Spring 2008 Course Descriptions

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1000-Level Courses

English 1210: Introduction to British Literature.  Jonas Cope
Section 1

English 1520: Creative Writing: Introduction to Nonfiction Prose.  Maureen Stanton
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
This is an introductory course, in which students will be reading, discussing, and writing works of creative nonfiction (personal essays, literary journalism, memoir, etc.), an exciting and provocative literary form, in which writers artfully shape “true” stories and experiences in literary works. Students will read a wide variety of samples of the form by contemporary and historical authors, noting how stylistic and technical choices shape the works and impact the reader, and establishing a lexicon for discussing the genre’s place in the contemporary literary landscape. Students will learn about the history, tradition, and evolution of various creative nonfiction forms, and through a series of exercises, practice their hand at writing creative nonfiction. Students will share exercises in class, and produce longer, more complete works for peer review and critique in the traditional workshop format.

2000-Level Courses

English 2000: Sound and Writing.  Jenny Edbauer Rice
Section 01

MWF 11:00-11:50
What you are reading right now is a technology: from the digital circuits of your computer down to the alphabetic type that renders these words meaningful. But sound is also a technology of communication. Sounds—the grain of your voice, the music playing in the background of a restaurant, the hum of electronics—they all communicate ideas, feelings, and images. Sound is a writing technology, just as the alphabet is a tool for writing.

This is a writing course. In that sense, it might be like many other writing courses you’ve taken. But this is a writing course that uses sound and audio for its chosen medium. So, in another sense, it might be unlike any other writing course you’ve taken.

Our “readings” will include audio documentaries and sound-writings constructed by various writers. Students in this course will create an audio text that draws from the theories of sound and language we read throughout the semester.

English 2000: Studies in English.  Raymond Ronci
Section 02

MWF 12:00-12:50
“The Hero Journey.” The Critical Praxis for this course is sometimes referred to as Archetypal Criticism, (based on Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious) and more commonly referred to as Myth Criticism. The basic paradigm of the heroic cycle is typically as follows: the Miraculous Birth, Childhood Initiations, the Calling, the Departure, the Descent and Trials, the Death, Resurrection and Apotheosis. The study selections change periodically but almost always include David Adams Leeming’s book, The Voyage of The Hero, an anthology of Hero Journey myths from all over the world. This is supplemented by Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth. Typically we then proceed through a close analysis of each of the following: Gilgamesh, The Theban Plays, The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Tao Te Ching. Students are often asked to apply the principles of archetypal criticism and the hero paradigm to criticizing a contemporary novel or film.

English 2000: Studies in English.  Joanna Hearne
Section 03

R 3:00-5:30; TR 9:30-10:45
“Introduction to Film Analysis.” This course introduces students to the basics of film aesthetics, including units on mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, narrative, sound, color, and genre. Balancing our focus on technical elements with broader frameworks, we will also consider various critical, theoretical, ideological, and historical approaches to film studies and to the practice of writing about film. (Cross-listed with Film Studies 2810)

English 2000: Studies in English.  Samuel Cohen
Section 04

TR 9:30-10:45
“Global History/World Fiction.” Much post-WWII fiction from around the world has been interested in one way or another in history—the past, but also the present as shaped by larger movements and forces and the narratives people construct to deal with the past. Much of this fiction has also seen history as something global, as crossing national borders and narratives. In this course we will read examples of fiction from around the world—from Japan, Kenya, Great Britain, South Africa, Germany, the U.S.—that consider past and present in a way that is both historical and global, and we will ourselves consider the way these perspectives inform and influence each other. In doing so, we will get to enjoy some interesting, powerful, entertaining stories that, while thinking about the world and history, also at the same time explore the inner life of people and of storytelling itself.

English 2000: Studies in English.  Sw. Anand Prahlad
Section 08

R 3:00-5:30
“Beginning Popular Songwriting Workshop.” This workshop will be devoted to the writing, performance, and critique of songs. The workshop will highlight the art of song lyrics, examining such issues as the differences between song lyrics and poems, approaches to composing lyrics, and relationships between lyrics and music. However, workshop members will be required to compose and perform several songs for critique. We will also cover topics such as recording songs, making demos, performing in public, copyrighting, making CDs, and getting songs onto public data banks. Readings for the workshop will include interviews with songwriters, song lyrics from a wide variety of genres, and articles about the process of songwriting. It is assumed that students who sign up for the workshop will have some proficiency with an instrument, or with some method for making a musical accompaniment to their lyrics. It is also recommended that those signing up for the workshop have already had some experience writing songs, even if they have no experience performing.

English 2000: Studies in English.  Aliki Barnstone
Section 09

TR 11:00-12:15
“American Women Poets and Re-visionary Theology.” Until the twentieth century social norms prevented women from writing, unless they had a didactic purpose or an economic need. In the nineteenth century, “woman’s sphere” was limited to the home, angelic motherhood, teaching religious values, and selflessness. Virginia Woolf wrote that if a woman wished to be a writer, she would have to “kill the angel in the house.” In this course, we will read American women poets closely and examine the ways in which they revise their religious inheritance in order establish their own selfhood, identity, spirituality, and writers’ vision. Among the poets we will read are Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Anne Sexton, Brenda Hillman, and Lucille Clifton.

English 2000: Studies in English.  Nancy West
Section 10

TR 11:00-12:15
“Writing about Photography.” Since its invention in 1839, the camera and its products have profoundly influenced the way we perceive events. What is at stake, then, when writers incorporate descriptions of photographs or use photographic metaphors in their texts? Is it a gesture toward realism, a simple attempt to make a narrative more factual? Perhaps. . . yet if Diane Arbus' famous statement that "a photograph is a secret about a secret" is true, then we are moved to enquire if verbal images of photographs are likewise coded. This speculation is supported by a wealth of historical and contemporary photographic criticism, alerting us that photographs are far more than uncomplicated representations of the real. Indeed, according to Susan Sontag, photographs have taught us a new visual code and in the process they have shaped our notions of what merits observation. They are "a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing."

In this course, we will read works from a variety of genres, including photo essays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Specific texts include Kathryn Harrison’s Exposure, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and stories by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Updike, and Italo Calvino.

English 2100: Writing About Literature.  Karen Laird
Section 1

Love in British Literature: Austen to McEwan

English 2300: Topics in American Literature.  Charles Marvin
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
“Historical Survey of American Short Fiction.” This course has been designed to provide an introduction to the development of the American story in the historical and cultural contexts from which its authors emerged. Concentrating on 19th century and early 20th century writers, it will examine the central role played by the genre in establishing models for a distinctively American literature. A course packet will accompany stories appearing in single-author collections and inexpensive anthologies to provide opportunities for extended study of major authors, with special attention to Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson. Short weekly written assignments, to be incorporated into a larger essay surveying the treatment of particular themes in the American short story, will be required, as well as three exams.

English 2300: Topics in American Literature.  Peter Monacell
Section 2

MWF 3:00-3:50
"The Country and The City in American Literature." This course will look into the distinctions drawn between these two types of spaces by American writers, as well as these writers' depictions of that in-between space, the American suburb. We'll begin with the work of poets such as Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, and proceed into novels such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Throughout the course we will investigate how American spaces shape communities and individuals, and also how these spaces themselves are the products of our geographical and cultural histories. Requirements include active class participation, weekly responses, a class presentation, two short response papers, a midterm, and a final.

English 2309: Topics in American Literature: 1890 to the Present..  Joseph Scott
Section 1

MWF 8:00-8:50
“The Alien Experience: From Expatriates to Extraterrestrials.” One of the central concerns of twentieth-century American fiction has been an attempt to describe the experience of being, or encountering, an alien, whether "alien" refers to someone who lives in a strange country or on a strange planet. The texts in this course all center on characters who are aliens, in one (or more) of the word's many senses. Texts will include Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Tomas Rivera's . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Grades will be based on class participation, weekly responses, an in-class presentation, two short response papers, and a final.

