Graduate Courses

ENG 501 Literary Theories Practices

CRN: 40007 TR 0800-0950 Katherine Anderson

This course is designed to prepare you for graduate-level study. It should do two things.

First, give you a (very) selective overview of key movements in critical theory and literary schools of criticism.

We can’t cover the enormous range of topics addressed by literary and cultural theory in ten weeks, but my goal is to provide you with a broad sketch of a few important evolutions and relatedly, to help you begin to develop your own scholarly methodology and professional persona in relation to them. I’ve chosen to foreground more recent theoretical fields/developments as much as possible. I do so with the hope and expectation that the introduction to current intellectual preoccupations will help you craft an informed and marketable professional persona as you chart your own methodological path. Course texts will be made available as pdfs.

Second, and relatedly, equip you with the professional skills you will need going forward.

Graduate school is above all a process of professionalization. I take my responsibility in introducing you to that and helping you to navigate it seriously. Therefore, assignments in this course will be geared toward the practical skills and habits of academia that you will need to demonstrate as a professional scholar. Our primary focus in our formal writing assignments will be on two genres that get your writing out into the world quickly: the academic book review and public-facing review essay (which are related, but distinct from one another in style and tone). Throughout the course, I will attempt to demystify some of the hidden expectations for professionals in academia, and give you the tools to help you play the game.

ENG 506 Multigenre

Initially restricted to MFA candidates. The graduate program coordinator will contact graduate students with information regarding the when MA candidates can register.

CRN: 42793 TR 1200-1350 Kathryn Trueblood

Welcome! In this class, we will reflect upon some oddly permeable literary forms: the memoir, the autobiographical novel, and the fictional memoir. How do writers choose what genre they are writing in? Do they base their decision on ethics, authorial intention, family reaction, or an agent’s advice? We will consider odd questions, such as whether the presence of ancestral ghosts transforms a memoir into fiction. Maxine Hong Kingston subtitled her book, The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which sparked a great deal of controversy. The book was reviewed as both a novel and as a memoir. How much can writers employ the techniques of fiction before they must declare that they are writing a novel? Yet some first novels are so autobiographical, they invite comparison to the author’s life and achieve cult hood—for example The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, or On the Road by Jack Kerouac. We will discuss these thorny issues while writing narratives that take risks, all kinds of risks. You will be encouraged to cross genre lines and capture extreme states of mind.

Texts:

• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Tim, O’Brien, The Things They Carried
• Marguerite Duras, The Lover

ENG 513 Seminar in Tchg College Comp

CRN: 40132 TR 1000-1150 Jeremy Cushman

ENG 513 is what some folks in my field have called the impossible: a practicum for grad students in the teaching of college composition. Why does is it get dubbed impossible? For lots of reasons, I suppose. I can’t list them all here, but a good way to start thinking about this impossibility is simply to try and define “composition” for yourself. What does in mean in a 21st century classroom? What’s the process underlying composing? What does a composition look like? In other words, how does one learn to teach relatively new college students a diverse activity that is also a kind of nebulous noun. It’s hard to say exactly how one does such a thing. Still, much of this class is to recognize that impossibility and proclaim “challenge accepted!”

So we’ll look to historical definitions of composition, and we’ll put those up against more contemporary questions and concerns as we work to better understand what you are doing in your own composition classrooms. What that means is that, together, we’ll try on some of the assignments that our students do, we’ll ask questions and write responses concerning how and why we might create better assignments, and we’ll reflect on the place of our college composition course in the university.

What’s more, we’ll spend a good deal of time together working through the relationship between rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. The goal here is to ground both your thinking about composition and your developing pedagogical style in the imaginative and productive questions that, I think, grow out of an authentic engagement with rhetoric and composition (both ancient and contemporary approaches).

Clearly, it’s a busy class. And while teaching composition may very well be impossible, we’ll still build a few practical paths through the strange project of teaching as a graduate student.

ENG 520 Studies in Poetry

CRN: 44234 1400-1550 Jane Wong

“May the poems be

the little snail’s trail.

Everywhere I go,

every inch: quiet record

of the foot’s silver prayer.

I lived once.

Thank you.

It was here.”

- Aracelis Girmay, “Ars Poetica”

As a generative and workshop-based class, we will closely read and pursue poetry and hybrid/interdisciplinary forms—through the lens of a radical ecopoetics. We will delve deeply into the complex layers of an ecopoetics entangled with the intersections of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, and class in the face of drastic environmental change and disaster. Some questions we will consider: what is “nature poetry” and how can we decolonize and decapitalize what this looks like? What is our relationship to nature, to landscape, to place, to ecological history, to environmental justice, to speculative ecofutures? And, how does one's own lineage and experience of the environment echo one’s formal enactments on (and beyond) the page? Along with additional poems and excerpts, texts we will read include: Camille T. Dungy’s Trophic Cascade, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Milk Black Carbon, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold, and Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. As poets and artists, we will experiment with language to engage our memories, questions, concerns, research, etc. on the environment—paying close attention to what hums in the mycelium underneath. As we write and read, we will reflect on our creative processes and consider the intertwined relationship between experiential form and content. Along with creative exercises and community-based workshops, you will be creating a final project – in a medium (or mediums) of your choosing – featuring new and revised work. We will also welcome guest poets into our community.

ENG 525 Studies in Fiction

CRN: 44233 TR 1600-1750 Dawn Dietrich

This course will introduce you to the radical creativity of the indie comix scene that largely originated in Seattle. Focusing on handmade comics and contemporary indie presses, we will explore the intersectional themes of identity, community, and agency. Through our diverse range of texts, we will try to articulate and understand the strange, the beautiful, the complex, and the interesting . . . in these graphic narratives. The selected texts feature marginalized and under-represented characters and themes, including topics such as love and friendship (relationship building), depression, sexuality, resiliency, loneliness/isolation, and mental and physical abuse. We will celebrate comix as a potentially queer space where openness, fluidity, and non-conformity represent textual strategies as well as characters’ identities. The themes in these writers’ work intersect and overlap with politics and rebellion while issues of diversity and inclusion are brought to the fore in a contemporary context. We will also study comix form, technique and theory, and you will have the opportunity to write about comix as well as create your own comix in the course. No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required for this assignment or this class! I also invite you to share your favorite comix or web comix throughout the quarter.

*Please note: this class content contains adult language and themes.

Assignments and Evaluation

You will have the opportunity to write multi-modal blogs and to engage in comix production. You will receive full credit for doing Lynda Barry’s art experiments, which are totally fun! No artistic experience or illustrating talent is required. And the capstone project will involve creating your own short comix! This seminar is geared for both literature and creative writing students.

Required Texts

• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud (PDF available)
• Comix Samples, Eroyn Franklin (online)
• Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
• Making Comics, Lynda Barry
• My Favorite Thing is Monsters (vol. 1), Emil Ferris
• Megahex, Simon Hanselmann
• The Pervert, Michelle Perez & Remy Boydell
• Sabrina, Nick Drnaso
• Free Comic Book Day’s (FCBD) Our Favorite Thing is My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Emil
• Ferris (PDF available)
• The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen (PDF available)

Note: My Favorite Thing is Monsters (vol. 2), Emil Ferris (available September 2021)!

ENG 570 Cultural Stds:

CRN: 43302 TR 1000-1150 Stefania Heim

Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” uses language from Congressional hearings, personal interviews, scientific facts, and lyrical passages to tell the story of the Gauley Bridge industrial disaster, in which almost 1,000 mostly Black workers in West Virginia died as a result of prolonged exposure to Silica dust. “Poetry can extend the document,” Rukeyser asserts, urging her readers to reconsider the work of poetry, its “proper” materials, and what it has to do with the broad terrain on which lives are negotiated, organized, remembered, made meaning from. Following Rukeyser into the field of Documentary Poetics, this course asks: How might the tools of poetry be used to engage topics outside of the narrowly construed realm of the “aesthetic”? What relationships does Documentary Poetry assume or animate between the individual and the communal? Between intimate life and public life? Between poetry and history? Between expression and witness? How shall we talk about a poem’s “voice” or voices. What sort of truth are we after, anyway? In this course we will take the poetic use of source materials not as instances of “mere” play (though many works we encounter will be playful), but as urgent interventions in interdisciplinary thought. We will read poems closely to investigate how its techniques and strategies enact knowledge, make things happen. Whether it is a form or a current, a practice or a tradition, we will attend to the history of Documentary Poetry as it has intersected with documentary work in other media and we will revel in contemporary experiments with “extending the document.” There will be opportunities for both creative and scholarly investigations into Documentary Poetics, including a significant research project.

ENG 504 Seminar in Writing of Poetry 5c

23643 TR 06:00-07:50 pm Shipley, Ely

In this course, we will work from the basis that in order to become better writers, we also must become better readers, and that the practice of writing is our greatest teacher. We will explore contemporary developments poetry, focusing specifically on form’s relationship to content. You will submit original work and offer thoughtful observations to each work discussed. We become better writers through reading, thinking and feeling intensely, learning from our own work, the work of others, and above all, by practicing.

