School of Humanities
English Graduate Course Descriptions
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Fall 2025
ENG 445/545
Study of Children's and Young Adults Literature
M/W 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Dr. Eric Tribunella
This course will focus on the graphic novel for children and young adults. We will
examine the history of graphic literature, including landmark graphic novels for adults,
and the evolution of the form. We will discuss how to analyze works that combine
text and image, and we will survey a variety of sub-genres of graphic fiction for
children and young adults, such as the superhero graphic novel, the graphic memoir,
graphic historical fiction, and gothic graphic fiction. Likely readings will include:
Understanding Comics (1994), McCloud
Maus: Volume I and II (1986/1991), Spiegelman
Watchmen (1987), Moore and Gibbons
Ghost World (1997), Clowes
Black Hole (2005), Burns
Smile (2010) and Drama (2012), Telgemeier
Anya’s Ghost (2011), Brosgol
March I and II (2013/2015), Lewis, Aydin, & Powell
This One Summer (2014), Tamaki
El Deafo (2014), Bell
New Kid (2019), Craft
Dragon Hoops (2020), Yang
ENG 468/568
British Women Writers
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 AM
Dr. Nicolle Jordan
** fulfills British pre-1800 requirement
How does female identity vary depending on whether it is depicted in a rural or urban
setting? Is one setting more congenial to the heroine—or the woman writer—than another?
How does a woman’s experience of the country and/or the city vary depending upon her
social status? In this course we will read British poetry and novels that imagine
female characters in an array of settings, from the bucolic English countryside to
the bustling social season of London. We will explore whether a woman’s value, and
her values, change depending on the familiarity or strangeness of her surroundings.
Readings include texts by Anne Finch, Jane Barker, Sarah Scott, Jane Austen, George
Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
ENG 640
Critical Reading and Methods
Mondays 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Craig Carey
** required for MA in lit, PhD in lit, PhD in CW
This course prepares graduate students to read, write, and publish literary criticism
and research. It will introduce professional norms and protocols, disciplinary histories
and debates, and critical theories and methods in English. How do scholars navigate
the constellation of concepts used to define and map literary studies—key words like
theory, research, methodology, scholarship, professionalization, textuality, discourse,
criticism, interpretation, close reading, poetics, semiotics, history, and more? Our
first goal will be to define these terms and their relationships. Our second: to learn
how to read literature, theory, and scholarship with more historical, critical, professional,
and creative sensitivity.
In surveying the field, we’ll practice multiple ways of reading, analyzing, and attending
to texts, from the hermeneutics of suspicion invented by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche,
to formalist and post-structuralist methods of textual analysis, to varieties of historical
criticism and cultural materialism, to the explosion of subfields such as gender and
sexuality, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, affect
studies, and more. Literary texts will serve as the ground for our critical and theoretical
engagement, and will likely include stories and poems by Melville, Whitman, Chesnutt,
Dickinson, Hurston, Chopin, Rich, Walcott, and Stevens. Course requirements will include
extensive reading, short writing exercises, and a final theoretically informed research-driven
work of scholarship.
Required Books:
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (978-0199691340)
Peter Berry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (978-1526121790)
John Guillory, On Close Reading (978-0226837437)
Recommended Books:
Murfin and Ray, Bedford Glossary of Critical & Literary Terms (978-1319035396)
MLA Handbook (9th Edition), 9781603293518
ENG 644
Literary Theory
Mondays 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Eric Tribunella
** fulfills theory requirement
The Life of the Author--New Biographical Criticism and Theory
British author Beverley Nichols wrote in 1920 that “nowadays fiction is becoming more
and more biography, with the result that biography is to-day the only province of
literature where we can be quite certain that we are soaring in the realms of pure
imagination.” The New Critics of the mid-twentieth century rejected the practice
of reading literature through and for the biography of its author, and postmodern
theorists went a step further by pronouncing the death of the author. However, as
historicist approaches have become increasingly dominant in the post-theory era, “New
Biographical Criticism” has been offered as a more theoretically informed approach
to using biographical contexts to analyze literary texts, and the lives of authors
have been especially important in feminist, queer, and African American literary criticism.