English 2520: Intermediate Nonfiction Prose.  Maureen Stanton
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
This is an intermediate creative writing workshop in literary nonfiction (personal essay, literary journalism, memoir, nature writing, lyrical essay, etc.). Students will read and discuss traditional and innovative samples of the form by established writers, practice their craft through short exercises and assignments, produce two to three complete essays for workshop response, offer thoughtful written criticism of each other's essays, and actively participate in workshop discussion. The goals are to familiarize writers with varieties of the protean form of creative nonfiction, and to hone creative writing skills. The course is structured so that exercises and assignments produce building blocks of material for the longer essays, while allowing students to practice and develop craft techniques available to creative nonfiction writers (including tools of the poet, the fiction writer, the journalist, and the essayist).

3000-Level Courses

English 3080: Sexuality and Gender Theory.  Elisa Glick
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
“Sexuality Studies: Theory, Culture and Politics.” Debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary efforts to rethink concepts of identity, desire, and the body. This course seeks to provide a theoretical and cultural context for such debates by investigating the complex and often contradictory relationship between sexuality and society. After tracing the historical emergence of the modern sexual self, we will survey contemporary theories of sexuality and sexual representations, particularly as they intersect with systems of race, class, and gender. Topics include sexuality and desire under capitalism; feminist theories of sexuality and the feminist "sex wars;" queer theory; reproductive politics; same-sex marriage; cultural and biomedical representations of HIV/AIDS; global politics of sex work; gender performance; the social construction of the body. Readings and other course materials range from theoretical and historical essays to literary texts, films, and popular culture.

English 3100: Introduction to Literary Study.  Raymond Ronci
Section 1

MWF 10:00-10:50
This course covers roughly one hundred years of literary theory beginning with New Criticism and covering the major critical praxes of the 20th century such as formalism, structuralism, reader-oriented theories, Marxist theories, feminist theories, Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism and Postmodernism. We will study and discuss how these various practices influence the reading of a text; we will also examine the nature of what we mean by a “text.” From a Postmodern point of view, everything is a text – a building, a hat, a hairstyle, a shopping center, an ad, etc – and can be read, interpreted and commented upon. We will apply literary critical strategies to the various texts of contemporary American culture. Teaching methodology – informal lectures and discussion. Critical writing assignments.

English 3200: Survey of British Literature, Beginning to 1784.  Noah Heringman
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
In this survey of the first 1,000 years of British literature, we will study the works produced during three distinct phases in the evolution of English. We'll begin the semester with a few short works in Old English, followed by a somewhat longer unit on the Middle English of Chaucer and others. The majority of the course is devoted to works in early modern and modern English, but there will be a translation exam to ensure that students have attained a basic grasp of the earlier forms of the language. Readings after Chaucer will include a play by Middleton and Dekker; nonfiction prose by Margery Kempe and Samuel Pepys; lyric poetry by John Donne and Thomas Gray, and portions of Milton's Paradise Lost; prose fiction by Aphra Behn; and further works by notable writers in these and in other genres, including verse satire and the periodical essay. We will use two principles to organize this material: attention to genre and to historical context. Each student will research a particular genre and a particular historical moment to discover how individual works are shaped by changes in the literary marketplace and the cultural landscape. Group presentations and individual research papers will serve as venues for this work.

English 3210: Survey of British Literature, Romanticism to the Present.  Elizabeth Chang
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This course will survey major works in British literature produced between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 21st. Our central concern will be to think about the literature we read in a national and global context, and, more particularly, in the context of the rise and fall of the British empire. We will read a variety of genres—especially poetry, essays, and novels—as we pursue this goal. Authors considered will include Blake, Earle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Dickens, Darwin, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Eliot, Woolf, and Rushdie.
This course is designated writing intensive; there will be frequent short papers as well as two longer papers involving significant revision.

English 3300: Survey of American Literature, Beginning to 1865.  Tom Quirk
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
This course is a survey of American literature from its beginnings to 1865. A survey course, by definition, attempts to trace the general contours of the literary landscape over a given period of time, to chart the changes in attitudes, presuppositions, and manner of expression in diverse literary texts, and to understand the historical and cultural contexts in which those texts were produced. The readings, then, will be chosen on the basis of how they reveal and clarify and/or challenge and critique the prevailing ethos of the time. There will be reading quizzes and two exams. The texts: The Bedford Anthology of American Literature: Volume One; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

English 3400: Survey of African American Litertaure, Beginning to 1900.  April Langley
Section 1

MWF 8:00-8:50
This writing intensive course introduces students to the major developments, themes, and works of African American literature-from its eighteenth-century beginnings to 1900, the post-Civil War and Reconstruction Era. The course has three objectives: a) to explore African American literature's continuing response to the call of African, American, and Afro-British American oral and written traditions-in the form of folktales, songs, sermons, prose, and poetry; b) to examine the social, political, and cultural influences of early African-American literature; and, c) to analyze the implications of this literature through class discussions and the following assignments: meaningful reading responses, one short essay, one oral presentation, one group presentation, and one final essay. (Writing Intensive) (Same as Black Studies 3400, 1)

4000- / 7000-Level Courses

English 4004/7004: Topics in English-Social Science.  Marly Swick
Section 2

M 2:00-4:30
This is a new course designed for students who have already taken English 4510/7510, the Advanced Fiction Writing course and have shown exceptional interest and ability. It is an opportunity for those students thinking about applying to graduate programs in Creative Writing (fiction) to have a final semester to hone their craft before having to send out writing samples to these highly competitive programs. We will also read and discuss approximately 8-10 novels, novellas, and short story collections with a focus on narrative form.

English 4510 is a pre-requisite. The course is by instructor permission only. Interested students should submit a writing sample (1 or 2 stories) to me as soon as possible. Please leave writing samples in one of the black holders next to my office door (Tate 222) and include your email address so that I can get back to you.

English 4004/7004; Ling/Anthro 4870: Linguistic Field Methods.  Vicki Carstens
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
“Linguistic Field Methods.” In this course, students will learn through first-hand experience how to document and analyze a wholly unfamiliar language. We will explore the language through weekly elicitation sessions with a native speaker, both as a class and in smaller groups. By the end of the semester we will have assembled a database of vocabulary, a document recording all our investigations, and individually authored short papers on the sound system, morphology, and grammar of the language. (Also listed as Linguistics 4870 and Anthropology 4870: Linguistic Field Methods)

English 4040/7040: Studies in Writing.  Donna Strickland
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
“Writing Web 2.0.” Web 2.0 or the “Read/Write Web” refers to the many social networking and collaborative applications that characterize the second-generation World Wide Web. In this course, we’ll experiment with a variety of applications, including blogs, wikis, real simple syndication, and social networking sites. We’ll also read some practical and theoretical explorations of Web 2.0 and social networks. The major project for the course will be student-designed and will make use of at least one Web 2.0 application. Because the Read/Write web also has many educational applications, this course will be especially useful for both writers and future teachers.

English 4060/7060: Studies in Critical Theory.  Ellie Ragland
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
4060 will be a course on considering the role of interpretation in reading literature. The primary texts will be Desire and the Interpretation of Desire (S. VI by Jacques Lacan). We will also be reading Shakespeare's Hamlet which this Seminar is about. We will look at other texts on hermeneutics, or the "science" of interpretation.

English 4100/7100: Genres.  John Evelev
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
“The American Historical Novel.” The genre of the historical novel became the most popular mode of the novel in the romantic era, with the work of Walter Scott and the first prominent American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, owed his popularity to the genre. The historical novel has remained a popular genre, but also a genre that many of the most important U.S. authors have taken up and used to write some of their most compelling work. For the historical novel is not merely ‘stories about the past,’ but also an attempt to imagine how our present—with its virtues and problems—was forged out of the past. The historical novel has persistently dealt with important issues like our Puritan and revolutionary heritage, the consequences of our genocidal treatment of Native Americans, the shadow of slavery and the ramification of past political injustices. This course will be balanced between nineteenth and twentieth century American historical novels, looking for continuing themes and changes in the uses of the genre over time. In addition to the novels, we will also read literary theory and criticism about the historical novel genre. Students will be asked to present on aspects of historical information relevant to a novel, post regular informal comments to a web-based discussion site, and write two short papers with a final revision paper.

