Fall 2022 Courses

(Blansett, class #6490): [3 credits] Scholarship in the fields of writing studies, composition, and rhetoric often raises questions about how texts are made and the roles we play in teaching others to create texts. In response, compositionists have formulated a variety of theories for the assumptions, methods, and practices we rely on in the classroom. In ENGL 5100, we will engage with the theories, histories, research, and practices that inform our own First-Year Writing Program at UConn. Specifically, we will explore theories related to our writing program's approach to reading and writing, cognition and creativity, teaching and learning, language and meaning-making. We will build a greater understanding of the contexts that shape and are affected by our practices of teaching writing.

In addition to being introduced to the theoretical approaches to writing and teaching writing, you will also be introduced to some basic methodologies used by composition researchers that you will assess and use in a research project on teaching, learning, and writing (Scholarship of Teaching & Learning [SoTL]). Your classroom-based research will culminate in a project that contributes to our understanding of how undergraduate students learn to write and compose You will share what you have learned in the classroom in a brief teaching-presentation. The research will also provide the groundwork upon which you develop a course inquiry and assignment architecture in preparation for teaching your own version of UConn's FYW course. Work includes weekly written engagements with assigned readings, a teaching-presentation (10 minutes), and a description of the course inquiry and assignment architecture.

(Smith, class #7563): This one-credit seminar provides incoming graduate students a structured opportunity to get to know the faculty and resources at UConn, both within and outside the English Department, and to begin engaging with the many ways graduate study in English can make meaning in scholarly, pedagogical, and other professional contexts. Students develop a set of learning goals and writing tasks at the start of the semester and, with those goals in mind, self-select and attend ten meetings or events. Those events may include (but are not limited to) talks and presentations, undergraduate courses, panel discussions, professionalization workshops, and informational interviews. We will meet frequently (although not every week) to discuss with one another and with guests your progress toward those goals alongside readings in professionalization, graduate study and academia, and other topics based on participants’ interests. The seminar is required for entering MA and MA/PhD students and open to PhD students with instructor permission.

(Blansett, class #6551): [1 Credit] Guided development of teaching in the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program. As part of a Practicum, new graduate student instructors who are teaching FYW at UConn meet with the Director to implement the theories of teaching and writing introduced in ENGL 5100, which includes developing active-learning teaching strategies, instructional materials, and classroom activities that help their students meet program goals and learning objectives. Enrolled instructors provide weekly reflections on teaching and assemble an annotated portfolio of the materials and activities generated during the semester.

(Smith, class #13213): Childhood studies might focus on small humans, but its reach is wide — across geographies, chronologies, and methodologies. This seminar invites participants to consider how their work might be enriched or complicated by a consideration of childhood as an area of inquiry. What does American, British, or world literature look like from the playground, the classroom, the abecedary, or the nursery? How do the critical conversations in queer theory, disability studies, ecocriticism, or gender and sexuality studies shift when we use age, and in particular youth, as a central term? While my expertise in literary studies will feature in the seminar, we also will explore together, and try on, methods that have been adopted by scholars in other fields. What does it look like when a philosopher does childhood studies? Or an art historian? Or a sociologist? What models are available to scholars across fields who are interested in pursuing research or teaching that addresses questions of childhood, and what projects might scholars new to these questions pursue? The reading list on our syllabus will be nearly entirely secondary. We will study theorizations of childhood (real and imagined) and children’s literature through shared texts. However, students will provide primary texts through their own research. Once the semester is underway, we will spend a portion of each seminar meeting engaging with those primary texts by brainstorming and workshopping individual projects. Students will develop projects in response to a flexible slate of assignments that allows them to pursue work that is meaningful to their intellectual and professional goals, whether that be traditional scholarly writing (such as conference and seminar papers), pedagogy-related material (such as syllabi), deep archival work, or public-facing writing.

Note that UConn is an ideal site for such exploration. Here, students enjoy the expertise of faculty in childhood studies in English, Education, HDFS, and other departments; rich archives both on campus (the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection and the Maurice Sendak Papers¬¬) and nearby (at the American Antiquarian Society, Pierpont Morgan, Beinecke, and Schomburg Center, among many other sites), and frequent events and programming in children’s literature and culture.

(Semenza):

The course will combine the study of adaptation as a distinctive but widespread cultural phenomenon and of Shakespeare—the most-frequently-adapted author in the English language—as he appears on screens of various sorts, including in films, television shows, video games, YouTube videos, and so forth.

The course will be organized into three general sections: Introducing Shakespeare on Screen and Adaptation, Understanding Shakespeare on Screen, and Writing About Shakespeare on Screen—all of which are designed to help students navigate this increasingly complex subfield.  Part One introduces what counts as Shakespeare on screen (with a heavy focus on theories of adaptation, appropriation, and intertextuality); Part Two provides practical knowledge about both the mechanics of producing Shakespearean screen texts and those texts’ formal features, empowering students to pursue more in-depth explorations of primarily visual texts; the final Part presents students with different models for writing critically and imaginatively about screen Shakespeare.

