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Spring 2013 Class Schedule - updated May 24, 2012 at 05:56 pm

Number/Section  Title
Days Time Room Instructor
 
ENGL 101-01  College Writing
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm Jake Mohan
 
ENGL 135-01  Poetry
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am Theresa Krier
 
ENGL 137-01  Novel
MWF 09:40 am-10:40 am Robert Warde
 
ENGL 137-02  Novel
MWF 12:00 pm-01:00 pm Robert Warde
 
ENGL 150-01  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am James Dawes
 
ENGL 150-02  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm Peter Bognanni
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 150-03  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm Peter Bognanni
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 150-04  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm Marlon James
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 150-05  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 09:40 am-10:40 am Jon Lurie
 
ENGL 150-06  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 02:20 pm-03:20 pm Jon Lurie
 
ENGL 208-01  Literary Publishing
M 07:00 pm-10:00 pm Jeffrey Shotts
 
ENGL 230-01  Nineteenth-Century British Literature
MWF 02:20 pm-03:20 pm Robert Warde
 
ENGL 275-01  African American Literature to 1900
MWF 10:50 am-11:50 am Daylanne English
 
ENGL 276-01  African American Literature 1900 to Present
MWF 01:10 pm-02:10 pm Daylanne English
 
ENGL 280-01  Crafts of Writing: Poetry
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am Kristin Naca
 
ENGL 281-01  Crafts of Writing: Fiction
M 07:00 pm-10:00 pm STAFF
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 281-02  Crafts of Writing: Fiction
W 07:00 pm-10:00 pm Peter Bognanni
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 294-01  British Youth Subcultures
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm Casey Jarrin
 
ENGL 294-02  Global Shakespeares: All the World
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm Dana Schumacher-Schmidt
*Cross-listed with INTL 294-01* This course looks at selected works of William Shakespeare in four interlocking ways: the already-global circa 1600 aspects of his great plays Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest; various modern adaptations such as the Voodoo Macbeth, Zulu Macbeth, and the recent Indian film Maqbool; multiple translations and worldwide stagings; and Shakespeare's global afterlife. Shakespeare is often termed a "universal" author: we will critically gaze upon this claim.
ENGL 310-01  Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm Theresa Krier
 
ENGL 341-01  20th Century British Novel
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am Casey Jarrin
 
ENGL 384-01  Langston Hughes: Global Writer
TR 08:00 am-09:30 am David Moore
*Cross-listed with INTL 384-01*
ENGL 394-01  Comics/Graphic Storytelling
MWF 12:00 pm-01:00 pm Matthew Burgess
With its origins going as far back as cave paintings, graphic storytelling has been around as long as we have, and over the last few decades it has made exponential increases in both its popularity and artistic ambition. In this creative writing workshop course, we will contribute to the medium by writing and drawing (but mostly writing; don't worry if you can't draw) our own original comics over a wide range of genres, from the superhero story to the personal memoir. Readings may include Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, Matt Madden's 99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY, Marjane Mastrapi's PERSEPOLIS, Alison Bechdel's FUN HOME, Frank Miller's BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and the BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2012 anthology, amongst others
ENGL 394-02  Topics Course in ENGL
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm Kristin Naca
 
ENGL 394-03  Writing Human Rights
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm Dianna Shandy
*Cross-listed with ANTH 394-01; permission of instructor required* This writing intensive seminar will explore the relationship between human rights and life narratives. Life stories are of increasing importance across a range of academic disciplines, but nowhere more so than in the interdisciplinary work of human rights. Human rights advocacy has always relied upon the use of peoples' stories—to give voice to those cruelly silenced by violence, to generate sympathy in global bystanders, to shame perpetrator governments. The special challenges of this sort of storytelling have recently become topics of special attention in academic scholarship. Many of the questions are ethical: How can you move audiences without being sensational? How can you speak for others without displacing them? How can you put incommunicable trauma into words without somehow altering the truth of it? This interdisciplinary course, co-taught by faculty in Anthropology and English, will train students in the methods and ethics of life history interviewing and the craft of narrative writing. Priority for registration will be given to students who can count the course for one or more of the following: English, Anthropology, Human Rights and Humanitarianism. We also aim to achieve a mix of sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the course.
ENGL 394-03  Writing Human Rights
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm James Dawes
*Cross-listed with ANTH 394-01; permission of instructor required* This writing intensive seminar will explore the relationship between human rights and life narratives. Life stories are of increasing importance across a range of academic disciplines, but nowhere more so than in the interdisciplinary work of human rights. Human rights advocacy has always relied upon the use of peoples' stories—to give voice to those cruelly silenced by violence, to generate sympathy in global bystanders, to shame perpetrator governments. The special challenges of this sort of storytelling have recently become topics of special attention in academic scholarship. Many of the questions are ethical: How can you move audiences without being sensational? How can you speak for others without displacing them? How can you put incommunicable trauma into words without somehow altering the truth of it? This interdisciplinary course, co-taught by faculty in Anthropology and English, will train students in the methods and ethics of life history interviewing and the craft of narrative writing. Priority for registration will be given to students who can count the course for one or more of the following: English, Anthropology, Human Rights and Humanitarianism. We also aim to achieve a mix of sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the course.
ENGL 394-04  Advanced Feminist/Queer Theories and Methodologies
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am Sonita Sarker
*Cross-listed with WGSS 300-01*
ENGL 400-01  Seminar: Special Topics in Literary Studies
W 07:00 pm-10:00 pm Daylanne English
 
