English courses for winter 2025
Dive into a wide array of topics, from classic and contemporary literature to creative and professional writing, as well as advanced studies in rhetoric and critical analysis! Our courses are designed to sharpen your reading, writing and analytical skills, while offering fresh perspectives on texts, language and storytelling. Whether you’re here to explore new literary horizons or to hone your craft, we’re excited to embark on this academic journey with you!
1000 level
ENG 1010: Basic Writing
All sections
English 1010 prepares students for English 1020 by building upon their diverse skills to help them become critical readers and effective writers at the college level. The main goals of the course are (1) to teach students to integrate reading and writing in basic academic genres; (2) to use a writing process that incorporates drafting, revising and editing for grammar and mechanics; and (3) to write according to the conventions of college writing, including documentation.
To achieve these goals, the course encourages students to read carefully; respond analytically and critically; and write in a variety of academic genres, including summary, response, analysis and argument for an academic audience.
ENG 1020: (BC) Introductory College Writing
All sections
In ENG 1020 you'll apply the Wayne State writing curriculum's core emphases of discourse community, genre, rhetorical situation and metacognition/reflection to written and multimedia works focused on specific audiences, such as your classmates, academic and professional audiences of various types or civic communities you might belong to or wish to influence in a particular way. While, as with all of the courses in the Wayne State required writing sequence, mechanical correctness and appropriate academic writing styles are key concerns, in ENG 1020 you'll also concentrate specifically on rhetoric (or persuasion) and argument as major objectives of many important kinds of writing you may be asked to produce. By focusing on rhetoric and audience, assignments in ENG 1020 will require you to do two major types of work. In one type, you'll analyze a particular piece of argumentative discourse to determine how it succeeds (or fails) to appropriately impact its audience. In another type, you'll choose a particular issue and a relevant audience for that issue and then argue for a certain point or for a certain action to be taken by that audience. Work in 1020 often takes place through the following key writing tasks, several of which might serve as long-term projects in your 1020 course: genre and subgenre analyses, genre critiques, researched position arguments, rhetorical analyses, definition analyses and arguments, proposal arguments and reflective argument and portfolio.ENG 1020 Introductory College Writing
ENG 1020: (BC) Introductory College Writing
Adrienne Jankens
This course includes students' practice with reading, writing, secondary research and reflection while they work to understand their own rhetorical practices, analyze the strategies others use to accomplish their rhetorical goals and compose their own argumentative texts. Students in this class will engage in peer mentoring with students from Cass Technical High School.
2000 level
ENG/AFS 2390: (IC, DEI) Introduction to African American Literature: Writing about Texts
All sections
Introduction to major themes and some major writers of African-American literature, emphasizing modern works. Reading and writing about representative poetry, fiction, essays and plays.
ENG/AFS 2390: (IC, DEI) Introduction to African American Literature: Writing about Texts
Allan Ford
Students will be prompted by specific selections of prose and fiction to discuss, think through, investigate, and evaluate African American experiences, histories, and culture. More specifically, students will be encouraged to use the selected literatures as well as their own experiences and research to evaluate the theme of "home". The literature will span the African American experience and highlight literary eras that include American Chattel Slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power era, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the current moment.
ENG 2415: (CI, GL) Geopolitics and Literature: Writing about Texts
Sarika Chandra
The term geopolitics generally refers to changing forms of power relations encompassing territorial struggles over global, regional and national geographies such as land mass, waterways and energy grids. This course offers a study of contemporary literature and culture that is attentive to such geopolitical forms of conflict, subordination and advantage. We will examine how writers have sought to understand and define a historically shifting integrated world. How do narrative arcs reimagine global spaces in relation to major questions such as those of labor, nation, war, imperialism, race, gender and sexuality? Our focus will be on texts that attempt to capture cross-border flows, migration, language and translation spanning different geopolitical boundaries. We will also read historical and critical essays that will help to contextualize the literary works. Readings may include writings by authors such as Christy Lefteri, David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta. This is a discussion-based course; therefore, attendance is required.
