Graduate Courses
Summer 2023 Graduate Courses
EH 590 - Contemporary Black Women's Poetry | Vrana
FULL SUMMER TERM: MAY 31-JULY 28
MW 2:30-5:00
This colloquium will examine 21st-century Black women's poetry, exploring questions about how academia, prizes, and publishing respond to, endorse, and/or commodify different types of poets, and how readers engage their exceptional works. We will read Natasha Trethewey, Evie Shockley, Elizabeth Alexander, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. We will supplement with theories of poetics, race, gender, and ideas of symbolic capital/the cultural field. The course will be blended (some in-person meetings, some asynchronous/online work); students will develop independent research projects to present at a colloquium at term's end.
EH 592 - Oral Narrative | Jackson
MAYMESTER: MAY 8-JUNE 26
MTWRF 10:00-12:30
"Where there is darkness, they shine beams of light." This course focuses on African American oral narrative as data to be collected, and how it is used in literature. We will explore the "telling" that captures the ephemeral, "lived sensation and experience," as well as the practical magic and spiritual nourishment of "stories" that help us make sense of the world. Doing so will put forth a contemporary glimpse into collective Black American memory.
Fall 2023 Graduate Courses
EH 502 - Graduate Writing for English | McLaughlin
W 6:00-8:30
EH 502 is required of all M.A. students in their first year of course work. The central purpose of this course is to prepare students for research and academic writing at the graduate level, but it also aims to prepare students for direct engagement with the academic conversations, discourses, and practices that circulate around and through the study of literature—in this case, the short stories and novellas of Henry James as well as the literary criticism that has been written in response to them.
EH 505 - Teaching College Writing | Shaw
MW 2:30-3:45
This course examines issues in composition history, theory, and pedagogy in the context of teaching first-year composition. Students will use this knowledge to develop course material appropriate to teaching first-year composition. Topics include syllabus and assignment design, lesson planning, course management, teaching in the linguistically and culturally diverse classroom, and assessment. Pre-requisite / Co-requisite: EH 502.
EH 525 - Restoration & Early 18th-Century Lit | Hillyer
R 6:00-8:30
We will be studying a representative selection of British literature from the post-Restoration period and the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on women — sometimes as authors, more often as subjects or characters. We will be covering Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, and Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock. Other authors likely to feature include John Wilmot, Samuel Pepys, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Though the primary focus of our discussion will accordingly be gender, we will no doubt be thinking as well about issues relating to social class and to the emergence of Britain as an imperial power with colonies in almost all parts of the planet. The primary writing assignment will be a research paper of about 15-20 pages, developed throughout the semester.
EH 552 - African American Literature since 1900 | Vrana
M 6:00-8:30
Although by now African American authors like Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison have become widely read, the political and aesthetic diversity of this longstanding tradition remains little discussed. This course will survey selected works of African American literature from 1900 to the present across genres (fiction, drama, and poetry), emphasizing writers' wide-ranging aesthetic approaches. Authors may include: Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement poets, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Fran Ross, Ishmael Reed, Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, and Colson Whitehead.
EH 571 - Modern British Fiction | Raczkowski
T 2:30-5:00
This course on the modernist British novel is curiously bookended by E.M. Forster's Howard's End (1908) on one side and Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2006) on the other. While we will focus on modernist novels that investigate the relationships between art, ethics, and politics, my cunning plan is to use Smith's postmodern rewriting of Howard's End as a means of evaluating the current status of modernist claims (like Forster's) that art and aesthetic experience can make the world new. Let's hope Forster was right...
EH 583/4 - Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop I/II | Johnson
W 6:00-8:30
This graduate-level workshop is devoted to writing literary short fiction — and what that term means today. Stories students write in this course can be set anywhere, during any time period, but should demonstrate a deep engagement with respect to craft and technique. Or as the writer Audre Lord said, "There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean."
EH 585/6 - Graduate Poetry Writing Workshop I/II | Pence
R 6:00-8:30
This graduate writing course explores different styles that currently define the American contemporary poem and engages with how these styles are responses to Romantic and modern literature. We will analyze political, narrative, surreal and other types of poems from some of the best poets writing today in order to create our own poem. To help us gain an understanding of this vibrant field, our class will host guest poets, including Alabama's State Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones.
