University of Massachusetts Amherst

Graduate Course Descriptions Fall 2013

Engl 698B P-Intro. To Teaching Writing Tu, Th, 11:15-12:30 H. Hoang
Engl 698I Teaching Basic Writing by arrangement D. Vinyard
Engl 698J P-Teaching Mentoring by arrangement P. Woods
Engl 698L P-Teaching CW Practicum M, 5:00-6:00 N.Holland&L.Olstein
Engl 698R P-Applied Literary Arts by arrangement L. Olstein
Engl 698V-1 Special Topics: Teaching of Writing M, 4-5 D. LeCourt
Engl 698V-2 Special Topics: Teaching of Writing M, 4-5 D. Vinyard
Engl 698V-3 Special Topics: Teaching of Writing M, 4-5 H. Hoang

699-----Master’s Thesis Staff

780/1---Imaginative Writing: Poetry Dara Wier
Wednesdays, 6:00-8:30
For this workshop we'll be trying out counterintuitive means of writing and reading. Each week you'll have something to do that amounts to doing something somewhere along the line someone (including yourself) it doesn't matter who, has indicated to you you shouldn't be doing. Let's say one week will be about over-using an egocentric, narcissistic I as often as possible. Another week you'll want to be as bombastic as possible. Another week you will want to make absolutely no sense at all. None. Or you'll want to do all or many of these things. You get the drift. Cliches, sentimentality, stereotypes, heavy-handedness, boring logic, spastic rhythm, unbalanced development, inappropriate nomenclature, over-writing, under-writing, deadpan rhyme, awkward syntax, ridiculous sentences, irrationally unproductive combinations, predictable scenarios, boundlessly trite didacticism, impenetrable dogma, superficial psychological pretensions, unapologetically unnecessary mendacities, relentless repetitions, dogged shallowness, unrepentant, irredeemable plagiarism, precious pretentiousness, predictability, and such. We will talk about why all this has come to pass. Several books of poetry and prose will be read in common; additional booklists will be available for those who wish supplemental reading in order to fulfill either contemporary or modern requirements.

Dara Wier's new book is YOU GOOD THING (WAVE BOOKS, 2013), a collection of sonnet-length poems. Guggenheim, NEA and MCC fellowships have supported her work which can be found in BEST AMERICAN POETRY, THE PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY, THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN HYBRID POETRY, FOU, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, THE NATION, CONDUIT, MAGGY, FENCE, VOLT, BAT CITY REVIEW, TINHOUSE, GLITTERPONY, SKEIN, NOTNOSTRUMS, JUBILAT, MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW, BOSTON REVIEW, SIXTH FINCH, OH NO, TELEPHONE, LUNGFUL, GREEN MOUNTAIN REVIEW, MAKE, MATTER, SCYTHE, THE FAIRYTALE REVIEW, WOLF IN A FIELD, SALT HILL JOURNAL, elsewhere, and on The Academy of American Poets website. Her work has been selected as the San Francisco Poetry Center's book of the year and awarded The Jerome Shestack Prize.

She is a founding editor of Factory Hollow Press and member of Flying Object, a center for the arts and book art, performance and sometimes collaborative laboratory located in Hadley, Massachusetts. Her books include SELECTED POEMS, REVERSE RAPTURE, HAT ON A POND, VOYAGES IN ENGLISH and chapbooks from Pilot Books, Small Anchor Books, The Song Cave and others. In progress: collection of stories, novel, two collections of poems, book of essays. Serial installments of INSIDE UNDIVIDED, a Series of Notes and Fragments about Chance, Fate, Context and Intention appear regularly on the Flying Object website.


780-2 Imaginative Writing: Poetry James Tate
Tuesdays, 1:00-3:30

780/3 Imaginative Writing: Poetry Peter Gizzi
Mondays, 1:25-3:55
The workshop is a very demanding class. It consists of workshopping several batches of poems, providing in-depth written comments, handing in revisions, reading several books of poetry and essays, and required participation and attendance. Enrollment is limited to 12. Permission of instructor requires of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets & Writes. All course books available at Amherst Books.

Peter Gizzi is the author of Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and a reprint of his first book, Periplum and other poems 1987-1992 (Salt Publishsing UK, 2004). He has also published several limited edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized both here and abroad. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2011, he was The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.

781/1---Imaginative Writing: Fiction Edie Meidav
Wednesdays, 1:25-3:55

781/2--- Imaginative Writing: Fiction Noy Holland
Thursday, 10:30-1:00
This is a course about learning to be better at being, as Mr. Joyce says, “above the text, paring one’s fingernails.” My hope is that the class inspires fanaticism, perversions of the given, a new sense of the plasticity of the language, its instability, a fresh devotedness to the task of exploring lingual effects, the texture and coloration of words, the deep structure of sentences. The course seeks to encourage work that produces not sensationalism but sensation or what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss; that is, a sense of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Please note that we will be reading at least 3 collections of short fiction for this course, and I will expect submissions to the workshop to be, in the main, short fiction. If you are working on a novel, please check with me first to determine whether or not this is the best workshop for you. Books ordered at Amherst Books.

