There's the episodic/fragmentary novel (Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever; Steve ... (
Chris Bachelder's U.S.!; Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) ...
2014 Spring Course Offerings Wasserman Workshop
UA
T
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-807
Barzak Workshop
YSU
T
5:10 – 7:50 pm
26122-ENGL 6967-01
Rahman C&T
CSU
TH
6:00 – 9:00 pm
ENG615
Barnhouse C&T
YSU
W
5:10 – 7:50 pm
26524 - ENGL 6969 - 01
Giffels Workshop
UA
TH
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-809
Novel Writing II: Open to all NEOMFA students. Having taken the fall Novel Writing I workshop is NOT required. Both students working on novels and those working on self-contained short stories or interlinked stories are welcome. A continuation of Novel Writing I with a special emphasis on what the aspiring novelists in the workshop can learn from their short story writing peers in the class and vise versa. No assigned reading other than the creative work produced by workshop members.
Unusual Structures of the Novel: In this class we will look, as writers, at five unconventional novelistic structural choices, and read two examples of each unexpected structure. There’s the episodic/fragmentary novel (Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever; Steve Erickson’s Zeroville), the collage novel (Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!; Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?), the epistolary novel (Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin; Arthur Phillips’ The Egyptologist), the novel-in-stories (Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff; Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge), and the overlapping novel (Steven Wright’s Going Native; Joy Williams’ The Quick & The Dead). We’ll not only expand your bag of writerly tricks but also expose you to writers &/or books that you probably haven’t read (& should read!), and familiarize you with a variety of fairly unusual (but not necessarily new) structural approaches to the novel, so that you can get outside your comfort zone and produce work that is fresh and surprising. The class culminates with each student writer picking one structure to work with/through and writing a 25-30 page novel excerpt, along with a 3-5 page novel proposal, which will both be presented to the class. Writing the Youth Novel: ENG 6969 will focus on strategies for crafting middle grade and young adult novels. In the first weeks of the course we will examine several recent novels as well as works about youth literature. Then we will turn to exploring craft through intensive writing.
In this MFA course, students will workshop a semester-long writing project, working either in long-form nonfiction or a series of related essays, with exercises to develop a concept and advance the writing process. Please note: Enrollment limits observed.
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2014 Spring Course Offerings continued... O’Connor C&T
KSU
T
5:30 – 8:15 pm
66895/12992
Geither Workshop
CSU
W
3:00 – 5:50 pm
ENG612
Biddinger Workshop
UA
T
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-808
Wing C&T
KSU
M
4:25 – 7:05 pm
66895/12993
The focus of this craft & theory will be biography, not in simply the conventional sense. Though we will consider some traditional biography, we’ll also be looking at the profile and how nonfiction prose centered on individual lives is approached in the personal essay and memoir. We’ll read and analyze texts together, while working toward our own biographical writing which we will workshop (probably one piece or chapter per student) in the latter part of the semester. Books will include Diane Arbus, a biography of the photographer by Patricia Bosworth, My Brother, a memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, My Dog Tulip, a memoir by J.R. Ackerly, and A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin. We may look at one or two biographical novels, which may be The Master by Colm Toibin, Passing by Nella Larsen and/or The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje. A number of the profiles and personal essays we read will consider the lives of creative artists; authors will include Natalia Ginzburg, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata.
This is an open workshop designed to facilitate completion of full-length plays. For the first four weeks we will write intensively and consider unconventional contemporary plays. No adaptations or documentary-related works may be considered for your semester-long project.
This course will focus almost exclusively on student poems, with a significant amount of time dedicated to workshopping. Students will submit new poems every week and receive extensive feedback from peers and instructor. Loose Meters & Free Forms: A Study of Traditional Form in Contemporary Poetry: If Louis Sullivan’s dictum that “form ever follows function” is true, then what can be said of form’s role in poetry? Even on clear (and optimistic) days the function of poetry remains somewhat elusive, while the idea of strict poetic form leaves many poets uneasy. Are we, as Frost would have it, “playing tennis with the net down,” or have we, a la Ezra Pound, freed ourselves from “the sequence of the metronome” and “the shackles of the iamb”? In this class we will explore form’s role in poetry, as we consider where we might stand in relation to it, as writers. The class will serve as an introduction to (and practice of) form’s basic mechanics, as well as an investigation of what effects these techniques have on a reader. We’ll look at the evolution of form over time—sapphics to sonnets, iambs to Oulipo—to determine what different structures can accomplish. No formal background required, just an open mind and a willingness to experiment.
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2014 Spring Course Offerings
Internship
Miltner Internship
KSU
S
10:00 am – 1:00 pm 6
66895/12944
The Internship class is comprised of two components: an internship experience in teaching, publication, nonprofit or other, to better prepare students for their career interest, and a series of four seminars that supplement these areas as well as resumes, cv’s and cover letters; researching jobs; and interview techniques. Guest speakers attend some of the sessions. This course will meet four times during the semseter: Jan. 25, Feb. 22, Mar. 22, and Apr. 26.
