English 501:  Professional Seminar in College Composition,  Professor Shelley Aley
M/W 4:00-5:15
Practical examination of the content and methodology of freshman English (GWRIT 101, 102) for the training of beginning teaching assistants.  (Required for all beginning teaching assistants).

English 510:  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Professor Laura Henigman
T/TH 9:30-10:45
Abraham Lincoln, on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe during the Civil War, was supposed to have said to her, “So you’re the little lady that started this big war.”  His  remark, possibly legendary, was an apt testimony to the power of literature, for  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s best seller of a decade previous, had stoked the passions of the abolitionists and anti-abolitionists alike, and would outlive slavery in popular engravings and melodramas.  A century later, readers were less kind to Stowe – denigrating the sentimentalism of the novel (the very thing that nineteenth-century readers would have responded to), decrying what appears to be its racism.  Stowe’s place in one of the leading literary families of her time – a family of ministers, suffragists, and other reformers, including her sister Catharine Beecher, the nineteenth century’s version of Martha Stewart – locates her squarely in the middle of American literary life, and hers was a voice critical not only to the abolitionist movement but also to nineteenth-century conversations about sexuality, gender, and power.  Her status as a celebrity author, together with her complicated posthumous reputation, make her career an important window into the issue of canonicity:   What did it mean for a woman to write a popular protest novel in nineteenth century America?  How are we to understand the sentimental rhetoric in the book?  And what, in general, makes a book today worth our time?  We will attend to a number of Stowe’s other “local color” works (that very label was often used to denigrate the value of women’s literature generally), her participation in the burgeoning magazine culture, her affinity for a female-centered version of Christianity, and her spirited responses to sexually controversial figures of the nineteenth century:  Victoria Woodhull, suffragist, free lover, and presidential candidate; Lady Byron, the beleaguered wife of the Romantic poet; and her own brother, Henry Ward Beecher, charismatic preacher who was named as a correspondent in the divorce case of one of his parishioners.  Taking a cultural studies approach generally, we will also find occasion to read works of recent criticism as well as to examine works by Stowe’s contemporaries, including escaped slave Harriet Jacobs and children’s best-selling author Susan Warner. 

English 584:  Advanced Fiction, Professor Inman Majors
Tuesday 12:30-3:00
An advanced workshop with emphasis on developing sound narrative form and style. 

English 512: Advanced Topics in Creative Writing: Comedy Writing, Professor Inman Majors
Thursday 12:30-3:00
An advanced workshop with emphasis on comedic writing.  The early portion of the semester will be spend reading 3-4 comedic novels. In the middle and later portions, the class will focus exclusively on student writing in the workshop format.

English 512:  Advanced Topics in Creative Writing:  Characters in Poems,  Professor Laurie Kutchins
Thursday 3:30-6:00
Characters in Poems -- is an advanced topical workshop-style creative writing course that will focus on character development and voice in contemporary poetry.  We will read and discuss a number of poetry books that rely on specific characters to develop and sustain thematic tensions within individual poems, as well as for these books as a whole. Your reading will then influence and direct your own writing of poems for this course.  Although we will study and write poems, this course will also be useful for fiction writers, given its emphasis on creating voice and character.

English 512:  Modern Grammar, Professor Sharon Cote
M/W 5:15-6:3
In this course, we will examine the structure of the English language from a modern, linguistic perspective. We will explore what it means to be a native speaker of a language, and we will develop a conscious awareness of particular subconscious grammatical principles and rules that shape our everyday use of English, in particular, including the basics of English phonetics, phonology, and morphology, details about English lexical classes, and a range of English syntactic structures. More generally, students should come away from this course with a better understanding of what grammar rules are, of where they come from, of how they can be determined, and of the extent to which they are or are not fixed and comprehensive.  No prior knowledge of English grammar is required, but students should expect that the course will cover a lot of grammatical territory in a single semester. Graduate students in this course must fulfill all the requirements specified for the cross-listed undergraduate course. In addition, graduate students will meet with me individually to choose a paper topic relating grammar to their other academic interests, and may continue to meet with me on occasion to discuss their progress on their chosen topics.

English 512:  Evil in Literature, Professor Robert Geary
M/W/F 11:15-12:05
A study of literary works dealing with the problem of evil, that is, whether unmerited suffering negates the possibility of God. (Literary theodicies and their rejection would be a more formal description.)  Readings include Paradise Lost, Candide, The Brothers Karamazov .

