Fall 2023 Graduate-Level Courses
All English graduate students will be notified of course cancellations or additions over email.
501.001 Old English
T. Toon
Day & Time: T TH - 10AM-11:30AM
Location: MH2330
3 Credits
Meets with German 501.001
This course, along with English 503 (Middle English), taught in the winter term, meets one basic language requirement. It does not double-count as both an English course and a language course. You can use it for one or the other.
This course is an introduction to Old English, the language spoken by our forebears until the unpleasantness at Hastings — the Norman Conquest. Since Old English is so different from Modern English as to seem like another language, the greatest effort of this class will be to master the rudiments of the structure and vocabulary of the earliest attested form of English. The reward is being able to read an excitingly different corpus of prose and poetry. You will also develop a new appreciation of where our language, culture, and intellectual traditions come from. Course requirements: daily recitation, weekly quizzes, two-hour exams, a term project (written and oral presentation). Written work also includes regular short modernizations and longer take-home modernizations.
508.001 Discourse and Rhetoric
D. Gold
Writing to Save the World
Day & Time: M W - 11:30AM-1PM
Location: AH4211
3 Credits
Scholar-teachers seeking to promote social justice have likely heard some version of Stanley Fish’s admonishment to stay in their disciplinary lanes: “Save the world on your own time.” But what if “saving the world” is part of our job description? Writing studies has long seen the promotion of justice as core to its scholarly and pedagogical identity, seeking to help students to not just navigate existing power structures but transform them. In recent years, the field has increasingly interrogated its own role in sustaining social inequities in language education. This class will take seriously the premise that how we teach writing matters, examining both past and present efforts to develop more just writing pedagogies. This class is open to any major and students will be invited to develop a final project in line with their own scholarly, pedagogical, and extracurricular interests. Contact Prof. David Gold (dpg@umich.edu) for more info.
520.001 Introduction to Graduate Studies
A. Levy-Hussen
Day & Time: MW - 2:30M-4:00PM
Location: MH2401
3 Credits
This course is restricted to and required of 1st Year Lang & Lit and E&WS Ph.D.’s Only “Introduction to Graduate Studies” is a course that serves many purposes. For that reason, its aims are both modest and impossible; our agenda will likely seem both ambitious and pragmatic. My hope is that it will be a space of growth, challenge, and community. Scholarly self-definition doesn’t come
quickly or easily, but its rewards will stick with you for a long time to come. This seminar serves as an introduction to the fields of literary and cultural studies, to the Department of English Language and Literature, to the Rackham graduate school, and to the pressures, debates, and controversies that impact knowledge production—and life—within and beyond the academy. This seminar is not a substantive course on literature, criticism, theory, or method. It aims to provide opportunities for reflection, conversation, and engagement that inform your scholarly work throughout your career.
Our aim will be to develop a toolkit and a knowledge base rather than mastering a particular field or conceptual framework. At times we’ll pause over difficult key terms and concepts when they arise and/or when it seems useful to address gaps in knowledge. We’ll consider varied practical strategies for thinking and writing as well as explore methodological strategies, theoretical principles, and ethical commitments. The course will draw upon what we already know and what we don’t (yet, or care to) know; we will explore what it means to commit to an intellectual disposition of openness, curiosity, respect, and generosity.
In addition to some shorter essays, assigned readings will be primarily one essay or chapter chosen by each of you. This sample set of readings will provide a framework within which to articulate your professional/personal scholarly self and encourage you to interact with your cohort’s intellectual passions and priorities. Students will facilitate discussion on their chosen essay, prepare one substantive discussion question on another essay, interview a faculty member, engage in short exercises to develop specific skills, and participate in the intellectual community of the English Department. I will ask you to reflect on your past academic experiences, consider which strategies have and haven’t worked well for you, be open to learning from the experiences and strategies of others, and identify those areas in which some concentrated effort will augment your capacity to handle whatever lies ahead.
540.002 Topics in Language and Literature
L. Makman
Internship Practicum
Day & Time: T - 11AM-12PM
Location: AH4211
1 Credits
This practicum is the required curricular supplement to the English Department Graduate Internship Program. The practicum offers opportunities to learn about diverse career pathways for humanities PhDs. Participants will develop strategies to prepare for an expansive job search; they will also craft professional materials, such as cover letters, bios, resumes, and LinkedIn accounts.
569.001 Creative Non-Fiction Craft Course
A. Sloan
Architecture and the Essay
Day & Time: TH - 10AM-1PM
Location: UMMA049
3 Credits
In this class, we will read contemporary essays with an eye on structure. How do these essayists visualize and construct their work? Do conventional essays relate in any way to traditional architectural styles? How might we close read, dissect, and diagram a variety of nonfiction pieces in order to better appreciate how they were conceived? What is the effect of a dynamic structural decision on the experience of the reader? We will briefly delve into the way that architects describe their creative process, borrow tactics where possible, and use the concept of a blueprint to engineer essays of our own.
Can count as an elective for PhD students, cannot count as a Literature course for MFA students
571.001 Workshop in Writing Fiction
G. Habash
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: AH4175
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Prose Students - override needed
571.002 Workshop in Writing Fiction
K. Reid
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: AH4211
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Prose Students - override needed
574.001 Workshop in Writing Poetry
L. Gregerson
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: STB4000
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Poetry Students - override needed
574.002 Workshop in Writing Poetry
K. McGlynn
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: STB6000
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Poetry Students - override needed
579.001 Creative Writing Poetry
K. Mattawa
Poetry Craft Course
Day & Time: M - 4PM-7PM
Location: AH4199
3 Credits
580.001 Topics in Disability Studies
I. Orr
Contemporary Disability Theory
Day & Time: T - 2PM-4PM
Location: MHG463
3 Credits
This course will introduce students to ongoing debates and new directions in the field of Disability Studies with special emphasis on emergent intersectional and global approaches. We will survey recent
efforts to establish genealogies of disability and disability-related concepts and archaeologies of archival silences in order to develop useful theories for the present. What histories of disability and ability remain untold and what are the stakes of telling them? How might comparative and historical methods empower disability movements in the US and abroad, and how does the study of disability reveal linkages and convergences with the political and cultural movements associated with class struggle, anticolonialism, the women’s movement, LGBTQIA+ liberation, animal rights and environmentalism, and demands for racial justice? Scholarly texts we will examine include Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, Nermala Erevelles’s Disability and Difference in Global Contexts, Jay Timothy Dolmage’s Disabled Upon Arrival, and Denis Tyler’s Disabilities of the Color Line. Students will develop their own research questions and bibliographies and have the option of writing an article- or chapter-length paper.
627.001 Critical Theories and Cross-Cultural Literature
A. Khan
Decolonial/Postcolonial
Day & Time: M - 5PM-8PM
Location: MH3440
3 Credits
What is the “decolonial?” (How) is it different from the postcolonial and the postmodern? This course is a broad exploration and overview of the epistemic and methodological turn from postcolonialism and subaltern Anglophone coloniality to a Latin American-influenced decoloniality in contemporary anti imperialist critical theory and scholarly methodology.
Themes include the colonial production of modernity in the Americas, indigenous methodologies against settler colonialism, decolonial feminism, queer archives, race, migration, and intersectionality, scholarly positionality and autoethnographic genres, anti-secularism, ecology and extractivism, and decolonizing the university. We read texts of decoloniality that include foundational works by Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and María Lugones, and newer developments in intersectional decolonial thought by Jodi Byrd, Sara Ahmed, Cristina Sharpe, Julietta Singh, Sadia Abbas, and others. Our regional focuses include Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, the Muslim world, and the United States.
