91´ÎÔª

3 Credits

Section 01: Mondays / Wednesdays / Fridays 9:00 – 9:50

Section 02: Mondays / Wednesdays / Fridays 11:00 – 11:50

Prof. Rob Browning

This course is about interpreting literature, with the primary goal of helping you to read with greater understanding, independence, and pleasure. Our focus throughout the semester will be the question of how interpretation works: in short, what makes a given literary text meaningful and (quite possibly) interesting? How should a text’s genre—its adherence to the conventions of drama, epic poetry, or fiction—affect the ways we go about making sense of it? What do the most basic elements of literature (diction, figurative language, voice, sound, and structure) contribute to a text’s potential meanings? How do personal experiences and perspectives affect what each of us sees in a text and the ways we each interpret what we see? How can one’s understanding and appreciation of a particular work of literature change over time?

In the spirit of a 100-level literature course, we will be studying a wide variety of texts, including short fiction, poetry, a play, a film, a work of nonfiction, and a novel. I have chosen our readings with great care, and believe you will find each one of them (each in its own way) to be thought provoking.

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writng Across Curriculum

3 Credits

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30am – 10:50 am

Prof. Ann Emmons

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writng Across Curriculum

3 Credits

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30am – 10:50 am

Prof. Sam McPhee

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writng Across Curriculum

3 Credits

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50

Prof. Quan Ha

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writng Across Curriculum

3 Credits

Tuesdays / Thursdays 3:30 – 4:50

Prof. Brady Harrison

LIT 246, a course in American literary and cultural history and the history of American popular music, explores the music, writings, and history of Bob Dylan, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Taking the 1960s as the primary focus of the course—with a look at and listen to some of his later work—we will situate Dylan’s songs in their historical, cultural, and especially musical contexts.  We’ll explore his roots in rock’n’roll, folk music, and the blues and trace his evolution into a rock, roots, country, and gospel musician and, eventually, into a master of the broad palette of American music.  Along the way, and as part of our efforts to situate Dylan in his times, we will also have the opportunity to read works by the Beats (particularly Ginsberg) and to study, albeit briefly, some of the history of the civil rights movement and of the American War in Vietnam (particularly as they inform Dylan’s “protest” songs).  (Fair Warning:  Some of the material covered in this course offers graphic depictions of cultural and catastrophic violence.)

REQUIRED WORKS (Subject to Revision)

Audio

• Selected Tracks by Bob Dylan & Others

Print

• Dylan, Bob.  Chronicles Volume One. (Simon & Schuster.)
• Ginsberg, Allen.  Howl & Other Poems.  (City Lights.)

Films

• Hayes, Todd. (dir.)  I’m Not There.
• Mangold, James. (dir.) A Complete Unknown.
• Scorsese, Martin. (dir.)  No Direction Home.
• Rolling Thunder Revue:  A Bob Dylan Story.
• Stone, Oliver.  (dir.)  Platoon.

Supplementary readings and films will also be assigned.

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit & Artistic Studies (L); Writng Across Curriculum

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 – 12:20

Prof. Katie Kane

In this introductory course in literary and cultural theory, we will attempt to explore representative schools of and issues in contemporary criticism (formalism, postmodernism, eco-criticism, postcolonial/colonial criticism, critical race theory, trans-studies, psychoanalytic criticism and others).  We will be working, therefore, to build an analytic and critical vocabulary for the activity of reading select number of texts from the canons of literary criticism and from the canons of Anglophone culture.  Prior to engaging with the core of the class, we will consider the multiple ways in which both the truth and research methodology are in flux in our era: we will consider what it means to read a theoretical text, what it means to create an argument or assertion, and what it means to do research in Literary and Cultural Studies. 

In addition to these “first-principles” objectives, however, we will also attempt to engage with such complexities of the current theoretical debate such as the role of emotion in art,

the question of aesthetics in the Anthropocene, the problematic of decolonization, the use value of economic and political theory (among other concerns)., and, finally, with the crucial issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.  Throughout the course we will be moving toward our current early twenty-first century moment in which the range and scope of the labor of the literary critic seems—in light of the rise of a host of non-traditional representational and narrative forms—to be both expanding and contracting.  Film, video games, the world of the digital, social media, all require the decoding and demystifying work of the engaged critic.  A specific focus on the filmic texts of Sinners and Adolescence will allow for us to work through major issues and schools of cultural criticism.

