Donna Strickland
All Sections

TBA; dependent on section
English 1000 is a college writing course that focuses on the choices that informed writers make when discovering, developing, and revising academic papers appropriate for the given topic. We offer about 115 sections of English 1000 each semester. For more information see our Introduction to English 1000.

Martha Townsend
Section 2

TR 11-12:15
This section of ENGL 1000H uses the Mizzou Reads book (which will be selected in March 2013) as the sole text for the course. Students write and revise three papers in a workshop-style format, make team-based presentations on related research, and engage in numerous informal writing activities. Students from diverse majors and disciplines are especially welcome.

Matthew Gordon
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
Language is a uniquely human achievement, a development that sets us apart from other animals. It is a powerful tool that we use during our every waking hour (and during much of our sleep). Still, we rarely stop to appreciate the complex role it plays in our everyday life. This course explores language from a variety of perspectives. We will consider the structure of language, looking at how sounds combine to form words and how words combine to form sentences. To gain a sense of the diversity of linguistic structures, we will consider examples from a variety of the world’s languages. We will also investigate the social functioning of language. We will learn about American dialects and about differences in the speech of men and women. Along the way, we will take on a number of popular myths about “primitive” languages, grammar rules, the language of the media, etc. In sum, the course will teach you how to make nouns plural in Swahili, how to recognize St. Louisans by their dialect and, most importantly, how to think critically about language. 

April Langley
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This course introduces students to the political, cultural, and historical aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black women's spiritual identity, and they ways in which they defined "spirituality" and "religion." It does so by exploring the origins of black women's religious and other worldly voices and experiences, through readings in various genres of literature and orature from poetry and slave narrative to political treatise, speeches, sermons, memoirs, letters and journals, and considering the significant role that spirituality played in the development of their intersecting social, political, and religious worlds. Investigating the claim of the African American gospel song-"We've Come this far by Faith"-we reflect on the extent to which black women both articulated their progress and empowerment and challenged the patriarchal limitations and oppression in terms of their faith. Course Requirements include three short informal response papers and one final essay.)

Various Instructors

All sections of ENGLISH 1210 offer students an introduction to the concepts, terms, and practices commonly encountered in literary study, presented by way of texts from the history of British literature that appropriately demonstrate such concepts, terms, and practices. The goals of this course are: 1) to provide broad exposure to a national literary tradition across its history 2) to introduce the major forms of literary expression: drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction 3) to introduce tools for interpretation, including beginning critical and interpretive vocabulary and 4) to develop skills in literary interpretation and argumentation.
 

Various Instructors

All sections of ENGLISH 1310 offer students an introduction to the concepts, terms, and practices commonly encountered in literary study, presented by way of texts from the history of American literature that appropriately demonstrate such concepts, terms, and practices. The goals of this course are: 1) to provide broad exposure to a national literary tradition across its history 2) to introduce the major forms of literary expression: drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction 3) to introduce tools for interpretation, including beginning critical and interpretive vocabulary and 4) to develop skills in literary interpretation and argumentation.
 

Various Instructors

In the Introductory Fiction class, students will learn to recognize and implement the basic elements of storytelling, such as plot, character, exposition, dialogue, setting, and point-of-view.  The course will include a number of writing exercises and move toward a peer workshop, in which students deliver constructive criticism of one another’s work with the instructor as facilitator and guide. The class will generally follow a standard fiction textbook supplemented by other examples of contemporary fiction and a short story collection and/or novel.

Various Instructors

In this introduction to poetry writing, students will first be introduced to current works in contemporary American poetry, studying these works as models and provocations for their own literary production.  Students will also be introduced to the formal aspects of poetry—its cadences, its sounds, its focus onwords as such.  Ideally, students will begin to understand that poetry is specifically a genre that depends upon the poet's attention to and command of the connotative reach of language.  Ideally, students will begin to recognize that poetry is not an expression of what one already knows, but is a way of knowing.

Various Instructors

This is a beginning introduction to the study of folklore. The course focuses on the many different genres of what folklorists call "verbal art" (folk and fairy tales, legends, jokes, personal experience stories, etc.). It also will introduce students to varieties of the "material culture" of folklore studies, such as foodways, rituals, vernacular housing, etc. Students will learn to appreciate differences in cultures in the worlds in which they reside--including the university, their families, home communities, group activities, religion, ethnicity. In addition, the course will alert students to similarities among cultures providing ways for them to understand how cultures are both similar and different. Different instructors will emphasize different aspects of this course and develop their own syllabus. A good first folklore course for undergraduates to take.

Sheri-Marie Harrison
Section 1

MWF 9-9:50
This course focuses on popular images of Caribbean masculinity, such as Bob Marley, Dexter St Jock from Eddie Murphy’s Raw, Screwface from Marked for Death, Ivan from The Harder they Come, Winston from How Stella Got Her Groove Back, or Snoop Dogg’s recent transformation into Snoop Lion. It does this to think about how men from the Caribbean are portrayed in popular music, literature, and film. We will read novels, listen to music, and watch films, in order to trace the origins and evolution of tropes of Caribbean masculinity, which include but are not restricted to the drug-dealing gangster, the reggae musician, and the gigolo. In tracing these origins, we will also explore how masculine tropes external to the Caribbean, like the American cowboy, as well as political, historical, and cultural factors inform popular cultural representations of Caribbean masculinity. Our goal is to be able to offer researched and well-written critiques of these representations.

Michael Marlo
Section 2

TR 11-12:15
This course is an introduction to the 2000+ languages of Africa and an introduction to the field of linguistics through African languages. The first half of the course overviews the considerable diversity of African languages, surveying the social contexts in which African languages are used and the history of their development up to the present day. Core linguistic properties of African languages, including the types of sounds used and the structure of words and sentences, are also introduced and compared to English and other languages of the world. The second half of the course shifts to more detailed investigations of specific African languages. During class sessions, we will collect linguistic data from speakers of 2-3 African languages, and students will carry out library research to supplement the original data to produce linguistic reports describing and analyzing the languages they have studied. (Cross-listed as Linguistics 2001.)

Noah Heringman
Section 3

TR 9:30-10:45
The idea of "deep time"--the long period predating recorded human history--came into being along with modern geology roughly 200 years ago.  The vastly expanded time scale of the earth's slow changes made possible evolutionary biology and archaeology in the nineteenth century.  In the twentieth century the development of radio-carbon dating and other technologies began to reveal the age of the earth, the history of life, and place of human beings within that history. Today these are three separate time scales, all of them "deep" in relation to history.  In this course we will examine and practice different kinds of science writing that have brought the idea of deep time to life and helped to show how it connects different sciences and connects science to culture.  We will read authors such as Charles Darwin, Annie Dillard, Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Lord Smail, and Henry David Thoreau in order to explore the emergence of geological, evolutionary, and archaeological time scales and their relationships to each other.

