Spring 2019

Incest. Seduction. Suicide. Abandonment. Immolation. Cross-dressing. Revolution. For fun, toss in ventriloquism and hauntings. Welcome to the early American novel . Even such a simple welcome raises all sorts of questions: at what point does America become “America”? what role does literature play in that transformation? at what point does...

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls...

This will be an experiment in reading and studying a strain of modernist art created by women that questions the stability and efficacy of the terms ''Modernist," "art," "create" and "woman." We will pay attention to artifacts, objects and texts from Paula Modersohn-Becker, Claude Cahun, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Simone...

Writing is never done in a vacuum; it occurs always in context. Often fiction writing is provoked by contact with other art forms like painting, music and film. If composition is a series of decisions about what goes where, shouldn’t the translating of decisions from painting, music and film into...

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.

Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake...

This course tests the usefulness of assemblage theory, actor network theory, and similar approaches, for our understanding of international relations in the English Renaissance. Our primary focus will be on the work of a number of Renaissance literary authors who depict a variety of forms international interaction--dynastic conquest, colonial or...

Studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. Topics vary each semester. MA-Lit Course Designation: Elective, B (Technologies/Epistemologies)

Introduces purposes, methods and techniques of professional scholarship in English. Provides an overview of the discipline, including traditional areas of research and recent developments. Teaches students how to use research, bibliographic, and reference tools to prepare papers for conferences and publication. Required of all MA students in English. MA-Lit Course...

Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent black American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952’s Invisible Man. Over a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison published two essay collections, wrote dozens of articles, and delivered numerous speeches, but he never published the...