ENCW 2300:  Poetry Writing (7 sections)

An introductory course in poetry writing, with a primary focus on creating new poems in a workshop setting. Students will study basic poetic terms and techniques and revise and arrange a series of poems for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 2600:  Fiction Writing (6 sections)

An introductory course in fiction writing, with a primary focus on creating short stories in a workshop setting. Students will study basic narrative terms and techniques and revise several short stories for a final portfolio. The course will also have extensive outside reading and non-creative writing requirements.

ENCW 3310-001: Intermediate Poetry Writing I - Virginia (For Poets)

ENCW 3310-002: Intermediate Poetry Writing I

ENCW 3350-001: Intermediate Nonfiction

ENCW 3500-001: Storytelling and Performance Prose

ENCW 3500-002: Screenwriting

ENCW 3559-001: New Mythologies

ENCW 3610-001: Intermediate Fiction Writing

ENCW 3610-002: Intermediate Fiction Writing

ENCW 4550-001: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives

ENCW 4810-001: Advanced Fiction Writing I

ENCW 4820-001: Poetry Program Poetics

ENCW 4830-001: Advanced Poetry Writing I

ENCW 5310-001: Advanced Poetry Writing II - Poets' Memoirs

ENGL 2500-001: Intro to Literary Studies

ENGL 2502-001: Four Centuries, Four Texts, Four Genres

ENGL 2502-002: Jane Austen Jumps the Shark

ENGL 2506-001: Introduction to Poetry

ENGL 2506-003: Contemporary Poetry

In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific genres, forms, or kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2506-002: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry

What is poetry? What sets it apart from other modes of writing, thinking, imagining, feeling? What are the distinctive tools at the poet’s disposal? How do these tools work, and how can we describe their workings? Should poetry be plain or intricate, delightful or didactic, passionate or rational, heavenly or human? In this course, we will explore the many Renaissance responses to these questions by reading a selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse. We will inspect a range of poetic styles and genres, beginning with sonnets by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Mary Wroth. Other poets will include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Katherine Philips, Richard Lovelace, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell. We will move slowly at first, sometimes reading only one poem per class, and will work together to develop the interpretive skills to unpack a poem. This course also aims to help you sharpen your skills as a writer; we will focus in particular on close reading and on logical organization. The first written assignment will be a bulleted list of observations about a sonnet that you will then transform into a structured close reading paper. You will have the opportunity to revise the first paper based on feedback from your instructor and your classmates.

No prior knowledge of poetry, meter, or rhyme is expected. Lovers and despisers of poetry are equally welcome. The only prerequisite is a willingness to read with the utmost attention—and a dictionary.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2506-004: Introduction to Poetry

Hodges Adams
TR 11:00-12:15

“I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery” —Lorine Neidecker | This class aims to strengthen the skills of close reading and analytical thinking through evaluating poetry. Discussion is the primary format; we will explore various poetic forms and movements and pay close attention to language. Students will read individual poems across a wide variety of styles and time periods, as well as reading two short collections of contemporary American poetry. There will be three essays, one of which will be paired with an in-class presentation. Extensive revision of at least one essay is expected. We may take field trips to some places around Grounds such as the Fralin Art Museum and the Special Collections Library.

ENGL 2507-001: Identity, Race, and Religion in Renaissance Drama

How can Hamlet help us understand the sources of modern beliefs about identity and individuality? What can we learn from Othello and The Merchant of Venice about Renaissance understandings of race and religion? In this introduction to the study of dramatic literature, we will study the theater of the English Renaissance in order to help us understand where our modern ideas about identity come from. We live in an era marked by fierce debates about race, religion, nationalism, gender, and sexuality, but these topics were equally pressing (though in different ways) to authors such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, and to their audiences. Our goal is to step outside of ourselves and engage in imaginative time travel, so that we may understand how race, religion, and identity were and are culturally constructed, both in their time, and in our own. As we read, we will ask ourselves:  How do dramatic texts destabilize our understandings of identity categories such as race, religion, and gender? What makes drama distinct in this regard from poetry, or prose? How does theater enable competing interpretations, such that marginalized characters can question orthodoxies and push against dominant narratives? As values and social norms change over time, how have scholars, directors, actors, and other artists responded to, reclaimed, and reinterpreted dramatic texts that contain historical, context-specific manifestations of racism and other prejudices? Throughout the course, we will grapple with these questions and with many others that enable us to consider the value of turning to early modern dramatic texts to understand divergent, complex ideas about selfhood and identity. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-001: Medical Narratives

