Note: The descriptions that appear below for Fall 2012 are grouped by course, starting with English 102W, English 104W, English 116W, English 117W, English 118W, English 120W, English 122 and ending with English 123. If you do not find your section number, it means that that instructor has not yet provided a description. The webmaster will make every effort to continually update this page, so please check back often.

ENGL 100 Composition

01. MWF 0910-1000 Gillette Hall 103

02. H. Cook MWF 1210-1300 Sutherland House 106

03. MWF 1310-1400 Hank Ingram House 208

04. A. Miller MWF 1310-1400 Stevenson Canter 6411

05 A. Porterfield MWF 1410-1500 Murray House 206

06. A. Johnson MWF 1510-1600 calhoun Hall 219

07. N. Spigner TR 1435-1550 Hank Ingram House 208

ENGL 102W Literature and Analytical Thinking
Close reading and writing in a variety of genres drawn from several periods. Productive dialogue, persuasive argument, and effective prose style.

01. A. Castro MWF 0910-1000 Memorial Hall 104

What does it mean to just “be yourself?” This class will explore the many ways we perform in our daily lives and how we use different types of performance to define ourselves with and against others’ expectations. We will look at numerous texts in which a character questions what it means to “perform” his or her own identity on and off the public stage. We will read and critically analyze poetry, drama, fiction, live performance, and film, spanning the centuries from Shakespeare to Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The class will examine the ways in which different communities demand distinct representations of gender, sexuality, and race. Furthermore, we will see what happens when a person’s performance of his or her own identity clashes with cultural expectations.

02 I Love You, Man: Re-thinking Masculinity and the Birth of Bromance R.J. Boutelle MWF 0910-1000 Calhoun Hall 218

In 2011, Merriam-Webster added “bromance” to its US Dictionary, defined as “a close nonsexual relationship between men.” Although the term has only come to prominence in the last decade, thanks largely to the films of Judd Apatow, this course will explore these relationships across a variety of literary and film traditions. How does this lens affect traditional conceptions of masculinity? What is the role of women in texts that focus on bromantic bonds? How is race portrayed across this spectrum? What possibilities are opened/closed in exploring male intimacy in this way? Students in this course will discuss sexuality, gender politics, racial politics, popular culture, and current events; students should be prepared to read, view, and discuss "sexually explicit" content. Possible texts include William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Poe, Henry James, Rafael Campo, Junot Diaz, Terrence Hayes, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Mark Jordan. This course will also include clips from popular television shows including Scrubs, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Seinfeld. Several required film screenings will take place outside of class and may include Chasing Amy (1997), Y tu mamá también (2001), Superbad (2007), and I Love You, Man (2009).

03. F. Barter MWF 1010-1100 McGill Hall 111

What do we mean when we talk about "justice?" To what extent do we measure a society by the structures it has in place to ensure the ministration of justice? In this course, we will examine works of fiction in order to ask questions about how justice systems exist and operate within dystopian societies. We will also examine other types of literature—court opinions, essays, and news articles—to identify how our familiar systems of justice sometimes produce dystopian results. Throughout all of our readings, we will work toward a deeper understanding of the relationship between these fraught concepts, and particularly the extent to which our definition of dystopia depends on deeply ingrained notions of “justice.” Readings will include young adult fiction such as The Hunger Games and The Giver, short works of fiction by Coetzee and Kafka, court opinions, poetry, and various historical texts.

04. L. Mensah MWF 1010-1100 Murray House 206

05. MW 0935-1050 Calhoun Hall 302

06. P. Samuel MWF 1010-1100 Furman 202

07. Seeing Green: Imagining the “Natural” K. Quigley MWF 1110-1200 Gillette Hall 103

To what do we refer when we invoke “nature,” “the natural,” and their opposites? How did we come up with these terms in the first place, and how are their meanings context-specific? In this course, we will not arrive at definitive answers to these questions, but we will explore them vigorously. Our investigations will carry us through broad expanses of time and space, and toward a wide variety of cultural products that offer themselves – more and less obviously – to our lines of inquiry. Expect to engage with travel writing, with the novel, with poetry, with film, with drama, and more besides. Expect, too, to focus intently on developing the faculties of criticism, argumentation, and, most importantly of all, writing: students will regularly submit brief reading responses in addition to the course’s longer essay assignments.

