English Graduate Course Descriptions

ENG 620: Poetic Forms 
Dr. Jenny Peterson 
Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:15 

** fulfills poetry workshop

ENG 620 is a part-seminar, part-workshop exploration of the theories, histories, and uses of poetic form. Through course readings and researched class presentations, students will become conversant with a number of traditional forms: those that employ rhyme or repetition, like the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, ghazal, and pantoum; that play with shape and duration like haibuns, syllabics, and contrapuntals; and that involve collaboration and patchwork, like the renga, cento, glosa, and golden shovel. In addition to learning about forms, students will also write in form, navigating the practical challenges of at least two traditional forms, engaging their conventions in either strict or experimental ways. We will reflect on the continuing relevance of received forms and the emergence of new shapes, modes, and patterns of expression in contemporary poetry. As an optional community-engaged learning experience, students in the course will be invited to assist with Hattiesburg’s National Poetry Month celebration in April. 

  
 
ENG 625: Readings in Fiction 
Dr. Monika Gehlawat 
Thursdays 2:30 – 5:15 
** fulfills a creative writing elective; only open to students in the creative writing program

Readings in Fiction offers a craft-based approach to studying literary classics, modern and contemporary literature, as well as seminal craft essays and books. Drawing from fiction on exam lists as well as from new and emerging writers, this class is open to creative writing students who will read and discuss literature with an eye towards formal innovation and the choices writers make to get there. Students will be responsible for leading one class discussion with a formal presentation and submitting a final paper that makes a focused argument about the function of craft in one or more texts we read. Among other writers, we'll read Lillian Fishman, Anton Chekhov, Hortense Calisher, Alice Munro, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, and César Aira. 
 
 
 
ENG 627: Intro to Publishing 
Dr. Rachael Fowler 
M/W 11:00 – 12:15 

** fulfills CW elective
 
Considering a job as an editor? Want to see your name listed in an esteemed literary journal? ENG 428/627 welcomes all creative writers who’d like to learn more about the world of literary publishing. In this class, we’ll work to produce an issue of Mississippi Review and Product Magazine, giving you the chance to have a reading/editorial position in both and see the full production process of a journal from receiving submissions, to designing an issue, to launching/publicizing. We’ll also read a variety of texts that introduce you to the historical and current role of the literary editor along with other career paths in the editing world. You’ll complete an in-depth research project on a specific aspect of publishing that is interesting to you along with the professional materials you need to apply to editing internships, fellowships, and jobs. By the end of this class, you’ll gain editorial experience, skills needed to collaborate with a community of literary citizens, a growing knowledge of the literary market, and practical documents you need to step into the professional editing world. 
 
 

ENG 641: Advanced Research 
Dr. Eric Tribunella 
Wednesdays 2:30 – 5:15 

** required for second-year literature students

ENG 641 seeks to assist students with the development of substantial research projects such as critical articles, theses, and dissertations.  Students will read and discuss selections of literary criticism as models for their own work, review the collection and presentation of research materials, and workshop their own projects.  Those focusing on literature and on creative writing may register for this course. 
 
 
 
ENG 672: Bishop, Brooks, and Beyond 
Dr. Christopher Spaide 
Tuesdays 6:00 – 9:00 

** fulfills nontraditional requirement or American post-1865 requirement

This seminar focuses on two women who could be convincingly called, with nearly a century of retrospect to back the claim up, the most influential and durable American poets to write since modernism: Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000). Following their sometimes intersecting, often diverging careers from the 1930s onward, we will read all of Bishop’s mature poetry and almost all of Brooks’s; major prose works including Bishop’s story “In the Village” (1953) and Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953); and selections from memoirs, translations, children’s literature, reviews, interviews, correspondence, juvenilia, and unpublished work. Alongside the always mounting piles of criticism, scholarship, and biography on their lives and writing, we will also consider their chief influences (from George Herbert to Langston Hughes), indispensable friends across several generations (Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti), and some of the writers they’ve influenced (too many to list). As synopses of modern American poetry go, you could do worse. Our assignments include short pre-class writing exercises, the occasional presentation, a commentary or teaching guide on a single poem, and a conference paper or lyric essay featuring Brooks or Bishop or both. 
 
Required books: 
Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (Library of America, 2008), ISBN: 9781598530179 (alternatively, you could use the 2011 editions of Bishop’s Poems and Prose, sold together as a boxset, but it’s probably more expensive and harder to find) 
Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Third World Press, 1987), ISBN: 9780883781050 
 
 
 
ENG 716: Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity
Dr. Ery Shin 
Thursdays 6:00 – 9:00 

** fulfills nontraditional requirement or American post-1865 requirement
 

This seminar explores how notions of race and ethnicity have shaped not only political systems and public policies across the world but also the most intimate of spaces and interactions—homes, a singular look.  The body itself, for many, bears the burden of the quest for recognition and belonging.  A step further: the racialized body has often been a profoundly overdetermined one, insulated from narratives of possibility throughout history.  What it means to liberate the body and voice, to discover stories grounded in new senses of communion, are among the questions pursued by generations of writers seeking to understand the present we live in and the future to come. 