ENGL 406-01  Projects in Creative Writing
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm Marlon James
 

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Fall 2012 Class Schedule - updated May 24, 2012 at 05:56 pm

Number/Section  Title
Days Time Room Instructor
 
ENGL 101-01  College Writing
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am OLRI 370 Rebecca Graham
 
ENGL 105-01  American Voices
MWF 12:00 pm-01:00 pm MAIN 001 Kristin Naca
As we speak, a caravan of freedom writers, named the Librotraficantes, are driving from Houston to Arizona, performing teach-ins on the way to the Arizona capital. This situation and several more like it across the U.S. will ground our conversation of Latina/o literature. In this course, we trace the development of Latina/o writing over the past fifty years, from collected personal narratives into complex American literary tradition. We read literary texts produced through grassroots publishing efforts, in English and English translations from the Spanish original. We read Mexican American cultural theory texts that address issues of race and indigenism, class, provisional citizenship, the status of migrant workers, border crossings, and gender and sexuality including transitional sexualities. We consider what multiple genres of literature—fiction, non-fiction essay, poetry and drama—and film have to offer audiences, and theorize how genre interacts, constructs, and/or up-ends audience expectations brought to bear on Latina/o representations. This course meets two General Education Requirements: Domestic Diversity and Writing.
ENGL 105-02  American Voices
MWF 03:30 pm-04:30 pm MAIN 001 Kristin Naca
As we speak, a caravan of freedom writers, named the Librotraficantes, are driving from Houston to Arizona, performing teach-ins on the way to the Arizona capital. This situation and several more like it across the U.S. will ground our conversation of Latina/o literature. In this course, we trace the development of Latina/o writing over the past fifty years, from collected personal narratives into complex American literary tradition. We read literary texts produced through grassroots publishing efforts, in English and English translations from the Spanish original. We read Mexican American cultural theory texts that address issues of race and indigenism, class, provisional citizenship, the status of migrant workers, border crossings, and gender and sexuality including transitional sexualities. We consider what multiple genres of literature—fiction, non-fiction essay, poetry and drama—and film have to offer audiences, and theorize how genre interacts, constructs, and/or up-ends audience expectations brought to bear on Latina/o representations. This course meets two General Education Requirements: Domestic Diversity and Writing.
ENGL 125-01  Studies in Literature
MWF 10:50 am-11:50 am MAIN 011 Casey Jarrin
*First Year Course only*
ENGL 137-01  Novel: Art and Violence
MWF 02:20 pm-03:20 pm MAIN 011 Casey Jarrin
Introduction to aesthetic, historical, and ideological transformations in the novel. From the violent anti-heroes of Dorian Gray and American Psycho to the “nonfiction” experiments of In Cold Blood and Vietnam War memoir Dispatches, from modernist stream-of-consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway to aesthetic anarchy in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, from celebrated to censored texts, we’ll explore the relationship between the novel as a literary form and its representation of violence in language, thought, and action. With a specific focus on the 20th-century, we’ll encounter modern, postmodern, and postcolonial revisions of the novel; we’ll read authors from a range of historical moments and national contexts (Wilde, Woolf, Capote, Burroughs, Nabokov, Puig, Rushdie, McCarthy, Welsh) whose work challenges novelistic convention in iconoclastic and often shocking ways. Attention to formal and stylistic elements will underscore connections between the novel form and its violent content. We’ll ask: What’s the relation between aesthetic creation and (self)destruction? How might narrative perform gruesome acts of violence, insatiable consumption, or cannibalism? How do particular novels embody violent and/or criminal psychopathology? What’s the relationship between hyperviolence, pornography, and censorship? How do race, gender, and sexuality manifest themselves in these texts? How have the gothic, horror, and war genres shaped our cultural understanding of violence in literature, film, and image? Our discussion of novels will be complemented by close analysis of selected films. Likely Novels (8-9 of the following): Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Nathanael West, Day of the Locust; Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Michael Herr, Dispatches; Salman Rushdie, Shame; Isabel Allende, Eva Luna; Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Alan Moore, V for Vendetta; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting Likely Films: A Clockwork Orange (Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971); The Shining (Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980); Apocalypse Now (Dir. Derek Jarman, 1989); The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (Dir. Peter Greenaway, 1989); Cat People (Dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942); Capote (Dir. Bennett Miller, 2005); No Country For Old Men (Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007); Trainspotting (Dir. Danny Boyle, 1996); American Psycho (Dir. Mary Harron, 2000); Psycho (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Requirements: Journals (20%); 3 Papers (60%); Participation/Presentation (20%) *Course fulfills 100-level/introductory English major requirement.
ENGL 150-01  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 09:40 am-10:40 am MAIN 111 Peter Bognanni
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 150-02  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 10:50 am-11:50 am MAIN 001 James Cihlar
 