Possible readings might include: Cooper, The Pioneers or The Last of the Mohicans; Child, Hobomok; Brown, Clotel; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Israel Potter; Doctorow, Ragtime; Boyle, World’s End; Morrison, Beloved; Roth, The Plot Against America.

English 4109/7109: Genres, 1890 to Present.  Speer Morgan
Section 1

W 3:00-5:30
“The Contemporary Novel.” In this course, we will read a variety of contemporary novels beginning with those published in the 1950s. We will consider the influential The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Czech author Milan Kundera, Palace Walk, a post-colonial Egyptian novel by Naghib Mahfouz, as well as works by Russian/American Vladimir Nabokov, the English Pat Barker and South African writer J.M. Coetzee.

North American authors will include Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller and Philip Roth. The class will focus on such varied themes as post-colonialism, family relationships, and crime and criminality. Because the instructors are both writers, we will also discuss the craft of fiction, including such matters as structure and novelistic design, character, plot, point-of-view, and style.

The teaching method will include collaborations between the team teachers and students in presenting and managing discussion of novels. We hope that these collaborations will identify and dramatize essential elements of the novels. Students are encouraged to develop their own broader interests regarding such matters as genre, the history of the novel, and the larger body of work of the novelists under consideration.

English 4109/7109: Genres, 1890 to Present.  Joanna Hearne
Section 2

TR 12:30-1:45; R E6:00-8:30
“The Western.” This course offers a historical overview and critical exploration of the Western film genre. We will begin by discussing the literary, political and industry contexts for the emergence of the genre as we view the early silent Westerns of Edwin S. Porter, James Young Deer, Cecil B. DeMille, Thomas Ince, D.W Griffith, Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Later units will focus on the radio and B-film figure of the singing cowboy (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers) and major works by John Ford, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood, as well as examples of the genre’s international influence. We will also view Native American documentary and feature films that respond to the Western, including Imagining Indians (Masayesva 1992), Smoke Signals (Eyre 1998) and The Return of Navajo Boy (Spitz 2001). Readings in criticism and theory will address the politics of representation, approaches to the study of genre and historical issues in industry production, distribution and exhibition. Assignments consist of weekly response papers, a presentation, and a research proposal and final seminar paper. (Cross-listed with Film Studies 4005/7005)

English 4140/7140: Modern Literature.  Timothy Materer
Section 1

MW 2:00-3:15
A survey of literature in England, America and Ireland from 1890 to 1940, including such authors as Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and Samuel Beckett. The course will survey the critical theories that seem to offer the most promising approaches to the interpretation of modern and post-modern literature. An emphasis will be put on developments in the visual arts that parallel those in literature.

English 4166/7166: Major Authors: Beginning to 1603.  Anne Myers
Section 1

TR 8:00-9:15
In this course, we will study several plays drawn mainly from the later part of Shakespeare’s career. These are plays you will never forget: they are by turns beautiful, brilliant, violent, tender, and disturbing. Study of each play will include literary analysis, cultural and historical context, and performance history. Plays are likely to include Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale.

This course is writing intensive and will involve the preparation and revision of a substantial term paper (12-15 pages) incorporating secondary sources and independent research. Quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam may also be required.

Graduate students will be expected to propose and defend a topic for their seminar papers, prepare a critical history of the works they intend to study, and write a substantial seminar paper (18-20 pages) combining independent analysis and consideration of relevant secondary materials.

English 4167/7167: Major Authors, 1603-1789.  David Read
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
“John Milton.” In this course we will survey the writing and thought of one of most remarkable, idiosyncratic, and influential figures in English literature, an author who transformed into great art the political and religious crises that wracked England in the mid-seventeenth century. We will read Milton's major works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd, and Samson Agonistes—but also study a range of his prose and minor poetry. While our attention will primarily be on the texts themselves, we will also try to reach a better understanding of the very complex period of English history in which Milton lived and wrote. Assignments will include two papers (the second with a research component), a midterm, and a final. The required text will be The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (Modern Library, 2007).

English 4168/7168: Major Authors: 1789-1890.  Tom Quirk
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This course is devoted to Mark Twain as a major American author. The readings will include much of his early humorous sketches as well as some of the late philosophical pieces, but the emphasis will be on Twain's major books. There will be reading quizzes, two exams, and group presentations. The texts: Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches; Roughing It; Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings; Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi; Huckleberry Finn; Pudd'nhead Wilson (Library of America) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

English 4170/7170: Comparative Approaches to Literature.  Christopher N. Okonkwo
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
“The Colonial Encounter in African Fiction.” The derisive notion that Africa is “the Dark Continent” has yet to depart Western consciousness even as we enter the twenty-first century. Years after officially regaining their independence from colonial rule, African societies, debilitated and scarred by the interlocking historical moments of slavery, imperialism, colonization, and neo-colonization, continue to search for ways to survive, balance, and transcend their interesting meeting with Europe.

This class is structured around that encounter. It examines the variegated yet related perspectives that modern African novelists bring to their peoples’ shared experience with the colonial project. Using postcolonial theory, documentaries, historical data, and other critical scholarship as context, we will discuss rigorously representative, twentieth-century works by writers from different parts of Africa. We will explore how the authors, both individually and collectively, address such issues as African peoples’ humanity; “Africa” in Western imagination; colonial destabilization of indigenous cultures; the colonizer’s religion, education, and language; land and economic exploitation; identity, gender, and class politics; “race” and interracial relationship; violence and decolonization, and the post-colonial condition.

English 4210/7210: Medieval Literature.  Michelle Karnes
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
“The Age of Chaucer.” This course provides a survey of late-medieval literature. We will spend a good deal of the semester on Chaucer, but since the period in which Chaucer wrote was a good and productive time for English literature in general, we’ll also read works by Julian of Norwich (the first known female author of a Middle English text), Margery Kempe, the Pearl-poet, and William Langland. Most of the readings will be in Middle English. There will be two papers, a mid-term, and a final.

English 4240/7240: Restoration & 18th Century Literature.  Anne Myers
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
This course will involve close study of a few strange and brilliant works from the period 1660-1784. Texts are likely to include Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Etheredge’s Man of Mode, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s Roxana, Burney’s Evelina, and essays by Johnson. In addition to close reading, we will discuss important cultural and historical contexts for each work.

Discussion and presentations will be required, in addition to quizzes, a midterm, a final, and a term paper of 8-12 pages.

English 4260/7260: 20th Century British Literature.  Karen Piper
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
“Postcolonial London.” This course focuses on contemporary black British literature, with the understanding that “black” in Britain has been used differently that in the United States. First, we will look at what most consider the watershed event in British ethnic history: the arrival of the Empire Windrush to London in 1948, which brought the first of many Afro-Caribbean immigrants from the colonies. This event was preceded by a law giving duel citizenship to people from the colonies, which led to waves of immigration from India, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will look at the problems that followed: violence against minorities, racist housing and immigration laws, and eventually, full blown race rioting. But we will also look at the long history of black people in London, demonstrating that the arrival of the Empire Windrush was merely a new chapter in interactions between people of various ethnicities in London—and not really the watershed event it’s seen as being. The books that we will read for this course may include: Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and Diana Evans’ 26a.

English 4310/7310: 19th Century American Literature.  Charles Marvin
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
“Antebellum American Narratives.” This course has been designed to provide opportunities for an intensive study of texts written during the first significant “wave” of American literary production in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Covering the years 1845-1860, with attention to the texts as they appeared or were intended to appear at the time they were published, it will emphasize student research into the historical and cultural circumstances from which these texts emerged and to which they refer. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, as well as the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, are among the texts being considered for study. Major literary texts of the period which have become more obscure will also figure in our study, among which Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall are most likely to be included. Several short research assignments and the writing of two 10-12 page papers will be required.