Literature THE Univeristy of Akron Braun
UA
M
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-806
Chura
UA
M
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-805
Forster
UA
T
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-801
Nunn
UA
Th
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:615-801
COURSE FULL The Doppelganger: This course investigates the evolution of the Doppelgänger figure in nineteenth-century British literature. For their final projects, students will investigate one example of the Doppelgänger since 1950 and its relevance to shifting trends in thinking about this figure’s importance since 1800. American Regional Realism: Major fiction of the local color or regionalist movement—which began in the late nineteenth century as the U.S. experienced rapid territorial expansion and a corresponding desire to “survey and map” in literary form the new and varied cultural landscape. Works on the syllabus reveal traditions, man-ners, dialects and historical concerns of distinct geographic localities both rural and urban. Author list: Mark Twain, C.W. Chesnutt, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Edward Eggleston, George W. Cable, Elia Peattie, Jack London, Gene Stratton-Porter. J Austen & F Burney: We’ll examine in detail the work of these two women novelists, considering their similarities and differences and aiming to see them in the context of the development of fiction that preceded and followed them and to try to determine the reasons for their relative popularity at different times, including the increasing recent interest in both writers by feminist critics. Shakespearean Drama: This seminar will deal with Shakespeare as a professional dramatist in the Early Modern English theatre. Although various approaches may be used, the primary focus will be on text, performance, and theatrical conditions, both contemporary and modern.
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2014 Spring Course Offerings Literature continued... Pope
UA
W
5:20 – 7:50 pm
3300:689-803
COURSE FULL O’Connor & Malamud: After WWII it was still possible to make money selling stories to magazines; at the same time, writers were forgoing of the short story a new art form. Key collections reshaped the nature and aim of short fiction, foremost among them, O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Malamud’s The Majic Barrel, Salinger’s Nine Stories, Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, and Updikes’ Pigeon Feathers. Expect a combination of papers to equal twenty pages.
CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY Carnell
CSU
T,Th
6:00 – 7:50 pm
ENG695
Giampietro
CSU
Th
3:00 – 5:50 pm
ENG616
Marino
CSU
M,W
6:00 – 7:50 pm
ENG511
T,Th
12:30 – 1:45 pm
Eng 66991/12995
Graduate Seminar/Secret Histories and Novels: Popular in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, secret histories recounted gossip about sex scandals and political corruption in the courts of Charles II, James II, and Anne. Long misunderstood by literary historians as badly written or unrealistic novels, these works, in the style of romans à clef, defined a popular literary genre in their own eras and served as stylistic precursors to the later British novel. In this seminar, we will read a sampling of these texts from 1680 to 1750—by authors such as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood—and examine recent critical accounts analyzing this racy, best-selling, and influential—but long misunderstood—literary form. MFA Literature/Skittery Poetry: Students will study the history of the skittery / leaping poem and poems made predominantly with associative leaps. Texts may include “Technicians of the Sacred,” “Leaping Poetry” by Robert Bly, as well as single books of poetry by John Ashbery, Matthea Harvey, Wendy Xu, and the like. For more information on the term “skittery” see Tony Hoagland’s essay at The Poetry Foundation: Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment” Critical Approaches to Literature
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY Camden
KSU
Seminar: Archive Fever Starting with Derrida’s treatise on the archive, this course will look at the significance of archival research in the early modern period with special emphasis on the resurgence of interest in Early Modern women’s manuscript studies. Then we will move to examine the more recent celebration of domestic papers and archival reconstruction in Life-Writing of diarists, memoirists, and letter writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and DW Winnicott. We will conclude with more recent attention given to “graphic narratives” by Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, and transnational narratives of Marjane
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2014 Spring Course Offerings Literature continued... Satrapi noted in the critical study _Graphic Women_ by Hilary Chute. Each of these forms relies on the archive, its reconstruction, imagining, and representation in creative forms. Throughout this course we will rely on theories of the subject and articulation of lived experience as theorized by psychoanalysis.
Clewell
KSU
M,W
11:00 am – 12:15 pm
Eng 66401/12989
Floyd
KSU
M,W
5:30 – 6:45 pm
Eng 67104/12996
Van Ittersum
KSU
T
11:00 AM – 1:15 pm
Eng 65053/12988
Roman
KSU
W
2:15 – 5:00 pm
Eng 66791-12990
Literary Movements: Course offers a research-based approach to the study of “high modernism,” focusing on the work of Forster, Ford, West, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, Eliot, and Woolf. Social & Cultural Theory and Criticism
Writing Technologies: Writing on computers has taken numerous forms in the past fifty years, such as word processors, hypertext markup, instant messaging, email, and new media creation. In this course, we will explore the ways these technologies shape writing and other literate practices as well as the ways technologies are developed and appropriated by people through their practices. The Medieval Mystical Text: This course addresses the issue of the medieval mystical text. Beginning with early church writings, represented by Saint Anselm and Pseudo-Dionysus, we will take a historical account of the medieval mystical text ending with the work of Margery Kempe and Nicholas Love. Along the way, we will be examining how the mystics represented themselves in relation to the larger church institution which was often threatened by them, as well as consider the influence medieval mystics have had on twentieth and twenty-first century literary theory. Medieval mystics discuss the problem of the body, gender, community, and the natural world—all concepts we are still wrestling with. As well, we will be looking at medieval material culture by utilizing the British Library’s on-line manuscript library and spending time with British Library MS Additional 37049. We will be mostly reading these texts in Middle English; a prior knowledge of ME is not necessary.
YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY Andrews
YSU
T
5:10 – 7:50 pm
26521 - ENGL 6914 - 01
Brown Anderson
YSU
Th
5:10 – 7:50 pm
25953 - ENGL 6963 - 01
Graber
YSU
M
5:10 – 7:50 pm
26859 - ENGL 6919 - 01
Restoration and 18th-Century British Perspective Multicultural Studies Studies in Young Adult Literature