William Kerwin
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
This course uses imaginative literature to complicate the question “What is medicine?”  Clearly medicine involves the body, with all of its biological and chemical processes.  But we will consider the many ways that medical matters are also cultural and narrative matters: illness, health, and medical practices always occur within history, and attempts to make meaning of them look differently from different perspectives. So we will be approaching this project in two major ways.  First, we will look at narratives of  disease with an eye towards how illness is always placed, and how it always has cultural meanings. Epilepsy, alcoholism, AIDS, depression, plague, eating disorders—we will read short stories, novels, and other narrative accounts that help us understand the experience of these and other illnesses within history.  Literature makes vivid how much medicine is a part of society, and how much both disease and healing have cultural as well as scientific aspects.  This is not an attempt to “unmedicalize” these matters, so much as to stretch our sense of what medicine includes. Second, we will consider how patients and doctors can better understand disease if they consider its narratives consciously—that is, through literary categories such as frame, time, plot, and desire. We will have several units that considers the importance of narrative in medical practice—in reading case histories, in engaging in diagnostic interchanges, in doing medical research—in the terms of narrative analysis.Most but not all of the reading will be American literature: the authors we will read include Abraham Verghese, Kay Jamison, Anne Fadiman, Sinclair Lewis, William Carlos Williams, J.M. Coetzee, and Sandra Cisneros. 

Ray Ronci
Section 1

MWF 12-12:50
"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 and the central theme of the course 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.

Various Instructors

Provides intensive guided practice in expository and persuasive writing. Prerequisite: English [ENGLSH] 1000 or equivalent.

Rachel Harper and Aaron Harms
Section 1

MW 2-2:50

Various Instructors

Introduction to the communication required in any professional field, including basic letters and resumes, reviews, reports, and electronic networking, culminating in an extensive report and a related oral presentation. Prerequisite: English [ENGLSH] 1000.

Andrew Hoberek
Section 1

MWF 11-11:50
This course looks at the career and work of Jay-Z and Kanye West from three perspectives: (1) Where do they fit within, and how do they change, the history of hip-hop music? (2) How is what they do similar to and different from what poets do?, and (3) How does their rise to both celebrity and corporate power alter what we understand as the American dream?  In addition to listening to music and watching videos, we will also read Jay-Z's Decoded; histories of and critical works on rap music by Jeff Chang, Adam Bradley, and others; and one or two good studies of how poetry works.

Julie Melnyk
Section 1

MWF 2-2:50
In this course we analyze literary treatments of romantic love in British literature from Shakespeare to the present.  As we read the drama, poetry, and fiction of romantic love, we encounter treatments in comic, tragic, and realistic modes, and address such issues as generic influences on the representation of love, continuity and change in the representations of love over time, gender differences in such representations, and the sacralization of human love.  Prerequisite: Honors Eligibility.

Melissa Range
Section 1

MWF 10-10:50
Can something as indescribable as war be represented in poetic language? And should it be? This semester, we will attempt to answer these questions as we consider how American poets (both soldiers and civilians) have represented, memorialized, appropriated, and mythologized particular American wars. We’ll also look at how these war poets play off one other, borrowing and revising each other’s war-poetry tropes and themes. Proceeding chronologically, we will focus on four American wars and their cultural and historical moments—the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq. Because popular visual representations of war drive much of our mental imagery of war, we will also look at selected movie and documentary clips, comparing and contrasting their representations of war with those of the poets we read. Assignments will likely include weekly in-class writing assignments (some critical, some creative), two presentations (one on a cultural or historical aspect of a particular war, and one on a particular poem), and a final project, which can take the form of a 5-6 page critical paper or a critical-creative hybrid of similar length. Poets we will read include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, Jorie Graham, Natasha Trethewey, Brian Turner, and Jehanne Dubrow. 

Clenora Hudson-Weems
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
Theorizing Africana Literature is an undergraduate course designed to introduce students to 20th and 21st Centuries Africana Literature & Theory. The turn of the 20th century in the Africana literary world is marked by the WEB DuBois & Booker T Washington Controversy, along with Marcus Garvey, which ushered us into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Major poets of that era to be discussed include James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes & Countee Cullen. Next was the WEB DuBois-Alain Locke Debate of the 30s, a precursor to the cultural & literary debates of the searing 60s, which followed the inception of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s, ignited by the 1955 brutal lynching of 14-year-old Black Chicago Youth, Emmett Till. This incident was followed by Rosa Parks’ demonstration & Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership in the CRM. The searing 60s highlights the Black Arts/Black Aesthetics Movement, with Amiri Baraka & Larry Neale, the prime movers. The 70s continued the Movement of the 60s, with Black Aesthetician Richard Barksdale, theorizing on it beyond that period, while the 80s ushered in Molefi Asante’s Afrocenticity. The latter part of the 20th & early 21st centuries highlight the Africana literary and theoretical works of several Africana theorists in general, including Robert L.Williams--Ebonics & Maulana Karenga--7 Principles & Kwanzaa. Moreover, there are several Africana women theorists, including chief black feminists Barbara Smith & bell hooks & Africana Womanist Clenora Hudson-Weems, who set forth literary theories as tools of analysis for Black women writers. To validate the relevancy/applicability to our lives in the world place, we will also consider the political climate surrounding the 1st Africana American President, via studying Africana Womanism & Race & Gender in the Presidential Candidacy of Barack Obama. [Cross-listed with Black Studies 2400]

Various Instructors

Intermediate Fiction challenges students to identify, analyze, and imitate diverse narrative strategies. Instructors may choose to concentrate on a theme, a genre, or some other organizing principle. In any case, the focus will shift from basic story elements to a more nuanced discussion of narrative moves, genre conventions, character types and archetypes, modes of representation, and stylistic variations. Instructors may also choose to address cultural difference as a factor in storytelling. Students will learn to evaluate the rhetorical choices of published authors and their own peers. Instructors of Intermediate Fiction assume some familiarity with the workshop method, though students will certainly continue to master this technique as they progress through the emphasis area. This course will likely include a variety of texts from anthologies such as Best American Short Stories, Best American Non- Required Reading, or O Henry Prize Stories, to classic and contemporary novels and short story collections.

