Instructor: Prof Karim Mattar

In this course, we explore literary and cultural works by indigenous writers from around the world in relation to the histories of colonialism and incorporation to which their communities have been subject.  Employing a broad comparative framework, and looking into the histories of indigenous communities in the United States, Kenya, Libya, Palestine, India, and New Zealand from the 19^thcentury to the present as case studies, we ask how such texts address questions of collective historical trauma, and what new critical insights into the local / global dialectic might be gleaned when they are read alongside one another.  All in all, we aim through our readings and discussions to develop what Chadwick Allen calls a strong, “trans-indigenous” literary critical response to the violence of colonial modernity.  Primary texts include novels, poems, essays, films, and multimedia websites by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm & Josie Douglas, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ibrahim al-Koni, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, Reina Whaitiri & Robert Sullivan, Lee Tamahori, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

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ENGL 5269-001

Noah Eli Gordon

Provides practical experience in the editorial, design, and business procedures of desktop publishing.

Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.

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ENGL 5239-001

Elisabeth Sheffield

Designed to give students time and impetus to generate fiction 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.

Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.

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ENGL 5229-001

Ruth Ellen Kocher

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.

Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.

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ENGL 5529-001

Media History: Print Lab, Thora Brylowe

You hold a book in your hands. On its title page there is a date: MDCCXIV. What is this book? What is its relationship to the text it contains? Who made it and what is the maker's relationship to the person or people who wrote its text? How does it differ from a book from 2014? What historical and institutional forces shaped your encounter with this book? Why was this particular book preserved for 300 years, and who kept it safe? This course encourages participants to ask these kinds of questions and asks students to stage encounters like this for each other. Answers come through a combination of archival research, bibliographical analysis, and hands-on workshops. The class meets in the Media Archeology Lab and students will have the opportunity to use printing presses, experiment with early writing technologies, and examine old books. In addition, students will read media theory, write papers, and develop projects that help us understand the physical transmission of culture, knowledge and history.

MA Designation: Elective, A (Formalisms)
 

ENGL 5529-002

Literature and Culture of WWI, Jeremy Green

World War One is inescapable.  It is the founding event of the short twentieth century (1914-89), the first total war, and the catastrophe that shattered all ideas of social progress.  The ‘war to end all wars’ (H.G. Wells coined the phrase) brought the methods of industrial capitalism to the battlefield; it was a four-year period of accelerated technological innovation, rapid social change, and psychic devastation.  The war was also integral to the development of literary and cultural modernism.  Even after a hundred years and more, historians continue to debate the sources and meaning of the war: it remains resistant to comprehension, even as stereotyped images of trench warfare circulate in popular culture. 

In this course we will explore the literary, critical, historical, and theoretical discourses through which the Great War may be made at least partially legible.  We will examine the literature of nationalism, testimony, trauma, remembrance and aftermath.  We will also explore the less examined aspects of the war, including the home front, imprisonment, conscientious objection, and the fate of veterans.  Although our main focus will be on Anglophone literature (British and American), we will touch on some translated works.  The reading list will include: Ford Madox Ford, Vera Brittain, H.G. Wells, Rose Macaulay, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Ernst Junger, Rebecca West, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, David Jones, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf.  Response papers, term paper, presentation.

MA Designation: Literature After 1800, D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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ENGL 5169-001

Native American and Indigenous Film, Penny Kelsey

This seminar examines contemporary, emergent Native North American film and visualities in relationship to cultures and identities, knowledge and epistemic production, time and indigenous futurisms.  Cultural narratives and tribal knowledges (i.e., “oral traditions”) have played and continue to perform key roles in Indigenous American artists’ creative processes like filmic storyboarding and the resultant visual records; at the same time, indigenous artists seek to continually innovate grounded, local epistemes through endeavors like tribal language adaptations of Star Wars and scifi representations of migration stories in Futurestates.  This seminar begins with mainstream films that seek solely to represent indigenous peoples with accuracy (i.e., Winter in the Blood, Rumble), moves into first-generation independent films (i.e., Shelley Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper (1993)), and focuses largely on recent independent short films of the fictional, documentary, and animated varieties.  Course readings and screenings will include an array of texts by NAIS scholars and theorists and films directed by indigenous filmmakers. Critical methodologies will be gathered from works by First Nations, Native American, Native Hawaiian, and other Indigenous literary critics, historians, and social scientists.

