ENGL 4000 Colloquium (2 Credits)

ENGL 4001 Sem Creative Writing-Poetry (4 Credits)

ENGL 4009 Seminar -- Creative Nonfiction (4 Credits)

Advanced writing and study of creative nonfiction, including prose development and structure.

ENGL 4011 Sem Creative Writing-Fiction (4 Credits)

ENGL 4012 History/Theory of Genre-Poetry (4 Credits)

ENGL 4017 Travel Writing (4 Credits)

ENGL 4020 The Essay: Criticism, Culture, and the Modern Intellectual (4 Credits)

This course examines the modern essay as a form of intellectual and cultural expression, looking at seminal texts by figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois to George Orwell, Stanley Cavell, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and T.J. Clark. It asks: How is the self located, produced, or communicated in an essay? What is the essayist’s relationship to topic, style, resistance, and the public? What does beginning and closure look like in an essay? And what is the essay’s relationship to thinking? We will study the genre’s relationship to rhetoric, power, and influence, while investigating its interdisciplinary nature—its capacity to at once entail cultural discourse and philosophy, personal reflection and criticism. We will also ask why it is novelists and poets have historically turned to the essay form.

ENGL 4050 The Critical Imagination (2 Credits)

This graduate level course explores poetry, fiction, and criticism as different facets of the imagination. This is a large and a necessarily vaguely defined topic. But in the world of literary studies, creativity and criticism are clearly symbiotic. Reading and writing are connected activities. The poet or fiction writer is often a critic, and there are numerous treatments of interpretation in the critical canon suggesting that the act of reading and interpreting is itself an imaginative and creative act. The course explores genre signatures and possibilities, as well as provides an introduction to some of the analytics through which texts, literary and otherwise, are interpreted.

ENGL 4100 Graduate Tutorial (2-4 Credits)

ENGL 4120 Beowulf (4 Credits)

Reading and translation of the Old English Beowulf. Prerequisite: ENGL 4125.

ENGL 4125 Old English (4 Credits)

This class introduces students to Old English grammar, prose, and poetry. This course is a prerequisite for ENGL 4120.

ENGL 4150 Special Topics in Medieval Lit (4 Credits)

ENGL 4200 Special Topics-Early Mod Lit (4 Credits)

ENGL 4210 Holocaust Literature (4 Credits)

This seminar presents a multidisciplinary and transnational approach to literature of the Holocaust. Students consider memoir, fiction, and poetry drawn from a variety of national literatures and linguistic traditions. Works written by victims, survivors and 'witnesses through the imagination' are all considered. These readings are supplemented by secondary texts, including historical and philosophical materials, as well as relevant works from the social sciences.

ENGL 4213 Advanced Studies in Early Modern Literature (4 Credits)

ENGL 4220 Seminar-Studies in Shakespeare (4 Credits)

ENGL 4300 Advanced Studies in 18th Century Literature (4 Credits)

ENGL 4424 Topics in English: 19th Century Literature (4 Credits)

Special Topics courses will explore specific topics within historical periods, single authors, or theoretical/critical/ scholarly issues.

ENGL 4511 Translingualism and Multilingualism (4 Credits)

The course starts with an introduction to the field of Translation Studies and Practice but continues to focus on two particular aspects of the field: translingualism and multilingualism. We delve into the various phenomena of language porousness, such as linguistic elements existing in and moving across multiple languages as well as language users morphing multiple languages or navigating between several. We discuss theoretical debates about these phenomena and their impact on the praxis of translating and writing, in the context of language pedagogy and creative practices. We also study examples of creative work that embody translingualism and multilingualism to different extents using various methodologies. Students write critically in conversation with the theoretical material and create their own works implementing and exploring linguistic porousness offered by translingualism and multilingualism.

ENGL 4515 The Novella: craft and construction (4 Credits)

This graduate praxis course will focus on approaches to understanding and executing the prose form of the novella. We will look at a number of examples of novella length works as we seek to clarify a definition of the form, understand its affordances, and work to develop new projects adopting the parameters of this form. Students will have options for creative or critical assignments across the quarter, and considerable weekly readings: Students will be asked to commit to the intensive study of a novella of their choosing, to write critically or creatively about about this form, and/or to make interventions in their on-going projects using methods informed by our discussions around the novella form, and there will be opportunities for collaborations if there are those who are keen. Readings for the class may include examples from Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Agota Kristoff, Cesar Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Fleur Jaeggy, Yoko Tawada, Marie NDiaye, Muriel Spark, and Renee Gladman.

ENGL 4600 Adv Studies -20th Cent Lit (4 Credits)

ENGL 4620 A Poetics of Revision: Stevens, Eigner, Berssenbrugge (4 Credits)

This seminar will consider how poems from early twentieth to early twenty-first century Americans negotiated radical changes in how attempts at seeing and being seen were depicted and understood. The great but radically flawed Wallace Stevens, the equally great but physically limited Larry Eigner, and the elegantly visionary Mei Mei Berrssenbrugge all produced depictions of the confused, dynamic cultures they inhabited while attempting to break into clarity and precision. We will reexamine each by questioning our own limitations as inhabitants of a particular time and place, a particularly volatile time and place.

