Course Descriptions Fall 2017
Department of English
ENGL 3100: Critical Writing about Literature - Kimberly Manganelli
Terms and techniques for literary analysis, including close reading, vocabulary for analysis, research and writing skills,
casebook study of critical approaches. Discussion of poetry and genres preferred.
ENGL 3100: Critical Writing about Literature - Dominic Mastroianni
This course will help you acquire and develop the skills needed to closely read and interpret literary texts, and to craft
and defend arguments about them. The course is oriented less by a particular set of texts, than by a desire (mine, and
hopefully yours) to respond to texts with sensitivity, intensity, and discipline. We will read, discuss, and write about
poetry, short fiction, a novel, and a range of important works of literary criticism and theory. Our class meetings will be a
series of experiments in close reading, the sort of patient, meticulous attention to textual detail called for by literary
texts and practiced by literary scholars. Authors to include Stanley Cavell, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, John Donne,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Edgar Allan
Poe, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, and Henry David Thoreau.
ENGL 3100: Critical Writing about Literature - Will Stockton
This course aims to shift your way of thinking about literature from questions of "what" to questions of "how." That is,
we will not concern ourselves so much with what writers have to say (the moral of the story, for instance) as with how
they say it, paying particular interest into issues of form. The reading for this course will consist of poetry and short
fiction from a range of periods and authors.
ENGL 3370: Creative Inquiry (Student Directors of the Clemson Literary Festival) - John Pursley
Engages students in discussions and examinations of ideas and issues in contemporary literature, which ultimately
provide the foundation for making preparations for the 11th Annual Clemson Lit Fest. Students will gain valuable insight
into the culture of contemporary literature by planning the festival at every stage, coordinating multiple events, and
working one-on-one with festival authors both before and during their visits to Clemson.
ENGL 3450: Structure of Fiction - Keith Morris
This is an introductory fiction writing course. The early stages of the semester center around class discussion of fiction
writing techniques and readings in contemporary literature, then the focus shifts to fiction workshop, in which students
submit their own fiction and critique and discuss the fiction of their classmates. At semester’s end, students turn in their
revised short fiction in the form of a portfolio. Reading material includes authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie,
ZZ Packer, and George Saunders.
ENGL 3460: The Structure of Poetry - Jillian Weise
A better name for this class is Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry. You will read a variety of poems, across time and
globe, in order to learn what the poets are doing, how they are doing it, and whether you might like to try it. The class
focuses on praxis rather than analysis. For example, during the week on love poems, you will read a dozen love poems
and then write your own love poem. For the final project, you will apprentice with one poet (a poet you have never read
before), read their books/reviews/interviews, reach out to them via email/social media, if you wish, and present your
findings to the class.
ENGL 3480: The Structure of Screenplay - Nic Brown
This is an introductory workshop in the writing of screenplays. Students will examine examples of screenwriting from
film and television as well as write and workshop screenplays of their own.
ENGL 3490: Technology and the Popular Imagination - Gabriel Hankins
In this class we will read and write about the way technology shapes and informs contemporary fiction, from the
internet novel to the anti-internet novel to very short fictions on digital experience. How do social networks inform the
networks of character and experience in a novel? What happens to the short story form in a time of pervasive
distraction? How might Henry James help us read Twitter fiction? Readings will include several novels, works of digital
fiction, and secondary critical readings. Authors may include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, Jennifer
Egan, Teju Cole, Jarett Kobek, and Sheila Heti. Several shorter and two long papers, along with weekly written responses.
ENGL 3540: Literature of the Middle East and North Africa - Angela Naimou
In this course, we will study a variety of 20th and 21st century literary texts of the Middle East and North Africa by poets
and prose writers from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Iran, and elsewhere. In our
study of literary texts, we’ll also turn to other genres of writing--history, literary criticism and theory, journalism, and
cultural critique. Students can expect regular reading and writing as well as actively contributing to discussions. We will
also consider diasporic writers and the historic and current relationship between the United States and the Middle East.
No knowledge of foreign languages is required. Preq: ENGL 2020 or ENGL 2120 or ENGL 2130 or ENGL 2140 or ENGL
2150.
ENGL 3570: Film - Amy Monaghan
Examination of the film medium as an art form: its history, how films are made, why certain types of films (western,
horror movies, etc.) have become popular, and how critical theories provide standards for judging film.