Various Instructors

In this intermediate course in poetry writing, students will continue to read current works in contemporary American poetry, studying these works as models and provocations for their own literary production. Students will also be introduced to traditional prosody and to traditional forms, adapting these forms to their own poetry-in-progress.

David Crespy

Study and practice of playwritingfundamentals (including exploration of plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle, etc.); emphasizes the one-act play.  Students present their work at the Missouri Playwrights Workshop. (Cross-listed with Theater 2920.)

Various Instructors

This course will introduce students to the methods that folklorists use to study the folklore of various cultural groups. Students will likely be assigned to locate a group to study; they may be asked to attend meetings of that group, make recorded interviews of participants about their participation in the group, gather oral histories of elders in the group, take photographs, and build a profile of the kinds of folklore this group shares and transmits to other members. Although it might be best to take English 1700 before taking 2700, it really does not matter which course should be taken first. Different instructors will emphasize different aspects of this course and develop their own syllabus. A good first folklore course for undergraduates to take. Students interested in the study of folklore should take both of these courses in order to enroll in courses offered at the 2000, 3000, and 4000 levels.

LuAnne Roth
Section 1 and 2

Sec. 1: MW 1-2:15 with screening T 6-8:30
Sec. 2: MW 2-3:15 with screening T 6-8:30
Increasingly, the living dead are shuffling across the landscape of America in films, video games, comic books, screensavers, and “zombified” literary classics.   Few monster figures have taken hold of the American imagination as pervasively as these curious creatures. Applying a folkloristic and cultural analysis to the current craze for “all things zombie,” in this class we will examine the paradox of how zombies can be alternately horrifying and hilarious and how zombies can embody societal anxiety about almost everything – from slavery, capitalism, and disease to bio-terrorism and scientific experimentation gone amok.  If it is true that “nothing is more dangerous than a monster whose story is ignored,” as Annalee Newitz says, then this course offers valuable intellectual weaponry.  Warning: this class is not for the faint of heart.

Martha Townsend
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This section of Advanced Composition is geared for students from any discipline who enjoy academic and/or informational writing, who want to learn more about doing it well, and who want to build skills transferable to their upcoming professions, whether inside or outside academia. There is no overarching theme per se. Writers will select the topic or subject area they wish to work on, build or add to the relevant research-based knowledge they already possess, identify an audience and venue to whom they wish to communicate, and craft an appropriate article for publication. The workshop orientation requires thoughtful feedback from every writer to everyone else’s writing-in-progress, so we all will learn about one another’s intellectual interests.

If you love to write, want to be a better writer, and enjoy talking with others about your writing and theirs, this may be the section for you. 

Ray Ronci
Section 1

MWF 10-10:50
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 when discussing fiction and poetry and apply the same strategies when discussing the various texts of contemporary American culture. Teaching methodology: informal lectures and discussion. Critical writing assignments.

Elisa Glick
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
What makes a book gay? How have mechanisms of social control, silence, and invisibility shaped modern literature by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people? What is the relationship of queer narratives to social change? Is there a specifically gay or lesbian aesthetic? This course explores these and related questions through twentieth-century literary and aesthetic engagements with same-sex desire and gender expression. Writers may include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, John Rechy, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Thurman, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Tony Kushner, and Dorothy Allison. Films by Andrea Weiss, Greta Schiller, Isaac Julien, and Kimberly Pierce. Fiction, drama, and poetry will be examined alongside critical, historical, and theoretical texts drawn from feminist and queer studies. [Cross-listed with WGST 3480]

David Crespy
Section 1

TR 2-3:15
Same as Theatre 3700.

Julie Melnyk
Section 2

MWF 10-10:50
Historical survey of British literature from the Romantic period to the present, emphasizing important writers and significant intellectual and cultural movements.  Texts: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume B; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.  Prerequisite: EN1000. 

Elizabeth Chang
Section 1

TR 11-12:15
This course is designed to introduce you to some major British/Anglophone authors and works of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, otherwise known as the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary eras. We will look at some of the major literary, cultural, and historical developments of each time period and try to balance our time between big-picture considerations of large themes and close readings of individual poems and prose passages. Our main interest will be tracing the influence of British Empire on literary production both globally and locally. To do so, we will read some long novels as well as some short poems and discuss these works both separately and in dialogue with each other. There will be several papers and other shorter writing assignments; active participation in class discussion is also expected.

Charles Marvin
Section 1

MWF 1-1:50

For most of the period covered by this American survey, "literature" was broadly understood to mean "letters."  Historical accounts, travel writing, philosophical essays, sermons, and autobiographical narratives were considered, along with poetry, drama, and fiction, to be "literary" in this broad sense, and all of these genres must be considered in presenting a coherent record of American literary history.  However, since our own sense of what counts as literature--shared with authors like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville writing at the tail end of the 350-year period covered by the course--are imaginative works of creative genius, we will take advantage of fictional and poetic portrayals wherever we can find them.  Particular attention will be devoted to historical fiction written about the times, places, and persons covered in the course.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes A-B, will be the main text for the course; it will be supplemented by a course reader of fiction, journalism, and personal narratives of significance to a fuller understanding of American literary history, including regional literatures typically left out of anthologies.  Three examinations will be given over the course of the semester; a term paper on one of the major works assigned during the semester will also be required.

Maureen Konkle
Section 1

MWF 2 - 2:50
At the present time, environmentalists struggle to get the rest of us first to believe that global warming is real and then to care enough to do something about it.  Part of the difficulty that scientists and activists face in making their case about global warming is the narrow manner in which nature has been conceived in American and other western cultures.  "Nature" is out there, something outside of yourself that you either visit or attempt to control, rather than something pervasive and enveloping to which you are related, in all senses of the word.  When someone tells you that the environment is in crisis then, it's difficult to imagine it as an immediate problem and thus easier to ignore it.  This course is focused on establishing how this problem came about and then on showing how contemporary writers, artists, journalists, and others are trying to think their way through the problem and convince the rest of us to pay attention and do something.  The course is divided into two parts.  The first part outlines a history of dominant conceptions of nature, the wilderness, and the environment in American writing from Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century to Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard in the later twentieth century.  The second part of the course surveys contemporary efforts to re-imagine our relationship to nature in science writing, indigenous writing, science fiction, film, and the visual arts.   This course includes 40% online work and will meet in class on Monday and Wednesday only.  Assignments will include reading quizzes, several tests, and a semester project, which may be collaborative.

Dana Kinnison
Section 1

MWF 12-12:50
Type description here. 