MA students can register on Tuesday, March 2nd, at 9am.

 

ENG 525 Studies in Fiction 5cr

23644 TR 10:00-11:50 am, participation encourage however asynchronous option is available. Araki-Kawaguchi, Hiroki

As a participant in this course, we will ask you to develop fictional worlds, characters and predicaments. We will have conversations about the fundamental elements of fiction (e.g. tense, pov, dialog, voice, conflict), as we examine both a diverse body of published work and the early drafts by your peers.

Expect this to be an exciting and challenging course. We hope you will develop new ways of thinking, working, writing and communicating. We hope you will take risks. You do not have to write magnificent fiction to do well in this course. You will have to be brave, respectful and a hard worker.

Participation in a 5-credit course is equivalent to 150 hours of work over the quarter. This will include 4 hours of classroom time weekly (lecture, discussions, workshop) and approximately 10 hours of outside preparation (reading, writing, investigating, reflecting, projects). You are also encouraged to visit me in office hours, attend (online) literary events, and connect (online) with your peers.

Required reading to include Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer, Making Comics by Lynda Barry, If the Body Allows It by Megan Cummins, and course handouts. I am also asking that you find access to a portable electronic device that will allow you to listen to a podcast and move simultaneously (e.g. walk or dance).

 

ENG 560 Studies in British Literature 5cr

23827 TR 04:00-05:50 pm, contact professor for schedule queries. Loar, Christopher F.

Sex and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century

This course examines a range of literatures from the 1660s through the 1770s to explore transformations in the sex/gender system in the Anglophone world. It's long been a truism that this was a period of crucial developments in the fashioning of Euro-British genders and sexualities: traditionally, it has been identified with the emergence of domesticity and companionate marriage; the solidifying of identities around heterosexual forms of desire; and the stabilizing of a narrow range of femininities and masculinities. Recent scholarship has extended and, in some cases, challenged these understandings of the dynamics of gender and sexuality in this period, drawing on newer theorizations of queerness, transness, and disability. We will read some exemplary texts that engage sharply with questions of gender and sex--some highly canonical, some less so--to better understand how prestigious and popular forms of writing responded to and reimagined sex and gender in this dynamic period.

Rather than attempting a chronological survey, the course will be organized around several topics, including libertine sexualities, domesticity and heteronormativity, and colonial sexualities, among others.

Texts:

• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded
• Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela/Fielding, Shamela
• Prince, History of Mary Prince
• Other readings available through library, Canvas, or online.

 

ENG 580 Studies in Film 5cr

23646 R 02:00-03:50 pm Odabasi, Eren

This graduate seminar explores multiple theoretical approaches to spirituality in global cinema. Since Paul Schrader first formulated the transcendental style in the early 1970s, several scholars have inquired about what makes certain films contemplative, profound or spiritual. How do films move beyond questions of narrative progression or ideology to explore universal, timeless, and often abstract themes about the human condition? In order to answer this question, Gilles Deleuze developed the notion of “time-image” while Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made a series of poetic, unclassifiable films about time, faith, and the human soul before writing a book that summarized his approach to cinema. Then the “slow cinema” movement emerged, utilizing stillness and filmic duration to create a similar, albeit distinct sense of spirituality and transcendence.

What are the common thematic and stylistic elements that characterize cinematic portrayals of spirituality? This seminar aims to offer a range of possible answers to this question by tracing the lineage outlined above. Throughout the quarter, we will discuss canonical films by various important directors and work towards a mid-length research paper.

OPTIONAL: Assignments / Evaluation

OPTIONAL: Texts

BOOKS
Required:

• Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Paul Schrader, University of California Press, 2018.
• Sculpting in Time. Andrei Tarkovsky, University of Texas Press, 1989.

Optional:

• Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom. Emre Caglayan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

FILMS (All available online)

• Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
• The Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
• Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979
• An Autumn Afternoon, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, 1962
• Au Hasard Balthazar, directed by Robert Bresson, 1966
• Ordet, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955
• Winter Light, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1963
• Tree of Wooden Clogs, directed by Ermanno Olmi, 1978
• The Turin Horse, directed by Bela Tarr, 2011

 

ENG 598 Sem Tch Eng: 5cr

22074 TR 12:00-01:50 pm Trueblood, Kathryn R.

Description: Welcome writers and teachers! We will be engaged in a discussion of the paradoxes particular to the field of Creative Writing: Is it a studio art, a healing art, or an academic field? Or all of the above: a hybrid.

In addition to introducing you to historical and controversial pedagogical practices within academe, we will investigate under what circumstances the workshop is a source of inspiration and when it is a force for homogeneity. We will examine the role creative writing plays in specific communities outside academe for the purposes of personal growth, social advocacy, and health.

This course will give graduate students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience as we team up with introductory creative writing courses on campus. We will be hearing from professors of introductory courses, guest speakers in community education, and teachers in secondary education as we consider how to align the goals of creative writing with a host organization.

Formal Assignments: a role-play lesson, a teaching demonstration, a creative writing textbook review, a syllabus with reflection, a personal teaching statement.

Texts:

• Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider (Oxford University Press)
• A series of articles about racism and class in creative writing pedagogy by David Mura, Gloria Anzaldua, Cathy Park Hong, Craig Perez, and Claudia Rankine, among others.
• A craft book of your choosing to be selected from the class bibliography

ENG 502 Seminar in Writing of Fiction 5 cr.

13695 TR 1200-1350 Carol Guess

MA students will be able to register in Phase 2.

This fiction workshop will focus on writing short form fiction for a literary audience with the goal of publishing at least one piece. It will be taught on Zoom using a remote synchronous format, in exact accordance with the scheduled class times. Any English graduate student is welcome to sign up, regardless of past experience writing fiction or practicing creative writing. We will not be writing long form fiction (long stories, novellas, novels); please be prepared to work in shorter forms.

Assignments/Evaluation: Two flash fiction pieces and two short stories; one literary magazine review.

 

ENG 510 Rhetoric 5 cr.

10342 TR 0800-0950 Donna Qualley

Ralph Waldo Emerson: All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. . . . Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man [sic] is or should be an inventor.

Joseph Harris: Our voices emerge out of the ways the texts we quote rub up against each other. Remixing is a way to create new insights out of old materials.

Edwardo Navas: The remix is a sampling or reinterpretation of a pre-existing text where the “aura” of the original remains visible in the remixed version.

Adam Banks: Remix is [in part] a critical reflexive gesture producing the paradox of independent yet dependent texts.

Kirby Ferguson: Everything is a remix.

John Muckelbauer: Everything is rhetorical.

This writing seminar explores remix as a rhetorical practice and as a constellation of moves that composers of print and digital texts use to construct new texts out of or in response to existing texts. We’ll begin by examining different ways that critical writers “rewrite” the work of others. Similar to documentary films, musical mashups, political memes, or TikTok videos, academic writing (at least in the humanities) also involves creating something new by drawing from and repurposing existing texts and material. As Joe Harris notes, a defining feature of almost all critical essays (at least in the humanities) is that they contain the visible traces of other texts. In fact, it is the work of others that precipitates the creation of new critical ideas in the first place. As such, many forms of critical, scholarly, and intellectual writing could be loosely conceptualized as a kind of remix.

After examining some of the scholarship on remix, we’ll then look to what we might borrow or repurpose from other communities and practitioners that could inspire more critically inventive and inventively critical genres of writing. What if, as Adam Banks playfully suggests, we retire the academy’s go-to scholarly genre and relegate the essay to “dominant genre emeritus” status? What new models and new moves can we discover for critically working with and responding to other texts?

My aim in this course is for you:

1. to become more knowledgeable and practiced with the moves you unconsciously make or consciously could make in working with other texts and

1. to provide space for you to explore, try on, or invent other approaches to reusing and remixing the ideas of others. As a kind of ancillary effect, the course offers people interested in teaching useful language for talking to students about their own writing.

Multiple, small assignments and a culminating remix. Texts include:

• Joseph Harris: Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (must be 2nd edition)
• Adam Banks: sections from Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (available as an e-book from WWU’s library).
• Additional readings and viewings on Canvas

 

ENG 515 Studies in Literary/Crit Theory 5 cr.

13696 TR 1400-1550 Ning Yu

Literature’s primary purpose, according to William Shakespeare, is to “hold a mirror to nature.”  But for literary critics the word “nature” has been confined to a narrower sense of human nature as it is developed, twisted or alienated in a human subject’s  struggle in society.  In the past three decades or so, literary scholars have been constantly redrawing the boundaries of their fields to “remap” its rapidly changing contours.  Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, all sorts of power relation and cultural constructs, especially language, are hot topics in contemporary criticism.  If you attempt to understand the “nature” of our world through the numerous “mirrors” of critical schools, you would never suspect that our physical environment, the planet earth, the only life-giving and life-supporting system to our knowledge in the whole universe, is under a lot of stress.