08. MWF 1210-1300 Gillette 103

09. MWF 1210-1300 Crawford House 208

10. Words, Words, Words: E. Pellarin TR 0810-0925 Wilson Hall 112

When reading a novel or a text, one is unraveling a story, analyzing a situation, experiencing emotional connections, and, most basically, reading words. It is the ability to put words together in a comprehensible and meaningful manner that makes it possible for us to call ourselves readers, and authors to call themselves authors. The word, then, is the building block of all literature and all discussion of literature.

This class aims to explore how the written word is framed in literature—how are words used and why? What makes some words, or the stories they form, more successful, what does it mean to be successful in writing and/or reading, and what is the point of writing at all? Further, what can language tell us about reality or about how someone experiences reality? For instance, we will consider how Tim O’ Brien’s war novel, The Things They Carried enabled him to survive his experiences, if in fact it did. We will look in comparison at Mary Karr’s autobiography provocatively entitled the Liars Club and how it enabled her to survive her childhood. At the end of the semester, we will watch Big Fish to see what makes a good story a good story, and we will reflect on a good story’s power. This class will seek to answer these questions by looking at a variety of traditional and non-traditional texts.

11. L. Saborido TR 0810-0925 Calhoun Hall 104

12. Reading, Writing, and the Self in Western Culture and Literature C. Woods TR 0935-1050 Tolman Hall 22

This course exposes students to the evolving conceptualizations of the self and of personhood through western culture from classical antiquity to the height of English Romanticism. One consistent theme of this intellectual trajectory will be the implications of orienting the self around technologies of writing. Writers such as Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, and Coleridge dwelled at length on how writing and reading change human psychology and humans’ disposition toward the world and others. Thus, this course will give students an opportunity to think about the very idea of writing and reading as they engage in the processes of reading and writing. We will consider how various media (e.g. the scroll, the codex, the manuscript, the printing press, the Internet) through history have fundamentally altered our manner of conceptualizing the world and our place in it. The course thereby presents students with the unique opportunities to engage in the meta-cognitive practice of writing about writing through history and to consider their current place in the evolution of discursive media in modern culture.

13. Watchers and Wanderers E. Ingrisani TR 0935-1050 Furman 202

The world of fiction has been populated by watchers and wanderers: characters whose acute powers of observation are intimately connected to their status as social outsiders or wayfarers. Starting with Adam Smith’s notion of the “impartial spectator” and Baudelaire’s rootless, cosmopolitan flâneur, we will read across centuries and genres, tracing the connections between the voyeuristic and the visionary in these rambling men (and women). Probable authors include Aphra Behn, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, and Vladimir Nabokov.

14. Islands K. DeGuzman MWF 1110-1200 Furman 202

Islands – pieces of land surrounded by water – serve as potent locations for the literary imagination. They have been called upon to evoke individual isolation, rousing adventure, and unspoiled paradise. But this course will approach such assumptions through a focus on the vexed relationship between select islands of the Caribbean and another isolated landmass: Britain. With colonialism as a framework, we will explore what happens when the cultures of freestanding pieces of land are yoked together. Readings will include works by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, C.L.R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Erna Brodber, and Dorothea Smartt.

15. Thingstravaganza!: Material Concerns in Literature and the Media D. Fang TR 0810-0925 Memorial 104

What do we know about the things around us? How do we interact with them, and what do they tell about their owners? In this course, we will explore the world of things in literature and culture. From Robinson Crusoe to Harry Potter, we will look at a variety of novels, poems, movies, and critical theories, and we will think about what objects might mean and what they might tell us that a standard concern with character and plot does not.