This course is a critical theory seminar that is broadly relevant to scholars of race, modernity, and various regional post/decolonialisms. Assignments include a presentation, in-class writing, and a final research paper that is either a journal article or a dissertation chapter.
627.002 Critical Theories and Cross-Cultural Literature
T. Hu
Introduction to (Digital) Media Studies
Day & Time: M W - 11:30AM-1PM
Location: MHG421B
3 Credits
This course will offer an overview of media studies from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Welcoming both students working with digital media and students working outside of the contemporary period, this course makes aesthetics, visual culture, and literary forms central to the analysis of media. It asks: What can today’s analysis of media and mediation on a screen say about a poem or a film? How do we understand the political stakes of something as ordinary as a GIF or a looped video?
This course will draw out connections between the history of media theory and newer research in the field: on race, gender, and sexuality; on robots, AI, and digital labor; in the environmental humanities;
on the “infrastructural turn” towards logistics and materiality; and on new methodological innovations, such as the study of cultural logics behind the screen.
Note: this course fulfills the core course requirement for the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate.
637.001 Studies in the Novel
D. Hack
Novel Readers: the Real and the Fictional
Day & Time: T TH - 4PM-5:30PM
Location: AH4199
3 Credits
This course explores the history and phenomenology of reading, especially novel reading, on the one hand, and the depiction of fictional readers, on the other. With regard to the former (the study of real readers), we will focus in particular on recent scholarship that attempts to: recover the actual experiences and responses of actual readers; understand reading as a cognitive process and bring this understanding to bear on literary analysis; analyze historical ideas and ideologies concerning the effects of reading. With regard to the latter (the study of fictional readers), we will focus in particular on novels that address the question of if and how readers should apply their reading to their own lives, as a source of understanding or guide to action—novels interested, that is, in how readers, both fictional and real, should understand the relationship between the fictional and the real.
Novels will likely include at least some of the following (with final selections made in consultation with the class): Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (or Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda); Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.
Assignments will include a conference paper (3000-3500 words), a review of a recent scholarly book, in-class presentations, and response papers. For the longer writing assignments, you will be ready to focus on materials from any historical period, so long as you engage with topics and issues addressed in the course.
MFA students are welcome and can substitute creative work for the conference paper.
635.001 Topics in Poetry
Y. Prins
Victorian Poetry Around the Globe
Day & Time: W - 10AM-1PM
Location: AH4175
3 Credits
As an introduction to Victorian poetry, this course will also introduce students to various comparative approaches (transnational, transhistorical, translational) in the study of poetics. We will trace how “Victorian” poems circulated broadly both within and beyond England during the long reign of Queen Victoria, often as a function of translation either into or out of English. We will ask how Victorian poets contributed to the idea of a “global bookshelf” for poetry, and we will consider various examples of the Victorian Poetess as a generic figure for global circulation. Throughout the semester, we will compare different ideas about Victorian poetry emerging in different geographical, historical, and cultural locations, including among critics and poets in our own time. MFA and PhD students in any historical period are welcome; familiarity with other languages is not required. Course expectations will include active participation in discussion, an oral presentation, and either one longer essay (16-20 pages, written in several drafts) or two shorter essays (8-10 pages each, one of which may be a creative response).
832.001 Seminar: The Study of Genre
V. Mendoza
Asian American Queer and Trans Critique and Culture
Day & Time: TH - 9AM-12PM
Location: NEED
3 Credits
This seminar will examine the scattered genealogies and contemporary iterations of Asian American queer- and trans-of-color theory, critique, and cultural production. Such an examination is an inherently difficult task. Queer and trans studies, already diverse interdisciplinary fields, have distinct intellectual lineages, strains, and commitments. The interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, meanwhile, is tasked to deal with the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity--to repurpose cultural studies scholar Lisa Lowe's canonical phrase--of "Asian America." Asian diasporic formations of gender and sexuality, categories usually not disaggregated from the other in non-Euro-American conventions, reflect and depart from distinct histories of countries and communities of origin, migration, and displacement. This seminar will trace how these varied critical studies of gender, race, sexuality, and nation have nonetheless overlapped, while training our eyes towards future modes of critique.
Winter 2023 Course Descriptions
503.001 Middle English
T. Toon
Day & Time: MW – 1PM-2:30PM
Location: AH4175
3 Credits
Meets with UG English 410.001
Both Old English 501 and Middle English 503 must be taken for this course to count as one basic language.
This term we will examine works in early Middle English, as well as the better known and more frequently studied major authors – Chaucer, Gower, Piers, the Pearl poet. Readings will include selections from prose and poetic histories, mystical writers, contemporary social and political documents (laws, recipes, medical texts, chronicles, charters). We will examine a wide range of early Middle English texts as we develop an appreciation for the roles written English played in medieval England and the cultural and political consequences of the ability to read and write.
The course requirements include regular in-class participation, frequent quizzes, two hour exams, and a short paper.
Enrollment Capacity: 5
510.001 Research Methods and Materials
Sweeney, Meg
English Department Prospectus Writing Workshop
Day & Time: M - 10am-11:30am
Location: MH2401
1 Credit
This one-credit, semester-long course is open to students from all three English Ph.D. programs who have completed their qualifying milestone (prelims or Second Year Exam) by January 31, 2023.
This workshop will give you an opportunity to create a collaborative, generative, interdisciplinary space in which you and your colleagues share questions, ideas, and suggestions as you conceptualize your dissertation projects. Through readings of sample dissertations and sample prospectuses, discussions of a broad range of methods, and peer review workshops of in-progress drafts written by each participant, you’ll have a chance to deepen and hone your own thinking about your dissertation, offer feedback for your peers, and develop intellectual and social connections that can help to sustain you through the process of writing your dissertation. Our weekly discussions and activities will enable you to identify the purpose and the stakes of your project, your primary audience(s) and the conversation(s) to which you are contributing, your project archive, your key terms, and the methods that you will use in your research and analysis. The workshop will position you well to submit your pre-prospectus by April 1, and it will help you to develop a plan for submitting your full prospectus (including chapter summaries and a bibliography) by September 15.
Enrollment Capacity: 12
572.001 Workshop in Writing Fiction
Townsend, Jacinda
Day & Time: T - 4pm-7pm
Location: AH4175
6 credits
Limited to MFA Prose Students - Class Permission Needed
575.001 Workshop in Writing Poetry
Hartsock, Katie
Day & Time: T - 4pm-7pm
Location: AHG160
6 credits
Limited to MFA PO Students - Class Permission Needed
578.002 Creative Writing - Fiction
Buntin, Julie
How to Debut: Writing the First Book
Day & Time: TH - 1pm-4pm
Location: SEB2228
3 Credits
In this MFA-level craft course, we will read noteworthy first books from across the literary landscape–indie sleeper hits, overlooked greats, prizewinners, forgotten debuts, mega bestsellers–focusing on titles published within the last ten years. Discussions will center
on questions of craft and artistic vision as well as process, and written assignments will be creative–writers will generate and revise the first chapter, story, or essay of a hypothetical debut–as well as professional (query letters, writing logs). Guest speakers will include authors and members of the publishing teams that helped introduce these books to the world (agents, editors, and even publicists). Are the concerns of a debut distinct from other books? How do writers translate the spark of an idea into their initial entry onto bookstore shelves? What is "failure," what is "success," and how might our answers be different for different debuts, different writers? We’ll blend rigorous discussions of craft– dissecting elements of fiction like POV, time, plot–with concrete, practical information about how to build a literary career without compromising one's art. By zeroing in on recent titles, we will develop an understanding of the state of publishing now and the many pathways to a published debut. Over the course of the semester, writers will consider how they might chart their own unique course through their writing lives.