English 4310/7310: Poetry of the American Renaissance.  Alexandra Socarides
Section 2

MWF 11:00-11:50
“Poetry of the American Renaissance .” This course will explore the poetry written in American between 1820 and 1870. This period – later called the “American Renaissance” – gave rise to some of America’s most famous poets and to others who were well known at the time but have been all but forgotten today. We will ask what it means to call this period a “Renaissance,” will try to understand the place of poetry in a period that is far better known for its prose, and will attempt to make sense of the different schools of poetry (fireside poetry, transcendentalist poetry, women’s poetry, and abolitionist poetry) that emerged.

Poets will include: Bryant, Sigourney, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, J. Lowell, Poe, S. Whitman, Oakes-Smith, Osgood, Davidson, Howe, M. Lowell, Whitman, Melville, Harper, Dickinson, and Piatt. We will also read several nineteenth-century essays about poetry and the role of the poet, including those by Bryant, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman. Weekly readings will be supplemented by critical essays by, among others, Matthiessen, Kane, Bennett, Pearce, Richards, and Loeffelholz. There will be several short in-class and at-home writing assignments, a midterm paper, and a final paper.

English 4400/7400: Studies in Anglophone Africana Literature.  Christopher N. Okonkwo
Section 1

TR 11:00-12:15
“Mythic Black Fiction." Leasing its caption “Mythic Black Fiction” from Jane Campbell’s book of the same title, this course will meditate on John B. Vickery’s observation that “The history of literature everywhere attests to the closeness and complexity of the relation between literature and myth,” an affinity evident in “their shared traits of narrative, character, image and theme.” Specifically, we will engage with the mythmaking imperative in African American literature and culture. Antebellum and postbellum African American literature discloses earlier black writers’ mythic consciousness, an awareness subsisted partly on the conventions of romance. It is twentieth-century African American authors, however, who have taken their inventions and reinventions of the (im)probable to new heights.

So why are black writers drawn so strongly to myth? Are they simply interested in its thematic, aesthetic, and affective value? Not so, says Jacqueline de Weever: “The experiences of black people in the New World, into which they have been forcibly thrust against their will, cannot be [fully] told or treated in realistic or naturalistic traditions in which much of American literature has been cast—the pain of the results of three centuries of oppression is too great to be faced and confronted in a realistic mode. Such an experience demands another mode for which mythic narrative is more appropriate.” Thus, when black writers invert history, disintegrate time, re-live an aborted slave insurrection, supplicate a trickster god, pit an infernal, Eugenicist spirit against an ageless shape-shifter/Earth mother, hyperbolize their hero, borrow the schematic of Dante’s hell, or star an unnaveled pilot/Pilate and some flying Africans—all that helps them tell a political good story, affirm African diaspora ways of knowing, confront their oppression and, most important, imagine a more livable life and future in a still hostile nation.

Our primary texts will include: Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder; David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident; William Melvin Kelly, A Different Drummer; Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow; and Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills.

English 4510/7510: Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction.  Trudy Lewis
Section 2

M 2:00-4:30
“ Fantastic Fictions.” The main objective of the advanced fiction course is to familiarize students with the production and critique of narrative form. Our focus this semester will be fantasy in its various guises: fable, allegory, parable, magical realism, and science fiction. By investigating this particular strain of our literary heritage, I hope to: a) give us a common canon for discussion and imitation; b) discourage students from falling back on the consolations of realism or representation in order to justify their narrative choices; and c) emphasize the imaginative and formal elements of the craft of fiction. However, the generic emphasis should not prevent students from producing work in the realist tradition. We will move from a series of exercises based on the readings to a full-length story on a topic of the student's choice, and from small-group workshops to a more traditional full class critique. Students will also produce a number of collaborative scenes and stories, in order to balance peer review with co-creation. Texts will include: The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, Fledgling by Octavia Butler, R. Crumb’s Kafka, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link and Shelley Jackson, and After the Quake by Haruki Murakami.

English 4510/7510: Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction.  Marly Swick
Section 3

W 2:00-4:30
This is an Advanced Fiction Writing workshop in which we will read two complete stories from each student plus a revision. We will also read and discuss stories from a new anthology entitled Bestial Noise: Tin House Fiction Reader, a literary novel (to be determined), and occasional hand-outs. In addition to your stories, you will write a few brief exercises, written critiques of workshop stories, and short response papers based on the reading. Since this is the advanced workshop, I will assume you've learned the basics of craft in the lower level workshops and will expect to see more ambition, complexity, and polish in your stories than I would in the lower level fiction writing classes.

English 4520/7520: Creative Writing: Advanced Nonfiction Prose.  Bettina Drew
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This course looks at non-fiction readings that convey stories, thoughts, feelings, and history, but it is primarily a writing workshop in which students are encouraged to choose and develop their own projects. Revision and the creation of a respectful atmosphere in which we all see ourselves as writers are essential aspects of the course. Attendance is crucial.

English 4530/7530: Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry.  Aliki Barnstone
Section 1

R 2:00-4:30
The theme of this course is “Questions of Identity or the Fusionist’s Delight.” Here are some (but not all) of the questions I’d like us to address: How do we internalize cultural influence? How do we define ourselves? How do we strain against definition? What are the ways in which artistic voice develops within a group? Against a group? How are we engaging in translation when we write? How do we translate the myriad of influences that add up to culture? I hope we’ll explore identity as it pertains to autobiography, ancestry, history, ethnicity, politics, the foreign and the domestic, all the media we consume (books, TV, film, music, visual art), and language itself. (Let me add as codicil that our theme is intended to enhance a belleslettristic approach to poetry, not to divert us from it.) Most of all, I want you to become more aware of your influences, where you came from, and what compels you to sing in poetry. I believe that the consciousness of how your identity is constructed leads a deepening of vision, more passion, and greater large-mindedness—at least that’s what I hope for. I’d like us to develop a vocabulary from these readings. In our discussions, I ask that you be prepared to refer the books we’ve read as we workshop poems.

English 4600/7600: Structure of American English.  Tivoli Majors
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
Speakers of English already know the grammar of their language intimately. This knowledge, however, is buried in our subconscious minds. This course is designed as an introduction to the methods linguists use to uncover these subconscious rules of language so that we may better understand the systematic nature of language in general and English in particular. Although the course will primarily examine the structure of English sentences, we will also take a look at the sounds of English as well as the internal structure of English words. The overarching goal of the course is to promote greater linguistic awareness and to provide students with the tools needed to think about language from new perspectives.

English 4600/7600: Structure of American English.  Tivoli Majors
Section 2

TR 9:30-10:45
Speakers of English already know the grammar of their language intimately. This knowledge, however, is buried in our subconscious minds. This course is designed as an introduction to the methods linguists use to uncover these subconscious rules of language so that we may better understand the systematic nature of language in general and English in particular. Although the course will primarily examine the structure of English sentences, we will also take a look at the sounds of English as well as the internal structure of English words. The overarching goal of the course is to promote greater linguistic awareness and to provide students with the tools needed to think about language from new perspectives.

English 4610/7610: History of the English Language.  Johanna Kramer
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
This course traces the history of the English language from its prehistoric but reconstructable roots in Indo-European through its earliest written records into the present and its spread across the globe. As we investigate the many fundamental changes that English has undergone in terms of morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, graphics, and vocabulary, we will also explore the social, cultural, and historical forces that affect language transformation. As by nature the course has a strong linguistic component, you can expect to become familiar with some basic methodology and terminology of historical linguistics, and we will spend a good deal of time talking about grammar. The course emphasizes the pre-modern history of English. In addition to regular readings, homework assignments, and active class participation, requirements include two exams and two shorter essays.

