Department of English Course Descriptions
Fall 2015
AMST 200: Introduction to American Studies
Henigman
How and why do we study America? One of the attractions of the field of American
Studies has been that its multidisciplinary approach seems to promise a coherent and unitary way
of “explaining” American culture. But is such coherence possible or desirable? How have
traditionally resonant myths affected how we view American history and society and America’s
place in the world, and what alternative paradigms are possible and useful? We will examine
three ideas that have tended to be part of the American self-concept: American exceptionalism,
the melting pot, and economic self-determination (including upward mobility). What are the
origins of these ideas, and how have they worked in culture? What are the costs of their currency
in American ideology? Throughout the semester, we will be mindful as well of international
perspectives on these American myths and realities. This course fulfills General Education
requirement Cluster Two, Group One.
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ENG 221: Literature/Culture/Ideas: Literature and the Environment
Castellano
This course will examine nature writing and literary representations of human
interdependency with the environment and animals. Literary analysis in the course will ask: what
is our relationship to nature? What role does literature and language play in shaping a cultural
understanding of the environment? Beginning with the Romantic response to industrialization,
the course will examine the themes of wilderness exploration and advocacy; place-based writing;
the environmental consequences of imperialism; and animals and human animality. Moreover,
by critically reading environmental literature in several genres—non-fiction nature writing,
poetry, and fiction—this course will further engage students in the practice of literary analysis
and close-reading.
*****
ENG 221: Literature/Culture/Ideas: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature
Foster
Postcolonial scholar Edward Said reminds us of an important historical fact: that by 1914
Western powers had colonized roughly 85% of the globe. This astonishing fact suggests that
when we read postcolonial literature, that is, literature from formerly colonized places around
the world, we must first begin with the historical fact of colonialism and the ways in which it
bears upon the present. In this course we will study the historical, economic, and cultural
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 2
processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization as well as “postcolonial” literary
responses to these processes. We will discuss representations of race, racism, gender, and global
class iniquity. In addition, we will attend to issues of migration, identity, diaspora, and other
themes that subtend postcolonialism and contemporary global literary studies. We will use
disciplinary tools within the field to analyze novels, poetry, prose, film, and images, each of
which will become the objects of our knowledge, class discussions, essays, and blog comments.
Primary authors may include: Frantz Fanon, Léopold Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Osman
Sembene, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Fatou Diome, Patricia Powell, Hari Kunzru, and others.
.
*****
ENG 221: Literature/Culture/Ideas: Baseball Literature
Baragona
Social historian Jacques Barzun famously wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and
mind of America had better learn baseball.” Baseball manager Suishu Tobita said, “Baseball is
more than just a game. It has eternal value. Through it, one learns the beautiful and noble spirit
of Japan.” This course will focus on the attraction creative writers and thinkers have felt for
baseball as a sport, as a symbol of American culture, and as a vehicle for examining the human
condition. Then it looks at the way baseball has been adopted and adapted by other cultures,
most notably in Latin America, where baseball literature is often associated with politics, and
Japan, where baseball is intimately connected with the philosophies of Taoism, Bushido, and Zen
(with side trips to China and Europe). The goal is to illuminate the sport’s malleability and to use
it as a window on the world. Why is there so much good fiction, non-fiction, and poetry about
baseball, why have countries outside the United States embraced it, and how have they remade it
in their own image? What can we learn through baseball about other cultures and ourselves?
Perhaps New Yorker editor Roger Angell got it right when he said, “Baseball seems to have been
invented for the sole purpose of explaining everything else.”
*****
ENG 222: Genre(s): Women's Literature
Thompson
This course examines texts by contemporary women writers to explore the themes of
women’s development and growth. Works may include
Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Allison, Bastard out of Carolina
Bedford, Yoruba Girl Dancing
Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Kincaid, Lucy
Plath, The Bell Jar
Morrison, Sula
Robinson, Housekeeping
Satrapi, Persepolis
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 3
*****
ENG 235: Survey of English Literature: From Beowulf to the Eighteenth Century
Goode
The main purpose of this survey of British literature from the Middle Ages through the
18 century is to introduce you to major authors and texts of the period while encouraging you to
recognize how these texts from the past hold relevance to our current exploration of the human
condition. The course is divided into three periods, with texts and authors representative of each
period and literary movement: the medieval period, the Early Modern period (16th and early 17th
centuries), and the “long eighteenth century” (1660-1800). We will focus pointedly on issues of
class, gender, sexuality, and national identity. We will pay close attention to the texts
themselves as well as the historical contexts within which they were produced. As with any
survey course, many significant texts and authors have not been included. Those works and
authors selected for our study, however, give significant voice stylistically and rhetorically to the
concerns and issues of their times. Although this course will have the large enrollment expected
from an introductory General Education class, it will follow a discussion format with students
being encouraged and expected to participate, and with the vast majority of information
disseminated through these discussions.
th
This course fulfills the GenED Cluster II Literature requirement, and one of the literature
survey requirements for the English Major.
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ENG 236: Survey of English Literature: Eighteenth Century to Modern
Section 0001
White
This course is designed as a survey of British literature from the late eighteenth through
the twenty-first centuries. The readings selected are meant to be representative rather than
comprehensive. Given the broad scope of such a class, we will narrow our view to approach
these works from a narratological standpoint, in terms of voice and its relationship specifically to
literary form. Questions we might ask of any one work include: Whose voice is this? What is the
voice saying? What is the voice trying to communicate, and to whom? What impact do outside
forces, powers or influences have on the voice (including social convention, revolution,
industrialism, patriarchy, or colonialism)? What does the speaker realize or not realize?
This course will engage students in the practice of literary analysis and close-reading, and
challenge them to understand the theme of voice against the backdrop of broader political, social
and philosophical developments, paying special attention to the Woman Question, the expansion
of Empire, and the challenges of modernity. Related subtopics will include the relationship of
poet or author to the speaking voice; associated forms such as the greater Romantic lyric, the
epistolary novel, autobiography, and dramatic monologue; patriarchal, feminist, imperial and
colonial voices.
