School of Humanities
English Graduate Course Descriptions
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Fall 2025
ENG 445/545
Study of Children's and Young Adults Literature
M/W 9:30 â 10:45 AM
Dr. Eric Tribunella
This course will focus on the graphic novel for children and young adults. We will
examine the history of graphic literature, including landmark graphic novels for adults,
and the evolution of the form. We will discuss how to analyze works that combine
text and image, and we will survey a variety of sub-genres of graphic fiction for
children and young adults, such as the superhero graphic novel, the graphic memoir,
graphic historical fiction, and gothic graphic fiction. Likely readings will include:
Understanding Comics (1994), McCloud
Maus: Volume I and II (1986/1991), Spiegelman
Watchmen (1987), Moore and Gibbons
Ghost World (1997), Clowes
Black Hole (2005), Burns
Smile (2010) and Drama (2012), Telgemeier
Anyaâs Ghost (2011), Brosgol
March I and II (2013/2015), Lewis, Aydin, & Powell
This One Summer (2014), Tamaki
El Deafo (2014), Bell
New Kid (2019), Craft
Dragon Hoops (2020), Yang
ENG 468/568
British Women Writers
T/TH 9:30 â 10:45 AM
Dr. Nicolle Jordan
How does female identity vary depending on whether it is depicted in a rural or urban
setting? Is one setting more congenial to the heroineâor the woman writerâthan another?
How does a womanâs experience of the country and/or the city vary depending upon her
social status? In this course we will read British poetry and novels that imagine
female characters in an array of settings, from the bucolic English countryside to
the bustling social season of London. We will explore whether a womanâs value, and
her values, change depending on the familiarity or strangeness of her surroundings.
Readings include texts by Anne Finch, Jane Barker, Sarah Scott, Jane Austen, George
Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
ENG 620
Poetic Forms
Thursdays 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Michael Aderibigbe
In ENG 620, students will explore both traditional and emerging poetic forms from
various regions of the world. These forms include the sonnet, villanelle, sestina,
ghazal, pantoum, zuihitsu, duplex, blues poem, and golden shovel, among others. Students
will examine the development of each form, read poems by established writers, and
then write their own.
ENG 640
Critical Reading and Methods
Mondays 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Craig Carey
This course prepares graduate students to read, write, and publish literary criticism
and research. It will introduce professional norms and protocols, disciplinary histories
and debates, and critical theories and methods in English. How do scholars navigate
the constellation of concepts used to define and map literary studiesâkey words like
theory, research, methodology, scholarship, professionalization, textuality, discourse,
criticism, interpretation, close reading, poetics, semiotics, history, and more? Our
first goal will be to define these terms and their relationships. Our second: to learn
how to read literature, theory, and scholarship with more historical, critical, professional,
and creative sensitivity.
In surveying the field, weâll practice multiple ways of reading, analyzing, and attending
to texts, from the hermeneutics of suspicion invented by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche,
to formalist and post-structuralist methods of textual analysis, to varieties of historical
criticism and cultural materialism, to the explosion of subfields such as gender and
sexuality, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, affect
studies, and more. Literary texts will serve as the ground for our critical and theoretical
engagement, and will likely include stories and poems by Melville, Whitman, Chesnutt,
Dickinson, Hurston, Chopin, Rich, Walcott, and Stevens. Course requirements will include
extensive reading, short writing exercises, and a final theoretically informed research-driven
work of scholarship.
Required Books:
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (978-0199691340)
Peter Berry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (978-1526121790)
John Guillory, On Close Reading (978-0226837437)
Recommended Books:
Murfin and Ray, Bedford Glossary of Critical & Literary Terms (978-1319035396)
MLA Handbook (9th Edition), 9781603293518
ENG 644
Literary Theory
Mondays 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Eric Tribunella
The Life of the Author--New Biographical Criticism and Theory
British author Beverley Nichols wrote in 1920 that ânowadays fiction is becoming more
and more biography, with the result that biography is to-day the only province of
literature where we can be quite certain that we are soaring in the realms of pure
imagination.â The New Critics of the mid-twentieth century rejected the practice
of reading literature through and for the biography of its author, and postmodern
theorists went a step further by pronouncing the death of the author. However, as
historicist approaches have become increasingly dominant in the post-theory era, âNew
Biographical Criticismâ has been offered as a more theoretically informed approach
to using biographical contexts to analyze literary texts, and the lives of authors
have been especially important in feminist, queer, and African American literary criticism.