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing in the Disciplines

3 credits

Tuesdays / Thursdays 12:30 – 1:50

Prof. Quan Ha

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing in the Disciplines

CRN 72946 / 3 Credits

Mondays / Wednesdays 2:00 – 3:20

Prof. Rob Browning

“He understood what fierce, singular certainty creates and what it destroys. In response, he made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally.”

Zadie Smith, Changing my Mind (2009)

As we read a selection of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances, we will attend to both what is strange and what’s familiar as we strive to make sense of these works within the cultural context of the playwright’s own time four centuries ago as well as in our own. We will not attempt to “cover” Shakespeare – an impossible task for a mere semester. The aim of this course, rather, is to provide you with a working knowledge of what makes Shakespeare’s dramatic texts interesting, meaningful, challenging, and, to generations of playgoers and readers, continually inspiring. To this end (which is really a beginning) we will focus our attention on how the plays engage with the basic elements of human life: love, fear, power, nature, death, aspiration, war, mourning, beauty, spirituality, sexuality, religion, psychology, family, race, politics, gender, friendship, performance, absurdity, pleasure, art, and entertainment. We'll conclude the semester with a unit on Shakespeare and artificial intelligence. 

Tentative list of plays: The Merchant of Venice; 1 Henry IV; Hamlet; Othello; The Tempest

Gen Ed Attributes: Lit and Artistic Studies (L); Writing in the Disciplines

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 12:30 – 1:50

Prof. Brady Harrison

Although William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich might seem, at a glance, to be a strange pairing, in addition to being major authors, they both conjure vast and intricate milieux across a series of interlinked stories and novels that span generations and decades and that dive deeply into American history and cultures. Most celebrated for his works written in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, Faulkner sets many of his works in his mythical parcel of Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, and in addition to reading a number of his stories—including “Barn Burning,” “A Rose for Emily,” “That Evening Sun,” and others—we’ll  also study The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and encounter the Compsons, Bundrens, Sutpens, and many more of the often macabre, bizarre, and brutal denizens of Yoknapatawpha. Erdrich, an Indigenous writer at work from the early 1980s to the present day, often sets her work on mythical Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota (with excursions to Montana), and we’ll read two masterpieces that form part of her “Love Medicine” series, Love Medicine (first published in 1984 and revised and expanded in 1993 and again in 2009) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and the brilliant and devastating middle work of her “Justice Trilogy,” The Round House (2012). A course in American literary history, we’ll study such literary movements as Modernism, High Modernism, Postmodernism, Magic Realism, and more. As the course proceeds we’ll also have opportunities to apply different critical theories to the primary texts and to discuss critical studies of the authors. (Fair Warning:  Some of the material covered in this course offers graphic depictions of individual and catastrophic violence.)

Be Advised: This is a READING INTENSIVE course; it requires constant, close reading.

REQUIRED TEXTS

• Erdrich, Louise
  • The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. (Harper Perennial.)
  • Love Medicine. (Harper Perennial.)
  • The Round House. (Harper Perennial.)
• Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!
  • As I Lay Dying. (Vintage.)
  • Collected Stories. (Vintage.)
  • The Sound and the Fury. (Vintage.)

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50 am

Prof. Eric Reimer

This course will explore how London has been figured, represented, and imagined in works of literature, film, music, and the visual arts, whether as the world’s greatest imperial power, as an enfeebled state in a world divided between two new superpowers, or as a vibrant crossroads of cultures shaped by migration and colonial history. With some nods to the deeper past, the class will begin in the late-Victorian period – when London had become the definitive city of empire – and will proceed through the twentieth century and up to the present day. Our inquiry will focus on expressions of -- but more importantly responses to -- the fact of empire. We will consider such developments as Oscar Wilde and fin-de-siecle anxieties throwing mainstream, genteel London society out of countenance, the historical trauma of the Blitz and World War II, the arrival of West Indian immigrants on the Empire Windrush, the immigration and citizenship acts that increasingly sought a racially pure English identity, the new racism of the 1960s, and the post-imperial melancholy and nostalgia of the last half-century. Through it all we will consider that there has never been a “real” London, that it has been and is a city that is always metamorphosing, that is always susceptible to rewriting and alternative signifying practices.