ENGL 150-03  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 01:10 pm-02:10 pm MAIN 002 Matthew Burgess
 
ENGL 150-04  Introduction to Creative Writing
MWF 03:30 pm-04:30 pm MAIN 111 Matthew Burgess
 
ENGL 150-05  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am HUM 212 Jon Lurie
 
ENGL 150-06  Introduction to Creative Writing
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm MAIN 009 Jon Lurie
 
ENGL 210-01  Film Studies: Film Violence & Voyeurism
W 07:00 pm-10:00 pm HUM 226 Casey Jarrin
*First day atttenance required* Exploration of viewing desire and voyeuristic encounters with violence on screen, as well as forms of spectatorship and surveillance, from silent films and films noir through New Wave cinemas, Vietnam-era films, and recent neo-noir. Each week we'll conduct formal analysis of a single film with textual/visual counterparts and film criticism/theory. We’ll explore aesthetic questions, ideological/political frameworks, psychosexual contexts, and the ethics of voyeurism, with a focus on how noir style and the crime, war, and horror genres in particular have shaped our relationship to viewing violence. Directors will include: Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Bunuel, Jean Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Pedro Almodovar, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noe. Course divided into three segments: 1. Spectatorship, Gender, Desire; 2. New Wave Voyeurisms, Paranoid Spectatorship, War; 3. Neo-Noir and Technologies of Surveillance. Potential Films: M (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1931); Rear Window (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954); Psycho (Dir. Hitchcock, 1960); Peeping Tom (Dir. Michael Powell, 1960); Repulsion (Dir. Roman Polanski, 1965); Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966); Straw Dogs (Dir. Polanski, 1971); Blow Up (Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966); Belle du Jour (Dir. Luis Bunuel, 1967); Alphaville (Dir. Jean Luc Godard, 1965); A Clockwork Orange (Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971);