Registration will be restricted to MFA students first - and then PhD students Please register for the waitlist if you are interested in registering for this course.
579.001 Creative Writing-Poetry
Gregerson, Linda
Exploring Poetic Form
Day & Time: M - 1pm-4pm
Location: 1168 Angell Hall (Hopwood Annex)
3 Credits
In a combined workshop- and discussion-format, members of the class will explore the basic elements of prosody and poetic form in English-language poetry, most of which have been borrowed from other cultures and languages. We’ll be reading a wide range of poems as well as critical essays and handbook entries. Weekly writing assignments will afford members of the class an opportunity to experiment with form in their own poems. I’m imagining this course as chiefly appealing to members of the MFA graduate cohort but doctoral students are warmly welcome as well. I’ll be happy to modify written assignments to accommodate those of you who may be interested in exploring the powerful contributions (and pleasures!) that formal analysis can add to critical method.
Count as an elective for PhD students, cannot count as a Literature course for MFA students
Open to MFA and PhD students
580.001 Disability Studies
Kuppers, Petra
Speculative Embodiment
Day & Time: T - 2pm-4pm
Location: MHG463
3 Credits
Meets with WGS 590/Arch 609/EDUC 580/Kinesiology 505/PMR 580/Soc 580/SW 572
This class will introduce students to disability arts and culture, and to creating community around/through/with disability. Our focus this semester will be on speculative gendered and embodied formations: forms of thinking forward in difference, in sci-fi and horror texts, designs, films and technologies, and in theoretical texts of imaginative futures. What will humans/animals/others be, how are gender and sexuality (re)configured, how do we reimagine power and life, precarity and utopia, embodiment and enmindment? The majority of contemporary disability cultural production has been telling it straight, inserting disability into dominant US literature traditions, often through memoir-like approaches that focus on truth-telling. This approach to disability is important: it pushes back against the many decades of cultural production in which disability featured mainly as a short-hand for death, evil, or tragedy. But this focus has tended to overshadow another aspect of disability culture’s creative production: imaginative work that conceives of disability and embodied difference as a generative lens through which to imagine new worlds not grounded in realist assumptions -- the weird dreams.
We will read chapters from Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future Is Disabled, Alison Kafer’s Feminist Queer Crip, Theri Pickens’ Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Ria Cheyne’s Disability, Literature, Genre, and Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. We will read excerpts of literary materials, including Addie Tsai’s Unwieldly Creatures, a queer bi-racial engagement with reproductive technologies in a Frankenstein retelling. We will also look at productions like (Portland, OR’s) Wobby Dance Company that are creating alternatives to straight stages, to the rehearsal/production regime that is often out of reach for disabled dance practitioners, and they and other companies/artists like (Seattle’s) NEVE or (Toronto’s) Syrus Marcus Ware who investigate storytelling approaches to performance, create imaginative installations, or use dance film and video as means of expanding time and space for disabled bodymindspirits.
This version of the course will partly work through the arts, not just about them – practical exercises will be part of the class work. We will also have a one or two studio visits to North Campus where we will engage in creative work.
This class is hybrid (not hyflex): it meets in person or online (online for up to 30% of the overall course, in particular during the most snowy periods). We meet for two hours in class time, with an additional hour in self-study and online engagement with exercises from Studying Disability Arts and Culture (book provided for free). This arrangement of the material hopes to make the class more widely accessible, and allows for a wider diversity of expression and disciplinary foci.
Requirements:
1 credit: attendance and Canvas responses to each class’s readings/exercises, wellness exercise
3 credits: attendance, Canvas responses, wellness exercise, group presentation, final class project or paper
Enrollment Capacity: 20
Class Permission Requests: Please contact: wgsoffice@umich.edu ____________________________________________________________
627.001 Critical Theories and Cross-Cultural Literature
Larson, Kerry
Aesthetic Theory: The Critical Tradition
Day & Time: TTH - 10am-11:30am
Location: MH3315
3 Credits
The course offers an introduction to the major ideas and figures in the history of aesthetics from the early 18th Century to the contemporary period. Questions involving the value of beauty and sublimity and their relation, if any, to moral or political values represent a common point of departure for this tradition, and we shall follow the evolution of various discussions and debates on the subject over the past three centuries. Beginning with selections from Hume and Burke, we shall move on to Kant’s seminal contribution along with Schiller’s influential adaptation, The Aesthetic Education of Man. A commitment to historicize aesthetics begins in earnest with Hegel, and we shall discuss the Introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics as well as Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In addition to selections from Heidegger and Adorno, essays by more recent critics such as Sianne Ngai, Jane Bennett, and Michael Clune shall round out the term. Students should expect to emerge from the seminar with a reasonably solid grounding in the basic issues engaged by aesthetic theory. Written assignments consist of a brief (1 to 2 page) explication due each week together with a longer essay at the end of the term. (Larson)
Enrollment Capacity: 12
627.002 Critical Theories and Cross-Cultural Literature
Adi Saleem
Postcolonialism and Decoloniality
Day & Time: M - 3pm-6pm
Location: AH4175
3 Credits
This course introduces students to a wide range of perspectives and approaches within postcolonial studies and decolonial thinking to understanding race and racism, empire and colonialism, and slavery and genocide. Given the transnational nature of colonialism, we will adopt a comparative approach, focusing on a variety of colonial and post-colonial settings from France and Algeria to the United Kingdom and Malaya. Selected theorists include Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Sylvia Winter, James Baldwin, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Syed Hussein Alatas, Françoise Vergès, Oyèrónkẹ ́ Oyěwùmí, Audre Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. This course is taught in English. All readings will be in English or English translations.
630.001 Special Topics
Portnoy, Alisse
Equity Practicum: Pedagogies of Public Engagement
Day & Time: MW - 10am-11:30am
Location: MH3333
3 Credits
Several years ago, the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching transitioned from inclusion-focused to equity-focused teaching. That transition reflects an increasingly popular politics of pedagogy. What do such shifts make available to teachers, at UM and beyond, in classrooms and other publicly engaged spaces? What,
too, do equity-focused shifts ask of us as scholars, teachers, and members of other publics? In this course, we’ll explore topics that may include land acknowledgments; UM’s new SPG about Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility; Florida’s HB 1557 and HB 7 legislation from 2022; and student-, faculty-, staff-, and/or public-facing University materials on a topic that we’ll select early in the semester. As we engage, we’ll take some field trips on campus to places such as UMMA, we’ll meet with other UM practitioners, and we’ll read some essays on pedagogies. Your final project will include an annotated suite of course materials for a course you’d like to teach or a similar pedagogies project that reflects what you’ve learned in our course.
Enrollment Capacity: 12
630.002 Special Topics
Porter, David
Approaches to Global and Transcultural Studies
Day & Time: MW - 4pm-5:30pm
Location: MH2401
3 Credits
This course offers a wide-ranging introduction to humanistic methods used in the study of cultural boundaries and contact zones, broadly understood, and the dynamics of how people, ideas, and artifacts move through and across them. Organized around the core concepts of translation, comparison, and connectivity, readings from a variety of fields will provide a sampling of generative approaches to understanding the cross-border workings of power, appropriation, assimilation, and group identity formation in historical and present-day contexts. Specific topics will likely include critical theorizations of translation, transculturation, racial discourse, linguistic creolization, postcolonialism, and disciplinary decolonization. A flexible menu of assignment options provides opportunities for students to cultivate graduate-level research and communication skills valuable in a variety of academic and post-academic contexts.
