ENGL670-01: Slavery and the Black Imagination
Meetings: Monday, 5pm-7:30 pm
Professor Cassandra Jackson
In her Nobel Lecture, Toni Morrison pointed out that “language could never pin down slavery.” And yet, before this nation was a nation and until now, slavery has been a profound source for the American literary imagination. In this course, we will focus on how 20th Century African-American writers, such as Octavia Butler, Gayle Jones, and Colson Whitehead have made slavery the subject of literary art. While our focus will be on the late 20th and early 21st century Neo Slave narrative, we will contextualize these novels with a brief journey through 19th century slave narratives.
ENGL670-03: Queer YA Literature
Meetings: Tuesday, 5pm-7:30 pm
Professor Emily Meixner
This course will examine the expanding range of queer texts available to middle grade and young adult readers and the ways in which this body of literature serves as an ideological touchstone for both hegemonic and contested depictions of adolescence and adolescent sexuality. The primary focus of the course will be fiction; however, participants will also have the opportunity to consider contemporary non-fiction offerings as well. Our readings of these texts will be informed by the work of post-structural, feminist, and queer theorists in addition to the growing body of scholarship on queer children’s literature.
ENGL 505: Literary Theory
Meetings: Wednesday, 5pm-7:30pm
Professor: Harriet Hustis
An introduction to the scholarly methods necessary for graduate work in literature and to the study of theoretical frameworks important to contemporary literary criticism, including formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, new historicism, and psychoanalysis. The course exposes students to the primary texts from which those theoretical frameworks are derived and requires students to critique and construct applications of those theories to specific literary texts.
ENGL670-02: Revising British Modernism
Meetings: Thursday, 5pm-7:30pm
Professor: Mindi McMann
This course explores how the end of empire invites revisions of British modernism in light of postcolonialism, migration, and globalization. We will study how postcolonial and contemporary British writers revisit modernist themes and reflect on how imperialism get revised with decolonization.