Some works we’ll be studying: a range of Macbeth film adaptations, including Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021); the recent HBO limited series Station Eleven (2021); video game projects such as the failed launch of the MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Arden in 2007 (and of course some games that actually were released, such as Elsinore [2019]); and several forms of online and small-screen Shakespeareana.

This course fulfills the Theory distribution requirement.

(Williams, class #8563): In her novel Passing, Nella Larsen observes that "passing," traditionally defined as the act of claiming an identity that was neither assigned at birth nor ordained by convention, is a "hazardous business," since it often requires leaving family, tradition, and in some cases, even oneself, behind. In this course, we will unpack the depth of Larsen's claim and complicate the notion of "passing" by examining racial, gendered, sexual, and other forms of identity shifting in a variety of fictional and non-fictional narratives that span the genres of novel, film, and memoir essay.
Some theorists of passing believe that it is a phantom idea, since the concept of passing relies on both an essentialist identity politics that may reduce a subject to their perceived ethnicity, gender, or nationality, and an outmoded belief in a coherent self. Yet other critics working within the fields of critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies define passing as an opportunity to reimagine the social locations of one’s identity, constituting a kind of “code-switching” that also amounts to a “misapplication” of the socio-political and already established criteria for various cultural identities.
Taking for granted that passing is a contested term subject to political adjudication and philosophic interpretation and that passing literature is a dynamic product transformed by the eras, histories, and cultural beliefs that shape it, we will explore some key examples of passing literature and discourse from the modernist era of the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary, postmodern moment in order to theorize the elements, interpretations, and implications of identity passing.

Texts and figures to be studied will likely include Nella Larsen’s Passing, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Mat Johnson’s Loving Day, Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and the lives and public interpretations of Pauli Murray, Anatole Broyard and Rachel Dolezal. We will also engage some texts that fall outside the parameters of African American literature and (strictly) racial passing by exploring other cultural representations of identity transformation such as Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

Our methodological practice will be drawn from interdisciplinary literary study consisting of critical race studies, gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, genre studies, and multicultural American studies. Requirements will include 1 shorter paper, 1 oral, researched presentation, and a longer seminar paper of 12-15 pages.

(Somerset): Required for all MA/PhD and PhD students before the end of coursework.

In this seminar we’ll investigate the different facets of academic life, from practical details such as composing CVs and syllabi through to larger issues such as the role of the humanities in the twenty-first university and the adjunctification of the profession. We will learn about the types of jobs within and beyond the academy that UCONN alumni have made their own, and consider how the various roles you are asked to play as graduate students and in your developing careers might complement one another to form a life worth having. Students will participate in selecting what we focus on: topics might include activism in a changing profession, diversity and difference in the academy, the academic job market and beyond, working in archives, presenting at conferences, balancing teaching and research, making time for your well-being, applying for grants and fellowships, and how to write in genres such as the book review, the CV, the reader’s report, the letter of recommendation, the teaching statement, the research description, the conference abstract, etc. You will be asked to blog about our readings on a weekly basis, and to complete small writing assignments and participate in class workshops leading to a class project developed to suit each student’s needs and goals. Options include a pedagogy assignment that would ask you to develop a syllabus and assignments for a course of your own design, an exercise in academic publishing (selecting possible journals, revising a course or conference paper into an article, responding to reader’s reports), or the development of a digital project or other public scholarship.

(Coundouriotis):

This course is an opportunity to study key texts in the postcolonial field. The course gains coherence from its focus on the novel and the syllabus’s historical organization. Each week, we will place a text in a “topic” central to the postcolonial field. Our discussion will broaden beyond the given novel to key theoretical concepts that tackle the historical, social, and political challenges of decolonization. This is a good course not only for students who want to anchor their research in world literature but also for students more broadly interested in the novel as form. We will read African, Caribbean and South Asian Anglophone writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zakes Mda, Nurrudin Farah, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Ondaatje. Assignments include oral presentations and a research paper. An alternative to the research paper will be offered in the form of a take-home essay exam similar to the PhD qualifying exams.

(Mahoney):

As Jonathan Culler and others continue to ask us, “Why lyric?” At the same time as poetry plays a vibrant role in our culture at large, it is increasingly marginalized in literary studies in the academy. Yet “lyric” in some ways remains (nearly) synonymous with “poetry,” and criticism of the lyric is indispensable to any understanding of the history of literature and literary studies. (Is it conceivable to think about Romanticism without the lyric? Or contemporary poetry?) This seminar will examine the history, practice, and theorization of the lyric since the late eighteenth century, with particular attention to such issues as the generic status of the lyric (is the lyric in the final analysis a genre? when was it first recognized as such?) and the “lyricization” of criticism (whether or not of the lyric), especially since the middle of the twentieth century. We will take many of our bearings from two important recent publications: The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Johns Hopkins 2014), and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (Harvard 2015).