In this course, we will review the theoretical debates surrounding the role of author
biography in literary analysis and read several biographies in order to practice New
Biographical Criticism as an historicist approach to literature. Readings may include
essays by Wimsatt & Beardsley, Barthes, and Foucault; selections from George Hoffmann’s
The New Biographical Criticism and William Epstein’s Contesting the Subject: Essays
in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism; biographical
readings of Amelia E. Johnson and Henry James; and biographies of Louisa May Alcott,
J.M. Barrie, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
ENG 670
Style & Genre in Early American Literature
Tuesdays 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Dr. Luis Iglesias
** fulfills American pre-1865 requirement
Style & Genre in Early American Literature, which traces the development of American
literature from the Colonial and Revolutionary era through the early National period
to the flowering of the “American Novel,” will focus on issues of literary form and
content, reading across several genres. The course will press against the prevailing
sense that Anglo-American writers of the period were mainly concerned with “practical,”
political matters and in the absence of a traditional cultural community and heritage
have led to viewing literary considerations as a secondary concern. In response, the
course will survey a range of narrative and poetic forms including essay, epic poetry,
personal narrative, captivity narrative, lyric, prose sketches, “creative non-fiction,”
and the novel as used by our early writers within a dynamic matrix of both national
and transatlantic influences and concerns. Close attention to historical context and
meaning will feature importantly in the discussion as the writers of the period imaginatively
represented and recast forms while simultaneously imagined (often before the fact)
a national style and expressive identity.
Among the Assigned Texts:
Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, the Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground
Washington Irving, The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Parts I & II
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: …
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth
Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive
Phillis Wheatley, selected poems
ENG 673
African American Literature
Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Monika Gehlawat
** fulfills nontraditional requirement or American post-1865 requirement
James Baldwin and Luminaries of Artistic Influence
This class will focus primarily on James Baldwin’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction.
Baldwin has enjoyed a resurgence of public appreciation and scholarly attention in
recent years for his literary accomplishments, but also for his cultural, political,
and historical significance as seen in museum exhibitions, academic and popular books,
and worldwide conferences. As a framework for the class, we will also read and discuss
artists who Baldwin considered part of his “tribe” of predecessors, contemporaries,
and now successors. From Henry James to Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole, we will consider
writers who inspired and are now influenced by Baldwin’s work. With an eye toward
the constellation of Baldwin’s interdisciplinary relationships, the class will also
study works by playwright Lorraine Hansberry, painter Beauford Delaney, actor Sidney
Poitier, artist Glenn Ligon, and singer Nina Simone, among others.
ENG 690
Theory of Teaching Composition
M/W 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM
Dr. Erika Luckert
** required for new instructors
First and foremost, our goal in this class is to form a community of teachers that
will support your teaching development (though we’ll also problematize that idea of
community). I’ve designed this course with the understanding that educators come to
the teaching of composition from a range of different disciplinary and personal backgrounds,
and we’ll be drawing on the richness of your own educational history in this class.
This course is also designed with the understanding that you may go on to teach (or
may already be teaching) in other courses and contexts. Thus, while our conversations
will orbit around the context of the first-year composition classroom, I hope this
course will also inform a wide range of work that you do as teachers and writers.
We’ll organize this course as a series of conversations—these are conversations that
are both urgent and ongoing in writing pedagogy, and conversations which you are already
contributing to through the teaching choices you make in your classroom. By engaging
in these conversations together, I hope we can complicate the ways we think about
the work of teaching writing, expand our sense of what choices we might make as teachers,
and also develop more nuanced ways to talk about our pedagogies with each other and
with our students. Because teaching involves much more than the work that happens
in a classroom, we’ll also engage in some of the social and professional work of teachers—observing
each other’s classes, sharing resources, reflecting on practice, and researching in
order to learn from others outside our teaching community.
