2015 Spring Course Offerings Barzak Workshop YSU T 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6967.26122 Rahman Workshop CSU W 6:00 – 8:50 pm ENG610 Pope C&T UA TH 5:20 – 7:50 pm 3300: 689-804 Ricca Workshop CSU W 6:00 – 8:50 pm ENG611 The Writing of Prose Book 2 (Book 1 is not a prerequisite for Book 2.) In this workshop, we will focus on shaping and sharpening what will ultimately become a book-length manuscript, or the near facsimile of one (75 pages); this can take the form of a novel, a short story collection, or that hybrid beast, the novel-in-stories. In other words, you will, with ambition, write half of a short book this semester (75 pages); for those of you who have already taken Book ! in the fall (not a prerequisite for Book 2 however), this will bring you up to a grand total of 150 pages for the year (fall & spring combined). These books-in-waiting (or books-in-training) will be workshopped by all. We will also be reading three books from the 2014 National Book Award (Fiction) longlist in addition to workshopping: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Phil Klay’s Redeployment & John Darnielle’s Wolf In White Van. Some of our concerns this semester will be: different ways to plot, organize, develop, inhabit and approach a novel; how to organize a stand-alone short story collection (how do these stories speak to each other, what should the ordering principle be: strength of story or theme or tone, etc.); what exactly is a novel-in-stories, an ungainly spillover from a short story collection or the fragments of a ruined novel or a form which contains both the compression of the story and the cohesive expansive unity of a novel? And the big question: how do you, how should you, how will you, write one of these books. COURSE FULL | Craft &Theory of Fiction: Flash Fiction: Flash Fiction crosses many lines—a true hybrid. In varying degrees it can veer toward poetry or to the short story, toward creative nonfiction or pure language invention. Writers of flash fiction create their own form. This is a place to develop your language or your ability to create striking imagery—and these pieces are short enough not to interfere with that novel you’re writing. We’ll read and write flash fiction and talk about what to do with them once they’re written—and there are many journals, in print and online, looking for what you write. Course list continued... 2015 Spring Course Offerings continued... Giffels C&T UA T 5:20 – 7:50 pm 3300: 689-805 Geither Workshop CSU TH 6:00 – 8:50 pm ENG612 Wing Workshop KSU W 4:25 – 7:05 pm 64070/74070 Reese C&T YSU M 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6968.27412 COURSE FULL | Craft &Theory of Creative Nonfiction: The Nobody Memoir: In this course, we’ll analyze the recent rise in popularity and critical acceptance of memoirs written by non-famous people, beginning with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and continuing through Cheryl Strayed’s recent bestseller Wild. What makes them work, and how do they work in the culture? We’ll also practice the craft of memoir writing. Experimental Playwriting: We will read and view experimental performances and create several short pieces and a single longer work. Video, radio plays, site-specific plays, puppetry, installations, conceptual art, solo performance. In a world where poetry has been defined as a lump in the throat, a small (or large) machine made of words, a meteor or pheasant—no, a pheasant disappearing into the brush—imaginary gardens with real toads in them, a dash of the dictionary, the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits, the medieval town, with frieze of boy scouts from Nagoya,the best words in the best order, in a world such as this it’s hard even to figure out what a poem is, never mind how to write a good one. This workshop will seek to do a little of both. We will pool our collective knowledge, do a little outside reading, and come up with a common critical language that will focus our conversations and allow for more precision and exactitude in our commentary. Of course, the primary focus will be on the production and discussion of student work. Students will be writing and critiquing poems every week, as well as presenting larger batches of poems for a more in-depth and concentrated discussion of the work as a whole. Conversation will both address larger stylistic issues (within a body of work) and focus on specific points within individual poems. Students should expect to produce ten to twelve poems over the course of the semester and submit a final portfolio with evidence of your revisions and progress. Studies in Literary Form: This is a course in poetics that will use as texts some of the best prose written about poetry, with a concentration on the 20th Century. It is designed for writers who want to develop a clearer sense of their own practice by seeing it in the context of what has been done, what might be done, and what ought to be done in their genre, according to some of its most heralded practitioners. Texts will include prose from Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Muriel Rukeyser, Donald Hall, Mary Kinzie, and a host of others. Course list continued... 