2016 Spring Course Offerings
Barzak Workshop YSU
W 5:10 – 7:50 pm
ENG 6967
Wasserman Workshop
UA
Th 5:20 – 7:50 pm
Robert Miltner C&T
KSU
T 5:30 – 8:15 pm
COURSE FULL Book 2: Book Two will follow the progress of the shaping of a book of fiction (novel, short story
collection, novel in stories) beyond the opening and into the breadth of a middle and the closing notes of a final
movement. Students who did not participate in Book One are welcome to register for this course (with the above in
mind, knowing they’ll be submitting work that is in the middle of a much larger narrative or project).
COURSE FULL: A positive and inviting MFA workshop in fiction writing that gives exclusive attention to the creative
work of students enrolled in the course (there are no required texts to purchase and there will only be minimal
handouts read in class as a group). Students are provided a manuscript submission schedule that allows for flexible
creative output. Working on a focused, specific project? Great! We’re excited to see what you’re developing. Want to
be more exploratory and get some feedback on self-contained short stories or maybe interlinked, connected short
fiction, maybe even an idea for the opening of a novel? That’s great, too! You will not be creatively constricted in this
workshop. Instead, you will be encouraged to take your fiction writing where the creative impulse leads you over the
semester. The course includes some minor exposure to fiction writing theory that is covered in short class discussions
that will directly assist students with crafting their own original fiction. In addition, students will respond critically
and constructively to the work of their peers in building an inspiring, semester-long creative classroom community.
COURSE FULL Writing on the Hyphen: Hybrid Literarture(s): This class will explore the exciting range of hybrid
literatures, using fiction as a base but crossing boundaries into other genres. As a result, this class can also be used as
C&T for fiction, poetry, nonfiction and playwriting. Hybrid forms to be studied include micro fiction, flash fiction,
flash nonfiction, poetic memoir, prose poetry, lyric essay, blurs, epistolary, graphic novel/story, performance, and
monologue. Reading, discussion, response writing and one original hybrid piece.
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Rebecca Barnhouse C&T
YSU
W 5:10 – 7:50 pm
ENG 6969/26524
O’Connor Workshop
KSU
T 1:00 – 4:00 pm
ENG 64070
Giffels C&T
UA
W 5:20 – 7:50 pm
Writing the Youth Novel: Novels for teenagers are hugely popular these days—and not just with teen readers. In
this course, students will read several of them to see how they’re put together, while also planning out and beginning
their own novels. We’ll spend the first several weeks planning out novels and discussing matters of craft. The majority
of class time will be spent workshopping chapters of these novels-in-progress. By the end of the course, students
will have written the first 35-40 pages of their novels (or more, for those so inclined). Assignments will include short
essays and presentations on craft, critiques on classmates’ work, chapter drafts, and a revision. Texts: Kole, Writing
Irresistible Kidlit; Springstubb, What Happened on Fox Street; Woodson, If You Come Softly; Lu, Legend; Kirby, Icefall;
and a novel chosen by each student individually.
Writing Nonfiction: In this workshop, reserved for NEOMFA students only, students will submit two manuscripts
across the semester for discussion, as well as completing a few exercises in the genre. We will close read a number
of published examples in various nonfiction forms together in class. Written reader responses to published texts are
required.
“Who Is I?”: In this course, we will examine the various uses of the “I” narrator in creative nonfiction, ranging
through raw, revealing memoir; first-person reportage; the persona of personal essays; the memoirist who tells
another person’s story; and others. Students will read and analyze contemporary works and practice the craft of their
own first-person nonfiction.
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2016 Spring Course Offerings
Geither Workshop
CSU
M 6:00 – 8:50 pm
ENG 612
Brady Workshop
YSU
T 5:10 – 7:50 pm
ENG 6968
Wing C&T
KSU
Th 4:25 – 7:05 pm
ENG 66895
Adaptation: This workshop will explore the dynamics involved in bringing works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry
to the stage. Significant time will be spent in examining the re-contextualizing of classic plays and to understanding
varying approaches to preparing written texts for a live audience.
This poetry workshop will frame conversations about student poems in terms of each poem’s arc from inception
through publication. Where does the poem come from? Where is it going? How does it relate to other poems? We
will engage issues of form, idiom, identity, and tradition, and share ways that poems come together to form a body of
work. We’ll also explore the mysterious and potent connection between sound and meaning, delving in poetry’ preliterary source as musical utterance. We’ll invite and encourage one another to consider poetry as a life-sustaining and
life-examining art.
