LIT 6216: Issues in Literary Study: The Black Atlantic: Nation, Diaspora, and Modernity.

Paul Gilroys Black Atlantic addresses an important dilemma in the discourse of culture: how do we understand the contacts of culture and its effects in that space between Africa, Europe, and the Americas? How does this contact shape new dimensions of subjectivity, community, and culture that we now describe as the Black Diaspora? How do we in fact theorize the African sense of diaspora? In what ways do the experience and context of the black Atlantic refine, reshape, or even alter our conception of history and the evolution of the ideas of modernity? This class will explore the situation of the black Atlantic, the dynamics of a Black Diaspora and the implications of its development within the context of the 20th century and beyond. While Paul Gilroys work provides the major theoretical ground and our point of departure, we will examine issues of hybridity, double-consciousness, Modernity, and diaspora using the literary texts of the major figures of the African and African Diasporic imagination from Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Aime Ceasire to more contemporary writers like Ike Oguine, Teju Cole, Edwige Danticat etc. We will also read foundational theoretical texts of the black Atlantic by DuBois, Fanon, Okpewho, Gates, Chinweizu, among others, as well as important texts on the ideas by Western/ Euro-modernist philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Benjamin. This course, in the end aims to help graduate students develop a theoretical and literary insight that would enable them understand the distinctive character of the African diaspora and its complex imaginative productions and the range of its important system of ideas. We will open and engage in debates ranging from the meaning of black lives to the politics of identity, aesthetics, music and the hidden and obvious forms of interconnected memory in the African and its Diasporic texts. ------------CRW 6025 - Poissant An Advanced Writing Workshop in Fiction for graduate-level students. The class will serve as a workshop for graduate students composing or completing their MFA theses in fiction. Stories and novel chapters are welcome. Along with workshops, students will read and study the work of several writers visiting in spring, including Brock Clarke, Leah Stewart, Holly

Goddard Jones, and Kevin McIlvoy. The reading list will be finalized as the readers are confirmed this fall. ------------LIT 6267 Teaching College Literature This course will include face-to-face class time dedicated to our discussion of readings and student presentations; the online portion will include discussion postings and sharing of position papers on pedagogical essays. Equally beneficial for those in need of experience teaching college literature as well as for those who have already had some though perhaps limited experience teaching literature at the college/university level. We will survey current approaches to teaching introductory courses in literature--as informed by recent theory as well as classroom constraints, institutional settings, and student and faculty needs. Students will be expected to observe and write observation reports on at least two faculty members teaching literature and prepare and present a lesson based on self-selected text as well as produce a syllabus for an introductory or advanced literature class. Our readings will include several essays, two literary texts, bell hooks Teaching Critical Thinking and excerpts from Freire for the Classroom (ed Ira Shor), Practicing Theory in Introductory Literature Courses (eds Cahalan and Downing) and other collections ------------CRW 6025 - Nonfiction This workshop focuses on creative nonfiction, but its emphasis on "truth" of various sorts will benefit fiction writers and poets as well. Along with production and critique of student manuscripts, we will entertain various notions about what constitutes "fact," whether there is a "higher" truth beyond fact, and whether "fact" and "truth" ever conflict in the literary quality of our work. Concentration will be on manuscripts, but we will also read and discuss published works. ------------LIN 5137 Do you use friend as a verb? Why do some people say aks and not ask? How many different ways can you use the word like? When does Im busy mean no? Will txtng make us talk in abbrevs? In this course, we will study the

English language: how we use it; how it uses us. We will connect technical linguistic information to your daily experiences with language. We will learn and practice techniques for describing English, both its words and sentences and larger elements of discourse in context. We will look at the social, historical, and political forces that shape language and its use. We will investigate linguistic issues empirically with professional research corpuses. And we will suggest ways to use what we learn about language both in the classroom and in the professional world. -------------

LIT6939: Lit Theory: Autobiography/Life Writing This advanced graduate seminar will read genres and theories of autobiography/life writing and their exemplars in loosely chronological order, from St. Augustines Confessions to the myriad 21st century constructions of life writing on the Internet. The assigned course readings of the first twothirds of the term will focus primarily on the emergence of modern identities between the ancient and early-modern eras. In the last one-third of the term, students will launch their own individual, guided research projects that read autobiographical texts in a chosen genre, gather theoretically informed readings about those texts, and write a formal conference paper, abstract, and annotated bibliography that they will submit for possible inclusion at local, national and/or international autobiography/life writing conferences. ------------ENC 6297 This course will cover all aspects of the production of technical documents including typography, visual rhetoric, layout and design, and planning and managing production projects. Students will work on real-world projects and will also research production and publication methods. Required Textbook: None required