School of Humanities
English Graduate Course Descriptions
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Spring 2025
ENG 627
Intro to Publishing
Mondays 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Dr. Rachael Fowler
*Fulfills CW elective
Would you like to one day be an editor? Want to see your name listed in an esteemed literary journal? ENG 627 welcomes all creative writers who’d like to learn more about the world of literary publishing. In this class, we’ll work to produce an issue of Mississippi Review and Product Magazine, giving you the chance to have a reading/editorial position in both. We’ll also talk with professionals currently working in various areas of publishing so that we can ask career questions and learn about the evolving literary landscape. Finally, we’ll explore how to write and submit book reviews for publication, and you’ll complete an in-depth research project on a specific aspect of publishing that is interesting to you. At the end of this class, you’ll have experience as an editor and literary citizen as well as contacts within and growing knowledge of the professional literary world.
ENG 641
Advanced Methods and Research
Wednesdays 2:30 PM - 5:15 PM
Dr. Monika Gehlawat
*Required for 2nd year literature students
This course is required for all second-year students in literature. MA students will prepare and workshop their final theses and PhD students will begin to work on their dissertation prospectus. Given its focus on research, writing, and revision, this course is also open to creative writing students who want to workshop critical writing with an eye toward conference presentations and/or peer-reviewed publications. In addition to workshopping student writing, we will also read books and articles about scholarly writing and research methodology.
ENG 644
Theory of Poetry
Mondays 2:30 PM - 5:15 PM
Dr. Christopher Spaide
*Fulfills theory requirement
A poem, etymologically speaking, is “something made.” So what’s a poem made of? What
does the making entail? Why are some made things “poems” when other made things aren’t?
Who makes the call that a poem’s a poem—poets, critics, readers, editors? This course
looks deeply into three centuries of articulations of and answers to those questions.
Starting with canonical European and American understandings of poetry, we will move
swiftly to ongoing theoretical debates about what we now call lyric theory, the work
often called historical poetics (and sometimes called the New Lyric Studies), and
recent defenses of lyric as a transhistorical genre. In between, we will explore the
significance (or even the centrality) of poetry and lyric to the New Criticism, the
Frankfurt School, genre theory, structuralism, feminism, media studies, ecocriticism,
and the intersection of law and literature; we’ll also consider why poetry studies
can look so far behind in thinking about race, sexuality, the postcolonial, and the
global. Each week, alongside readings in theory and criticism, we will discuss a handful
of poems, not only as tests of theoretical models but as self-theorizing objects in
their own right.
ENG 670
Style & Genre in Early American Literature
Tuesdays 2:30 – 5:15 PM
Dr. Luis Iglesias
*Fulfills Pre-1865 American requirement
Style & Genre in Early American Literature, which traces the development of American literature from the Colonial and Revolutionary era through the early National period to the flowering of the “American Novel,” will focus on issues of literary form and content, reading across several genres. The course will press against the prevailing sense that Anglo-American writers of the period were mainly concerned with “practical,” political matters and in the absence of a traditional cultural community and heritage have led to viewing literary considerations as a secondary concern. In response, the course will survey a range of narrative and poetic forms including essay, epic poetry, personal narrative, captivity narrative, nature writing, political track, prose sketches and the novel as used by our early writers within a dynamic matrix of both national and transatlantic influences and concerns. Close attention to historical context and meaning will feature importantly in the discussion as they are imaginatively represented and recast by the writers of the period as they simultaneously imagine (often before the fact) a national style and expressive identity.
Among the Assigned Texts:
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, the Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa
Washington Irving, The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Parts I & II
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: … the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth
Royall Tyler, The Contrast
ENG 671
American Literature II
Wednesdays 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Dr. Ery Shin
*Fulfills Post-1865 American and Non-traditional requirements
With an emphasis on the legacy of the American Indian Wars and slavery in the New World, this course explores contemporary American narratives of nationhood and belonging. While Americanness and the ethnic have often invited synonymous readings given the nation’s diverse constituencies, these two terms nevertheless generate friction when the latter is required to qualify the former—or when the former precludes the latter. The pair circulate as interchangeable and yet also antithetical ideas at times, attesting to the slipperiness of authentic Americana and its pursuit.
SAMPLE READING LIST:
John Rechy, City of Night
R. O. Kwon, Exhibit
Jessica Johns, Bad Cree
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
Nicola Yoon, One of Our Kind
Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants
ENG 721
Graduate Seminar in Fiction Writing
Dr. Olivia Clare Friedman
Tuesdays 2:30 PM – 5:15 PM
How can workshop be the most beneficial for your current writing? What kinds of classroom conversation can help you bring your current draft to the next level? To help you address these questions, we’ll experiment with the form of workshop. You’ll always have an option to have a traditional workshop, but you’ll have other options too. These will include:
-- workshop conversation between writer and readers
-- workshop that begins with a series of set questions
-- workshop that begins with questions composed by the writer
-- workshopping alternate beginnings, middles, and ends
You will have two main submissions, and you may submit either short stories or novel excerpts. You will also submit a piece of flash fiction at the end of the semester. We’ll devote some time to craft topics, as well as informal writing, with in-class writing exercises, both solo and collaborative. At the end of the term, you’ll complete a revision of one of your workshop pieces.