ENGL 4621 Adv Studies-20th C. Literature (2-4 Credits)

This course will offer (and be required of) graduate students an advanced foundation in 20th century literature; the primary texts and their cultural/historical/ theoretical contexts.

ENGL 4650 Special Topics: 20th Cent Lit (4 Credits)

ENGL 4660 The Black Imagination (4 Credits)

Focusing mainly on Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (especially the USA and the Caribbean/Latin America), this course explores and connects aspects of the black imagination. These aspects include oral performances, thought systems, literature, art, cinema, and critical discourses in different eras and in various places. Studied together, these existential and intellectual signposts provide an expanded insight into black (African and African diasporic) aesthetics from an intercontinental and an interdisciplinary perspective.

ENGL 4665 Postcolonial Modernism (4 Credits)

Referencing geographies of modernism, this course examines the intersection of Euro-American modernity/modernism and postcoloniality/postcolonialism in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Australia. In addition to the relation or “markets of memories” between literature and Empire (including the dis/connection between the postcolonial and the transnational), we also focus on the varied span of postcolonial aesthetics in literature and culture.

ENGL 4670 Semiotics and World Literature (4 Credits)

Referencing foundational semiotic concepts or projections, such as Charles Sanders Peirce’s "semeiotic" (“A sign is an object which stands for another to some mind”) and Ferdinand de Saussure’s "semiology" (“a science that studies the life of signs within society”), this course studies various theories of signification and interpretation as it explores the relation of signs to cultural-ideological realities and imaginaries as well as pertinent literary applications or possibilities. Our study includes the examination of literary texts from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

ENGL 4675 Theories of Narrative: Formalism, Narratology, Cybertext (4 Credits)

This class traces developments in narrative theory from Russian Formalism through "classical" narratology and on to examine the border between traditional narrative texts and texts that require a higher degree of interactivity, sometimes called "cyber texts." The goal is to identify significant contributions to narrative theory and to suggest the possibilities for the future of the field. Seminal articles, key works, and critical introductions survey key advances in narrative theory to present an overview of the field from its inception to contemporary trends.

ENGL 4700 Antebellum American Literature (4 Credits)

ENGL 4701 Topics in English (2-5 Credits)

A topics class; topics may change.

ENGL 4702 Topics in English (2-5 Credits)

A topics class; topics may change.

ENGL 4703 Topics in International Literature (4 Credits)

A graduate seminar focusing on international literature (e.g. English-language literature from Canada, Australia, Ireland, etc., and/or literature in translation from countries that are not the United States or the United Kingdom).

ENGL 4730 American Romanticism (4 Credits)

ENGL 4732 Spc Tpc: Antebellum Amer Lit (4 Credits)

ENGL 4743 Black Feminist Criticism (4 Credits)

This course examines the discursive reach of black feminist criticism by journeying into the creative terrain of literature, visual art, music, and performance produced by black women in the United States and throughout the black diaspora, from the nineteenth century to the present.

ENGL 4800 Bibliography and Research Methods (4 Credits)

ENGL 4813 History and Structure of the English Language (4 Credits)

A composite course studying both the structure of modern English and the history of the English language.

ENGL 4825 Cultural Studies (4 Credits)

This course introduces students to the field of Cultural Studies, which includes theories from the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Feminism and Gender Studies, and other cultural theory.

ENGL 4830 Seminar: Teaching and Writing Literature (2-4 Credits)

ENGL 4840 Topics in Composition Studies (2-4 Credits)

Each offering of this course focuses on specific issues in theory, research, or pedagogy within the broad field of composition studies. Examples of topics include the development of writing abilities; genre theory and composing; multimodal texts and their intersections and disjunctions of rhetoric and composition; the history of composing theories and practices; realms of composing, including the academic, civic, vocational, aesthetic, and interpersonal; institutional formations and settings of composing; discourse theories; stylistics; race, gender, class and composing; and so on.

ENGL 4851 Publishing Institute (6 Credits)

ENGL 4852 Dissertation Colloquium (2 Credits)

This two-credit dissertation colloquium is offered in the winter and spring for third-year PhD students in English who are in the process of researching and writing their dissertations. In addition to having weekly presentations and discussions of work in progress, the group will peruse prefaces and introductions to former English Department dissertations, write and abstract for their own dissertation, and possibly revise and send out a piece from their dissertation. The class is open to both literary studies and creative writing students. Restricted to doctoral students in English.

ENGL 4991 Independent Study (1-17 Credits)

ENGL 4995 Independent Research (1-17 Credits)

ENGL 5991 Independent Study (1-17 Credits)

ENGL 5995 Independent Research (1-17 Credits)

ENGL 5999 Professional, Pedagogical, and Methodological Skills Training (0-2 Credits)

Professional, Pedagogical, and Methodological Skills Training provides graduate students with the ability to gain professional, pedagogical, and methodological skills training.