By Tayler Bradley
Happy Fall Bibliophiles!
While I hope you’re spending your time admiring autumnal leaves and cozying up with a good book and warm beverage, registration season is upon us. Spring course registration begins November 5th and, if you’re new to registering for classes at UP, the rolling registration schedule can be found here. Curious about which courses the English Department is offering next semester? Don’t know which ones to take? Have no fear! I reached out to all our wonderful faculty to gain a little more insight into their upcoming upper-division courses.
Intro to Literary Studies – Dr. Joshua Swidzinski
Summary of your course:
I think of ENG 225 in terms of “tools” and “lenses.” On the one hand, it aims to familiarize students with a wide array of interpretive “tools” with which to unpack their experience of literature. These tools range from the traditional and familiar (e.g. ‘close reading’) to newer techniques (e.g. digital tools for analyzing and visualizing texts). On the other hand, the course aims to teach students how to use a variety of “lenses” or theories (e.g. historicism, feminism, post-colonialism, etc.) to re-contextualize and enrich their reading experience.
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
We’re going to read widely across a number of genres and centuries. The work I most look forward to reading is Shakespeare’s great, late masterpiece about celebrity, gossip, love, lust, and empire – Antony and Cleopatra.
British Literature Survey II – Dr. Genevieve Brassard
Summary of your course:
Because of our curriculum changes, this will be my first time teaching a course that spans 200+ years of British Literature here at UP (previously, I covered only the 20th Century, and had the leisure of two separate courses to do so). I have, however, thought a version of that British Lit II survey in graduate school, so I have a rough template in mind to tackle a wealth of reading material. There is so much to choose from, so my task will be to balance depth and breadth without overwhelming students with too much reading! The course covers authors and texts from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern eras, with special attention paid to key artistic movements (Romanticism and Modernism), and historical events and trends (Imperialism, suffrage movement, World War I, and World War II). Students who enroll in English 302 can expect to read Austen, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Arnold, Browning, Rossetti, Shaw, Forster, war poets like Wilfrid Owen, Woolf, Selvon, and Stoppard. All major literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama) will be included. Assignments will include short papers, exams, and historical research.
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
The reading list includes 3 of my top 10 books of all time, but the one closest to my heart is Howards End, by E.M. Forster (1910). The novel’s motto, ‘Only connect…’ applied to the importance of empathy at a time of still-sharp class divisions in a rapidly modernizing England, and still resonates today in our very divided times. It features a smart, sensitive, and well-meaning female protagonist, Margaret Schlegel, who was played to perfection by Emma Thompson in the 1992 film adaptation of the novel.
Studies in Non-Fiction – Fr. Pat Hannon
Summary of your course:
Nonfiction writers look at the world (us human beings, nature, structures, memories, obsessions, you name it) and see stories. Interesting, compelling, funny, sad, ennobling, outrageous, true stories. Every human person, a little universe. A ubiquitous, ordinary object (an orange, for instance), a living, breathing metaphor. This penchant for story-hunting might help to explain why memoirists, journalists, essayists, etc., are willing to go to dark, unfamiliar places (out there and in their own thinking): That’s where the best stories are hiding. This course will help us to look at these true stories in creative and critical ways.
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces. Ehrlich, a journalist, spends a year on a Wyoming sheep ranch and writes a series of loosely connected essays that explore some pretty wild ideas about love, death, time, memory. Beautiful and hauntingly lovely writing.
City Life in American Literature – Dr. Lars Larson
Summary of your course:
Even though many of us come from rural backgrounds, the urban is now a part of us (given our current location) and will continue to influence us in the future, now that over half of our human species lives in cities. This is both good news and bad news; we’ll explore why. The course is a blend of American history, sociology, linguistic ferment, and wicked good storytelling.
We’ll cover American writers from the past two centuries during a time when the nation went from rural to radically urban. The best writers invented a vocabulary to articulate those cultural changes: short works by Walt Whitman, Ed Poe, Nate Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Anzia Yezierska, Frank Norris, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, and Nathanael West usually fill the first half of the semester. Then a number of larger, more contemporary works put us in dialogue with our own times. Haven’t decided on those yet, but in past years we’ve read such works as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, etc. Throughout, a number of theoretical texts will provide concepts to help bridge the primary works.
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
A favorite text – surely among my all-time top five – is Colum McCann’s panoramic novel Let the Great World Spin. This is a story of New York City in 1974 – the moment when a tightrope walker made an illegal walk across the just-born World Trade Center Towers (true story!). McCann weaves a series of fictional stories (told by 11 narrators) around this moment of attention and wonder, as it unites a vast and eclectic set of urbanites below.