However, since 1990s, four waves of ecocriticism have been working towards a literature curriculum that  prepares us to participate effectively in the conversation or action about such pressing issues in the larger world as oil spill, acid rain, greenhouse gas, toxic waste contamination, climate change, wildfires, nuclear waste dumps, deforestation and loss of topsoil although our literary geniuses have been writing about similar concerns since decades even centuries ago.  “Literature,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s strong words, “should not disappear up its own ass-hole.” 

In this seminar, given the time frame of our quarter system, we’re unable to review all the four waves in meaningful depth. I therefore plan to review how the first wave of ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s and then catch up with the latest, fourth wave which emphasizes “new material” and “zoopoetics”. Students will read and discuss key texts in the field, in the context of our own experience of the nonhuman environment (especially under the stress of the current pandemic) as well as in comparison with other literary theories. An oral presentation (20% of grade), one final paper (40% of grade). Careful reading of the assigned texts and active participation in discussion (20% of grade) are essential to the success of the seminar. Write 5 sets of question and a two-page response to each of your questions (20% of grade, 4% each question/response).

 

ENG 535 Studies in Nonfiction 5 cr.

13697 TR 1800-1950 Brenda Miller

In this class, we will put our attention fully on form, studying lyric essays that work much the way poetry works: through attention to language, image, sound, metaphor, white space, and voice. These prose pieces often forego a traditional linear narrative in favor of fragmentation and metaphorical connections. What new rules arise to govern such pieces? Or do they abandon “rules” altogether? What do these pieces require of the reader? We will seek to create our own definitions of the lyric essay by reading many writers in the genre, modeling our own efforts on their essays, and creating works that encourage risk-taking and experimentation. You will do both creative writing and academic analysis in this course.

Suggested Text: Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, Third Edition.

Each student will also choose a book of lyric nonfiction to study and present during the quarter.

 

ENG 540 Studies in Global Literature 5 cr.

13698 TR 1600-1750 Jean Lee

Studies in Global Literature: Caribbean Women Writers

Caribbean women have been writing themselves into existence through stylistic, aesthetic, and thematic innovations to recover and claim their histories, voices, agency, and identities. In particular, since the 1980s, the decolonization of the Bildungsroman has gained importance in exploring the constitution of Caribbean women’s subjectivities. In this course, we will explore how Merle Hodge, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarez, Christian García, and Ramabai Espinet feature girls’ and women’s stories to speak back to the concept of “development” in colonial, postcolonial, and neo-imperial settings.

 

ENG 550 Studies in American Literature 5 cr.

13699 TR 1000-1150 Laura Laffrado

Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will examine American autobiographical texts from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. We will look at various stories of selfhood and think about self-representation, subject formation, and other autobiographical practices. On our way, we will consider early American Puritanism, domestic violence, gender, genre, race, and capitalism, among other issues. While this is not a seminar in pedagogies, the texts and contexts of this seminar will provide solid preparation for those who might go on to teach an American literature survey.

Assignments: Expect fairly heavy reading, oral presentations, and a 15-20 page seminar paper.

Evaluation: Evaluation will be based on seminar participation, oral presentations, and the seminar paper.

Texts:

• K. Z. Derounian Stodola (ed.), Women's Indian Captivity Narratives
• Abigail Abbot Bailey, The Memoir of Abigail Abbott Bailey
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
• Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth
• Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
• James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Ella Higginson, Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature

ENG 501 Literary Theories & Practices 5 cr.

40003 TR 1400-1550 Katherine Anderson

Course Description:
This course introduces students to the study of literature and film at the graduate level. In this, it provides students with foundational professional skills, such as database searching, academic publishing and presentation, and scholarly writing, while also familiarizing students with a range of critical approaches to the study of literature. Intellectual community is crucial to this endeavor, which means we will meet synchronously once a week, and that we need to take our work and our class meetings seriously. That means not just passively “doing the reading,” but also processing what we read, considering why it might matter or be interesting, and committing to doing the intellectual and written work with reflection and intent.

Course Objectives:
The course is designed to do two things.

1. To give you a selective overview of key movements in critical theory and literary schools of criticism. We can’t cover the enormous range of topics addressed by literary and cultural theory in ten weeks, but my goal is to provide you with a broad sketch of various important evolutions and relatedly, to help you begin to develop your own scholarly methodology and professional persona in relation to them.
2. To equip you with the professional skills you will need going forward. Graduate school is a process of professionalization. I take my responsibility in introducing you to that and helping you to navigate it seriously. Therefore, all assignments in this course will be geared toward giving you exposure to and practice of a number of the facets of academic professionalization that you need to demonstrate as a professional scholar. Our primary focus will be on academic genres that get your scholarly work out into the world, which may include, for example, the academic book review and public-facing review essay (which are related, but distinct from one another in style and tone), the abstract, the conference paper, and the journal article. I will attempt to demystify the hidden expectations for professionals in academia, and give you the tools to help you play the game.

ENG 505 Seminar in Writing Nonfiction 5 c.

44307 TR 0800-0950 Suzanne Paola

The Poetries of Prose: Beyond the Lyric Essay

Virginia Woolf often began work not with an idea but with a “rhythm.” Though it’s become popular, and helpful at times, to divide up nonfiction into narrative and lyric essays, doing so can obscure the fact that all language is controlled by rhythm—especially a highly stressed, partly Germanic language like our own. Today we’re going to play around with ways of seeing how language operates prosodically, within prose—how it can be more fresh, more surprising, when you add the tools of performative syntax and careful sentence and paragraph structure to your toolbox. Accordingly, we will spend several weeks on the sentence and the paragraph before diving in to entire essays and other prose forms still reading those with an attention to the prosody of the work.

ENG 506 Multigenre: Hybrid Forms 5 cr.

43229 TR 1000-1150 Jane Wong

“Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.”
– Fanny Howe, from “Bewilderment”

As a generative and workshop based class, we will closely read and pursue a variety of hybrid forms that cross genre and disciplinary boundaries. What happens when writing challenges our preconceived notions of genre, rendering the text open and amorphous? How do these texts push our emotional, intellectual, and felt experiences as readers? And, how does one’s own experience of hybridity echo their formal enactments on (and beyond) the page? Some of our course texts include: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Anne Carson’s Nox, Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and others. As writers and artists, we will experiment with hybrid forms – forms that are neither/nor, defy definition, and celebrate invention. We will increase our sense of “bewilderment” by pushing genre boundaries toward radical possibilities – while still paying close attention to craft and revision. As we explore hybrid forms, we will deeply reflect on our creative processes and consider the intertwined relationship between form and content. Along with creative exercises and community-based workshops, you will be creating a final project – in a medium (or mediums) of your choosing – featuring new and revised work.

ENG 513 Seminar in Tchg College Comp 5 cr.

40133 TR 1200-1350 Andrew Lucchesi

English 513 is designed to serve two purposes. It provides an introduction to pedagogical theories about the teaching of writing. It also serves as a workshop, where new English department TAs can examine what they are experiencing in their first quarter teaching at Western, helping them become more confident, adaptable, and well-equipped teachers going forward. We will focus on theories and practices appropriate for teaching writing in a range of settings, including how one might teach in a fully online writing class. Our readings will focus primarily on pedagogical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, examining particularly how teachers and scholars have used theory and technological innovation to continue teaching writing in this new context.

The work for this course will involve keeping a weekly teaching blog, presenting and leading a discussion about one of our readings, and contributing to a class-wide annotated bibliography. At the end of the course, students will work together to design large-scale writing assignments that they could potentially teach in a class like English 101.

ENG 570 Topics in Cultural Studies 5 cr.

44309 TR 1800-1950 Lysa Rivera

Afrofuturisms: Since at least the late nineteenth century, images of and references to space, science, and technology have permeated much of African-American cultural production. From post-Reconstruction literary figures such as Sutton Griggs, E.A. Johnson, Pauline Hopkins and W.E.B. Du Bois, to more recent speculative luminaries like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Samuel Delany, black cultural workers in the United States (and beyond) have energized and transformed science fiction—traditionally a pulp genre directed to and consumed by white, male adolescents—into a politicized space for the examination of fictions of science, many of which have historically played an integral part in policing, violating, even defining black bodies.

Working predominantly with contemporary texts and artists, this graduate seminar attempts to unpack the concept (and stakes) of Afrofuturism, currently a very popular black speculative aesthetic that defiantly appropriates images of science and technology both to dramatize how being black is akin to inhabiting a sci-fi nightmare and to construct powerful alternatives to that nightmare. Examining multiple forms of media – including literature, music, visual, and performance art – we will trace the ways in which Afrofuturism sheds light not only on African American cultural history and practices, but also on the broader field of science fiction itself. To supplement and contextualize our understanding of Afrofuturism, we will occasionally consult readings in postcolonial, diaspora, and critical race theory.

