Engl 521 Intro to Old Irish M. Tymoczko Tuesdays, 6-9:30
Old Irish is the language of the earliest poetry and tales of Ireland , including the Deirdre story and the narratives about CuChulainn. The course will enable students to read medieval Irish literary texts in the original. Half of each class meeting will be spent on grammar and the remainder on text translation. Old Irish is a very important medieval literature in its own right. It is also important for the study of Irish writing in English, opening significant perspectives on authors from Yeats and Joyce to Heaney. There will be a follow-up course in the spring focusing on early Irish.
Maria Tymoczko is a specialist in Irish literature, publishing on topics ranging from medieval Irish narratives to James Joyce. She is author of The Irish “Ulysses” (University of California 1994), a study that treats Joyce as a postcolonial writer, showing his debt to early Irish literature and culture. She is a comparatist, also working in the field of Translation Studies where her work focuses on the politics and poetics of intercultural transfer. Her most recent book is Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (St. Jerome 2007)
Engl 698B Intro. To Teaching Writing Tu, 11:15-12:30 D. Fleming
Engl 698D Alternative Classroom Practices M, 4-5 P. Woods
Engl 698F Professional Development M, 4-5 R. Mordecai
Engl 698G Composition Theories & Pedagogies M, 4-5 D. Fleming
Engl 698I Teaching Basic Writing M, 4-5 D. Vineyard
Engl 698J Teacher Mentoring by arrangement P. Woods
Engl 698L Teaching Creative Writing M, 5:15-6:30 D. Wier & L. Olstein
Engl 698R Applied Literary Arts by arrangment L. Olstein
699-----Master's Thesis Staff
721---Eighteenth-Century Novel Joseph Bartolomeo Tuesdays, 6-8:30
Reading and discussion of important texts from the first century of novel-writing in England, including works by Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Frances Burney. We will examine such issues as: the problems of origin and generic stability (how and why the novel “rose” and flourished when it did); adaptations of and experiments with narrative form; intertextuality and influence; social commentary and satire; gender and genre; the rise of the publishing industry and the “business” of writing. Students will deliver presentations in class, compile an annotated bibliography, and prepare an article-length essay. Books will be available at Amherst Books.
Joseph Bartolomeo is the author of A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (1994), Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2002), and the editor of Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (2009). His current research involves transatlantic eighteenth-century fiction.
731---Bible as Literature James Freeman Wednesdays, 6:30-9
Most of us, I think, feel inadequate when confronted by the Bible. It is an indispensable book for students of literature, however, and (happily) a fascinating one to read. We will familiarize ourselves with the most important genres of biblical expression: creation myths, hero tales, prophecy, erotic verse, short stories, gospels. I'll lecture to provide the necessary backgrounds in history and some attention will be paid to analogous tales from other cultures, later explanations of biblical references and subsequent reuse of biblical motifs. Texts: Harper-Collins Study Bible. Various handouts of extra-biblical material. Books available at the Textbook Annex.
James Freeman has published books: “Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and European Traditions of War; Urbane Milton: the Latin Poetry; Articles: Comparative Literature, Milton Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Scriblerian, Victorian Poetry, Children's Literature, Milton Encyclopedia, Concerning Poetry, Biblical Literature, Massachusetts Review and given talks on many topics from Bible to Donald Duck at nice places like West Point, St. Andrews, Scotland, Florence, Italy…as well as made Translations from Greek & Latin (mainly erotic). Later essays concern the influential late Latin love poem from “The Vigil of Venus,” The Reputation of Joan of Arc, the Chinese Cemetery in Singapore , A British War Cemetery in Rome , the Village Cemetery in Vitnnau , Switzerland , and the City Cemetery of Amsterdam.
738---John Milton Joseph Black Thursdays, 4-6:30
An in-depth study of the writings of John Milton: we will read a broad selection of Milton 's writings, including all of his shorter English poems, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and selections from his prose, along with some recent critical and theoretical writings about Milton and his works. We will also read various texts with which Milton engages in explicit or implicit dialogue, including classical poetry (in translation) and seventeenth-century works of radical politics, religion, and social commentary. The course will explore such issues as the intersection of literature, revolution, and authority; Milton and the Renaissance notion of woman; and Milton 's afterlife in the imagination of writers and critics of later centuries. The following texts will be ordered through Amherst Books: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007); Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, adapted by Nicholas Wright, based on the novels by Philip Pullman (London: Nick Hern Books, 1993).
