2023-2024 Academic Year

Fall 2023

WGSS 201 Feminist Genres
Cross-listed with ENGL 222-01.This course explores the centrality of literature to feminist thought, consciousness, and activism. Since women began gaining access to literacy itself, women writers have used inherited literary genres—and created new ones—to make and expand feminist thought, the category of “woman,” and the scope of feminist action. We will study how and why (mostly) twentieth-century US feminist literary artists approached and reimagined six literary genres and modes, among them essay, authotheory, novel, lyric poetry, and noir. Students can expect to develop a solid grounding in the history and contestation of feminist literary studies, to experiment with writing in several genres, and to read exemplary works across genres by Gloria Anzaldúa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kate Chopin, bell hooks, Dorothy B. Hughes, Audre Lorde, and Maggie Nelson, among others.

ENGL 222 Feminist Genres
Cross-listed with WGSS 201-01.This course explores the centrality of literature to feminist thought, consciousness, and activism. Since women began gaining access to literacy itself, women writers have used inherited literary genres—and created new ones—to make and expand feminist thought, the category of “woman,” and the scope of feminist action. We will study how and why (mostly) twentieth-century US feminist literary artists approached and reimagined six literary genres and modes, among them essay, authotheory, novel, lyric poetry, and noir. Students can expect to develop a solid grounding in the history and contestation of feminist literary studies, to experiment with writing in several genres, and to read exemplary works across genres by Gloria Anzaldúa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kate Chopin, bell hooks, Dorothy B. Hughes, Audre Lorde, and Maggie Nelson, among others.

ENGL 403 Meth/Models of Lit Schol
In preparation for the Senior Writing Workshop, students in this seminar will: (1) strengthen their grasp of the history and current configuration of literary studies and related fields; (2) frame and begin to pursue the questions that will motivate their senior theses; and (3) hone their critical self-awareness as readers and writers. During the first ten or so weeks of the semester, we will devote a significant portion of our class time to Ralph Ellison's touchstone novel Invisible Man (1952), as well as to readings of the novel enabled by a range of literary methodologies, cultural and institutional contexts, historical and theoretical vantages, and research strategies. Throughout the semester, we will make our collaborative discussion of Invisible Man into a model for thinking in broader terms about the questions, practices, and habits of mind that inform the most generative literary scholarship, including and especially students' own.

Spring 2024

WGSS 301 The Novel and the Normal
Cross-listed with ENGL 331-01. Theorists of the novel have long debated the means and the extent to which the genre consolidates national, social, and embodied ideas of the "normal" person or citizen. This course takes up that debate with reference to 19th- and 20th-century American, British, and Irish fiction in which a character's or a polity's physical body is at issue. How and why do modern novelists variously bend, break, or repurpose the rules of the novel genre or engage with the "norms" it projects? How do hallmarks of the novel (e.g., the creation of "round" and "flat" characters, the arc of plot, the evocation of mood, the description of social and environmental settings) contribute to dominant or other imaginations of the normal body at discrete historical moments? How does the novel genre work on its readers across time and in particular communities, including disability communities? Students can expect to explore these and other pressing questions about the novel and its publics as they read (a lot)-and savor reading-engrossing novels by Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Virginia Woolf, among others, as well as important critical writings on the politics, disability and otherwise, of the novel genre itself.

ENGL 331 The Novel and the Normal
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-03. Theorists of the novel have long debated the means and the extent to which the genre consolidates national, social, and embodied ideas of the "normal" person or citizen. This course takes up that debate with reference to 19th- and 20th-century American, British, and Irish fiction in which a character's or a polity's physical body is at issue. How and why do modern novelists variously bend, break, or repurpose the rules of the novel genre or engage with the "norms" it projects? How do hallmarks of the novel (e.g., the creation of "round" and "flat" characters, the arc of plot, the evocation of mood, the description of social and environmental settings) contribute to dominant or other imaginations of the normal body at discrete historical moments? How does the novel genre work on its readers across time and in particular communities, including disability communities? Students can expect to explore these and other pressing questions about the novel and its publics as they read (a lot)-and savor reading-engrossing novels by Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Virginia Woolf, among others, as well as important critical writings on the politics, disability and otherwise, of the novel genre itself.

ENGL 404 Senior Thesis Workshop
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.