ENGL 3850: Children’s Literature (African American Children’s Literature) - Megan MacAlystre
In 1932, Langston Hughes noted that "one of the greatest tasks of the teachers" of black children was overcoming a
"racial inferiority complex"; in 1965, Nancy Larrick lamented "the All- White World of Children's Books"; in 2010, Jerry
Pinkney became the first individual African American to win the Caldecott Medal.
In Fall 2017, English 3850 will explore the history and future of African American children's literature, from Ezra Jack
Keats' classic picture book A Snowy Day to 2014's Newberry Honor novel Brown Girl Dreaming by South Carolinian
native Jacqueline Woodson. But we'll also extend our analysis of the representations of characters and authors of color
to advertising using African American children, children's films like Princess and the Frog and children's toys such as
Melody, a 2016 American Girl doll. As a class, we'll be discussing intersections with gender, history, civil rights, and
education to address the didactic and cultural messages implicit in these texts.
ENGL 3960: British Literature Survey I - Erin Goss
This course offers a survey of British Literature from Middle English to the early eighteenth century. Telling a story about
the coming into being of an identity called Englishness, the course considers the ways that this identity has often been
defined through its relationship to the not-English, defined variously through history. Ultimately, the course draws
attention to the mechanisms of negation and opposition to difference by which national and personal identities are
often established, both in the past and the present. Texts include selections from The Canterbury Tales, Doctor Faustus,
The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, Oroonoko, Gulliver’s Travels, and Robinson Crusoe, as well as several shorter poems
along the way. The course is offered as a bi-weekly lecture (Mondays and Wednesdays) with a weekly discussion section
(Fridays) in which you will engage closely with individual texts and with topics from the lectures and the reading for the
week. There will be three major exams, each including an in-class and a take-home component, as well as quizzes.
ENGL 3970: British Literature Survey II - David Coombs
In this class, we will survey the literary history of Britain since 1789, the year that marks the beginning of the French
Revolution. As both the term "literary history" and our beginning with the French Revolution suggest, we will pay close
attention to how literary texts are influenced by and respond to their historical contexts, focusing especially on: the
transformations of British society wrought by industrial modernity; the changing status of women and sexuality; the
expansion of democratic voting rights and the emergence of consumer culture; and British imperialism and its legacies.
Since we will be surveying a literary history, however, we will seek primarily to understand how our texts' literariness—
their formal qualities as poems, novels, and plays—shapes the way they represent or seek to intervene in history. To
that end, students will learn to engage in close analysis of texts from a wide variety of genres in the service of thinking
critically about literature and history.
ENGL 3980: American Literature Survey I - Susanna Ashton
This junior-level class for English Majors, Education Majors, and other enthusiasts of all stripes will wander through a
couple of centuries and across all sorts of hazy borders. But where did America begin and where did Mexico end? Do a
couple of letters written on boat that was sailing back from the Caribbean really document the “discovery” of America?
If someone, such as Wheatley, wasn’t allowed to be a full citizen, what are we doing by calling her work “American”? If
Bradstreet’s poems are so “accessible” why do I still have to read footnotes to understand her references? What do we
learn from the edits to the Declaration of Independence? If the extant speeches by Tecumseh and Red Jacket might be
fake, is it worth reading them? Is a Narragansett dictionary written by the Puritan Roger Williams really literature and
what story can a phrase book tell, anyway? Why was Emerson protesting the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears? Cowboys sound
romantic but what can Caroline Kirkland tell us about what it was like to be stuck in an isolated Western cabin with sick
kids in the 1840s? And if a story or poem isn’t “set” in the US but seems to happen in Europe or some vague fairy
kingdom (Hello, Poe), does that help us actually understand anything about the culture of the USA? Slave narratives
were written to manipulate readers, but is that different from any other sort of stealthy text? What does it mean to read
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin knowing in hindsight that the Civil War was to explode a decade later? Does any of this
uncertainty belong in a public school K-12 curriculum? As you can tell, I have some questions.
In this class, you’ll participate with verve or why bother to come? You’ll write messy inchoate thoughts and then you’ll
rewrite them into sharper analyses for at least two meaty papers. My quizzes may terrorize or delight you, a final exam
will give you an opportunity to show off the kind of teacher or student you want to be and every step of the way I expect
you to add to my question list.