I am overjoyed that UP has chosen this text as the 2019 ReadUP/Schoenfeldt selection (in which the campus buys and distributes 700 copies free to our community in November). The Irish/American writer will be joining our campus in February for a series of talks and encounters, including a visit to our City Life class! Order your free book this month, then plan on experiencing a thrilling spring semester of learning from the literature of cities.
African-American Literature – Dr. Molly Hiro
Summary of your course:
African American literature is my favorite class to teach at UP. This is in part because the syllabus is full of awesome books, but also because the preoccupations of African American writers are so compelling. From the writings of enslaved people that get at questions of what it means to be seen as human and to be free, to twentieth century debates about whether black writers need to be explicitly political in their writings or can “just” pursue aesthetics—these are vital issues that are meaningful to all Americans. Indeed, it’s often said that African American literature IS American literature which is a way of *centering* this literature rather than seeing it as some marginal “minority” area. I love too how reading the rich narratives and visions of black American writers can help us think more deeply and historically about contemporary movements like #Blacklivesmatter.
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
A text I’m excited to teach for the second time is Claudia Rankine’s acclaimed 2014 collection, Citizen. From its haunting cover (of an empty black hoodie) to its moody prose poems, the book animates what it’s like to be a black American in our contemporary moment as it probes concepts of microaggression and white fragility. It’s pretty gripping.
Seminar in British Literature I: Otherness in Early British Lit. – Dr. Cara Hersh
Summary of your course:
This course explores representations of “otherness” in medieval literature. Many people incorrectly assume that medieval literature is populated only by blonde damsels in distress and white knights in shining armor, but the texts that we will read together will prove otherwise as we investigate poetry, prose, and plays that include provocative representations of gender, Islam, Judaism, race, and homoerotocism. We’ll tackle questions such as: what is the connection between the monster and “the other” in medieval literature? what did medieval women have to say about their own literary representations? what can we learn about posthumanism from studying a pre-humanist era? what can these texts teach us about our own enduring struggles with issues of difference?
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
One of my favorite things about this class is that we get to apply rich modern lenses such as feminist theory, queer theory, race theory, and posthumanism to these pre-modern texts; this allows us to not only to see how 21st-century conceptions of otherness are radically different from those of the medieval period, but also illustrates how these conceptions have developed from such early models. Our readings will cover terrain such as werewolf stories, violent descriptions of the Crusades, incidents of cannibalism, and even one or two radical feminist damsels in distress. Texts may include The Song of Roland, selections from the Lais of Marie de France, The Siege of Jerusalem, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Seminar in American Literature I: American Romanticism – Dr. John Orr
Summary of your course:
We will be looking at representative works from the first flowering of a distinct American literature covering roughly the years 1836 through 1865. A part of the course will focus on questions of identity: What does it mean to be an American? What are the implications of a radical sense of individuality? How does the experience of being American diverge among different minority groups in contract to the dominant group? How do we come to understand who we are? How do these motifs play out in current American culture?
Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Moby-Dick!!! That book tasks me and heaps me, and if I had time, I would reread it every year. I worship Melville and want my students to find the joy of working through the book. Those who read it cover to cover receive a bookmark that I designed that is a talisman of achievement that they can carry through life.
Advanced Writing – Prof. John McDonald
Summary of your course:
Advanced Writing is a non-fiction essay writing workshop in which you work on various styles of non-fiction writing: including flash-nonfiction, braided essays, lyrical essays, and narratives. The workshop depends heavily upon your work with peers and your openness to sharing your writing. We also read a variety of non-fiction writers. The focus for your writing is style, substance, and voice.
Advanced Writing – Fr. Pat Hannon
Summary of your course:
In a writing workshop setting, we will be forming a community of writers who wish to explore a number of ways a writer can tell true stories. We will be reading and discussing the works of some outstanding writers as a way to inspire us to write at our very best and to see how our individual voices can be developed and celebrated.
Which piece is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Sunshine O’Donnell’s masterful essay, Consumption. It will blow you mind. ‘Nuff said.
An intriguing prompt that’s on your mind:
One I haven’t done in a while but plan on doing it soon: Think of a place you know very well, a place that is meaningful to you. Now imagine it is dusk. Now, write about it for 10 minutes. Do not stop writing and do notend the sentence. Only one period at the end. You may use all the various punctuation marks you need (commas and conjunctions, colons, parentheses, M-dashes, etc), but you may not use a semi-colon.
I hope these insights are helpful as we approach registration! More formal course information, including time slots and registration pins, are available on the Self-Serve Banner registration tab under “Look Up Classes”.
Now back to your regularly scheduled fall activities.