Course texts will be drawn from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, and Graham Swift’s Last Orders, as well as a number of poems and short stories. We’ll also listen to plenty of music, consider the representation of London in the visual arts, and watch one feature film.

Credits: 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 - 12:20

Prof. Louise Economides

Theorists such as Amitav Ghosh have identified a strange phenomenon:  given the existential threat posed by climate change, why has “serious” literature been slow to register concern or to raise public awareness about what might well be the single greatest crisis of this generation?  As a means to begin answering this question, we will be studying contemporary literary forms that have developed recently to meet the representational and conceptual challenges posed by climate change – particularly climate change fiction (cli-fi). We’ll consider ways that traditional definitions of what novels “should” do in order to meet the demands of high art are potentially at odds with artforms that seek to adequately address unprecedented ecological and social problems today.  Likewise, we’ll examine artistic challenges associated with attempts to represent the global scope and/or long duration of phenomena such as climate change.

 Despite these challenges, one of this course’s goals is to explore ways that literature can offer important perspectives on climate change that complement scientific understanding.  As we shall see, literary texts can “bring home” -- in an immediate and emotionally moving way -- what might otherwise seem to be abstract or distant problems associated with global warming.  Literature can also reveal complex networks of interrelations that are encompassed by the term “climate change” including (but not limited to) phenomena such as increasingly prevalent so-called “natural” disasters (massive wildfires, flooding, superstorms), social disparities in human communities most at risk from global warming’s effects, rising extinction rates in non-human species and links between climate disruption and disease pandemics.  Finally, future-oriented climate change literature can allow us to imagine different possible outcomes of our collective action (or inaction) on global warming ranging from apocalyptic survivalism to unexpected trans-species alliances that usher in new, post-humanist ways of dwelling on the earth.

Credits: 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 3:30 - 4:50

Prof. Eric Reimer

Underpinned by questions and issues emerging from contemporary trauma theory and, more generally, by the ongoing discussions of historical interpretation, this course will focus on the representations of trauma and traumatic experience in literature, examining how writers give voice to painful pasts, from individual experiences of grief and violence to shared histories of war, genocide, colonialism, and displacement. Our primary texts will thus in various ways focus on characters (and collectives) that have lived through or otherwise inherited traumatic events without really understanding them, and that find themselves both remembering and reordering in an effort to reconstruct the past. Through our reading and inquiry, we will undoubtedly come to understand how the literary imagination provides an expansive space for exploring the modalities of responding to trauma. We will want, too, ultimately, to consider that the cultivation of empathy may be essential in the writing of trauma and human misery, and that storytelling can open paths toward healing. Some of our operative questions will include: What constitutes trauma literature? What is the relationship between traumatic experience and memory? What are the particular difficulties associated with the representation of trauma? How and when do horrific events become part of a history passed on to the future? To what extent can traumatic suffering be overcome, and what might be the means of doing so? What kinds of memorialization are most appropriate for those who have experienced trauma? What is the relationship between trauma and literary form? What do visual genres and technologies contribute to the process of remembering and bearing witness to trauma?

Course texts may include Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune, Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami, as well as a selection of poems (from Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and others), musical works, and a feature film. Secondary readings may include selections from Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Kali Tal, Derek Walcott, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and others. Students will write an annotated bibliography, a 15-page analytical paper informed by assiduous research, and present their work to the class.

3 Credits

Thursdays 6:00pm – 8:50 pm

Prof. Katie Kane

One of the newest fields in critical theory and cultural studies, Affect Theory marks a turn in critical thinking and philosophy toward feeling and the emotive.  Emerging out of the work of queer theorists and feminists the theoretical and creative field is deeply engaged with a post-Cartesian notion of a responsive, feeling theory.  That is, in Affect Theory the cogito is displaced in favor of the body (the gut, the heart, the sensory) as the locus of both analytic and creative production and meaning.  Looking at a variety of narrative genres, the seminar includes focus on specific literary and cultural texts such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequences, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.  A selection of theoretical texts we will contact include the following: José Esteban Muñoz, Crusing Utopia; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Eve Sedgewick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity; Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoys.  In carrying out this reading the seminar will engage with the range of emotions that reoccur and are valued in literary culture: empathy and sympathy, sorrow, delight/joy, happiness, fear, and the aesthetic frisson, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on or generate emotional response.  Finally, the seminar will take seriously recent critiques of Affect Theory that charge the field with failure, at least in its early manifestation, to fully engage with those feelings that attach to and emerge out of colonialism, racism, the climate crisis, and other unexplored and challenging categories of analysis and emotion.