Joseph Black is Associate Director of Graduate Studies. His publications include The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge UP, 2008), Private Libraries of Renaissance England, vol. 7 (MRTS, 2009), The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2: The Renaissance and Early Seventeenth Century (Broadview, 2006), The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century English Verse and Prose (Broadview, 2000), and various articles on Renaissance literature and material culture. His research interests focus on early modern oppositional communities, the public sphere, and the social uses of literary and other texts. His teaching interests include seventeenth-century literature, Milton , Shakespeare, the epic tradition, and the history of the book.
780/1-Imaginative Writing: Poetry Dara Wier Mondays, 6-8:30
Satisfies the MFA Contemporary and Modern Poetry Requirement.
We'll discuss various considerations poets imagine while composing or revising a poem, the role reading plays in these activities and writing's and reading's instantaneous exchange. The main event will be your work-in-progress. We'll occasionally read and talk about essays and
poems from supplementary booklist, TBA available from Amherst Books. Enrollment limited Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.
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 elsewhere. 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 Peter Gizzi Mondays, 1:25-3:55
The workshop is a very demanding class. It consists of each student workshopping several batches of poems, providing in-depth written comments, handing in revisions, reading several books of poetry, writing at least five responses from the reading list, giving in-class presentations, experimenting in a variety of poetic forms, and required attendance. Enrollment is limited to 12. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers. All course books available at Amherst Books.
Peter Gizzi books include The Outernationale (2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), Artificial Heart (1998), and Periplum (1992). He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (1998). His honors include The Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation of Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He currently serves as poetry editor for The Nation.
781/1--- Imaginative Writing: Fiction Sabina Murray
Tuesdays, 6-8:30
Satisfies the MFA Contemporary Fiction requirement.
This workshop will focus on the short story, although other work will be accommodated. We will explore the form of the short story, it's capacity to explore ideas, with a focus on formal elements, language, character, and logic/plot. Outside reading will include a collection of short stories by someone very good at writing short stories, as well as stories that class members wish to be read by the class. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers
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.
781/3—Imaginative Writing: Fiction Chris Bachelder
Wednesdays, 1:25-3:55
Weekly discussion of student work will investigate vital issues of craft and perhaps even improve the work under consideration. Discussion will be wide-ranging, but we will pay particularly close attention to structure and scene. The workshop can accommodate the novel or the short story. Student writing will be our main focus, though we will also read and discuss some published work (available at Amherst Books). Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers
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.
781/3 Imaginative Writing: Fiction Noy Holland
Mondays 9:30-12:30
This is a course about learning to be better at being, as Mr. Joyce says, "above the text, paring's 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 deovtedness to the task of exploring lingual effects, the texture of coloration of words, the deep structure of sentences. The course seeks to encourage work that produces not sensationalism but sensation or what Nabakov called "aesthetic bliss;" that is, a sense of where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindess, ecstasy) is the norm." Books ordered at Amherst Books.
792A-Methods for Study of American Culture Ron Welburn
Mondays, 6:30-9:00
Perhaps one facet that makes American Studies an intriguing field of cultural and intellectual inquiry is that its greatest minds can articulate its cultural and social significance but feel they have not developed either a substantive theory for the discipline or a methodology. This course will explore several questions pertaining to how we can pursue and develop methods for this field whose very parameters have expanded from a once parochial national focus to engage a vocabulary inclusive of "ethnic" studies, borderlands concerns, and transnationalism in the hemisphere. In addition to a collection of essays we will engage topics that offer functional methodological value such as oral history and jazz and the Cold War. The course will be built around lectures, discussion, individual presentations, and a lengthy research essay. Texts will be available at Food For Thought Books on North Pleasant Street in Amherst . A syllabus will not be available until the eve of the semester. Please read Melville's MOBY-DICK prior to the start of classes. And become familiar with the online issues of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, especially the presidential addresses since 1990. Texts, with others to follow: Donald E. Pease & Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures Of American Studies Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Plays The Cold War.
Ron Welburn has contributed an essay on Native Americans in Jazz, Blues, and Popular Music for the Indivisble Project coordinated by the National Museum of the American Indian, and he will be discussing the Indian presence and influence in blues at NMAI in August. He has also presented and written on Native American Studies theory and methodology, continues to publish poetry and review for CHOICE magazine, and is researching Ann Plato, the nineteenth-century Native American/African American author.
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: Directed 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
891G---Romance & Realism in the Short Story Chris Bachelder Thursdays, 9:30-12
Satisfies the MFA Contemporary Fiction requirement.
