ENG 600: Research Methods
Dr. Allison Fagan
Thursday, 5:00-8:00 PM
Introduction to research and writing in the discipline for beginning graduate students. Advanced training in research methods and citation, in critical analysis and scholarly writing, and in the disciplinary history and the workings of the academy. Required for all Master of Arts students in their first semester.
ENG 612: Affect Theory
Dr. Sofia Samatar
Monday, 5:00-8:00 PM
Affect is feeling. It’s embodied knowledge, sensation, virtual reality, promise, and threat. It’s the vibe in a room. It’s unnamed emotion, contagious and often collective. In this course, we will trace the history of affect theory and examine creative and philosophical attempts to describe and influence feelings in politics, aesthetics, and everyday life.
ENG 662 –Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature of the United States
“Race and Place in Modern American Literature”
Dr. Brooks E. Hefner
Tuesday, 5-8 PM
William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville. Ernest Hemingway’s France and Spain. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s New York. Jean Toomer’s Sempter. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg. Willa Cather’s Nebraska. Claude McKay’s Harlem and Marseille. Anzia Yezierska and Michael Gold’s Lower East Side. Nathanael West’s Hollywood. American writers of the modernist era were obsessed with places and spaces. Modernism was understood at once as the liberation of bodies from the fetters of inherited spaces—the movement of writers across the globe as expatriates—and a mode that might more fully and completely reveal the truth of a space through fragmented and experimental techniques. It offered an opportunity to alienate oneself from familiar places or to abandon these spaces entirely for a constant experience of the new. This seminar will consider how these obsessions with place in American modernist fiction intersect with notions of race. We will read a variety of texts from the period—texts that range from the hyper-local to the enthusiastically globetrotting—wrestling all the while with questions of embodiment, emplacement, representation, mapping, and movement. Readings may include work by writers like Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Michael Gold, Zora Neale Hurston, John Dos Passos, H.T. Tsiang, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H.P. Lovecraft, Willa Cather, George Schuyler, Nathanael West, and James Agee.
ENG 673: Caribbean Plantations and Black Abolitionist Ecologies, 1761-1834
Dr. Katey Castellano
Wednesday, 5:00-8:00 PM
Starting with Tacky’s Revolt and ending at the Emancipation, this seminar will explore Black abolitionist resistance to plantation economies in the British West Indies, particularly Jamaica. Black abolitionist ecologies will be traced through three types of primary texts: 1) the life narratives of formerly enslaved people, 2) poetry and prose written by European colonizers, and 3) contemporary fiction by Black British writers. Readings will include the History of Mary Prince, R. Wedderburn’s Horrors of Slavery, James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane, Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, William Earle’s Obi, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, and Caryl Phillip’s Cambridge. By juxtaposing Romantic-era and contemporary texts, the seminar will focus on the crucial role of the literary imagination, or what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” in recovering histories of Black Caribbean place-based resistance.
