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 – 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 
Anya’s 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 – 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 heroine—or the woman writer—than another? How does a woman’s 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 woman’s 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 – 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 – 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 studies—key 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, we’ll 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 – 5:15 PM 
Dr. Eric Tribunella 
 
The Life of the Author--New Biographical Criticism and Theory  
  
British author Beverley Nichols wrote in 1920 that “nowadays 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.”  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, “New Biographical Criticism” 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 Hoffmann’s The New Biographical Criticism and William Epstein’s 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 – 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 “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, lyric, prose sketches, “creative non-fiction,” 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: …  
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 – 5:15 PM 
Dr. Monika Gehlawat 
 
James Baldwin and Luminaries of Artistic Influence 
 
This class will focus primarily on James Baldwin’s 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 “tribe” 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 Baldwin’s work. With an eye toward the constellation of Baldwin’s 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 – 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 we’ll also problematize that idea of community). I’ve designed this course with the understanding that educators come to the teaching of composition from a range of different disciplinary and personal backgrounds, and we’ll 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.  
We’ll organize this course as a series of conversations—these 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, we’ll also engage in some of the social and professional work of teachers—observing each other’s 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 – 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. We’ll look at some classic and newer examples, likely including Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nella Larsen’s Passing, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Jim Harrison’s The River Swimmer, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, and Andrew Malan Milward’s 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. We’ll also discuss publishing, querying, and professional concerns, along with the usual facets of writing fiction (voice, perspective, dialogue, characterization, etc.). While you’re 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 you’ve never written longform fiction before, don’t worry: writers of all backgrounds and prose styles are welcome. 
 
 
ENG 722 
Seminar in Poetry Writing 
W 2:30 – 5:15 PM 
Dr. Angela Ball 
 
GRADUATE POETRY WORKSHOP: THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. Fall, 2025 
  
This workshop has its source in Lars von Trier’s 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 “obstructions,” such as “no frame longer than X number of seconds,” “set it in the worst place in the world,” etc. In the workshop version, the student submits his or her poem, which is commented on by the first respondent, also known as the “vile obstructionist,” 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 – 5:15 PM 
Dr. Alexandra Valint 
 
THE VICTORIAN NEW WOMAN 
In her 1894 essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” Sarah Grand names the emergent “new woman.” Grand imagines this figure awakening and feeling dissatisfied with what she has, “with Home-is-the-Woman’s Sphere.” Grand hopes for the coming of a “stronger and wiser” future woman, as well as a “better” future man. The new woman is a figure from the fin de siècle (1880s and 1890s) who challenged the conception of woman as an “angel in the house”: 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 women’s rights, including suffrage. But the new woman was also attacked and mocked. As scholar Sally Ledger writes, she was sometimes believed to be “a threat to the human race…an infanticidal mother and at the very least sexually ‘abnormal.’” In an 1896 essay, Victorian author Mrs. Morgan-Dockrell contrasts the “genuine new woman” with the bogeyman version caricatured by her opponents as an “unwomanly, unlovable, unlovely, untidy, undomesticated, revolting, shrieking, man-hating shrew.” In this course, we will thoroughly explore the figure of the “new woman” 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 Das’s lead, we will interrogate the new woman’s 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 Schreiner’s experimental novel The Story of an African Farm, George Egerton’s short story collection Keynotes, H. G. Wells’s suffrage novel Ann Veronica, Florence Marryat’s gothic novel The Blood of the Vampire, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s 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 – 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.