This course will investigate the tradition and craft of the short story by means of a rigorous study of two pairs of major writers—-Hawthorne and Cheever, Chekhov and Carver. We'll consider structure, tone, and point of view, as well as issues such as relating vs. revealing, mythic vs. particular, narrative judgment vs. objectivity. Given that we'll read roughly 150 stories during the semester, a prerequisite of the class is at least a mild curiosity about these four writers. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.
891H---Victorian Monstrosity Kirby Farrell Thursdays, 6-8:30 Lab: Tues, 7-9:30
Satisfies the MFA Modern Fiction requirement.
This seminar explores the impact of modernity. Fantasies of monstrosity in 1890s culture crystallized many of the themes that haunt us today, from terrorism and predatory economics to perplexing sexuality and traumatic stress. Radical historical change raised liberating and terrifying questions about identity: What sort of creatures are we? This is not a conventional literature course. We'll be using history, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines to explore the impact of modernity. There's some required outside reading and a required film lab that screens some early films, adaptations of novels, documentaries, etc. Writers include Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, Stevenson, Wells, Haggard, Wilde, Gilman, Stoker, and Conrad. Books will be available at the bookstore annex. If you've signed up for the seminar and want a head start on the reading, you can email me for a syllabus. The required film lab opens up the novels and the period, but also a wider critical context, allowing us to explore how meaning is embodied in behavior. Since you'll be making an extra commitment of time, you may want to sign up for Independent Study credits and do some extra writing about film/lit. Requirements: plan on doing some short problem-solving papers and a longer semester essay.
Kirby Farrell's books include Post-Traumatic Culture; Play Death and Heroism in Shakespeare; Shakespeare's Creation; Women in the Renaissance, and most recently, The Mysteries of Elizabeth I. He has also published several novels. He is an editor of English Literary Renaissance and Kritikon Litterarum. Currently he is working on novels and a study titled "The Berserk Style 
in American Culture." He has lectured here and abroad on literature and culture, and for the Ernest Becker Foundation on radical existential criticism, the 
 psychology of violence, and social justice. He has offered creative writing workshops, and regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare as well as a cycle of late Victorian and modern fiction courses that explore the impact of modernism.
891LL-Composition Theory Anne Herrington
Thursdays, 1-3:30
Designed as a survey course, composition theory provides an introduction to
various writing theories, focusing almost exclusively on modern theories (1960-present). 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, questions of difference, ideologies of writing production, and
writing's possibilities for social action and public discourse. 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.
The course will explore both composition theory and the way other theories have
been 'applied' to composition. As a result, readings will come from many
perspectives, such as expressivism, cognitive theory, social construction,
rhetorical theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism.
Specifically we will read work by scholars such as Bartholomae, Bizzell,
Britton, Brodkey, Burke, Elbow, Flynn, Horner, Lu, Trimbur, and
Villanueva. Major projects include position/issue papers, a book review, and a
longer essay on an issue of the student's choice.
Anne Herrington's scholarly interests draw on a range of theories for exploring writing and learning in school, genre in print and multi-modal texts, and writing assessment. Her most recent books include two collections: Genre across the Curriculum and The New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21 st Century Classroom.
891T---Writing & Race Haivan Hoang
Monday, 6-8:30
Historically, American political and educational policies have alternately restricted, invalidated, and/or affirmed particular racial group's language practices. Language has simultaneously performed race (late 19th- and early 20th-century judicial writings that performed whiteness/nonwhiteness) and been a vehicle for restricting access (literacy testing as prerequisite for voting and citizenship). More recent manifestations of racialized understandings of language have included U.S. English movements, dismissals of Black English, and characterizations of bilingual education as un-American. To challenge the tangled relationship between writing and race, scholars in rhetoric and composition, education, linguistics, and critical race theory have interrogated the continuing effects of this legacy and explored how writers have upset writing conventions in order to challenged prevailing conceptions of racialized (or race-neutral) writing and reading subjects. This seminar focuses, in particular, on composition pedagogy and racial minority student writers; studies of racial minorities' writing practices; composition studies' response to language politics in the 1974 publication Students' Right to Their Own Language; writing and borderlands; and critical re-writings of race.
**Note: Books available at Amherst Books.
Haivan Hoang's research interests center on literacy education and racial formation in American schools. Her book project Rewriting Injury: The Racial Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric examines the political rhetoric of Asian American activists who have responded to the historical interplay between literacy and language education and racial formation.