2015 Spring Course Offerings Internship Miltner Internship KSU S 10:00 am – 1:00 pm 66895 The Internship class is comprised of two components: an internship experience in teaching, publication, nonprofit or other, to better prepare students for their career interest, and a series of four seminars that supplement these areas as well as resumes, cv’s and cover letters; researching jobs; and interview techniques. Guest speakers attend some of the sessions. Class dates are January 17, February 7th, February 28, April 25 . Literature THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON Miller UA T 5:20 – 7:50 pm 689-802 Chura UA M 5:20 – 7:50 pm 689-803 Nunn UA TH 5:20 – 7:50 pm 689-806 M 6:00 – 8:50 pm ENG616 Whitman & Dickinson: Substantial readings from each author: tales, novels, essays, letters, poetry. Also, representative literary criticism about each author. Vital Contact: This seminar analyzes fiction and nonfiction about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience “vital contact” by living or working, temporarily, with the poor. Authors on the syllabus range widely and include Sarah Orne Jewett, Jane Addams, Henry James, Richard Wright. Secondary readings will explore differences between male and female versions of vital contact and show how the class dynamics on display in the literary works were co-produced by specific historical contexts. In sum, the seminar offers new ways of thinking about various forms of class identification as they developed in American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shakespeare’s History Plays: This class will help seminar members gain familiarity with history plays attributed to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will examine early modern ideas of history and its uses, and we will consider how those notions compare to changing perceptions of history’s importance in interpreting plays from the early modern era. As we read, we will investigate how the plays’ presentations of historical events might shape audience perceptions of their own present, as well as of the past. In addition, we will explore how these plays can benefit from readings that do not explicitly invoke the historical frameworks represented on stage. CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY Pagel CSU “I Have Looked Diligently At My Own Mind”: Roots of the Contemporary Essay: iIn this class we will explore the essay as a developing record of the human mind at work and also an inclusive-yet-chaotic location of thinking in social inquiry, personal revelation, philosophy, memory, problem solving, story Course list continued... 2015 Spring Course Offerings Literature continued... telling, and research. We will begin with our contemporaries and work backwards, noting how particular investigations, contexts, and politics are eternal topics in creative nonfiction and identifying who a specific essayist’s concerns are evolving from or tethered to. Pairings will include essays by Wayne Koestenbaum/ Joe Brainard, Eula Biss/Joan Didion, Amy Leach/Charles Darwin, Hilton Als/James Baldwin, Maggie Nelson/John Berger, Lia Purpura/Michel de Montaigne, Rebecca Solnit/Susan Sontag, Lena Dunham/Nora Ephron, Leslie Jamison/Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald/Sir Thomas Browne, and Mary Ruefle/Ralph Waldo Emerson. Marino CSU M,W 6:00 – 7:50 pm ENG511 Dyer CSU T,TH 6:00 – 7:50 pm ENG695 Critical Approaches to Literature Graduate Seminar: Law and Literature KENT STATE UNIVERSITY Hediger KSU W 11:00am – 1:45 pm 6/77591 Clewell KSU TH 4:25 – 7:05 pm 6/76401 Fein KSU W 5:30 – 8:15 pm 6/76791 M’Baye KSU T 5:30 – 8:15 pm 6/76104 Ecocriticism Modernism and Postmodernism Chaucer Canterbury Tales African-American Literature YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY Graber YSU TH 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6919.26859 Reese YSU TH 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6920.27115 Studies in Young Adult Literature 20th Century British Studies: The Angry Years: This course will focus on literature of the 1950s, a decade called “the angry years” because of the impact of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. We will consider, but not be confined by, the period’s chief literary phenomena, the AYM (Angry Course list continued... 2015 Spring Course Offerings Literature continued... Young Men—mostly referring to fiction) and The Movement (mostly referring to poetry). Writers include Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and William Golding, among others, in whose texts we will meet drunken university lecturers, existential outsiders, the cinema star and escape artist Mars (a dog), atom bombs, myxomatosis (a disease fatal to rabbits), drug smuggling, an archaeological hoax, more than a few murders, and a lot of laughs. Anderson YSU W 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6922.26522 Tingley YSU W 5:10 – 7:50 pm ENG 6965.26857 20th Century American Studies Studies in Film