Loose Meters & Free Forms: A Study of Traditional Form in Contemporary Poetry
If Louis Sullivan’s dictum that “form ever follows function” is true, then what can be said of form’s role in poetry?
Even on clear (and optimistic) days the function of poetry remains somewhat elusive, while the idea of strict poetic
form leaves many poets uneasy. Are we, as Frost would have it, “playing tennis with the net down,” or have we, a la
Ezra Pound, freed ourselves from “the sequence of the metronome” and “the shackles of the iamb”? In this class
we will explore form’s role in poetry, as we consider where we might stand in relation to it, as writers. The class will
serve as an introduction to (and practice of) form’s basic mechanics, as well as an investigation of what effects these
techniques have on a reader. We’ll look at the evolution of form over time—sapphics to sonnets, iambs to Oulipo—
to determine what different structures can accomplish. No formal background required, just an open mind and a
willingness to experiment.
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2016 Spring Course Offerings
Internship
Barzak Internship
YSU
Sat 11:00 am – 2:00 pm
During the NEOMFA Internship, students will set up an internship project with local businesses, nonprofits or
schools, in which their skill sets with creative writing (or skills related to creative writing) are put to use. Students will
make these arrangements independently or with the help of their campus coordinator, ideally, prior to the beginning
of the semester. The course will meet four days as a whole class throughout the semester, on Saturdays at YSU from
11-2, during which professionalization seminars will be held alongside conferencing in regard to student internships.
Subjects of seminars include
• Creative Writing Pedagogy
• Building Literary Community Online
• The Business of Writing: Agents and Publishing Process
Literature
THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON
Nunn
UA
T 5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:615-801
Chura
UA
M 5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-804
Shakespearean Drama: This seminar will deal with Shakespeare as a professional dramatist in the Early Modern
English theatre. Although various approaches may be used, the primary focus will be on text, performance, and
theatrical conditions, both contemporary and modern.
Melville: A study of Melville’s greatest prose and poetry, with special attention to sources and historical contexts. In
addition to the sea-adventure tales Typee and Redburn and the short masterpieces Benito Cereno, “Bartleby” and
Billy Budd, we will analyze Melville’s Civil War poetry, his psychological novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities, and of
course Moby-Dick. Secondary readings include Andrew Delbanco’s recent critical biography Melville, His World and
Work (2005) and excerpts from Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: Tragedy of
the Whaleship Essex.
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CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY
Rahman
CSU
W 6:00 – 8:50 pm
ENG616
COURSE FULL Let Me Be Honest with You. I’m a Liar: Unreliable Narrators, Characters and Narratives
In this class, we’re going to take a look at a number of varieties of that old con artist shape-shifting trickster, the
unreliable narrator. We will encounter unreliability in many guises: naiveté, gullibility, narcissism, sociopathy, charm,
ignorance, trauma, confusion, delusion, drug use, and more. In some cases we might discover that unreliability
effectively layers and deepens a narrative, while in others we might see how a novel can organically disarm, misdirect
and surprise. We will learn why and how it is best to allow plot twists and turns to arise through character. We will
explore how to engage unreliability in our own work. Class will conclude with students presenting project proposals
and excerpts for their own work using an unreliable narrator in some way. Possible texts include Shirley Jackson’s
We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, Thomas Tryon’s The
Other, Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Julie Schumacher’s Dear
Committee Members, Herman Koch’s The Dinner, Hanya Yanagihara’s The People In The Trees, Lauren Groff’s Fates
and Furies, & Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.
Carnell
CSU
T,Th 6:00 – 7:50 pm
ENG695
Todd
CSU
T 6:00 – 8:50 pm
ENG616
The Rise of the British Novel: We will trace the development of the novel from Aphra Behn (writing in the 1680s) to
Jane Austen (writing in the early nineteenth century). We will read a range of novels from this era--including novels
by Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft--and also look
at different theoretical accounts of the novel’s development, and the social and political reasons for its emergence
during this era.