16. The Modern South? The Southern Modern? A. Hines MW 0935-1050 Tolman Hall 222

This course will critically explore and challenge the "backwardness" of the American South by thinking about what may be modern about the South, and perhaps, more surprisingly, what is Southern about the modern. Before we do that, however, we will figure out what exactly we mean by "Southern" or "modern" (if we mean anything at all!). We will potentially examine texts by Henry Bibb, Mark Twain, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren and Jesmyn Ward as well as contemporary critical approaches to the South to give us a common vocabulary to approach these issues in our writing.

17. TBA MWF 0910-1000 Hank Ingram House 208

18. Literary New Orleans: Race, Region, and Folklore J. Bagneris MWF 1110-1200 Hank Ingram House 208

Situated within its own unique literary tradition, New Orleans has served as the backdrop for numerous stories across several different genres such as the short story, poetry, and the novel, as well as film and television. Representations of this unique city have varied in their production of multiple and memorable incarnations such as gothic New Orleans, global New Orleans, the New Orleans of sin, corruption, and vice; and more recently, expendable New Orleans. Together, the class will consider the following questions: How is region constructed by and reproduced through literary representation? How and what does New Orleans, as a literary space, contain, repress, or contradict within alternative national or southern narratives and mythologies? And how have new traumas and current events, such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, altered New Orleans’ narrative and those “entitled” to participate in its production?

ENGL 104W-01. Prose Fiction: Forms and Techniques
Close study of short stories and novels and written explication of these forms.

01. MWF 0810-0900 Calhoun Hall 104

02. MWF 1210-1300 Furman 209

03. MWF 1310-1400 Memorial Hall 117

04. MWF 1510-1600 TBA TBA

05. MWF1510-1600 Buttrick Hall 302

ENGL 105W

Close study of representative plays of the major periods and of the main formal categories (tragedy, comedy) and written explication of these forms.

01. MWF 0910-1000 TBA

02. MWF 1110-1200 Hank Ingram House 208

ENGL 115F First-Year Writing Seminar

Note: All English 115F descriptions appear in YES as part of the entry for that course.

06. Foundational Stories R. Gottfried MWF 0910-1000 Benson 200

07. Women Poets in America B. Bachmann TR 0935-1050 Memorial Hall 104

In this course, we will track the voices of American women poets, from Dickinson to present day. Along the way, we’ll read the works of major American women poets, including H.D., Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Our final unit will explore the work of contemporary women poets. Students will complete reading responses and attend literary readings sponsored by the Department of English during the semester.

08. S. Juengel MW 1310-1424 TBA TBA

16. T. Goddu TR 1310-1425 Hank Ingram House 208

25. R. Hilles MW 1310-1425 North Hall 116

There is a great tradition of storytelling verse in American poetry that bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modernism had a profound effect on this tradition in the twentieth century, as it did on all art forms, but narrative poetry continued to be vital for some important American poets. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Anne Carson have all made innovative use of narrative in their poetry. Various elements of prose fiction such as plot, character development, setting, and narration are apparent in their works, along with form, rhythm, and imagery. The central events of modern American history are also reflected in their poems, including the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, migrations west and north, and the Civil Rights Movement. Reading their poems allows us to become familiar with some great stories in poetic form, while also watching the development of modern American society and personal identity. Texts: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Poems; Robert Frost, Early Poems; Langston Hughes, Selected Poems; Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons; Robert Lowell, Life Studies, Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks; Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah; Anne Carson, NOX. [3] (HCA)

30. What is America to Me?: Immigration, Identity, and the (Re)Making of America I. Nwankwo TR 1310-1425 West Hall 102

Over the course of the semester, we will explore personal stories, films, and literature about migration to the U.S. from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, and learn about and from these immigrant communities’ cultures, histories, identities, and perspectives on the American Dream. We will consider questions such as: What are the push and pull factors that lead these immigrants to the U.S? What are their experiences when they get here? What sorts of adjustments do they have to make? What impact do they have or have they had on American society? How have they been represented in literature, media, and film?