Noy Holland is the author of three collections of stories, Swim for the Little One First, The Spectacle of the Body, and What Begins with Bird. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, and Open City. She has taught at Phillips Academy and the University of Florida, and has received fellowships from the University of Florida, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

781/3---Imaginative Writing: Fiction Jeff Parker
Wednesdays, 4:40-7:10
This workshop is an intensive course in lying and language-made hallucination. Expect to submit work to be discussed by the group; to revise that work; to read texts that do well that which we wish to do better; to identify strengths and weaknesses in your own work and the work of others; to do exercises designed, no matter how frustrating they may be, to sharpen and enliven; to focus on sentences; and to focus on narrative structure (regarding the latter, see Barry Hannah for whom his "best stories come out of nowhere with no regard for form at all"). For the first day of class, please bring, on a printed sheet of paper, page eight of whatever you're currently working on. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman and the story collection The Taste of Penny. His nonfiction book, Igor in Crisis: A Russia Journal, is forthcoming in 2014. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Indiana Review, n+1, Ploughshares, Tin House, and others. He co-edited two anthologies of contemporary Russian writing, and he is currently co-translating the novel Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin.


791E---Theorizing the Discipline Suzanne Daly
Mondays, 6:30-9:00
This course will address the theoretical underpinnings of critical approaches current in literary studies. By studying a field’s foundational texts, we can begin to theorize its aesthetic and ideological investments as well as its limitations and possibilities. Fields may include animal studies, affect theory, ecocriticism, various formalisms, global studies, globalization theory, and speculative realism/object-oriented ontology. We will concurrently consider the fates of more established methodologies, particularly feminism, Marxism, and postcolonial theory: where do we see them being absorbed, appropriated, co-opted, defanged, repudiated, reconfigured, or reinvented, and to what ends?

Suzanne Daly teaches and writes about Victorian literature and culture.

791R---Old English Stephen Harris
Tuesdays, 5-7:30
English 791R is an introduction to the Old English language and literature. Our focus will be on learning the language. We will discuss various aspects of its syntax, morphology, phonology, and history. This will continue throughout the course. We will also translate and discuss Old English poems, proverbs, stories, charms, riddles, curses, and magical incantations. Finally, we will discuss briefly the literary culture of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages as it pertains to our texts.

Required books are Mitchell and Robinson, Guide to Old English, 8th ed; two free on-line textbooks; Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites: the Spritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes; Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature; and J. R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edition. There are a number of recommended readings which will be available in the library, or at any of the dozens of libraries in the vicinity. Books will be available at Amherst Books on Main Street.

Stephen Harris studies historical semantics (how words change meaning over time). He recently co-edited VoxGermanica: Essays in Germanic Languages and Literature in Honor of James E. Cathey (Arizona, 2013). Harris' first book explored terms for racial identity in Anglo-Saxon England. His current project is a commentary on the Latin poetry of the Venerable Bede.

791S---Transnational Feminism Asha Nadkarni
Wednesdays, 5-7:30
This course surveys transnational feminist perspectives from the global North and Southto ask how they transform feminist theory and practice. We begin with critiques of the exclusions engendered by certain feminist models. What issues must a feminism that locates gender as the only site of oppression ignore? Which women are left out of its universalist discourse? How do the perspectives of feminists of color in the U.S. and postcolonial world radically reshape feminist politics? In asking these questions the aim of this course is not simply comparative: we will not look at different feminist movements as representative of the national contexts from which they emerge. Rather, this course understands feminisms in different parts of the globe as mutually constitutive and informing. As such, the “transnational” in the course title signals that we will theorize feminism as a global phenomenon that challenges and complicates the bounded nature of the nation-state itself.

Asha Nadkarni is an assistant professor of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, U.S. empire studies, Asian American studies, and transnational feminist theory, and has published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, American Quarterly, and Feminist Studies. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism and Development in the United States and India (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation.


792A---Methods for the Study of American Culture Ron Welburn
Mondays, 5:30-8:00
Methods, one of two courses required for American Studies graduate students, will approach interdisciplinary topics not just in literature and history, the foundation departments in the field. American studies has expanded to encompass indigenous and ethnic studies, popular culture, theories of the hemispheric, borderlands, and the transnational, and the global consumerism of U.S. popular culture. Tentative principal texts for the first half of the semester will be Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827), Deborah Madsen’s American Exceptionalism, and George Lipsitz’s American Studies in a Moment of Danger. During the second half, students will draw upon these readings to engage case studies presenting theoretical and methodological models for this rapidly changing interdisciplinary field. One bi-product of this course will be helping students prepare readings for their qualifying exams and formulate ideas towards their comprehensive exams. Texts will be available at Amherst Books downtown.

