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Department of English
Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing Tu, 11:15-12:30 D. Fleming Engl 698G Composition Theories & Pedagogies M, 4-5 D. Fleming 780/3 Imaginative Writing: Poetry J. Haug Engl 796 Independent Study by arrangement Engl 891G Form & Theory of Fiction Tu, 1-3:30 N. Holland Engngl; 891I Writing & Emerging Technologies W, 6:30-9:00 J. Solberg (Click here to see a list of graduate courses from Fall 2007)
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Graduate Course Descriptions Fall 2008
Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing D. Fleming Engl 698D Alernative Classroom Practices P. Woods Engl 698F Professional Development R. Mordecai Engl 698G Composition Theories & Pedagogies D. Fleming Engl 698I Teaching Basic Writing D. Vineyard Engl 698J Teacher Mentoring P. Woods Engl 698L Teaching Creative Writing D. Wier & L. Olstein
699-----Master's Thesis Staff
730—Literature of the Sixteenth-Century Arthur Kinney Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00 This survey of the historical, intellectual, cultural, and literary concerns of the sixteenth century in England will be divided into fairly discrete periods: the rise of humanism (More, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey); the Reformation (Foxe, Bale, Askew); the early Elizabethen (Elizabeth 1, Lyly, Gascoigne); the “golden age” (Sidney, Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, Nashe Daniel, Dekker Stow, Amelia Lanyer, Drayton, Holinshed), and Spenser. There will be collateral considerations of Continental writing, especially Castiglione, Rabelais, Marguerite of Navarre, Ronsard, Cervantes, Montaigne). Books will be ordered through Amherst Books. Arthur F. Kinney is the author or editor of several books on sixteenth-century works including Elizabethan Backgrounds ; Humanist Poetics ; Continental Humanist Poetics ; John Skelton: the Priest as Poet ; The Achievement of Sir Philip Sidney ; and Nicholas Hilliard's Arte of Lymning . He directs the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies.
753—American Romanticism Mason Lowance Mondays 6:30-9:00 Satisfies the MFA Modern Poetry or Modern Fiction Requirement . American Romanticism examines the literature of antebellum America, those vibrant decades commencing with Washington Irving and concluding with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. The format will be a seminar in American literature and culture from 1820 to 1865. The content will be organized chronologically but it will also be examined thematically and topically. For example, the antebellum slavery debates dominated these decades and aspects of this national tension will supplement the close reading of selected great books. American “exceptionalism” as a theoretical and critical issue will govern our approach to some of the texts, as will a consideration of the divisive problem of American slavery. In addition to the “canonized” authors of this period of the “American Renaissance,” (Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson) we will also consider some of the writers who exerted tremendous social and political influence on antebellum American culture, including the slave narrators Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the feminist critics Margaret Fuller and Angeline Grimke Weld, the reformers and Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child, and the most widely read author of the entire period, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin galvanized sentiment against slavery through sales of 5 million by 1860. Aesthetic, literary, biographical, cultural, social, and political approaches to these authors are all valid methods of exploring this extremely rich territory. Short analytical essay, term paper, and a take home final examination, plus some in-class presentation of work-in-progress. Books at Jeffrey Amherst. Mason Lowance has taught Early American Literature, American Romanticism, seminars on Melville and Hawthorne and nineteenth-century america since 1967. He has directed three NEH Summer Seminars for College Teachers, " Uncle Tom's Cabin and Antebellum American Culture," 1976, 1992, and 1995. He is author or editor of eight books, including: Increase Mather (1974); Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution (1976); The Language of Cannan: Metaphor and Symbol in American Literature from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (l980); ) The Typological Writings of Jonathan Edwards (1993); The Stowe Debate (1994); and Against Slavery: The Penguin Anthology of Abolitionist Writings (1999); A House Divided: the Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865" (Princeton, 2003). 771—Contemporary Fiction Chris Bachelder Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels U.S.!, BEAR v. SHARK, and LESSONS IN VIRTUAL TOUR PHOTOGRAPHY (an e-book). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Oxford American, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere.
780/1-Imaginative Writing: Poetry Dara Wier Tuesdays, 1-3:30 Satisfies the MFA Contemporary Poetry Requirement. We will discuss the various considerations a poet imagines while composing or revising a poem, the role reading plays in these activities and the various ways people incorporate poetry in their lives. Our main events will be your work-in-progress. We'll occasionally read and talk about essays and poems from supplementary texts TBA available from Amherst Books. Enrollment limited to 10. Permission of instructor required of anyone not enrolled through MFA Program in English. Dara Wier is the author of Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture (2006 Poetry Center Book Award), Hat on a Pond, (finalist for a Phi Beta Kappa Award); Voyages in English; Our Master Plan; Blue for the Plough; The Book of Knowledge; All You Have in Common; The 8-Step Grapevine; and Blood, Hook & Eye. Recent work has appeared in the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. In Spring 2005 she was the Rubin Distinguished Chairholder in Poetry at Hollins University. New work is in American Poetry Review, the Canary, Painted Bride Quarterly, Volt and elswhere. In preparation: a collection of short stories and a book of essays about literary arts and Selected Poems.