Enrollment Capacity: 12
675.001 Creative Writing Project - Thesis
Mattawa, Khaled
Poetry Thesis Workshop
Day & Time: T - 4pm-7pm
Location: MH2353
6 credits
675.002 Creative Writing Project - Thesis
Davies, Peter Ho
Fiction Thesis Workshop
Day & Time: T - 4pm-7pm
Location: MH2427
6 credits
720.001 Proseminar Critical Theory
von Moltke, Johannes
Critical Theory and Philosophy: Identity and Difference
Day & Time: TH - 4pm-7pm
Location: MH2437
Meets with German 762.001
What resources does Critical Theory offer for the politics of identity and for its critique? Prompted by a resurgence in the culture wars over identity and by the rise of “identitarianism” on the right, this seminar looks to the Frankfurt School for earlier articulations of the dialectic of the particular and the universal. Retracing the apparent negation of identity in Theodor Adorno’s philosophy of “non-identity,” we will ask how Critical Theory has negotiated the relation of identity and difference, how it might help address impasses in current debates, but also what blind spots it perpetuates. Through readings designed to offer an introduction to the work of the Frankfurt School, we will reconstruct notions of identity that Critical Theorists either formulated explicitly or assumed tacitly – from Walter Benjamin’s description of his childhood around 1900 to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s description of Odysseus as a proto-bourgeois subject in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the psycho-social analysis of the “potential fascist” in The Authoritarian Personality; from Siegfried Kracauer’s ethnographic study of white-collar workers in the 1930s to Herbert Marcuse’s engaged theorization of the social movements and the new left in the 1960s.
As we work through these primary texts, we will also study the ways in which Critical Theory’s notions of (non-)identity and difference have been taken up and critiqued in more recent work on culture and identity in queer theory, critical race theory, feminism, and political theory. Readings will include texts by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, Mark Lilla, Wendy Brown, José Muñoz, Fumi Okiji, Max Czollek, Mithu Sanyal.
Class Permission Requests: Please contact dharte@umich.edu
822.001 Seminar: Critical Theory
Miller, Joshua
Reconsidering Presentism: Approaches to 21st Century US Fiction
Day & Time: MW - 11:30AM-1PM
Location: MH2401
3 Credits
What are the methodological challenges inherent within contemporary literary and cultural studies? Is the primary problem that we know the objects of study too well or that we cannot know what they mean until later? If we cannot historicize the present, are there more modest, yet illuminating, ways to temporalize it? Are there distinctive problematics of contemporary literary studies in the 21st century? And, by the way, what are we calling the present moment? When did it begin? How are authors responding, IRT, to current events, such as regional and global migration crises, climatological collapse, police violence, and political authoritarianisms?
In this seminar, we’ll engage some key conceptual, interpretive, and practical problematics inherent in contemporary studies in order to clarify our own critical approaches to 21st century US fiction (the definitional limits of which will be open to each participant to set). We’ll consider recent historical events as well as trends in media platforms and
technologies that spur new (and remediated) as well as mixed narrative forms. Visual and digital artforms have particularly influenced the languages, structures, and layouts of contemporary literature. In an effort to develop methods to respond to these broad questions, we’ll consider approaches that foreground narrative form, race, sexualities, trans/gender, temporalities, media/platform, ecologies, and cultural value (which novels will future critics consider representative of our time?) and then generate interpretations of a wide range of genres in early 21st- century prose fiction, including short (micro or flash) fiction, experimental and mixed-media novels, speculative fiction, graphic narratives, and digital fiction, among others. How can comparative cultural studies take the distinct histories of varied social groups into account? Those who wish to pursue any of these considerations in greater detail or with an eye toward future projects will have opportunities to begin research into particular conceptual frameworks, techniques, and/or texts.
We can’t engage comprehensively the full range of methodologies and theoretical frameworks that have emerged as exciting directions for contemporary cultural studies, so the variety of our readings will reflect the inherently generative (and maddening) instability of this field. For similar reasons, the reading assignments are substantial and challenging; my expectation is not that you’ll read every text with the same intensity, but that you’ll choose particular foci for each class meeting and, at the same time, will gain a broader sense of the dynamics in play with examining the contemporary. The goal of this course is not to develop a singular conception of the cultural present, but to grapple collaboratively to formulate a wide range of original and compelling analytic questions and interpretive strategies.
Enrollment Capacity: 12
822.002 Seminar Critical Theory
Hartley, Lucy
Doing Cultural Studies with Stuart Hall
Day & Time: W - 1pm-4pm
Location: DANA3038
3 Credits
Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies, sometimes called the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and one of the foremost political intellectuals of postwar Britain. Born in Jamaica and educated at Oxford, Hall’s study of culture was shaped by a theory of encoding and decoding media and, in turn, shaped manifold debates about identity, policing, historical memory, and race relations, and much more. Culture is, Hall argued, experience, ‘experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined’; in other words, culture is not the preserve of an educated elite but, rather, a site of negotiation, a conjuncture. As such, he insisted that culture can tell us something about the world that traditional politics and economics do not.
This course models what might be called a socio-biographical mode of inquiry: that is, it combines biographical and theoretical approaches to the study of culture, primarily as a site of experience and principally via popular culture. Using Hall’s life and works as our guides, we will map the changing significance of cultural studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our focus will be mainly, though not exclusively, on Britain for, in the process, we will encounter other theorists of culture (e.g. C. L. R. James, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, F. R. Leavis, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Frantz
Fanon) and consider such topics as the emergence of mass media, Black migration and settlement in Britain, Marxism and the politics of culture, and the Black Arts Movement.
The following books are required (and will be supplemented with PDFs of other relevant works):
Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, ed. Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press, 2017).
Stuart Hall, The Essential Essays. Volume One: Foundations of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley (Duke University Press, 2010).
Stuart Hall, The Essential Essays. Volume Two: Identity and Diaspora, ed. David Morley (Duke University Press, 2019).
Enrollment Capacity: 12
Fall 2022 Graduate-Level Courses
All English graduate students will be notified of course cancellations or additions over email.
501.001 Old English
T. Toon
Day & Time: T TH - 10AM-11:30AM
Location: MH2330
3 Credits
Meets with German 501.001
This course, along with English 503 (Middle English), taught in the winter term, meets one basic language requirement. It does not double-count as both an English course and a language course. You can use it for one or the other.
This course is an introduction to Old English, the language spoken by our forebears until the unpleasantness at Hastings — the Norman Conquest. Since Old English is so different from Modern English as to seem like another language, the greatest effort of this class will be to master the rudiments of the structure and vocabulary of the earliest attested form of English. The reward is being able to read an excitingly different corpus of prose and poetry. You will also develop a new appreciation of where our language, culture, and intellectual traditions come from. Course requirements: daily recitation, weekly quizzes, two-hour exams, a term project (written and oral presentation). Written work also includes regular short modernizations and longer take-home modernizations.
506.001 Structure of English
L. Aull
Exploring the English Language
Day & Time: TH - 4PM-7PM
Location: MH1401
3 Credits
This course introduces graduate students to the systematic study of language and the English language specifically, first, through a survey of the structural levels of English, from phonology and morphology to syntax, and then through an introduction to language acquisition and several broad interactions of English with history, culture, society, and linguistic justice (e.g., by addressing slang, dialects, the teaching of standardized English, language and gender, bilingual education, and language change).
The course at present meets with English 305, an undergraduate course, though the graduate students work with one another during group activities. Coursework consists of group discussion leading, a midterm and a final exam, two reflection and analysis assignments, and a public-facing application project designed by the graduate student.