3 Credits

Wednesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Robert Baker

In this course we will study three gifted and widely read poets of our time: two poets who came of age in the 60s and 70s, C. D. Wright (1949 – 2016) and Anne Carson (born in 1950), and one poet who came of age in the 90s, Ross Gay (born in 1974). Wright and Gay are American writers. Carson is a Canadian writer who has had a large American readership and taught at several American universities. Wright’s work is earthy, erotic, collagist, and capacious: she is perhaps best known for her book-length poems that interweave vernacular lyricism and broad social scope. Carson’s work is melancholic, ironic, at times riddling, and (for all her debts to modernism) often narrative. Gay’s work is irreverent, exuberant, urban-ecological, and, while deeply attentive to the sorrows and bleaknesses of life, nearly psalmic. All three of these poets have been drawn to the long poem, or the book-length poem, which has something of the range of concerns and voices we find in the modern novel. All three, in different ways, are at once worldly and speculative. All three have a distinctive sense of humor. Each is formally restless and inventive. Each is occasionally drawn to prose or the boundaries between poetry and prose. Each helps us to see what it might mean to live a wakeful life. “Some of us do not read particularly for pleasure or instruction,” Wright says in Cooling Time, “but to be changed, healed, charged.”

There is not an overarching aesthetic or thematic frame for the course. We will be reading three poets who are very different from one another. Our primary concern will be to understand what is disclosed in their particular adventures. Along the way, though, we will try to trace connections among them, to address larger questions raised by their work, and to clarify the ways in which they engage the social and cultural force fields of our time.

Provisional list of readings:

C. D. Wright

• Tremble
• Deepstep Come Shining
• One Big Self
• Cooling Time
• Rising, Falling, Hovering

Anne Carson 

• Eros the Bittersweet
• Glass, Irony, and God
• Plainwater
• Autobiography of Red
• Red Doc>

Ross Gay

• Bringing the Shovel Down
• Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
• The Book of Delights
• Be Holding
• Inciting Joy

3 Credits

Tuesdays 3:30pm – 6:20

Prof. Louise Economides

How has literature responded to what Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz refer to as the “shock of the Anthropocene”?  If we have entered an historically unprecedented phase in human history wherein our species’ collective impact on planet Earth is analogous to what Michel Serres (and others) have described as a “geological” force (both in its scope and duration), how does this impact our inherited ideas regarding humanism, technology, sustainability and the future of the arts?  What representational challenges does “dreaming” the Anthropocene pose for literature, and why are apocalyptic (rather than adaptive) visions of our ecological future so common?  This course will examine contemporary literary responses to material and political dislocations associated with the Anthropocene, including global climate change, loss of biodiversity, the “Great Acceleration” of technology (including bio- and geo-engineering) and the hegemony of capitalist petromodernity.

We’ll be looking at definitions of the “Anthropocene” by theorists such as Bonneuil and Fressoz, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, Timothy Morton, Anna Tsing, Timothy Clark and others. We’ll also examine debates about when to locate the Anthropocene’s historical origins and objections to Anthropocene theory from critics who charge that it is universalist, technocratic and/or arrogantly reinforces (rather than challenges) anthropocentric subjectivity.  A final overarching goal of the course will be to explore how literary responses to the Anthropocene overlap with but also differ significantly from earlier attempts to respond to our “postmodernist” ecological condition. Some fiction writers we'll explore may include Don DeLillo, N.K. Jemisin, James Bradley, Karen Russell, Jeff VanderMeer, Nnedi Okorafor and Richard Powers. We may also be reading poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Don McKay, Dionne Brande, Juliana Spahr and others.  

This beginning writing workshop emphasizes the reading, discussion, and revision of students' short fiction. Students will be introduced to the technical elements of writing fiction. No prior experience in writing short fiction required.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

This beginning writing workshop focuses on the reading, discussion, and revision of students' poems. Students will study and use models of poetic techniques. No prior experience in writing poetry required.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

A study of the art of nonfiction through reading and responding to contemporary nonfiction and the writing of original nonfiction works. Focus is on creative expression, writing technique and nonfiction forms. Students begin with writing exercises and brief essays, advancing to longer forms as the semester progresses.