780/2-Imaginative Writing: Poetry James Tate Tuesdays, 1-3:30 Workshop in the writing of poetry. Each week, a close reading analysis of poems submitted by poets and writers enrolled in the workshop, and occasional poems brought in from outside. Attention to the way in which a poem works and how it comes together through its choice of images, rhythms and subject matter. Assignments in an anthology of contemporary poetry and supplementary reading. Enrollment limited to 10. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers. James Tate's newest book, THE GHOST SOLDIERS, is out from Ecco/Harper/Collins in April 2008; other recent books have included MEMOIR OF THE HAWK, and SHROUD OF THE GNOME, both from Ecco. His Selected Poems was published in 1991, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. WORSHIPFUL COMPANY OF FLETCHERS (ECCO, 1994) was awarded the National Book Award. In 1995, the Academy of American Poets presented him with The Tanning Prize, now known as The Wallace Stevens Award for mastery of poetic composition. He's an elected member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and an elected member of the chancellor's board of the Academy of American Poets.
780/3-Imaginative Writing: Poetry James Haug Mondays, 1:00 - 3:30 In this workshop, we'll consider contemporary poetry, both in the work you write and bring to class and in a selection of 6 or 7 recent books of poetry (available at Amherst Books). Discussions will focus on the choices a poet considers while writing and re-writing, and how what you're reading (and seeing and listening to) comes to bear on your work. We'll also occasionally discuss the selected poetry books, considering their range of styles and influences. Enrollment is 10. Permission required for anyone not enrolled in the MFA program. James Haug is author of, most recently, A Plan of How to Catch Amanda , from Factory Hollow Press, and Legend of the Recent Past , forthcoming in 2009 from National Poetry Review Press. His other books and chapbooks include Walking Liberty (Winner of the Morse Poetry Prize), The Stolen Car , and Fox Luck (Winner of the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award). He's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
781/1-Imaginative Writing: Fiction Noy Holland Thursdays 1-3:30 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.” Books ordered at Atticus. Noy Holland is the author of two collections of stories, 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.
781/2-Imaginative Writing: Fiction Chris Bachelder Wednesdays, 1-3:30 This course uses student writing and occasional published work to study the craft of fiction. Writing submitted to workshop will give us an opportunity to identify and discuss the various elements of narrative art. We shall open our hearts to both the familiar and the unfamiliar. If we do all of this with rigor and generosity, it should feel pretty invigorating.
781/3—Imaginative Writing: Fiction Sabina Murray Wednesdays, 6-8:30 This course assumes that the process of revision is as satisfying and creative as the process of writing. Also, that through reading the work of others, we are forced to come to terms with our own goals, forced to articulate certain abstract aims in a concrete way. Workshop will feature round-table discussions of student mss. and individual conferences with instructor.. Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels A Carnivore's Inquiry , Slow Burn , and, forthcoming, Forgery . Her short story collection The Caprices received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charilie Chan is Dead II . Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She wrote the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country . She is a former Bunting Fellow at Harvard University and Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover
791D—Major Texts for Study of American Literature Randall Knoper Wednesdays, 6-8:30 The aim of this course is to read and evaluate "major" examples of interdisciplinary scholarly work, from the "prehistory" of American Studies as a discipline to its present. Our concern will be partly historical, tracing the transformation of American Studies over the past century. That means we will read studies of "American character" and "mind" from the 1930s; myth-and-symbol-school work from the 1950s and 60s; transformative work on gender, race, and ethnicity from the 70s and 80s; writings influenced by cultural studies, ideological critique, and new historicism from the 80s; and examples of the multiple trends that have changed the field from the 90s to the present (empire, transnational, postnational, and hemispheric studies; border theory and diaspora studies; whiteness studies; queer studies; science, technology, and environmental studies; visual and performance studies; trauma and affect theory; etc.). In almost every case I have tried to choose a text that has gained some prominence and currency in American Studies generally, and in its particular territory of American Studies especially. We will be pondering various questions these texts raise that are central to American Studies, e.g., questions of nationality and national self-definition, conceptions of cultures and subcultures, and the possibilities of making generalizations about these things. And I have tried to choose texts that raise important questions for, and about, interdisciplinary study. We will be wondering, throughout the course, about what interdisciplinarity is, how we can do interdisciplinary study, whether we can do such study, and what the benefits of it might be. The ultimate aim will be to give you a better sense—for your own work—of how an interdisciplinary study of American culture(s) might be shaped and what problems and concerns would accompany it. Randall Knoper is the author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance . He is currently working on a book about late-nineteenth-century American literature and the sciences of the brain and nervous system.