In this course, we will review the theoretical debates surrounding the role of author
biography in literary analysis and read several biographies in order to practice New
Biographical Criticism as an historicist approach to literature. Readings may include
essays by Wimsatt & Beardsley, Barthes, and Foucault; selections from George Hoffmannâs
The New Biographical Criticism and William Epsteinâs Contesting the Subject: Essays
in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism; biographical
readings of Amelia E. Johnson and Henry James; and biographies of Louisa May Alcott,
J.M. Barrie, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
ENG 670
Style & Genre in Early American Literature
Tuesdays 6:00 â 9:00 PM
Dr. Luis Iglesias
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 âAmerican Novel,â 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 âpractical,â
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, lyric, prose sketches, âcreative non-fiction,â
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 the writers of the period imaginatively
represented and recast forms while simultaneously imagined (often before the fact)
a national style and expressive identity.
Among the Assigned Texts:
Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, the Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground
Washington Irving, The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Parts I & II
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: âŚ
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth
Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive
Phillis Wheatley, selected poems
ENG 673
African American Literature
Tuesdays 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Monika Gehlawat
James Baldwin and Luminaries of Artistic Influence
This class will focus primarily on James Baldwinâs novels, short stories, and nonfiction.
Baldwin has enjoyed a resurgence of public appreciation and scholarly attention in
recent years for his literary accomplishments, but also for his cultural, political,
and historical significance as seen in museum exhibitions, academic and popular books,
and worldwide conferences. As a framework for the class, we will also read and discuss
artists who Baldwin considered part of his âtribeâ of predecessors, contemporaries,
and now successors. From Henry James to Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole, we will consider
writers who inspired and are now influenced by Baldwinâs work. With an eye toward
the constellation of Baldwinâs interdisciplinary relationships, the class will also
study works by playwright Lorraine Hansberry, painter Beauford Delaney, actor Sidney
Poitier, artist Glenn Ligon, and singer Nina Simone, among others.
ENG 690
Theory of Teaching Composition
M/W 11:00 AM â 12:15 PM
Dr. Erika Luckert
First and foremost, our goal in this class is to form a community of teachers that
will support your teaching development (though weâll also problematize that idea of
community). Iâve designed this course with the understanding that educators come to
the teaching of composition from a range of different disciplinary and personal backgrounds,
and weâll be drawing on the richness of your own educational history in this class.
This course is also designed with the understanding that you may go on to teach (or
may already be teaching) in other courses and contexts. Thus, while our conversations
will orbit around the context of the first-year composition classroom, I hope this
course will also inform a wide range of work that you do as teachers and writers.
Weâll organize this course as a series of conversationsâthese are conversations that
are both urgent and ongoing in writing pedagogy, and conversations which you are already
contributing to through the teaching choices you make in your classroom. By engaging
in these conversations together, I hope we can complicate the ways we think about
the work of teaching writing, expand our sense of what choices we might make as teachers,
and also develop more nuanced ways to talk about our pedagogies with each other and
with our students. Because teaching involves much more than the work that happens
in a classroom, weâll also engage in some of the social and professional work of teachersâobserving
each otherâs classes, sharing resources, reflecting on practice, and researching in
order to learn from others outside our teaching community.
