ENGL 692       Teaching of Composition in College     |      MW 2:20 - 3:35     |     Brock

This course is designed to give new graduate assistants the conceptual tools needed to teach rhetoric and argument in the composition classroom. Teaching composition and rhetoric is probably the most universal experience for graduate students and faculty in English. Regardless of specialization, instructors of rhetoric and composition will almost certainly spend at least some teaching such courses from various argumentative models and perspectives. The primary aim for ENGL 692, then, is not to simply get new instructors through their first year of teaching, but rather to introduce them to key rhetorical concepts and practices as a foundation for developing an individual approach to teaching the course that coincides with both the discipline of composition and rhetoric and the university's Carolina Core goals for the course. 

ENGL 700.001    Intro to Graduate Studies: Writing Something Big     |     TTh 11:40 - 12:55     |     Glavey

This section of Introduction to Graduate Studies is devoted to the problem of how to start and sustain a long scholarly writing project. One challenge of graduate study is that, after years of excelling at the kinds of writing required by coursework, we suddenly find ourselves faced with an assignment that is unlike anything we’ve undertaken before: a thesis, a dissertation, or some other long-form project that requires a different set of skills that we haven’t had many opportunities to develop. This class will provide an opportunity to think and discuss this challenge as an intellectual problem--What does it mean to engage with this kind of writing? What are its challenges and affordances?—but, more importantly, it will also be a practical opportunity to get to work and figure out how to do this work with the feedback and encouragement of other people. We will spend some time looking at theoretical and practical readings about the writing and research process, but the central component of the class will be a practicum and workshop in which you will spend time working on and developing a project of your choice. The course is devised to offer practical assistance and feedback for graduate students who are writing: a) a MA thesis, b) a dissertation prospectus, c) a first dissertation chapter, or d) a scholarly article for publication. If you have a different project in mind and wonder if it would work with what we will be doing, reach out to Brian Glavey to discuss. 

ENGL 722.001     Imposter Syndrome: The Modern U.S. Novel and Uncertain Identity     |     TTh 10:05 - 11:20     |     Keyser

This course will offer a survey of the twentieth-century U.S. novel, spilling into the twenty-first century, following the theme of imposture and the characterization of protagonists who perform an identity that they think or feel is not fully their own. These characters blur the supposedly indelible line between social categories (class, race, ethnicity, nationality, even humanity), and their performances reveal the artificiality as well as the lived power of whiteness, wealth, and Americanism. In this class, we will explore genres that emphasize transgressive behavior--like the novel of passing, hard-boiled detective fiction, and the psychological thriller—as well as the convergence of canonicity and imposture. After all, The Great Gatsby as “great American novel” is also arguably the story of a man who pretends to be something more than what and who he is. From James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), the modern and contemporary novel shows us how feelings of inferiority serve as the first form of acculturation to a divisive racial and economic system. Through the unlikely performances of anti-heroic characters, however, the novel exposes the holes in the social fabric that allows other ways of being and living to peek through. 

ENGL 734.001      Modern Literary Theory     |     Tue 6:00 - 8:45     |     Muckelbauer

The work of English Departments has changed significantly over the last few decades, due in no small part to the emergence of what is sometimes called Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, or Critical Theory, work that has repeatedly posed fundamental questions about meaning, interpretation, subjectivity, and power.  As a result, theory is also one of the most polarizing focal points in today’s academy.  But whether you love it, hate it, fear it, or just have no concrete idea what “it” is, it’s nearly impossible today to become a humanities scholar, teacher, or writer without becoming explicitly steeped in some version of theory.  This course is designed as an introduction to that theory, whose purpose is to familiarize you with some of the more salient problems, issues, and positions that people often associate with “theory.” The most common way to teach such a class is to offer a survey of various “-isms” (new criticism, feminism, Marxism, structuralism, etc), but I believe this approach offers a very poor sense of how theory actually operates in practice (often leading, for example, to cookie-cutter “applications” of theory).  For this class, theory is not a meta-language standing above literature or life.  Instead, it is immanent to reading practices, institutional norms, cultural habits, and forms of attachment. From the Greek theoresai (to make visible), theory is the practice of making visible the constellation of concepts that orchestrate any particular action.  The aim of this course is not to teach you certain principles and characteristics of theoretical movements (though it will also do that), but to cultivate an attentiveness to the different ways in which things like language, writing, and reading work in actual practice. 

ENGL 741.001      African American Literature And Black New England Studies     |     TTh 2:50 - 4:05     |     Jackson

This course will offer an advanced introduction to African American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by exploring how it might be illuminated by what has recently come to be called 'Black New England Studies.'  A new and dynamic interdisciplinary field, Black New England Studies, as its name suggests, seeks to root African American life within the very specific and somewhat unexpected geographical context of New England, while  at the same time understanding that region as enmeshed in national, oceanic, hemispheric, and global networks of commerce, communication, and cultural production.  Over the course of the semester, we'll explore a variety of canonical black New England authors from Phillis Wheatley (b. 1753) to W. E. B. DuBois (d. 1963) but also, and crucially, consider a range of less conventional expressive genres, including petitions, sermons, songs, ballads, advertisements, dances, dress, paratheatricals, and tattoos. Along the way, we'll consider various theories of, and controversies about, the study, reasearch, and teaching of African American literature. We'll also ground our pedagogy in the practical genres and modalities of modern academe, including the creation of annotated bibliographies, scholarly surveys, books reviews, conference papers, and archival research. 