English 4620/7620: Regional and Social Dialects of American English.  Matthew Gordon
Section 1

MWF 9:00-9:50
This course examines how the English language varies in the U.S. along regional and social lines. We will study differences in pronunciation, word choice, and grammar. You will learn how American dialects differ and also how linguists investigate these differences. Special attention is also given to the status of dialects in U.S. society as we consider the political and educational implications of linguistic variation. In addition to exams and regular homework assignments, students will conduct research projects involving the collection and analysis of linguistic data. Prerequisite: Engl/Ling 4600, 4610, or equivalent.

English 4630/7630: Phonology.  Tivoli Majors
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
Phonology is the study of how sounds pattern in language. The course will begin with an overview of phonetics where we will look at how human sounds are actually produced and transcribed into written form. We will look at how sounds pattern differently in different languages; for instance, how are the sounds /l/ and /r/ different in English and Japanese? We will also look briefly at syllable structures (why can blork be an English word but zbokl can’t?), metrical structure (iambic pentameter, anyone?), and questions of tone and intonation. Time permitting, we may also look at different approaches to phonological theory – linear, non-linear, and constraint-based.

English 4700/7700: Special Themes in Folklore.  Sw. Anand Prahlad
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
“Black Style in African American Folk Culture, From Congo Square to Hip Hop.” This course will survey and explore the continuities and innovations in modes of performance in African American folk culture. This exploration will consider the dynamics between forces of tradition and change. Beginning with styles of cultural performances during the slavery period, we will focus on such specific events as; rituals in Congo Square, hush harbors, and churches; festivals such as Pinkster’s Day and Mardi Gras; pimp subculture; shucking and jiving; spoken word and poetry readings; fashions such as zoot suits, Afros, and camouflage pants; and dress and posturing in performances of musical genres such as blues, jazz, funk, fraternity stepping, and hip hop. The central issues of focus will be the aesthetics and other elements of style and performance, and how these can be read within the specific historical and social contexts in which they occur. For example, some of the costuming of performers of Funk mirror those of participants in festivals such as New Orleans Mardi Gras or Brazilian or Caribbean Carnival. But how do differences in social context influence the meanings of these similar elements of performance? The course will include a survey of images from video, film, photography, and advertisements as well as readings from folklore texts. The requirements for the course will include two research papers.

English 4940: Internship in English.  
Section 1

Arranged
Students work in an agency or institution using their English-related skills for one to three credit hours. Prerequisite: junior standing and departmental consent.

English 4950/7950: Internship in Publishing.  Speer Morgan
Section 1

T 2:30-5:00
The internship at The Missouri Review is open by consent only to undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines and is especially recommended for students in English who anticipate careers in creative writing or publishing. Interns should have a solid background in literature, be strong readers and self-motivated students. Interns at TMR attend weekly staff meetings, assist in screening manuscript submissions and work on a variety of projects in areas such as marketing, manuscript editing, research and website maintenance. There is also a classroom component, with brief reading and writing assignments. Summer interns must be available to work in the TMR office three hours a week, in addition to Tuesday class meetings (2:30-5:00 p.m.)

English 4950/7950: Internship in Publishing.  
Section 2

Arranged
This course offers undergraduate students as well as graduate students the opportunity to gain practical experience by working at either the University of Missouri Press or at one of these journals: Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Missouri Folklore Society Journal, The Missouri Review, or Oral Tradition. Graduate students receive graduate credit for the course only by taking it for two consecutive semesters. Meeting time and place arranged.

English 4955: Independent Research in English.  
Section 1

Arranged
Development of a carefully considered independent research project under close supervision of a faculty member. Open to undergraduate students only.

English 4960: Special Readings in English.  
Section 1

Arranged
Individual work with conferences adjusted to the needs of the student. Prerequisites: 300-level course in area of proposed work and written consent of the instructor. Restricted to English majors in their final semester.

English 4970, Capstone: History in Contemporary Fiction.  Samuel Cohen
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
“History in Contemporary Fiction.” In this course we will be reading contemporary fiction and thinking about its relation to history. We will examine the problems and possibilities of historical representation in contemporary fiction and historical criticism of contemporary fiction, and in doing so will encounter contemporary arguments about the nature of history and of historical understanding, arguments that that themselves are informed by contemporary ideas about the nature of language, knowledge, and reality. Students will write a substantial research essay; the essays will be produced in stages, with class and conference time spent on the process of planning, researching, and writing.

English 4970: Capstone.  Elizabeth Chang
Section 2

TR 9:30-10:45
“The Gothic.” As an ever-expanding genre, the Gothic is now held to encompass everything from the fiction of Ann Radcliffe to the films of David Lynch. This seminar will look closely at some key examples of the genre in order to give you an idea of the range and flexibility of the Gothic as a concept for reading race, gender, and nationality, among other possibilities. At the same time, you will also be responsible for planning, researching and writing a substantial project focusing on a particular iteration of the Gothic genre. Works considered will include: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker, Dracula, and Octavia Butler, Fledgling, as well as shorter works by Byron, Poe, James, O’Connor, and Oates.

English 4970: Capstone.  Noah Heringman
Section 4

TR 11:00-12:15
"Literature and Science": This capstone invites graduating English majors to think about literature from the outside, from the perspective often held to be its opposite. How much should non-scientists know about science? This course introduces basic issues of history and philosophy of science in the context of literary culture. The course begins by tracing the evolution of natural history, from its origins in literary and cultural practice, into a set of modern scientific disciplines. We will consider such works as Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth and Darwin's The Origin of Species in light of both scientific and aesthetic categories, while also considering the interaction of scientific knowledge and literary form in such novels and poems such as The Botanic Garden (by Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. The course concludes by looking briefly at the postmodern fascination with cybernetics, the emerging field of science studies, and a contemporary scinece fiction novel, probably Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. The major goal of the course is to understand the origin of modern disciplinary boundaries and the distinctions among different kinds of knowledge.

English 4970: Capstone.  William Kerwin
Section 5

TR 8:00-9:15
“Contemporary Irish Fiction.” In this course, you will be exploring Irish fiction of the past several decades. We as a class will read works by eight authors, and you individually will become something of an expert in one contemporary Irish writer. The fiction of this period is a bit of an un-mapped land, even for specialists in Irish culture: Ireland has a well-recognized and well-charted literary heritage, including the trail-blazing short stories and novels of James Joyce, but the fiction of the past quarter century moves in very different directions.

As we read widely in this body of fiction and in the culture that produced it, we will make our own set of “maps” of this terrain. This rather unbounded agenda is intended as a shift from your previous coursework. The university catalogue’s course description for the capstone reads: “This course focuses on a major project and the processes of selection, research, and writing leading to its completion.” You might interpret those words to mean that the course is intended as something of a culmination, as the “final stone” in the structure of your college education. But I also regard the course as something of a first step; like the “commencement” awaiting you in May. What we are beginning here is a process of reading and writing in which you receive loosely framed assignments and then create your own agenda. Your success in this course depends upon your willingness to take charge of making meaning.

The course emphasizes student presentations as part of a research-based approach: each student will give three short presentations, and a final longer presentation in conjunction with a final research project on an author of his or her choosing.

Texts including: The Inland Ice: And Other Stories by Dhuibhne; Fishing the Sloe-Black River: Stories by McCann; Wild Decembers by O’Brien; Amongst Women by McGahern; Shawdows on Our Skin by Johnston; Ireland: Selected Stories by Trevor; The Heather Blazing by Toibin; and The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Doyle.

English 4970: Modern Rhetorical Theories.  Jenny Edbauer Rice
Section 3

M 2:00-3:25
"In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action."
--Lloyd Bitzer

If we translate the above definition into more user-friendly terms, we might say that reality is constructed through the ways we talk. Rhetoric reflects ways of talking about the world: what things are considered true, what is considered socially and politically possible, and where the boundaries of truth lie.

This course asks a very simple question: How does rhetoric create reality? We will answer this question by examining some of the most important texts in rhetorical theory. If you are looking toward a career in law, teaching, advertisement, writing, business—or if you look forward to living a “life of the mind”—this course is a must. Don’t leave school without studying the oldest subject of all: Rhetoric. Learn what thinkers have said about argument, philosophy, and thought itself.