The Shining (Dir. Kubrick, 1980), Full Metal Jacket (Dir. Kubrick, 1987); The Conversation (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974); The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974); Videodrome (Dir. David Cronenberg, 1983); Wings of Desire (Dir. Wim Wenders); Funny Games (Dir. Michael Haneke, 1997/2007); Cache (Dir. Haneke 2006); The Lives of Others (Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006); The Skin I Live In (Dir. Pedro Almodovar, 2011); Enter the Void (Dir. Gaspar Noe, 2009); Andy Warhol silent films (Sleep; Eat; Blow Job); Shorts by Guy Maddin and Cindy Sherman. Potential Texts: Weegee, Naked City; Julio Cortazar short fiction; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Michael Herr, Dispatches; Essays/Theory: Laura Mulvey, Miriam Hansen, Raymond Bellour, Griselda Pollack, Susan Sontag, Kaja Silverman, Carol Clover, Peter Gidal, Fredric Jameson, WJT Mitchell, Peggy Phelan, Slavoj Zizek, among other scholars of film & visual culture. Photography: Weegee, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Kohei Yoshiyuki, Cindy Sherman. Requirements: Weekly journals, Midterm paper, Final project. Prerequisite: Prior course in English, MCS, or film studies OR approval of instructor.
ENGL 220-01  Eighteenth-Century British Literature
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am THEATR 204 Neil Chudgar
This course is an introduction to the British literature of the long eighteenth century. Between the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century and the revolutionary turn of the nineteenth, Britons enjoyed a period of relative political stability, rapid technological innovation, unprecedented social mobility, and increasing material comfort. Yet the period’s literary works are anything but lacquered artifacts of a serene Age of Reason: they record readers’ and writers’ urgent efforts to register the consequences of global capitalism, to invent from scratch new forms of social and spiritual identity. Eighteenth-century Britons found themselves all at once in a newly modern world, and the literature they produced records their feelings about it. Reading from the passions of Thomas Hobbes to the sympathies of Adam Smith, from Jonathon Swift’s “savage indignation” to the “unutterable bliss” of Olaudah Equiano, we will explore the relationships between the historical forms of British literature and the forms of modern feelings to which they respond. Our texts may include works by, e.g., Burton, Descartes, Hobbes, Pepys, Dryden, Bunyan, Rochester, Locke, Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, Haywood, Goldsmith, Hume, Richardson, Gray, Johnson, Smith, Burney, and Wordsworth. We’ll spend most of our time in the long eighteenth century, but we will sometimes examine more recent texts that will help us think about the literary history of modern feeling. In your work for this course, you will develop some of our own cultures’ modern sensibilities to their literary origins, and develop crafts of reading and response that will help you reckon with the cultural forms you encounter. Our primary goal will be to explore relationships between eighteenth-century texts and the structures of modern feeling that inform our cultures in the here and how. English majors may count this course as one of the three required courses in literary history; it also satisfies general-education requirements in Internationalism and the Humanities. Students from all majors and of all intellectual orientations will find questions here to interest and challenge them: the British eighteenth century is nothing if not comprehensive.
ENGL 272-01  Love and Madness in 19th Century American Literature
MWF 09:40 am-10:40 am MAIN 001 James Dawes
Our common vocabulary of love presents it as a force that strikes and knocks down its victims. It comes like a fever and it disables cognition. Lovers "fall," they are "smitten," "head over heels," "crazy" for each other. Love is both mania and obsession, both a euphoria that alters one's view of the world as a whole and an exclusion of the whole world, a radical narrowing of our normally capacious imaginative and perceptual faculties down to the simplest and smallest of human frames: a face, or the sound of a voice. For American authors of the 18th and 19th century, love and madness were twinned sites of altered consciousness that represented the radical "others" of Enlightenment reason, psychic parallels to and extensions of the wilds of the New World and the uncontrollable crowds and freedoms of the new democracy. This course will examine love and madness from multiple perspectives, including the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, gender and sexuality, the American Gothic, violence, and sin. Authors will range from Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
ENGL 275-01  African American Literature to 1900
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am MAIN 111 Daylanne English
*First day attendance required*
ENGL 280-01  Crafts of Writing: Poetry
MWF 02:20 pm-03:20 pm MAIN 003 James Cihlar
 
ENGL 281-02  Crafts of Writing: Fiction
MWF 12:00 pm-01:00 pm THEATR 204 Marlon James
*First day attendance required* In English 150 Introduction To Creative Writing you encountered the fundamentals of creative writing: plot, setting imagery, voice and character. Building on that foundation, Crafts is where you put those fundamentals to striking use—where you really begin to write. Crafts Of Fiction expands on your previous learning and reshapes it in more complex and unconventional ways, a lecture on Text as Seduction or Energy and Tension, instead of the usual nuts and bolts of creative prose. The course will conducted for the most part in workshop format with the emphasis on continuing to develop writing skills, but it will also involve extensive readings and discussion of several examples of short fiction, as well as four works assigned for group study. You will think like a writer. And write like a born storyteller. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester.
ENGL 283-01  Crafts of Writing: Scriptwriting
MWF 01:10 pm-02:10 pm MAIN 003 Peter Bognanni
 