This course is designed for prospective English majors as well as students who may one day enter a medical field—and should appeal to all students who love short stories. It explores the history of the American short story from the nineteenth century through our own by focusing specifically on medical themes: ailing and injured bodies and minds; doctors, nurses, and patients; the social construction of disease and madness as well as of health and sanity. It is widely acknowledged today in various fields of medical research and clinical training that the effective and humane practice of medicine requires what has been called “narrative competence”: the ability to recognize and interpret the stories people tell; to attend closely to the details that accumulate to make a larger meaning; to evaluate contradictory and competing hypotheses about meaning; to locate expression within cultural context; and finally to appreciate and respond to any given story for its insight into the human condition. But if these skills are in demand within the medical fields, they also shape the practice of the English major. We will discuss classic stories as well as the work of recent writers.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-002: The Dystopian Novel

“We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies,” Joseph Conrad writes, casting the modern era as a bleak one.  This course will survey the genre of dystopian novels.  Dystopias offer apocalyptic visions; they summon aesthetics of disease, speculation, pessimism, horror, and dysfunction to warn against seeing modern developments as benevolent.  In novels, dystopia often takes the form of political and science fiction.  A singular feature of this genre is its questioning of modern state forms, both totalitarian and democratic.  These works also ask us to think about how we live our increasingly technological lives. Do conditions of modern living such as of surveillance, conformity, comfort, militarism, mechanization, mobility, reproductive facticity, incarceration, medicalization, and scientificity lead to better futures? The dire worlds that dystopias imagine starkly suggest that they do not.  Instead, dystopian novels ask that readers contemplate, and even critique, the ethical cost of our acceptance of modern social conditions, the depletion of freedom, autonomy, and humanity.

The seminar will survey major works of dystopian fiction from the late-19thC onward.  Alongside such classics as Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, we may also read work by Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula LeGuin, Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, and others.  Given our experience of the pandemic, we will pay particular attention to the spread of disease and how it is narrated.  The syllabus includes brief readings on utopia, science, satire, feminism, race, capitalism, and modernity.  We will also view a few films and consider other literary genres when relevant. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-003: Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction

The nineteenth century was an age of lively experimentation in narrative fiction. In this course we will read a range of texts that depart from conventional realism: Gothic tales, science fiction, stories of ghosts and the supernatural. Likely authors include Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Like all ENGL 2500 classes, this course is designed to help you read closely, think creatively, and write lucidly about literary and other texts.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2508-004: Awakenings in Literature and Culture: Narrating Queer Experience

What does it mean to be awakened? To be aroused or stirred? What is an awakening’s affective contour? Is it socially constituted or a matter of spiritual enchantment? Is it psychic or embodied? Mental or physical? Our course will address these questions to a variety of novels and films. In doing so, we will attune to representations of awakenings in literature while also paying close attention—through imaginative close reading—to our responses to literature. The course will approach "awakenings" capaciously, with possible topics ranging from gender and sexuality to childhood/adolescence and negative or “toxic awakenings.” Some of the authors we'll encounter include Henry James, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Alison Bechdel. We will also watch films like Todd Haynes' Carol, Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, and Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Assignments will consist of short weekly discussion posts, three close reading papers, and informal roundtable presentations. 

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2560:  Contemporary Latinx Literature

Jordan Norviel
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM

This course offers a wide overview of contemporary Latinx literature. We will read novels and poetry from different Latinx groups within the US (Chicano, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, and Panamanian) and situate them in their specific historical contexts. We will also explore how race, identity, migration, and land shape literary forms and discuss the political role of contemporary literature.