Course Objective: In addition to introducing you to the topic of literary Afrofuturisms, this course aims to strengthen your ability to develop and sustain a self-directed research project that culminates in a substantive and polished research paper, one potentially suitable for publication or to be used as a writing sample for graduate applications. Your role as a junior scholar will be to identify a relevant topic (ideally one that truly interests you), familiarize yourself deeply with scholarship already produced on that topic, and stake out new ground within those established critical conversations. While individual research methods will vary, all students will produce paper proposals, annotated bibliographies, multiple partial drafts and a final revision.

ENG 505 – Seminar in Writing Nonfiction

13562 TR 02:00-03:50 pm Miller, Brenda

This course will be an intensive generative writing workshop. We will write new work every day, practicing the fundamental skills of creative nonfiction and expanding our range of techniques. We will study classic, contemporary, and emerging forms, and by the end of the course you will have a substantial body of new work and a more nuanced understanding of the genre.

Texts:

• Tell it Slant, Third Edition, Miller/Paola
• Selected works posted on Canvas

ENG 510 – Rhetoric

10352 TR 04:00-05:50 pm Brown, Nicole

In this course we will explore the intersections of the ongoing making of the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and the social praxis within Rhetoric and Composition towards the making of the worlds we inhabit.

Throughout the quarter we will transverse disciplinary identities and conceptual and theoretical spaces in the history of Rhetoric and Composition. The rhetorical tradition has long concerned it self with the arts and acts of “making”— from the art of rhetoric, the discovery of invention, to the craft and technologies of techne’, the strategies of heuristics, the building of discourse, and the social action of genres, and multimodal assemblages of bodies, meaning, and things.

In response to the importance of materialist thought in Rhetoric and Composition and object-oriented rhetorics, we will shift our focus from the human relationship with things and the things themselves, to theories, practices, and processes of making things and makerspaces. We will approach our inquires and research towards Rhetoric in the Making though social, sensory, and embodied problem-solving, reading, and composing. Makerspaces can involve digital technologies, but they do not have to. They do emphasize participation, dialogue, and communication with publics, perhaps even rhetorical citizenship.

Of course, throughout the course we will weave in readings and reflections on “Maker Culture” and the spirit of DIY (Do It Yourself), tracing the locations of such work through the informal, highly networked, decentralized sharing of skills related to participatory design, world making, hacker aesthetics, tinkering, crafting, and more.

The course will be loosely structured around three scholarly focuses: the rhetorical tradition and rhetorical theory, cultural technique and material culture, and cultural studies. Course projects include rhetorical analysis and reflection (Blog, public or private), a multimedia composition project (Zine, digital or print), and maker days. Through maker days, you will make a “thing” and share a presentation and a scholarly reflection about the making of that thing.

If you are concerned about artistic or technological ability for any of the projects, know that we will focus on the making process and related scholarship, reflecting more on relationships with our making process and movements in the field of Rhetoric and Composition than on the end product. If you would like to discuss details of these projects further, please be in touch, and I would be happy to share: nicole.brown@wwu.edu.

ENG 525 – Studies in Fiction

13699 TR 12:00-01:50 pm Kahakauwila, Kristiana

Consider This a Vessel: On Story & Structure

When fiction writers think of story we tend to focus on linear structures such as plotline or Freytag’s triangle, with its emphasis on conflict and climactic satisfaction. Ursula Le Guin in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” argues instead for a story model that would be better described as a vessel, which gathers elements and holds them in relation to one another. Taking this as our starting point, we’ll look at ways to structure everything from a sentence to a scene to a novel, and how to employ the most resonant structures for our particular work. We’ll explore what different genres have to teach us (hermit crabs! ikebana à la Brenda Miller! the delights of Ross Gay!). We’ll study community- and culturally-specific vessels as examples of decolonial and other politically implicated shapes. And finally, we’ll consider how assumptions of structure can favor one kind of story over another, how craft—the way we tell—is tied to the ethics of that telling. The course is open to all genres, MFAs and MAs, and is great for those working on their theses as well as those nervous about working on their theses. You’ll have a rigorous reading list, a small teaching assignment, and lots of fresh writing due.

ENG 570 – Topics in Cultural Studies

13563 TR 12:00-01:50 pm Warburton, Theresa Anne

Critically Sovereign: Studies in Queer Native and Indigenous Literatures

Using the frameworks provided through both critical and queer Indigenous studies, this course examines how contemporary Native authors are using a variety of literary genres to explore the connections between colonialism, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and feminism. Specifically eschewing a model that takes an anthropological approach to the study of Native literatures as descriptive narratives of experience, we will explore how such texts and authors are challenging foundational assumptions of gender, sexuality, feminist, and queer studies and asserting frameworks for addressing core questions of power, sovereignty, identity, and politics that are both long-standing and innovative.

Students can expect a high reading load that spans both critical theory and literary texts, accompanied by written assignments that familiarize them with techniques and skills useful in graduate-level literary studies more generally.

ENG 575 – Women’s Lit:

12326 TR 08:00-09:50 am Giffen, Allison A.

Nineteenth-Century US Women’s Literature: This seminar will explore the work of U.S. women writers of the nineteenth century. Focusing on novels and poetry, we will explore the philosophical roots and cultural context of sentimentalism and investigate the ways that these writers deploy the sentimental as they participate in the public realm of contemporary political debates about race, class, and gender. Our approach will be largely cultural and historical as we examine women writers’ complicated and varied relationship to cultural constructions of womanhood and the notion of separate spheres. We will also attend such issues as the problem of authenticity and sincerity, in part by considering dress and ritual, domesticity and home reform, as they pertain to assertions of middle-class identity.

ENG 580 – Film:

10588 TR 10:00-11:50 am + Film viewing W 5-7:50 p.m. Youmans, Greg

This foundational seminar centers on canonical (and a few outlier) writings in film and media theory, from the silent era to the digital present and including not only cinema but also online media and video games. The seminar is designed to prepare participants for film and media scholarship at the graduate level. As such, our first goal is to build knowledge and facility with the core theories that have defined the field over the past half century. Our second goal is to develop and hone skills in the application of these theories to both scholarship and production. Participants will write an essay in which they apply one or more of the theories we explore in class to an original analysis of a particular film or other audiovisual media work of their choosing. Each person will also design and create a media project that elucidates, complicates, or challenges one of the works of theory we read together.

ENG 501 Literary Theories & Practices 5cr

40005 TR 12:00-01:50 pm Loar, Christopher F.

This foundational course will introduce MA and MFA students to literary theories and criticism, as well as to foundational skills and knowledges necessary for literary research, such as database searches, working with archival material, and the composition of specialized academic genres such as the prospectus and annotated bibliography. We will examine a range of critical approaches (from the classical period to the present).

Course work will include reading a wide range of theoretical essays; participating in class discussions and presentations; contributing actively to small group work; and writing in several distinct academic genres.

ENG 506 Multigenre: SpeculativeWriting 5cr

44128 TR 12:00-01:50 pm Magee, Kelly Elizabeth

Catalog: Studies in the theory and practice of creative writing that can encompass more than one genre, create hybrid genres, or cross genre lines. May be repeated under advisement.

ENG 509 Intrnship in Writ, Edit & Prod 1 TO 5cr

40137 TBD TBD Staff

ENG 513 Seminar in Tchg College Comp 5cr

Notes: appointment as a teaching assistant or instructor permission

40138 TR 08:00-09:50 am Lucchesi, Andrew John

This class explores the questions all composition teachers face—not just in their first year in front of a classroom, but throughout their careers. What does it mean to teach writing? What do we expect of our students as they learn? What does it mean to be a teacher? What do we expect our students to be in response? How does our work as teachers coexist with our lives as researchers, students, and creative writers? How can our teaching matter—to our students, to ourselves, to the world outside our classrooms?

This class is framed around such questions. Your work will be to answer them, as best you can in this moment, using your daily experiences in the first-year writing classroom as your guide. We’ll read a range of scholarship together as a way to help us approach these questions with more confidence—with an awareness that these questions are not new, and the struggle to answer them is not ours alone. Writing Studies is built on contradictions and disagreements: about what writing is, and what it should be; about what a writing class is, and whom it should serve; about what teaching is for, and what it can achieve. While you may not leave this class with settled answers to these questions—indeed, it’s my greatest hope that you don’t—I hope that they can help focus you in your development as a writing teacher, to point you toward a way of teaching and a way of learning that matters to you.

ENG 515 Crit Thry: Feminist Theory 5cr

44129 TR 04:00-05:50 pm Metzger, Mary J.

In this course we will explore the nature of feminist theory in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on its intersectionality and utility for the creative practice of resistance to the long history of heteropatriarchal white supremacist thought and practice. We will begin with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but quickly move to the developments of Queer & Trans Theory, Indigenous Theory, and Critical Race Theory. The works we will read will often defy many traditional academic binaries. Backgrounds in these theories and/or post colonial theory, affect theory, structuralism, Marxism, philosophy, poststructuralism and postmodernism are welcome, but we will work consistently to explain foundational ideas or histories of thought that inform our readings. No prerequisites necessary except for a willingness to read a lot of challenging but exciting material and actively engage it in collaboration with others. As in all my theory courses, my principle aim is to help you find the theory/theorists that best help you do your most transformational work.