ENGL 294-01  The Anglo-Planetary World, 1450-1800
MWF 03:30 pm-04:30 pm CARN 404 Dana Schumacher-Schmidt
*Cross-listed with INTL 294-03*
ENGL 331-01  Nineteenth Century British Novel
TR 09:40 am-11:10 am MAIN 009 Robert Warde
This survey of the nineteenth century British novel focuses on four works from the Victorian period: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; George Eliot, Middlemarch; and Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. We will consider these novels as

reflections of their era (1840s to 1890s), as crafted works of art, and as embodiments of human experience. We begin with Bronte, whose novel opens with these words: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." We end with Hardy, whose novel closes with these words: "As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on." Between that thwarted walk ("the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question") and that manageable walk ("the sun's rays smiled on pitilessly"), between the somber clouds of Jane Eyre and the pitiless sun of Tess, we will explore four of Victorian England's most celebrated pieces of fiction. Along our journey we will meet birth, youth, courtship, marriage, separation, old age, and death. We will meet good people, bad people, and people like most of us. That's pretty much how it will go. Four pieces of writing are required during the course of the semester--a combination of in-class exams and papers according to student preference. Periodic, very brief objective quizzes will manifest themselves along the way. Class format is discussion based, and both attendance and participation are expected.

Fulfills the English Department's period literature requirement
ENGL 367-01  Postcolonial Theory
MWF 09:40 am-10:40 am CARN 105 David Moore
*Cross-listed with INTL 367-01*
ENGL 380-01  Topics in African Amer Lit: Harlem Renaissance
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm MAIN 111 Daylanne English
*Cross-listed with AMST 380-01* In this course, we will ask a wide variety of literary, aesthetic, political, and historical questions about an equally wide variety of cultural productions from the Harlem Renaissance, roughly 1910-1938. We will study figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Bessie Smith, Oscar Micheaux, and James Van der Zee, among others. Our texts will include: ragtime, the blues, film, photography, poetry, novels, short stories, plays, autobiographies, fictional autobiographies and autobiographical fictions, and literary and cultural criticism. As we closely read, view, and listen, we will investigate: the movement’s chronological, geographic, and cultural boundaries; the imagination and representation of a "New Negro"; class, gender, and color conflict within the movement; tensions regarding “highbrow” versus “lowbrow” cultural production; the power and presence of gays and lesbians in what one scholar of the movement has termed "the gayest Renaissance in history"; debates regarding white patronage and audience; and the various "criteria of Negro art" being advanced by Harlem Renaissance figures. We will, finally, explore the current status of the Harlem Renaissance as a field of study and interest. Requirements for the course include: weekly 1-page responses to the reading, one paper of about 5 pages, one longer paper of about 15 pages, and one 20-minute presentation. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.
ENGL 385-01  Los Angeles and the American Dream
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm MAIN 009 Robert Warde
*First day attendance required; Mandatory film screenings TBA* One out of eight Americans lives in California; Los Angeles has become the second largest city in the country; and United States history records a steady movement of people from East Coast to West Coast, from South (Latin America) to North, and across the Pacific Rim. In this course we will examine the growth and nature of Los Angeles (its need for water, its automobiles, its film industry, its ethnic makeup,its lurking potential for natural disaster) and this city's relationship to the evolving identity of the nation as a whole. It will be a study in the significance of place, the human and environmental impact of urban development, and the characteristics of the American dream. The focus is on literature, and the approximate reading list is as follows: Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land; Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go; James Ellroy, Black Dahlia; Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays; Mike Davis, City of Quartz; Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Brando Skyhorse, The Madonnas of Echo Park; D. J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles; and David Ulin's edited collection, Another City: Writing from Los Angeles. A companion film series tentatively includes Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Chinatown, Blade Runner, L. A. Confidential, Boys n the Hood, Clueless, and The Big Lebowski, along with independent films such as Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles, and concluding with Thom Andersen's documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself. A music component embraces a wide range of artists from Randy Newman, Madonna, Dave Alvin, and the Distillers, to Guns N' Roses, NWA, and 2Pac. Supplementary videos cover everything from riots and earthquakes to the famous slow-motion freeway pursuit of O. J. Simpson. This is a discussion-based course, and evaluation depends on attendance and participation, plus a combination of exams and papers according to student preference, these written assignments to total three. Occasional, very brief objective quizzes will measure the degree of enthusiasm with which students approach each day's assignment.
ENGL 394-01  The Self as A Character and the Writing Life
MWF 02:20 pm-03:20 pm THEATR 204 Marlon James
*First day attendance required* Now that you are or want to be a writer what does that mean? How do we take the journal to the height of literary value? How does writing change from a piece to be read, to a piece to be performed, both of which you'll be expected to do? Reading moves on to become a reflexive act; meaning that you deliberately use what you have read to inform, influence and spur what you are writing, watching as that changes with each piece you read. The course is very free form and I wield a very light (some say too light) hand in the proceedings preferring to watch students develop a dynamic with each other. The coursework will include written pieces in several genres as well as presentations and performances.
ENGL 394-02  Crime, Horror, and Science Fiction
W 07:00 pm-10:00 pm MAIN 001 Matthew Burgess
In this creative writing workshop, students will be expected to write a short story in three of the more popular genres: crime, horror, and science/speculative fiction. This course will not attempt to erect walls between so-called literary fiction and genre fiction, nor will we spend much time picking nits over what exactly is and isn't a ghost story or private eye story. Instead--through reading, writing, and discussion--we will attempt to resucitate the good name of entertainment. Readings may include stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Moseley, Neil Gaiman, and Suzanne Collins's novel, The Hunger Games.
ENGL 394-03  Narrative Journalism
M 07:00 pm-10:00 pm MAIN 111 James Dawes
Co-taught with acclaimed writer and journalist Stephen Smith (Executive Editor and Host of American RadioWorks, the highly respected documentary series from American Public Media).This course will focus on creating vivid, economical prose as a foundation for many types of expository writing. Students will do research and interviews for print journalism pieces. Writing for audio/radio presentation will also be covered. Students will write frequently,