ENG 2500: (CI) Literature and Religion: Writing about Texts (Inferno)
Hilary Fox
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" reads the sign over the gates of hell--hopefully the description for this course is less ominous and more inviting. This course introduces students to and takes them on a journey through the world of Dante's Inferno (1321), one of the foundational works of European literature. Although we will focus our reading and discussion on the Inferno itself, we will fold in explorations of the theology, demonology, politics, ethics, literature, philosophy and concepts of crime and punishment that Dante fuses into one of the world's hellishly good reads.
ENG/GSW 2530: (DEI) Queer Literatures: Writing about Texts
Peter Marra
Queer Literatures explores queer voices and perspectives in writing. We will consider the frameworks of queer history and queer theory in order to understand and discuss the queer meanings of literature and the culturally specific writing practices of queer authors. Topics will include queerness as ambient and repressed subtext within classic horror and sci-fi literature, historicized explorations of queer shame via memoir, and imagined queer futures in YA literature and graphic novels.
ENG/GSW 2570: (CI, DEI) Women Writers: Writing about Texts
Elizabeth Evans
In this course, we will read and analyze powerful stories written in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by diverse women. Reading literature written by women from a variety of backgrounds reminds us that gender intersects with other constituents of identity, including race, class, sexuality and religion. We will pay special attention to this intersectionality in our discussion of these books as we consider to what extent women’s writing constitutes a distinct literary subculture forged out of what women may have in common, despite obvious and important differences. We will ask: How have women writers negotiated their relationships with language and literary history when patriarchal systems have so often limited women’s access to literacy and sociopolitical agency? How does their writing challenge literary conventions and reimagine history, tradition and resistance? Our texts are likely to include novels and short stories by Alison Bechdel, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Zitkala Šu and Virginia Woolf. This course has a hybrid format that provides the face-to-face meeting, collaborative learning and engagement with peers of the traditional classroom combined with the convenience of remote learning. It will meet in person about one day a month (dates to be announced prior to the start of the semester). On all other class days, we will meet synchronously on Zoom using our cameras, speakers and microphones to facilitate class and small group discussion.
ENG/LIN 2730: (GL) Languages of the World
Natalia Rakhlin
This course will introduce students to global linguistic diversity. We will survey languages spoken in different geographic regions of the world, discuss major language families focusing on a few representative languages and their speakers. We will compare characteristics of the sound system, word and sentence structure in diverse languages, learn about ways in which languages relate to each other, and historical reasons of these relationships. We will also discuss the importance of linguistic diversity and causes for widespread language loss and its implications. The course should broaden students’ understanding of the diversity and unity that exists in the way people structure their thoughts through language. This course fulfills the General Education Global Learning requirement.
3000 level
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
All sections
Building on students' diverse skills, ENG 3010 prepares students for reading, research and writing in the disciplines and professions, particularly for writing-intensive courses in the majors. To do so, it asks students to consider how research and writing are fundamentally shaped by the disciplinary and professional communities using them. Students analyze the kinds of texts, evidence and writing conventions used in their own disciplinary or professional communities and consider how these items differ across communities. Thus students achieve key composition objectives: (1) learn how the goals and expectations of specific communities shape texts and their functions; (2) learn how writing constructs knowledge in the disciplines and professions and (3) develop a sustained research project that analyzes or undertakes writing in a discipline or profession.
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
Ruth Boeder
ENG 3010 prepares students for reading, research, and writing in their disciplines and professions, particularly ahead of any Writing Intensive courses in the majors. The course prompts students to consider how writing and research are fundamentally shaped by the goals, values, and expectations of the disciplinary and professional communities using them.