  
SAMPLE READING LIST: 
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (excerpts) 
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (excerpts) 
Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, Broke 
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow 
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law 
Iván Monalisa Ojeda, Las Biuty Queens 
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back (excerpts) 

 
ENG 721: Fiction Workshop 
Dr. Olivia Clare Friedman 
Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:15  

** fulfills fiction workshop

This semester, you may submit works of various lengths for workshop. That is to say--you might consider submitting several pieces of flash as one submission, with an aim to develop your practice of compression. You will have two main submissions, and you may submit either short stories or novel excerpts. 
 
In addition, we will discuss: beginnings, characterization, dialogue, setting, pacing, momentum, subtlety, syntax, syncopation, tension, anticipation, endings, style, your creative life, your reading habits, your writing habits, revision, publishing, and literary citizenship.  
 
Texts: 
PDFs to be distributed 
 

 
ENG 744: Seminar in Literary Criticism 
Dr. Charles Sumner 
Mondays 6:00 – 9:00 
** fulfills theory requirement

The first part of this semester will be devoted to very careful readings of many of Freud’s major works.  Once we have a grasp of Freud’s theoretical framework, we will read Marx’s early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.  We will then explore how the Frankfurt School philosophers – including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse – synthesize Marx and Freud in their own work, and we will end the semester by reading The Waste Land, Falling Man, and A Clockwork Orange through a Marxist-Freudian lens. 

 
ENG 754: Gender and Disability in Medieval Literature 
Dr. Leah Parker 
Mondays 2:30 – 5:15 

** fulfills British pre-1800 requirement

This seminar will explore medieval concepts of gender and disability as they are reflected in literature of the period and other primary sources. We will analyze texts such as the earliest surviving autobiography written in English (The Book of Margery Kempe), lives of saints who transgress gender norms and enact miracles of healing, and Arthurian romances including Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and Le Roman de Silence. We will read alongside real medieval people who wrote and read medieval literature, and whose documented engagement with matters of gender and disability complement the literary tradition, including King Alfred the Great, Geoffrey Chaucer, Eleanor Rykener, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe. Drawing upon critical methods including disability, gender, queer, and trans theory, this course will invite students to deepen not only their understanding of the Middle Ages, but also their ability to use such methods in the study of other literary periods. 

Students in this seminar can expect to (1) read widely in medieval literature and primary historical sources, both in translation and in Middle English, with training in the latter provided, (2) assess the strengths and weaknesses of scholarship on medieval literature as models for their own writing, and (3) craft analyses that reconcile contemporary critical methods with rigorous historicism. 
 
 
 
ENG 763: Seminar in English Romanticism 
Dr. Emily Stanback 
T/TH 11:00 – 12:15 

** fulfills British post-1800 requirement

 

Many of Romanticism’s most enduring characters, from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to Frankenstein’s Creature, are characterized by the kinds of bodies and minds that we would call “disabled.” Many Romantic-era authors also lived with conditions that, then and now, were pathologized by medicine—and many of them explicitly claimed the importance of these embodied states to their lives and writing. For example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote letters and poetry about a wide range of chronic bodily and mental symptoms, Mary Prince spoke movingly about her rheumatism, Thomas De Quincey minutely tracked his “crazy body,” and Charles Lamb wrote about his stuttering, limping, and experience of madness. In exploring the extent to which conceptions of “disability”—in the modern sense of the word—developed during the era, this iteration of 763 will put a particular emphasis on medicine.  
Students in this course can expect to gain familiarity with key concepts in disability studies, as well as practice in centering disability in the interpretation of literature; students also will discuss how to incorporate history of medicine scholarship and methodologies into their own scholarship. The semester will culminate in a class conference; along the way students will complete a bibliographical project related to a text of their choosing, as well as a research project on a medical context for a text of their choosing. 
 

HUM 402/502: Digital Humanities Practicum 
T/TH 2:30 – 3:45 
Dr. Jennifer Andrella 

 

In this course, students will work collaboratively on a Digital Humanities project while learning digital methods, community-engaged best practices, and archival research. We will engage in the entire process of constructing a digital project, from idea to public launch. Through this course, students will gain valuable skills in web authoring, team-based learning, and project management. By working closely with local archives, special collections, and/or community partners, students will explore how the digital humanities can connect scholarship with public audiences in meaningful ways.