April Langley
Section 1

TR 8-9:15
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)

Chris Okonkwo
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
African American literature offers a fascinating body of works, unique in their history, diverse in their concerns, and engaging in their sometimes "call-and-response" conversation. Since the literature’s inception centuries ago, African American writers and artists have through their works—folk/oral tradition, poetry, autobiographies, pamphlets, fiction, drama, non-fiction prose, speeches, paintings, songs and other cultural productions—contemplated the various issues integral to the complex experience of people of African descent in the United States. This course surveys important twentieth-century historical moments, writers, and works, as well as some of the intellectual debates and theories that have helped define the African American literary tradition. We will examine the tradition mainly from a historical, theoretical and critical standpoint and also supplement our readings and discussions with photographs, documentaries and audio recordings of significant, African American historical and literary figures and sociopolitical events.

Maureen Konkle
Section 1

MWF 1-1:5
This course surveys Native writing in English from the earliest traditions to contemporary fiction and poetry, but is focused on issues that resonate in contemporary Native literature and artistic expression:  history, identity, tradition, language, land, and sovereignty.  We will be reading translated traditional stories, novels, autobiography, history, short stories, and poetry and looking at films, painting and photography.  Representative writers/artists include Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones, Vine Deloria, Jr., Chris Eyre, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.  Assignments include reading quizzes, periodic tests, and a semester project, which may be collaborative.  This course can be used to fulfill the requirements of the College of Arts and Sciences Multicultural Certificate [http://multicultural.missouri.edu].  The course includes 40% online work and will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays only.

David Crespy
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45

Cross-listed with Theatre 3920

Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
Same as Communication 3570 and Theatre 3200

Richard Schwartz
Section 1

TR 11-12:15
Lifewriting includes such forms as biography, autobiography, the memoir, diary and journal.  Normally done in prose, it can also be done in verse, on film and in other forms.  While prominent examples exist in both antiquity and the renaissance, lifewriting accelerates in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and theoretical issues concerning the practice begin to be elucidated and debated.  In the first half of the course we will examine a series of examples of lifewriting from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In the second half, students will prepare three pieces of work: a report on a specific biography of their choosing, a biographical document of their own creation and an autobiographical document of their own creation.  The students' work will be discussed and workshopped by their classmates.

Ellie Ragland
Section 2

TR 2-3:15
Type description here. 

Lily Gurton-Wachter
Section 1

TR 11-12:15
In this course, we will explore the lyric as a genre that puts pressure on the possibilities of language to depict, express, or give an account, a form that pushes language to its limits: to extreme ambivalence, ambiguity, and condensation, or to cliché, tautology, and repetition. During our readings of a wide range of poets, we will keep in mind the following questions: Despite the conventional understanding of lyric as a genre devoted to a solitary first person marked by an interiority and isolation absent from more social genres (like novels or plays), how do lyric poems suggest new or unusual modes of relating to others? What do they have to say about their historical and political contexts? What forms of attachment or relation emerge by way of lyric address? What happens when poetic language represents violence, or when poets attempt to account for that which resists representation, or even articulation? What is at stake in the use of particular tropes - what, for example, are the relations between simile and sympathy, apostrophe and mourning, or catachresis and violence? How does lyric alter the temporality of reading? We will explore the relations between poetry and prayer, confession, and conversation, and look at sites where the lyric intersects with other genres. Finally, we will also consider how lyric poets attend to the quotidian, to the banal moments that go unnoticed, to temporalities of waiting, boredom, or anxiety, or to the feeling of not feeling at all. Readings will include a wide range of poets from a number of historical periods, likely to include Ashbery, Auden, Baudelaire, Bishop, Blake, Celan, Coleridge, Dickinson, Hardy, Harvey, Herbert, Hopkins, Hughes, Keats, Lerner, Marvell, Merrill, Mullen, O’Hara, Rilke, Stevens, Tate, Wordsworth, and critics, including Adorno, Benjamin, De Man, Johnson, Mill, Poe.

Gabriel Fried
Section 1

MWF 2-2:50

Open to lovers of poetry and bewildered skeptics alike, this course will provide a survey of the varied, ambitious verse being written in our current American moment. Over the semester, we will read one poem at a time, seeking to be rewarded for our attentive engagement, but prepared, too, to call a poem on its guff. Along the way, we’ll consider similarities between poems and a variety of other rituals, texts, and verbalizations, including spell-casting, arias, riddles, hip-hop, customs declarations forms, ghost stories, tv commercials, shopping lists, church sermons, horserace announcing, soliloquys, and personals ads. As we read, discuss, and write about contemporary poetry, we’ll cultivate a sense of what today’s poems do and why they do them.

 

This course is writing intensive.

Andrew Hoberek
Section 1

MWF 1-1:50
Beginning in the late nineteenth century a number of fiction writers working in English challenged what had become the traditions of realism, writing experimental work that abandoned omniscient representation to foreground characters' subjectivities, played with the conventions of narrative and plot, and drew self-conscious attention to how fiction works.  Beginning with George Eliot's 1861 Silas Marner as an example of realism, we will read works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner and others that sought to move beyond realism and in the process remade the novel in English.

Karen Piper
Section 2

TR 11-12:15
This course focuses on representations of environmental crisis in postcolonial literature, including climate change, toxic waste, and the over-extraction of resources.  Reading postcolonial authors who have become involved in environmental struggles, such as Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, and Ken Saro-Wiwa, we will explore the fine line between economic and environmental imperialism in Anglophone African and South Asian literature.  We will also look at the fine line between activist and artist for many of these these writers, discussing why their work led to imprisonment or even execution.  "Environmentalism" is not about protecting scenery or "getting back to nature" for millions of people around the world--it is about survival.  The course includes novels about the Bhopal incident, disappearing coral reefs, oil industry pollution, and nuclear waste in the Pacific islands.  Authors include Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Helon Habila, Chantal Spitz, Salman Rushdie, and Romesh Gunesekera.  Our primary theoretical text will be Postcolonial Ecologies:  Literatures and the Environment. 

Sheri-Marie Harrison
Section 1

MWF 10-10:50
This course will explore a variety of twentieth century world literature. While it is impossible to become experts in literature of several countries in one semester, we can begin to understand, conceptualize and analyze the field of world literature within the contexts of cultural, historical, and literary vocabularies. We can also begin to think about the intersections between literature, history, and politics, in addition to the historical and cultural contexts that each text grew out of. To do this, our required reading will include writing by  Chinua Achebe, Mariama Bâ, J.M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie.