ENG 3010: (IC) Intermediate Writing
Jule Thomas
Department of English Course Description ENG 3010 prepares students for reading, research and writing in their disciplines and professions, particularly ahead of any Writing Intensive courses in the majors. The course prompts students to consider how writing and research are fundamentally shaped by the goals, values and expectations of the disciplinary and professional communities using them. Students will also consider how they will position themselves as professionals in these communities. As a student in this course, you will work toward three core goals. The first of these is to develop a basic understanding of the discourse within a specific scholarly or professional community you intend to join. Secondly, you will practice researching and reading deeply into a focused research question developed around a contemporary topic from your discourse community. Finally, you will analyze and practice genres of writing that synthesize your research and help you practice valuable inquiry and research-writing strategies that can transfer to your future work in your field or discipline. The projects in this course are designed to help you explore the ways professionals read, write, research and communicate findings within the community in which they work.
ENG 3020: (IC) Writing and Community
All sections
ENG 3020 satisfies the intermediate composition (IC) requirement. It combines advanced research writing techniques with community-based activities with local community organizations. In addition to coursework, the course requires community-based work outside of normal class time distributed across the semester. Satisfies the honors college service-learning requirement.
ENG 3020: (IC) Writing and Community
Jule Thomas
Requirements of the Course: ENG 3020 is a community learning course that introduces students to the grant writing process and provides them with experience writing actual grant applications on behalf of a local non-profit organization, 826michigan. As a community learning course, students are required to complete 8 hours volunteering at 826michigan to better understand the mission and work of the organization and the learners it supports. The 8 volunteer hours will support students in finding and writing a grant proposal that may provide funding for 825michigan staff, learners and community outreach. Overview of Course: English 3020 is an opportunity for students to learn strategies about the Grant Writing process and provide students with actual experience writing real, submitted-to-funding-agency grants. The ability to write grants is a highly marketable skill, especially in today's political climate, which finds governments withdrawing support from education and non-profit, resulting in an increased need for finding additional financial support through grants. In the course, students will learn the basics of grant writing, including working with a client in need of funding, needs assessment, identifying potential funding sources, submitting a One Pager grant pitch, drafting and finalizing a grant proposal and identifying assessment plans. Our class will partner with 826michigan, a non-profit organization in Detroit who will be your client for the semester. The course will be collaborative where students work in teams to determine the mission, goals and needs of 826Michigan, draft a grant proposal, receive feedback for necessary revisions and present the final grant proposal and a multimodal presentation for 826Michigan. Students who complete this course will know how to write a grant and will be able to list grant writing experience on her or his résumé. If the grant is funded, students will also have a published grant for their résumé.
ENG 3060: (OC) Technical Communication II: Presentations
Chris Susak
Students in this course will develop projects in collaboration with real clients including community nonprofits, socially conscious startups and public institutions.
ENG 3090: Introduction to Cultural Studies (Cultural Poetics)
Barrett Watten
In this course, we will survey literary and cultural texts ranging from epic, lyric and avant-garde poetry; the novel, short stories and folk tales; visual art, film and media in relation to critical theories of culture. What we will be seeking is no less than a “poetics of culture”—the ways culture(s) and works of art mutually inform each other. How can we read a given culture through selected genres and forms; how do critical theories of culture help us read our texts? Literary and artistic works will range from the canonical to the highly experimental. There will be online responses, a series of short papers and open class discussion to bring together our texts and approaches.
ENG 3120: British Literature after 1700 (The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries)
renée hoogland
This course focuses on British literature from the modern and contemporary periods. We will read a wide range of literary texts—poetry, short stories, critical essays, plays, manifestos and (excepts from) novels to acquire a sense of the developments of both sociohistorical, political and cultural movements throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries that shaped and were at the same time informed by the literary texts of the era. We will pay special attention to aspects of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and other differences. The course will require careful close readings of a variety of literary texts and will ask you to write argumentative essays about the works we read. While we move through readings from the two centuries, we will study a textbook on reading, thinking and writing about literary texts that will help us to write meaningfully about them.
