Fall 2018 Graduate Courses

Content List: Fall 2018 Graduate Literature Courses

ENGL 5019-001: Survey of Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory

This course introduces a variety of critical and theoretical practices informing contemporary literary and cultural studies. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours. Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.   MA-Lit Course Designation: Required for 1st year students

ENGL 5019-002: Survey of Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory

This course introduces a variety of critical and theoretical practices informing contemporary literary and cultural studies. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours. Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.   MA-Lit Course Designation: Required for 1st year students

ENGL 5029-001: British Literature and Culture, Medieval Drama

The plays that survive from the Middle Ages were written for street performances, services in churches and monasteries, entertainment in great halls and outdoor stages, but never for theaters as such. As games and/or worship more so than texts per se, these plays require as much an anthropological as a purely literary approach:  when medieval people performed or attended performances what were they doing, thinking, and feeling? In this course, we will explore the great variety of these performances: cycle p...

ENGL 5059-001: British Literature and Culture After 1800, Contesting Romantic Poetry, The Lakers vs. the Cockneys

We will be exploring the rich and varied poetry of what has come to be called the romantic period. While over the course of the nineteenth century, critics arrived at some consensus about what romantic poetry was and who the romantic poets were, at the time the nature of poetry was very much up for debate. The writers we now consider the major poets of the period were, with the exception of Byron, not the best selling writers of the era. While the canon of romanticism came to limited to six male poets, at t...

ENGL 5139-001: Global Literature and Culture, The Global Eighteenth

This course focuses on the role played by the intersection of commerce and culture in the creation of a global imaginary in the long eighteenth century. In particular, we shall study the feedback loop that obtained between financial capitalism and joint-stock companies like the South Sea, Mississippi, and East India Companies on the one hand and the worldwide movements of people, things, and discursive and visual practices on the other. We shall analyze a broad range of texts and objects, including prose na...

ENGL 5169-001: Multicultural/Postcolonial Studies, (UN)documenting LatinX Cultural and Literary Studies

This course has two goals—to introduce you to Mexican and Latino cultural forms and theory, mostly literary, from the 18th to the 21stcentury.  The second is to explore theories of information and New Realist studies, specifically, Ferraris’ theories of documentality, in order to explore the how Mexicans have engaged and been constituted by discourses of un/documentality.  Learning the theory and practice of what I am calling “un/documentality,” we will engage how “acts” across historical, political and aes...

ENGL 5169-002: Multicultural/Postcolonial Studies, Black Atlantic Theories and Cultures

This graduate seminar will investigate the production, circulation, and translation of 20th- and 21st- century Afro-diasporic cultures that track the Middle Passage and traverse Africa, Europe and the Americas. Taking a cultural materialist approach to literature, visual arts including film, and music, we will think about these works less as finished products than in terms of their movement, exchange, and translation within transnational circuits. Through this lens, we will take up questions of how the hist...

ENGL 5529-002: Studies in Special Topics, Special Effects in Film

This course studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours.

ENGL 5549-001: Studies in Special Topics 2, Afrofuturism

Ready to travel the Spaceways? Our propulsion system will be Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement driven by “African American voices” with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.”  We’ll begin with theoretical readings (Rammellzee, Kodwo Eshun, Fred Moten, Ytasha Womack), then explore its Caribbean heritage in the practice of marronage, the work of Marcus Garvey, and the wisdom of Rastafari and roots reggae. We’ll turn to Sun Ra’s poetry and prose for a blueprint for...

Content List: Fall 2018 Graduate Creative Writing Courses

ENGL 5229-001: Poetry Workshop

This course is designed to give students time and impetus to generate poetry and discussion of it in an atmosphere at once supportive and critically serious. Enrollment requires admission to the Creative Writing Graduate Program or the instructor's approval of an application manuscript.

ENGL 5239-001: Fiction Workshop

Lot of writing, good amount of reading, workshopping every week, always with an eye toward publication.

ENGL 5319-001: Studies in Literary Movements, Modernism

“From the modernism you chose you get the postmodernism you deserve.”  David Antin “If it is art, it is not popular.  And if it is popular, it is not art.”  Arnold Schoenberg. Texts: In Search of Lost Time—Marcel Proust,  The Complete Stories—Franz Kafka. In addition to these primary texts, I will also email assorted essays, including “The Dehumanization of Art” by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” by Sigmund Freud, “The Ideology of Marxism” by Georg Lukacs and “The Work of Art in th...