892L Cosmological Revolutions and 17th and 18th Century British Literature
Thursdays, 6:30-9 Dave Toomey
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were witness to great revolutions in understanding of the nature of the cosmos and humanity's place within it. These revolutions mark disjunctions between three scientific traditions, each dominating an interval within the period in question, and each commonly identified with a particular text: the Copernican tradition (Galileo's 1610 Sidereus nuncius [Sidereal Messenger]), the Cartesian tradition (Descartes' 1664 Principia philosophiae [Principles of Philosophy), and the Newtonian tradition (Newton's 1687 Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy]).
The course will treat these tracts and their subsequent editions in conversation with several works of English literature of the same period, as the authors of those works negotiated among and responded to the religious, social, aesthetic and philosophical implications of a universe shaped and reshaped. In addition to the aforementioned scientific texts, we will read (among others) Spenser, Donne, Milton and Pope. Secondary resources will include Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture and Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being.
Books for the course will be ordered through Amherst Books.
Dave Toomey's most recent book is The New Time Travelers: a Journey to the Frontiers of Physics. New York : W.W. Norton, 2007.
892M---Black Popular Culture TreaAndrea Russworm
Wednesdays. 6:30-9:00
This course will serve as an intensive introduction to the interdisciplinary study of contemporary black popular culture. The material for the course will be divided into five main units: film, television, black pulp and popular fiction, hip hop, and video game narrative. Our case studies are likely to include the Blaxploitation film cycle of the 1970s, Bill Cosby's genre-saving and, to use Janet Staiger's term, “blockbuster sitcom” The Cosby Show (1984-1992), the current wave of “street literature,” Lauryn Hill and the Fugees, as well as the video games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) and Afro Samurai (2009). Each unit will mobilize American studies and cultural studies approaches to reading representations of blackness across genre and form while also problematizing the very notion of "black" popular culture—as Stuart Hall and others have done. By the end of the course, students should be able to write more confidently about popular forms and also have an improved understanding of the current trends in scholarship for each of the major interdisciplinary fields that fall under the critical umbrella of the popular. For assignments, graduate students will have an opportunity to work on one aspect of black popular culture for the entire semester, presenting one “paper” in four different formats: in digital form (i.e. as a blog, wiki, video essay, etc.), as a short CFP abstract, as a twenty-minute conference style paper, and as a longer seminar paper.
TreaAndrea M. Russworm received her AB from Brown University (1998), AM from the University of Chicago (2002), and PhD from the University of Chicago (2008). Her current research project is on race, popular culture, and psychoanalytic thought during the civil rights era. Her teaching interests, both primary and secondary, include post-1950s African American literature and culture, film and television studies, American studies, psychoanalysis, digital media (including video game theory and culture) and representations of race and community in the “avatar age.” Her research and popular culture blog may be found at: http://blogs.umass.edu/russworm .
892N– Renaissance Tragicomedy Jane Degenhardt
Tuesdays, 1:00 at the Renaissance Center
This course explores the rise of a popular genre of stage plays that debuted in England around 1600 and attracted every major playwright of the period. It will analyze the tropes and conventions of tragicomedy in relation to social and cultural politics, as well as the literary models that preceded tragicomedy, especially romance. We'll pay particular attention to the political implications of genre. And we'll analyze closely the formal structures and thematic content of tragicomic plays, including the specific means by which they arrive at comic resolutions and the tragic possibilities that they flirt with but refuse to play out. Primary readings will include tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, Marston, Dekker, and Heywood, as well as romances by Tasso, Cervantes, Chaucer, and others. Secondary readings will include both Renaissance and modern genre theory, as well as emerging criticism on tragicomedy. Final projects will give students the opportunity to explore their own interests in relation to those of the course.
Jane Degenhardt specializes in Renaissance drama. She is particularly interested in how the interrelated categories of sexuality, race, and gender inform the politics of genre. She is also interested in the role of drama and its relationship to culture. Her current research includes a new book that seeks to theorize the relationship between religion and drama by paying special attention to the material and theatrical conventions of the stage.
892P Beckett Seminar Noy Holland Tuesdays, 6:00-8:30
Satisfies MFA Modern Fiction Requirement.
This seminar will explore the wild range of forms Samuel Beckett embraced--film, dance, work for television, plays, short stories, and novels. We will look at biographical and critical material as well. Get ready for immersion Beckett--for the stone in the road, the rope in the tree, for great white graps of inerrable contraptions, for the unstoppable fluency of speech.
899----Doctoral Dissertation Staff
All graduate students must have a minimum of 18 credits at the time of their graduation.