Readings include texts from Classic rhetoric (Aristotle, Plato, Gorgias, Cicero), Renaissance and Enlightenment rhetoric (Ramus, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Vico), and post/modern rhetoric (Bakhtin, Burke, Foucault, Derrida, Fish).

English 4995: Honors Senior Essay.  John Evelev
Section 1

Arranged
This course is the second half of the English department's honors sequence and is taken after completion of English 4996, the Honors Seminar in English. The Honors Senior Essay is an independent study project arranged with a faculty mentor. Contact the Director of Undergraduate Studies for registration consent.

English 4996: Honors Seminar in English.  David Read
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
This course is the first part of the two-semester Honors sequence in the English Department, and is intended to lead into the second part, the writing of the Honors senior thesis. The course will include an inquiry into research and writing techniques within the discipline (working with primary and secondary sources, using the library and its reference materials efficiently, doing historical and interdisciplinary research, applying theory appropriately in interpretive writing, etc.); an investigation of major critical, theoretical, and practical questions in the field of English studies; and a workshop-oriented unit in which each student will prepare a longer research paper. Our reading for the workshop unit will center on Nabokov's Pale Fire but will also include a range of other texts to which Nabokov alludes in the novel. The intent here is to establish a network of literary relationships which we will be able to investigate (and write about) in many different ways during the last part of the course. Assignments will include a 10-12 page research paper, an oral presentation on the research project, and several short exercises. The texts will include Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles;T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed.; Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire and Pnin; Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man; William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens; and occasional handouts.

8000-Level Courses

English 8040: Seminar in Rhetoric and Composition.  Rebecca Dingo
Section 1

TR 1:30-2:45
“Rhetoric and Transnationalism.” “Transnationalism is clearly in the air” (Guarnizo & Smith). In their essay, “The Locations of Transnationalism” Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith aptly state: “transnationalism is clearly in the air.” And they are right. The term “transnational” has become a common buzzword—an all encompassing term that describes post-coloniality, globalization, terrorism, immigration, the far reaches of the internet, changes to the nation-state, the availability of “exotic” products, and the general global-cultural changes that have occurred in the last twenty years or so. But transnationalism is not a fleeting concept or happening. In the last ten years disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences have recognized that increasing globalization and the rise of transnationalism has impacted people, places, and texts. Indeed, six years ago, the PMLA offered a special issue on “Globalizing Literary Studies” and then followed in May 2006 with a discussion about how transnationalism is changing the field of English Studies. Transnationalism, while defined in a number of ways, generally refers to the ways in which globalization has influenced the movement of people and the production texts, culture, and knowledge across borders. These movements have had uneven material consequences throughout different regions of the world. Given the pervasive effects of transnationalism, English-Studies scholars generally and rhetorical scholars specifically have a vested interest in studying how transnationalism affects how we write, read, and are persuaded across the borders of the nation-state.

This seminar will take up the concept of transnationalism as a relevant focus to the field of rhetorical studies. The purpose of the course is two fold: to introduce transnationalism as a material, social, political, and cultural reality that unevenly impacts people across the globe and to consider its significance for rhetorical studies. Because transnationalism is a relatively new area for rhetorical scholars (and for many scholars for that matter), although not a new cultural or material phenomenon, we will read and discuss the recent work of rhetorical scholars as they dialogue with interdisciplinary work on transnationalism in the fields of literature, anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, and women’s studies. We will also explore how to examine texts, broadly defined, rhetorically and transnationally. Thus, in addition to reading academic works on globalization and transnationalism, we will also examine cinematic and literary examples that usefully address globalization and transnationalism. Ultimately, this course encourages grad students to bring a transnational and rhetorical lens to their own scholarly work.

Please note: No prior knowledge of rhetoric and composition or globalization/transnationalism is necessary to take this class. This course is appropriate for graduate students in the literary fields, rhetoric and composition, and/or folklore studies but the course might be especially interesting for students in diasporas studies, post-colonial studies, 20th-century literatures, and rhetoric and composition. I will encourage grad students to develop research projects that will enhance their own scholarly focus while bringing a transnational rhetorical lens to their studies.

Readings may include selections from:

• Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
• Benjamin, Bret. Invested Interests: Culture, Capital, and the World Bank
• Cooper, Frederick, Laura Chrisman, Ania Loomb, eds, et als. Post Colonial Studies and Beyond.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire.
• Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol. Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation.
• Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms.
• Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices.
• Lunsford, Andrea A. and Lahoucine Ouzgane, eds. Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies.
• Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
• Olson, Gary A. and Lynn Worsham, eds. Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial.
• Remote Sensing. Videocassette. Dir. Ursula Beimann.
• Schell, Eileen. "Gender, Rhetorics, and Globalization: Rethinking the Spaces and Locations of Women's Rhetorics in Our Field." Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Ed. Kate and Joy Ritchie Ronald.
• Smith, Zadie. White Teeth.
• Scott, J. Blake. "Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Response to Bioterrorism." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92.2 (2006): 115-43.
• Spurr, David The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration.
• Wilson, Rob and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global/local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary.

English 8060 Seminar in Crit and Theory: "Warhol" (Spring 08).  Elisa Glick
Section 1

R 3:00-5:30
“Warhol.” In the last year of his life, Andy Warhol created a series of self-portraits that use the jigsaw-like pattern of army camouflage to abstract and disguise his own image, offering an ironic and haunting comment on his reputation as an enigmatic disappearing act. This enduring image of Warhol as an icon of nothingness--his puzzling "blankness" or machine-like impersonality--will serve as our point of departure this semester. Are Warhol's strategies of self-effacement an extended meditation on the complexities of self-revelation? A critique of humanist notions of identity? We will take up such questions by investigating a wide range of the artist's multi-media work, including writings, films, photographs, performance art, collections, sculpture, commercial art, and time capsules. Focusing upon his key motifs of profit, sex, death and fame, this seminar will contextualize Warhol's aesthetic choices and social commitments within the larger preoccupations and problems of (post)modern cultural production. For example, how can the avant-garde integrate art and everyday life in the standardized world of mass culture? Is the autonomy of art necessary to guarantee its utopian potential? Topics will include: the cultural milieu of the Factory, nostalgia, celebrity, mechanical reproduction, art and commodity culture, dandyism, authenticity, beauty, pleasure, camp and queer aesthetics, temporality, boredom, and repetition.

English 8060: Seminar in Criticism and Theory.  Karen Piper
Section 2

R 3:00-5:30
“Postcolonial Theory.” This course focuses on “empire,” looking at the history of empire from its expansion in the nineteenth century to its permutations in the twenty-first century. First, we will discuss the history of European colonization and its impact on Africa by reading Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Then, we will then look at the kinds of discourse used to justify colonization, as explained in David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire and Edward Said’s Orientalism. After reviewing the history of empire and colonial discourse theory, we will then move on to discuss postcolonialism, both as a response to colonization and as an academic field and theoretical approach. For this section, we will read Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction and selections from Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. We will become familiar with some of the field’s main terms: decolonization, neocolonialism, hybridity, the black Atlantic, double consciousness, and globalization. Finally, we will talk about contemporary forms of “empire,” discussing Arundhati Roy’s The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. This course is useful for anyone interested in becoming more fluent about issues of race/ethnicity, globalization, and the history of imperialism and resistance to empire.

English 8070: History of Criticism and Theory.  Ellie Ragland
Section 1

T E7:00-9:30
8070 is a course on the History of literary criticism from the past to the present. We will begin with Plato and read forward. The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory will be our text of reference.

English 8090: Master Thesis Research.  
Section 1

Arranged
Leads to preparation of thesis. Graded on S/U basis only. Make sure that you enroll under the section designated to your advisor.

English 8095: Problems.  
Section 1

Arranged
Individual work not leading to preparation of dissertation. Departmental approval required.