791E--- Theorizing the Discipline Suzanne Daly Wednesdays, 1-3:30 An introduction to major statements of literary and cultural theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will concentrate particularly on genealogies of Marxist, poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial thought. A final list of readings will be emailed to enrolled students in January. Books will be available at Amherst Books. Suzanne Daly's scholarly interests include: Victorian Studies, British Empire Studies, Feminist Theory, History and Theory of the Novel. Her most recent publications and presentations include: “Indiscreet Jewels: The Eustace Diamonds” (Nineteenth-Century Studies), “Kashmir Shawls in Mid-Victorian Novels” (Victorian Literature and Culture), “Regenerating the Center in Dombey and Son” (New Faculty Lecture Series 2005) , “The Reinvention of Tea and the Opening of Assam” (Cooking Culture Conference London 2004)
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 in 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 By arrangement 796X----INDEPENDENT AREA By arrangement 796Z----INDEPENDENT AREA By arrangement
892C—Aesthetics, Dialectics, and Transnational Subjects on the Atlantic Laura Doyle Wed, 1-3:30 Satisfies the MFA Modern Fiction Requirement. This course will: 1) introduce a selection of aesthetic philosophy from the 18th to the 20th centuries; 2) explore the implicit conditioning of these theories by a shifting world-system economy and new contact-zone encounters, especially in the Atlantic world; and 3) study the aesthetic forms of modernist literature and visual arts (especially cubism) in relation to existential philosophy as well as Atlantic economic, political, and aesthetic history. We will aim to think freshly about how works of art (and theories about them) become sites of engagement and negotiation; and in turn we will reconsider modernisms' genealogies, definitions, investments, and interventions. Requirements in addition to course reading include: short writing and thinking assignments throughout the semester; readiness to take risks, think collectively, and participate regularly in seminar discussion; and a final seminar essay. Laura Doyle's literary-historical work focuses on race and modernity, and her philosophical work draws especially on existential phenomenology. Recent publications include essays on Hawthorne, Faulkner, Woolf, and Larsen and two edited collections, Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity . Her forthcoming book is titled Liberty's Empire: Rethinking Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 .
892D---Early Textual Cultures Stephen Harris Mondays, 1-3:30 This course introduces you to paleography, codicology, libraries, and the book trade from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We will concentrate on manuscripts and the technologies of reading and writing—including the history of word-spacing, punctuation, commentary, footnotes, indices, word lists, and so forth. We will consider literature in its immediate manuscript contexts in order to draw conclusions about the social and pedagogical uses of texts. Along with two short papers, you will produce a descriptive bibliography of a medieval manuscript or Early Modern incunabula held by Amherst College or Smith College. Books ordered at Amherst Books. Stephen Harris has recently co-edited Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2007), and published an essay on the liturgical context of the Old English sermons of Ælfric of Eynsham. Forthcoming are an introduction to early medieval race and ethnicity, an essay on Germanic oaths and The Battle of Maldon , an essay on the Old English Judith , and a survey of the use of Cicero in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin texts. Currently working on a book about English etymology, and a book on the Psalms in Anglo-Saxon England. My interests coalesce around the interaction of Germanic and Roman cultures in the early Middle Ages.
891Z---Introduction to Research on Writing Anne Herrington Wednesdays, 4-6:30 The seminar is designed to introduce participants to a range of empirical research approaches, primarily qualitative, and experiment with a few methods of qualitative research. A second aim is to create occasions for all of us to reflect critically on this enterprise as we consider a range of types of research and try to get some perspectives on them—in time and as situated within the broader areas of composition and literacy studies. We will consider, for example, case study research, teacher-researcher, ethnographies. Methods examined will include interviewing, observation, text analysis (e.g., rhetorical and critical discourse analysis). Assignments: Two short evaluations of research studies as assigned; regular experiments with various research methods; a review of research on an issue of interest; and an exploratory study to gain hands on experience designing a study, conducting research, and writing a brief research article. Readings will include theory and method as well as selected research studies. Books will be available at Food for Thought and a course reader will be created, to be available either through Electronic Reserves or at Collective Copies. Check with Anne in August for the full list. Anne Herrington's interests include qualitative research methodology, genre, assessment, and writing across the curriculum. With Marcia Curtis, she has published Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College , recipient of the 2002 NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. With Charles Moran, she has co-edited two collections, Research and Scholarship on Writing, Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines and Genre across the Curriculum . With Kevin Hodgson, they are now working on a new collection, Technology, Change, and Assessment: Teaching Practice in the Writing Classroom .
