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Spring 2006
English 520: Non-Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Patricia Stephens
Wednesdays
4:10 to 6:00 pm
This course is designed for writers who want to study and
practice a range of non-fiction writing, including, but not
limited to: memoir, personal essay, travel-writing, nature-writing,
writing about place, and photo journalism. Students will spend
the first 4-5 weeks reading essays by established authors
and analyzing form, style, persona, rhetorical strategies,
and uses of language and visual texts. As we immerse ourselves
in the various genres of creative non-fiction, students will
be asked to focus their energies on one or two specific genres
and to produce one long (20-30 page) or two shorter (10-15
page) texts by the end of the semester. The second half of
the semester will be conducted as a writing workshop in which
students will share works-in-progress and receive constructive
critique from all members of the class and the professor.
English 523.001: Fiction Writing Workshop
Professor Lewis Warsh
Thursdays
6:10 to 8:30 pm
This workshop explores both the art and the craft of fiction
writing. Frequent writing assignments and exercises will concentrate
on the conventions of fiction—description, dialogue,
characterization—as well as more experimental possibilities
such as fragmentation and shifting point of view. Focus will
be on the ways autobiography overlaps fiction and how the
past is fictionalized as a way of keeping it alive. Among
the models we will look at are stories and novels by Marguerite
Duras, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, W. E. Sebald, and Raymond
Chandler. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading
and discussing student work.
English 579.001: The Essay and the Public Intellectual
Professor Harriet Malinowitz
Mondays
4:10 to 6:00 pm
Click here to see Professor
Malinowitz's flyer for this course.
This course will examine the genre of the essay by focusing
on those practitioners of the form whose work has not been
exclusively, or even primarily, addressed to audiences within
academe. Philosophers, literary and cultural critics, political
journalists, social commentators, artists, teachers, clergy,
dissidents, and humorists—as well as "experts"
(housed in disciplines and professional fields) who choose
to engage a world of "non-experts" on matters of
common concern—are among those who have applied sharp
and wide-ranging analysis to problems of public culture and
contemporary life, often using the medium of the popular or
alternative press. Taking up issues of politics, citizenship,
democracy, ethics, religion, science, health, race, gender,
sexuality, class, globalization, and other areas of social
policy and opinion, they have been galvanized by the notion
that independent, thoughtfully articulated ideas matter, and
need to be heard by a populace often narcotized by the myth
of national consensus.
The first two thirds of the course will be devoted to identifying
the "public intellectual" (who/what/where/when/why
is s/he?) and to reading numerous essays by writers who may
be said to lay claim to the title. The last four weeks of
the course will consist of a writing workshop. Each student
will be required to complete an original essay (20-30 pages)
on a topic of public interest and submit it for publication
to a non-academic venue at the end of the term.
See the separate flyer for a breakdown of the specific readings,
topics, and areas of interest.
English 620: Theory of Teaching Writing
Professor Xiao-Ming Li
Tuesdays
6:10 to 8:00 pm
Although an "emerging field" (North), Composition
Studies traces its ancestry to the classic rhetoric that was
formed in ancient democracies, where the study of rhetoric
was equivalent to the study of citizenship. Ever since its
birth in the 60s in the form of freshman writing in American
universities, the precocious child has undergone several metamorphoses
already: historicist, current traditionalist, cognitivist,
expressionist, social-constructionist, empiricist, feminist,
Marxist, cultural critic, and discourse analyst, among others.
Since to cover them all in one semester is next to impossible,
the course intends to offer an overview of both the classic
rhetoric and new theories in teaching writing. Two books comprise
the core reading of the course: Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary
Students by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, and Cross-talk
in Comp Theory: A Reader edited by Victor Villanueva,
Jr. A collection of articles selected from various journals
and monographs will add a more practical dimension to the
course.
Participants in this course will keep a reading journal and
conduct a library research project on a chosen theory. The
research will be reported in a term paper of at least 10 pages
and presented to the class.
English 624: African American Literature and Theory
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays
4:10 to 6:00 pm
This course charts the contours of the African American literary
tradition and the discourse of literary criticism and theory
that surrounds it. Each primary text will be paired with one
or more critical or theoretical works so that by the time
you have finished the semester, you will have acquired a keen
sense of what constitutes this body of literary work as a
separate but interpenetrating tradition and how the major
critics have catalogued, contextualized, critiqued, and further
molded the terrain. Expect to read texts by Frederick Douglass,
Jean Toomer, Houston Baker, Hortense Spillers, Zora Neale
Hurston, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Ralph Ellison,
Langston Hughes, and other powerful writers.
English 626: 20th Century American Literature
Professor Leah Dilworth
Wednesdays
6:10 pm to 8:00 pm
In this course we will explore some of the main trends of
American literature of the last century through the lens of
place. Growing out of the regionalism and local color writing
of the 19th century and in the wake of modernism, the South
and the West emerge as the primary American regions of the
20th century: the New South, where, according to Faulkner,
the past isn't even past; and the West of the open road and
lifestyle frontier. How are these landscapes imagined? What
do they signify? How do questions of racial and ethnic identity
play out in these regions of the American psyche? Readings
will include poetry, short stories, and novels, by, among
others, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Conner,
Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.
English 700: Practicum in Teaching Composition
Professor Donald McCrary
Thursdays
4:10 to 6:00 pm
The course will examine the theoretical and practical implications
of teaching and tutoring writing. Although the emphasis will
be on college writing instruction, most of the theories and
practices we discuss will be relevant to secondary education
teaching. The course will examine important teaching issues
such as constructing course syllabi, integrating reading and
writing assignments, promoting process writing, responding
to student papers, addressing the linguistic needs and abilities
of a multicultural student population, and managing student
behavior in the classroom. In each class, time will be allotted
to discuss the immediate teaching issues of the class members.
English 707: Methods in Research and Criticism
Professor Maria McGarrity
Mondays
6:10 to 8:00 pm
This course is designed to prepare graduate students for
advanced level work in the MA program. While we attend to
refining our analytical methods in textual research and analysis,
in an effort to center our discussion around a cohesive topic
for the term, we will focus more particularly on the reshaping
of British Modernism. We will examine its transformation throughout
the twentieth century from a field that examines "white
Englishness" to a field that has transformed itself into
a reflection of Britain's Global Cultures. For example, we
will discuss not simply the import of Virginia Woolf and the
Hogarth Press but will also examine the import of the Hogarth
Press' 1933 publishing of CLR James' The Case for West
Indian Self-Government. We will explore the foundational
texts of literary analysis shaped around this topic and pay
particular attention to the theories of Feminism, New Historicism
and Postcolonialism. Students will offer an oral presentation,
compile an annotated bibliography, and prepare a large research
project that relates both to the focus of the seminar and
to their particular field/tracks within the MA program.
English 708: Thesis
Time to be arranged individually
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