ENGL 116W. Introduction to Poetry
Close study and criticism of poems. The nature of poetry, and the process of literary explication.

01. MWF 0810-0900 North Hall 116

02. MWF 0910-1000 TBA TBA

03. MWF 1010-1100 Benson Hall 200

04. J. Plummer MWF 1110-1200 Calhoun Hall 218

05. MWF 1310-1400 Calhoun Hall 204

06. MWF 1410-1500 TBA TBA

07. MWF 1410-1500 TBA TBA

08. TR 0935-1050 Calhoun Hall 320

09. TR 1435-1550 TBA TBA

10. TR 1600-1715 Calhoun Hall 117

11. TR 1600-1715 calhoun 320

ENGL 117W Introduction to Literary Criticism

01. MWF 1110-1200 Calhoun Hall 203

02. MWF 1210-1300 Calhoun Hall 103

03. MWF 1310-1400 Calhoun Hall 218

ENGL 118W. Introduction to Literary and Cultural Analysis
Analysis of a range of texts in social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Interdisciplinary study of cultural forms as diverse as poetry, advertisement and film.

01. MW 1435-1550 Calhoun Hall 320

02. MW 1310-1425 Wast Hall 102

03. MWF 1010-1100 Calhoun Hall 103

04. MWF 1110-1200 Cohen 324

05.MWF 14101500 TBA TBA

06. MWF 1410-1500 Stevenson Center 1120

07. "What is Nature?" R. Teukolsky TR 1600-1715 Calhoun Hall 203

The idyllic and pastoral qualities of “nature” have always been attractive to poets and writers. In this class, we will take a challenging and even skeptical view of the subject, examining the ways that nature has been constructed in literature and culture. We will focus in particular on writings in 19^th-century Britain and America, where the industrial revolution and westward expansion respectively were transforming the natural landscape. The latter part of the course will focus on more recent writings. We will ask the following broader questions: What is nature? How have authors drawn the line between nature and culture? How did 19^th-century authors use the natural world as a symbolic register for examining human problems? What is the best way for humans to interact with nature? Topics will likely include: the picturesque aesthetic; the country and the city; the commodification of nature in tourism; Darwinism; the relationship between humans and animals; the dangers and rewards of the natural sciences; and feminist critiques, among others. Authors might include J.-J. Rousseau, Mary Shelley, W. Wordsworth, John Clare, H. Thoreau, C. Darwin, E. Dickinson, H. G. Wells, W. Faulkner, and Ursula LeGuin.

08. G. Briggs TR 0935-1050 Hank Ingram House 208

This course will examine the rise of American Literature in the United States from the end of the revolutionary period to the late-nineteenth-century. We will read the work of authors who shaped America’s literary landscape, challenged conventional wisdom, and who help us to imagine alternative literary histories in the US. As much as the course will provide students with a window on cultural responses to prominent issues from our nation’s past, it is also a course in developing the students’ general critical skills. As such, this course is designed to strengthen critical reading and writing skills as we examine literary texts to understand how writers use their work to preserve, disseminate, and analyze the social, cultural, and political issues of their day. Among the authors we will read are Susanna Rowson, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Wilson, and Sutton Griggs.