520.001 Introduction to Graduate Studies
V. Traub
Day & Time: F - 12PM-3PM
Location: LSA4155
3 Credits
This course is restricted to and required of 1st Year Lang & Lit and E&WS Ph.D.’s Only
This seminar serves as an introduction to the fields of literary and cultural studies, to U of M’s Department of English Language and Literature, to the Rackham graduate school, and to the pressures, debates, and controversies that impact knowledge production—and life—within and beyond the academy. This seminar is not intended as a fourth, substantive course on literature, criticism, theory, or method. It aims to provide opportunities for structured and free-wheeling conversations about topics that could inform and enhance your involvement in scholarly work, courses, fields, the department, the university, academia, and your eventual career, whether inside academia or out. Together we will explore your evolving academic identities and modes of participation in new intellectual environments, seek to develop confidence in the give-and-take of academic performance, and discuss strategies for planning your intellectual path.
Our emphasis will be more on the how than the what—on developing a robust toolkit and set of resources rather than mastering a particular field of knowledge. We will, however, pause over difficult key terms and concepts when they arise and/or when it seems useful to address certain gaps in knowledge. We will move between practical strategies for thinking and writing to exploring potential methodological strategies, theoretical principles, and real-world commitments. The course will value not only what we already know, but what we don’t (yet, or care to) know; we will explore what it means to commit to an intellectual disposition of openness, curiosity and generosity.
In addition to some short pieces and academic websites, readings will be primarily one essay or chapter chosen by each of you; this mode of reading will provide a framework within which to articulate your professional/personal identities and encourage you to interact with your cohort’s intellectual passions and priorities. Students will facilitate discussion on their chosen essay, prepare one substantive discussion question on another essay, interview a faculty member, engage in short exercises meant to develop specific skills, and participate in the intellectual community of the English department. I will ask you to reflect on your past academic experiences, consider which strategies have and haven’t worked well for you, be open to learning from the experiences and strategies of others, and identify those areas in which some concentrated effort will augment your capacity to handle whatever lies ahead.
540.001 Topics in Language and Literature
A. Gere
Writing for Publication
Day & Time: T - 4-7PM
Location: SEB4212
3 Credits
Meets with EDUC 621.001
If you have ever wondered how to transform a seminar paper into a published article or a dissertation into a published book, you may be interested in this course. Topics we will cover include: determining the best venue(s) for publishing your work; considering scholarly and public-facing publication; developing a compelling argument; locating yourself in an existing scholarly conversation; making your methodology clear and effective; determining the appropriate scope and length of your project; adapting your writing to different audiences; preparing queries and proposals; writing and publishing collaboratively; and managing time, anxieties, and the vagaries of publishing.
To enroll in this class you need to have a project already in hand so you can revise, edit, and prepare it for publication during the course of the semester. To help you in this process, course guests will include published authors, journal editors, and acquisitions editors for university presses.
Course requirements include presenting a copy of your project by the first day of class, making weekly written reports, participating in peer review, and preparing a document ready for submission by the end of the semester.
540.002 Topics in Language & Literature
L. Makman
Internship Practicum
Day & Time: T - 11:30AM-12:30PM
Location: AH3154
1 Credit
This course is only for students who received an internship through the PhD Internship Program This practicum is the required curricular supplement to the English Department Graduate Internship Program. The practicum offers opportunities to learn about diverse career pathways for humanities PhDs. Participants will develop strategies to prepare for an expansive job search; they will also craft
professional materials, such as cover letters, bios, resumes, and LinkedIn accounts.
569.001 Writing Workshop in Creative Non-Fiction
A. Sloan
The Art Essay
Day & Time: TH - 10AM-1PM
Location: UMMA049
3 Credits
In this course, part craft class, part workshop, we will read writing about art that lives in the space between criticism and personal narrative, by authors like Barbara Browning, Raquel Gutierrez, Christina Sharpe, Olivia Laing, and others. We will visit museum exhibits, write short essay-as-reviews, and workshop longer essays toward the end of the semester. No prior knowledge in art or art history is required.
Registration will be restricted to MFA students first - and then PhD students Please register for the waitlist if you are interested in registering for this course.
570.001 Research in Composition
T. Tinkle
Writing Theory and Practice
Day & Time: TTH - 2:30-4PM
Location: MHG421B
3 Credits
This course pairs composition theories with writerly self-reflection and experimentation. We will initially focus on sociocultural theories of writing, which invite us to think about how genres typify social
interactions, express epistemologies, respond to audience expectations, and anticipate rhetorical purposes. You will have opportunities to reflect on the audiences, rhetorical situations, social contexts, and genres that you find most interesting in your scholarly and/or creative work. You will also develop critical genre awareness by challenging the norms built into genres that interest you, and by writing in ways that upset genre expectations. We will examine the role of metacognition in writers’ development and analyze our writing processes and revision strategies. We will read about linguistic justice and reflect on our own languages, their social contexts, and how they might function as resources in our writing. This course invites you to engage with recent developments in writing studies while exploring your capacities and ambitions as a writer.
571.001 Workshop in Writing Fiction
J. Buntin
Day & Time: T - 4-7PM
Location: AH4175
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Prose Students - override needed
571.002 Workshop in Writing Fiction
G. Habash
Day & Time: T - 4-7PM
Location: AH4211
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Prose Students - override needed
574.001 Workshop in Writing Poetry
M. Smith-Beehler
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: AH3184
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Poetry Students - override needed
574.002 Workshop in Writing Poetry
L. Gregerson
Day & Time: T - 4PM-7PM
Location: Hopwood Room
6 Credits
Limited to MFA Poetry Students - override needed
578.001 Creative Writing-Fiction
J. Townsend
Microfiction and Magical Realism
Day & Time: W - 5-8PM
Location: AH4199
3 Credits
Microfiction and magical realism are often dismissed in workshop due to unwarranted bias against anything but traditional-length fiction and realism. This quarter, we will give such forays into the unusual
tough love that they deserve, and nurture these evolutions toward the very short, and the worlds of absurdism, surrealism, magical realism, and fabulism.
Registration will be restricted to MFA students first - and then PhD students Please register for the waitlist if you are interested in registering for this course.
580.001 Disability Studies
R. Adams
Criptographies: Disability and Design
Day & Time: T - 2-5PM
Location: MHG463
3 Credits
Meets with the following units:
Architecture 609
Education 580
English 528
Kinesiology 503
Physical Medicine + Rehabilitation 580
Social Work 572
Sociology 580
Women’s Studies 590
Criptographies invites students from allied academic units to co-innovate mental health networks and mindful practices that locate design-research within complex forms of embodiment through disability, intersectionality, and neurodiversity perspectives. Criptographies develops design strategies and representational systems to explore spaces and virtual platforms that empower students in navigating Disability Studies, and mental health practices that promote well-being. The course seeks to de-stress the demands of cognitive labor, introduce you to creative practices and theories in Disability Studies, and to reposition mental health within wellness enhanced infrastructure.
Disability Studies discourse is populated with numerous conceptual models that frame disability as a form of cultural production. From technological innovation to public policy, Disability Studies are concerned with new types of embodiment from artistic, historical, literary, political, and scientific perspectives. Disability makes a scene; it punctuates normative frameworks - vividly. Disability and Design is a course that explores the communicative structures of disability as it motivates new design methodologies between objects and bodies, and the relational structuring of architecture, the city, and public life. Disability and Design utilizes the generative energies of design in a cooperative environment that seek to agitate academic ableism and the dominance of normative culture.