ENGL 3990: American Literature Survey II - Walt Hunter
This course is an introduction to the extraordinary vitality and capaciousness of modern American literature. We begin
with two poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, whose work offers us a prismatic view forward into the aesthetic,
political, ethical, and global concerns of the fiction writers, poets, dramatists, and filmmakers of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Then we’ll proceed chronologically through major literary movements, genres, and
preoccupations, from realist fiction (James) to expressionist drama (Treadwell); from pre-WWI Imagist poetry (H.D.,
Pound) to post-WWII “confessional” lyric (Plath, Lowell); from postmodern prophecy (Pynchon) to postcolonial
apocalypse (Diaz). Our geographical reach will extend far beyond the nation, even as we take the nation as the platform
from which to understand the global involvement of the US: Charles Chesnutt’s North Carolina, Claude McKay’s Harlem,
Willa Cather’s Nebraska, William Faulkner’s Mississippi, and Marilynne Robinson’s Idaho will be just a few of the sites
where contemporary questions of citizenship, nationalism, immigration, social vulnerability, and economic
precariousness find their clear and prescient articulations in breathtakingly innovative literary forms. The course will
conclude, combust, and collect itself anew with the celebrated Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. Course
evaluation will be conducted via five discussion posts, two essays, and final exam.
ENGL 4030: The Classics in Translation - Walt Hunter
This course explores how translation shapes the form of imaginative works of art and literature. We will take translation
to be a paradigmatic way of understanding the complex relations between works of art, material history, and ethics.
Different conceptions of “translation”—and a cluster of related ethical, political, social, juridical, linguistic, and aesthetic
notions—give us unique purchase on the location of culture in the development of a modern world-system, from the
period “before European hegemony” (Janet Abu-Lughod) through the consolidation of first British and then US global
hegemony by means of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, inter-state competition, and settler colonialism to our
contemporary period of neoliberal globalization, the precarization of life and labor, and ecological cataclysm.
Translation is, literally, the “carrying across” of an idea from one language into another. Various kinds of translation have
been definitive not only for the work of linguists and creative writers, but also for the thinking of philosophers,
theologians, and political theorists. This course will carry us across theories and practices of translation, beginning with
Alice Oswald’s recent “translation” of Homer’s Iliad. The vernacular will be one thread we’ll take up, from the group
translation of the King James Bible through Dante’s treatise on Italian and Tottel’s adjustments of Wyatt’s sonnets to
postcolonial and anti-colonial uses of dialect and hybridizations of “Western” poetic forms in Robert Burns, Louise
Bennett, and Junot Diaz.
The metaphor of translation as an ethical encounter will be another common theme, plunging us not only into the
critical theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, but also into fictional and semi-fictional
treatments of exploration, migration, and displacement by Michel de Montaigne, Bartolomé de las Casas, Shakespeare,
Jean Rhys, Sofia Coppola, Etel Adnan, and M. NourbeSe Philip.
We won’t restrict ourselves to theories of translation, much less a narrow understanding of “the classics.” Rather, we
will discover that a focus on translation as a mode of recognition, revelation, and critique provides the classical
foundation for multiple genres, from poems and novels to contemporary visual artists working with disruptive
installations, murals and graffiti, and new media.
Course assignments will include two papers, one of which may be replaced by a translation of a work of literature or
critical theory.
ENGL 4110: Shakespeare - Elizabeth Rivlin
Shakespeare’s plays are especially resonant as we live through a time of great political intensity, for
Shakespeare, too, lived in—and reflected on—such times. In this course, we’ll talk about Politics (governance,
political power, international relations) and politics (gender, race, religion, class) in Shakespeare’s plays: Under
a monarchy, do the people have any voice? Do some people “count” more than others? What happens when
monarchs abuse their power? Can we see stirrings of republicanism in Shakespeare? Is being a man (and what
kind of man?) a prerequisite for political power? What roles are open to women? How might the family itself
be a political entity? How does race function in the social and political landscape? What is literature and
theater’s role in politics?
We’ll use the questions above and others to investigate how Shakespeare represented politics as a deeply
human set of problems and possibilities, both completely embedded in the context of late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century England and evocative of challenges we face today. Our questions will also give us insight
into how Shakespeare reshaped genres and created new models for drama. We’ll study performances as well,
both our own and others’, so that we can understand how performing—not just reading—the plays gives rise
to a range of interpretations. Works include Richard II, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, King Lear,
Coriolanus and its recent film version, and Pericles. Writing is an important course priority; we will pay special
attention to textual analysis and thesis construction. Requirements include three papers and a take-home final
exam, as well as active class participation and student performances!