MA Designation: Multicultural/Postcolonial Literature, A (Formalisms), B (Technologies/Epistemologies), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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ENGL 5059-001

The Later Romantics, Jill Heydt-Stevenson

This graduate course will explore a central phenomenon during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the relationship between literature and the fine arts. In their writings, William Blake, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Thomas Love Peacock, Felicia Hemans and many more authors drew on painting, drawing, and sculpture to imagine and reimagine how to depict their world as well as how to describe what moves them in representations themselves (for example, Keats writes about the Elgin Marbles and Peacock about the ruins of Palmyra).  This class will offer the exciting prospect of learning about literature and the fine arts (though no specialized knowledge of art history is necessary). We will explore varying ways that these two fields intersect: does the literature “redeploy” the statue, ruin, or landscape’s intensities and energies? Does the novel or poem’s description displace what is being viewed? How might a representation of a representation (novel describing a painting) change how we see the “original”? Inversely, how might the remaking of a literary scene or character into a physical artifact dislodge that original liveliness into new performances, new meanings? What does it mean to embody words in marble or gold? What are the benefits and limitations of description? Where do the concepts of originality and authenticity figure in when an author depicts the work of a painter, or vice versa. To help frame and answer such questions, we will look at a few essays by Thing Theorists (such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter) and other Romantic-era and contemporary philosophers.  Our focus, however, will be on the literature. Assignments will probably include a short paper, a long paper, and a presentation.

MA Designation: Literature After 1800, Poetry Intensive, A (Formalisms)

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ENGL 5029-001

Medieval Genres, Katie Little

The Middle Ages has long been synonymous with "quiet hierarchies," Christian dogmatism, and primitive thinking. And yet, it was also (or instead) a time of great literary invention and experimentation: the beginning of a literature in English, the emergence of new genres, and challenges to clerical dominance (to those who owned literature). This course will approach the variety and complexity, the familiarity and the weirdness of medieval literature by looking at its distinctive kinds or genres: the romance, the dream vision, the cycle play, the saints' life, the estates' satire, the devotional treatise, and the exemplum. Our medieval texts will include works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Marie de France, and Julian of Norwich. Our approach to genre will be informed by recent debates over what a genre is and does, and we will touch on the following theories: socially symbolic (Fredric Jameson), reader response (Jan Radway), discourse analysis (Norman Fairclough), composition/ rhetoric (Amy Devitt), and cognitive/ literary science (the work of social psychologists).

MA Designation: Literature Before 1800, Poetry Intensive, A (Formalisms)

ENGL 5029-002

Racial Ecologies of Risk, Ramesh Mallipeddi

Plantation agriculture was a hazardous enterprise. Tropical plants, sugar in particular, are vulnerable not only to pests, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires but also to loss of soil fertility.  In his 1729 The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, the Quaker merchant Joshua Gee observed that “the island of Barbados is very much worn out, and does not afford the quantity of sugar as heretofore” (45). Planters recognized that, as fertility declined, additional slave importations and new uncultivated lands would be necessary to produce enough sugar for the world market. They endeavored, in other words, to counter the irreversible effects of environmental degradation by making African bodies and colonial landscapes replaceable.

The course examines how the plantation complex transferred risks or uncertainties entailed by speculation to its most vulnerable groups: African migrants and Caribbean slaves. Drawing on late 17th and early 18th natural and social histories of the Caribbean (by Richard Ligon, John Oldmixon, and Edward Long), Samuel Martin’s plantation manual _An Essay on Plantership_ (1762), James Grainger’s West-India Georgic _The Sugar Cane_ (1764), John Hippisley’s _On the Populousness of Africa_ (1765), the testimonies before the select committee of the House of Commons, and slave narratives such as _The History of Mary Prince_ (1831), the course investigates how the subjugation of slaves and soil, labor and land, and bodies and landscapes was a social and environmental disaster—one with lasting consequences for African Caribbean slaves and their emancipated descendants. 

MA Designation: Literature Before 1800, C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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ENGL 5019-001

Professor Sue Zemka

Introduces a variety of critical and theoretical practices informing contemporary literary and cultural studies.

MA Designation: Required for 1st year MAs

ENGL 5019-002

Professor Julie Carr

Introduces a variety of critical and theoretical practices informing contemporary literary and cultural studies.

MA Designation: Required for 1st year MAs

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ENGL 5003-001

Tiffany Beechy

Hwæt!  English looked a lot different 1000 years ago. Although it sounds “old,” the history of English has everything to do with how we use the language today.  This course provides an introduction to Old English, the ancient ancestor of Modern English (as Latin is the ancient ancestor of Spanish and Italian, distinct from both). The focus of the course is on reading knowledge through grammar study and translation, and to a lesser extent on pronunciation. The course will provide basic parsing and translation skills and an introduction to the history, culture, and literature of early medieval Britain, as well as an introduction to the history of the English Language.  Did you know that the word glamor comes from grammar?  You will see why! Old English is a sequence, and Intermediate Old English II (Engl 4023) will be offered in the spring.

MA Designation: Elective

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