ENGL 2599-001: Nature and Romanticism

ENGL 2599-002: Criticism in the First Person

ENGL 2599-004: Routes, Writing, Reggae

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a marijuana spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with the song “One Love” and the album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? This course traces the history of reggae music and its influence on Jamaican literature. Framed by readings on Jamaican history, Marcus Garvey’s teachings, and Rastafari philosophy, at the heart of the course is an intensive study of Marley’s lyrics and the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae. Armed with these tools, we will apply the ‘reggae aesthetic’ to Jamaican poetry, fiction and film, including The Harder They Come and the Booker Prize novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Assignments such as album reviews, ‘diss’ tracks, and critical essays will allow you to engage topical and controversial issues such as: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and spirituality (and yes, marijuana) in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and reggaetón.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-005: Literatures of the Nonhuman

This course explores ideas of the ‘nonhuman’ in literature. From John Keats’s address to autumn and Franz Kafka’s giant bug, Gregor Samsa, to imagining yourself into another species, ‘alien’ forms of life, and experiments with artificial intelligence, are human and nonhuman distinct categories? Where and how do they overlap, or even merge? The focus will be on developing strategies of close reading and introducing the basics of literary critical analysis through shorter forms in poetry and prose that examine the nonhuman across a range of genres from the nineteenth century to the present. No prior knowledge required. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement of 20+ pages of written work. Active class participation, reading responses, shorter pieces of writing, and a final essay.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-006: Reading Ecology Across Genres

ENGL 2599-008: Modern Literature and the Quest for Self

ENGL 2599-010: Diversity of Voices in Young Adult Narratives

This course will survey and explore a range of literature from the 20th and 21st centuries written for or marketed to an adolescent audience. Readings will consist of short stories and novel-length works from multiple genres which will be contextualized within literary history and by critical scholarship.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-012: “Ain’t I A Mother?”: Motherhood in African American Literature

What is (Black) motherhood? This course will explore representations of mothers and mothering in African American literature. How have legacies of enslavement and colonialism shaped the social and political experiences of Black mothers (and Black women as a whole)? Foregrounding a Black feminist analytic to the study of motherhood, the selected course texts will prompt us to consider how the interlocking matters of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (im)migration not only impact the journey of motherhood but also challenge dichotomized, social constructions of ‘good mothers’ vs ‘bad mothers.’ We’ll also look into how form and genre conventions shape the varying portrayals of (Black) motherhood as well. Some of the writers we may read include Harriet Jacobs, Ann Petry, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. Students should expect to do a lot of writing, namely close-reading and analytical work. Requirements include three essay projects, active attendance and participation, and discussion posts.

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-013: Cultures of Climate Change

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-014: The Lives of Monsters

This course satisfies the English Major Prerequisite, the Second Writing Requirement, and the AIP Disciplines Requirement.

ENGL 2599-015: Austen and her Afterlives

Lydia Brown
MWF 10:00-10:50

Why are we so obsessed with Jane Austen? "Austenmania," if not a household term, is at least a household phenomenon: walk into the UVA Bookstore, for example, and peruse shelves of Austen bobbleheads, board games, and temporary tattoos. What about Austen is worth obsessing over—and what if we’re obsessing over the wrong things? This course will examine not only Austen’s oeuvre itself, but its legacy—its relationship with the novel, the 19th century, empire and whiteness, gender and sexuality, genre, and canon. We will ask what pop culture asks of Austen and why; what it is we remember about Austen and what else we willingly forget. This course examines a selection of Austen's major works and some of their contemporary adaptations across many media, and, in doing so, asks what adaptation attempts to do, what it creates, transforms, or transplants. We will work to complicate many assumed narratives about Austen’s work, applying queer, feminist, and decolonial lenses to the texts we examine, even producing short adaptations of our own.

This writing-intensive course satisfies the second writing requirement and requirements for the English major. Assignments include a midterm paper, a final research paper, and short writing exercises, including short responses.

ENGL 2599-100: Landscapes of Black Education

ENGL 3001-100: History of Literatures in English I

ENGL 3220-001: The Seventeenth Century

In this course we will study a period marked by two big-name revolutions—the scientific revolution and the political revolution known as the English Civil War—but our task will be to examine the subtler currents of thought that ran beneath these epochal changes. We will focus in particular on vigorous seventeenth-century debates about the origins of knowledge and the purpose of liberty. Seventeenth-century writers put pressure on all the received ways of explaining the human mind, the natural world, and the political regime. They asked whether we should trust political customs, intellectual authorities, or even our own eyes and minds. They wondered whether goodness, greatness, and honor are meaningful ideas or fictions that had long impeded progress toward certain knowledge and secure peace. They debated about the primary aim of political life and what kinds of freedom are desirable and achievable. As we study political and philosophical prose by Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes in conversation with poems and plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell (among others), we will practice reading with the utmost care—and a dictionary by our sides. Our aim will be not only to understand the complexities of these authors’ thought but also to draw out the rich particularities of their language.