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Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 4
ENG 236: Survey of English Literature: Eighteenth Century to Modern
Section 0002
Pennington
In this overview of English literature from the last two hundred years or so, we’ll
examine works of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama. Paying careful attention to historical context,
thematic content, and poetic and narrative form, we’ll attempt to generate a rudimentary
understanding of what’s so “English” about this literature. In the process, we’ll trace shifting
ideas about national identities, authority and authorship, gender, and sociability through the
literary creations of diverse writers.
*****
ENG 239: Studies in World Literature: Literatures of Global English since 1945
Babcock
This course serves as an introduction to world Anglophone literatures since 1945, with
special attention to English as a global language with a colonial history. Our texts are produced
in places where, historically, English has been the language of imperialism and colonization,
ranging from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Keeping in
mind this bloody history, we will consider what it means to think in terms of a “global” English
literature today, and identify common literary themes, problems, and strategies that have arisen
across different areas of the world. How do postcolonial writers go about using English for their
own purposes, occupying a potentially treacherous literary ground?
*****
ENG 239H Studies in World Literature (Honors)
Mookerjea-Leonard
This course introduces students to representative works of South Asian literature
produced over the course of the 20th century. It aims to cultivate an awareness of the historical,
cultural, and intellectual contexts of writings from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.
Texts for the course have been selected from a range of genres, including the novel, short story,
drama and poetry. Films will be used to provide a visual complement to the texts. Through close
reading and analyses of literary texts, and discussions in class, the course endeavors to refine
students’ skills of critical thinking, reading and writing.
*****
ENG 247: Survey of American Literature I
Harrison
This course surveys dominant themes in American literature and culture from the AngloEuropean arrival in North America through 1865. Covering a vast period of transformation in
life and thought in America and around the world, the course will explore those questions,
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 5
problems, ideas, and interests that, taken together, form what is commonly called the American
experience. Most basically, we’ll be interested in Americanness: what is it? Can it even be said
to exist? How have various incarnations of it been used, abused, and (mis)understood? How has
it shaped and been shaped by the works of imagination and experience – especially, of course,
literature – of people who have whether willingly or not been deemed “American”?
Methodologically, the course will engage students in the practice of literary and cultural analysis.
Our approach will be grounded in close reading, or, as M.H. Abrams described it, “the detailed
analysis of the complex interrelationships and multiple meanings” contained within a text. We
will situate our readings of texts within the broader social, political, economic, cultural, and
historical contexts of the periods. Students take three exams, write three in-class essays, and take
regular reading quizzes.
*****
ENG 247H: Survey of American Literature I (Honors)
Rebhorn
This course aims to explore the foundations of American Literature from its origins to,
arguably, the most significant event in this country’s history—the American Civil War. Helping
to guide our exploration of the diverse literary texts constituting “American Literature” during
this time period, we will be looking at the numerous formal, stylistic, and thematic ways in
which all of these texts “contest,” or challenge, what it meant to be American. Exploring the rich
texts of this course, therefore, from Puritan sermons to Enlightenment autobiographies, from
Transcendental essays to slave narratives, we will not discover the “real” American experience
beneath this era. Rather, we will begin to see the ways in which these contests over the meaning
of race, gender, history, class, and religion supplied the foundational energy that drove this
country onto the national stage.
*****
ENG 248: Survey of American Literature: From the Civil War to the Modern Period
Facknitz
English 248 is a survey course dedicated to American literature and culture since the
Civil War. It meets general education goals and objectives and serves as an overview of the
subject and period for English majors. The course emphasizes reading and writing skills,
cultural awareness, and historical understanding. In-class essays and exams.
*****
ENG 260: Survey of African American Literature
Fagan
This course introduces students to major authors, literary forms, and movements in
African American literature. We study the emergence and flourishing of African American
literature over the past two centuries, noting common as well as diverging themes, techniques,
and arguments over the coherence of African American literature as a genre. Throughout the
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 6
semester we will explore antebellum, Reconstruction, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, Black
Arts, and Post-Soul writers in their historical contexts as well as make connections between texts
across historical periods. Students can expect to complete in-class reading quizzes, short essays,
a midterm and a final exam.
*****
ENG 299: Writing About Literature
Section 0001
Facknitz
Writing about Literature introduces English majors to several critical perspectives,
sophisticates their reading ability, hones their interpretive skills, renovates their writing,
rehabilitates their prejudices, and in general prepares them to succeed as English majors. The
emphasis of the course is on formal writing, creative synthesis, close reading, and reading in
critical and historical context.
*****
ENG 299: Writing About Literature
Section 0002
Babcock
This course will provide students with the skills and knowledge necessary for
interpreting, researching and writing about literature. Students will learn basic literary terms,
acquire an understanding of canon formation and transformation, and gain a knowledge of
literary theories.
*****
ENG 299: Writing About Literature
Section 0003
Parker
This course has several components, some practical and others more theoretical. You will
learn to do what is called a “close reading,” and you’ll practice this technique throughout the
semester on lyric poems, a play by Shakespeare, and a short novel by Stevenson. As we do this,
we will explore several basic—but surprisingly complicated—critical concepts (author, reader,
text) by reading several well-known theoretical essays. Finally, we’ll examine a selection of
scholarly articles on The Tempest and two collections of historical documents on “The Strange
Case.”
As we proceed, you’ll produce several close readings of poems for your journal, a few
summaries of critical articles, and three formal essays.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 7
ENG 299: Writing About Literature
Section 0004
Federico
The purpose of this course is to build and reinforce good habits of close reading and
careful textual analysis. We will spend considerable time looking hard at our primary texts and
the genres they represent. We’ll also study various critical approaches as practiced by experts;
learn how to pursue sound research and write great English papers; and develop confidence and
poise in speaking about our encounters with sophisticated literary works.