Text: TBA
Other outside readings will be distributed in class.
ENG 722
Seminar in Poetry Writing
Dr. Michael Aderibigbe
Tuesdays 2:30 PM - 5:15 PM
In ENG 722, students will write and workshop new poems. The class will be sorted into groups alphabetically, with one group submitting poems at a time.
Craft is also an essential part of this course. To this end, in the first quarter of every class, we will engage a section of a prescribed text. In addition, each student will also turn in one short paper and a handful of very brief responses over the semester.
Reading List:
Okot p'Bitek, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol
Aracelis Girmay, Teeth
Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office
ENG 723
Nonfiction Writing
Dr. Joshua Bernstein
Wednesdays 2:30 PM - 5:15 PM
*Fulfills CW elective
The word essay, deriving from the French essayer, meaning “to attempt” or “to try,” was originally conceived as a kind of experiment, or planned inquiry on a topic. Montaigne famously applied the term to his writings around 1580. Four-and-a-half centuries later, we’ll ask to what extent essays can still be thought of as experiments, or loose attempts at understanding, as opposed to preconceived answers, and try our hands at writing them. We’ll also look at the variety of forms the essay can take, from the narrative, reflective, hybrid, and lyric to the spiritual, experimental, sporting, and comic. Think: Joyce Carol Oates on boxing; Nora Ephron on puberty. Finally, and per Montaigne’s intent, we’ll treat the writing as a kind of process, one in which the writer is led through writing to discovery and, hopefully, surprise.
Although ours is firstly a workshop, we’ll also trace the history of the essay, its evolution as a form, and its current status and outlook as a genre. Outside works will likely include Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and shorter works by Oates, Ephron, Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Kiese Laymon, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Christopher Hitchens, Randall Kenan, Ben Lerner, Lia Purpura, and others. Please keep in mind that all work submitted for the class must be factual and, if applicable, documented, though we will also work on traditional techniques, including (faithfully) reinvented dialogue, narrative arc, and the building of dramatic tension and conflict. Finally, if the weather allows, we may venture outside for excursions and on-site writing activities in nature.
ENG 750
Old English Language and Literature
Dr. Leah Parker
Tu/Th 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
*Fulfills Pre-1800 British requirement
In this seminar, graduate students will learn to read, pronounce, and translate the Old English language, which was spoken in the area now known as England from the sixth through the eleventh centuries. By reading widely in Old English literature, both in the original language and—to expand our scope during the limited time of the semester—in translation, students will become familiar with popular genres of the earliest period of English literature: heroic poetry, riddles, elegies, vernacular adaptations of Biblical texts, and saints’ lives. For students specializing in medieval or early modern literature, this is a crucial course to prepare for research in earlier forms of English and for teaching history of the English language. For all students, however, the payoff is a richer understanding of the English language, both our object of study and the medium in which we pursue our writing craft.
ENG 763
Seminar in Romanticism: Crip Temporalities / Crip Geographies
M/W 9:30 AM – 10:15 AM
Dr. Emily Stanback
*Fulfills Post-1800 British requirement
According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s introduction to “Kubla Khan” (1816), the poem
first appeared in print nearly twenty years after it was written in part because the
author had not sensed its “poetic merits”—seeing it “rather as a psychological curiosity.”
He explained that it was created out of an experience of “ill health” and medication,
and was inspired by an early 17th-century travel narrative. The poem came into being
only as a “fragment,” one Coleridge “frequently purposed to finish for himself,” though
that “to-morrow is yet to come.” “Kubla Khan” is now one of the most famous lyric
poems in the English language—created out of disability experience, deferred according
to crip time, taking on a crip form (the fragment), and offering a visionary a world
that is far from the poet’s own place and time.
This is just one example of many in which distinctive temporalities and geographies emerge in Romantic-era writing in response or relation to disability experience. This course will look at several other examples by authors including Mary Prince, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron. A key concern will be how disability shapes the form of the texts under consideration; poetry will be a special focus, but we will consider a variety of other genres, including letters and journals. Looking to contemporary disability theorists, we will examine the general tendency of crip experience to deviate from normative temporality and spatiality. We also will look at historical contexts including empire, slavery, and medicine in examining Romanticism’s crip temporalities and crip geographies.