630.002 Special Topics
A. Coleman
Poetic Methods of Translation
Day & Time: M - 4-7PM
Location: NQ1185
3 Credits
Meets with COMPLIT 580.001
What strategies and skills do translators use to bring poetry to life in new languages, cultures, and time periods? This course weaves together translation praxis in a workshop setting with seminar discussions
of a wide array of translation theories. By juxtaposing praxis and theory this course will guide both aspiring translators and students interested in Translation Studies through an exploration of literary translation. Embracing hands-on experimentation, we will practice translating a variety of poems into other languages, forms, genres, and media (depending on the linguistic and literary interests of students in the course). We will also read a number of translated poetry collections and consider the position of translated books in the U.S. publishing landscape. Invited guest speakers will include professionals in the field, from literary translators of all genres to publishers of translated works.
Course Requirements include regular attendance; active participation in workshop and discussion; a short seminar presentation; and a final translation project consisting of 5-7 poems/pages translated by the student accompanied by a paper (12-14 pages) reflecting on the author’s original work, the student’s translation method(s), and comparing their translation to at least 1-2 previous translations of the author’s original text. Portions of the literary work chosen by the student for the translation project will be discussed during at least two workshops during the semester. Students are encouraged to consider prospective translation projects prior to the start of the semester.
This workshop is open to all graduate students interested in the practice, theory, and industry of literary translation; poetry and poetics; and genre-bending literary forms.
While no specific language expertise beyond English is required, at least basic reading knowledge in another language is highly recommended. Please reach out to Dr. Coleman with any questions.
Meet-together with Comp Lit 580 Translation Workshop
635.001 Topics in Poetry
M. Schoenfeldt
Poetry of Sensation
Day & Time: MW - 2:30-4PM
Location: VIRTUAL/ONLINE
3 Credits
This class will focus on a range of works from early modern England that explore the ethical meanings lavished on various modes of sensation. We will be particularly interested in works that challenge the premium on pain and suffering pervading so much of western Christian culture, and that manage to celebrate corporeal and intellectual pleasure. By interrogating the privileged status of suffering, we will dispute those traditions of Judeo-Christian morality that transform self-renunciation into a spiritual ideal. We will look at the various ways that early modern writers attempt to make sense of their various corporeal, intellectual and emotional sensations. And as we read, we will not ignore the signal pleasures of formal accomplishment. We will read a wide range of genres, including lyric, epic, drama, and fantasy, focusing on texts dedicated to the frustrated desires, haunted hearts, ephemeral pleasures, and immense pains of corporeal existence. Writers to be studied include Thomas Wyatt, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, Amelia Lanyer, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips. Those students whose interests are not specifically early modern will be welcome to explore issues related to sensation in earlier or later writers. Attending to the literary record of the glories and afflictions of mortal flesh, we will investigate the motives for rendering the inherently unruly sensations of pleasure and pain in scrupulously patterned language. Requirements include attendance, participation, two short papers (one on a critical work, and one on a poem), two class presentations, and one longer research paper.
646.001 Topics in the Romantic Period
A. Pinch
Romantic Autobiography
Day & Time: TTH - 8:30-10AM
Location: AH4175
3 Credits
This class is designed for students in all graduate programs (English L&L, English & WGS, English & Ed, MFA) who have interests—as writers, teachers, and scholars--in life writing.
This class will give you an opportunity to read some of the touchstone texts of modern autobiography and contemporary theories of life writing, and to explore the diversity of the field.
Romantic period texts persist in being foundational to the history of life-writing genres, and for theories of autobiography, to this day. We e will explore the explosion of autobiographical writings that took place in early nineteenth-century England in the wake of Rousseau’s Confessions. We will draw on enduring topics, questions, and theories in autobiography studies: the relation of self to narrative, consciousness and subjectivity, the relation of autobiography to other genres (epic, novel). But we will also draw on topics from more recent approaches to life writing: autobiography and claims to personhood, national citizenship, and political franchise; definitions of the human; relation of body and self; performance of self; the role of address and addressee in life writing. We will consider the relation of the Romantic literary autobiography to related genres such as the abolitionist slave narrative; scandalous memoir; fiction and auto-fiction; and visual modes of self-representation.
While our reading will focus on texts from the nineteenth-century, students with interests in life writing in other areas will be able to pursue projects relevant to their fields. Assignments for the course will be designed to be diverse, multi-modal, and responsive to student’s own goals.
Likely Books:
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of An English Opium-Eater (Oxford 0199537933)
Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford 0199555400)
William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris and Related Writings (Carcanet 1857548574)
J.S.Mill, Autobiography (Penguin 978-0-14-043316-6)
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (Michigan 0472084100)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford 0199540039)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford 0199563276)
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Oxford 0199230633 )
Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (Oxford 0199536872)
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Norton 039309071X)
649.001 Topics in Contemporary Literature
W. Cohen
What’s Left of Class
Day & Time: TTH - 10-11:30AM
Location: AH4211
3 Credits
What's Left of Class?
Class issues were traditionally at the heart of progressive and revolutionary politics, as well as of corresponding intellectual analysis. Historically, Marxism was the central, though hardly the only way of addressing the topic. The new social movements and accompanying research of the past half century, however, have shown the inadequacy of a monistic view of history based on class. Partly as a result, in literary study today—more committed than ever to a leftist stance—investigations of class have all but disappeared, except on infrequent occasions when the category is introduced as a consideration subordinate to a central concern with a group defined in other terms (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability). In contradiction to the express ideals of the discipline, then, this evolution has mirrored the movement in U.S. politics as a whole, where it is no longer acceptable to speak of any class except the middle class—as if the working class had somehow disappeared.
The irony here is obvious: stratification based on income and wealth has increased dramatically over the past 50 years—in this country and not in this country alone, to levels not seen in a century or more, at least in the U.S. In other words, in the class conflicts of our time, one side (the side with wealth and power) has successfully rolled back decades of progress. Political changes have been both causes and effects of this process, often with dire consequences. The shift has been amply documented not only in progressive and radical scholarship in other disciplines, but also in mainstream outlets such as The New York Times.
This seminar aims not to return class to a position of primacy but to re-insert it into the conversation, into the methods and theories deployed in literary study. Class will be considered in capacious terms, so that it extends to questions of stratification and inequality more generally. To that end, we'll consider a series of topics:
1) the intellectual tradition of class analysis, with a focus on culture;
2) contemporary social-science accounts of inequality;
3) present-day cultural and theoretical studies of class;
4) the relationship of class to other pressing issues (certainly race, probably gender, possibly ecology); and
5) sample works of literature (perhaps: depending on the interests of those in the course).
Requirements: an oral presentation and a term paper of 15-20 pages. The oral presentation must focus on the required reading for the day. The paper can consider one or more of the writers or issues we study; or, it can bring class questions to bear on a literary work of your choice, whether or not we read any literature as a group. The paper can build on the oral presentation.