*****
ENG 302: Special Topics in Literature and Language: Linguistic Approaches to Literature
Section 0001
Cote
As a beautiful tapestry is shaped by the thread and the loom, so is a work of literature
shaped by language. A big difference, however, is that with literary “tapestries,” a reader must
work with thread and loom as well. We know, of course, that we need to be English speakers to
read a poem or a novel written in English, but it is also true that having a conscious
understanding of linguistic patterns and details in a literary work can be a valuable resource for
appreciating and analyzing that work. This course examines a variety of such linguistic details
and patterns that can be and have been considered in literary analysis. The objectives of this
course are for students to learn some of the vocabulary for talking about language in literature
and also to develop some skill with using various types of linguistic knowledge to analyze
literary works. In doing so, students will advance their ability to read and discuss linguistic texts
as well, laying foundations for continuing exploration of linguistic approaches to literature.
Students in this course will also enhance their understanding of why it is so difficult to
characterize “literary language” in a way that distinguishes it with any reliability from other
linguistic forms.
*****
ENG 302: Special Topics in Literature and Language:
Tolkien: The Legends and Literature Behind The Lord of the Rings
Section 0002
Rankin
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001-03) and The Hobbit (2012-14) film
franchises have brought J. R. R. Tolkien’s work to wide audiences. Tolkien (1892-1973), a
professor of medieval language and literature at the University of Oxford, has exerted a very
substantial influence upon twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture, and Jackson’s
films have only enhanced that influence. Impressive accomplishments in their own right,
Tolkien’s two best-known books have single-handedly inaugurated the entire genre of the
modern fantasy novel. However, they constitute the tip of an enormous, and still largely
undiscovered, iceberg. During his time in the armed service during World War 1, Tolkien began
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 8
to invent a new language—Quenya—and to compose a series of myths and legends that would
explain the origin and subsequent history of those who spoke this language—the High Elves.
This was the project to which he devoted his literary career. He suspended work on this material
in the 1930s in order to write The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), and he
returned to it with new purpose thereafter. He continued to work on his “legendarium,” as he
came to call this body of writing, until 1973, the year of his death.
Since the 1970s, Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, has edited and posthumously
published many of these writings. The Silmarillion (1977) and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and
Middle Earth (1980) represent initial offerings. They were followed by printed versions of
numerous unfinished drafts, manuscript fragments, and miscellaneous lore in a 12-volume
sequence titled The History of Middle Earth (1983-96). Still other texts have since followed,
including what may be Tolkien’s greatest work, the epic masterpiece The Children of Hurin
(2007); and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009), Tolkien’s adaptation of the medieval
Norse Poetic Edda.
This course will assess Tolkien’s ongoing importance and influence. Our goals will be (a)
to develop sufficient familiarity with Tolkien’s literary career as to recognize and understand
allusions in The Lord of the Rings (book and film) to the broader legendarium; (b) to master a
selection of Germanic medieval literature that shaped Tolkien’s literary vision and methods of
composition, and (c) to understand Tolkien’s writing as a serious response to the challenges and
problems of the twentieth century. Course texts will include the following works by Tolkien:
The Silmarillion
The Children of Húrin
The Book of Lost Tales, Parts 1-2
The Lay of Leithian
The Lay of the Children of Húrin
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
Selections, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle Earth
Selections, The History of Middle Earth
Selected shorter Tolkien poems and essays related to the course topic
As well as
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda
Selections, The Poetic Edda
Selections, The Saga of the Volsungs
Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs
Students will produce short written reports and two longer writing projects.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 9
ENG 302: Special Topics in Literature and Language: American Psycho: Madness in 19thCentury American Literature
Section 0003
Rebhorn
As much as the American nineteenth century was defined by the innovation and growth
of the industrialized nation—the inventions of the steamship, for instance, as well as the
telegraph and trans-continental railroad, among others—this boom also had a dark
underside. Rising crime rates, particularly in the metropoles, the publication of conduct
manuals, and the birth of the American asylum, both complicate the story of American progress
as simply progressive, and suggest that the origins of certain celebrated types of American
individualism occurred simultaneously with the beginnings of various forms of American
madness. This course explores this dynamic by focusing on a range of literary texts that
represent madness as the underside to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called American “selfreliance.” By reading works by Poe, Melville, Brown, James, and others, through medical
theories of madness, histories of the asylum, and lurid reports from the penny press, this course
ultimately aims to paint a fuller, richer, and more nuanced picture of what it meant to be
“American” in the nineteenth century. NB: While a previous knowledge of the period is not
required, ENG 247 is highly recommended. This course fulfills the requirement for the pre-1900
overlay for the English major.
*****
ENG 302: Special Topics in Literature and Language: Suburban Blues, Ennui, and the
Beat Hippie Revolution
Section 0004
L’Heureux
From The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; from June
Cleaver in her kitchen with high heels and ear rings; to Erica Jong’s "zipless f..." in Fear of
Flying; we will travel from American 1950s conformity and angst to its antithetical counter
culture with its liberation and eventual implosion in a drug-induced helter skelter (Joan Didion).
Side trips will include John Cheever, John Updike, the Beat poets, and films The Graduate and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
You must have a ticket for this trip: three papers, Canvas postings, and student
presentations.
*****
ENG 305: Mythology
Klemt
Study of the nature and meaning of Greek myths as interpreted and reinterpreted in
significant works of ancient and modern literature.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 10
ENG 308: Introduction to Linguistics
Cote
Language is an essential part of who we are as human beings. It has been described as a
biological imperative, as a communicative tool, and as an art. We all have extensive and subtle
language skills and, indeed, we all have opinions about what is good or bad language. Few of us,
however, really understand what language is. This course is a broad survey of the theoretical, the
historical, the psychological, the biological, and the sociocultural issues related to human
language in general and English in particular. Objectives for this course include the following:
for students to become aware of how important the study of human language is to understanding
human cognition, behavior, and society; for students to learn that knowing the “structure” or
grammar of a language requires much more than just knowing a set of rules for good and bad
sentences and to understand that the study of language is more than just the study of grammar;
for students to recognize some general types of variation in different human languages; for
students to recognize syntax, semantics, phonetics, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and
other subfields of linguistics and to understand basic concepts and issues in these subfields; for
students to gain some perspective both on how much has been learned about language and on
how many more questions there still are to be answered; for students to be able to apply general
linguistic concepts and vocabulary to particular examples and to related fields of research; and
for students to have gained a novice ability to read additional linguistic sources and to apply the
information in these sources to language as they find it in the real world.