ENG 525 Fiction: Cybernetic Fiction 5cr

43132 TR 10:00-11:50 am Dietrich, Dawn Y.

This course will explore one of the most important developments in current literary study: the convergence of twentieth and twentieth-first century narrative and technology. Basically, we’ll be looking at the ways in which the novel has enlarged and redefined its territory of representation and its range of technique and play, while maintaining its viability in the new media ecology. Specifically, we’ll be analyzing the relationship between print texts and electronic media, including canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism, artists’ books, technotexts, and hypermedia. We’ll also be engaging in a new form of literary discourse–media-specific analysis–which attends to the specificity of form as well as to citations and imitations of one medium in another. As defined by N. Katherine Hayles, “media-specific analysis moves from the language of text to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, mutable image and durable mark, computer and book. Media-specific analysis insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call literature.”

Assignments: The reading in this class is very challenging, notably the inclusion of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’ve organized the course like an intimate book group that gathers regularly for literary discussions. My hope is to create an informal discussion format where any questions and comments can be asked of the group. This only works if you’re willing to share your perceptions and your experience of reading, openly–and if you practice active listening when others speak. You do not have to worry that the course will be too difficult for you! I have found successful techniques to help students explore Gravity’s Rainbow in meaningful ways, and I’m excited to work with all of you this time around. But, you do have to be willing to take risks with your reading, and not just with Gravity’s Rainbow . . . . Many of the texts in this course will be experimental and may be out of your comfort zone. I ask that you come to class having read the text critically and willing to share your thoughts, questions, and comments. This is especially important for those areas of the text that seem the most difficult, puzzling, or provocative. It is okay not to have answers; and, in fact, it is much more useful to explore literary complexity from different and multivalent perspectives. Finally, in this course you will have the opportunity to respond to texts critically and creatively and to employ experimental or hybrid approaches to textuality, inscription processes, and book/media form and format. The final project will involve creating your own technotext! Both creative writers and literature students should find this course useful to their work.

Trigger Warning: Some of the material in the course deals explicitly with rape, sexual violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, and graphic descriptions of bodily functions. Feel free to talk with me, if you want to know what to expect with each text and whether this course will work for you.

Evaluation: Course grades will be determined by a short exploratory paper (5-7 pages, if print), a longer exploratory paper (10-12 pages, if print), a class discussion lead, and a technotext project. For the writing assignments, it is possible to create a multi-modal text, such as a podcast, visual essay, or digital artifact, as well as the more conventional print text. Details will be forthcoming. Finally, I don’t want anyone to be stressed out and/or stifled by anticipating a grade, so while I will give you detailed and challenging feedback on your writing, you may revise your work at any time for re-assessment. I hope to value risk taking and invention and to work with the assumption that writing, creating, thinking, and learning are ongoing processes.

Required Texts:

• Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz
• Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
• A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, Steven Weisenburger
• Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism, David Witzling
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
• House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition, Mark Danielewski
• Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles

*All books will be placed on course reserves.

Optional Text: Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Zak Smith (print or online)

• Hypermedia, Technotexts, Graphic Novels, and Artists’ Books
• Electronic Literature Collection, vols. 1-3, co-edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, Nick
  Montfort, Scott Rettberg (online)
• My Body: A Wunderkammer, Shelley Jackson (online)
• A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Tom Phillips
• P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y, John Cayley (online)
• Dakota, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (online)
• V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse, Stephanie Strickland (print and online)
• Lexia to Perplexia, Talan Memmott (online)
• Screen, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, John Cayley, et al.
• Welcome to Pine Point, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons

ENG 550 Studies in American Literature 5cr

44130 TR 02:00-03:50 pm Heim, Stefania F.

Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” uses language from Congressional hearings, personal interviews, devastating facts, and lyrical passages to tell the story of the Gauley Bridge industrial disaster, in which almost 1,000 mostly black workers in West Virginia died from prolonged exposure to Silica dust. “Poetry can extend the document,” Rukeyser asserts, urging her readers to reconsider the work of poetry, its “proper” materials, and what it has to do with the broad terrain on which lives are negotiated, organized, remembered, made meaning from. Following Rukeyser into the field of Documentary Poetry, this course asks: How have the tools of poetry been used to engage topics outside of the narrowly construed realm of the “aesthetic”? What relationships does Documentary Poetry assume or animate between the individual and the communal? Between intimate life and public life? Between poetry and history? Between expression and witness? How shall we talk about a poem’s “voice” or voices. What sort of truth are we after, anyway?

In this course we will take the poetic use of source materials not as instances of “mere” play (though many works we encounter will be playful), but as urgent interventions in interdisciplinary thought. We will read poems closely to investigate how their techniques and strategies enact knowledge and make things happen. Whether it is a form or a current, a practice or a tradition, we will attend to the history of Documentary Poetry as it has intersected with documentary work in other media as well as with other Modernist forms; and we will revel in contemporary experiments with “extending the document.” There will be opportunities for both creative and scholarly investigations into Documentary Poetics, including a significant research project. We will read a range of poets, most likely including Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Hayden, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, M NourbeSe Philip, Mark Nowak, Susan Howe, Layli Long Soldier, Don Mee Choi, Craig Santos Perez, and Rodrigo Toscano.

ENG 594 Practicum in Teaching 2 TO 5cr

Catalog: Supervised teaching for MA or MFA candidates, under the direction of graduate faculty. Repeatable to a maximum of 5 credits including original course.

ENG 690 Thesis Writing 2 TO 10cr

ENG 502 Seminar in Writing of Fiction 5cr

23418 TR 02:00-03:50 Magee, Kelly Elizabeth

The theme of this fiction writing workshop is “Influences,” and we will examine novels and short stories that have been influential in some way–both to individual members of the class and to larger communities. Influence can incorporate everything from mentor texts that address particular subjects, to texts that model technique, to collaborative texts written by multiple authors. This awareness of influence includes critically examining the workshop process as well–attempting different strategies for influencing the process of composition and revision in peer writers. It also includes putting an extra emphasis on audience, articulating who we are writing for and how we hope to influence them, including stories that make statements about politics, identity, activism, science, and/or culture; stories that directly call their readers to action; and stories that shape contemporary ethical and artistic conversations. The class will be primarily concerned with the discussion and analysis of full-length student-produced work, with a smaller emphasis on writing exercises and technique practice, student-led discussions of course texts, publication forums, and informal pedagogical discussions.

The majority of our time will be spent on your writing, and you’ll be expected to produce large quantities of your own fiction for group discussion. You are also encouraged to use this course to write and workshop sections of your thesis-in-progress, and while the assigned texts are centered around a particular theme, your submissions will be open topic (in other words, don’t get hung up on trying to write “influence” pieces; write whatever you want). You’ll be graded on the quality of the work you submit to class.

ENG 505 Seminar in Writing Nonfiction 5cr

23419 TR 10:00-11:50 Paola, Suzanne

The Poetries of Prose: Beyond the Lyric Essay

Virginia Woolf often began work not with an idea but with a “rhythm.” Though it’s become popular, and helpful at times, to divide up nonfiction into narrative and lyric essays, doing so can obscure the fact that all language is controlled by rhythm—especially a highly stressed, partly Germanic language like our own. Today we’re going to play around with ways of seeing how language operates prosodically, within prose—how it can be more fresh, more surprising, when you add the tools of performative syntax and careful sentence and paragraph structure to your toolbox. Accordingly, we will spend several weeks on the sentence and the paragraph before diving in to entire essays and other prose forms still reading those with an attention to the prosody of the work.

ENG 506 Sem Creative Wrtg: Multigenre 5cr

23420 TR 10:00-11:50 Shipley, Ely

Textual Transformations: Hybrid Bodies & Contemporary Genre Crossings

Building on poet Robert Creeley’s statement, “form is never more than an extension of content,” we will explore the recent trend in contemporary poetry toward hybrid forms. While hybrid texts are nothing new (Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess interweaves Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone from the epic poem The Metamorphoses; Dante’s La Vita Nuova combines prose and verse—prosimetrum—in a tale of courtly love), many contemporary poets are crossing genres to a degree that suggests an erasure of such categories altogether. This trend leads to questions such as: what are the subjects, circumstances, and desires that drive expansions of poetic form? What poetic techniques, whether meter and rhyme or appropriation and erasure, are used? What are their effects? Might we read such moves as fundamental to contemporary identity? Carole Maso asks, “Does form imply a value system? Is it a statement about perception?”