ENGL 4110/6110: Shakespeare (Concerning Hamlet) - Andy Lemons
The characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet spend much of the play concerned with Hamlet’s state of mind. Hamlet himself
is no exception. Through the affordance of the soliloquy, we are able to “overhear” the troubled prince talking to
himself about himself, thinking about his own thoughts as he thinks them—concerned about his concerns. This course
focuses on this peculiar literary trope: talking to oneself about oneself. We will examine one history of this trope in
western literary tradition (there are certainly many others). In addition to two very different versions Hamlet, the First
and Second Quartos, readings will include works by Plautus, Seneca, Augustine, Petrarch, Chaucer, Montaigne and
Thomas Wyatt, and critical work by Giorgio Agamben, Frank Kermode, Leo Bersani and Helen Vendler. These paraShakespearean texts help us not only to perceive more acutely the nuances of Shakespeare’s masterful representation
of interiority, but also to understand the way in which literary texts dramatize, facilitate and complicate thought: the
human mind’s incessant conversation with itself. Evaluation will be based on participation in class discussion and three
major writing projects.
ENGL 4170: The Victorian Period - David Coombs
This class will examine the historical novel, the single most influential genre of fiction in the nineteenth-century and one
that profoundly shaped the way we understand history itself. The historical novel is something of a contradiction. It
promises to provide us with factual information about history—how things really were in the past—but it also promises
to do so using the resources of fiction—by making things up, in other words. In this regard, the historical novel embodies
what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” Its truthiness makes the historical novel a good place to think
about the relationship between fiction and knowledge. How can stories about things that never happened tell us
something about what really happened? What can we learn from fiction about realities, historical or otherwise? Possible
readings include novels by Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, and Hilary Mantel.
ENGL 4190/6190: Postcolonial and World Literatures - Cameron Bushnell
In this course, we will investigate issues related to slavery and the slave trade, empire and legacies of imperialism,
hybridity, exile, and diaspora. We will read World Literature and Anglophone postcolonial literature from three large
geographical areas (Caribbean, Southeast Asia, East Africa) written from the 19th to the early 21st centuries. We will
begin with writings from the earlier period when European colonialism and imperialism defined the social, cultural, and
political landscape. We will progress through literature, which reflects postcolonial attitudes generated in
independence movements, migration, and globalization. The course will look at the ways in which world and
postcolonial literatures affect social and cultural movements, such as women’s rights, human rights, environmentalism.
We will read works, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, George Orwell’s Burmese Days, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of
Small Bombs, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. Secondary readings will come from Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri
Spivak, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, and others.
ENGL 4200/6200: American Literature to 1799 (Literatures of Settler Colonialism in Early N. America) - Jonathan Field
“They never tell the truth about frontiers…”
-Channel 3, “True West"
This class reconsiders two of the cherished social formations of early American history – the town and the frontier. By
re-reading the literature and the historiography of the town and the frontier from a critical perspective, we will explore
how these genres work to construct narratives of settlement that displace indigenous people, even as they codify
colonial forms of settlement. Our work will focus on three axes – primary sources describing the forms of colonial
settlement (John Winthrop, Mercy Otis Warren, Edward Johnson, Robert Beverly, etc.); classic historiography (Frederick
Jackson Turner, Perry Miller, Eric Williams, etc.); and more contemporary scholarship that offers ways to reimagine
these patterns (David Harvey, Henri LeFebvre, Lorenzo Veracini, Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Silvia
Federici, etc.).
As the course unfolds, we will use the critical frameworks we develop to bring theories of gender and sexuality to bear
on our work. Juxtaposing the town and the frontier as ways to imagine settler colonialism suggests a hypothesis that the
ideological structure of the town depends upon families as an instrument of social reproduction, while for the resource
extraction economies of the frontier sex work largely supplants family/domestic relations.
Finally, this seminar will consider how these sexual and economic dynamics of settler colonialism allow us to return to
questions of relations among European, African, and Native inhabitants of North America, including the Caribbean.
Seminar papers for this class will take the form of a case study, where students will bring the apparatus we have
developed to re-think a specific colonial settlement.
ENGL 4210: American Literature from 1800 to 1899 - Dominic Mastroianni
In this course we’ll read nineteenth-century American literature intensively and imaginatively, focusing on ideas of
accompaniment. We’ll think of the company provided, or withheld, by friends, lovers, strangers, and neighbors. We’ll
also consider musical accompaniment, together with the sounds that accompany our lives. And we’ll ask what makes
some thoughts and artworks companionable, others not. Authors to include Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau; we’ll also read some criticism by Sharon Cameron and
Stanley Cavell.
