural issues as wide-ranging as religious conflict, ethnic identity, and the mysteries of love.

Major medieval texts include Beowulf, Vinland Sagas, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Shakespeare’s Othello.

Contemporary media in this course will include the Game of Thrones franchise and its global audience reception. We will consider how the Western medieval past is appropriated across Anglo-American, indigenous, Asian American, Jewish, and African diaspora contexts.

Assignments include a close reading, a public-facing review of a work of popular media (such as a TV series, film, or graphic novel), and a final project that integrates literary analysis and contemporary scholarship.

No previous experience with medieval literature is required. All medieval texts will be provided in modern English (or bilingual) translation.

This course fulfills the pre-1700 requirement of the English major.

ENGL 3910 – Introduction to Disability Studies

Monday and Wednesday, 11:10 - 12:25 pm
Prof. David Mitchell

This course will explore the systemic, historical disenfranchisement of disabled people in the U.S. and other global locations. Students will leave with an ability to analyze how bodily capacity, appearance, and functionality are all normative aspects of what it means to be a citizen and how the provision of public supports are leveraged against some of the most vulnerable populations in modern nation states.

ENGL 3960 – Asian American Literature: An Introduction

Tuesday and Thursday, 4:45 - 6:00 pm
Prof. Patricia Chu

Asians have been coming to America since 1849, but the writings of the immigrants and their descendents didn’t become “Asian American” until the word was coined, and students demanded courses in Asian American Studies, in 1968. In fact, there was no such racial group in 1878 when the United States Congress created a new legal category, “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” just for Chinese, and then began to pass laws that also excluded other Asians and Pacific Islanders from immigration and citizenship—setting them apart from Europeans and placing them into a middle category, neither white nor black.

Asian Americanist scholars argue that the treatment of Asian Americans in America has always been shaped by U.S. foreign policy objectives, by the Orientalist perception of Asians as unassimilable aliens, and by a suspicion of “orientals” borrowed from European colonialism and re-framed just for America. In response, Asian American writers have turned from writing only about their efforts to claim identities as fully American citizens to questioning American “exceptionalism” and to reconceiving themselves as citizens of the world. Or have they?

This course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicity and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences. We’ll discuss the political roots of the terms “Asian American” and “Asian American literature”; Chinese immigration and exclusion; Japanese American internment narratives; feminist, national, and postcolonial influences; adoption and mixed race families; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, melancholia, and loss.

Texts include: David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly or Chinglish; Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy; Deanne Borshay Liem, First Person Plural (film); Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathiser; Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You; Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

ENGL 3980W – Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures

Monday and Wednesday, 12:45-2:00 pm
Prof. Robert McRuer

English 3980: Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures: The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or bisexual or transgender people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other, complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized, however contentiously, around identity?

This film studies course will consider how questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer globalization(s). From November 7-15, we will travel to Prague, Czech Republic to attend Mezipatra: Queer Film Festival along with students in Professor Kateřina Kolářová’s class.

ENGL 4040 – Honors Seminar

Monday 9:00 - 11:30 am
Prof. Tony López

This course teaches English Honors students the basics, complexities, and pleasures of research in literary and cultural studies with a view toward writing the senior-year honors thesis. It covers everything from how to choose texts and topics to how to do archival research and make sense of the print and digital differences in the materials encountered along the way. Our ultimate goal is to perfect research practices en route to drafting a thesis chapter by the end of the term. With that in mind, the course will also include writing workshops in which we’ll exchange and comment on drafts in small groups to make as much progress on the thesis as possible by December.

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