The books for this course span diverse embodiments of sexual, racial, national, class-based, and familial experience as they necessarily trouble traditional genres. Examining the artistic attributes of these texts, we will seek to understand how literature might be made. Through deep analysis of varied and excellent models, we will amass resources and practice techniques to produce creative work. Authors whose works are under consideration for this course include Kazim Ali, Aaron Apps, Eula Biss, Jenny Boully, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, CA Conrad, Lily Hoang, Bhanu Kapil, Wayne Kostenbaum, Lucas de Lima, Shane McCrae, Maggie Nelson, Mark Nowak, Diana Khoi Nguyen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kristin Prevallet, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and CD Wright, among others.

ENG 515 Stdies in Literary/Crit Theory 5cr

23422 TR 04:00-05:50 Wise, Christopher

This course will focus on major language and literary theorists after Ferdinand de Saussure, especially Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida. Romantic Rationalist (“RR”) theorists of language will be compared and contrasted with Empirical Externalist (“EE”) theorists of language like Derrida and Michel Foucault. Despite their differences, each of these thinkers developed his respective views of language in response to Saussure’s “Course In General Linguistics.” In order to better ground our discussions, we will also read selections from Plato, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger. Course concerns will not be limited to questions of linguistics: We will also discuss the political, pedagogical, philosophical, and ethical implications of the texts that we will study. At the conclusion of the seminar, students will write an article length essay which they will present to the class.

ENG 560 Studies in British Literature 5cr

23424 TR 12:00-01:50 Vulic, Kathryn Rajam

In this class, we will read medieval texts in their manuscript context (in facsimile and in original medieval documents) to understand better how literate people in late-medieval England would have thought about reading and writing. We will focus on several literary works found within four important manuscripts: the Ellesmere Chaucer, the Cernon manuscript, the Auchinleck Manuscript, and the Pearl Manuscript. These manuscripts come from the late Middle English period (dating roughly 1300 CE to 1500 CE) and contain some of the finest poetry to survive from the medieval English period. Though we will be reading all texts in modern edited/published forms, we will also be able to examine the original manuscripts themselves, as either paper or digital facsimiles. We will also discuss medieval textual production, high and low literary tastes, and the different means through which an individual might have experienced a literary work (through the eyes, or if the person was illiterate, through the ears). Though the items on the reading list have mainly been chosen according to the significance of the manuscript(s) in which they survive, the readings nevertheless represent a wide range of medieval genres and literary tastes.

A secondary focus of this class will be the study of manuscripts as historical artifacts; students will receive general instruction in medieval paleography (the study of medieval handwriting) and codicology (the study of manuscript construction) and will learn some of the basic principles of manuscript creation and preservation. These experiences will help students to imagine better the medieval experiences of reading, composing, and physically constructing texts. Students will also have an opportunity to edit actual medieval manuscript fragments currently on loan in our library. To accomplish these secondary goals, our class will meet in the Special Collections library (6th Floor of Wilson Library).

This class is intended for graduate students of all backgrounds, and will serve as an introduction to some of the earliest recorded reflections on the social, political, material, and aesthetic stakes of writing. Students will develop a working understanding of Middle English language over the course of the quarter. Though our reading will focus primarily on medieval literary texts, our class discussion and assignments will also address matters of research methodology (including how to conduct research involving manuscripts) and critical writing.

Assignments/evaluation:

• Pre-class Canvas posts (meant to set the day’s discussion agenda): 20%
• Manuscript metadata project (archival work with real medieval manuscript fragments) 10%
• Historical research project (on a topic significant to class discussion) 20%
• Research essay (including several drafting stages leading to the final product) 40%
• Participation 10%

Texts:

• Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell UP, 2007)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Broadview, 2nd ed., 2012)
• The Pearl Poet, trans. Casey Finch (UC Press, 1993)
• Piers Plowman, ed. Robertson and Shepherd (Norton 2006)
• Selected Middle English romances (King Horn, Floris and Blanchefleur, Lay le Freine, Sir Orfeo) from the TEAMS Middle English Text Series Online, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm
• Supplements are available online; other texts must be on hand as hard copy.

ENG 598 Sem Tch Eng:Creative Writing 5cr

22539 TR 08:00-09:50 Miller, Brenda

We will explore the various ways one might envision, develop, and teach an Introduction to Creative Writing course. As an entry-level instructor at a community college or university, you will most likely be asked to teach such a course, and this class will prepare you not only for this scenario, but also for teaching in the community. We will study a variety of textbooks and syllabi, and you will come up with your own syllabus, as well as a reflection on your creative writing teaching philosophy. If time allows, you will also create stand-alone topics workshops in a specific genre that you might offer at a conference, residency, or in the community.

ENG 502 – Seminar in Writing of Fiction

12575 TR 6-8 CAROL GUESS

Truth, Trauma, and Transformation: This is an experimental workshop in short form fiction conceived as a response to individual and collective trauma and resilience triggered by current events in the United States. We will answer pressing questions in fiction, using imagination to write beyond the limits of this historical moment, building fictional characters and worlds focused on lying, truth-telling, witness, and memory. Our primary texts for discussion will be online journals and magazines. Requirements include two polished short stories and numerous brief writing assignments. Additional texts TBA.

ENG 504 – Seminar in Writing of Poetry

13723 TR 2-4 JANE WONG

As Audre Lorde writes: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” This seminar will explore the role of poetry as deeply engaging, resisting, and changing our current society. Who are we as poets in today’s world? How can we wrestle with the complexities and intersections of our personal and collective lives through language? With rigorous attention to the relationship between form and content, we will write poems in dialogue with prominent contemporary poets. As an active poetry community, we will revisit the stakes of poetry via seminar discussions, constructive feedback, and radical revision strategies. Alongside books by guest visitor(s), poets we will engage with include: H..D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, Chen Chen, CA Conrad, Cathy Park Hong, Javier Zamora, and many more.

ENG 510 – Rhetoric: New Publics

10377 TR 2-4 JEREMY CUSHMAN

This course wrestles with two competing assumptions: 1. The public is a social sphere constructed through historically shifting interactions among people. And 2. the public is made up of social interaction, yes. But it also is comprised by the built environment––the objects and spaces and processes through which we interact. There is a lot (a lot!) of ‘middle’ between these two poles and we’ll do our best to ask our questions from there.

We’ll start wrestling with these assumptions by first finding some relatively stable footholds within rhetorical theory and practice, particularly the theories and practice that emerge from a relationship between ancient rhetoric (e.g. “Big Daddy A and Greco-Roman Way”) and what increasingly goes by the name New Materialism. New Materialism has its roots in feminists methodologies (generally operating in the sciences). It’s a name for work that emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, that explores the dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, and, maybe most importantly, that rethinks the sources of ethics. New Materialism has, for many, upended what it means to study and to practice rhetoric. It has to some degree altered our historical, classical “origin” stories in exciting and pretty uncomfortable ways. So that’s where will start.

Once we all feel some stability within the relationship between classic rhetoric and New Materialist rhetoric in terms of what “counts” as a public, we’ll slow way down and take that relationship with as we read D. Diane Davis’s Inessential Solidarity. In her book, Davis makes a compelling, if difficult, case for an ethical obligation to respond to the other that is as undeniable as the obligation to age. Such an obligation generates new possibilities for publics and for public rhetoric because it pushes past symbolic theories of persuasion toward more fundamental (and undeniable!) notions of affectability and resposivity.

Believe or not, we’ll still have some time to then explore fairly contemporary practices for public rhetorics. While we are exploring these practices together, you’ll be completing your own public engagement project. You’ll start the project about half way through the quarter and the project might consist of, say, a designed social media campaign, a guerrilla poetry project, a set of small essays for a platform like Medium.com, a podcast project, a longer research essay for an academic public, and so on. What you decide to make will depend on what theories and practices get a hold of you as you think through the publics in which in you act.

Texts:

• Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter
• D. Diane Davis’s Inessential Solidarity
• Provided Articles, Videos, and Audio Projects

ENG 550 – Amer Lits: Nature Writing and Ecocriticism

12576 TR 12-2 NING YU

From the “Howling Wilderness” to “Life in the Woods”: a Critical Review of the American Perceptions of Nature.

This course helps students develop a working history of an important American genre of literary perceptions and presentations of nature. We’ll start with a glimpse of the Native American world picture and then review the Puritan, Romantic and what Larry Buell calls the realism of environmental literature.

ENG 575 –Women’s Literature: Chicana Feminism

12577 TR 8-10 LYSA RIVERA

Chicana Feminisms: This graduate seminar examines Chicana literary history and feminist discourse since the Chicano Movement (1960s-70s). Briefly, Chicana feminist discourse (also known Xicanisma) encompasses the political, theoretical, and cultural work of women and trans women who self-identify as Chicana, a term usually reserved for politically engaged women of Mexican descent living in the United States. Working more or less chronologically, we will work together to understand and appreciate the how material, lived, and political conditions and political concerns have animated Xicanisma and shaped its literary expressions. Our reading list is robust and includes literary texts across multiple genres and several book-length works of Chicana feminist theory and history. Assignment requirements will include weekly response papers, individual presentations, an annotated syllabus assignment, and one 15-20-page research paper.