Ron Welburn is Director of the Department’s American Studies Concentration. He also co-established and served as Director of the Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies (administered by Anthropology) from 1997‒-2006. Currently he is developing a profile of nineteenth-century author Ann Plato as part of an urban Indian community in Hartford, Connecticut. Professor Welburn also believes Native studies and jazz studies offer useful practical methods for American studies.

796---Independent Study By arrangement
For students wishing to do special work not covered by courses listed in the curriculum. Each student when registering should submit a brief description of the semester’s work agreed on by the student and the instructor. This must be signed by both the instructor and the student. No instructor should do more than one such course. Forms for registering for this course are available from Wanda Bakin Bartlett 452. The Director of Graduate Studies must approve each proposal.

796A---Independent Study By arrangement
For students who are taking more than one independent study course per semester.

796W---INDEPENDENT AREA-1 By arrangement

796X----INDEPENDENT AREA-2 By arrangement

891AK—South African Literature: Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Stephen Clingman
Thursdays, 5-7:30
Satisfies the MFA Contemporary Fiction requirement. The year 1994 was a momentous one in South Africa as nearly fifty years of formal apartheid came to an end, and a new free and democratic era began under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. Prior to that time, South African literature had been renowned for the range and intensity of its responses to a severely enforced system of racial oppression, even as writers negotiated the complex challenges of the literary and political in varied ways. After 1994, through an extended period of transition, open questions remained, but took on other forms. In the political domain, these concerned the contours of transformation, whether in terms of economic justice or gender and sexual equity, or the broad racial disparities that still existed in an era of AIDS, crime and violence. In the literary sphere, the predominant question was what shapes South African writing would take on in a post-apartheid universe. This course will consider writers and writing across the bridge year of 1994. Some of the ‘classics’ will be there, including the Nobel prizewinners Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, as well as Njabulo Ndebele. But in the later period some other remarkable contemporary writers will come into view: Zoe Wicomb; Ivan Vladislavic; the extraordinary Marlene van Niekerk. And we will also address the work of a younger generation of black writers: K. Sello Duiker; NiqMhlongo; KopanoMatlwa. Around and about this (if time permits), we’ll bring in some poetry, the short films of William Kentridge, perhaps the photography of David Goldblatt and ZaneleMahola. The purpose of the course will be twofold: to introduce students to the South African context and some of its most notable writers; and to gain at least some sense of the critical and theoretical debates surrounding them. Overall, we’ll be considering relations between aesthetics and politics in a setting which has concentrated some of the key conflicts, asymmetries, and transitional points of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Stephen Clingman is the author of The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, and editor of The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, by Nadine Gordimer. His Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary won the Alan Paton Award (South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction), and is being republished in a new edition this year. He has held fellowships at the Southern African Research Program (Yale), The Society for the Humanities (Cornell), the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, D.C.), and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (South Africa). His book, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (OUP, 2009), was released in paperback in 2013.

891AL---Renaissance Romance Arthur Kinney
Mondays, 1-3:30
The literary mode of romance reached a zenith during the English Renaissance cutting across all the major genres and we will examine its ideas, conventions, intended audiences, and development. We will begin with the source of it all in Heliodorus, then move to the first Tudor attempt in Thomas More's prose work Utopia. After that, we will turn to to the introduction of prose fiction with the author who introduced it to Elizabethan literature, Robert Greene, reading Menaphon and Pandosto. We'll turn then to the New Arcadia, Philip Sidney's masterpiece (and best selling prose fiction for more than a century) with Donald Stump's proposed ending before looking at the poetry of Tasso, Spenser's Amoretti and Faerie Queene III and IV, Bacon's New Atlantis, and, in drama, works of Beaumont and Fletcher and late Shakespeare. Alternative readings may be taken from the work of Marguerite of Navarre, Ariosto, Rabelais,or Cervantes. One report and a term paper that might become a conference paper.

Arthur F. Kinney has written, most recently, a book with Hugh Craig on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays for Cambridge University Press and the Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare for Oxford University Press. He is an Advisory Editor for the forthcoming five-volume Shakespeare Encyclopedia edited by Patricia Parker. The author of a number of books on the Renaissance and on Renaissaance drama--including an anthology of the drama and a Blackwell Companion--he has also served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. At UMass, he is the Director of the Renaissance Center.