ENGL 4230: Topics in Writing Fiction - Keith Morris
In this course, students will work on The South Carolina Review, Clemson University’s literary journal. Students will assist
in the production, design, selection process, editing, and distribution of the journal, completing the course with an issue
of the journal ready to send out for printing. In addition, students will read contemporary literary journals such as Tin
House, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, etc. and become familiar with the
submission/publication process. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor.
ENGL 4260/6260: Southern Literature - Michael LeMahieu
This survey of southern literature will focus on multiple literary genres and three historical moments: the Civil War, the
civil rights movement, and the contemporary moment. Through these lenses, we will examine how different formations
of southern identity are constructed and contested as they circulate in literary texts. Our reading list will feature authors
such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Sidney Lanier, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery
O’Connor, Allen Tate, Natasha Trethewey, Monique Truong, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren. Active participation in
class discussions required. Students will write weekly response papers, a shorter analytical essay (~5 pages), and a
longer seminar paper (~12 pages). We will not read Gone With the Wind.
ENGL 4310: Modern Poetry - Steve Katz
It could be argued that Modern Poetry begins in the late nineteenth century and for all intents and purposes, is still
being written. The power and influence of Modern Poetry certainly spans the entire 20th century, and that is the poetry
we will be exploring. From the mysticism of W.B. Yeats to the earthy Irish wisdom of Seamus Heaney, and the Caribbean
‘Homer’ of Derek Wolcott; from late fascist-form maker/breaker Ezra Pound, to feminist and linguistic Adrienne Rich,
and African American iconoclast Amiri Baraka. English and American Modern Poetry touches on just about every social
and literary issue we deal with today in our postmodern, and even posthuman world of animals and objects and
networks and the internet of things.
Some folks find Modern Poetry rather difficult: it is rooted deeply in various Western traditions, including classical Greek
and Roman and Biblical/religious texts; it often alludes to these traditions in cultural references and different original
languages; and it is written in subtle verse forms as well as free verse. Our approach to this rich, critical, and inspiring
poetry will be to respond to the poem first, emotionally, through the subjective effects of style and sound (often
listening to the poet read his/her poetry first) before making scholarly inquiry in to the substance of the poem and
relevant critical essays. What did the poet do? How did the poem create that feeling? Why?
That is, we will approach Modern Poetry not only as readers but as writers! We will let ourselves be moved, and then
explore what moves us in the poem. This approach to poetry as writers will extend to papers and exams as well: there
won’t be any! —at least not in the usual sense.* Our exploration of poems will take place not only in classroom
discussions and on Canvas, but also in short response papers, and in poetic responses (poems) that you yourself will
write in a series of exercises (no prior expertise required; I will help you do this*).
As we will hear/feel/see, each poem we read will have many things to teach us. But we also will focus in on, highlight,
and absorb what each poet is especially known for, what each poem does especially well, and what it can teach us. How
can poetry create meaningful experiences through the basically linear medium of language except by the textual
unification of style and content—by playing with the multidimensional nature of images, metaphors, figures of speech,
line breaks, off/rhyme, meter, and set or free forms? In our personal as well as scholarly exploration of these poets and
poems, we will thus learn what Modern Poetry is.
*The more conventional avenues of evaluation (exams and papers) will be available for those who feel uncomfortable
responding to poetry as writers in their own right.
ENGL 4340/6340: Environmental Literature - Matt Hooley
The environment is what we call the parts of the world that are beyond us, that are other-than-human. And yet, the
tools we have to think about the environment are themselves deeply human: our curiosity, memory, imagination, care,
and critique. This course explores texts that wrestle with this paradox. What do human practices of knowing tell us
about animals, objects, and landscapes that exceed our ability to know them fully? Can reading and writing improve our
relationship with ecosystems that we can’t know, but nevertheless need to live? This course will be rooted in the social
and environmental history of Americas, and will pay particular attention Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and diasporic texts. In
addition, students will have the chance to think and write about the environments they come from and/or care about.
ENGL 4350/6350: Literary Criticism - Matt Hooley
Literature allows people to make sense of themselves in the world. Novels, poetry, polemic, drama, and popular culture
offer us a chance to understand the political conditions that shape our lives and to imagine other ways of living. This
introduction to literary criticism focuses on significant critical approaches to the relationship between power and
literature: structuralism and poststructuralism, marxism, feminist and queer criticisms, critical race theory, and
decolonization. Assignments in this course will give students an opportunity to consider how different ways of reading a
given text can open new political possibilities—for that text itself and for the world beyond it.
