Professor Steve Arch
Mondays and Wednesdays 8:00-9:50
 
This is an introductory course on the basics of reading and interpreting poetry in English, with an emphasis on poetic forms and developing a critical vocabulary. We will read poetry from a range of time periods and national literatures. No previous knowledge about poetry is required. Most students in the course will not be English majors. Students will practice the skill of close reading poetry, build a library of poems that speak to them, and
learn to talk about difficult poems with confidence. After reading a broad range of poetry, from the 16th century to the present, we will read a recent award-winning collection of poetry (perhaps Justin Phillip Read’s Indecency [2018], National Book Award winner in 2018). The class begins at 8:00 am, but the discussions about great
poetry are a perfect way to start your day! (Coffee not provided.)
Professor Shelia Contreras
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:20-11:40
Professor Sheng-Mei Ma
Mondays and Wednesdays 10:20-11:40
 
This Global lit course focuses on Global Asia, mainly on English-language fiction, film, graphic novel, and other cultural production by Westerners, some of Asian descent. It interrogates the hypothetical commonality of Asianness in myriad works by Americans, Asian Americans, Anglo-Asians, and Asian Europeans. The course also flips “Global Asia” into Asianized Globalization, as the millennial China on the rise expands and challenges the Anglophone world order. This course studies fiction, film, visual art, and graphics. Course grade is based on papers, exams, and class performance.

Professor Josh Lam
Mondays and Wednesdays 12:40-2:00pm

Focus: Though modernist authors like Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Zora Neale Hurston are best known for their formal innovations in fiction and poetry, they also profoundly changed the shape of non-fiction genres like autobiography, literary criticism, and ethnography. As writers began to explore changing notions of subjective truth, history, and cultural relativism in the early twentieth century, the ostensibly “true” genres of non-fiction were essential to their thinking. This course will explore multiple genres of non-fiction in American modernism, including autobiography, travel writing, literary and cultural criticism, and paratextual forms like the preface. Though literary modernism developed on an international scale, we will focus on the specific case of American modernism from the 1890s to World War II in order to ask: How did modernist writers use non-fiction forms to interrogate social conditions such as poverty, inequality, education, and democracy? How did autobiography articulate emerging conceptions of history, memory, and identity? How did travel writing adapt to new technologies of communication and transportation? How did literary non-fiction co-evolve with disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, and anthropology? To answer such questions, we will read journalism and activist writing (Ida B. Wells, Djuna Barnes); experimental autobiographies (W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Miné Okubo); travel writing (Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston); documentary aesthetics (James Agee, Objectivist poets); literary criticism (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Weldon Johnson); and cultural criticism (Charles Chesnutt, Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey). This reading-intensive course will double as a broad survey of American modernism and an exploration of non-fiction genres.

Professor Salah Hassan
Mondays and Wednesdays 10:20-11:40pm
Professor William Johnsen
Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:40-2:00pm

Professor Jyotsna Singh
Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00-4:20pm 

Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00-4:20pm

Focus: The class will explore the origins and evolution of digital modes of representation and communication and will dig into contemporary issues of identity, community, labor, and the like, with readings in a variety of critical and theoretical texts as well as more direct study of digital media texts, platforms, and networks.

Professor Ned Watts
Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:20-11:40pm

Focus: The old canon of sermons, conversion narratives and political tracts has long been displaced by captivity narratives, mystery novels, and stories that push the boundaries of race and gender. In this seminar, we will study the revitalization of this vital period in American literature.

Professor Salah Hassan
Mondays and Wednesdays 8:30-9:50pm

Offered in conjunction with GSAH 414

This course will cover Arab American literature from its beginnings in the late 19th century and early 20th century to the present. Readings will include a range of works across the genres by some of the first Arab immigrant authors to write in English, such as Gibran and Rihani, as well as works by contemporary Arab American authors, such as Laila Lalami, Rabih Alameddine and Omar al Akkad. The course will also include works of non-fiction that provide a context for understanding the history of Arab presence in the US.

Professor Julian Chambliss
Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:20pm

Focus: The relationship between science fiction and high tech culture has garnered increasing attention as we debate contemporary technoculture impact on everyday life. Has technology failed or realized the science fiction vision that inspired it? In this course, we will chart the rise of contemporary technoculture in the United States from its roots in 1970s counterculture. From the Whole Earth Manual and Hacker’s Crackdown to John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider and Vernor Ving’s True Names, the ideology that defines cyberculture in the United States has always been intimately intertwined with an ideology of resistance, liberation, and autonomy rooted in a narrow vision of identity and experience.

Professor Steve Arch
Mondays and Wednesdays 10:20-12:10
 
This course asks why the gothic mode has been so useful for writers working in North America. We will analyze examples of gothic fiction, poetry, drama, and film from New England, Canada, the South, the Midwest, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Mayra Montero, and Carlos Fuentes were writing in very different regional, national, and cultural contexts, yet each turned to the gothic to grapple with questions of identity, history, and knowledge. We could think about this question historically, tracking the emergence, development, and evolution of the gothic, starting perhaps with Charles Brockden Brown in New England ca 1800 or starting with the gothic colonial reverberations in the Bronte’s fictions in the 1840s. Instead, we are going to move through geographic space and track the aesthetic of the gothic mode, persistently asking why and how it inspired writers in such varied and different locales as Toronto, Georgia, Haiti, and Mexico City. Critical readings will introduce students to different theories about the gothic: queer, ecocritical, postcolonial, global, etc. Students will write short scaffolding assignments, and one long project.