ENG 3140: American Literature after 1865 to Present
Todd (Laval) Duncan
The end of the American Civil War marks the beginning of our Survey of American Literature to the Present. Wars in fact have marked off the phases of our reading: Civil War to World War I, World War I to World War II, and World War II to the Present. Among the voices we are sampling are a speech by Booker T. Washington, a memoir by Zitkala- Sa, poems by Emily Dickinson, narratives by Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair; stories by Hemingway, poems by Langston Hughes; and narratives by Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Conner, Toni Morrison, and Sherman Alexie. By paying close attention to the contexts and distinct language of each work we read, we want to better understand the range and variety of our national literature as it has been developing. Our course will include some lecture but will depend mainly on discussion. There will be short quizzes, two short presentations, a midterm, and a final.
ENG 3250: Professional Editing
Ruth Boeder
ENG 3250 serves as a substantive introduction to technical and professional editing practices used in the workplace. The course provides an overview of copy editing and comprehensive editing practices while also engaging with emerging concerns related to ethics and globalized practices. Major projects, including a client project, are designed to help students prepare themselves to provide professional editing services. Even for those who will not be employed solely as editors, experience with editing work can be very valuable. Class will meet on campus 1/15, 1/29, 2/12, 2/26, 3/26, and 4/9 to allow for practicing key skills with each other; otherwise, independent work will be completed asynchronously.
ENG 3820: The Craft of Prose
Michael Okpanachi
In this course, through reading and practice, students will gain increasing mastery of the essential techniques of literary prose, both fiction and nonfiction. Each week we will turn our attention to a different element of craft—imagery, scene-building, dialogue, narrative distance, setting, characterization, plot, point-of-view, narrative time, nonfiction forms, subtext. We will read, respond to, and otherwise learn from an aesthetically eclectic selection of stories and essays, most but not all of them published in the last several decades. For guidance, we will also read one craft book, Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story, and two story collections, Junot Diaz’ The Cheater’s Guide to Love and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Weekly creative writing exercises will help build skills. Twice, students will revise one of their exercises into something approaching a final draft. Twice, they will write short analytical essays about one of our readings in which they examine closely one element of craft. Twice, I will administer a quiz in which I will ask students to apply the concepts we’ve been studying to passages of fiction and nonfiction. Using the workshop method, we will practice responding to one another’s efforts with editorial rigor, precision, and sympathy. By the end of the semester each student in the course will have written between 15 and 30 pages of original work.
4000 level
ENG 4850: Undergraduate Research Colloquium (Monstrous Thoughts)
Hilary Fox
The Undergraduate Research Colloquium provides undergraduates in the English program--majors, minors and concentrators alike--with the tools to conduct independent research in literary and cultural studies. Using literal and metaphorical monsters from a range of time periods, forms and genres, we will learn how to develop close readings of primary texts and fuse them with relevant contextual materials, then engage with secondary scholarship and use it to support close readings and interpretations. Writing will focus on the production of a range of interpretive and research-based materials, culminating in a longer final project that will prepare successful students for more advanced work in the field.
ENG 4991: Senior Honors Thesis Surrealist Tendencies: Avant-Garde to Global (meets with ENG 5992)
Barrett Watten
2024 marked the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism, a founding text of the avant-garde and a benchmark for literary and aesthetic theory. At art exhibitions and scholarly conferences celebrating this event, the emphasis has been on surrealism’s transformation as a European avant-garde, centered in Paris and then other European cities, as it proliferated across the globe, especially after 1945, to North and South America, Africa and the Caribbean and even Asia. This course will establish the basic principles of surrealism—literature and art that channel the “automatic message” and the unconscious, making revolutionary new forms of art that attack the given forms of modern societies, subjects and objects. We will move from basic texts such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and André Breton’s Nadja; to the collective products of the movement, especially poetry and automatic writing; to the work of surrealist women such as Leonora Carrington and Joyce Mansour; to global influences from Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo; to recent films (Pan’s Labryinth) and novels (Han Kang); to its influence on African-American poets. The seminar will be interactive and reflexive; involving weekly response notes (which may be creative) and a final research paper; with a field trip to visit the DIA and Detroit flea markets.