891AN---“Renaissance Drama and the World Stage: Postcoloniality, Transnationalism, Globalization”
Jane Degenhardt
Tuesdays, 2-4:30
This course puts plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in conversation with canonical and emerging theoretical frameworks in the fields of postcolonial, transnational, and global studies. How did the early modern theater – a pervasive medium of commercial, popular entertainment – negotiate England’s history of imperial subjugation as well as its nascent imperial aspirations? What was the public theater’s role in imagining and influencing the meanings of “nation,” “empire,” and the “global”? How do England’s early ventures in cross-cultural trade and colonial settlement fit into larger narratives of capitalist and imperial development? We will study such plays as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. We will also place these primary texts in conversation with theoretical writings by Frantz Fanon, Benedict Anderson, Gayatri Spivak, Ania Loomba, Mark Netzloff, David Baker, David Armitage, Laura Doyle, and others, as well as with Renaissance travel narratives and other (short) non-dramatic primary texts.

Jane Degenhardt is the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010) and the co-editor of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (2011). She has published articles on early modern inter-cultural encounter as well as the on the intersections between public theater and religious culture in ELH, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Philology, and the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. She is currently working on a study of “fortune” in early modern drama, which considers how England’s nascent engagement in imperial exploration placed new pressures on the cultural authority of religious belief and gave rise to a new faith in the secular forces of chance, hap, and luck.

891AR ---American Literature and the Visual Arts, 1880-1920 Randall Knoper
Thursdays, 5-7:30
Satisfies the MFA Modern Fiction requirement. This course will focus mainly on American novels from this period along with painting, photography, and film, but with multiple forays into theater and other spectacles of visual culture. We will probably read work by W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Zitkala-Ša and Gertrude Stein. Visual artists will likely include John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Frederick Remington, and the Ashcan School (all painters); Alexander Gardner, Jacob Riis, Gertrude Kasebier, Alfred Stieglitz, Eadweard Muybridge, and Alvin Langdon Coburn (all photographers); and the makers of early film. Our agenda will be set by the novels. The questions raised will include those put by the movements of realism and Impressionism. At a time when physiological optics revealed visual perception to be unreliable, what constituted “observation” and what were the effects on “objectivity”? As sensations and perceptions were measured, rationalized, and reconceived, how did artists try to register or record them? What role did literature have to play in representing reality given the apparent accuracy of the camera? How did emergent visual media affect literary form? What did it mean to turn one’s eye on war and the war dead, lynched African Americans, “freaks,” “vanishing” Native Americans, poor people of the slums, wealthy women, the houses and possessions of the rich, the world viewed by the imperial eye? Requirements: short weekly writings, a class presentation, and a final project (15-20 pp.). Books ordered at Amherst Books.

Randall Knoper is the author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance. He is currently working on a book project about the relations between American literature and neurophysiology from 1880 to 1925.

891AS---Writing Histories of U.S. Women Janine Solberg
Wednesdays, 5-7:30

891AT---The Short Novel Jeff Parker
Mondays, 6-8:30
Satisfies the MFA Contemporary Fiction requirement. This seminar will study the form in between the novel and the short story. Longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, the novella or the long short story or the short novel is a form whose precise character is unclear. If a short story burns with a gem-like flame and a novel indulges its digressions, what characteristics beyond length define their cousin? That is the question the seminar will seek to answer as we look deeply at novella-ists, classic and contemporary, ranging from Mikhail Bulgakov (The Heart of a Dog) to Lorrie Moore (Anagrams) to Harry Crews (Car), among many others.

891LL---Composition Theory Donna LeCourt
Tuesdays, 5-7:30
Designed as a survey course, composition theory provides an introduction to various writing theories, focusing almost exclusively on modern theories. While many of these theories emerge from studies of teaching writing, our focus will not be on the practice of teaching. Rather, the course interrogates the act of writing itself--how it takes place, what effect it has on people and their world, what purposes/goals it serves the writer, how it functions within culture, etc. Our primary goals will be to understand both the variety of perspectives on how writing might be theorized as well as the debates and disagreements that exist between and among these theories. Broader questions that will be pursued include the relationship between writing and reality, the status of the writer/agency, questions of difference and identity, the ideologies of writing theories, and the materiality of writing. By the end of the course, students should have a clear understanding of what is at stake in such theorizing and begin to consider how they position themselves within these debates as teachers and scholars.

Readings will be drawn from a wide range of approaches, including expressivism, cognitive theory, social construction, rhetorical theory, genre theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and globalization. Specifically we will read work by scholars such as Bartholomae, Bizzell, Brandt, Canagarajah, Elbow, Flower and Hayes, Foucault, Horner, Lu, Miller, Trimbur, and others. Books will be available at Amherst Books.

Donna LeCourt has published work on composition theory, identity, and computers and writing. Her current research focuses on the possibility for digital public spheres and how public rhetoric can encourage discourse and social action across difference.

899----Doctoral Dissertation Staff
All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.