ENG 721
Seminar in Fiction Writing
W 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Joshua Bernstein
In this workshop, our focus will be on that strange and unruly beast, the novella,
sometimes characterized as the red-headed stepchild of the novel. Weâll look at some
classic and newer examples, likely including Franz Kafkaâs The Metamorphosis, Joseph
Conradâs Heart of Darkness, Nella Larsenâs Passing, William Faulknerâs The Bear, Thomas
Pynchonâs The Crying of Lot 49, Ghassan Kanafaniâs Men in the Sun, Jim Harrisonâs
The River Swimmer, Nnedi Okoraforâs Binti, and Andrew Malan Milwardâs You Are Loved,
and ask what the strengths and the limitations of the form might be for writers, as
well as the special challenges it may pose. Weâll also discuss publishing, querying,
and professional concerns, along with the usual facets of writing fiction (voice,
perspective, dialogue, characterization, etc.). While youâre encouraged to submit
portions of a novella for discussion in workshop, you are also welcome to submit shorter
works or excerpts from full-length novels, as desired. If youâve never written longform
fiction before, donât worry: writers of all backgrounds and prose styles are welcome.
ENG 722
Seminar in Poetry Writing
W 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Angela Ball
GRADUATE POETRY WORKSHOP: THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. Fall, 2025
This workshop has its source in Lars von Trierâs 2003 film, The Five Obstructions,
in which von Trier asks his mentor, director Jorgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short
film, The Perfect Human in accordance with various crippling stipulations, or âobstructions,â
such as âno frame longer than X number of seconds,â âset it in the worst place in
the world,â etc. In the workshop version, the student submits his or her poem, which
is commented on by the first respondent, also known as the âvile obstructionist,â
then by the group as a whole. At the end of the discussion, the obstructionist presents
the poet with one or more obstructions which he or she must use in the revision. We
will workshop new poems each week, and everyone will serve regularly as Vile Obstructionist.
The semester will end with a reading of the obstructed poems.
ENG 764
Victorianism
Thursdays 2:30 â 5:15 PM
Dr. Alexandra Valint
THE VICTORIAN NEW WOMAN
In her 1894 essay âThe New Aspect of the Woman Question,â Sarah Grand names the emergent
ânew woman.â Grand imagines this figure awakening and feeling dissatisfied with what
she has, âwith Home-is-the-Womanâs Sphere.â Grand hopes for the coming of a âstronger
and wiserâ future woman, as well as a âbetterâ future man. The new woman is a figure
from the fin de siècle (1880s and 1890s) who challenged the conception of woman as
an âangel in the houseâ: the new women rode bikes, smoked, sought more educational
and professional opportunities, expressed her sexual desires, explored alternatives
to marriage and motherhood, and fought for womenâs rights, including suffrage. But
the new woman was also attacked and mocked. As scholar Sally Ledger writes, she was
sometimes believed to be âa threat to the human raceâŚan infanticidal mother and at
the very least sexually âabnormal.ââ In an 1896 essay, Victorian author Mrs. Morgan-Dockrell
contrasts the âgenuine new womanâ with the bogeyman version caricatured by her opponents
as an âunwomanly, unlovable, unlovely, untidy, undomesticated, revolting, shrieking,
man-hating shrew.â In this course, we will thoroughly explore the figure of the ânew
womanâ though essays, short stories, poetry, and novels; we will explore the multifarious
stances new women held on marriage, sexuality, motherhood, and suffrage. Following
scholar Riya Dasâs lead, we will interrogate the new womanâs views on race, class,
disability, and colonialism to demarcate the harsh limits of their liberated vision
for women. Likely readings will include (but are not limited to) Olive Schreinerâs
experimental novel The Story of an African Farm, George Egertonâs short story collection
Keynotes, H. G. Wellsâs suffrage novel Ann Veronica, Florence Marryatâs gothic novel
The Blood of the Vampire, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustaceâs crime/detective story collection
The Sorceress of the Strand, and various poems, essays, and short stories.
ENG 771
Seminar in American Literature II
Mondays 6:00 â 9:00 PM
Dr. Charles Sumner
This class will cover the work of selected American writers since 1900. Among others,
we will read Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Sinclair Lewis, Nathaneal
West, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and Don DeLillo.