5000 level
ENG/GSW 5035: Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies: Horror and Otherness
Peter Marra
Horror and Otherness explores cultural and historical traditions of enmeshing marginalized identities with screen images of the monster. We will consider scholarship that has seen horror media as reflective of social and political struggles pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, class and disability, such as Harry M. Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet, Robin R. Means Coleman’s Horror Noire, Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine, and Angela M. Smith’s Hideous Progeny. Through readings and screenings, we will advance a collective understanding of horror as an art form in which marginalized communities have found meaningful embrace. This includes exploring questions of narrative allegory, spectatorship, and evolving practices of self-authored community-based horror cinemas. Students will develop a clear understanding of how marginalized communities have historically seen and identified with horror and how these identifications yield cultural practices that reimagine horror as a queer, Black, feminist, and disabled cinema.
ENG 5090: Topics in Critical Theory: Climate, Race and Capitalism (meets with ENG 7004)
Sarika Chandra
How do various writers understand the planetary environmental emergency and attempt to reimagine our future? Centered on environment and ecology, we will aim to understand how climate catastrophe relates to race, gender, class, migration, health and labor. How do different writings explore the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, oil/energy, food/water, war, urban spaces, conservation and extinction? We will read theoretical and historical scholarship that will ground the discussion on ecological crisis. The course will analyze literature and film in consideration in relation to broader social processes. Reading may include the work of writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Timothy Mitchell, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Winona LaDuke. Students will have the opportunity to develop their written work commensurate with their own intellectual interests. This is a discussion-based course; therefore, attendance is required.
ENG 5095: Topics in Visual Culture: Mediated Identities
renée hoogland
The pervasive presence of images and a range of visual technologies in our everyday lives entail that ideas, knowledge and beliefs are increasingly being disseminated through the visual. Mixing “high” cultural forms such as fine art, design and architecture with popular or “low” cultural forms such as film, print images, television and digital multimedia, our everyday reality today is increasingly marked by cross-mediation: how do we negotiate the different codes required to see and make sense of what we are looking at? How do image and word interact in the immersive textual-visual systems we inhabit? What are the social and political implications and effects of the hybridization of visual cultural forms? And how do we acquire the level of visual literacy effectively to deal with and understand the operation of images? This course focuses on questions and theories that are critical to Visual Culture, a field at the crossroads of various disciplines (including art history, cultural studies, film and media studies, anthropology, semiotics, communication), which turns the visual, vision and visuality as such into objects of study. We will engage both the theory and practice of visual culture by looking at and discussing a great many visual artifacts, as well as study critical methodologies that emphasize the importance of cultural diversity in defining and understanding visual culture.
ENG 5150: Shakespeare
Ken Jackson
The idea that Shakespeare was a "timeless" author ("not of an age, but for all time" per his great rival Ben Jonson) came under severe criticism in the 20th century. To identify an artist as outside time: capable of expressing universal truths – was seen to privilege a single viewpoint at the expense of others. It was sexist, racist, homophobic and much else. The critique seems commonplace – if not common sense – now, but it was once cutting-edge, sophisticated literary criticism. Now that the late twentieth-century arguments that placed Shakespeare back in his own time and place have become standard fare – the stuff of Twitter arguments and K12 professional development training – it is worth testing again Shakespeare's "timelessness." How well does he address matters rather urgent to us? Anti-semitism? The relationship between Islam and the West? Race? Trauma? Truth in politics and governance?
