English Graduate Course Descriptions

ENG 716 
Seminar in Modern World Literature 
Dr. Charles Sumner 
TH 6:00 - 9:00PM 
** fulfills American post-1865 or British post-1800 requirements 
 
This course will examine modernist art and literary movements of America, Britain, and Continental Europe. We will treat major art movements including Cubism, Vorticism, and Futurism, and we will consider the challenges that advances in the visual arts posed for such writers as F. T. Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Kay Boyle, Mary Butts, and Ernest Hemingway. 
 
 
 
ENG 721 
Seminar in Fiction Writing 
Dr. Joshua Bernstein 
W 2:30 - 5:15PM 
** fulfills fiction workshop 
 
In Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, literary theorist Anna Kornbluh traces the rise of first-person perspectives in fiction. Citing data, she explains that “for most of its 300-year existence, third person has been the norm for the anglophone novel. Now, a serious formal mutation is underway, with first person becoming the dominant.” She offers a host of theoretical explanations, mostly connected to capitalism and the consolidation of markets, as she sees it. Our purpose in this workshop isn’t theory. But we’ll ask what’s at stake in the sudden rise of first-person and ask when or how a novelist or fiction writer might do well to buck the trend. To that end, we’ll read a classic Victorian novel, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and put it in conversation with several similarly themed contemporary works, including Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and shorter pieces by Becky Hagenston, Dana Johnson, Cris Mazza, and Sana Krasikov, to name a few. From a craft standpoint, we’ll ask what, if anything, a first-person narrative needs to do, what sort of expectations it places upon the reader (and writer), and what its limitations and advantages might be in writing fiction. 
 
 
 
ENG 722 
Graduate Poetry Workshop: The Five Obstructions 
Dr. Angela Ball 
W 2:30 - 5:15PM 
** fulfills poetry workshop requirement 
 
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 “all frame lengths the same,” “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 provides the poet with one or more obstructions which he or she must use in the revision. We will workshop new poems by everyone each week, and everyone will serve as Vile Obstructionist each week. The semester will end with a reading of the obstructed poems. 
 
 
 
ENG 761 
Seminar in 18th-Century British Literature: On the River: Riparian Landscapes in British Literature 
Dr. Nicolle Jordan 
T 2:30 - 5:15PM 
** fulfills British pre-1800 requirement 
 
From the Thames to the Congo, rivers in British literature suggest important links between nation and nature. This is especially true for an island nation such as Britain, whose imperial stature was aided in no small part by its mastery of inland and oceanic waterways. This course explores rivers as both agents of nationhood and sites for negotiating national and regional identity. How do rivers aid or determine human activity, and vice versa? How does a provincial river like George Eliot’s fictional Floss differ from an urban behemoth like the Thames, and with what consequences for the landscape and its people? More broadly, what might a riparian—i.e., riverbank—literary criticism look like? Authors include Alexander Pope, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad. 
 
 
 
ENG 770 
Seminar in American Literature I: Reading Poe 
Dr. Craig Carey 
W 6:00 - 9:00PM 
** fulfills American pre-1865 requirement 
 
This seminar is devoted to the literature and critical reception of Edgar Allan Poe. How do we read Poe today and how have others read him in the past? What might it look like to catch Poe and his readers in the act of reading itself, ensnared by the uncanny effects of literature, theory, history, criticism, and popular culture? 
 
We will practice the art of reading Poe’s work, reading critics reading Poe’s work, and reading across different historical methods of criticism. On one level, this will include reading Poe’s body of work directly by exhuming a corpus that consists of poems, stories, sketches, a novel, reviews, and essays, splintered across genres including Gothic fiction, horror, adventure, science fiction, mystery, hoax, detective fiction, cosmology, criticism, and ecohorror. It will also include reading Poe in conversation with his contemporaries, specifically Emerson and Hawthorne. On another level, it will include reading some of the most famous readings and adaptations of Poe by other writers, theorists, and scholars. At this scale, we’ll read selected fiction by Jules Verne, Ambrose Bierce, and H.P. Lovecraft; French critics and symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry; essays by Walter Benjamin and T.S. Eliot; psychoanalytical and deconstructive readings of Poe by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida; Toni Morrison’s influential reading of Poe’s racialized blackness; Meredith McGill’s materialist reading of Poe in the “culture of reprinting”; political readings of Poe in the context of capitalism and popular culture; and contemporary works inspired by Poe including Mat Johnson’s Pym: A Novel and Mike Flanagan’s miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher. Finally, we’ll also consider Poe’s relevance for understanding the uncanny horrors of Generative AI, stable diffusion, and new techniques for image, text, and sound composition/decomposition. 
 
Throughout our reading, the seminar will explore how Poe and his critics challenge the premise of Henry James’s assertion that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection” and “that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self.” Inspired by the history of reading and criticism, participants will probe the historical ambiguities and enigmas produced by others playfully “reading Poe” seriously. 
 
 
 
ENG 772 
Readings in American Literature 
Dr. Luis Iglesias 
T 6:00 - 9:00PM 
** fulfills nontraditional requirement or American post-1865 requirements 
 
The past ten years has witnessed an explosion of Latine cultural production across the literary, artistic, and creative fields, seemingly unprecedented but with deep historical roots. Sensitive to the changing national demographics and the globalizing reach of Latinx culture, the contemporary literary marketplace has not only given an expansive reach to writers of Hispanic origins and identities but also opened up radical textual imaginaries for linguistic and expressive creativity. This course will examine texts across the ethnic and national spectrums of Latino/a/x/e identity, reading a variety of novels, short stories, and poetry collections representative of diverse subject and racialized positions while taking the pulse of the effects the most recent cultural interventions of Latine creative artists are having on the national literary scene. 
 
Among the readings: 
 

House of Broken Angels (2018), Luis Alberto Urrea

Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), Natalie Diaz

Fiebre Tropical (2020), Julián Delgado Lopera

Of Women and Salt: A Novel (2021), Gabriela Garcia

Stepmotherland: Poems (2022), Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Plantains and Our Becoming: Poems (2023), Melania Luis Marte

Blackouts (2023), Justin Torres