*****
ENG 309 Traditional English Grammar
Johnson
Introduction to traditional grammar, probing its logic, system and history, with an
examination of modern applications of conventional rules.
*****
ENG 313: Sixteenth Century British Literature
Rankin
This course offers a detailed overview of the principal writers in English during the
sixteenth-century, including John Foxe, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas More, Thomas Nashe, Sir
Philip Sidney, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and others. We will ask challenging questions of
these writers that concern, among other topics, problems related to canon formation and
periodization. This period has been variously termed, and we will take up the question of how
period labels shape our reading practices and prompt us to make literary judgments. We will ask
whether the designation “Renaissance literature” is even productive: it implies a “rebirth” that
has traditionally been associated with the extraordinary writing of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare,
and their contemporaries, even though these writers demonstrated very considerable continuity
with medieval authors and literary genres and forms. Our investigation will include focus on the
poetry and politics of the English Reformation; the literature of the nation; issues concerning
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 11
literary patronage, literature and rhetoric; the uses of and responses to the classical and medieval
traditions; humanism and satire; literature and the printing press; manuscript studies; and more.
We will also investigate royal verse, issues concerning gender and authorship, and the earliest
examples of prose fiction in English.
English 313 satisfies the intermediate and overlay requirements (i.e., literature before
1700 or literature before 1900) for the English major.
*****
ENG 317: Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Romances
Favilla
A poet paints with words; a painter, with his brush; a sculptor, with his chisel. These
artists present their audience with a perfect text: one that can be experienced over and over again,
but never changed. That is not to say that a reader or viewer is locked into the same response
each time she reads Paradise Lost, contemplates the Mona Lisa's smile, or wonders at the height
of David. But the art form itself remains the same: carved in stone, so to speak. Drama, however,
is live. The playwright paints with breath and bone, and his art dies in the very process of
creation. Though a play may be read, the reader can never forget that she fingers a skeleton as
she turns each page. A character’s expression, movement, speech, or pause must be continuously
imagined, for stage directions are often kept at a minimum. Given that, the first goal of this class
is to teach the student how to read drama: to visualize the play as production; to analyze the
interaction between actor and audience (especially in the Renaissance); to recognize that,
regardless of the author’s intent, the theatrical moment is rife with change, as its medium is the
human being. The second goal of this course is to help the student recognize and analyze the
origins of Shakespearean Drama. Jonson defined Shakespeare as a man for all time, and
Coleridge heralded Shakespeare’s natural genius, but the Bard did not write in a vacuum.
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I and Part II owe an obvious debt to the morality plays that
preceded them. His Titus Andronicus and Hamlet revisit Seneca’s bloody revenge tragedies and
stoic philosophy. His chaste Juliet breathes new life into the Petrarchan Ideal, just as his not-sochaste Cleopatra embodies much of the love/hate portrait of the Dark Lady. Given that, the
course readings include Seneca's Thyestes, two morality plays (Mankind and Everyman), and
English Renaissance poetry.
*****
ENG 325: Romantic Literature
Castellano
This course will examine British literature of the Romantic period, 1776-1832. We will
read the work of the canonical British Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Clare, and Keats) and popular prose writers (Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey and Mary
Shelley). Attention will also be given to the historical and political context of the Romantic
period through reading critical articles and a final project that investigates primary materials in
the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database.
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 12
*****
ENG 340: Modern British and Irish Literature
White
This course focuses on British and Irish fiction from roughly the first third of the
twentieth century, and how that literature highlights relationships between modernity and
modernism, history and form, artistic theory and practice. Part of our approach will be to identify
voice and view, looking to the formal, or narratological, choices that help shape our idea of the
modern novel and short stories. Moreover, we will address the central themes in broader
contexts, accounting for intellectual perspectives offered by colonialism and imperialism, as well
as innovations in scientific theory, psychoanalysis, and mechanical and technological advances;
for historical events and trends that include industrialism and the metropolis, The Great War and
its effect on the home front; for questions of place that consider London and Dublin, the
countryside and the continent, nation and home; for shifting values surrounding social mores,
class distinctions, gender roles, propriety, and morality; for the place of the individual in the
collective, and for a sense of community in a modernity that privileges the autonomous
individual. Authors will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys.
*****
ENG 341: Contemporary British and Irish Literature
Babcock
Early in the twentieth century, the British Empire was the preeminent global superpower.
Since then, the country has gone through two deeply traumatic world wars (as well as a Cold
War), the dismantling of the empire, and numerous economic, political, social, and ecological
crises. Using a selection of recent novels and films, we will examine how British writers have
sought to reorient themselves in the world following these momentous historical shifts. This line
of inquiry will spawn broader questions: What does it mean to be “postimperial,” and what does
it have to do with being “postmodern”? How does literary experimentation contribute to the
formation of new social and political ideas? How do we decide which parts of the past to keep,
which to leave behind, and which will always remain with us regardless? Likely authors include
Jean Rhys, Roddy Doyle, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo
Ishiguro.
*****
ENG 347: Playwriting
De Sanctis
Study of the process of writing plays. Consideration of plot, character, thematic material,
conflict and dramatic structure. Emphasis on individual writing assignments.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 13
ENG 352: The American Novel to 1914: Sex and the Novel.
Henigman
"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." -- E.A.
Poe
Not only the most poetical, for nineteenth-century novels are strewn with dead heroines
as well. We will examine the ways in which nineteenth-century conventions and innovations of
narrative form both allowed sexuality into the novel and punished it. Authors may include
Foster, Hawthorne, Stoddard, James, Chopin, Wharton and Stein.