William Kerwin
Section 1

TR 8-9:15
In this course we will read eight amazing plays from Shakespeare's histories and comedies.  While these genres might at first glance seem to create and exist in radically different realms--comedies dealing with love and private lives, histories with political struggles and the public world--we will look for the emphasis upon change that these genres share.  Trauma and transformation are Shakespeare's subjects in all of these plays: Henry VI part 3, Richard III, Henry IV part 1, Henry V, A Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night.  Some previous experience with Shakespeare's writing or other writing from the Renaissance will definitely help you in the course, but much more important is a willingness to explore in the culture and language of a very distant time period and in the work of a very ambitious author.  Attention to the culture of the period, and how it appears in the plays, will be a significant part of our work, as a prelude to an examination of how the plays' poetic forms help express pain and reconciliation. 

Anne Myers
Section 1

MWF 9-9:50
The objective of this course is to introduce students to some of the major works of John Milton (1608-1674). John Milton, in turn, will introduce students to some of the most important political events and religious controversies of seventeenth-century England. Intensive study and enjoyment of Paradise Lost will form the centerpiece of this course, supplemented by Samson Agonistes, some of the shorter poems, and selections from the major prose works. Written assignments include a term paper, quizzes, and two exams. 

Chris Okonkwo
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45

A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and also the first African American writer, indeed the first black woman, to win the Nobel Prize for literature, among her other honors, Morrison (1931-) is a luminary that needs little or no introduction to readers worldwide.  In this class—the second part of a two-semester course that focuses on Morrison’s canon—we will address her last five novels Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), and Home (2012).  We will also examine her poetry, “Recitatif” her only published short story to date, her Nobel Lecture, her critical intervention Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, as well as her other select polemical pieces and recorded interviews. Students will have an opportunity to explore the official Toni Morrison Society website for a wealth of historic, programmatic and visual information in preparation for their oral presentations and researched papers for the class. To help deepen our understanding of Morrison, however, we will appreciate her biography, the African diaspora cultures, and the American/Western experiences and art that have helped shape her world, politics, and aesthetics.

 

Julie Melnyk
Section 1

MWF 11-11:50
Looser will not be teaching this course, as she is taking a position at Arizona State University in fall 2013.  Please contact the Department of English for further information about this course.

Johanna Kramer
Section 1

MWF 12-12:50
   This course is an intensive introduction to Old English, the earliest form of English recorded in writing and the language spoken in Anglo-Saxon England from about the 5th to the later 11th century. While the focus of this class is the acquisition and practice of the Old English language, the course also introduces students to the fascinating literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England (including its art, archaeology, manuscript culture, and religious practices).
    As we gain knowledge of the language, we will first read prose texts and then move on to more complex verse texts, among them such famous and brilliant poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Dream of the Rood.” This course is intended to give students a solid grounding in Old English grammar, enabling them to read a wide range of Old English texts in the original with the help of a dictionary and to proceed to more advanced studies in early English language and literature. Another purpose of this course is to become acquainted with the rich culture of Anglo-Saxon England, which combines oral and written, pre-Christian and Christian-Latin traditions.
    For those students not typically too intrigued by things medieval, this course may hold some interest nonetheless in that studying Old English can teach us much about modern English, the etymology and semantic range of English words, the history of poetry and prose, and about the influences of Old English literature on subsequent literary periods and writers (Milton, Auden, Pound, Borges, etc.).
    Assignments include (but are probably not limited to) daily translations, regular quizzes, a brief oral presentation, a poetry recitation, and exams. No prior knowledge of Old English or other languages is required to take this course, although previous language experience will prove helpful. (Cross-listed as Linguistics 4200/7200.)

Johanna Kramer
Section 1

MW 2:00-3:15
This course is dedicated to the study of women in both the literature and the history of early medieval England, covering texts produced ca. 700 to ca. 1150 C.E. In particular we will examine how religious and secular authorities shaped the lives and literary representations Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman women. Current scholarship will supplement our knowledge of this period and provide tools for critical investigation of the literature. Our readings (in translation) will be writings for and about women, such as heroic poetry featuring stunningly powerful biblical and historical female figures, saints' lives, biblical narratives, laws, riddles, and historiography. Among possible topics of discussion are the influence of social and religious interests on the representation of women, the depiction of female saints in particularly Anglo-Saxon terms, gendered sainthood, the impact of female patronage on the production of texts and thus on medieval English literary culture, and the religious education of women. The course also provides a basic historical understanding of the period by learning about the social, political, and legal status of both noble and ordinary women and the opportunities available to women to act in positions of authority or to exert political power.

Charles Marvin
Section 2

MWF 2-2:50

The ten years leading up to the American Civil War was a period of intense literary activity in which many of the definitive works of the American canon were written.  It was during this concentrated period, since referred to as the “American Renaissance,” that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden,  and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appeared. 

In order to gain insights into the political and cultural concerns that informed major works by each of these authors, we will read broadly rather than narrowly, surveying a range of primary source documents from the period that will provide a richer understanding of the times in which they wrote.  Two major essay assignments will be required, as well as shorter written assignments designed to familiarize students with methods for pursuing original research into the philosophical, cultural, and political contexts that inform the major literary works covered in the class.   

Ray Ronci
Section 1

MWF 2-2:50
"Postmodern American Poetry" —The semester begins with an in-depth study of the term Postmodernism as it applies to philosophy, politics, feminism, religion, popular culture, music and literature. After establishing a basic understanding of what Postmodernism means, we will direct our focus towards Postmodern Poetics by carefully examining the poetry and selected writings of such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O' Hara, Susan Howe and so on. There are at least two formal papers required for this class, one on Postmodernism(s), the other on Postmodern Poetics. 

Cornelius Eady
Section 1

MW 12-1:15
In this course we will examine and explore the recent emergent of young African American poets born in the mid to late 1970’s who are now in the process of adding their voices to the on-going conversation of American and African American Literature.  In order to better understand their moment, the first few weeks of the class will concentrate on earlier African American poets and poetics from Phillis Wheatley to the Black Arts Movement, as well as the “lost generation” (as stated by poet Kevin Young): the writers between the end of the BAM movement in the mid 1970’s  (which includes poets Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa, among others), and start of the Dark Room Collective in Boston in the late 1980’s.

Some of the questions we may ask and examine through our reading will be; How is the concept of identity defined between these two close, yet slightly different generations? What traditions, ideas and ideals are carried forward, and what (if any) are left behind? A secondary concern of the course will be how the concept of “Movement” influences or hinders these writers. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, the student should have: a better sense of how to read and interpret these writers, and the space they inhabit in American Letters. I also hope the course will prove to be a true adventure in reading and discussion.

