Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)

CRN: 42530

Lecture

St Paul: John Roach Center 246

  Laura Zebuhr

This course provides an introduction to the expectations and conventions of graduate study, including research and writing methodology. In addition, it will introduce students to the field of English studies: its areas of specialization, key issues, and genres of writing. This course must be taken as one of the first three courses in the MA in English program.

3 Credits

Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)

CRN: 42531

Lecture

St Paul: John Roach Center 481

  Kanishka Chowdhury

In this course, we will examine the border both as geographical line and limit and imaginative space and method. How might the current regimentation of borders work on and against the increasing dispersal of global culture and capital? How might our analysis of the border as an epistemic framework shape the way we read texts? This class will consider the ways in which writers and theorists are rethinking notions of the border as a political and aesthetic category. This course is required by all students entering the program in the summer of 2018 and beyond.

3 Credits

Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)

CRN: 42552

Lecture

St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 212

  Martin Warren

J.R.R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor and eminent medievalist, is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works that have been popular since they were first published. One of Tolkien’s distinctive contributions to fantasy writing lies in the example he set as a builder of worlds. Fantasy and science-fiction novelists, game designers, and role-play enthusiasts all acknowledge Tolkien as a master in the art of constructing a universe with its own history and geography, flora and fauna, cultures and languages, magic and physics. Tolkien rooted his fictional works in the language and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Gothic, and Celtic cultures that he studied as a medievalist. The class examines his major, seminal fantasy fictions through these cultures, traditions, and languages alongside the theories he himself developed of fantasy world-building. The labor of creating Middle-earth, in its various phases, revisions and versions, has become a subject of study, to which much academic attention has been devoted. Questions that guide this class are: What are the implications and ramifications of the act of worldbuilding, especially as it was conceived and practiced by Tolkien? How do we situate Tolkien's creation within the context of Tolkien’s work as both artist and medievalist and alongside its medieval sources and modern parallels, the uses of tradition, the nature of history and its relationship to place? What does Tolkien’s work teach us about storytelling, art and imagination? How are Tolkien’s works repurposed in modern media (a children’s play, spoken word poetry, visual art, film, radio, song cycle, Aubusson tapestries, dialect literature and YouTube videos)? This course fulfills the early British literature distribution requirement.

3 Credits

Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)

CRN: 42534

Lecture

St Paul: John Roach Center 481

  Leslie Miller

This graduate course in the writing of poetry will include practical, theoretical and creative explorations of poetry writing and publishing. A combination of readings, workshop experiences, and writing exercises designed to facilitate exploration of subject matter and technique, this course welcomes students exploring the genre of poetry for the first time, as well as students continuing studies in poetry writing. Readings will include practical, theoretical and creative texts, and address poetry writing in publishing contexts-- how poetry collections are written, revised, organized, submitted, acquired, edited, and marketed. Students will also gain insight into broader issues in the publishing world such as the roles of small and independent presses, university presses, traditional major presses, online publishing, audience development, and issues of access and diversity in the literary marketplace.

3 Credits

Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)

CRN: 42533

Lecture

St Paul: John Roach Center 481

  Emily James

Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, this class will look closely at modernist experiments across the arts and then turn to the homages and reactions they inspired later in the century. Writers may include E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Roddy Doyle, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Ali Smith. This course satisfies the transnational requirement in the new curriculum.

3 Credits