Fulfills Literature pre-1900 requirement for the English major.
*****
ENG 360: Introduction to Ethnic American Literature: Latina/o Voices
Fagan
“So who can hear
the words we speak
you and I, like but unlike,
and translate us to us
side by side?”
-Pat Mora
In this course, we will compare and contrast the narratives of contemporary Latina/o
writers who trace their heritage to Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia. We will explore the
differences between as well as the differences within these identities, asking whether the term
“Latina/o” is an appropriate collective definition. In addition to considering how race, nation,
and ethnicity shape our understandings of Latina/o identity, we will also discuss the influencing
forces of gender, sexuality, class, language, and religion.
Though the novels, stories, and poetry in this course incorporate some Spanish, no
reading knowledge of Spanish is required.
This course fulfills the “Identity, Diversity, Power” requirement for the English major.
*****
ENG 363: Native American Literature
Henigman
From Hollywood westerns to children “playing Indian”, American Indians loom large in
the American imagination. But the images pop culture gives us are little more than stereotypes:
humorous or ineffective sidekicks; savages, whether violent or noble; and overall, a tragic and
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 14
disappearing race, inarticulate, silent, absent from modern American life. However, Native
American people have not vanished and have never been silent. Throughout the centuries in
which they’ve been in contact with American newcomers, they have been writing to respond to
these distorting images and assert their own sovereignty.
This semester we will study these writings by indigenous American people from various
tribal groups. We will examine the variety of literacies available to them; the ways in which they
have engaged with settler culture and literary forms; and the various genres (as-told-to stories
and other autobiographical forms, novels, treaties and treaty speeches, and other experimental
forms) that they have employed to represent personal and national identity and experience.
Along the way, we will need to learn about the political history and cultural practices of
America’s First Peoples, about how they have respond to changing US government policies and
actions, and the varying strategies, at once realistic and principled (revitalization movements, the
creation of an “Indian public sphere”, and others) they employ to ensure their survivance as
Indian nations.
ENG 363 fulfills the Identity, Diversity, and Power requirement for the English major.
*****
ENG 369: Feminist Literary Theory
Thompson
Students will explore the history of feminist literary criticism in addition to contemporary
feminist theory. Students will gain familiarity with on-going feminist conversations, concepts
and terminology, and practice engaging with these ideas in their critical writing.
Required Texts:
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Felski, Rita. Literature After Feminism. University of Chicago Press. 2003.
S. Gilbert & S. Gubar, Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader. W. W. Norton
& Co.. 2007
Additional texts may include: Behn, Oroonoko; Bronte Jane Eyre; Larsen, Quicksand; Plath,
poetry.
*****
ENG 370: Queer Literature
Goode
The goals of this course are to provide grounding in LGBTQ literary and social history,
and to explore through our texts (literature, film, and academic essays) the historical construction
of queer identities and queer communities. Our texts and films have been selected because they
are linked to watershed moments of the western LGBTQ tradition – 1920s Paris, the Harlem
Renaissance, pre-WWII Berlin, the Stonewall Riots, feminism of the early 70s, AIDS and AIDS
activism of the 80s, and the rise of the queer civil rights movement of the late 20th-century. Part
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 15
of our objective is to trace the changing representation by queer authors of queer identities and
communities. As a mandatory component to the course, we will have screenings of
documentaries and films relevant to both queer history and queer texts on Wednesday from
5:00—7:00pm.
This course fulfills the English Major Overlay requirement for “Identity, Diversity, Power,” and
serves as a Women’s Studies Minor elective.
*****
ENG 379: Literature and Empire: The Jewel in the Crown
Mookerjea-Leonard
“The Jewel in the Crown” is a reference to Great Britain’s prized colony in India. In this
course we will combine our study of British colonial writings on the empire in India both with
contemporary Indian reflections. Together with works of fiction, which focus on a localized
experience of colonialism (the Indian subcontinent), we will read a set of critical essays which
will offer a global perspective on colonial writings.
Some of the questions we will consider are: How did literature written in the colonial era
represent the colonized, how did this impact those who were depicted, how did people deploy
literature as a way of resisting colonial representations and exploring new ways of describing a
national identity? The course examines the colonial and nationalist shaping of individual and
collective identities through literature; the intersections of race, gender, and nation; the crafting
of a new idiom in English in response to both political and literary histories; and the significance
of choices of genre and form.
*****
ENG 380: Introduction to Film (cross-listed with SMAD 380)
Parker
An introduction to the study of film as an aesthetic practice, including formal and
industrial aspects of film analysis, theoretical approaches to film, and writing and research
methodologies of film and media studies.
*****
ENG 385: Special Topics in Film Study: Race in Hollywood
Godfrey
This course will investigate the conceptualization and perpetuation of race and racism in
popular American culture by examining representations of African Americans in Hollywood
films from the birth of film to the present day. Many of America’s most enduring antiblack
stereotypes have their origin in blackface minstrelsy—stage-based racial caricatures which in the
antebellum years became America’s first form of mass entertainment. At the turn of the
twentieth century, blackface minstrelsy still retained its hold on American popular culture, and
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 16
early American films drew heavily on the racist stereotypes and conventions of blackface.
Although blackface performances began to fade from the screen in the late 1940s, many
representations of African Americans in Hollywood films both before and after that point also
had their origin in the stock characters of blackface minstrelsy. This class will begin by
examining the relationship between blackface minstrelsy and some of the most prominent early
American films, including Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and Gone with the Wind. We will
then examine a series of enduring Hollywood paradigms by comparing Civil Rights era films
such as The Defiant Ones, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to more
recent films such as Lethal Weapon, Driving Miss Daisy, and The Help. We will ask how these
paradigms have transformed, how they have remained the same, how they may challenge racist
ideology, and how they may perpetuate the very racism they claim to challenge. Finally, we will
compare recent Hollywood films such as Django Unchained and Glory to independent films
such as 12 Years a Slave and Selma, to see how mainstream and independent filmic discourses
speak differently about race, racism, and representational politics.