Clenora Hudson-Weems
Section 1

TR 11-12:15
English 4420, Africana Womanism, is an undergraduate and graduate course specifically designed to broaden one's scope from a family-centered perspective in the area of issues, recurring themes and/or trends in modern Africana women fiction, highlighting its applicability to our everyday lives worldwide. An in depth study of the lives and selected works by six (6) leading Africana women writers—Noted Pre-Africana Womanist, Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God); Senegalese novelist, Mariama Ba (So Long a Letter—currently out of print) or African American/Caribbean Novelist, Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow); Nobel Prize Winning author, Toni Morrison (Beloved); Popular Cultural Novelist, Terry McMillan (Disappearing Acts); and Former Rap Star Artist, Sister Souljah (No Disrespect)--will be enhanced by critical readings of two (2) books from the Africana Womanism Trilogy, as well as scholarly articles by and about the various authors. Methodologically, we will be highlighting the prioritization of Race, Class & Gender, a key feature in this powerful paradigm, committed to the empowerment and equality of all, rather than a gender exclusive agenda (female-centered, female-empowerment) so characteristic of other female based constructs. Students will be introduced to an authentic theoretical concept and methodology, Africana Womanism, and will be applying Africana Womanist theory to these Africana womanist novels, which clearly reflect our daily lives throughout the world. [Cross-listed with Black Studies 4420]

Richard Schwartz
Section 1

R 2-4:30
This course will focus on crime fiction, as broadly conceived.  We will study particular examples of such fiction and discuss contemporary trends, both in American genre writing and in actual market opportunities.  Students will conceive, plot and write several major sections of a novel as part of the course.  Class discussions will focus on themes within the genre, techniques that both define and transcend the genre and practical aspects of novel writing.

Trudy Lewis
Section 3

W 2-4:30
Story Time: Fiction of the Past, Present, and Future
This semester, we will investigate time, one of the key features of narrative prose, in historical, modernist, contemporary, and science fiction. Texts will include: Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Kindred by Octavia Butler, selected stories by Philip K. Dick, A Visit from The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, She Loves Me Not by Ron Hansen, The Tenth of December by George Saunders, and Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Students will produce three full-length stories, one in each time period, and engage in several other exercises and collaborations.  

Marly Swick
Section 4

T 12:30-2:50
Type description here. 

Scott Cairns
Section 1

T 12:30-3:00
After a 2- to 3-week study of "the line" in contemporary poetry, we'll start with a number of premises, which you may or may not share, but which you will be expected to adopt (try on for size) for the duration of the course. Then, we'll proceed to shape what we'll think of as poems that matter, poems that have a chance of mattering even to strangers, even, perhaps, to strangers who have read a good deal of poetry before they happen upon yours. We will commence the course with an examination and discussion of three collections by three poets, and some individual poems. Thereafter, we will meet each week prepared to discuss your poems. Ideally, you will have read your classmates' works-in-progress well ahead of time, and will have prepared written comments from which we will generate the class discussion of those works. I will collect your written comments following each critique. All of our efforts for the oral and written critiques should be understood as enabling the poem's development into a richer, more complex, more interesting text than it was when we first came across it.

The Premises:

1. Poems are not documents of prior events; they are to be understood as events in and of themselves.
2. Poems are not written to express previously held ideas, but are written to discover ideational matter.
3. The poet is not necessarily (and is never exactly) the speaker of the poem.
4. To the extent that poems occasion multiple, suggestive meanings, they are poetic; to the extent that they prescribe a singular, denotative meaning, they are less so.
5. Poetry is the art of language itself; therefore, poems that draw the reader's attention to the linguistic fabric of an utterance are more interesting than poems that do not.
6. For the sake of this particular class, I'd like to add one more premise: a satisfactory poetic line is one that works—does work—as a line. Mere line-phrasing—in which the "line" does nothing beyond moving along the syntax—is not to be considered a satisfactory line.

Michael Marlo
Section 1

TR 9:30-10:45
This course is an upper-level introduction to linguistics that orients students to the ‘generative’ approach to language study and investigates the core areas of the structure of American English: phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure). The main aims of the course are to develop students’ analytical and reasoning skills and to provide training on how to construct a linguistic argument, with English grammar constituting the primary object of study. (Cross-listed as Linguistics 4600/7600.) 

Matthew Gordon
Section 1

TR 11-12:15
This course examines the history of English from the prehistoric roots that bind it to other languages of Europe and Asia, through the period of its earliest attestation, and into the modern era. We will see that English has undergone dramatic alterations throughout its life, and we will look at changes in sounds, grammar, meaning, and vocabulary. To understand these changes and why they occur, we will look for explanations in both the structure of the language and in the social history of its speakers. We will approach the subject from the perspective of modern linguistics and will, therefore, also develop familiarity with the theory and analytical methods of this field.

Vicki Carstens
Section 1

MWF 11-11:50
The course provides an in-depth study of the universal and language-particular properties of phrase- and sentence-level grammar, based on comparison of English and other languages. Prerequisite: English/Ling 4600 or another comparable linguistics course. The approach is that of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist program.

Johanna Hearne
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
This course explores contemporary trends in film theory, with a strong emphasis on issues of gender, race and imperialism in film representations.  Our conversations will revolve around the social dimensions of our relationships with visual representations.  How are cinematic images and our apprehension of those images affected by social institutions, and by systems of power based on race, gender, class, and histories of colonialism?  How and when do cinematic images intervene in such systems?  We will discuss spectatorship, reception, the cultural work of film genres, stars and performance, realism, stereotypes, Third Cinema and alternative cinema aesthetics, and other topics.  Students will write weekly short papers and a short paper on an individual film and theorist; students may also have an opportunity to participate in the Citizen Jane Film Festival as part of their coursework. 

Dana Kinnison
Section 1

Arranged
The Internship in English is reserved for those students who secure any kind of internship (other than in the field of publishing) on their own and would like to receive academic credit for the experience. Please contact the internship coordinator for the English department, Dana Kinnison, at  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Dana Kinnison
Section 3

Arranged
This section of Internship in Publishing is reserved for those students who secure any kind of publishing internship on their own and would like to receive academic credit for the experience. Please contact the internship coordinator for the English department, Dana Kinnison, at  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Gabriel Fried
Section 1

M 9:30-12
Persea Books is a small, prestigious publishing house founded in 1975. While the press is based in New York City, its poetry division operates out of Columbia, Missouri. As interns, students will be exposed to (and do real-world work on behalf of) many aspects of Persea's poetry series. This includes reading submissions, writing reader reports and press releases, doing Web research for book covers, proofing book galleys, interviewing authors, assisting with author tours and promotion, and co-administering contests. Interested students will also have the opportunity to gain familiarity with some practical (and resume-building) facets of book publishing (e.g. book contracts, copyright application, subsidiary rights). While a broad familiarity with contemporary poetry is not required, an interest in contemporary poetry is essential to this course. 

