Manuscripts are a literary critic’s bread-and-butter; this course will introduce you, in hands-on fashion, to the practical and ethical principles of working with modern literary archives.
Learn more about this courseBesides being one of the great poems of the Middle Ages in England, Piers Plowman also speaks to other times and other catastrophes in its characteristically challenging allegory, its bewildering intertextuality, and its passionate witness to contemporary crises of the late fourteenth century. We will be taking the semester to read this poem in the B-text version in conjunction with a number of different contemporary approaches to it, a consideration of its other (A- and C-) versions, and its prodigious legacy.
Learn more about this courseThis course will explore how Shakespeare’s plays dissect the uses of spectacle during eras when existing political systems are under severe stress or trauma.
Learn more about this courseThis course considers how Enlightenment models of property and personhood shaped and reshaped the conditions of worldbuilding over the course of the long eighteenth century—a period known for the emergence of human rights discourses, on the one hand, and racialized regimes of violence, on the other.
Learn more about this courseThis class will survey writing in the nineteenth century in the U.S. by exploring the many “worlds elsewhere” fabricated, fantasized, and inhabited by writers both within the state, and those excluded from it. Polar expeditions, spirit communications, images of life on the moon, utopias and dystopias in both the future and the past, prophetic visions, narratives of liberation and escape, abolition and emancipation, technological fantasies involving photography, telegraphy, and phonography—these are a few of the expressions of “worlds elsewhere” we’ll look at.
Learn more about this courseOur focus will be on how premodern didactic, practical, and devotional texts both develop the distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, and on how contemplation and action call each other forth.
Learn more about this courseThe primary work of this course will thus be watching this undertaking unfold across James Joyce’s prose fiction, by reading some of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, culminating in our reading of Ulysses, though we will also dip our toes into Wake.
Learn more about this courseJane Austen’s rightfully prominent place in the history of realism and the development of the novel can sometimes inadvertently direct our attention away from her situatedness in her own times.
Learn more about this courseIn this readings course, we will explore some of the major milestones in the development of rhetorical theory from antiquity to the early modern period.
Learn more about this courseIndeed, all the words we use to discriminate science and the humanities are vexed terms of equivocation: Knowledge, culture, truth, method. So partly what we want to do in this course is trace the historical and cultural paths and furrows of these words so that we can try to get a grip on what is at stake in them.
Learn more about this courseIn this class let’s for now say we will have a handful of texts about The University, schooling, etc., possibly including work by Leanne Simpson, Arundhati Roy, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, La Paperson, Grace Lee Boggs, Juliana Spahr, Patrick Rosal, and others.
Learn more about this courseThis is a writing workshop for students enrolled in the graduate fiction writing program.
Learn more about this courseW614 is a workshop in the writing of poetry for students in the MFA Creative Writing Program.
Learn more about this courseIn this workshop/seminar we’ll explore the essay, essay collections, and works of creative nonfiction.
Learn more about this courseThis class is designed to serve as a workshop for English graduate students in their exam year, to provide regular guidance on the writing and revising of the dissertation prospectus.
Learn more about this course
The College of Arts