*****
ENG 391: Introduction to Creative Writing – Nonfiction
Section 0001
Cavanagh
This is an introductory workshop in the reading and writing of creative nonfiction, a
genre that includes memoir, personal essays, lyric essays, literary journalism, and hybrids of all
four. Creative nonfiction is rooted in actual experience as opposed to invented, and one of the
goals of this course is to help you give lived experiences a form. Toward that end, we’ll work on
developing your craft as a writer by reading and discussing a variety of nonfiction works and
paying particular attention to how published writers develop their stories. What kinds of details
do they choose to create revealing, memorable characters? Which elements of the setting do they
incorporate to create a mood, a sense of the socio-economic climate, or the values of a particular
household? How does the figurative language, or lack thereof, impact the story and your sense of
the narrator’s voice? By applying such questions to the nonfiction we read, you’ll be figuring out
how the writers put their stories together so that you may learn how to incorporate their
techniques into your own writing. All the while, you’ll be assembling a toolbox of narrative
forms, literary devices, sentence rhythms, and vocabulary in an effort to help you become a
writer with the tools to write well beyond this semester.
*****
ENG 391: Introduction to Creative Writing – Nonfiction
Section 0002
Bogard
In this introductory-level writing workshop we will study and practice the elements that
make creative nonfiction such a versatile and vibrant genre, one that promises the creative writer
a world of opportunity. Indeed, as the editors of the journal Creative Nonfiction explain, “We are
always on the lookout for true stories, well-told, about any subject.” We will read widely to
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 17
understand the breadth and possibility of the genre, surveying forms from lyric essay to memoir
to travel narrative, personal essay to narrative journalism, and practice reading as writers—
asking, “How can I learn from what they are doing, and what can I steal?” (Or, at least, borrow.)
We will learn the language creative writers use, such as “persona” and “voice” and “style,” and
practice writing essential craft features such as dialogue, scene, and reflection. We will learn the
process of the workshop, of commenting constructively on the work of our peers. And, we will
write our own essays—trying our hand at weaving sensory detail, firsthand experience, research,
vulnerability, and humor into our own “true stories, well-told.”
*****
ENG 391
Introduction to Creative Writing – Nonfiction
Sections 0003 & 0004
Varner
Through reading and writing, we will explore creative nonfiction, an umbrella term that
includes the subgenres of memoir, personal essays, literary journalism, and travel writing, among
others. We will explore the elasticity of truth and fact in our lives, while employing techniques
such as character, point of view, dialogue, and others traditionally credited to fiction writers.
Student writing will be discussed in both workshop and conferences. At the end of the semester,
each student will turn in a portfolio of three revised pieces.
*****
ENG 392: Introduction to Creative Writing – Poetry
Sections 0001, 0002, and 0003
Casteen
A basic workshop in reading and writing poetry.
*****
ENG 393: Introduction to Creative Writing – Fiction
Sections 0001, 0002, & 0003
Martin
In this class we will explore the underlying architecture of stories and find constructive
ways to improve them. To that end, we will spend the first third of the class studying stories—
many of them gleaned from recent editions of The Best American Short Stories—and reading
Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction. I will give five short-answer quizzes on assigned
readings from this writing text. I will also give many generative writing exercises in the first
third of the class. During the rest of the class, students will distribute stories or novel excerpts of
their own for workshops in which we will find ways to make their fiction more compelling.
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 18
“The first quality of good storytelling,” John Gardner says, “is storytelling….You are
trying to create a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind and that dream is broken by
bad technique.” You may be trying to create something quite different from what Gardner claims
a “good” story should be. So, we will discuss your work in light of your apparent goals. And it
may turn out that your drafts are not marred by “bad” technique. But revision is a crucial part of
the process of discovery. “It’s one of the things writing students don’t understand,” Elizabeth
Hardwick says. “They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be
disappointed. They don’t understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely
beginning even in the second or third draft.”
*****
ENG 393: Introduction to Creative Writing – Fiction
Sections 0004 & 0005
Fitzgerald
This course is an introduction to fiction writing. We will read and discuss contemporary
literature not as critics, but as artists and apprentices. Through short written exercises, we will
practice controlling elements of craft such as image, setting, and character, while exploring ways
to develop creativity. Students will also produce longer stories for workshop. Each student will
submit a final portfolio at the end of the semester. Our goal will be writing that is skilled, honest,
and guided by artistic vision.
*****
ENG 396: Advanced Composition
L'Heureux
Extensive exercises in expository writing, with emphasis on rhetorical types of
composition, designed to develop sophistication of style in the student‘s writing.
*****
ENG 401: Advanced Studies in Medieval Literature: Arthurian Literature
Baragona
ENG 401: Advanced Studies in Medieval Literature is a seminar-style topics course.
The topic for this class is Arthurian Legend. Along with the Bible and Classical myths, tales of
King Arthur are among the most widespread of European literary traditions. This course will
explore the origin and development of the legend from the earliest surviving mention of Arthur
to Sir Thomas Malory’s grand compendium at the end of the Middle Ages in England. Students
will study texts originally written in Welsh, Latin, Old French, Middle High German, and Middle
English. Each student will complete a term-long research project and present it to the class.
Enrollment cap: minimum 10, maximum 15.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 19
ENG 402: Advanced Studies in British Literature Before 1700: Sexuality & Gender in 18thCent. Literature
Goode
Exploring both canonical and little-known texts of diverse genres (poetry, drama, the
novel, medical treatises, pornography, and nonfiction prose), we will investigate in this course
certain standard literary figures of the “long” eighteenth century—the rake, the libertine, the fop,
the molly, the man of feeling, the tribade, the masculine woman, the woman of manners, the
cross-dressed woman, and the romantic friend. We will explore how these figures allowed
writers of the period to articulate or displace anxieties over the shifting paradigms of gender and
sex in the emergent modern era. In addition to reading primary texts, we will read critical essays
from leading scholars of Restoration and 18th-century studies.