ENGL 4400/6400: Literary Theory - Brian McGrath
An introduction to literary theoretical thinking, focusing on twentieth century structuralism, post-structuralism and
contemporary theory. We will examine the ways in which language is conceived and reconceived by major theoretical
writers and the implications of this rethinking for our notions of literature, history, politics, ideology, sexuality, trauma,
etc. We will also examine the ways in which these texts not only theorize literary language but are also, themselves,
subject to its surprises. Authors include Marx, Freud, Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Jameson, Said, Spivak, Butler, etc.
ENGL 4420/6420: Cultural Studies (Digital Cultures) - Maria Bose
It is not too long ago that the Internet was being hailed as a world-changer of the highest order. Portending new and
enhanced forms of global communication, techno-optimists of the mid-nineties foretold of a cyberculture whose very
connectedness would, in theory, render capitalism’s expansion equitable. As the then-popular libertarian fantasy went,
the production of an unregulated public sphere stood to energize commerce and renovate participatory democracy by
providing citizens with platforms whose virtuality was itself the formal guarantor and means of transcending social and
market inequalities. For these visionaries, the Internet was to inaugurate a free and open New Economy, poised to
deliver a host of online goods and services, and also bring us closer to the post-racial, post-feminist, and ultimately postidentity politics society we all, ostensibly, sought. This course explores the fortunes and failures of Web 2.0 in our stillunfolding digital era. Beginning with a critical media history of the Internet, we proceed to compass ongoing debates
over online privacy and user access; theorize the new modes of identity construction and political engagement proffered
by social media; consider new paradigms for the production of knowledge and the harvesting of user attention, labor,
and affect, all while remaining cognizant of the myriad ways in which the Internet remains a site for the reproduction of
classed, gendered, and raced inequalities that exist offline.
ENGL 4450/6450: Fiction Workshop - Nicholas Brown
Students write and workshop their own works of fiction.
ENGL 4460/6460: The Poetry Workshop - Jillian Weise
“The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves
more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.” – Amiri Baraka. The poetry workshop
provides a community of readers for your poems. The majority of our time is spent in conversation. We’ll talk about
form, content, public/private audiences, mystery and woo.
ENGL 4500/6500: Film Genres (History of British Cinema) - R. Barton Palmer
This course offers a survey in some depth of the history of an important national cinema, with a special emphasis on
industrial developments, the relationship between the cinema and the British state, and the principal genres and
production trends of the postwar period. Readings and viewings.
ENGL 4510/6510: Film Theory and Criticism - John Smith
Advanced study of films that have similar subjects, themes, and techniques, including such genres as the Western,
horror, gangster, science fiction, musical, and/or screwball comedy. Also considers nontraditional genres, screen irony,
genre theory, and historical evolution of genres. Topics vary. Preq: ENGL 3570. Coreq: ENGL 4501.
ENGL 4520/6520: Great Directors (Contemporary Irish Directors) - R. Barton Palmer
The Irish national cinema has become one of the world’s most dynamic and acclaimed during the past fifteen years, and
this course will focus on cultural and industrial developments that made possible the work of the principal directors who
have been involved, including Lenny Abrahamson, Neil Jordan, John Crowley, John Michael McDonagh, and Fintan
Connolly. Readings and Viewings.
ENGL 4600/6600: Issues in Writing Technologies - Tharon Howard
Every time the technology of writing production changes, culture changes and the ways we create knowledge
changes. The printing press and the Internet are only two of the more famous examples of the ways that changes in
writing technologies have had an impact on us. Beyond learning about the dates, places, and technologies involved in
different methods of textual production (from cave paintings to iPads to VR Gear), this class will explore the impact that
writing technologies have had on how information gets valued, circulated, and understood. We will examine how
different methods of textual production might reflect the ways different cultures constructed knowledge or placed
importance on different aspects of their world. This course grows out of the assumption that the ways we produce texts
dictate the ways in which we interact with written information — and, in some cases, that production methods
constrain the very subject matter that a particular text can contain. In this course, participants will be able to discuss
issues such as how is information understood and circulated? What does writing aim to represent or communicate? How
are “texts” legislated or guarded, based on the ways they are produced? From cuneiform and papyrus to wikis and
podcasts—at every turn, we will look at the material genesis for a given writing technology, so that it becomes clear how
production methods influence the more abstract questions involving culture and cognition. Please note that this course
is “hands-on” and will meet in a computer classroom where we will be working with different writing technologies.