Speer Morgan
Section 2

T 2:30-5:30
The Missouri Review is a leader in teaching students about literary publishing through our unique internship. Our goal is to train young literary editors in an intense, systematic program. The course is offered to undergraduate and graduate students in all disciplines, but the core group consists of students majoring in English who want to pursue careers in the publishing industry. Interns who take the course credit for their degree must be enrolled for at least two semesters.

An internship at The Missouri Review provides opportunities for students to gain valuable hands-on experience in publishing. From their first day, interns are an integral part of the general operations of the magazine. The editors encourage individual initiative and teamwork, while offering interns the resources of their 34 years of publishing experience. Students learn practical editing skills and generate publishing credit by writing reviews or conducting author interviews. Interested students write blogs and are otherwise involved in web content development, as well as assisting in producing digital audio versions of the print magazine. Students also learn the basics, such as manuscript acquisition, magazine distribution and other business practices. They may help run an audio/video contest, and learn grant writing. As they learn industry skills, interns are encouraged to consider careers in publishing.

An ongoing challenge in higher education is providing students with real-world experience to complement solid traditional scholarship. Potential employers want to know what students have actually accomplished, as well as what academic courses are taken. Our interns are able to say that they have contributed to one of America's finest literary magazines, helping shape our literature.

One demonstration of the effectiveness of our intensive internship program is that many of our interns enter into commercial publishing fields, editing other magazines or working at presses. Many others are employed as teachers and professors. Previous and current interns have published more than 100 books and contributed to most of the top American literary magazines. They have won major literary prizes including the National Book Award, the Delmore Schwartz Prize, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Guggenheim fellowships, and National Endowment for the Arts individual writing fellowships.

Lily Gurton-Wachter
Section 1

TR 2-3:15
This course will explore the relationship between writing and mourning, through close readings of a selection of literary texts that address the repercussions of loss. From Antigone’s defiant resolve to mourn to contemporary war elegies, we will look at literature as a site of mourning, explore the politics of who is and is not mourned publicly, consider texts that mourn the loss of places rather than people, and examine the role of postponement, repetition, apostrophe, melancholy, and forgetting in texts that try to record and register loss. Literary texts by Alison Bechdel, Anne Carson, John Clare, Mahmoud Darwish, Thomas Gray, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, M. Nourbese Philip, Kristin Prevallet, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, William Wordsworth, and theoretical texts by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Percy Shelley, and Susan Sontag.

Patricia Okker
Section 2

MWF 10-10:50
Designed primarily for those who are uncertain about their careers, this class guides students through a series of writing exercises that apply the writing and research skills that English majors have developed to career exploration. The focus is on exploring an individually selected career and preparing materials necessary for a job search in that field (including resumes and cover letters). Because of the nature of the class assignments, attendance and active class participation are essential.

Emma Lipton
Section 3

 TR 9:30-10:45am
In this class, we will consider the depiction of law and justice in literature, focusing on such concepts as social justice; judgment, redemption and punishment; proof and evidence; intention and motivation; confession and contrition; and the relationship between sin and crime. We will consider the ways in which legal and literary discourses and forms shape each other, focusing on such topics as drama and courtroom, confession as narrative, character and legal personhood, and the relationship between legal and literary ethics.  We will read a wide range of genres, including morality play, revenge tragedy, complaint, confessional writing, debate poetry, detective story, crime narrative, essay and legal theory. 

Texts may include:  selections from Aristotle, Aquinas and Bracton; Jacob’s Well, Gower’s Confessions of a Lover, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” “The Wakefield play of the Last Judgment”, “The Trial of Mary and Joseph,” “Mankind”, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; Locke, excerpts from "Essay on Human Understanding," Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”; Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart”; Melville’s Billy Budd; Sherlock Holmes detective stories. We will read theory and scholarship from a range of critical perspectives.

Assignments will include a review of a critical article, a presentation, several short papers, all of which will build towards a substantial research paper.

Elizabeth Chang
Section 1

TR 12:30-1:45
In this seminar, we will read novels and poetry that investigate acts of physical and emotional transport and that detail ways that characters and readers can be moved by and through literature. We will also read a range of literary criticism and literary theory including critical race, postcolonial, diaspora, and queer theory. Equally importantly, the class will prepare you to write your independent Honors Essay and a good portion of the final part of the class will involve refining and developing your essay proposal. (Permission number required to enroll)

Samuel Cohen
Section 1

R 6:30PM - 8:00PM
This course is a one-hour course designed to help introduce new graduate students in English to graduate study in general and in our department in particular, to the concrete procedures and long-term goals involved in successfully negotiating their programs of study, and to the discipline. We will meet biweekly and will focus on a single topic or group of related topics for each meeting, assisted by Gregory Colón Semenza's Graduate Study for the 21st Century and any other reading we turn up in our efforts to understand the ever-changing world of graduate study in English and the professional opportunities that await at the other end of your graduate school careers. In addition to attending all class meetings, there will be a number of additional requirements, all designed to expose you to the intellectual life of the department, the discipline, and the humanities as well as to the professionalization I will be encouraging through the year.

Joanna Hearne
Section 1

R 10-11:15
The goal of this workshop will be to expose and immerse graduate students in the genres that they will be required to master as they make their way through the profession: dissertation, article, conference abstract and paper, fellowship/grant application, critical introduction, and job materials. This course is meant to offer students who are emerging from their comps a structured environment in which writing (and a whole lot of talking about writing) will happen on a regular basis. Additionally, this course will aim to address the need for graduate students to begin preparing themselves for the job market by sending out an article and drafting job materials before the fall they go on the market. This course will meet once a week for the entire year. Only students who plan on taking the course for the entire year should apply. The application process will be advertised at the end of Spring 2013.

Stephen Karian
Section 2

T 11-1:130
This course will provide intensive preparation and support for graduate students going on the job market. We will workshop job letters, CVs, dissertation abstracts, statements of teaching philosophy, writing samples, and job talks. We will also practice MLA interviews, campus interviews, job talks, and teaching demonstrations. Readings for the course will come primarily from Kathryn Hume, Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs (revised edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and other sources. Because the job market is fast-paced in the fall (job postings begin to appear in mid-September and initial deadlines are as early as mid-October), students are strongly advised to work over the summer. Specifically, they should: 1) acquire Kathryn Hume's book and read her first chapter; 2) prepare the following items for the first class meeting: drafts of job letters, CVs, statements of teaching philosophy, and (for literature students) dissertation abstracts; and 3) arrange for recommendation letters to be ready for the fall. They are also required to attend the job market meeting in May (time and date to be announced). 

