Courses of Instruction Fall 2023
ENG 6a, The American Renaissance
Explores the transformation of U.S. literary culture before the Civil War: transcendentalism, the romance, the slave narrative, domestic fiction, sensationalism, and their relation to the visual art and architecture of the period. Authors will include Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Poe, Ridge, and Crafts.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 10b, Poetry: A Basic Course
Designed as a first course for all persons interested in the subject. It is intended to be basic without being elementary. The subject matter will consist of poems of short and middle length in English from the earliest period to the present.
Laura Quinney
ENG 12a, Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence.
Emilie Diouf
ENG 19a, Introduction to Creative Writing Workshop
Fall 2023 topic: That's So Pathetic!
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. A workshop for beginning writers.
Pathos, as derived from Greek, is the ability of artwork to appeal, emotionally, to its readers. The effective use of language and literary devices to extend the personal as an invitation is what some may argue makes literature successful. This creative writing course will explore essay, poetry, short story and dramatic writing to engage pathos. Student writers will engage love, fear, revenge and an array of other emotions as both content and craft move. Using the anthology Pathetic Literature edited by Eileen Myles, this course will challenge students to write at the intersection of authenticity and technique to get close to the truth they wish to explore in their own writing.
Porsha Olayiwola
AAPI/ENG 22b, Asian American Literature
With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Howie Tam
ENG 30a, Introduction to Graphic Novels
Introduces students to the genre conventions and theoretical context necessary for the critical study of graphic novels. In particular, we examine single-author graphic novels that trouble the border between fiction and nonfiction--memoirs, graphic reportage, and speculative histories.
Jerome Tharaud
ENG 31a, What Is It Like To Be An Animal: Other Minds in Literature
A study of literature that examines human-nonhuman relations and animal subjectivity. We will look at how thinkers have characterized essential differences between "human" and "animal," as well as modernist literary responses that reimagine the chasm between the "rational human" and "instinctual animal." Readings include Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Cora Diamond, and contemporary animal studies scholarship. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.
Daniel Schwartz
ENG 33a, Shakespeare
May be repeated once for credit. A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career.
William Flesch
ENG 46a, Native American Storytelling
Explores Native American storytelling practices in anglophone literature from the early 1800s to the present day. Course material will highlight prominent figures within Native American literature throughout history and will cover a range of non-fiction and fiction texts, including biographies, novels, films, and podcasts. Special one-time offering, fall 2023.
Anik Chartrand
ENG 52a, Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures.
Emilie Diouf
ENG 73a, Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance
Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed.
Ramie Targoff
ENG 79a, Screenwriting Workshop: Beginning Screenplay
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit. Fundamentals of screenwriting: structure, plot, conflict, character, and dialogue. Students read screenwriting theory, scripts, analyze files, and produce an outline and the first act of an original screenplay.
Marc Weinberg
AAAS/ENG 80a, Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking.
Faith Smith
ENG 102a, Ghosts of Race
Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia.
Brandon Callender
ENG 109b, Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit. This workshop will focus on short fiction--stories ten pages and under in length. We will use writing exercises, assigned readings, and essays on craft to discuss structure, character development, point of view, and other elements of fiction. While appropriate for all levels, this workshop might be of special interest to writers who want a secure foundation in the basics.
Christopher Castellani
ENG 113b, Performing Climate Justice
Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics?
Thomas King
ENG 119a, Fiction Workshop
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit. An advanced fiction workshop. Students are expected to compose and revise their fiction, complete typed critiques of each other's work weekly, and discuss readings based on examples of various techniques.
Stephen McCauley
ENG 119b, Poetry Workshop: Special Topics in Poetry
Fall 2023 topic: Mild Obsession: The Chapbook
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit. This special topics poetry workshop will center the chapbook. The poetry chapbook is a small collection of poems that fit together thematically. Student writers enrolled in this course will look at an array of authors (Danez Smith, Anne Risenberg, Yves Olade, Stacey Waithe, etc. etc.) and their published chapbooks. This generative course asks students to read and critique an array of poetry as a framework to fine-tuning their own writing, style, and voice. Writing assignments will center observation and obsession as a means of writing themed collections. By the end of semester, students will produce a hand-bound themed chapbook of 12-18 poems.
Porsha Olayiwola
CLAS/ENG 140a, Premodern Disability Studies Across the Mediterranean
The course charts disability in the Mediterranean literary tradition, particularly through the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods. Students will learn to identify the literary markers of the disabled body as well as the underlying philosophical and theological idea of the body and soul and their purpose. Students will engage with the figures of alterity through the lens of disability studies. We will consider the concept of disability from a feminist vantage, particularly through the writings of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Susan Wendell, and as a shifting theoretical framework through the social, cultural, medical, and religious models of disability.
Catherine Shepard Bloomer
ENG 141b, Poetry and Myth
Studies the way modern English-language poets have adapted traditional myth and legend, with attention to the anthropological and literary theory of myth. The poems treat, variously, Classical, Irish and Yoruba mythology, as well as Arthurian legend. Authors include: W.B. Yeats, Audre Lorde, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Wole Solyinka, and H.D.
Laura Quinney
ENG 142b, Black Queer Literatures
Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability).
Brandon Callender
ENG 144a, Medieval Travel Writing
Examining medieval travel literature from the Old English period to the early accounts of sixteenth-century explorers in the New World, this class will consider how the area of medieval travel writing exposes how race is framed in relation to gender, disability, multifaith encounters, critical animal studies, and thick mapping.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 149a, Screenwriting Workshop: Writing the Streaming Series
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information. May be repeated for credit. Introduces students to the craft of writing for a variety of television programming formats, including episodic, late-night, and public service announcements. Students will read and view examples and create their own works within each genre.
Marc Weinberg
ENG 152b, Arthurian Literature
A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative.
Dorothy Kim
ENG 153a, Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century
Reading libertine and erotic writing alongside medical and philosophical treatises and commercially mainstream fiction, we will ask how practices of writing and reading sex contributed to the emergence and surveillance of a private self knowable through its bodily sex and sensations.
Thomas King
ENG 176b, Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius
Explores the novels of England's most inventive and surprising worldbuilders, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their experiments in depicting unexpected aspects of reality unsettled their era's ideas about gender and class and the hidden workings of inequality. How did their innovative ways of depicting subjectivity, the passage of time, and the relationship between the ideal and the actual shape Modernist fiction'as well as the narrative arts of our own day, from film to television and beyond?
John Plotz
ENG 200a, Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
A broad-based theory course that will include a unit on research methods.
Caren Irr
ENG 215a, Milton and the Shelleys
A graduate seminar on Milton, primarily Paradise Lost, and his reception in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley.
William Flesch
ENG 240a, Genre, Form, Mode: Realism and Its Others (Genre Trouble)
Realism, even at its 19th century apex in Great Britain, always had a vexed relationship with neighboring novelistic genres: “we have never been realist.” By way of present-day theoretical and critical debates on realism’s limits and affordances (Jameson, Ranciere, Gallagher, Moi, Woloch et. al.) we explore, taxonomize and theorize the contact zone where canonical realist fiction (Gaskell, Eliot) shapes and is shaped by sensation (Wilde), naturalism (Hardy), fantasy (Jefferies), horror, “scientific romance” (Wells), the “verse novel.” Culminates with realist-adjacent Modernism (Ford, Woolf).
John Plotz
ENG 350a, Proseminar
Focuses on professional development, including teaching competency.
John Plotz