The following course descriptions only provide information about the focus that an individual professor chooses to take for their course. These descriptions are not a replacement for the official course description. Use the Course Description Search page to find the official course description.

AML 6268: Regional U.S. Literature of the American South
Dr. Masami Sugimori
T 5:00-7:45
Through close textual, intertextual, and contextual analyses of course readings, we will explore Southern literature in terms of its complex interaction with the socio-cultural factors in and outside of the region. In doing so, we will also examine literary and cultural criticisms about/from the South. The course’s reading list includes book-length works by Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Walter Francis White, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Howard Griffin, Ernest Gaines, and Selah Saterstrom. Required coursework includes essays, exams, group presentations, and in-class assignments.

ENG 6058 Lit., Language, and Society
Sutton, Timothy J.
Thursday 5:00-7:45 
This course xamines the function of language in social groups with special focus on the relationships among the individual, social institutions, and literature. This is the introductory course for students enrolled in the M.A. program in English.

ENL 6507 British Literature before 1900
Crone-Romanovski
W 5:00-7:45
The topic of this course will be the English novel in the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on representations of rank, gender, and nationality.  We will examine these issues through a chronological reading of some of the most innovative works of fiction in the period, which may include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, short amatory fiction by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Henry Fielding’s Shamela, Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Frances Burney’s Evelina, and Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent or The Absentee.  Assigned secondary scholarship is likely to include work on the rise of the novel; gender, race, and empire; master-servant relations; the middling ranks; and nationality.  Throughout the semester, we will try to articulate the ways in which the new literary form of the novel provided a means for supporting, revising, or subverting emerging constructions of gender, rank, and national identity.

LIT 6930 Special Topics: They Lift Their Voices and Sing: Contemporary Black Women Writers as Griottes of the Americas
Delphine Gras
M 5:00-7:45
In West Africa storytellers, often called griots, are more than entertainers. They are musicians-historians who use their talents to praise African dignitaries; chronicle the lives of entire tribes; teach the young and the old, the poor and the wealthy; conduct negotiations; and call for wars. In the New World, these bards have adapted to a new set of circumstances while maintaining their function at the center of the community as historians, as spokespersons, and as musicians who inspire others to fight for a common cause. With restricted access to literacy, African Americans had to rely on oral traditions to share their stories and when they finally gained access to the written words, they often merged the archive and the repertoire, oral and written modes of expression, so as to maintain their traditions while affecting the larger public sphere. This course will trace how, to this very day, contemporary African American women writers carry on the legacy of the griots, their art outliving colonialism and slavery. In fact, writers like Shay Youngblood, answer Amiri Baraka’s call to offer “what the Griot/Djali provided, information, inspiration, reformation, and self-determination” (Suso 82). Under their pen the griots’ art finds a new breath in the Americas. Texts will include Thomas Hale’s Griot and Griottes, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris, Nancy Morejon’s Looking Within, and Maryse Condé’s The Crossing of the Mangrove.