Carsten Strathausen
Section 1

M 7-9:30
Type description here. 

Karen Piper
Section 1

R 6:30-9
Starting in literature departments in the 1980s, postcolonial theory quickly spread  across disciplinary boundaries and today impacts much of academia.  However, the field of economics has remained largely removed from its influence, even though, according to James C. Scott, the "free market" is a state-imposed high modernist idea initially developed in the colonies to quantify and "make legible" peasant life.  This course begins by looking at the colonial interests of the founding members of British classical economics, the main economic model used today, and then examine individual economic motives for colonization as described in Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized.  We then learn the basics of postcolonial theory, reading essays from Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory.  We will also read Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, an important study about the universalizing tendencies of European economics and other modes of thought, and James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, which examines how discourses of power--including economics--function at multiple layers of deception, failure, and revival.  Finally, we conclude with recent writings on postcolonial economics in Postcolonial Economies, looking at modes of resistance and alternative economic systems.  This class is useful for anyone who wants a better understanding of the connection between classical economics, Marxism, and postcolonial theory, as well as literary scholars who want to understand the basics of postcolonial theory and its application to reading literature.  Finally, non-literary scholars are welcome--i.e. folklorists, economists, etc.--who are interested in the origins of the economic theory that now dominates contemporary life, as well as its impact upon rural communities around the world.     

Ellie Ragland
Section 2

T 7-9:30
Type description here. 

Elisa Glick
Section 3

W 1-3:30
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. 

Emma Lipton
Section 1

T 12:30-3
This course will study the drama in the context of medieval cultures of performance that were shaped by practices of sacrament, liturgy, confession and in the context of the devotional culture of the late Middle Ages, which often privileged the emotional and identificatory practice known as “affective piety.”  We will discuss the social function of Biblical drama performed on the streets of late medieval towns, focusing on the intersections of theology and civic politics.  We will consider the ways that drama engages with allegory and typology and how it theorizes temporality and truth. We will examine the records of medieval performance and consider how medieval drama constructed its own theatricality.

We will read a range of critical approaches, including ritual, gender and performance theory.  Attention will be given to influential criticism of the past, and to newer work focused on such topics as memory and cognition; ethics; affect theory; and the aesthetic turn in medieval studies.

Texts will include pageants from the Corpus Christi cycle plays; miracle plays such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; saint’s plays such as the Digby Mary Magdalene and civic entry pageants. The course will end with a brief consideration of the medievalism of early modern drama and of modern revivals of medieval theater.

David Read
Section 1

W 4-6:30
We will be studying only two poems in this seminar, but they are BIG poems--works that could easily be called world-encompassing. As the greatest monument of Elizabethan literature outside of the drama, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene rewards study from almost any critical angle. It is also the best English example of the romance-epic, a poetic form that flourished during the Renaissance but did not survive into the long eighteenth century (though its traces persisted in the rising genre of the novel). As preface to The Faerie Queene we will read an English verse translation of Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, an obvious model for Spenser's poem but also a hugely entertaining narrative in its own right, with noble knights (both male and female), wicked villains, witches and wizards, monsters, many magical items, a flying horse, and even a trip to the moon! Students will be required to write a seminar paper in addition to preparing several class presentations on topics connected with our reading.

Stephen Karian
Section 1

R 4-6:30
This course will explore major works of eighteenth-century fiction, with attention to the diverse range of forms and themes in this period. We will also focus on important secondary materials relevant to the study of eighteenth-century fiction, including but not limited to debates about "the rise of the novel." Upon completion of this course, students will be familiar with the main trends in the criticism of eighteenth-century fiction, will know how to use the major research tools (both printed and electronic) to research fiction from this period, and will complete a major research paper on a topic relevant to this course. Expected assignments will include a scholarly book review, oral presentations, various other assignments, and a seminar paper. In addition to about a dozen scholarly articles, likely assigned readings will include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Penelope Aubin, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. More details about specific books will be announced later this spring. 

Samuel Cohen
Section 1

F 1-3:30 
This course will examine the loosely-defined genre known as literary reportage (or literary journalism, or long-form journalism) as a contemporary phenomenon, as a postwar phenomenon (from Hersey’s Hiroshima to the New Journalism), and in the context of its relationship to the novel, both the contemporary sociopolitical novel of the present and also the longer history of the novel from its 18th-century rise to late-19th-century Realism to early-20th-century muckraking. Texts TBD,  but the primary-text possibilities include Chris Bachelder, Eula Biss, Daniel DeFoe, Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Lydia Millet, Upton Sinclair, Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, David Foster Wallace, and Tom Wolfe; there will also be secondary reading on the nature and history of literary reportage and the novel.

Marly Swick
Section 1

M 4-6:30
Type description here. 

Instructor TBA
Section 1

W 7-9:30

Scott Cairns
Section 1

T 6:30-9
Our course this semester will focus on "the line" in contemporary poetry.  We will begin with a study of two texts, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (edited by Rosko and Vander Zee) and The Art of the Poetic Line (by James Longenbach).  Our purpose will be to become increasingly canny about the choice we make with lines, and increasingly accomplished at producing lines that work, lines that do work beyond simply moving along a syntax.

Each student will produce 8 or more poems to be presented to workshop; I would like the poet (post workshop of his/her poem) to be ready to discuss the choices made in the lining of the poem.

As you are here, presumably, to develop your skills as a teacher of writing as well as your skills as a poet, each student will be expected to take very seriously the development of every other student, giving full critical attention to every poem submitted for workshop, indicating in writing and in classroom conversation how that poem might become a richer, more rewarding text for the attentive reader. 

In any event, besides this developing accomplishment with the line and with the discussion of the line, we hope to establish—more generally—a reliable, ongoing dialogic practice, one that enables ongoing relationships with prior texts, and that will assist our own continuing production over a lifetime of writing.  And more than that, we hope to develop an efficacious vocabulary, a provisional way of articulating what we come to understand as the generative process of our being in continuing dialogue with literary precursors.

Cornelius Eady
Section 1

M 2-4:30
This course will examine verse plays. Student will read, analyze and perform a selection of plays written and performed in verse, and will complete and perform a one act (30-40 pages) by the end of the semester.

This course may also examine the various ways performance (slam, hip-hop, video) may be incorporated into scripts. [Cross-listed with Theatre 8987]