Gen Ed Attributes: Expressive Arts Course (A)

3 Credits

Credits 3

Mondays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

This course is open to undergraduates who have completed at least one semester of creative writing. Students focus on the editing, design, layout and marketing of The Oval, 91´ÎÔª's undergraduate literary magazine. Students will read, discuss and develop responses to to recongnized literary works, as well as developing criteria for each volume's content and design. The class will include the evaluation and selection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art submissions to The Oval. Students are required to keep a reading journal, and compile a portfolio of writing exercises, responses to texts and critiques of published works.

Credits 3

Section 01: Prof. Rosalyn McLean

Section 02: Prof. Erin Saldin

Prereq, completion of CRWR 210A with a "B" average or better. An intermediate fiction writing workshop. Students will be expected to finish 3 or 4 substantial stories for the course. Although some outside material will be considered, the primary emphasis will be analysis and discussion of student work.

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 12:30 – 1:50 pm

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

Prereq., completion of CRWR 212A or CRWR 210A with a "B" average or better. An intermediate nonfiction workshop. Students read and respond to model essays, in addition to creating and revising original essays for workshop review. Assignments and exercises focus on writing craft and research techniques.

Credits 3

Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:50 

Prof. Jules Ohman

Prereq, junior standing and CRWR 310. An advanced writing workshop in which student manuscripts are read and critiqued. Rewriting of work already begun (in CRWR 310 classes) will be encouraged.

Credits 3

Thursdays 3:00 – 5:50

Prof. Sean Hill

Poetry is the art of connection—yoking disparate things together with metaphor, stringing sounds together in patterns of rhythm and rhyme, employing the power of syntax with a chain of words. In this course, students will analyze published poems for specific strategies of connection and discuss the ways the poet uses these various techniques to establish motivation and emotional depth, and create linguistic music, among other things. Writing in the class will focus primarily on the generation and revision of the students’ own poems. Students will participate in evaluating their own work and the work of their peers. The goal of this course is to deepen and expand the students’ poetry writing skills and knowledge developed in previous creative writing workshops. Each student will produce an end-of-term portfolio of revised poems.

Credits 3

Wednesdays 4:00 – 6:50

Prof. Robert Stubblefield

The BFA capstone is the ultimate course for students prior to graduation. This is a hands-on course and a mentorship, though some elements may be be offered electronically. Restricted to students in the Creative Writing BFA program.

Prereq., CRWR 410 or CRWR 411 or CRWR 412 with a minimum grade of B.

Credits 3

Thursdays 3:00 – 5:50

Prof. David Axelrod

Credits 3

Wednesdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Emily Ruskovich

Prereq, consent of instr. A creative writing workshop focused primarily on fiction.

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Wednesdays 3:00 – 5:50 pm

Prof. Jules Ohman

Prereq, consent of instr. A creative writing workshop focused primarily on fiction.

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Tuesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Sean Hill

Creative Writing 511 is a writing intensive course designed to facilitate the development of new poetry through the vital encouragement of faculty and peers in a workshop setting. Students in this course should already exhibit an advanced understanding of craft in at least one of the following areas: fiction, poetry, memoir, personal essay, or dramatic writing, as well as have experienced the writing workshop environment. We will also explore other aspects of the writing life and consider our goals and our roles in the greater literary and artistic community.

Prereq., consent of instr. 

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Mondays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Brian Blanchfield

A creative writing workshop focused primarily on personal essay and narrative nonfiction. Attention given to writing and publishing professional magazine essays. Students complete two substantial essays.

Prereq., consent of instr. 

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Tuesdays 6:00 – 8:50 pm

Prof. Rosalyn McLean

Prereq., consent of instr. 

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Wednesdays, 3:00 - 5:50

Prof. Brian Blanchfield

Prosody—broadly defined: the study of the rhythm of speech—is derived from the Greek prosoidia for “music added to speech” and has been foundational to the practice of poetry Practice is the operative word in this hands-on techniques studio for poets, where we will acquaint ourselves with the salient properties of our medium—rhythm and meter essential among them, particularly as they relate to lineation, form, stanza, pattern, rhetoric, bricolage, and lyric speech.  We will isolate technique in examples of canonical and contemporary poetry; immerse in the history of metrical poetry and key departures from it and innovations in its ebb or wake; study the mechanics of poetry uninvested in prosody (poetry “built” not spoken, e.g.) and—in & out of class—practice composing using received forms, irregular musics, and original constraints.