ENG 5480: Special Topics in African American Literature: Can't Forget the Motor City
Todd (Laval) Duncan
Detroit has a rich legacy of poets and poetry. Most of these poets, though not all, are from Detroit, several nurtured by Wayne State. All have been shaped by the city. In ways direct and indirect they write about it. Our course focuses principally on the legacy of African American poets but attempts to understand that legacy within a broad context that includes other poets and cultural intersections afforded by Detroit—and generic urban life. We will study Robert Hayden and the Broadside legacy of Dudley Randall, and we’ll look at the significance of writers as diverse as the late Naomi Long Madgett (Detroit Poet Laureate), Murray Jackson, and Alvin Aubert. Additionally, we will explore the importance of Philip Levine, the latest U.S. Poet Laureate to have been shaped by Detroit. We will also acknowledge the contributions of Melba Boyd, Nandi Comer (Michigan Poet Laureate), and jessica Care moore (Detroit Poet Laureate). Finally, we will pay some attention to an array of other significant Detroit poets, including Vievee Francis, the late David Blair, Jamaal May, and Francine Harris. Among the several books we will use are Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems, the Broadside anthology A Different Image, Naomi Long Madgett’s Connected Islands, Phillip Levine’s What Work Is, and the anthology Abandon Automobile. Everyone will keep a journal and do a final project. While there will be some lecture, the course will develop through discussion.
English 5550: Topics in Fiction: Wonderlands, the Strange and the Surreal English
Natalie Bakopoulos
This section of English 5550, Topics in Fiction, is an upper-level literature course that will explore and examine works of literary fiction—mostly novels—that intersect with the speculative or surreal. The course title comes from an essay by Charles Baxter entitled “Wonderlands.” Assigned works will be chosen from the fiction and criticism/essays of authors such as Yoko Ogawa, Olga Ravn, Cristina Rivera Garza, Hiroko Oyamada, Georgi Gospodinov, Mohsin Hamid, Laura van den Berg, Colson Whitehead, Deborah Levy, Rumaan Alam, Charles Baxter, Danielle Evans and others. There will be several analytical response papers and a final essay project. The class is traditional face-to-face (with the possible, occasional asynchronous week).
ENG 5595: Topics in Global Literatures: Empire and Gender in Global Literature
Elizabeth Evans
This course will explore the formative role of empire and anti-imperial movements in global literature, especially as they have intersected with gender. Our task is not so much to define, or even to survey, empire and gender’s literary significance, for circumstances differ vastly among geographic and cultural sites (think, for starters, of the disparate histories of Australia, India, Ireland, South Africa and Sudan, all of which were part of the British empire). Rather, our approach will be episodic, consisting of a series of loosely connected themes and issues and it will consist of more questions than answers. What are the connections between ideas of the nation and narrative? How has literature been both complicit in the imperial project and a form of anti-colonial resistance? How are purportedly private identities (such as of gender, class and sexual orientation) and intimate relationships between people (as parents and children, as siblings, as friends, as lovers) entangled in national identities and international relations? How, above all, has gender been central to the operations of empire and to anti-imperial movements? We will read a diverse selection of novels from the colonial, postcolonial and contemporary eras by such authors as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Mulk Raj Anand, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy and Tayeb Salih. This course has a hybrid format that provides the face-to-face meeting, collaborative learning and engagement with peers of the traditional classroom combined with the convenience of remote learning. It will meet in person about one day a month (dates to be announced prior to the start of the semester). On all other class days, we will meet synchronously on Zoom using our cameras, speakers and microphones to facilitate class and small group discussion.
English 5695: Publishing Practicum
M.L. Liebler
This class is designed to give students hands-on experience producing, creating and publishing a creative or scholarly journal for undergraduates at Wayne State. This semester, we will format, design and be ready for publication in the 2024 Wayne Literary Review in April. In addition, we will establish a WLR website that will contain the Review and serve as a possible outlet for creative writing by WSU students. Students will get experience in running this website and all social media. In addition, we will likely work on other possible chapbook-style publications as we establish a Teaching Press. Basic topics covered include editing, formatting and publishing texts. Prerequisites: AFS 2390 with a minimum grade of C, ENG 2390 with a minimum grade of C, ENG 3010 with a minimum grade of C, ENG 3020 with a minimum grade of C, or ENG 3050 with a minimum grade of C.