This course satisfies the pre-1700 literature requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3271-100: Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories

ENGL 3275-001: History of Drama I

ENGL 3310-001: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers

ENGL 3380-001: The English Novel I: Run Runaway

ENGL 3480-001: The Way We Live Now: The Novel in the Nineteenth Century

ENGL 3500-001:  Faust

Goethe's Faust has been called an "atlas of European modernity" and "one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history." The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes:  "As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not.  Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice."  

Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age.  Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, to which Goethe responded.  We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and parts II (either in its entirety or in excerpts), in part as a response to Rousseau’s  Although now a major work in the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society.  We will also study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to respond to part I of Goethe’s Faust create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality, and guilt.  And we will venture into the twentieth-century, viewing first F.W. Murnau's avant-garde Faust film (1926) as a response to contemporary European/German society and technology, and Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto (1981), which wrestled with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust.

Our aims will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social, and cultural problems of their own times.  Requirements:  one short paper (5 pages), one mid-term exam, long paper (10-12 pages), active class participation, including short written contributions to online discussion.

ENGL 3500-002:  Literatures of Revolutionary Hope and Radical Pessimism

Taylor Schey
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM

Which outlook is more conducive to social and political transformation: optimism or pessimism? Does hope produce change, or does it sustain the status quo? Does despair lead to resignation, or does it drive people to action? In this course we’ll explore the literatures of revolutionary hope and radical pessimism, taking a particular interest in works that complicate the distinction between these seemingly antithetical orientations. Our case studies will be drawn from diverse artistic and intellectual movements that have responded to world-changing political events and structural violences, including the French Revolution and its failure (British Romanticism), the rise of fascism that led to WWII (historical materialist poetry and prose), homophobia and heteronormativity (queer theory), and racial slavery and its afterlife (Afropessimism and Black optimism). While our aim will be to understand how hope and despair have functioned in different historical and social contexts, we’ll also keep an eye on their relevance in our own moment. Requirements include two exams, a final essay, and a handful of response papers.

ENGL 3510-001: Feminist Chaucer

ENGL 3540-001: Romantic Poetry

ENGL 3545-001: US Lit and Social Justice

Exploring U.S. literature from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era, this course asks, what strategies did literary authors use to influence public debates about social, economic, and political justice? Beneath this question lie two more:  What underlying conceptions of justice did U.S. literature advance, and how might we assess them? Literature during the era we’ll consider spanned the full political spectrum, but our focus will be primarily on literature invested in the extension of rights, equality, and protections to dispossessed people, as well as in the amelioration of politically induced suffering. We’ll examine literary protests against slavery, Jim Crow law, Chinese exclusion, urban poverty, women’s status, and the conditions of industrial labor. Course requirements include several short papers, class participation, and a final exam.

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 3560-002: U.S. Modernisms in Word & Image

ENGL 3570-001: Hemispheric Latinx Literature

This course offers a survey of Latinx literature from a hemispheric perspective. We explore how the histories of US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays, and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx. In addition to exploring the integrated global histories that produce Latinidades, we will analyze how race, class, gender and sexuality impact Latinx literature, film and other artistic forms. All readings, writing, and discussions are in English.

ENGL 3570-002: American Wild

With biblical images of wilderness in mind, seventeenth-century English colonizers of Massachusetts described what they found as another wilderness, howling, savage, terrible. For them it was to be feared, avoided, and, where possible, tamed. Four centuries later, with eighty percent of U.S. citizens living in cities, many of them exposed to wilderness only through calendar pictures or screensaver photos, what meaning or value does American wildness have? Is it only a fantasy image, part of an American brand, as in the phrase “the wild West.” Are wildness and wilderness the same thing? Has the howling, terrible, untamed wildness of the seventeenth-century forest relocated to another sphere, in the wildness of wildfires in California and throughout the west? Is climate the new frontier, the new wilderness, where Americans encounter untamed wildness in droughts, floods, violent storms, and extreme weather? Have we come full circle to more biblical imagery, with apocalypse replacing wilderness as the rubric under which we encounter the wild?

