This course explores contemporary Native American film by directors from an extensive range of tribal nations, geographies, and genders across time and space.  We’ll look at early films of the silent era by the first Native director like James Young Deer (Delaware), including White Fawn’s Devotion (1910), consider American Indian filmmaking and presence in TV and film of the 1950s and 1960s, and then move to the mainstream splash Smoke Signals (1998) by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapahoe), which first put Native American directors on the figurative “map.”  From there we’ll move to a host of independent and experimental films by Indigenous directors on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border, from films like Jeff Barnaby’s horror creations like Rhymes with Ghouls (2013) and Shelley Niro’s experimental works like The Incredible 25^th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw (2019) to speculative film such as Helen Haig-Brown’s ?E?ANX/The Cave (2009) (Tsilqot’in) and documentaries by Terry Jones (Seneca) and others, including a guest lecture with Iroquois corn soup by Jones.  The semester wraps up with a student film project, utilizing skills of editing, montage, and narratology, in order to develop a full appreciation for the work that directors perform.

Provides advanced in-depth study of literatures written by ethnic American authors. Texts may be drawn from a range of African-American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American or Indigenous literature traditions. Topics vary each semester.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-U.S. Perspective
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

Taught by Penny Kelsey.

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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.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Practical Poetics

Taught by Khadijah Queen.

The Western

An interrogation of the Western, as in, novels of the Old West, from pulp to Robert Coover, with Lonesome Dove and True Grit and Blood Meridian and more between. Your final project will be to participate in this genre with a piece we'll discuss.

Taught by Stephen Graham Jones.

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Designed to give students time and impetus to generate nonfiction 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.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Khadijah Queen.

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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.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Jeffrey DeShell.

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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.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Noah Eli Gordon.

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Psychic trauma can be understood as both a violent breaching of subjective boundaries with long-term aftereffects, and the event that caused the breach. The traumatized individual returns compulsively to the unbearable experience again and again in thought, memory, and dreams, but is unable to move beyond it.

We will read theoretical material by psychologists and psychoanalysts, historians, and cultural scholars, and study representations of trauma in film and literature. Please note that the theoretical material will be intellectually challenging, and the film and literature may well be emotionally challenging.

Some of our topics will include: representational strategies for depicting traumatic events and the subject’s immediate and long-term experience of trauma; historical trauma (war, genocide, and other atrocities); grief, mourning, and melancholia; shock and the experience of modernity; trauma theory and horror film.

Taught by Kelly Hurley.

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After Foucault 

Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist oeuvre looms over the final four decades of the twentieth century, having contributed the essential concepts of genealogies, biopower, disciplinary society, discursive formations, archeologies of knowledge, and the redistributions of power that elude top-down conceptions. Yet Foucault’s insistence on the centrality of language has been critiqued as unequal to some of the emphatically material crises we now collectively face. Indeed, Foucault himself claimed that the century would come to be known as Deleuzian, in perhaps canny anticipation of the ways Deleuze’s dynamically protean, post-anthropocentric work has come to inform several posthumanist trajectories in the twenty-first century.

While “high theory” is always vulnerable to the charge of elitism because of its difficulty and inevitable blind spots, the thrust of both Foucault’s and Deleuze’s philosophical programs is liberatory. Foucault’s analyses of how bodies are conscripted by regimes of power and knowledge invariably culminate in imagined strategies of resistance. Deleuze’s concept of a “minor” literature—a form of writing that transforms dominant language into a language of subversive force—is just one among those devoted to defining modalities of difference that exceed binary frameworks, and seek the conditions under which new political practices may be produced and lived. Each has given us a spectrum of ways to critique the legacy of Enlightenment humanism in the West, and each offers distinctive approaches, tools, and formal strategies for expressing alternatives to that tradition.

This advanced graduate course will begin by reading selections from Foucault's and Deleuze’s major texts toward assessing their respective limitations and contributions to posthumanism and the new materialisms; to understanding the ascendency of neoliberalism; and to grasping the challenges of the Anthropocene, planetarity, and human/non-human relationships. The class will decide collectively about the relative proportions which these diverse schools of thought will occupy over the course of the semester, as well the extent to which we will employ contemporary novels through which to illustrate and/or apply them. Prerequisite: Introduction to Critical Theory.

Studies special topics in writing of the United States.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Karen Jacobs.

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The Modernist Object 

Readers have traditionally prioritized human characters in literature, finding in those figures a correlative for our own experience of the world. In doing so they have affirmed a subject/object binary in which people exercise varying degrees of control over an allegedly inert material world. However, recent work in literary and cultural studies, philosophy, sociology and anthropology has worked to trouble this opposition. In complex and intriguing ways, contemporary “thing theory” and associated schools of thought have suggested that objects act and constitute human subjects in ways we have only begun to recognize. This course will introduce students to some of the core theoretical arguments in the multidisciplinary field of object studies. We will also read a selection of short stories and four novels published in Britain during the interwar period that feature compelling, strange, or disturbing objects. Among our questions will be: what is the correlation between objects and sensation? How do we apprehend things? What happens to objects in the absence of a human observer? Under what circumstances might objects become more important than people?

Students will post weekly to Canvas, give two oral presentations, and write one seminar paper which we will workshop at the end of the semester. Required texts (in addition to a course reader that I will compile): Candlin and Guins, The Object Reader; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex; Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight; Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca.

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.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Jane Garrity.

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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.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: 
Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

This class will address weird and new weird fiction through a set of interlocking formal, historical, theoretical, disciplinary, and professional questions. What is weird fiction? What are the conditions of its emergence and various transformations? What types of thinking and scholarship does it afford? Why has it become the focus of scholarly attention in the early twenty-first century? How might graduate students and early-career researchers leverage this attention to their own benefit, whether by focusing on the weird or by adopting and deploying the discourse surrounding it for their own purposes?