ENG 5710/LIN 5290: Phonology
Irina Monich
The sound systems of a variety of human languages compared and contrasted in an introduction to the diversity and similarities in human sound systems. Theories of the nature of sound systems and methods of analysis in phonology and morphophonology will be presented.
ENG 5870: Poetry Writing Workshop
Chris Tysh
I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart—Jacques Derrida This course will be an intense engagement with experimental lyric poetry and its various strategies. By focusing on some key representative modalities in American poetics, from Objectivist to New York School, from Beat to Language, to name just a few, the class will gauge the many ways that lyric plays at experiencing language in its materiality and its relationship to the social world. We will, in particular, attend to some key concepts that inform much of today’s postmodern poetry: defamiliarization, self-reflexivity, diminished referentiality and intertextuality. The aim will be not only to familiarize ourselves with today's writing scene but to stretch our notions about what constitutes poetic language. In other words, what can the lyric do or not do? How is it embedded culturally, ideologically? Can it contest prevailing myths of reality? Can it slide into critique? Another set of questions might center around the language of sites, where texts mirror, perform or disrupt the various structures that compose them: memory, desire, corporeality and genre. The authors studied will include Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Juan Felipe Herera, Erica Hunt, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara and Stephen Rodefer. A few theoretical essays will extend our discussion. The class will be a seminar-style discussion and will include a series of class critiques. Requirements: attendance, preparedness, participation, ten weekly assignments (1 page each approx.) a final manuscript of original works (25 pages minimum) and one oral presentation. Grading: Participation/Preparation: 20%; oral presentation: 20%; weekly assignments: 30%; final manuscript: 30%
ENG 5992/4991: Senior Seminar: Surrealist Tendencies: Avant-Garde to Global (meets with ENG 4991)
Barrett Watten
2024 marked the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism, a founding text of the avant-garde and a benchmark for literary and aesthetic theory. At art exhibitions and scholarly conferences celebrating this event, the emphasis has been on surrealism’s transformation as a European avant-garde, centered in Paris and then other European cities, as it proliferated across the globe, especially after 1945, to North and South America, Africa and the Caribbean and even Asia. This course will establish the basic principles of surrealism—literature and art that channels the “automatic message” and the unconscious, making revolutionary new forms of art that attack the given forms of modern societies, subjects and objects. We will move from basic texts such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and André Breton’s Nadja; to the collective products of the movement, especially poetry and automatic writing; to the work of surrealist women such as Leonora Carrington and Joyce Mansour; to global influences from Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo; to recent films (Pan’s Labryinth) and novels (Han Kang); to its influence on African-American poets. The seminar will be interactive and reflexive; involving weekly response notes (which may be creative) and a final research paper; with a field trip to visit the DIA and Detroit flea markets.
6000 level
ENG 6003: Teaching Film and Media Studies
Chera Kee
This course has three main objectives: to prepare students to teach an introductory undergraduate Film Studies course, to introduce students to the history of film and media studies as a discipline and how that history has shaped pedagogy and theory in the field and to expose students to some of the important sub-fields of the discipline, including Television Studies, Video Game Studies and Fan Studies. Students in the course will focus the majority of their time on creating a syllabus for an undergraduate Film & Media studies course. They will leave the course with a better understanding of film and media studies as a field, as well as practical methods for teaching a variety of Film and Media Studies topics.
ENG/LIN 6720: Topics in Language: Field Methods
Irina Monich
This course provides hands-on experience in linguistic data collection and analysis through the study of an unfamiliar language, in collaboration with a native speaker. Students will learn and apply techniques in linguistic fieldwork, including elicitation methods, transcription, and data organization. Additionally, students will develop critical skills in linguistic analysis and hypothesis testing. By the end of the course, students will have constructed a preliminary grammatical description of the language under study.