English 8200: Studies in Old English Literature.  Johanna Kramer
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
“The Exeter Book.” In this course, we will study the contents of the Exeter Book, one of the four main manuscripts containing the majority of Old English poetry. The Exeter Book contains such famous shorter poems as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, Widsith, and Deor, but also longer religious verse, for example, the Christ poems and Juliana, as well as popular and sapiential literature, like Maxims I and many riddles. The class will prioritize continued practice of translation at a more advanced level, but will also include some examination of literary, critical, and historical contexts of the poems to be translated. Possible topics to explore include: the manuscript, the logic of the compilation, considerations of genre, religious and secular themes in the Exeter Book, popular religious elements, and popular forms of literature. Students are required to present daily translations, give an oral presentation, and write a seminar paper. Prerequisite: English 4200/7200 or Linguistics 4200/7200 or permission of instructor. Prepared undergraduates welcome.

English 8220: Seminar in Renaissance British Literature.  William Kerwin
Section 1

W 5:45-8:15
“Staging Lyric: Shakespeare and Renaissance Lyric Poetry.” This seminar will explore connections between forms of the English Renaissance lyric and Shakespeare’s plays. While separation of generic forms, especially the lyric and the dramatic, is as old as Aristotle, and is still ingrained in our teaching, publishing, and university structures, drama in the Renaissance was written by practicing poets. And while drama certainly had its own traditions, conventions, and sources, playwrights undeniably had an awareness of and openness to poetry, and in many ways thought of themselves as poets. This situation that has been emphasized in recent critical work, including books by Lukas Erne, Patrick Cheney, and David Schalkwyk. We will be considering the continuous cross-genre relationship between lyric and drama, paying attention to how lyric gets transformed on stage.

We will also be considering the social politics and social histories of those various lyric genres and traditions. Each form did work in English culture—it participated in certain struggles, and it carried the marks of history. We will not be looking at the literary interchange in isolation from the non-literary competitions that were helping to write the texts.

The seminar will be structured in two-week units: in one session, we will look at a particular lyric form or poetic movement; in the next, we will read one or two of Shakespeare’s works, with an eye toward its use of poetry in general and that particular form or movement in particular. A provisional outline:

• Renaissance theories of poetry, and sonnets Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare’s sonnets.
• The complaint, the elegy, the lament Richard III, The Rape of Lucrece
• Marlowe and the Ovidian poem Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Epigrams, especially by Sir John Davies, John Harrington, Ben Jonson Love’s Labor’s Lost
• Pastoral, plus some more Ovid As You Like It
• Satires, part one Measure for Measure
• Satires, part two King Lear

Writing and Presentations: Members of the seminar will complete two written assignments, give two presentations, and lead one class discussion. First, a 1200-word book review of one of the theoretical or historical or critical books bearing on the subject of the course will give you a chance to practice the book review genre, and then share your knowledge of the book in ten-minute presentation of that written work to the class. At one point during the semester each student will get to teach part of one session.

You will also write a fifteen- to twenty-page critical essay. In this seminar paper you will work with one Shakespeare play not on our syllabus in terms of its relation to the lyric, exploring the issues you choose. In our final class session, you will get to share the results of that inquiry with the class in a ten-minute talk.

English 8240: Seminar in 18th Century British Literature.  Devoney Looser
Section 1

M 12:15-2:45
“The Beginnings of English Fiction: Richardson and the Fieldings.” Samuel Richardson (bap. 1689-1781) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754) loom large in virtually every account of the rise of the novel, and the fiction of the two men has long been contrasted. Richardson’s wildly popular didactic epistolary narrative of a female servant who marries her master, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), prompted Fielding’s hilarious parody in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), as well as his more ambitious Joseph Andrews (1742), sometimes dubbed the first comic novel in English. In this course, we will read both major and lesser-known works of these two literary lions, alongside those of Henry’s learned and successful sister-novelist, Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), who was for a time a friend of Richardson’s. Sarah Fielding’s writings first appeared in her brother’s publications, though she is perhaps now best known as the author of the first children’s school story both for and about young girls, The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749). Assigned readings will include the aforementioned fiction, additional primary texts, and recent critical essays. Requirements include online and in-class discussion, research proposal and revised research proposal, annotated bibliography, presentation, rough draft, and revised seminar paper. (This course will also feature regular pedagogical contributions from Prof. George Justice.)

English 8250: Seminar in 19th Century British Literature.  Nancy West
Section 1

TR 2:00-3:15
“Dickens, Hardy, and Victorian Visual Culture.” This course will study Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy—the two figures widely acclaimed as Victorian England's most pictorial novelists--through the lens of three visual media: the illustrated novel, photography, and cinema.

The first part of the course will be devoted to studying the relationship between text and illustration in several of Dickens' and Hardy's novels, including Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. As we read these novels, we will look closely at the variety of illustrations that have accompanied their publication, from the Hogarth-influenced sketches of Dickens’ collaborator George Cruikshank to the tourist-driven photographs of Hardy’s collaborator Hermann Lea. We’ll also consider how contemporary illustrators—including children’s illustrators—have reinterpreted these novels for a modern, younger set of readers.

The next two parts of the course will consider more broadly the role of visual media in the production and reception of these writers’ works. We will, for example, examine how the rise—and decline--of the picturesque movement influenced Hardy’s representation of rural landscapes and peoples. We will look at how the mid nineteenth-century explosion of optical entertainments—including stereoscopes, zootropes, and magic lanterns—created a culture of intense visual stimulation in which Dickens’ novels played a major role. We will study how cinema’s first two decades were largely shaped by efforts to imitate the techniques of Dickens’ writing and by adapting both his and Hardy’s most popular novels. Perhaps most importantly, we will investigate how photography’s invention in 1839, with its claims to accuracy and “truth,” drove nineteenth-century authors to write with an increasing eye toward realism and thereby strive to outrival the camera.

Criticism includes Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography, Julia Thomas’ Pictorial Victorians, and Graham Smith’s Dickens and the Dream of the Cinema. In addition, students will read a variety of critical articles available through E-Res

Course Format and Requirements: Written requirements include four short (2-3pp.) papers and an eight-ten page paper, the latter paper to be presented at a conference organized by the participants in the course. The conference paper will be due at the end of the semester, written for a presentation of twenty minutes (approximately ten pages apart from endnotes). We’ll also discuss appropriate regional and national conferences for your paper, and I’ll encourage you to send an abstract to a conference you find interesting.

English 8310: American Elegy.  Alexandra Socarides
Section 1

W 3:00-5:30
“ American Elegy.” This course will explore the complicated history and tradition of elegiac poetry written in America between the mid-seventeenth century and the present day. We will begin by briefly looking at the tradition that precedes the American elegy--at early examples of what later gets categorized as elegy and at the themes, issues, and forms with which these poems were concerned. In order to ask what happens to the elegy on American soil, we will turn our attention to a wide variety of American poems and to the rich body of literary criticism that grapples with the potentialities and limitations of such a generic classification.

This class will be primarily concerned with the poems themselves and with their beauty, difficulties, and tensions. Poets will include, among others, Bradstreet, Wheatley, Bryant, Emerson, Sigourney, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Bishop, Lowell, Hughes, Brooks, Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Ginsburg, Rich, Komunyakaa, Doty, Howe, and Muske-Dukes. We will also read selections of poems by now-unknown Civil War poets and nineteenth-century women poets, as well as just-emerging twenty-first century poets. In order to get at the question that resides at the heart of this course – “What is the American elegy?” – we will also look at the critical tradition that has sprung up around the genre. Criticism will include the work of, among others, Sacks, Ramazani, Cavitch, Zeiger, Schenck, Kete, Cameron, and Loeffelholz. These critics will allow us to formulate responses to some of the crucial questions that elegies raise: Why is the event of death so useful for poets? Do men and women write elegies in a fundamentally different way? What sorts of political and social issues are negotiated in these seemingly private articulations of grief?