ENGL 770.001      MFA Fiction Workshop     |     Thu 6:00 - 8:45     |     Bajo

This course is a workshop for analyzing and critiquing student fiction. The stories, chapters, and excerpts submitted should be works intended for the MFA thesis, a collection or novel manuscript that is ready or near-ready for submission to publishers. 

This course is for graduate students accepted into MFA Creative Writing program. It is an intensive workshop in the art and craft of the literary short story and the novel chapter. Writers will spend the majority of their time composing original stories or chapters and analyzing the fiction submitted by other workshop members. Our discussion will focus on each writer’s aesthetic decisions and the elements of fiction, including language and motif as well as plot, character, and temporal structure. We will also consider some recently published fiction and give some general consideration to the story form—its definitions, limits, variations, and possible futures. Interspersed will be discussions concerning professionalization. Prerequisites: admission to the MFA program in fiction. 

ENGL 771.001      MFA Poetry Workshop     |     TTh 11:40 - 12:55     |     Dings

This is an advanced course in poetry writing intended for MFA students.  While we will attend to some review of techniques and craft, as well as some close readings of professional poems, the majority of the class time will be spent reading and discussing the poems of the  students.  Individuation of style is already established but not necessarily completed.  In other words, we are always looking for further growth and development of our style and craft. 

ENGL 793.001      Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Medieval to Modern     |     Wed 5:50 - 8:35     |     Hawk

This course surveys major theories of rhetoric from medieval to modern times with a comparative approach between Western and non-Western traditions and aims to work broadly across cultural and textual histories to analyze how language and persuasion vary and align across diverse cultural and geographic situations. 

ENGL 795.001      The Teaching of Business and Technical Writing     |     TTh 10:05 - 11:20     |     Jordan

Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) is many things. It is a specific professional activity. It is also a more general activity that humans have used to share technical culture for hundreds of thousands of years. It is a field of academic study. It is also a pedagogical field of practice and study. TPC happens via and across different media; can document well known processes or invent and define something new. It includes business writing, professional writing, and technical writing, user experience design, as well as extra-institutional communication. When done well, it can bridge misunderstanding, keep users safe, establish cultural and ethical norms, and create change. Conversely, it can also cause harm. In this course, we will learn about the foundations and theories of TPC and then use our knowledge to build syllabi, major projects, and teaching activities. This course will be of interest for students who want to learn more about the TPC field and how to teach business and technical writing. 

ENGL 803.001      Comedies, Histories, Tragedies: Genre in Print and Performance in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries     |     TTh 1:15 - 2:30     |     Gieskes

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, 
these are the only men. 

When Shakespeare’s Folio appeared in 1623, it did not make use of the hybrid labels that Polonius uses to describe the work of the Players in Hamlet. Instead, it organized the contents under three headings: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.. This was not the only way that a collection of plays might have been organized: Jonson’s 1616 Workes simply listed its contents with no attention to genre, Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1647 Folio called itself Comedies and Tragedies, but did not sort the contents by genre. Plays we typically call history plays were often labelled as tragedies (even in Shakespeare’s Folio) and tragedies were sometimes referred to as histories. All of these labels are retrospective descriptions of plays that may have appeared on stage without labels at all or with names that do not match the later printed text. The mutability and arbitrariness of generic labelling will be a central topic of this seminar. What does genre do in print? How does it shape response? What can we discern about how playwrights saw genre? What kind of work do these concepts do? We will be reading plays by William Shakepseare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Middleton, among others. We will also spend a bit of time with genre theory.

ENGL 803.001      Fictions of 1848    |     Mon 5:50 - 8:35     |     Millen

The specter of communism was still very much haunting Europe when Elizabeth Gaskell published Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848). She was just one of the “splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England,” according to one commentator, “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” What, we will ask, is the relationship between the form of the novel and class antagonism? How do novels register the drift of history? What kinds of political and social truths can novels tell? This class will pursue these and other questions by studying some of the landmark novels of Victorian mid-century, along with lesser-known works. Along the way we will be considering how writers and commentators responded to the welter of social upheaval in the 1840s: industrialization and the growth of cities in full-bloom, colonial profit and plunder, the global and gendered division of labor—all contributing to what Raymond Williams was to describe as the “knowable community” conjured by the realist novel then gathering force. Paying attention to a short but decisive period in the global nineteenth century will allow us to consider more broadly the uses and abuses of periodization in literary history. 

ENGL 890.001      Writing through Things: Artifactual Inquiry in Composition/Rhetoric     |     MW 3:55 - 5:10     |     Rule

Writing, itself a 5000+ year-old, human-made technology, circulates in the world only by virtue of the work of countless other materialities, tools, and technologies that mediate it. Composing, in other words, is fundamentally artifactual. In looking closely at writing objects, we learn about writing cultures, communities, identities, history, and more--often in ways that surprise. 

This seminar nurtures curiosity about writing things, entering into the field's (new) material turn through a smaller scale entry point. We will assemble frameworks that draw from material culture, literacy, and technology studies; phenomenology; extended mind and embodied cognition in order to investigate the seemingly insignificant, overlooked artifacts that participate in literate action. Readings may include scholars like Christina Haas, Dennis Baron, Margaret Syverson, Brian McNely, John Trimbur, Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell, Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, and Andy Clark. Students can expect to conduct two exploratory artifactual research endeavors during the term with autoethnographic and archival methods, and a final seminar paper which inflects emerging scholarly interests with an artifactual approach. Let's get thingy with it!