09. G. Briggs TR 1100-1215 North Hall 116

10. TR 0810-0925 Calhoun Hall 117

11. Film and Culture: The Comic Spirit S. Girgus TR 1435-1550 Buttrick Hall 015

Throughout history, humor has been a very serious business. The elites and establishment of many societies continue to consider humor a threatening, dangerous, and subversive force. However, humor has been part of American culture and character from the very beginning of our history. This course will examine how Hollywood film comedy has contributed to American humor. The course will analyze what humor tells us about ourselves as individuals, groups, and a country. We will consider what Hollywood film comedy indicates about our attitudes and values on such subjects as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, marriage, domestic relations, and politics. We will look at Hollywood film comedy starting with the films of Chaplin and Keaton, to the work of such figures as W.C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers, to the era of screwball comedy and romantic comedy, up to our own time of the comedy of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Bill Murray, among others. We also will study various contemporary forms of outrageous and outlandish humor in film. In studying and analyzing humor in film and the psychology and philosophy of funny film, the body can be seen as a border between the internal and external—a process of abjection-- that cultivates tensions that arouse laughter, often of a violent and radical nature.

12 Epic Discontent L. Enterline TR 1435-1550 TBA TBA

The course’s title signals that while epic was for centuries the preeminent genre of nations – narratives about the rise and fall of cities, states, and empires – epic poets often signal considerable skepticism about the costs of imperial ambition and its ever-vanishing promise of “eternal peace.” (An important book about Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, bore the title, Darkness Visible). Because of the length of these poems, we will read only selected moments from an array of epics while progressing from the ancient world to the 19^th century. The class will acquaint students with some of the most influential narratives in European literature – this is a self-referential tradition keenly aware of its crucial place in literary history – while asking what the epic tradition and the “translation of empire” can tell us about what Freud once called Civilization and its Discontents. Beginning with Freud’s text, we will then read selections from among the following: Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Alongside such self-proclaimed epics, we will read three texts that take up the work of epic discontent in different forms: Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece; Pope’s The Rape of the Lock; and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Topics may include: political and personal identity; representation and violence; poetry and education; epic theories of language; the epistemology and temporality of “visionary” poetics; allegory, ideology, and hegemony; analogies between nations and families; epitaphs and death-songs; the tension between social contracts, gender, and the world of desire.

13. MWF 1010-1100 Buttrick Hall 320

14. MWF 1210-1300 Murray House 206

15. MWF 1510-1600 Stevenson Center 1313

16. MW 1610-1725 TBA TBA

17. G. Briggs TR 1600-1715 Buttrick Hall 112

ENGL 120W. Intermediate Composition

A writing course including the analysis of essays from a variety of disciplines

01. MWF 1210-1300 Stevenson Center 1313

02. TR 1100-1215 Hank Ingram House 210

ENGL 122. Beginning Fiction Workshop

Introduction to the art of writing prose fiction.

01. M. LaRowe MWF 1010-1100 Calhoun Hall 117

This course will explore the art and craft of writing short fiction. While the workshop of your own writing will be the focus of the course, we will also read and discuss classic and contemporary short fiction with an eye for craft elements such as plot, tension, structure, voice, point of view, character development, imagery, figurative language and others. In addition to submitting your own fiction for class feedback, your objectives are to read assigned stories and articles, participate in class discussion, prepare written workshop critiques for peers, complete writing exercises, and attend literary events on campus . Grading will be based on class participation, written assignments and a final portfolio of short fiction.

02. J. Thielke TR 1100-1215 Vanderbilt Hall 114

ENGL 123. Beginning Poetry Workshop

Introduction to the art of writing poetry.

01. Adamson TR 1100-1215 McGill Hall 111

In this introductory poetry writing workshop, you will both write and read poetry. While your original poems will be the main focus of the class, you will also be introduced to the work of influential classic and contemporary poets writing in English. Students will also learn the elements of poetics and poetic craft, such as form, line, image, prosody (rhythm and music), metaphor, and revision. In addition to submitting original poetry to a regular classroom workshop for peer critique, you will also be required to give thoughtful feedback to classmates on their work, participate in class, and attend poetry readings on campus. Grading assessment will be based on participation, completion of assignments, and the submission of a final portfolio of poetry.

02. R. Zamorano-Baez MWF 1210-1300 Wilson Hall 113