This course fulfills the Literature before 1900 Overlay requirement, and one of 400-level
Course requirements for the English Major, and serves as a Women’s Studies Minor elective.
*****
ENG 403: Advanced Studies in Literature after 1700: Picturing Victorian Literature
Federico
Victorian writers aspired to the visual, to the seeing-effect of the reading experience.
John Stuart Mill said that poetry was “painting a picture to the inward eye.” Thomas Carlyle
claimed that literary creation requires “seeing the thing sufficiently.” For John Ruskin, “To see
clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.”
Two accounts have been given of the history of the visual imagination in the nineteenth
century. One stresses the predominance of realism, culminating in photography and cinema. The
other emphasizes a break with realism, an increasingly subjective organization of vision leading
to modernism. (And often the same writers are used to support either model.)
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 20
This course will explore these ideas by engaging Victorian arguments about the
importance of seeing and picturing. We will also experience for ourselves the remarkable
descriptive strategies and techniques Victorian novelists found to organize and envision the
myriad phenomena of their changing world.
*****
ENG 410: Advanced Studies in Author: Larry Brown and His Literary Idols
Section 0001
Cash
Larry Brown (1951-2004) was one of the first of a “new” development among
contemporary Southern writers: he was arguably the most original of the “Rough South” writers
who began their careers in the late 1980s. Primarily self-taught, Brown learned from the writers
he idolized, among them Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and Cormac McCarthy.
The class will begin with “The Bear,” by Faulkner, several short stories by O’Connor, A Feast of
Snakes by Harry Crews, and Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. This novel was Brown’s favorite
throughout his life. After reading these works, the class will concentrate on fiction by Brown
himself, including selected short stories from Facing the Music and Big Bad Love and his major
novels: Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, and Fay. Students in the class will write four formal
papers, a research article, and be responsible for various presentations, including a power point
review of one of the essays from Larry Brown and the Blue Collar South.
*****
ENG 410: Advanced Studies in Author: John Milton
Section 0002
Johnson
The works of the greatest poet in English, studied through a biographical lens.
*****
ENG 413: Advanced Studies in Literature and Ideas: Global Black Literature
Foster
Has black literature always been global? Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, for example, spans Africa, the Caribbean, South
America, the United States, and Britain. In the United States Frederick Douglass lectured
on Haiti, and W.E.B. du Bois and Richard Wright thought carefully about Africa.
Furthermore, both continental African and Caribbean writers have demonstrated a
sophisticated awareness of global processes like the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, European
imperialism, and the policies of the United States. African, African diasporic, and AfricanAmerican authors in the twentieth and twenty-first century have taken up the problem of
globalization, racialized capitalism, and questions about forging black global solidarity and
social justice. In this course we will use a global perspective to study black literature from
abolitionism in the U.S. and the beginnings of pan-Africanism in the nineteenth century, to
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 21
the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and postcolonial African literature in the twentieth
century. We will also consider a surprisingly global African literature written in the
twenty-first century, including movements like “migritude,” Afropolitanism, as well as
recent United States-based African authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and NoViolet
Bulawayo. Authors include: Oladauh Equiano, Frederick Douglass, E. W. Blyden, W.E.B.
du Bois, Claude McKay, Paulette Nardal, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon,
Shailja Patel, Fatou Diome, and others. Films may include: Osmane Sembene’s Black
Girl and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu.
*****
ENG 414: Advanced Studies in Genre: Theory of the Novel
Pennington
There’s nothing more pleasurable than reading a good novel. But what is a “novel?”
What features characterize this literary genre? When and how did the novel reach such cultural
prominence? With a particular focus on the English literary tradition, this course will explore
some of the most significant theories of the novel in order to facilitate new ways of reading and
understanding extended prose fictions. Our focus on the development of the genre and its formal
features will provide us with historical and structural insights into the “how,” “what,” “when,”
and “why” of this now-ubiquitous—and unique—literary genre. In addition to the texts of
theory, we will be reading at least three novels.
*****
ENG 438: Studies in Russian Literature (Cross-listed with RUS 438)
Plecker
The general goal of this course is to introduce students to Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, covering
its development from his early work, “The Double” (1846) to his final novel The Brothers
Karamazov (1881). Of the three great 19th century Russian Realist novelists, Dostoevsky is the
one whose work seems to overflow the bounds of realism and spread into the realms of the
mystical and fantastic. Perhaps this particular nature of his works arises from his interest in the
deep psychological turmoil of his characters, an interest that values the characters’ internal
workings more than their external manifestations. Indeed, Georg Lukacs wrote that, “In general,
Dostoevsky does not like descriptions of external reality: he is not a paysagiste, as Turgenev and
Tolstoy are, each in his own manner.” This psychological interest, then, combined with a
religious understanding sometimes bordering on mysticism and, at times, a medically-based
distortion of perception, gives rise to a portrayal of a subjective reality that seems (or doesn’t
seem) out of place in a realist novel.
In this course we will examine Dostoevsky’s “realist” works in the context of his
understanding of psychology, philosophy, religion and medicine. We will discuss what makes
the works realist...or not. At the same time, we will examine the development of Dostoevsky’s
works, particularly the evolution of his intellectual anti-hero, who inevitably becomes torn by the
conflict of rational and irrational thought processes. At the end of the course, the student should
have a better understanding of Dostoevsky as an author, as well as a stronger understanding of
his philosophical and political milieu.
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 22
*****
ENG 451: Chaucer
Baragona
John Dryden called Geoffrey Chaucer “the father of English poetry.” He was certainly
the first English poet with an international reputation, and in many respects, there was no English
literary tradition before him. And yet, unlike most founding fathers, he was as comfortable with
sex comedies and flatulence jokes as he was with love tragedies and moral allegory. In fact, the
“father of English literature” was a chameleon. At different times he has been considered a love
poet, a philosophical poet, the first English realist, a proto-novelist, a Freudian, a subversive
satirist, an conservative opportunist, an atheistic moral relativist and a monkish orthodox
moralist, a friend to women and an antifeminist, a royalist snob and a champion of democratic
ideals. Among other things. No wonder Dryden pointed to The Canterbury Tales and wrote “here
is God’s plenty.” Only Shakespeare rivals Chaucer’s scope.