Readings will emphasize such topics as the genesis and transformation of lyric modes; the status of lyric as both a trans-historical category and an historically-determined genre; the idea and ideals of the lyric; poetics and prosody; the relation between form, genre, and mode; lyric temporality (e.g., the “lyric present”); New Criticism; formalism and the “New Formalism”; rhetorical reading; close reading; lyric ideology; “lyricization”; anti-lyric; historical poetics; and “New Lyric Studies.”  Criticism is likely to include selections from M.H. Abrams, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Cleanth Brooks, Reuben Brower, Jonathan Culler, Jacques Derrida, Northrup Frye, Gerard Genette, Geoffrey Hartman, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Caroline Levine, Marjorie Levinson, Paul de Man, Meredith Martin, Maureen McLane, Marjorie Perloff, Jopie Prins, I.A. Richards, Susan Stewart, Rei Terada, Herbert Tucker, Helen Vendler, René Wellek, William Wimsatt, and Susan Wolfson. Readings in lyric poetry will be determined as we proceed, as determined by the (teaching and research) interests of the seminar participants.

This seminar is in no way bound to one literary-historical period: while the critical texts emphasize twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American and continental criticism, the poetic texts rage from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first century. The seminar may appeal to students interested in poetry and poetics, genre theory, literary and critical theory, and the history of criticism.

Requirements: short weekly writing assignments (500 words), seminar presentation, midterm “conference paper” (10 pg.), and final project (traditional seminar paper of app. 7500 words or a DH project).

(Salvant):

We will read selected texts of 20th- and 21st-century African American literary criticism and theory, ranging roughly from the 1920s to today. Rather than providing a chronological overview, readings in the course will focus on 2-3 particular movements within the critical tradition (such as the vernacular theory, the blues aesthetic, Black feminist criticism). We’ll examine the central claims and projects of each movement and try to attend to linkages between them. Classic texts will often be paired with their (sometimes rebellious) scholarly or intellectual progeny. We’ll become familiar with past movements in order to better understand current trends and debates in African American literary criticism. Assignments will include regular participation, fairly frequent discussion questions, and a 20-25 page seminar paper.

(Pelizzon):

This class is an imaginative exploration of ecologies and environments through poetry and narrative prose. Beginning as well as experienced creative writers are welcome. Our readings will prompt many questions: How might our practice as creative writers make us more conscious co-habitants of our ecosystems? How can writing deepen our understanding of local places and of those who lived here before us? How can we, as creative writers, engage meaningfully with crucial environmental issues? We’ll study a variety of works offering possible models for our own original writings. Sample texts we might read include C.D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Camille Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days, Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, Hiromo Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank, and Darcie Dennigan’s Slater Orchard, as well as selected shorter works

Participants will compose and workshop five original projects exploring different poetic and narrative techniques. Participants will also keep a field log using a local ecosystem of their choice as the center of a semester-long series of reflective/ observational/ historical/ speculative “ramblings.” We’ll divide our class time between participant-led discussion of the readings and constructive critique of workshop members’ own writing. Participants should expect to read avidly, lead seminar discussions on the readings, share writing from their field log at most meetings, provide detailed commentary on colleague’s work, compose/discuss five longer creative projects, and get their feet wet—figuratively and literally—with their field log research. Options for a final project include a portfolio of revised creative work, a syllabus and teaching plans for an environmental writing course you’d like to lead, or a critical article engaging issues relevant to the class.

(Winter):

This course will focus on three major writers whose work will enable us to chart a trajectory from late-Victorian to modernist developments in literature, science, and the modern disciplines. In addition to studying Darwin’s evolutionary theory, we will be particularly interested in these writers’ representations of human psychology, biology, sexuality, the emotions, language, art, and embodiment, particularly insofar as they are viewed as sources of aggression and even war. Texts will include: Charles Darwin: travel writings, excerpts from The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and selected poetry; Virginia Woolf: selected autobiographical writings, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts; essays and shorter works by Freud, Bergson, and Bertrand Russell; selected criticism.

Critical rationale and methods: This course enables students to gain familiarity with major works by Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf and exposes them to literary criticism and critical theory focused on interrogating a Darwinian evolutionary understanding of species life and what counts as nature, the human, the emotions and affects, sex and gender, the animal, and the biological. Approaches considered will include animal studies, affect studies, modernism and media studies, feminist studies, biosemiotics, queer theory and gender/sexuality studies, and the critical theory of biopolitics. The course will also be interested historically in how these literary texts interact with developments in the modern disciplines, such as anthropology, philology and linguistics, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and psychology, as well as with pseudo-sciences of race and eugenics, biologized theories that provided ideological support for aggressive European imperial expansion. Hardy’s and Woolf’s confrontation with the devastating violence and mass casualties of World War I and its psychological impacts will form a central concern, as will Woolf’s anti-patriarchal pacifism. Consideration of photography and film as used in early twentieth-century studies of emotional expression and other kinds of scientific documentation is also likely.

Requirements: Two oral presentations; a 1-2 page critical analysis on the assigned readings due at each class meeting, to form the basis of class discussion and possible research topics; class discussion participation; a book review; an annotated bibliography; a final 20-25 page seminar paper, or two shorter papers: a 10-12 page critical analysis paper or a paper focused on pedagogy, and a research/conference style paper of 12-15 pages.