This course will begin with a look at biblical antecedents and their influence on white colonists encountering landscapes inhabited by native people. From there we’ll move to the literature of westward exploration, and further encounters with indigenous populations and their lands, in selections from the journals of Jefferson-commissioned Lewis and Clark. Then it’s on to the mid-nineteenth pivot toward wildness in the eyes of Romantic beholders, foremost among them Henry David Thoreau, patron saint of the environmental movement. Next comes John Muir, whose vision of wilderness preservation begat the U.S. National Park System. Proceeding to the twentieth-century, we’ll add important voices, such as Aldo Leopold’s and Rachel Carson’s and Rebecca Solnit’s, as the preservation impulse merges with concern about public health and social justice. We’ll complete our tour in the twenty-first century by joining the intensifying conversation, along with Robert Bullard, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Carol Finney, Lauret Savoy, J. Drew Lanham, and Garnette Cadogan, about whether the visions of Thoreau, Muir, et al. are exclusively white and male.

Open to all. Those in the Environmental Thought and Practice Program welcome.

ENGL 3570-003: Narrative Experiment in Contemporary American Fiction: Graphic Novels, Eccentric Narrators, Alternative Histories, Magical Realities

ENGL 3572-001: Black Protest Narrative

ENGL 3790-001: Moving On: Migration in/to US

ENGL 3825-001: Desktop Publishing

ENGL 3915-001: Point of View Journalism

ENGL 3924-001: Vietnam War in Literature & Film

It has been over 40  years since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of a war that claimed the lives of an estimated 58,260 American troops and over 4 million Southeast Asians across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In the U.S. today, “Vietnam” signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from debates about foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What, in this moment of commemoration and reflection, are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War / American War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans and Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong) affected by the Vietnam War, spanning the entirety of this 40 year period. Texts may include Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Peter Davis, Hearts and Minds; Yusek Komunyakaa, Dien Cia Dau; Tiana Alexander, From Hollywood to Hanoi; Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer; Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind; Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino; Socheata Poeuv, New Years Baby.

ENGL 4270-001: Shakespeare Seminar

ENGL 4500-001: Seven Ages, Seven Questions or How to Live, What to Do

ENGL 4500-002: Gothic Forms

Gothic literature burst onto the scene in the eighteenth century with ruined castles, ethereal music, brooding villains and surprisingly sturdy heroines, all performing as metaphors of our deepest fears and fiercest resistances. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the gothic continued as a genre of cultural anxiety. This seminar will survey gothic literature through both history and genre: the classic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818); 18thC German vampire poetry and poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Sylvia Plath; the plays of Matthew Lewis and Richard Brinsley Peake; and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. And we will ask ourselves: What are we afraid of? Active participation, a presentation , weekly short commentaries, one short paper (5-7pp), and one longer research paper (10-12pp).

This course satisfies the 1700-1900 requirement for the English major.

ENGL 4540-001: Jane Austen

ENGL 4560-001: Modern Love and US Fiction

Maybe love is eternal, but it’s also historical and ideological. Love is shaped by custom, law, and narrative, and it plays a central role in the formation of private and public life alike. This course examines romantic love in U.S. fiction from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth-first centuries. Our primary texts will cross genres as well as centuries as we examine romance, realism, modernism, post-modernism, and documentary. In addition, we’ll read archival and scholarly non-fiction. We’ll interpret fiction in light of historical changes in conceptions of love, based in factors including shifting economic conditions and changing conceptions of marriage, citizenship, queer sexualities, and modern psychology. We’ll discern the connections between romantic love and ideas of race, gender, nationhood, and empire. Students will be graded on two short papers, class participation, a 10-12-page final paper, and a final exam.