Contemporary Experimental Writing: In this course, we will explore literary currents emerging in the immediate
past and present. We will examine what fiction writers have been up to recently (Sheila Heti, Amelia Gray), as well
as playwrights (Jennifer Haley, Karinne Keithley), creative nonfiction writers (John D’Agata, Jenny Boully), and
poets (Sarah Riggs, Divya Victor). We will review storytelling strategies found in oral history projects, podcasts,
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and recent television series, and consider writers who have made aesthetic impacts as journalists. We will look at
commentary from David Shields and Martha Cooley, and explore genres such as the lyric essay and approaches such
as conceptualism. The first goal of this inquiry will be to understand what is happening today in both aesthetic and
(un-)commercial senses, especially as a way of placing one’s writing and literary sensibility in the contemporary
landscape. The second will be to apply this understanding in exercises producing original works in innovative forms.
The third will be to discuss our course content in critical and reflective pieces.
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY
Dugas
KSU
M 4:25 – 7:05 pm
ENG 6/76051
M’Baye
KSU
Th 5:30 – 8:15 pm
ENG 76302
Shakespeare: Students will read nine Shakespeare plays and one tragedy composed by one of his most influential
contemporaries. Students will learn the conventions of the several genres into which Shakespeare’s plays have
traditionally been divided. Students will gain familiarity with the theatrical-commercial context for which
Shakespeare composed his plays. Students will gain familiarity with the critical reception those plays have received
since the seventeenth century. Students will learn the plots of the plays studied and be able to provide detailed
analyses of their major characters. Students will gain familiarity with recent scholarly discussions of the plays studied.
Students will become proficient finding, interpreting, and incorporating literary criticism into their research projects.
Students will compile an annotated bibliography that will enable them to conduct original research. Following
a formal process of proposal and drafting, each student will write a scholarly essay. Each student will also write a
shorter, “conference version” of that essay she will present to her colleagues in order to get feedback and gain practice
delivering a conference paper.
Post-Colonial Literature in English: Expanding the previous paradigms that tended to merely critique the effects
of imperial states on national cultures, current directions in postcolonial studies re-evaluate such scholarships
while assessing the relationships between neo-colonial subjects and former (or modern) colonial powers. The study
of these relationships in transnational and interdisciplinary terms complicates the relationships between colonial
metropolises and younger nation states, especially when nationalisms are critiqued in the light of recent scholarships
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on cosmopolitanism. Stressing the importance of individual cultures and identities, this course examines new critical
voices of postcolonial literature that express individuality, fluidity, and hybridism in the formation of postcolonial
identities. Tracing the routes of this pluralism from colonial to neocolonial periods, this course also explore the
significance of culture and identity in specific contexts shaped by exchange, borrowings, and appropriations
among various populations. The readings of the course include literature of postcolonial African, Arab, Indian, and
Caribbean writers who have represented the social, political, cultural, and economic conditions of their nations
before and/or after the independence of these nations. We will explore the historical and political realities that have
influenced such literary production through the study of essays, theories, fiction, poetry, and cinema that reveal the
dualisms, inequalities, and contradictions in postcolonial nations that continue to search for freedom, sovereignty,
and development in a world that is becoming increasingly diverse, heterogeneous, and global.
Camden
KSU
T/Th 12:30 – 1:45 pm
ENG 76991
Novel Media: From Novel to Graphic Media: Even as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century herald
the apex of the novel as the dominant narrative form, so too the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has
enjoyed a positive burgeoning of the “graphic narrative”: a form that marries prose narrative of the novel to the
visual sequence of cartoons. The eighteenth century novel was, precisely, a “new” form that emerged from multiple
literacies-- from travelogues, to conversion narratives, to diaries and letters. Comics, similarly, draws from multiple
media, from early political broadsides, film, painting, travelogues, newspaper cartoons, and family archives. It relies
upon the simultaneous expression of visual and verbal media, while drawing upon traditional narrative conventions
of the novel and other prose forms. This course will look at the narrative logic and conventions of the emerging
multi-modal forms of the novel and the graphic narrative. We will ask several related questions about conventional
and emerging media. We will consider, in particular, the architechtonics of the comics page as presenting suggestive
parallels to the shifting conventions of the construction of the novel as a form in the eighteenth century. Multimedia
forms and representations offer an entry point into cultural changes in both the early modern and now; the “supermodern” or post-linguistic turn in architectural theory and practice can perhaps be found resonant with the prelinguistic preoccupations within theories of human development. We will also consider the prevalence of the
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“woman’s” voice in recent graphic narratives, the multi-cultural graphic narrative, and the ways that this trend is
reminiscent of the burgeoning domestic novel in the “long eighteenth-century.”