ENGL 4750/6750: Writing for Electronic Media - Jonathan Field
We will read and discuss texts written for electronic media, with the goal of producing and publishing texts for
established electronic media outlets. Class will feature live and Skype appearances by writers, publishers, and editors
working in electronic media. The final project will involve developing, pitching, and writing an article for an actual public
digital outlet. Along the way we will consider questions like:
"What does it mean to have a body on the internet?"
"Does having a smartphone make you a public intellectual?"
"Is critical thinking possible in the age of TL;DR?"
ENGL 4760: Filmmaking for Mobile Media - Brian Smith
Students will learn industry standard skills and practices in contemporary filmmaking and music video production, being
trained in working with Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, Adobe After Effects, tentatively other relevant Adobe
software programs, and camera/lighting/audio equipment resources from Cooper Library. While often filmmaking for
mobile devices is relatively identical to contemporary filmmaking in general, professional and prosumer filmmakers
must now take into account that viewers may be watching a very large production on a very small screen. Meanwhile,
filmmaking for mobile devices now includes 360 video and Virtual Reality, and students will heavily explore their
production techniques.
Teaching methods will include lecture, tutorial, viewing, and class discussion during the 50 min sessions. This course
includes a 2.5-hour lab for intensive filming and editing, guided and overseen by the instructor. Students will work on
both team and individual projects, and will consult technical documents and videos that will assist in understanding the
production workflow for both standard and 360/VR video. Required readings will be interviews from major directors
and producers selected based on student interests.
ENGL 4780/6780: Digital Literacy (Literary Mechanics) - Maria Bose
This course takes an expansive approach to literature written in our “new media" moment. We’ll read a handful of
award-winning contemporary novels (likely candidates include Jennifer Egan’s /A Visit from the Goon Squad/; Joshua
Cohen’s /Book of Numbers/; Ed Park’s /Personal Days/; and David Mitchell’s /Cloud Atlas/), and we’ll also read a variety
of text-based new-media forms, from e-poems and iOS games to Twitter fiction and nonfiction (here, we’ll likely cover
Teju Cole’s Twitter-and-Instagram essays; Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ adaptation of Pound’s Cantos (I & II); and
Sam Barlow’s detective game for iOS, /her story/). Our objective is to think closely about the formal and conceptual
rapport between these different types of texts. How, for instance, might Egan and Mitchell's dispersed, non-linear
narratives mirror the storytelling strategies of social media platforms like Twitter? How might Cohen and Park's formal
disruption of novelistic “character” and "point of view" draw on the mechanics of the iOS game? And how, finally, might
these formal innovations register and critique larger cultural transformations in the parameters of human identity and
sociality? The course will include a creative media assignment in the genre of those studied. For instance, you might
write a Twitter essay that makes use of Twitter’s particular affordances, or animate a canonical work of poetry in the
style of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.
ENGL 4890/6890: Special Topics in WPS (Rhetoric of the Body/Embodied Rhetoric) - Megan Eatman
Rhetorical theory has often seemed to exclude materiality, formulating persuasion as a rational process that can be
divorced from the bodies of speaker and hearer, as well as the spaces and objects around them. But even ancient
rhetoricians incorporated the body into rhetorical theory with concepts like metis, a kind of bodily cunning, and their use
of gymnasia as sites of philosophical discussion and education. A resurgence of scholarly interest in the rhetorical body
shows us that bodies intersect with rhetoric in many ways. As the technology through which we perceive the world, the
body is a rhetorical resource. It is also, however, a site marked by rhetoric in challenging and often problematic ways.
Public rhetoric and shared cultural values reinforce which bodies are normal, beautiful, healthy, and worthy. We can see
rhetorical operations in claims about gender, sexuality, wellness, race, and disability. The body, then, is rhetorical in at
least two ways: as a site of perception and persuasion and as a text whose meaning is structured by public discourse.
In this class, we’ll explore the rhetoric around and of the body: that is, rhetorics that label bodies and the material
rhetorics of bodies themselves. These aren’t entirely separate categories, as we’ll see, but we’ll be careful to remember
that, while bodies are affected by discourse, they also exist apart from it, and they may resist dominant discourses in a
variety of ways. We’ll start by reading works that unpack historical assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, and
ability. With that foundation, we’ll examine a wide range of texts that address the rhetoric that maintains these
assumptions, as well as primary texts that critique narrow or oppressive understandings of the body or imagine different
kinds of bodily existence. Likely assignments include regular “Talking Points” for class readings, a 3-4 page paper, a 6-8
page paper, and an open-form critical final project.
