ENGL 3410: British Modernism 1900-1945) – Kizza
British Modernism is an early to mid-twentieth century literary movement rooted in the Modernists’ desire to “bury Victoria”. The new millennium which opened with excitement but also apprehension enabled the Modernists to wage a battle against the Victorians. These brave adventurers captured the period’s overall sense of dislocation, despair, alienation, confusion, uncertainty, fear, etc.; critically analyzed and responded to political events and discoveries; voiced their dissatisfaction with “Western Civilization”; made artistic innovations, and experimented with literary techniques and styles to accurately depict the moral, social, and intellectual atmosphere of the new millennium, thereby successfully burying Victoria. So please join me for the most enchanting funeral you will ever attend – that of Queen Victoria, featuring renowned pallbearers like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, and many more.
ENGL 3750 M 5:30-8 Poetry Workshop: “What kind of times are these? Politics, Belief, and Poetry.” — Jackson
Through writing poems and prose poems (essentially descriptive, lyrical paragraphs) we will explore how to write about politics without writing mere propaganda, how to write about the beliefs we have that underlie our views without mere proselytizing. The theme comes from .the poem “What Kind of Times Are These” by Award winning poet Adrienne Rich who writes: “this is not somewhere else but here, / our country moving closer to its own truth and dread.” In this class we will read some poems about current issues and try writing some that speak to our own beliefs and views about political, religious and social issues. We’ll meet once a week to share our reading and writing and suggest ways to get further into its truths. Truth, after all, is what the poem can bring us, a way to combat what Slovene poet Dane Zajc called the “stalkers” who try to control our language by redefining words and situations. As major American poet Gerald Stern says about belief: “To write and American psalm today means to penetrate the horror, the indifference, and the cruelty …to reach a true place of love and affirmation.” Since all the material we need is on the internet we will not have any required texts.
ENGL 4270: Major American Figures: E.L. Doctorow – Stuart
E.L. Doctorow was a major presence in American letters from the late 1960s until his death in 2015. He was best known for his classic historical novels such as Ragtime (African American terrorists blow up fire stations and hole up in J.P. Morgan’s library, among other events), Billy Bathgate (gangsters in the 1930s), and The March (a novel tracing Sherman’s infamous march to the sea towards the end of the Civil War). Students in this course are in for a treat, as Doctorow’s novels offer a rare combination of accessible prose, exciting plots, and cerebral stimulation, an achievement reflected in the fact that many of his works were bestsellers while at the same time that they were winning the major literary awards and attracting sustained scholarly attention.
ENGL 4970: Fiction, Fashion, and Feminism – Noe
This course will look at the ways in which fashion informs culture and constructs identity as seen in the fiction of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, E.L. Doctorow, and other writers.
ENGL/WSTU 4430: Africana Womanism – Kizza
Since its inception in the late 1980s, Africana Womanism has been a major focus of literary scholars, and it is now centrally located in the feminist discourse, but what exactly is Africana Womanism? How and why did it move to the center of the feminist discourse? What is its agenda? How is it related to Black Feminism? How is it similar and different from main stream Feminism? What is its future? In this course, we will explore these issues and many more by immersing ourselves in the theoretical scholarship, and actively participating in the discourse on texts by Africana authors like Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Flora Nwapa, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Jamaica Kinkaid, and more, presumed to be representative of this ideology.
ENGL 4920 –Novel Writing Workshop – Baker
Although this new course does not show up on your My Mocs Degree yet, it DOES count as an upper-division level creative writing course.
For this class, we will focus on writing what Ann Lamont calls “the sh***y first draft” of a novel. We will use one literary novel to “read as a writer” in class, meaning we will closely examine and discuss the novel’s structure, scene, sentence structure, and character development as a guide to our own work. You will also choose a novel to write a short craft paper analyzing some aspect that interests you. All genres are allowed, but we will be focusing on the literary elements of writing in this class. At the end of the semester you will submit about 55,000 words toward the first draft of your novel.
Leave a Reply