7000 level
ENG 7004: Theoretical Issues in Cultural Studies: Climate, Race and Capitalism (meets with ENG 5090)
Sarika Chandra
How do various writers understand the planetary environmental emergency and attempt to reimagine our future? Centered on environment and ecology, we will aim to understand how climate catastrophe relates to race, gender, class, migration, health and labor. How do different writings explore the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, oil/energy, food/water, war, urban spaces, conservation and extinction? We will read theoretical and historical scholarship that will ground the discussion on ecological crisis. The course will analyze literature and film in consideration in relation to broader social processes. Reading may include the work of writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Timothy Mitchell, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Winona LaDuke. Students will have the opportunity to develop their written work commensurate with their own intellectual interests. This is a discussion-based course; therefore, attendance is required.
ENG 7044: African American Literature and Culture (meets with GSW 5400)
Lisa Ze Winters
This course takes up the question of representations of Black motherhood in African American writing from slavery through the present. How do Black writers use the figure of the Black mother to imagine possibilities for resistance, revolution and liberation of Black people? How might examining the reproductive lives and the social-reproductive labor of Black women help us theorize the ways family, kinship, care, gender and sexuality may at once be sites of resistance even as they are sites of oppression and violence? How does centering Black motherhood in our analyses help us theorize the political work of mothering Black children? Readings will include literary works from slavery through the present as well as scholarship that provides crucial socio-historical context and offers theoretical frameworks to guide and challenge our analyses.
ENG 7062: Designing Research in Composition and Rhetoric
Adrienne Jankens
This course provides an overview of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research in writing studies as well as in-depth engagement with in-process qualitative studies that utilize interviewing and participatory action research as primary methods. Students will read methods-focused texts and example studies that take up interviewing, text analysis, ethnography, action research and student voice research. Individual writing assignments will include weekly writing responses exploring methods and research problems, short synthesis essays and a research bibliography or research narrative. The class will collaborate on analysis for a longitudinal interview study.
ENG/LIN 7720: Advanced Studies in Language Use: Language Disorders
Natalia Rakhlin
This course will provide an overview of several acquired and developmental disorders affecting language and communication, including aphasia, specific language impairment, autism, genomic disorders (Williams and Down’s syndrome), schizophrenia and more. We will contrast different theoretical perspectives attempting to explain the nature of language impairments in these disorders. We will also address how the empirical findings about language disturbances in these populations confront the key theoretical debates in cognitive science, including the issue of innateness (i.e., whether any specific aspects of linguistic structure are encoded in our DNA), often discussed in conjunction with the issue of modularity and domain specificity (the degree to which various language domains and other cognitive domains are separable and function independently from each other).
English 7800: Seminar in Creative Writing: The Essay Collection as Theme-and-Variation
Donovan Hohn
Part graduate writing workshop in creative nonfiction, part literary seminar, this course will consider The Essay as a literary genre and The Essay Collection as a literary form comparable to a collection of poems or short stories. Although the essays they collect are self-contained enough to be published separately, the several books we will be reading are not miscellanies but artful arrangements in which the essays play variations on some unifying preoccupations, fields of study, subjects, or themes—empathy, say, or entropy, or entomology, to name three examples from titles I considered including on our reading list. The essays these books collect tend to be formally various and we will pay close attention to their forms. They include literary journalism, personal essays, lyric essays, hermit crab essays, forensic essays and archeological essays. A few include critical essays. Many hybridize these strains of creative nonfiction, combining the personal and the documentary, the lyrical and the critical. All are written for a general rather than specialized audience, as will be all of the writing we do in the course. Most of the collections on our reading list are comparatively new, published in the past ten years, but we will be accompanying them with selected essays by important precursors, tugging at if not unearthing rhizomes that extend deep into the past. Although we will write short critical responses to the books on our reading list, mainly we will be seeking from them models and inspirations for our own creative nonfiction. Over the course of the semester, you will map out a hypothetical table of contents for a collection of essays that play variations on your chosen theme and you will write and workshop two or three of those variations before the semester ends.