Readings will draw from rhetorical theory and other fields. Possible readings include:
Butler, Gender Trouble (excerpts)
Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (excerpts)
Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa”
Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”
Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (excerpts)
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (excerpts)
Hawhee, Bodily Arts (excerpts)
Weheliye, Habeas Viscus (excerpts)
DeConnick, Bitch Planet, vols. 1&2
ENGL 4920/6920: Modern Rhetoric (Material Rhetorics) - Michelle Smith
From the classical period onward, rhetorical theory has been preoccupied with the relation between rhetoric and
reality—that is, how do our words shape the world, and how does the world determine what we can say, think, and
believe? In this course, we will consider how modern, post-modern, and contemporary rhetorical theory answers these
questions.
After a brief introduction to rhetoric, we will explore two major approaches to material rhetorics. The first examines
language itself as material, through performative theories of language as “symbolic action.” In these views, to say
something is to do something, and identity is viewed not only as something we are (a question of “being”) but as
something we create (a question of “becoming”). The second approach examines the rhetoricity of the material world
itself, viewing space, embodiment, time, dress, and objects as persuasive, as encouraging us to act, speak, and think in
particular ways. On the whole, this course will introduce students to how modern rhetorical challenges enduring cultural
binaries: speech and action, mind and body, object and agent.
ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar (Law and Literature) - Brian McGrath
With attention to literary and legal texts, including the US Constitution, this senior seminar will explore some of the
ways texts inspire competing and sometimes irreconcilable interpretations. We will read Supreme Court decisions that
struggle to define free speech (First Amendment), cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment), and legal
personhood (Fourteenth Amendment) alongside poems and fiction. Authors may include William Wordsworth, P. B.
Shelley, Nathanial Hawthorne, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, William Empson, Paul de
Man, Barbara Johnson, and Judith Butler.
ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar (Melancholy | Ecology) - Michelle Ty
This seminar explores discourses and image-repertoires of melancholia, as it has been rendered variously as a psychic
pathology, an aesthetic resource, a way of life, and a mode of disinclination from the world, whose enactment may
occasion critical distance or political resistance. We will consider how theories and representations of melancholy make
perceptible psychic responses to loss that deviate from normative imperatives of mourning. The central inquiry of the
course asks what the melancholic gaze might offer or preclude as a framework for coming to terms with environmental
devastation—understood as a form of racialized violence.
Readings include selections from Sigmund Freud, W.G. Sebald, Fadwa Tuqan, Robert Burton, Louise Erdrich, Clifford
Geertz, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Rob Nixon, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Langston Hughes,
Stephanie Le Menager, and Elizabeth Povinelli.
Prints from Dürer.
Installations of Beverly Buchanan, Teresa Margolles.
Photographs of Atget.
Films, including El Abrazo del Serpiente and Still Life.
ENGL 4960: Senior Seminar (Frankenstein and other Human Progeny) - Erin Goss
Near the beginning of Mary Shelley’s nearly 200-year-old novel about the possibility of the construction of a living
humanoid creature, Victor Frankenstein remarks, with great seriousness, “In the university whither I was going, I must
form my own friends.” This class will take Victor Frankenstein’s statement as a starting point for a reflection on fictions
depicting efforts to construct new versions of humanity, often intended as “friends,” at least of a sort. Whether such
humanoid constructions come to be friend or foe, the reproductive fictions that generate them demand reflection on
the assumptions that govern notions of humanity, especially those that pertain to gender and sex, and to the relation of
humanity to other species and to the environment.
We will take up that demand for reflection and consider together Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as well as novels
like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick, 1968), Dawn (Butler, 1987), and Oryx and Crake (Atwood, 2003); films
like Metropolis (Lang, 1927), Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), as well as the revisit, Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017), and
Ex Machina (Garland, 2014); philosophical and theoretical reflections on automated humanity by thinkers like René
Descartes (1596-1650) and Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751); as well as selected short stories and poetry
selections (Milton’s Paradise Lost and the biblical book of Genesis both likely to make an appearance); and recent online
writing about cultural phenomena like Siri and other chatbots. Class assignments will include weekly informal writing,
active contribution to seminar conversation, a midterm essay, and a final term paper on a topic developed in
consultation with the instructor.