Restricted to students in the Creative writing MFA program.

Prereq, consent of instr. 

Credits 3

Thursdays, 3:00 - 5:50

Prof. Chris Dombrowski

We will begin under the tutelage of the haiku as we examine how image, compression, and perception work within the form.  Next, we’ll look briefly at fragments, epigrams, and contemporary variations of the haiku (as W.S. Merwin said, “a haiku is a 17-syllable poem written in Japanese”), before moving on to the haibun via Basho’s classic linked-verse travel journal, Narrow Road to the Deep North and Issa’s The Year of My Life, both of which interlace  verse and prose.  A respected but often ignored modern day form, the haibun will serve as our  launching point into discussion of several contemporary dynamic, nonce, hard-to-pin-down, multi-genre and edge-of-genre works that juxtapose prose and verse and/or narrative and lyric impulses. (See reading list.)

Close reading and weekly written imitations will steer discussion. Each week, students will be expected to read a book and produce a corresponding creative imitation, a piece of original work that employs elements and approaches identified in the assigned texts.  These one- or two-page typewritten imitations will be read aloud in class, introduced by the author, and appreciated by fellow classmates, not workshopped or otherwise assessed; they will serve to generate further discussion on technique, form, and invention.  Artistically speaking, these generative engagements should expand our individual notions of what is possible. Additionally, students are expected to spark, lead, and contribute to rigorous discussion on weekly texts.  

PAST and POSSIBLE TEXTS

• The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Matsuo Basho 
• The Narrow Road to the Interior, Kimiko Hahn 
• The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje  
• Just Us, Claudia Rankine 
• The Lost Journals of Sacagawea, Debra Magpie Earling 
• Whereas, Layli Long Soldier 
• The Meadow, James Galvin 
• Deepstep Come Shining, CD Wright 
• The Negroes Send Their Love, Sean Hill
• Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra
• Blackouts, Justin Torres 
• Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Prereq, consent of instr. 

Level: Graduate

Credits 3

Prof. Traolach O'Riordain

The primary objective of this course is to build on the foundations laid in Elementary Irish I. Students will expand their vocabulary with a special focus on verbs; they will also engage new themes that demand a corresponding increase in their store of nouns, adjectives, idioms and expressions. Students will also learn more songs and poems from the Irish tradition and thus increase their idiomatic and syntactical knowledge of the language.

The GenEd Foreign Language requirement can be fulfilled by successful completion of 102.

Credits 3

Prof. Traolach O'Riordain

Prereq. IRSH 201 or its equivalent from another university. Students will expand their knowledge of Irish language verbs: they will study the five declensions of the nouns; and acquire the vocabulary and language necessary to engage more abstract ideas and topical issues on an intellectual level.  For proficiency equal to the 202-level, students must take the four semester sequence (101, 102, 201, & 202) of Irish language study. 

Gen Ed Attributes: Language Requirement

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 9:30 – 10:50 

Prof. Erin Costello Wecker

Many courses on Irish literature are dominated by the writing of men. This course shifts the focus and places the work of Irish women writers at the center of our inquiry. Women were often seen as emblems of nation and motherhood; this course disrupts that binary to include Irish women as literary creators. To do this we will survey a range of Irish women’s writing including poems, novels, short stories, plays, cultural history, and literary criticism. To enhance our study, we will look to film and stage adaptations to explore the process of translating a written text into a visual or graphic format. We will discuss social, political, and cultural developments such as the formation of an Irish identity for the newly independent nation, women’s role in post-independent Ireland, the literary trope of woman-as-nation, and issues of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in the “new Ireland.”

Gen Ed Attributes: Writng Across Curriculum

Credits 3

Tuesdays / Thursdays 11:00 – 12:20 

Prof. Erin Costello Wecker

This course explores the concept of “Irishness” through generative works of music by artists such as Seán Ó Riada, The Wolf Tones, The Pogues, Sinéad O’Connor, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, U2, The Cranberries, Méav Ní Mhaolchatha, Soulé, Enya, Dolores, and Gearóidín Bhreathnach (not an exhaustive list). To do this the class will begin with an examination of traditional Irish music as a cultural form. Next, we will move through genres and decades charting political and cultural shifts as represented in folk, rebel, rock, punk, and pop music. We will explore concerns of authenticity and hybridity in Irish popular music and apply theoretical ways of understanding the reproduction and marketing of “Irishness” in a global context.