ENG 580 – FILM: Cinema & Immigration

10631 TR 10-12 FILM SCREENINGS W 5-8 EREN ODABASI

Cinema and Immigration: This course explores various ways through which the production, circulation, and consumption of cinematic texts intersect with the notions of immigration, diaspora, and exile. We will focus on several historical, social, and economic contexts including:

• The wave of German-speaking filmmakers who worked in the United States during and after the Nazi regime,
• The cinematic representations of the Jewish experience in Latin America,
• The role popular Hindi-language films play in shaping the Indian diaspora and the relationship diaspora audiences maintain with their homelands,
• The legacy of colonialism on both contemporary European films and the cinematic output of African countries formerly colonized by European nations,
• The recent roster of films depicting the ongoing European refugee crisis as it continues to unfold.

What are the common thematic and stylistic elements that characterize cinematic portrayals of immigration across such a wide range of contexts? What are the key concepts, debates and points of contention in the theorization of cinema’s relationship with the immigrant experience as formulated by prominent film scholars? In seeking answers to these questions (and other similar ones), we will see several films, read canonical texts, and work towards a mid-length research article throughout the quarter.

Selected Films:

• The Time That Remains, dir. Elia Suleiman, 2009
• The Earrings of Madame De…, dir. Max Ophuls, 1953
• The Other Side of Hope, dir. Aki Kaurismaki, 2017
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973
• Head On, dir. Fatih Akin, 2004
• Black Girl, dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1966
• Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, dir. Aditya Chopra, 1995
• Fire at Sea, dir. Gianfranco Rosi, 2016
• The Lost Embrace, dir. Daniel Burman, 2004

Readings:
Most of the readings will be available on Canvas, but there is one required book:

• An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking by Hamid Naficy, Princeton University Press, 2001.

ENG 501 – Literary Theories & Practices

40003 TR 10:00-11:50 CHRISTOPHER LOAR

This foundational course will introduce MA and MFA students to literary theories and criticism, as well as to foundational skills and knowledges necessary for literary research, such as database searches, working with archival material, and the composition of specialized academic genres such as the prospectus and annotated bibliography. We will examine a range of critical approaches (from the classical period to the present).

Course work will include reading a wide range of theoretical essays; participating in class discussions and presentations; contributing actively to small group work; and writing in several distinct academic genres.

ENG 513 – Seminar in Tchg College Comp

Prerequisites & Notes: appointment as a teaching assistant or instructor permission. Offered once a year in the fall.

40165 TR 2:00-3:50 ANDREW LUCCHESI

Many folks in the field of Rhetoric & Composition have called this an impossible course. That might seem strange because this is simply a practicum for graduate students in the teaching of college composition. Why dub it impossible? For lots of reasons, I suppose. I can’t list them all here, but a good way to start thinking about this impossibility is simply to try and define “composition” for yourself. What does it mean in a 21st century classroom? What’s the process underlying composing? What does a composition look like? In other words, how does one learn to teach relatively new college students a diverse activity that is also a kind of nebulous noun. It’s hard to say exactly how one does such a thing.

Still, much of this class is to recognize that impossibility and proclaim “challenge accepted!” We’ll look to historical definitions of composition and we’ll put those up against more contemporary questions and concerns as we work to better understand what you are doing in your own composition classrooms. What that means is that, together, we’ll try on some of the assignments that our students do, we’ll ask questions and write responses concerning how and why we might create better assignments, and we’ll reflect on the place of our college composition course in the field of Rhetoric & Composition and in our own university. What’s more, we’ll spend a good deal of time together working through the relationship between rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. The goal here is to ground both your thinking about composition and your developing pedagogical style in the imaginative and productive questions that, I think, grow out of a sincere engagement with rhetoric (both ancient and contemporary takes).

Clearly, it’s a busy class. And while teaching composition may very well be impossible, we’ll still build a few practical paths through the strange project of being a teacher and a graduate student.

ENG 520 – Studies in Poetry

44038 TR 8:00-9:50 BRUCE BEASLEY

Stephanie Strickland wrote that “Poems are words that take you through three kinds of doors: closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don’t know are there.” In this seminar we bang on all three doors and see who opens. We will explore the oblique and mysterious logics and unlogics of lyric poetry in the context of the parable, the paradox, the koan, and other forms and rhetorical structures that resist the linear and the rational in favor of the unsayable, undecideable, interdeterminable, overdetermined, and multiple. Reading individual poems from throughout the history of poetry and into recent avant-garde experimentation, we will read widely (and improvisationally) in poetry and poetics, experiencing how, as Seamus Heaney puts it, “Poetry is born out of the superfluity of language’s own resources and energy. It’s a kind of overdoing it. Enough is not enough when it comes to poetry.”

This seminar is itself a kind of paradox or oxymoron, as we’ll be reading poems critically and criticizing poems poetically. During each seminar we will intensively examine a wide range of poets and poems, trying out various ways of responding through theory, criticism, and poetry to what engages us in the poems, and in the classes that follow we will respond to some of those poems (and issues in poetics raised by our seminar discussions) through various radical reactions to those poems. Those reactions may take the form of critical essays, of poems that talk back to the poems we’re investigating, of hybrid forms of poetry and critical writing, and various not-yet-invented forms and structures of dialogue with the poems.

ENG 525 – Studies in Fiction

44039 TR 12:00-1:50 KRISTIANA KAHAKAUWILA

Who’s In Charge Around Here?: On Communal, Authorial & Narratorial Custody: For most artists, the work we create stems from personal, familial, genealogical, place-based, political, technological, communal and/or other (hi)stories. How do we honor and where do we re-imagine those (hi)stories in our own work? If we are custodians of the (hi)stories out of which we write, what can we share and what remains hidden? We’ll start the course by learning about the Hawaiian literary practice of kaona and use it as we weave in other ideas of authorial control and custody. Questions we’ll ask of our writing and ourselves will include: Am I maker or merely listener? Do I call on the muse, or does the muse command me? And how are these fun “writer woo-woo” questions tied to techniques of production and craft? We’ll beg an answer via a study of narratorial control, free indirect discourse, narrative custody, and profluence, just to name a few, even as we ask how and why these craft notions garner more critical attention than others.

We’ll read amazing work from multiple genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. We’ll intertwine theory, craft, and our own creative production as a means for considering how we produce and why and for whom. We’ll be scholar-writers, and the class will be structured to welcome MAs and MFAs, poets and prosers, those interested in Indigenous and Euro-American craft theory of the 20th and 21st centuries, artists of all kinds.

I’m still tinkering with the reading list so if there are questions of craft or artistry arising for you right now, come chat. We can build those into the course.

ENG 560: BRIT LITS: Empire/Globalization

42585 TR 4:00-5:50 KATHERINE ANDERSON

Empire and Globalization in British Literature: In the nineteenth century, Britain was the dominant superpower, claiming the “sun never set” on her vast empire because it stretched around the globe. This course investigates empire and global migration as manifested in British literature and culture from the nineteenth century up to the present, focusing on geographical locations that were touched by the British Empire and remain affected by Western imperialism and/or neo-imperialism in our contemporary postcolonial age: the West Indies, India and Pakistan, the Pacific, and Africa. We will consider depictions of the Empire ranging from the “uncharted” colonial territories and settler farms of South Africa to the urban spaces of London and Lahore. Along the way, we’ll incorporate attention to empire’s entanglements with race, class, gender and sexuality, and other forms of personal identity for both the colonized and the colonizers. Some of the questions we will consider include: How did social positioning (such as class, race, or gender identity), affect experiences of empire and migration in the nineteenth century versus today? What is the relationship of narrative to empire and expansion? How does form or genre affect a depiction of empire, or relatedly, of migration or diaspora? How did imperialism shape these various colonies, and in return, how did empire seep into the domestic space and consequently reshape Britain? What are the contemporary scholarly conversations about empire, globalization, neo-imperialism, and neo-liberalism, and what might we have to add?

This course is designed to do two things: to give you an in-depth understanding of the literature, issues, and developments of the nineteenth-century British Empire and its relevance to contemporary issues of postcolonialism and globalization, and to equip you with the professional skills you will need going forward. Part of your professional skill set includes reflexivity; it behooves you to be aware of developments in your specific field and in your greater discipline, and to be able to situate your own scholarship and methodologies in relation to those developments. A related aspect of your professional skill set requires reflexivity in relation to pedagogy: how and why do you teach the way you do? We’ll address both aspects of professionalism in this course. Assignments will consist of participation, a teaching presentation and syllabus, an op-ed piece, and an article-length final paper.