ENG 721
Seminar in Fiction Writing
W 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Joshua Bernstein
** fulfills fiction workshop
In this workshop, our focus will be on that strange and unruly beast, the novella,
sometimes characterized as the red-headed stepchild of the novel. We’ll look at some
classic and newer examples, likely including Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nella Larsen’s Passing, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Thomas
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Jim Harrison’s
The River Swimmer, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, and Andrew Malan Milward’s You Are Loved,
and ask what the strengths and the limitations of the form might be for writers, as
well as the special challenges it may pose. We’ll also discuss publishing, querying,
and professional concerns, along with the usual facets of writing fiction (voice,
perspective, dialogue, characterization, etc.). While you’re encouraged to submit
portions of a novella for discussion in workshop, you are also welcome to submit shorter
works or excerpts from full-length novels, as desired. If you’ve never written longform
fiction before, don’t worry: writers of all backgrounds and prose styles are welcome.
ENG 722
Seminar in Poetry Writing
W 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Angela Ball
** fulfills poetry workshop
GRADUATE POETRY WORKSHOP: THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. Fall, 2025
This workshop has its source in Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, The Five Obstructions,
in which von Trier asks his mentor, director Jorgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short
film, The Perfect Human in accordance with various crippling stipulations, or “obstructions,”
such as “no frame longer than X number of seconds,” “set it in the worst place in
the world,” etc. In the workshop version, the student submits his or her poem, which
is commented on by the first respondent, also known as the “vile obstructionist,”
then by the group as a whole. At the end of the discussion, the obstructionist presents
the poet with one or more obstructions which he or she must use in the revision. We
will workshop new poems each week, and everyone will serve regularly as Vile Obstructionist.
The semester will end with a reading of the obstructed poems.
English 760
Milton and His Contemporaries
Wednesday, 6:00-9:00 PM
Dr. Jameela Lares
** fulfills British pre-1800 requirement
This seminar will examine Milton's astonishingly good poetry and a few works of his prose in terms of the larger reality of English Renaissance literature. Besides participating in weekly discussions, each seminar member will also present on an additional author from the period and teach a 60-minute class on a Milton text assigned for a given date meeting. The required seminar paper can be on any topic with a demonstrable connection to the course material.
Readings include:
Sonnets
Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity
L'Allegro/Il Penseroso
Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle ("Comus")
Lycidas
Of Education (Prose)
Areopagitica (Prose)
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Samson Agonistes
ENG 764
Victorianism
Thursdays 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Alexandra Valint
** fulfills British post-1800 requirement
THE VICTORIAN NEW WOMAN
In her 1894 essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” Sarah Grand names the emergent
“new woman.” Grand imagines this figure awakening and feeling dissatisfied with what
she has, “with Home-is-the-Woman’s Sphere.” Grand hopes for the coming of a “stronger
and wiser” future woman, as well as a “better” future man. The new woman is a figure
from the fin de siècle (1880s and 1890s) who challenged the conception of woman as
an “angel in the house”: the new women rode bikes, smoked, sought more educational
and professional opportunities, expressed her sexual desires, explored alternatives
to marriage and motherhood, and fought for women’s rights, including suffrage. But
the new woman was also attacked and mocked. As scholar Sally Ledger writes, she was
sometimes believed to be “a threat to the human race…an infanticidal mother and at
the very least sexually ‘abnormal.’” In an 1896 essay, Victorian author Mrs. Morgan-Dockrell
contrasts the “genuine new woman” with the bogeyman version caricatured by her opponents
as an “unwomanly, unlovable, unlovely, untidy, undomesticated, revolting, shrieking,
man-hating shrew.” In this course, we will thoroughly explore the figure of the “new
woman” though essays, short stories, poetry, and novels; we will explore the multifarious
stances new women held on marriage, sexuality, motherhood, and suffrage. Following
scholar Riya Das’s lead, we will interrogate the new woman’s views on race, class,
disability, and colonialism to demarcate the harsh limits of their liberated vision
for women. Likely readings will include (but are not limited to) Olive Schreiner’s
experimental novel The Story of an African Farm, George Egerton’s short story collection
Keynotes, H. G. Wells’s suffrage novel Ann Veronica, Florence Marryat’s gothic novel
The Blood of the Vampire, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s crime/detective story collection
The Sorceress of the Strand, and various poems, essays, and short stories.
ENG 771
Seminar in American Literature II
Mondays 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Dr. Charles Sumner
** fulfills American post-1865 requirement
This class will cover the work of selected American writers since 1900. Among others,
we will read Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Sinclair Lewis, Nathaneal
West, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and Don DeLillo.