Readings will be selected primarily from the following authors, presented here in chronological order of birth.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Max Weber
W. E. B. Dubois
Georg Lukács
Antonio Gramsci
Raymond Williams
Michel Foucault
Pierre Bourdieu
Stuart Hall
Amartya Sen
Fredric Jameson
William Julius Wilson
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
Anthony Giddens
Orlando Patterson
Walter Rodney
Catherine Mackinnon
Erik Olin Wright
Nancy Fraser
Adolph Reed
Walter Benn Michaels
Michèle Barrett
Geoff Eley
David Grusky
Thomas Piketty
652.001 Topics in Nineeenth Century American Literature
S. Parrish
Southern Materialisms, 1780-1940
Day & Time: T 6-9 pm
Location: MHG463
3 Credits
I could name this course “Southern cultural and environmental history, 1780-1940.” Or “Race- and Place-Making in the US South under Slavery and Jim Crow.” Instead, I choose “Southern Materialisms, 1780-1940” in order to put the authors we will study in conversation with theorists of the ‘old’ materialism of Marx, and Black Marxist thinkers like Cedric J. Robinson and Robin D. G. Kelley (attending to economic, labor and race relations), as well as with the ‘new’ materialism associated with Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and others (attending to how non-human actors are agential, and how materiality and meaning are co-constituted). Scholars looking at the South have begun to integrate these materialisms as they, for example, study how climate and both European- and African-descended physiologies were discursively constructed to justify ‘race’-based slavery and freedom; or study how “Black ecologies,” including insurgent knowledge practices, developed in the wake of these mandatory emplacements; or focus on how cultivars, animals, and agricultural technology altered the terms of human possibility. I triangulate southern authors with these materialist theories and studies as a way to bring labor, race, environment and thinking together and ask questions about how a variety of authors construed relations between these categories. Beginning in the early national period, we will read: Jefferson, Equiano, and Latrobe, to understand the connection between the Black Atlantic, southern plantations and national foundations; statements by treaty delegations produced leading up to the relocation of southeastern Indigenous people across the Mississippi river; Douglass and Northup on the antebellum plantation as well as Mary Chesnut on the war years; Charles Chesnutt and DuBois on historiographies of slavery and reconstruction; and we will end by reading Hurston, Wright and Faulkner to think about Jim Crow modernity/ism in the South. You will do two short presentations; develop a research project around these issues, partially with texts/objects of your own selection, potentially in conversation with William J. Clements librarians, and present from this project at the end of the term. This course is very much open not only to PhD students in English, but also MFA students, and graduate students in other departments.
695.001 Pedagogy: Theory and Practice
A. Zemgulys
Day & Time: TH - 2-5PM
Location: MH3315
3 Credits
This course is designed to inform and support your work as an instructor. We will meet once for three hours each week of the semester to discuss readings, real-life scenarios, and various pedagogical resources. While our work will be focused on your needs in the immediate term, we will also engage in activities that will assist you in preparing for future teaching. All readings will be posted online.
821.001 Seminar Critical Theory:
M. Lahiri
Race and Comparison After Globalization
Day & Time: MW - 10AM-11:30AM
Location: AH4207
3 Credits
This course interrogates the changing terrain of racial comparison across the last century, whether between differently racialized persons or among discrepant regimes of racialization. To focus our inquiry, we will consider how neoliberal globalization – roughly, the oft-celebrated expansion of the connective currents of trade and migration in the late twentieth century – has transformed understandings and narratives of race, racism, and racialization, both popular and academic.
The decolonization movements that triumphed across much of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century not only transformed the global dispensation of national sovereignty; they also disrupted the available paradigms for understanding the relationship among different races. These national liberations, after all, heralded the collapse of the British and French empires, which had each articulated their particular understandings of race in a comparative and global frame. What happened, then, to the comparative understandings of race that had first emerged under those colonized conditions, and what remains of such understandings in our present moment?
The course proceeds by pairing twenty-first century texts with texts from the early twentieth century, allowing the Cold War to serve as a historical and conceptual interruption. We will consider explicit projects of racial comparison: for instance, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020) and Aniket Jawaare’s Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (Fordham UP, 2019), on the one hand, alongside W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and B.R. Ambedkar’s “Which is Worse: Slavery or Untouchability?” (1943), on the other. We will further consider the role of implicit racial comparisons: for instance, in the American “passing” narrative, by situating Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) alongside Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, 1927). Finally, we will also consider racial theories that explicitly refuse comparison, for instance, reading Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism (2020) alongside Okakura Kakuzo’s The Ideals of the East (1903). Theoretical and critical readings will include works by Chen Kuan-Hsing, Anne Anlin Cheng, Franz Fanon, Debjani Ganguly, Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak. Historically-oriented readings will also be provided.
As these primary and secondary readings suggest, our discussions will center on the comparability, or incomparability, of the racial experiences of African-descended and Asian-descended peoples. This question, as we will see, is as urgent today as it was a hundred years ago.
WINTER 2022 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
502.001 Old English Literature
Clark, Amy
Pathless Places in Old English Literature
Day & Time: M/W 10am-11:30am
Location: TBA
3 Credits
Notes: This is an Old English language course. Prior Old English language experience is recommended, but not required. A refresher/accelerated introduction to the language will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Course Description: From The Wanderer's lonely laments on the ice-cold sea to the surprising adventures of saints like Euphrosyne and King Edmund, the Old English corpus is full of liminal or contested space: places that are halfway between what we know, and what we have yet to discover. Sometimes these spaces are literal landscapes—but they can also be metaphorical spaces of spiritual or intellectual exploration, or socio-cultural spaces of gender and class. In this course, we will explore such “pathless places” in Old English literature together, revisiting texts written more than a thousand years ago with the aim of discovering something new.
This class will focus on reading and critical analysis of Old English literature in the original language. Assignments will include weekly translation and discussion of texts, five language quizzes, one short in-class presentation, and a final 10-page research essay.
Required texts: Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English Literature. Other primary Old English texts and secondary readings will be provided in PDF form.
503.001 Middle English
T. Toon
Day & Time: T/TH 8:30-10am
Location: MH3333
3 Credits
Meets with UG English 410.001
Both Old English 501 and Middle English 503 must be taken for this course to count as one basic language.
This term we will examine works in early Middle English, as well as the better known and more frequently studied major authors – Chaucer, Gower, Piers, the Pearl poet. Readings will include selections from prose and poetic histories, mystical writers, contemporary social and political documents (laws, recipes, medical texts, chronicles, charters). We will examine a wide range of early Middle English texts as we develop an appreciation for the roles written English played in medieval England and the cultural and political consequences of the ability to read and write.
The course requirements include regular in-class participation, frequent quizzes, two hour exams, and a short paper.
526.001 Literature and Culture
Orr, Ittai
Disabilities Past
Day & Time: MW 11:30am-1pm
Location: Lorch173
3 Credits
How were disabilities understood and mediated in past eras? How does the representation of disability in the English-speaking world reflect the priorities and aims of Anglo-American colonialism and empire? What kind of disability histories do we need today? This advanced undergrad/grad course is a collective investigation into the constructions of disability in textual, material, and visual culture from the Early Modern period to the late Twentieth Century, with an
emphasis on 19th-Century US and British sources. The culmination of the semester’s discussions and research will be a student-curated online and in-person exhibit housed at the Clements Library. Major secondary texts will include Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s Extraordinary Bodies and Kim Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States. We will also read primary texts by William Wordsworth, Samuel Gridley Howe, Harriet Martineau, Lydia A. Smith, and Robert Langdon Down, among others. Along the way, participants will have the chance to speak with visiting disability historians, activists, literary critics, curators, archivists, and scholars in the Public Humanities and Museum Studies to learn more about the stakes and challenges of doing historical and curatorial work. Graduate student participants will take the lead on various divisions of the final project, and read, review, and present on a recent book in the field.
540.001 Topics in Language and Literature
Mattawa, Khaled
Literary Editing and Publishing
Day & Time: F 12pm-3pm
Location: MLBB111
3 Credits
This course aims to introduce students to the larger literary marketplace, from its history to the diversity of publishing platforms, to the current challenges facing the industry. Students also will familiarize themselves with the various strategies involved in the practice of literary publishing, particularly the process of publishing literary reviews. Students will have opportunities to explore the practices of literary publishing through intensive readings on the profession, conversations with editors and publishing professionals, and hands-on editing and curation activities.