English 645: Romantic Revolutions, Professor Katey Castellano
Wed. 6:00-8:30
This course will explore the connections between political revolution and Romantic aesthetic practice in the late 18th and early 19th century.  A strong connection between politics and aesthetics emerges with the American and French Revolutions, in part because the revolutionaries foment political “representation” for the people through literary and other aesthetic representations of political power and social class.  This period of political turmoil, moreover, coincides with the financial, agricultural, and industrial revolutions, all of which change established configurations of wealth, local community, and traditional values.  Our readings will be primarily in British literature, with a smattering of pertinent French and German literature in translation.   The class will be divided into four sections, each addressing a different aspect of Romantic revolution:

Revolution and Reaction
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality
Edmund Burke, selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France
Tom Paine, selections from Rights of Man
Mary Wollestonecraft, selections from A Vindication of the Rights of Women
John Ruskin “The Nature of the Gothic”
James Gillray, selected satiric prints

Revolutionary Subjectivities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
S.T. Coleridge, selected poetry
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

Prophetic Revolutionary Histories
William Blake, selected prophetic books
Shelley, selected poetry and prose
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times” and Sartor Resartus

Agricultural Revolution and Romantic Landscape
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
William Cobbett, Rural Rides
Wordsworth, Two-Part Prelude of 1799
Landscape Painting by Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner

Primary texts will be read alongside critical and philosophical approaches to literature and history by Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, Alan Bewell, Rene Girard, Saree Makdisi, Thomas Pfau, J.G.A. Pocock, Ronald Paulson, Malcolm Lowy and Robert Sayre, Carl Schmitt, David Simpson, and Raymond Williams.

English 671:  Studies in World Literature:  The Haunted “Landscape” Beyond the Rio Grande:  Freud in Spanish, Professor Maria Odette Canivell
Tues. 5:00-7:30
Course Overview:
Latin American writers inhabit a real-ideal ontological and geographical space, which, oftentimes surpasses the “imaginary” of any creative mind.  From the time of the discovery, when Columbus reported he saw: “men with monkey-like tales paddling across the sea in their canoes”, the Latin American psyche has explored these “haunted spaces,” both in literary works and using the conventional tools of psychoanalysis.  In this course we will explore the intersection of the European imaginary avant-garde authors with that of their Latin American counterparts, some of whom had written prose and verse (from the point of view of the unconscious mind) in the centuries preceding the foundation of Psychoanalysis. We will undertake selected readings from Latin America authors analyzing the text from the perspective of the psychoanalytical theory. At the end of the semester, I will expect students to become proficient in handling the fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis, such as repression, the unconscious, Eros, Thanatos, libido, Oedipus and Electra’s complex…
This graduate course on Psychoanalysis and literature is a seminar. Although I have assigned a comprehensive set of required readings which will address much of the content of what we will be covering in this class, students may feel the need to supplement the mandatory readings with the additional list I provide in the syllabus. At the graduate level, I expect my students to be prepared to engage in a frank discussion about complex subjects, such as the rational versus the ir--rational, alternate perceptions of reality, artists and their demons, narrative and the unconscious mind,  Freud’s and Nietzsche’s vision of the artist, as well as Freud’s theory of culture, sexuality and aggression.

Required readings: (fiction)
Amado, Jorge. Doña Flor and her two husbands
Belli, Gioconda. The Inhabited Woman
Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz
Piglia, Ricardo. Artificial Respiration
Piñon, Nélida. The Republic of Dreams
Sabato, Ernesto. The Tunnel
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Aunt Julia and the Script writer

Poetry:
De la Cruz, Sor Juana.  Poems, Protests and a Dream
Neruda, Pablo: Selected Poems

English 672:  Studies in African-American Literature, Professor Michelle Smith-Bermiss
Tues. 4:00-6:30
Students will be introduced to some of the important themes and key tropes in African American literature by reading a survey of eighteenth- through twentieth-century writers.  We will also survey histories, critical theories, and philosophical perspectives informing the representations of/by African American writers.  Course requirements will include five critical reading responses; leading class discussion on assigned reading; annotated bibliography and final seminar paper.

English 674: Body Studies and Literature, Professor Mary Thompson
Monday, 5:30-8:00
This course will explore the recent field of body studies and its theoretical origins in feminist/gender theories and Foucault’s theories, as well as its connections to related fields such as masculinity studies, crictical race studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, and disability studies.  Using popular and canonical works of fiction and non-fiction, this course will examine the ideological work performed on and by bodies with particular attention to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, health, class, and identity. 

Plath, The Bell Jar
Atwood, Surfacing
Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
Sapphire, Push
Grant, The Passion of Alice
Weldon, The Life and Loves of the She-Devil
Murphy, The Body Silent
Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike
Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume one
Roberts, Killing the Black Body
Daniels, Exposing Men
Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies

English 685: Advanced Independent Work in Creative Writing (instructor permission required; see Catalog)

English 698: Comprehensive Continuance.  1 credit.
Continued preparation for the comprehensive examinations.

English 699: Thesis Continuance.  2 credits
Continued study, research and writing for the thesis (may be repeated as needed).

English 700: Thesis.  6 credits.
Required for Master of Arts candidates in the creative writing concentration.  Graded satisfactory/unsatisfactory.