The focus of the course will be The Canterbury Tales. The class will begin with selected
short poems that will introduce some of Chaucer’s themes and techniques, as well as his
language. Students will learn both to translate Middle English and to read it aloud, to appreciate
the verse and the verbal music of one of the greatest poets in any form of the English language.
Virtually everything Chaucer wrote has become a battlefield among scholars, so papers will
focus on interpretive controversies, and students will get to shape their own ideas and draw their
own conclusions.
*****
ENG 493: Advanced Creative Nonfiction
Section 0001
Cavanagh
In this advanced workshop we will read and write works of creative nonfiction. Building
on craft techniques gained in other workshops, you’ll learn how to write in four different
subgenres of creative nonfiction: memoir, the personal essay, the lyric essay, and literary
journalism. For each assignment, you'll tap your memory, research, imagination, and craft
techniques to create compelling nonfiction. You'll also tap from your journal or notebook. If you
don't already keep one of these, you'll begin to do so in this course. A journal is a physical record
of one’s attempts to notice the world more deliberately. Most authors do not have photographic
memories, so they tend to take copious notes about what they observe as a means to help them
recall and preserve a detailed and vivid life. Keeping a notebook can also be a way to remember
a story more accurately than if relying solely on the vagaries of memory. So, one of the goals of
this course is to help you adopt obsessive note-taking habits as a means to fill a well from which
you may draw out details for your future writing.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 23
ENG 493: Advanced Creative Nonfiction
Section 0002
Bogard
In this upper-level creative nonfiction writing course the focus will be on making your
creative nonfiction increasingly resonant, compelling, entertaining, and fun. We will read from
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, from The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.
Students will have wide latitude to explore their interests. We will write a number of shorter
pieces, as well as two main essays. This is a workshop writing course, so students will read and
respond to the work of their peers.
Pre-requisite ENG 391 or consent of the instructor.
*****
ENG 494: Advanced Poetry Writing
Kutchins
Having taken the prerequisite course, ENG 392, you are probably alight with poems and
creativity. Advanced Poetry Writing is a workshop-style course that will keep you going and
further immerse you in the creative process, in the discipline of writing of your own poems, and
in workshop conversations about your poems. It will also train you further in how to offer
critique of other people’s poems. You will also continue to learn about poetic craft and form, and
practice them to a greater degree than in the introductory poetry course. And you will apprentice
yourself to a Master Poet of your choosing in order to better experience how writers learn and
grow from close readings of other accomplished writers.
*****
ENG 495: Advanced Fiction Writing
Madonia
This workshop is designed to provide writers with the opportunity to revise late-draft
work (as opposed to first-draft work) and will utilize student submissions to explore some of our
most important tools as writers hoping to fine-tune our fiction: re-envisioning, re-writing,
editing, and polishing. Student work will be critiqued on an intensive level; we will address
general narrative techniques including character development, dramatic action, and point of
view, in addition to editing techniques such as sentence structure, precise language choice, and
submission/publication formatting. Prerequisite: ENG 393.
*****
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 24
ENG 496: Advanced Topics in Creative Writing: From Page to Stage: Poetry as
Performance and Visual Space
Section 0001
Kutchins
Spoken Word – a revolution or a return to ancestral, bardic roots? A travesty of literary
aesthetics, or an uprising from it? Typography and visual space – what poems can accomplish on
the page when visual integrity meets sonic energy.
This Advanced Topics in Creative Writing course focuses on poetry as performance and
as visual space. As a workshop course, we will study and critique both: poems that are intended
mostly for their visual “performance” on the page, and those that are meant to be spoken word
and oral/aural performance. Most poems are meant for both stage and page, and we will explore
this intersection all semester. Part of this course will involve participating in some poetry jams,
open mics, as well as making visual display of your own poems.
Pre-requisite is ENG 392 – Introduction to Poetry Writing.
*****
ENG 496: Advanced Topics in Creative Writing: Young Adult Literature
Section 0002
Madonia
This literature course and workshop will focus on the analysis of the elements of young
adult fiction; structural elements such as character, plot, point of view, and conflict will be
discussed in addition to stylistic elements such as voice, authenticity and writing with a sense of
urgency. We will examine essays and novels written by published writers; in addition, each
student will be responsible for submitting a piece of original YA fiction for workshop. By
studying the technical elements of storytelling, this course aims to help students become more
incisive readers, more effective critics of YA fiction, and more confident creative writers. As one
of the newest, largest, and most diverse genres in the industry, it is often difficult to define YA
Lit; through the examination of novels and the discussion of YA craft techniques, this class will
explore successful tools used to create the unique tone and momentum found in Young Adult
Literature. Prerequisite: ENG 393.
*****
ENG 496: Advanced Topics in Creative Writing: Life Writing
Section 0003
Gabbin
This course will focus on the practice of life writing, most commonly recognized as
autobiography, done by African American writers during the last sixty-five years. While life
writing goes back many thousands of years, the term “autobiography” emerged in the late
18th century, a product of the Enlightenment and notions of self. It resulted in major works of
Department of English Fall 2015 Course Descriptions 25
British and American literature in the 19th century and has flourished as a genre since the
20th century. While there are both anxiety and uncertainty in the critical literature concerning the
definition and/or boundaries of autobiography, it is clear that autobiography is, as scholar Jay
Parini has argued, “the essential American genre, a form of writing closely tied to our national
self-consciousness.” In this course, students will explore works by Jesmyn Ward, Audre Lorde,
bell hooks, James McBride, and Maya Angelou, among others. The course will also include an
opportunity for students to engage in some individual life writing, organized around such themes
as significant ancestors, the formation of identity, the vocabularies of the self, and the
relationship between subjectivity and memory.