892G---20 th -Century U.S. Fictions Deborah Carlin Mondays, 1-3:30 Satisfies the MFA Modern or Contemporary Fiction Requirement. In 1887, the novelist William Dean Howells, in his enormously influential role as editor of first The Atlantic Monthly and then of Harper's , argued in one of his “Editor's Columns” that “It is true that no one writer, no one book, represents [America] for that is not possible, our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may forever forbid it.” For Howells, whose great contribution to 19 th -century U.S. literature was his linking regional writing to the project of democracy, the diversity inherent in the astounding multiplicity and difference within “American” experiences made improbable, if not impossible, that any one novel, no matter how broad, could adequately address anything approximating a “national” experience. Yet many 20 th -century U.S. novelists attempted to do just this very thing: to portray national aspirations, anxieties, and historical aftermaths in fictions that, as in Faulkner, use region as both mythic and metonymic constructions of a broader, more encompassing, “American” narrative. This course will examine some of these narrative fictions of the 20th-century United States. Texts under consideration will include: Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913); Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920); Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925); William Faulkner, Light in August (1932); John Dos Passos, The Big Money (1936); John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977); Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991); Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997); and Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1998). We will, in other words, be reading self-consciously “big” fictions this semester; many of them will be proportionately lengthy, so those who read slowly may want to think carefully before you enroll in this course. This seminar will require considerable attention to critical traditions, as well as to different theoretical approaches to authors and texts; economics and class will play a prominent role in many of the early fictions, while history, myth, and narrative experimentation play critical roles in the later texts. Students are encouraged to read widely in the recommended reading on the syllabus in order to acquaint themselves with contemporary critical approaches; web research for biographical information is also strongly recommended if you are not sufficiently familiar with any of these writers. The course will be run as a discussion. I expect from all students an appropriate balance of talking and listening; a willingness to take risks in formulating questions, observations and interpretations; and active involvement in learning. Requirements: weekly submissions of two questions on each text for seminar discussion; one (5-6 pp.) essay that teases out a question or issue in a novel through close, analytical reading, and one 15-20 page final essay. Texts for the course will be ordered from and available at Food For Thought Books in Amherst.
Deborah Carlin is a Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she has taught since 1987. She holds a B.A. (1979), magna cum laude , in Literature (English & French) from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1987) in English and American Literature from Harvard University, as well as a Master's Degree in Clinical Social Work from Smith College (1994). She has twice won distinguished teaching awards, at Harvard University (1984) and at UMass Amherst (1996). She is the author of Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading (1992), and the editor of Queer Cultures (2003), a course textbook and essay anthology. Professor Carlin has published several articles and reviews on Willa Cather and on Cather scholarship, as well as on Edith Wharton, African American literary criticism and theory, 19th-Century American women's philanthropic fiction, trauma, narrative, and multiple personality, graduate internship programs in the humanities, and on queer theory and the American novel. She has just completed an edition of Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs for Broadview Press and is currently at work on two novels and an interdisciplinary study (novels and film) about representations of women department store workers in early 20th-century U.S. culture.
891G—Form and Theory of Fiction: Reading in the Past and Future Noy Holland Tuesdays, 1-3:30 This course will take up the work of several modern and contemporary writers (reading list to be determined) with an eye to the ways they manage time, and to the ways associative movement and acoustics produce structures loosened from temporal imperatives. Books available at Amherst Books.
891I----Writing and Emerging Technologies Janine Solberg Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00 In an age of texting, mashups, YouTube, and Facebook, what does it mean to “write”? To study writing? To teach writing? This course will examine recent research into the connections between digital technologies and writing, with a particular focus on theories of multimodal composing (e.g., combining sound, text, moving image) and Web 2.0 (social networking sites, wikis, blogs). We will supplement our reading of current composition theory with new media scholarship from other disciplines (e.g., Lev Manovich; Marshall McLuhan; Gunnar Liestol, et al.) and relevant historical texts (Dziga Vertov, Thomas Edison, Edward Bernays). In addition to traditional response papers, students will be asked to compose one short experimental/non-traditional text. For the final seminar project, students will have the choice to propose either a traditional seminar paper or an experimental (e.g., digital, multimodal) text accompanied by a written justification and reflection. Seminar readings may include texts by: Cynthia Selfe, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, James Gee, Gunther Kress, Jody Shipka, Danah Boyd, the New London Group, Anne Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Bruno Latour, and Geoff Sirc.
Janine Solberg is interested in intersections of writing and technology—both historically and as they relate to emerging digital technologies. She is currently working on a book-length project that analyzes the intersections of gender, technology, and literacy in early twentieth century career advice texts for women. These advice texts emerged with, and proliferated alongside, the steadily-increasing stream of American women who sought office work from 1900-1945, and thus offer a valuable record of the discursive, material, and ideological forces that came to bear on the articulation of a new, idealized feminine identity: the “business girl.”
899----DOCTORAL DISSERTATION Staff All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.
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