Fall 2008
Program Requirements 600: Introduction to Graduate Studies (Graduate Coordinator) American Literature 626R: Early American Women's Novels (Lawrence) 640: Studies in Folklore (Rudy) British Literature 520R: Old English I (Chapman) [Part II Winter '09] 622R: Women's Studies and Victorian Literature (Thorne-Murphy) Rhetoric and Composition 613: Rhetorical Theory and Criticism (Jackson) Creative Writing 517R: Creative Non-fiction (Thayer)
This course is a graduate workshop designed for advanced poetry students who are working to develop and refine their personal voice and style and prepare poems to send to journals. Students will read a broad spectrum of contemporary poetry and articles by practicing poets about their poetics; write and revise ten or more new poems; and prepare an essay in which they express this personal poetics.
521R: Writing for Children and Adolescents (Crowe)
“The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Anxiety of Influence,” will explore the work of six theorists: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Foucault, Lacan, and Jameson. We will read each theorist in detail. We will also explore the ways in which each of the three later theorists (Foucault, Lacan, and Jameson) misreads and rewrites one of the original practitioners of the so-called Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, respectively). So in a sense we will be looking at three related binaries: Nietzsche/Foucault, Freud/Lacan, Marx/Jameson. This version of 630R will be the most intense I have ever taught—and hopefully the most interesting.
American Literature 629R: Early 21st Century American Fiction and Poetry (Hickman) 623R: Political Economics and19th Century Novel - Amer/Brit (Christianson) British Literature 520R: Old English II (Wilcox) 620R: British Literature before 1660 - Spencer (Johnson) 622R: British Literature 1830-present - Woolf/Joyce (Harris) Rhetoric and Composition 615: Technical and Professional Communication (Zimmerman)
Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream; Ron Carlson Writes a Story; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird; Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer; Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences. I'll expect to discuss at least parts of these, and may also assign and discuss some readings on Reserve. I'll expect students to read 200+ pages of fiction in their genre by a living or recently dead writer, and to write a 7-10 page informal essay or set of notes on this reading. Half or more of the class sessions will be workshops. I'll expect students to write and revise 50+ pages of fiction and submit it in "finished" form in a portfolio at the end of the semester. The final exam will likely be a reading by each member of the class.
519R: This course is a graduate poetry workshop. Each student writes and revises original poetry, teaches a class session on a poetry book of his/her choosing, and writes a formal essay articulating his/her poetics. The goal in this course is not merely composition, but also the identification and synthesis of one's poetic project.
This course is designed to give advanced creative writing students experience examining the theory of writing creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. As they read both theoretical and literary texts, students will pose questions about the purpose of each genre, examine the range of what has been achieved, locate themselves within the contemporary project, and determine what constitutes excellence in the type of creative writing they pursue. Practically, this course should help graduate students in the creative writing emphasis draft the critical introduction to their theses.
Spring 2009Program Requirements 630R: Theoretical Discourse (Keith Johnson) American Literature 628R: American Literature - Modernism (Cutler) British Literature 621R: British Literature - 1660-1830 (Paxman)