ENGL 4560-002: Contemporary Poetry

In this seminar, we will examine an array of postwar idioms, forms, and movements. While devoting much of our attention to some of the most influential poetry from the second half of the twentieth century, we will also bring ourselves up to date by examining some of the best poems published in recent years by poets of diverse backgrounds. To hone our attention, we will focus on several specific kinds of poetry, including sonnets, elegies, and poems about the visual arts. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills of close reading, critical thinking, and imaginative, knowledgeable writing about poetry.

ENGL 4560-003: Caribbean Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will encounter Caribbean writers working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. Authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean might include: Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Karen Lord, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Marcia Douglas, Ernest Pepin, René Depestre, and Agustín de Rojas. We will also discuss supporting turns by Caribbean actors in mainstream works such as Star Trek and Black Panther. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. 

ENGL 4560-004: Visual Fictions: Photography and 20th/21st-Century US Literature

The emergence of photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries participated in an extraordinary vitality in both visual and literary cultures of the time. The force of new kinds of images and icons was immediate and transformative. Photographs were used in a wide range of ways during this period, from multimedia art forms (collage) to new surveillance methods (mug shots and passport photos) to advertising, journalism, family and personal mementos, among others. This was also the era of mass movements of people (immigration and migration). This course will provide an introduction to the emergence of photography as a popular and artistic medium in the 20th century US, which we will put in dialogue with the literary and cultural movements of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and the as-yet unnamed contemporary. We’ll consider how word-based arts changed—primarily narrative prose and the novel form—in response to the visualities generated by photography.

ENGL 4561-001: Literature and Trauma

ENGL 4561-002: Literature and Human Rights

ENGL 4580-001: Race, Space, Culture

ENGL 4901-001: The Bible Part 1 - Hebrew Bible / Old Testament

ENGL 4998-001: Distinguished Majors Program

ENGL 5559-001: Anne Spencer & the Harlem Renaissance

ENGL 5810-001: Books as Physical Objects

ENGL 5900-001: Counterpoint Seminar in Teaching Modern Literature - “Teaching Literature with Equity and Justice”

ENWR 1505 - Writing and Critical Inquiry: The Stretch Sequence (8 sections)

Offers a two-semester approach to the First Writing Requirement. This sequence allows students to take more time, in smaller sections and with support from the Writing Center, practicing and reinforcing the activities that are central to the first-year writing course. Like ENWR 1510, ENWR 1505-06 approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MW 01:00PM-01:50PM (CAB 042)
Claire A Chantell
 
002 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (CAB 042)
Claire Chantell
 
003 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
004 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan
 
005 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Literacy Narratives
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
006 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 066)
Kate Natishan
 
007 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Literacy Narratives
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 042)
Kate Kostelnik
 
008 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 066)
Kate Natishan

ENWR 1510 - Writing and Critical Inquiry (70+ sections)

Approaches writing as a way of generating, representing, and reflecting on critical inquiry. Students contribute to an academic conversation about a specific subject of inquiry and learn to position their ideas and research in relation to the ideas and research of others.  Instructors place student writing at the center of course, encourage students to think on the page, and prepare them to reflect on contemporary forms of expression.  Students read and respond to each other’s writing in class regularly, and they engage in thoughtful reflection on their own rhetorical choices as well as those of peers and published writers.  Additionally, the course requires students to give an oral presentation on their research and to assemble a digital portfolio of their writing.

001 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 064)
TBA

002 -- TBA 
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
003 – Writing & Community Engagement - Walking Charlottesville
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 312)
Kate Stephenson

This seminar will explore the connections between walking, writing, social justice, and activism. There is a long history of walking as a means of igniting thought, creativity, and dialogue that dates back to the meanderings of Socrates and Aristotle and continues through the strolls of the Romantic poets, the city wanderings of the fictional J. Alfred Prufrock and Clarissa Dalloway, and the outdoor hikes of Wendell Berry. But walking isn’t just linked to creativity and conversation; it’s also clearly connected to social justice. Walking to freedom, as depicted in myriad slave narratives and immigration stories, as well as walking for freedom in the form of protest marches, both past and present, are important reminders that our footsteps matter.   In this class, we will consider how walking can be both a solo activity and a means of creating community. By walking together, we will learn about the places and histories around us.  The course will be structured around biweekly walks themed around social justice. All walks and place-based visits will include time for reflective writing.