Requirements: Weekly response papers; annotated bibliography and presentation; final research paper.

English 8320: Seminar in 20th Century American Literature.  Andrew Hoberek
Section 1

W 3:00-5:30
“Modernization and Fiction.” In this course we will attempt to develop a framework for understanding twentieth-century US fiction that goes beyond the frequently cited (but in some ways exhausted) categories of modernism and postmodernism. Instead we will consider the relationship between fiction and the processes of economic, technological, and organizational development known collectively as “modernization,” treating modernization both as a material phenomenon and as an ideology that has furthered the interests of particular classes and nations. We will begin with literary responses to the modernization of agriculture in the early twentieth-century United States, exploring the reciprocal relationships between modernization and (1) the gendered nature of farm labor, (2) the construction of the Midwest as a particular region of the US, and (3) the nostalgia for vanishing ways of life typically associated with “local color” fiction. Then we will turn to the South, a region of the US long associated with underdevelopment, and consider the elaboration of a Southern identity grounded in resistance to modernization yet paradoxically affiliated with the experimental artistic movement known as modernism. We will address the contrast between Europe and the US central to representations of immigrants as embodying the modernizing impulse, and compare the celebrations of modernization central to the American New Deal and Soviet socialist realism. In the final weeks of the course we will turn to modernization as something that the US state has promoted in the rest of the world as part of its cold war and post-cold war foreign policies, and will consider how the literary trends commonly referred to as "postmodern" can perhaps be better understood as a reaction to the completion of the modernization process in the US and its movement to other parts of the globe. Students will write a paper incorporating both close reading of a literary work and research into the history of modernization theory and practice; a research report and drafts of the paper will be due throughout the semester. Prior to the first class students should read Hamlin Garland's 1891 story "Under the Lion's Paw." Our major texts will be Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918); Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925); William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Anzia Yezierska, Bread-Givers (1925); Fyodor Gladkov, Cement (1925); Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (1987); Don DeLillo, The Names (1982).

English 8410: Africana Theory and Literature Criticism.  April Langley
Section 1

MW 2:00-3:15
“Black Feminist/Womanist Thought, Theorizing the Dilemma of Race and Gender.” This course will investigate political, cultural, and historical aspects of a range of gender theories from the African Diaspora—from 18th- and 19th-century pre-womanist and feminist works to contemporary ones. Accordingly, race and gender will be studied as occupying shared and intersecting positions from the margins, periphery, and center. Thus, while the course will deal with theories of gender, we will do so with the understanding that both “womanist” and “feminist”—as descriptive, delimiting, and liminal terms—constitute a central component of the dilemma posed by debates in which theories of "race" and "gender" are simultaneously engaged. Importantly, neither womanist nor feminist is fully representative of the constructed and constitutive nature of race and gender as it applies to women of African descent and their struggles against multivalent oppressions—which include but are not limited to race, class, and gender. To that end, while we engage theoretical approaches primarily authored by women, we also study key texts in black male womanism/feminism. Further, while we examine scholarship primarily authored by black women from United States, key texts from the Caribbean and Africa (West, South, and Central) will constitute an essential component of our study as well. Indeed, our engagement with black feminist/womanist thought will contend with several inextricable issues: naming, the position/place of black men in black feminist studies, and the geo-political dilemmas posed by constructions of nationality, race, and cultural identity outside of U.S.-centric race/gender models. Readings will be taken from Joseph A. Adeleke, Michael Awkward, Anna Julia Cooper, Barbara Christian, Frances Smith Foster, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Clenora Hudson-Weems, bell hooks, Joy James, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Hortense Spillers, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and many others. Course requirements include: 2-page article review and presentation, annotated bibliography, prospectus, and seminar paper. (Same as Women & Gender Studies 8005)

English 8510: Advanced Writing of Fiction.  Trudy Lewis
Section 1

R 3:00-5:30
“Narrative Threads.” This semester, we will look at several strands of narrative analysis and innovation, from critical theory to genre, graphic, satiric, and performative fiction. Texts will include: S/Z by Roland Barthes, Erasure by Percival Everett, Out by Natsuo Kirino, No one belongs here more than you by Miranda July, Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan, and Vas: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula, Students will produce a brief essay, a narrative experiment, and an introduction to a fellow student’s work, in addition to the standard two workshop stories or novel chapters and a substantial revision.

English 8520: Advanced Writing of Nonfiction Prose.  Bettina Drew
Section 1

R 3:00-5:30
This is a writing workshop in which students are encouraged to choose and develop their own non-fiction writing projects long or short. The workshop emphasizes craft, including the use of dialogue, dramatic scenes, withheld information, and other literary techniques. Each week we read and discuss a book-length non-fiction work for 30 minutes and then workshop student writing. Students must be willing to write independently, share their work, and constructively critique the work of others. For graduate students only.

English 8530: Advanced Writing of Poetry.  Scott Cairns
Section 1

M 3:00-5:30
Everyone expecting to enroll must 1) select a volume of contemporary poetry (preferably one published in the past 1-3 years), 2) communicate that title to Scott Cairns ASAP so that he can include the volume in his book order, and 3) prepared to teach that book to the class in a seminar. This semester, the poetry writing seminar will focus on prosody and poetics. Following a review of traditional measures and a study of traditional forms, we will write a number of poems (5 or so) in fixed forms, and a successive grouping (another 5 or so) that work from, work over, re-work those forms into something that is both recognizable (as a received form) and innovative (as an original adaptation of that form). In class e will be using Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetry and Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. You may also find it useful to acquire and to engage The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Alfred Corn’s The Poem’s Heartbeat, John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, and/or The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. Following our study of prosody and poetics, we will focus our attention on the student-led seminars attending to recently published poetry collections.

English 8560: Graduate Seminar in Playwriting.  
Section 1

TBD
Designed expressly for writers from different backgrounds with varying levels of expertise, the graduate seminar in playwriting explores techniques of both traditional and non-traditional playwriting. We’ll use both a language-based approach to playwriting as developed by Paul Castagno in his book New Playwriting Strategies, as well as the traditional dramatic structure explored in Sam Smiley’s Playwriting: The Structure of Action.

Students taking this course will then write a full-length play (developing play ideas, character etudes, and plot treatments), read and discuss plays, playwrights, and theories of dramatic structure. We’ll also discuss pedagogical strategies and prepare syllabi for teaching an undergraduate playwriting course. We’ll utilize the MU venues of new play development including the Missouri Playwrights Workshop, Mizzou New Play Series, and Comedies-in-Concert.

Students will also have the opportunity to develop individualized reading lists in playwriting, dramatic literature, and dramatic criticism within the context of their specific graduate comprehensive exams.

Students taking this course will have the opportunity to work with Obie-award winning playwright Romulus Linney (author of Holy Ghosts), and explore development of their plays in the MU Department of Theatre. Meeting time, 3 hours, TBD.

English 8700: Seminar in Folklore.  Elaine Lawless
Section 1

W 3:00-5:30
“Ethnographic Writing.” This course will focus on the methods and ethics of ethnographic texts and writing; it should be of interest to students in Folklore Studies, Creative Nonfiction, Anthropology, Sociology, Performance Studies, and Communication. The course will seek to define "ethnography" and explore a qualitative approach to the writing of ethnographic texts. We will study some classic ethnographic writings by anthropologists and folklorists. Students will be required to do some fieldwork for the purposes of having materials about which they will be writing an ethnography for the final paper. The course will focus on the language of ethnographic discourse and the role of the ethnographer in her/his writing in light of postcolonial discourse. Books for the course include: James Clifford, Writing Culture; Deborah Gordon and Ruth Behar, Women Writing Culture; Trihn Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other; Barbara Meyerhoff, Number Our Days; Jay Ruby, The Crack in the Mirror; Karen Brown, Mama Lola; Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes; Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography; and others.

English 9090: Doctoral Dissertation Research.  
Section 1

Arranged
Leads to preparation of dissertation. Graded on S/U basis only.