More specifically, the class will consider:

• the historical background against which fantastika—including weird fiction, Gothic horror, science fiction, and fantasy—emerged, namely the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and related transformations to knowledge production;
• the four major periods of weird fiction both in terms of how they may be distinguished and in terns of how they overlap: 1880 – 1940 (the so-called “haute weird”), 1940 – 1980 (the so-called fallow period), 1980 – 2000 (the first instance of the new weird), and 2000 – present (the second new weird);
• the weird’s generic and formal relations to horror, fantasy, and science fiction;
• readings by William Hope Hodgson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.P. Lovecraft, Anna Kavan, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Clive Barker, China Miéville, Steph Swaintson, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, Stephen Graham Jones, and others;
• theoretical debates about world literature and geoliterature; the anthropocene; critical theory, postcritical theory, and speculative theory; humanism and posthumanism; and race/gender/sexuality (especially insofar as these categories are erased in face of cosmic terror and abstract notions of posthumanity);
• the professional discourse on the weird and our relation to it.

The class will not assume students to have any prior knowledge of weird fiction. Students with interests in any of the issues listed here are encouraged to sign up or email benjamin.j.robertson@colorado.edu for more information.

Taught by Ben Robertson.

This course will explore from multiple points of view the phenomenon of the enormous popularity of 18^th- and 19^th-century ruins—whether those be architectural, literary, or political, or all of these simultaneously. In fact, the course will maintain that there is no ruin that is not politically inflected.  Although the class focuses on the Romantic era in Britain, I have widened that scope. We will discuss ISIL’s 2015 destruction of the ancient ruins of Palmyra in what is now Syria; we will explore Native American ruins; and we will delve into the aftermaths of COVID-19 and September 11, 2001.

Expectations:  daily student participation; a short analytical paper, or, for MFA students, a creative piece; a short research presentation; a final paper of 15-20 pages.

Here are some themes we will explore and some possible readings.  Please note that this will change—I’ll subtract readings and offer others--and that the order presented here is not necessarily the order in which we will study these topics. 

• The Ruin as a hopeful harbinger of the past and present. The ruined, crumbling, shattered place where one paradoxically finds a grounding, a tremulously stable place to land and from which to launch.
  • Themes to consider:  The projection in conflict with the sight; hope and consolation in the midst of disaster.
  • Possible Readings:  William Wordsworth:  “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude, 1805
• The Ruined City:  Ruin as representation of liberation, as a site dangerous to despotic rule and as a graveyard of hope:
  • Themes, places, and literature to consider:  
    • The ruins of Palmyra, an ancient city in what is now Syria, was first partially destroyed by the Roman Empire in order to squelch a female ruler and her city’s bid for freedom from imperial governance; it was further destroyed by ISIS in 2015 to squelch the Syrian resistance against tyranny.  
    • Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a study of an apocalyptic plague that leaves all cities intact, and only one man standing
    • Themes to consider:  political implications of the ruin.  
  • Possible Readings:  Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra (1753); Thomas Love Peacock:  Palmyra (1806); Louise Pelletier:  Architecture in Words:  Theater, language and the sensuous space of architecture (2006); Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826); Volney’s The Ruins of Empire (1791)
• Literature as Ruin:  Deliberate and inadvertent fragments in Romantic-era poetry and literature.  Enormously popular in the early 19^th century, fragments became a genre of their own, inviting readers to think about what is not present. 
• Themes to consider:  Rendering the image into text and the text into the image; the invisible and the oblique; As Novalis wrote in On Goethe, “All that is visible clings to the invisible.  That which can be heard to that which cannot—that which can be felt to that which cannot.  Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable.” With Wollstonecraft, we can think about to about the Ruins of Gender-
  • Possible Readings:  Samuel Taylor Coleridge:  “Kubla Khan” (1797); John Keats:  Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion (1820); Mary Wollstonecraft:  Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
• The traveling-tourist-seeking Ruin—in person and via reading and viewing—to the Sacred Space of the Ruin:
  • Themes to consider:  Why did so many Romantic-era tourists feel compelled to see these debris, this rubble? Was it nostalgia or a stern urge to conjure the past. Are ruins the magic space of summoning or a pedagogical warning?  How does travel stimulate mass reproduction; what is a spectacle; how does a traveler really see versus imaginatively appropriate the visual—and is there anything wrong with the later?
  • Possible Readings: Roger Célestin:  From Cannibals to Radicals:  Figures and Limits of Exoticism (1996); Edward Said:  Orientalism (1978);  Several tourist accounts from the late 18^th and 19^th centuries
• Contemporary Ruins:  We'll address this in our last class. We will discuss Native American ruins and the ruins and impacts of September 11, 2001 and Covid-19.  
  • Themes to consider:  how does a historical moment affect views of the Ruin? What happens when ruins are “new” rather than 100’s of years old?  Can the contemporary ruin be a site of hope or consolation? In fact, how do we see the contemporary ruin? How has it been visualized in the arts and in personal accounts? Are the future’s promises always necessarily eclipsed by disasters that lead to ruins? How do we cope with disaster and ruin?  How does the ruin invite us to rethink the past, present, and future?
  • Possible readings:  Johann Drucker’s Graphesis:  Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014); personal accounts; other readings to be announced. James A. Swan: Sacred Ground in Natural:  The Power of Place and Human Environments (1991).

Taught by Jill Heydt-Stevenson.

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

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Julie Carr.

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