Gen Ed Attributes: Writng Across Curriculum

3 Credits

Staff

UM: Offered every term. Prereq., WRIT 095 or proof of passing score on writing diagnostic examination, ACT English, 22-27, ACT Combined English/Writing 18-31, ACT Writing subscore 7-10, SAT Writing Score 440-690, SAT Essay subscore 7-10, ACT Writing subject score 19-32, ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score 18-31, SAT Writ/Language Test score 25-36. Emphasis on rhetorical understanding, textual analysis, and genre flexibility. Grading A-F, or NC (no credit).

Missoula College description for this course: Offered every term. Prereq., WRIT 095 or proof of passing score on writing diagnostic examination, ACT English, 22-27,ACT Combined English/Writing 18-31, ACT Writing subscore 7-10, SAT Writing Score 440-690, SAT Essay subscore 7-10, ACT Writing subject score 19-32, ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score 18-31, SAT Writ/Language Test score 25-36., WRIT 095 or proof of appropriate SAT/ACT essay, English/Writing, writing section scores, appropriate MUSWA scores, or proof of passing scores on Writing Placement Exam). Expository prose and research paper; emphasis on structure, argument, development of ideas, clarity, style, and diction. Students expected to write without major faults in grammar or usage. Grading A-F, or NC (no credit). Co-Requisite Support sections of WRIT 101 are 4 credits; they are offered Autumn and Spring. Placement is based on UM Writing Placement Assessment score, ACT Combined English/Writing <18, ACT Writing subscore <7, SAT Writing Score <440, SAT Essay subscore <7, ACT Writing subject score <19, ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score <18, SAT Writ/Language Test score <25, or referral by WRIT 101 instructor. Designed for students who need additional instruction, support, and practice integrating critical thinking, reading and writing.

Gen Ed Attributes: Introductory Writing

3 Credits

Offered every term. Offered at Missoula College. Prereq., WRIT 101 (or higher) or equivalent or proof of appropriate SAT/ACT essay, English/Writing, writing section scores, appropriate MUSWA scores, or proof of passing scores on Writing Placement Exam. Introduction to technical writing situations that integrate text, design, and graphics. Emphasis is on evidence-based, informative writing that uses design and graphics to visually represent logic and organization. Course focuses on writing as a process and includes student self-assessment. Major assignments include a pure technical document, exploration of credibility, and public science writing. Students are expected to write without major faults in grammar or usage and to have basic computer literacy.

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing Across the Curriculum WRIM

3 Credits

Staff

Offered autumn and spring. Prereq., placement or C or better in WRIT 101; ACT English 28 or higher; ACT Combined English/Writing 32-36; ACT Writing subscore 11-12; SAT Writing Score 700-800; SAT Essay subscore 11-12; ACT Writing subject score 33 or higher; ACT English Language Arts (ELA) score 32 or higher; SAT Writ/Language Test score 37 or higher. Offers instruction in rhetorical reading and writing, particularly the study and practice of written argumentation in different academic and civic contexts.

Gen Ed Attributes: Writing Across the Curriculum WRIM; Writing Course - Introductory WRIN

Credits 3

Wednesdays 5:00 - 7:50 p.m.

Professor Beverly Ann Chin

The purpose of this course is to provide teachers with knowledge, skills, and abilities to teach reading. The course is designed for upper elementary, middle school, and high school educators who wish to help their students grow as critical, creative, and empathetic readers, writers, and thinkers. This class is conducted as a reading/writing workshop in which teachers experience and reflect on their own meaning-making processes.  We investigate the current research on culturally responsive strategies and critical theories in literacy instruction, multicultural education, and Indian Education for All.  Teachers learn effective literacy strategies and develop lessons that engage students in reading a variety of genres. Topics include reading processes, comprehension strategies, text complexity, literature circles, Socratic seminars, guiding questions, text sets, and inquiry units.

This course is a requirement for secondary English teaching licensure and may be taken for graduate credit.