ENGL 552 Seminar in Drama
Professor Lincoln Konkle
Thursday 5:00-7:30pm (Blended Learning Format)
ENGL 552 will focus on 20th-century American Drama. The course explores the evolution of American drama into one of the great bodies of theatre and drama in Western civilization. American playwrights¿ experimentation in dramatic form and the liberalization of dramatic subject matter are so rich and varied that this course’s selection of plays cannot fully represent the many aesthetic, philosophical, social, and theatrical issues related to American drama. Nevertheless, the plays we will read constitute a chronological survey of the most important experiments in dramaturgy, and many of the plays treat the prevailing American social issues of the 20th century (and the 21st century with the last couple of plays). Finally, although we are reading plays as literature, we will also consider certain aspects and issues of theatrical production, since the plays were written to be performed on a stage. Assignments include a couple of short non-research essays, a researched presentation, and a research essay.
ENGL 554 Seminar in Prose Fiction
Professor Jo Carney
Tuesday 5:00-7:30pm (Blended Learning Format)
The scholarly discourse on adaption, appropriation, and intertextuality is dynamic, extensive, and productively contentious. Adaptation theory has emerged as a robust field of critical study in its own right as literary retellings and revisions of works considered ¿canonical¿ keep appearing at a prodigious rate. In this seminar we will read canonical works paired with literary adaptations and appropriations, focusing on what takes place in the process. Works include Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad and Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles; Charles Dickens¿ David Copperfield and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead; and Emily Dickinson’s poetry and Apple TV’s Dickinson.
ENGL 640 Seminar in Romantic Literature
Professor David Venturo
Wednesday 5:00-7:30pm (Blended Learning Format)
Between 1790 and 1830, a small group of ground-breaking writers revolutionized English poetry by creating a new, lyrical, and expressive poetry that celebrated and explored the visionary creativity of the artistic mind. We will read works, chiefly poetry, by the British Romantics, focusing on the poetry of William Blake; William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; and John Keats, with excursions into their letters, essays, and literary criticism.
ENGL 670 Studies in Literature: Post Colonial Literature
Professor Samira Abdur-Rahman
Monday 5:00-7:30pm
This course examines the intersections of environmentalism, postcolonial landscapes and decolonial thought, literature and art. We will center Indigenous, Black, Asian and Latinx scholarship, writing and cultural productions to examine the social and environmental legacy of colonial occupation and ideology. We will focus on literature and film that trouble conventional approaches to “nature” or “wilderness.” We will also consider tensions between the rhetoric of the Anthropocene and the long history of combined and uneven development that renders postcolonial states and marginalized communities within the Americas more vulnerable to the exigencies of climate change. Writers to be discussed include Winona LaDuke, Edwidge Danticat, Raja Shehadah and Arundhati Roy.