Here are the course goals:
● Introduce students to the practical side of the literary world, including publishing, editing/curating, copyediting, book reviews, and interviews.
● Give students the opportunity to meet and interact with professionals in literary publishing.
● Give students hands-on experience in contributing to the process of editing a literary magazine, MQR.
● Give students the opportunity to shape a literary project in which they will practice and advance their editorial skills.
Assignments in the course include a wide range of readings on the work of literary publishing, analysis of current contemporary journals, book reviews, the process of conducting interviews, editing and curation exercises, and a final project that helps students explore a facet of publishing or editing that interests them.
572.001 Workshop in Writing Fiction
Townsend, Jacinda
Day & Time: M 5:30pm-8:30pm
Location: AH4199
6 credits
575.001 Workshop in Writing Poetry
Mattawa, Khaled
Day & Time: W 1-4pm
Location: MH3315
6 credits
578.001 Creative Writing-Fiction
Davies, Peter Ho
Invisible Art: Re-seeing Revision - a fiction craft class
Day & Time: T 5pm-8pm
Location: MH2436
3 Credits
Over and over writers from Ernest Hemingway (“The only kind of writing is rewriting”) to Khaled Hosseini (“Writing for me is largely about rewriting”) to Joyce Carol Oates (“Most of my time writing is really re-writing”) have stressed the importance of revision. And yet, since all we usually have access to is the final draft of a published book or story, revision is something of an invisible art. In this seminar we’ll try to draw it forth into the light, calling on examples from life, literature and pop culture (from remakes to reboots to retcons and cover versions), as well as offering a range of strategies - ‘Saving’ your Darlings, Revising Titles, Getting to Done - for how to re envision revision. Suitable for any fiction writer who’s ever balked at revision as a chore (akin to “tidy your room”), despaired of it as a sisyphean task (when every story feels like “the never ending story”), or shuddered at the bloodthirsty idea of “killing your darlings." Students will work on a revision or revisions of their own fiction, and explore/share examples of their own and others' revisions.
580.001 Topics in Disability Studies
Kuppers, Petra
Disability Arts and Culture: COVID and beyond
Day & Time: T 4pm-7pm
Location: MHG463
3 Credits
In this class, we will survey shifts and changes in the disability arts scene under COVID. How does disability culture resilience respond to shifting social rules? Living in the pandemic meant initially adopting some of the remote-working technologies long advocated for by disabled people. At the same time, social isolation, digital divides, and access issues with digital content meant that others felt even more excluded.
We will look together how disability arts and culture organizations pivoted to online delivery, and chart (likely in real time) how artists and culture producers open back up to in-person contact, or embrace new mixed delivery models.
Some historical inquiries will give us a sense of disability culture’s long-time ability to reinvent and reshape art delivery options, and we will analyze tools like critical fabulation for their use in our approach to artful reception.
We will engage online arts and culture content and analyze the affordances and complexities of its audience address, participatory opportunities, and barriers, all the while surveying the contemporary shape of disability arts and culture.
This class meets for two hours in class, with additional time in self-study and online engagement with exercises from Studying Disability Arts and Culture. This arrangement of the material hopes to make the class more widely accessible, and allows for a wider diversity of expression and disciplinary foci.
Requirements:
1 credit: attendance and Canvas responses to each class’s readings/exercises, wellness exercise 3 credits: attendance, Canvas responses, wellness exercise, final class project or paper
627.001 Critical Theories and Cross-Cultural Literature
Sanok, Catherine
Temporality and Literature
Day & Time: T 1pm-4pm
Location: AH4199
3 Credits
Imaginative literature has long been recognized for its capacity to model, reverse, arrest, accelerate, slow, and syncopate time; and recent historical, theoretical, and critical work on temporality—time as experienced, conceptualized, or mediated—has expanded the analytical purchase that the category of time offers literary criticism. The range of this work is vast: it includes critiques of historical temporalities and chronologies in postcolonial studies and African American studies; conceptualization of queer, crip, and normative temporalities in queer theory and disability studies; approaches to “futurity” in relation to sexuality, race, and climate; historical accounts of how technologies of measurement, representation, and preservation, such as clocks, calendars and timelines, archives, etc. inform or are explored in literary texts; and more.
After surveying some influential accounts of narrative temporality (e.g. Bakhtin, Genette, Ricoeur), we’ll turn to critical approaches to temporality and the politics of time (e.g. Hartman, Halberstam, Freeman, Best), and disciplinary arguments about periodization and anachronism (e.g. Aravamudan, Dimock, Dinshaw). In the second half of the term, we’ll read examples of recent literary criticism that takes up temporality in relation to sexuality, race, gender, disability, and affect. Throughout, we will ask what interdisciplinary, historical, and theoretical approaches to temporality offer to literary study, and what literary study offers to an understanding of temporality.
Most of our readings will be theoretical or critical, but we’ll read two works of imaginative literature, a premodern and a modern one, as shared touchstones. I’ll set the premodern text (probably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); we’ll choose the modern text together. You will also be required to identify a third text (or a cluster of texts) to “think with” as we move through the syllabus readings and, likely, write about in your seminar paper. You are very welcome to return to a text that you’ve worked on before or one that is part of a dissertation or other research project. Students who are interested in taking this course as an 800-level seminar are encouraged to contact me to discuss independent reading and research to supplement the syllabus.
There will be some collective assignments (a shared “Keywords of Literary Temporalities” glossary developed over the semester), opportunities for collaborative work (paired presentations on readings), and individual research (which we’ll workshop). Above all, seminar participants are required to be generous in class discussion with their curiosity, insights, expertise, and uncertainties.
675.001 Creative Writing Project - Thesis
Buntin, Julie
Fiction Thesis Workshop
Day & Time: W 6pm-9pm
Location: MH2449
6 credits
675.002 Creative Writing Project - Thesis
Hu, Tung-Hui
Poetry Thesis Workshop
Day & Time: TH 1pm-4pm
Location: MH2437
6 credits
821.001 Seminar: Critical Theory
Miller, Joshua
Reconsidering Presentism: Approaches to 21st Century US Fiction
Day & Time: MW 10am-11:30am
Location: MH3440
3 Credits
What are the methodological challenges inherent within contemporary literary and cultural studies? Is the primary problem that we know the objects of study too well or that we cannot know what they mean until later? If we cannot historicize the present, are there more modest, yet illuminating, ways to temporalize it? Are there distinctive problematics of contemporary
literary studies in the 21st century? And, by the way, what are we calling the present moment? When did it begin? How are authors responding, IRT, to current events, such as regional and global migration crises, climatological collapse, police violence, and political authoritarianisms? In this seminar, we’ll engage some key conceptual, interpretive, and practical problematics inherent in contemporary studies in order to clarify our own critical approaches to 21st century US fiction (the definitional limits of which will be open to each participant to set). We’ll consider recent historical events as well as trends in media and technologies that spur new (and remediated) as well as mixed narrative forms. Visual and digital artforms have particularly influenced the languages, structures, and layouts of contemporary literature. In an effort to develop methods to respond to these broad questions, we’ll consider approaches that foreground narrative form, race, sexualities, trans/gender, temporalities, media/platform, ecologies, and cultural value (which novels will future critics consider representative of our time?) and then generate interpretations of a wide range of genres in early 21st century prose fiction, including short (micro or flash) fiction, experimental and mixed-media novels, speculative fiction, graphic narratives, and digital fiction, among others. How can comparative cultural studies take the distinct histories of varied social groups into account? Those who wish to pursue any of these considerations in greater detail or with an eye toward future projects will have opportunities to begin research into particular conceptual frameworks, techniques, and/or texts.