will edit each other, and will receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructors.
ENGL 394-04  Eccentricity and Mediocrity
TR 01:20 pm-02:50 pm HUM 217 David Martyn
*Cross-listed with GERM 394-01; Taught in English* Tiring of heroism, modern prose fiction invented a new kind of figure beginning in the late 18th century: the mediocre protagonist whose distinguishing characteristic was not prowess or virtue but eccentricity, both real and imagined. What in Germany is called "the middle hero," in France "le bovarysme," and in Russia "poshlost'" (trivial bourgeois ordinariness) all designate aspects of this new literary space of the mediocre in which individuality depends increasingly on forms of deviance. The course traces this development from the dawn of romanticism to high modernism in German, French, and Russian fiction with the goal of understanding the way literature negotiates the tension between the need to be "different" and the injunction to be "normal." Readings from Goethe ("The Sorrows of Young Werther"), Flaubert ("Madame Bovary"), Gogol ("The Nose," "The Overcoat"), Musil (excerpts from "The Man without Qualities"), Kafka ("Letter to his Father," "Odradek," "The Metamorphosis"), and Thomas Mann ("Tristan"). Requirements: weekly reading reactions, three mid-length essays.
ENGL 400-01  Seminar: Literature and the Sense of Touch
TR 03:00 pm-04:30 pm CARN 208 Neil Chudgar
*First day attendance required* In this senior seminar for English majors, we will explore the points of contact between literary language and the sense of touch. The connections between touch and literature begin when we hold a book in our hands (or don’t), but they hardly end there: we also say (or refuse to say) that a novel is “touching,” that some texts are “hard,” that some language is “fuzzy,” other language is “rough.” Beyond such tactile figures for literary phenomena, there’s also the fact that the worlds literature constructs for us are filled (or not) with sensitive creatures, who come into physical contact (or don’t) with the tangible objects that surround them. Some literary texts require us to think about touching in new and challenging ways; others need us to forget that touch is even possible. This course will help us think better about the many ways in which reading is (and isn’t) touching, and about the many ways in which touching can (and can’t) be read. We’ll begin or work by taking the first third of the term to explore some of the ways Western intellectual traditions have understood encounters between sensitive bodies and the tangible world. Readings in this part of the course will trace two lines of thought in particular: a philosophical tradition, from Aristotle through George Berkeley to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a psychoanalytic tradition, beginning with the works of Freud and continuing in writings by (e.g.) D. W. Winnicott, Didier Anzieu, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. During this period of reading, we will remind each other to keep the consequences of these theoretical traditions in touch with our thinking about literature. Having establish a common theoretical framework for our discussion, we’ll devote the remaining two-thirds of the semester reading, writing about, and discussing texts you and your colleagues have chosen to study on your own. You’ll sign up for a day to assign the rest of us an excerpt from the literature you’re studying read and comment on your colleagues’ written responses to it, and lead our discussion of it in class. Our conversation about your research will help you as you prepare your final project. That project may take any of several forms, from a scholarly essay to a work of prose fiction. To help graduating students prepare for their next steps in the world, we will also devote some of our time to professional development. This course is intended for senior English major, other students will be admitted only if space allows.



ENGL 406-01  Projects in Creative Writing
M 07:00 pm-10:00 pm MAIN 001 Kristin Naca
 

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