Texts may include: Brontë, Jane Eyre; Coetzee, Disgrace; Haggard, She; Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands; Shamsie, Burnt Shadows; Smith, White Teeth; Stevenson, The Ebb-Tide.

ENG 504 Seminar in Writing of Poetry

Opens to MAs after 10:30 on Monday, Nov. 15.

CRN: 13986 Day/Time: TR 04:00-05:50 Instructor: Beasley, Bruce

This seminar will be an intensive examination of the poetry of the seminar participants and of the implicit and explicit poetics behind the generation and revision of those poems.  We’ll examine the role of poetry in contemporary culture and ask questions about what kind of poem we want to produce, and why; what kinds of poetic traditions we want to embrace, what kinds of traditions we want to reject, and why.  We’ll explore larger questions of the purpose of poetry and the ambitions of the seminar poets in the context of intensive seminar discussions of at least five poems per student. There will be weekly assignments for poems with a set of poetic challenges to generate new work, but with looseness to accommodate the work to your style, poetics, and obsessions.  We’ll work with multiple revisions of each poem and explore the revision process intensively. There will also be extensive readings in poetics and in poetry ranging from avant garde experimentation to innovative uses of form and reinventions of poetic traditions and poetic theory to accompany and give context for the discussions of poems by each seminar participant. 

 

ENG 505 Seminar in Writing Nonfiction

CRN: 13987 Day/Time: TR 12:00-1:50 Instructor: Paola, Suzanne

Opens to MAs after 10:30 on Monday, Nov. 15.

Michael Moore, accepting the Academy Award for “Bowling for Columbine,” told the audience that we need the nonfictional as we live in “fictitious times.” Our work in nonfiction will be a site for literary experimentation, social reckoning, witness, and the fascinating movements of the individual mind. We will discuss the work of self-construction in this genre, and the ways in which self-construction always involves power structures and questions of the oppressed body, the colonized body, the deemed-disabled body, the privileged body.

We live in a profoundly interesting time for this form. While reading will include historical nonfiction, we will also examine the relatively new urge to grapple with and define the chimera. The term “creative nonfiction” has only existed since the 1960s, for instance, and the popular term “lyric essay” since the late 1990s.

This class will be organized as both workshop and generative writing. You will create new work and use author-centered discussion to help it bloom. Our reading will include such writers as Sei Shonagon, Michel de Montaigne, and Sui Sin Far along with contemporary writers such as Jenny Boully, Kenny Fries, Teju Cole, Joanna Eleftheriou, Sisonke Msimang. We will study many forms, working with lists, photographs, hermit crab forms, hybrids, and more.

This class will also have a strong publishing component. This does NOT mean the kind of work that gears you toward a career in this field. Rather, we will work together to create individual publishing goals and publishing plans. We’ll also take a practical look at areas such as the large and getting-larger industry of predatory publishing. I want everyone to leave this seminar ready to begin their life as a publishing writer, understanding processes like the best ways to identify publishing venues. I also want you to be able to identify an unacceptable contract, be familiar with the wide variety of options such as hybrid or coop publishing and know the role of people like literary agents. Students will help to shape this area of the class.

 

ENG 510 Rhetoric:

CRN: 10323 Day/Time: TR 12:00-01:50 Instructor: Brown, Nicole

Rhetoric in the Making

In this course we will explore the intersections of the making of the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and the praxis towards “worlding.”

The course will explore the rhetorical tradition and its longstanding attention to social and symbolic acts of “making”— the art of rhetoric, the discovery of invention, the craft of techne’, the thinking of heuristics, the composition and deconstruction of discourse, the social action of genres, the recovery of critique, and the multimodal assemblage of bodies, agency, and things.

Through exploring the importance of materialist thought in Rhetoric and Composition, we will participate with dialectical theories of materiality with nature-cultures, objects & things, writing, and the human situated and space-oriented rhetorical praxis of making and worlding. The course also places our scholarship in relationship with readings and reflections on the “maker’s movement” and the spirit of DIY (Do It Yourself) and the informal, highly networked, decentralized making of hacker aesthetics, tinkering, crafting, participatory design, and more.

Course projects include ongoing rhetorical analysis and reflection on the readings via Blog or Vlog (public or private), a Concept Zine (digital or print), and a “Thing.”  Through maker days, you will make a “Thing” and through the process of making this “Thing” you will build a scholarly presentation and paper about the becoming of the “Thing” in relationship to your interests in Rhet Comp, the broader world, and your desire to contribute to the making of a discipline.
 
If you are concerned about artistic or technological ability for any of the projects, know that we will focus on the making process and related scholarship, reflecting more on relationships with our making process and movements in the field of Rhetoric and Composition than on the product or "Thing" itself.

 

ENG 515 Crit Thry:

CRN: 13141 Day/Time: TR 10:00-11:50 Instructor: Metzger, Mary J.

Intersectional Feminist Theory

Course Objectives: In this course, we will explore the nature of feminist theory in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on its intersectionality and utility for the creative practice of resistance to the long history of heteropatriarchal white supremacist thought and practice. We will begin with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but quickly move to the developments of Black Queer Theory, Indigenous Theory, and Critical Race Theory.

The works we will read will often defy traditional academic modes of thought and forms of writing. Backgrounds in these traditions of thought and/orpostcolonial theory, affect theory, structuralism, Marxism, philosophy, or postmodernism are welcome, but we will work consistently to explain the foundational ideas or histories of thought and practice that inform our readings. No prerequisites necessary except for a willingness to read a lot of challenging and exciting material and actively engage it in collaboration with others. As in all my theory courses, my principal aim is to help you find the theory/theorists that best help you do your most transformational work.

Course Assignments Beyond Readings: Reading Responses, Class Presentation, Short Citation Essay, In Class Work, Final Paper  (including a written proposal, a substantial draft, peer reviews, final draft) & Letter of Reflection.

Texts include Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Dean Spade’s Normal Life, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done, Patricia J. Williams, Alchemy of Race and rights, as well as essays & talks by writers such as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Kimberly Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldua, Cathy Cohen, and others.

 

ENG 540 Globl Lits:

CRN: 13143 Day/Time: TR 08:00-09:50 Instructor: Heim, Stefania

Translation

Theories of translation teem with contradiction. Nobel Laureate Thomas Tranströmer has declared, “Theoretically we can, to some extent justly, look at poetry translation as an absurdity. But in practice, we must believe in poetry translation if we want to believe in World Literature.” Recently, MacArthur fellow John Keene has called forcefully for “not only more translators, but more black translators” to take on “more translation of literary works by non-Anglophone black diasporic authors.” While poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay has asserted: “In our post-NAFTA world, Americans feel they have a right to literatures from other parts of the world, much like they have a right to Chilean cherries in New York in the middle of January… In such circumstances, I think it may be wise to NOT translate certain things.” Countering oft touted ideals of fidelity and accuracy, MacArthur fellow Don Mee Choi has written, “As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself.” And writing as language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire, JD Pluecker and Jen Hofer have asked: “Language is utterly necessary and utterly failed. What is right action?”

In this course on the theories and practices of literary translation, we will dive headlong into these conversations to explore the art, craft, theory, politics, and stakes of translating literature. We will ask what translation is, who it is for, how we should read, understand, and assess translations. In addition to encountering many theoretical takes, many of them experimental, we will spend time with multiple translations of the same text, approaching translation as the most intensive reading. We will do writing exercises that put translation theory into practice, also exploring modes of translation as generative for “original” writing. Foreign language knowledge is not a requirement for participation in this course.

Explore multiple translations of the same text
Scholarship and theories of translation
translation as the most intensive reading
Writing exercises that put translation theory into practice
Modes of translation of generative for “original” writing

from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the “driving-in-the-dark” model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between.

Wang Wei
This Little Art
Venuti

John Keene Rachel Zucker commonplace episode
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/writer/aaron-coleman/

 

ENG 575 Studies in Women's Literature

CRN: 13988 Day/Time: TR 02:00-03:50 Instructor: Rivera, Lysa

Reading Xicanisma

This graduate seminar examines Chicana literary history, Chicanx queer theory, and Chicana feminist discourse since the Chicano Movement (1960s-70s). Briefly, Chicana feminist discourse (also known Xicanisma) encompasses the political, theoretical, and cultural work of women and trans women who self-identify as Chicana, a term usually reserved for politically engaged women of Mexican descent living in the United States. Working more or less chronologically, we will work together to understand and appreciate how the material, lived, and political conditions have animated Xicanisma and shaped its literary expressions. Our reading list is robust and includes literary texts across multiple genres and several book-length works of Chicana feminist theory, Chicanx queer theory, and Chicana history.

Required Reading:

• Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement  
• Ana Castillo, So Far from God (novel)
• T. Jackie Cuevas, Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique
• Myriam Gurba, Mean (memoir)
• Emma Peréz, Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History
• Emma Peréz, Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory (novel)
• Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them (novel)
• Excerpts from Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (Garcia), and Methodology of the Oppressed (Sandoval).