004 – TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 211)
TBA
 
005 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
006 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing and Critical Inquiry at UVA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 330)
Heidi Nobles
 
007 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
008 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
009 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
010 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Citizen Science
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
011 -- TBA 
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA 
 
012 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 334)
Jon D'Errico
 
014 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Sports
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 064)
Rhiannon Goad
 
015 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
016 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens and Identities
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 594)
Charity Fowler
 
017 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 312)
Devin Donovan
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
018 -- TBA 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
019 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
020 -- Writing about Science & Tech 
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 330)
Eric Rawson
 
022 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 332)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)
 
024 -- Writing about Science & Tech - Writing and Critical Inquiry at UVA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 334)
Heidi Nobles
 
026 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Ideas of Home
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
John Casteen
 
027 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Ideas of Home
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 044)
John Casteen
 
028 -- TBA 
TR 05:00PM-6:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA 
 
029 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 036)
TBA
 
031 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
032 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
033 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
034 -- Multilingual Writers
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 310)
Davy Tran
(Multilingual/international students ONLY)
 
035 -- Writing about Culture/Society
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 334)
Jon D'Errico
 
036 -- Writing about Digital Media - The Art of the Post: Performance in Public Places
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 332)
Dana Little
 
037 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
040 -- Writing about Digital Media
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 334)
Kevin Smith
 
042 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
043 -- Writing about Culture/Society 
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 187)
Sethunya Mokoko
 
044 -- TBA
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
045 -- Writing about Science & Tech 
MWF 10:00AM-10:50AM (BRN 330)
Eric Rawson
 
046 -- Writing about Digital Media - The Art of the Post: Performance in Public Places
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 332)
Dana Little
 
047 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Writing About Sports
MW 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 330)
Rhiannon Goad 

050 -- Writing about Culture/Society 
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (CAB 056)
Sethunya Mokoko
 
051 -- Writing about Culture/Society
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 411)
Keith Driver
(Transfer Students ONLY)
 
052 -- TBA 
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
053 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
054 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (KER 317)
TBA
 
056 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
057 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (CAB 064)
TBA
 
058 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
059 -- TBA
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
060 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 056)
TBA
 
061 -- Writing about Science & Tech
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 330)
Cory Shaman
 
062 -- TBA
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
063 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
064 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (CAB 036)
TBA
 
066 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
TVA
 
067 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
068 -- Writing about Identities - Aliens and Identities
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 183)
Charity Fowler
 
071 -- TBA
MW 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
072 -- Writing about Digital Media 
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 334)
Kevin Smith
 
073 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
074 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
075 -- TBA
TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
076 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
077 -- TBA
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 310)
TBA
 
078 -- TBA
TR 06:30PM-07:45PM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
080 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
081 -- TBA
MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM (BRN 332)
TBA
 
082 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Indigenous Rhetorics
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 312)
Sarah Richardson
 
083 -- TBA
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 330)
TBA
 
085 -- TBA
TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 334)
TBA
 
086 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 115)
TBA
 
087 -- TBA
MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM (BRN 312)
TBA
 
088 -- Writing about Culture/Society - Indigenous Rhetorics
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 312)
Sarah Richardson
 
089 -- TBA
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 044)
TBA
 
090 -- TBA
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 332)
TBA

091 -- TBA
TR 08:00AM-09:15AM (CAB 064)
TBA

092 -- TBA
TR 05:00PM-06:15AM (KER 317)
TBA

ENWR 1520 - Writing and Community Engagement (1 section)

001 -- TR 12:30PM-01:45PM (BRN 312) - Writing about Food Justice
Kate Stephenson

Why do we eat what we eat? Do poor people eat more fast food than wealthy people? Why are Cheetos cheaper than cherries? Do you have to be skinny to be hungry? By volunteering at the UVA Student Garden, Morven Kitchen Garden, UVA Community Food Pantry, Loaves and Fishes, or the PVCC Community Garden and using different types of writing, including journal entries, forum posts, peer reviews, and formal papers, we will explore topics like food insecurity, food production, hunger stereotypes, privilege, urban gardening, and community engagement.  