Bracher
KSU
T/Th 10:45 am – 12:00 pm
ENG 76895
Culleton
KSU
W 4:25 – 7:05 pm
ENG 6/76401
Protest Novels: In this course we will read a selection of “protest novels”—texts that aim to improve their readers’
understanding of themselves, of others, and of the various natural, cultural, and social worlds in ways that will lead
to a reduction of suffering and injustice and an increase in human flourishing. Drawing on recent work in the social,
cognitive, and neurosciences, we will aim to understand the particular—and often quite unique—ways in which
literary texts are capable of fostering enhanced neurocognitive functioning of the sort that will enable their readers
to pursue courses of action and life paths that are both more personally fulfilling and more socially responsible and
just. Attention will also be given to pedagogical practices that can maximize the development of such neurocognitive
functioning through the study of literature. Readings will include the following novels: Voltaire, Candide; Shelley,
Frankenstein; Dickens, Hard Times; Eliot, Silas Marner; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson;
Sinclair, The Jungle; Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Wright, Native Son; Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; Achebe, Things
Fall Apart; Coetzee, Disgrace. Writing assignments will consist of three 3,000-4,000 word papers.
1960’s: American Literature and Culture in a Tumultuous Decade: Works under study include novels and plays
by Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Matt Crowley (The Boys in the Band), Barbara Garson’s MacBird, and LeRoi Jones (The
Toilet); selected essays by Joan Didion (from Slouching Towards Bethlehem) and Hunter S. Thompson (from Hell’s
Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga); poetry and fiction by Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Frank O’Hara, Richard
Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Muriel Rukeyser, and Denise Levertov; non-fiction by Betty Friedan (from The Feminine
Mystique), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night), Tom Wolfe (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test); speeches and pamphlets,
manifestoes, movies, memoirs, and autobiographies of the era (Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X);
and a wealth of responses to the National Guard campus shootings at Kent State in 1970 after the “longest decade of
the twentieth century” drew to a close.
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YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY
Graber
YSU
M 5:10 – 7:50 pm
ENG 6919
Hardy
YSU
W 5:10 – 7:50 pm
ENG 6915
Studies in Young Adult Literature: This course will explore young adult literature in terms of critical-theoretical
approaches for analysis and implications for pedagogy. Readings include: M.T. Anderson’s Feed, Matt de la Peña’s
We Were Here, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Candace Fleming’s The Family Romanov, Jandy Nelson’s
I’ll Give You the Sun, Matthew Quick’s Boy 21, Marcus Sedgwick’s Revolver and Midwinterblood, Andrew Smith’s
Grasshopper Jungle, Janne Teller’s Nothing, Maya Van Wagenen’s Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek, John
Corey Whaley’s Where Things Come Back, and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese.
Early American Studies: Literature of Disease and Contagion: In 1721, nearly eight percent of the population
of Boston, Massachusetts died during a smallpox epidemic. In 1793, one tenth of the population of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania died from yellow fever. While such outbreak mortality rates may seem high to Americans today, figures
like these were common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Seeking to understand the literary production
surrounding these epidemics and other instances of disease, this class will explore the intersection between literature
and pathology in early America. Our study will address the ways in which illnesses both threatened populations and
created new notions of community in the Colonial and Early National periods. By reading poetry, sermons, essays,
and novels, we will examine especially the ways in which religious belief and political thought served as lenses
through which writers interpret sickness. We will also pay close attention to how Native Americans and people of
African descent were both victims to and healers during epidemics. The course reading list will include canonical
figures who wrote extensively about the human body and illness: Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather,
Phillis Wheatley, and Charles Brockden Brown, among others. Additionally, we’ll explore ephemera—newspaper
articles, pamphlets, religious tracts, and the like—housed in digital archives as we consider broader cultural
perspectives on disease. Since this is a graduate seminar, our aim will be to interpret texts both as historical artifacts
and as objects of philosophical and theoretical inquiry. To this end, we will fold into our reading the work of literary
critics and philosophers like Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito, Pricilla Wald, and others.
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Francisco
16th and 17th Century Literature
YSU
T/Th 12:30 – 1:45 pm
ENG 6912