Courses

ENGL 5590.002: Advanced Symposium in Creative Writing

ESRR Visiting Writer Miranda Mellis

Wednesdays 6:00 – 9:00PM / Second half session

GC 3015

Description

Parables of Place

In this class we will read works that deeply intertwine senses of place (allegorical and historical), with contingencies of character. We’ll consider the dreamlike bureaucracies and institutional absurdism of Robert Walser and Lynne Tillman; poetic inheritance in Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal; the ecological site specificity of Lorine Niedecker and Allison Cobb; place-making and intimacy in Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter; and the formation of literary coteries and styles in Chile and San Francisco with Alejandro Zambra and Robert Glück, respectively. Participants will also be guided to begin a site-specific writing project of their own.

ENGL 6260: Literary Traditions

Prof. Craig Dworkin

Mo/We 1:25 – 2:45PM

LNCO 3875

Description

Poetry and Poetics of the Commons

Poetry and Poetics of the Commons. For hundreds of years, once common properties have been increasingly privatized, and once common customs have been outlawed. This class will look at some of the literary responses to those enclosures. Readings will span over four centuries and a variety of genres, including contemporary punk zines, 17th-Century antinomian tracts, Romantic poetry, film, Indigenous novels, media theory, environmental humanities, radio plays, political theory, and a mud wizard.

 

 

ENGL 6610: Medieval Literature

Prof. Chris Jones

Mo/We 1:25 – 2:45PM

LNCO 3875

 

How did people in the tenth and eleventh centuries imagine the End of the World? In this class we’ll study Old English language until the mid-semester break, after which we will read, in the original language, a variety of early English poems and prose texts that deal with apocalyptic anxieties and eschatological hopes. We’ll encounter geological and cosmological disasters, complex visions of the afterlife and macabre depictions of undead bodies being devoured by worms and tormented by demons. No previous language experience needed and we go at beginners’ speed. Why rush the End of the World?

Please note that this course will fulfill the pre-1700 lit history requirement

Required text

Peter Baker, Introduction to Old English, 3^rd edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Students MUST get the 3^rd edition (there are some errors in the earlier editions) and MUST buy a print copy, not an e-book, as we will be using the text in class and I have a no-screens policy in class. I also encourage students to annotate and gloss their copy of Baker.

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Introduction+to+Old+English%2C+3rd+Edition-p-9780470659847

If students wish to purchase a copy from elsewhere, to be sure they get the right text use the ISBN: 978-0-470-65984-7

Students may wish to get hold of a copy of John R. Clark-Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which they may find helpful in the second half of the semester. This is an optional, not required purchase. There are plenty of used, second-hand copies of this available on line, and they should be fine. New copies are available from University of Toronto Press: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802065483

ENGL 7040: Graduate Poetry Workshop

Prof. Jacqueline Osherow

Wednesdays 4:35 – 7:25pm

LNCO 3875

 

Course Description:

Students in the graduate workshop will write one poem a week and read one book or selected works of one poet each week. The poems submitted weekly will alternate between poet’s choice (form and subject determined by the student) and poems responding to thematic or formal assignments, mostly drawn from what we’ve read in the previous two weeks.  For the reading, my hope is both to introduce students to poems they may not be familiar with and deepen their experience of others they’ve read previously.   We’ll read a number of poets in translation to emphasize that there is a great deal more to a poem than its surface.

 We’ll begin by looking, the very first day of class, at translations of Petrarch by Wyatt, Surrey and Chaucer.  We’ll move on to Sidney’s ASTROPHIL AND STELLA, Robert Hass’s THE ESSENTIAL HAIKU, then selected poems by Coleridge, Rilke, Nazim Hikmet, Countee Cullen and Szymborska.  For the final six weeks of class, “books” will be collections from students.  These might simply be collections of the poems students have written for this workshop.  They could also be manuscripts students are completing and sending out to publishers and contests.  A great deal emerges when students’ poems are read in collections, rather than one by one.

Assigned Reading will be discussed for the first hour to seventy-five minutes of class; the rest of class time will be spent workshopping students’ weekly poems.  Any student might have a poem workshopped on any week.  Each student will, in the course of the semester, write one two-page position paper on one of the poets we’ll be discussing, to be distributed the day before the class when that poet is to be discussed, to jump-start class conversation.  For their final assignments, students will rewrite at least five of the poems they have written for the semester.

ENGL 7460: Theory & Practice of Poetry

Prof. Paisley Rekdal

Tuesdays 4:35 – 7:25pm

LNCO 387

Description

We use the terms “lyric” and “narrative” to describe poems all the time, but what do these terms—historically and practically—mean for understanding a specific poem’s structure? What characterizes the lyric voice? What are the limitations of time presented by the narrative? Are there specific prosodic forms that organically attach themselves to or best inform either lyric or narrative modes? How do elements of the lyric and/or narrative mode shape poetic movement, even subject matter? Finally, how might any poem, especially a long work, toggle back and forth between narrative and lyric impulses? This class will examine these questions and more by looking at a range of poems from the classical to the contemporary period, ending with a study of three recent notable long or book-length poems.

ENGL 7830: Genealogies of Lyric

Prof. Andrew Franta

Tues/Thurs 2:00 – 3:20PM

LNCO 3870

Description

This course will consider the genre and theory of lyric poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism (with some attention to classical antecedents). We will survey lyric forms (especially the sonnet, ode, and elegy) and examine critical, literary historical, and definitional questions raised by the genre. Course assignments will include several short papers, one of which will be presented in class, and a longer final paper or project. Students with an interest in non-Western lyric forms, such as ghazal or haiku, may choose to develop final projects on these traditions. Readings will include poems by Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wroth, Donne, Milton, Marvell, Cowley, Gray, Collins, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats and critical and theoretical works by René Wellek, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, Reuben Brower, M. H. Abrams, Gérard Genette, Helen Vendler, Jonathan Culler, Frances Ferguson, Barbara Johnson, and Virginia Jackson, among others.