Community engagement courses depend on creating pathways between different kinds of knowledge that enable us to learn with our minds, hearts, and bodies. The classroom is not a place where we find the answer; instead, it is a space for inquiry where process rather than product prevails. We will explore first-hand the ways in which academic conversations—and civic conversations—emphasize questions rather than answers. We will redefine knowledge—where it originates, who creates it, and how it circulates—by seeing the community outside the classroom as a site of knowledge production. 

ENWR 1530 - Writing About the Imagination

MW 01:00PM-01:50PM (MON 130)
Kenny Fountain

Discussion Sections: F 9:00AM, 10:00AM, 11:00AM, and 12:00PM.

Imagining and visualizing are key components of perceiving the world, remembering the part, and envisioning new futures. And words play an important role in how we imagine. That is, words make absence things present, bring to mind people, objects, and events remote in time or space, and allow us to conceive of possibilities that do not yet exist.
In this First Writing Requirement (FWR) course, we will explore how writers and researchers have investigated the imagination. To do this, we will read work from across several disciplines, from rhetoric and philosophy to cognitive science, history, and literature. As we do this, we will examine how these writers use verbal description, visual imagery, lively storytelling, compelling evidence, and persuasive argument. 

ENWR 2510 - Advanced Writing Seminar (4 sections)

001 -- Writing about Identities - Writing Regret and Repair
MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Tamika Carey
  
003 -- Writing about Identities
MWF 01:00PM-01:50PM (BRN 332)
Devin Donovan
 
004 -- TBA
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (CAB 594)
TBA
 
006 -- Writing about Science & Technology
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM (BRN 310)
Eric Rawson

ENWR 2520 - Special Topics in Writing (4 sections)

003 -- Writing Democratic Rights
T 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 310)
Stephen Parks

Students will study theories of democracy and work with global democratic advocates, as well as students located in internatioanal contexts.

004 -- Writing Human Rights
M 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 330)
Stephen Parks

Students will study theories of human rights and work with global human rights advocates, as well as students located in internatioanal contexts.

008 -- Writing about Medicine
MW 05:00PM-06:15PM (BRN 310)
Rhiannon Goad

009 -- Community Engagement  
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 310)
Sarah Richardson

010 -- Writing and Games
TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 330)
Kate Natishan

ENWR 2640 - Writing as Technology

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (BRN 203)
Patricia Sullivan

This course explores historical, theoretical, and practical conceptions of writing as technology. We will study various writing systems, the relation of writing to speaking and visual media, and the development of writing technologies (manuscript, printing presses, typewriters, hypertext, text messaging, and artificial intelligence). Students will produce written academic and personal essays, but will also experiment with multimedia electronic texts, such as web sites, digital essays/stories, and AI generated texts

ENWR 2700 - News Writing

TR 09:30AM-10:45AM (BRN 203)
Kate Sweeney

ENWR 2800 - Public Speaking

001 - The Power of Performance: From TED Talks to TikTok
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 330)
Dana Little

ENWR 3500 - Topics in Advanced Writing & Rhetoric

003 - Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice
TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 036)
Sethunya Mokoko

ENWR 3620 - Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures

TR 03:30PM-04:45PM (BRN 332)
Kate Kostelnik

In this course, we'll look at a variety of texts from academic arguments, narratives, and pedagogies, to consider what it means to write, communicate, and learn across cultures. Topics will include contrastive rhetorics, world Englishes, rhetorical listening, and tutoring multilingual writers. A service learning component will require students to volunteer weekly in the community.

ENWR 3640 - Writing with Sound

TR 11:00AM-12:15PM (RTN 152)
Steph Ceraso

In this collaborative, project-based course, students will learn to script, design, edit, and produce an original podcast series. In addition to reading about and practicing professional audio storytelling techniques (e.g. interviewing, writing for the ear, sound design), each student will get to work with a team to produce an episode for the podcast series. No experience with digital audio editing is necessary. Beginners welcome!

ENWR 3665 - Writing about the Environment

TR 02:00PM-03:15PM (BRN 334)
Cory Shaman

ENWR 3760 - Studies in Cultural Rhetoric

M 06:00PM-08:30PM (BRN 312)
Tamika Carey

ENWR 3900 - Career Based Writing and Rhetoric

MW 03:30PM-04:45PM (CAB 068)
John T. Casteen IV