Fall 2015 Course Descriptions

500.001: Introduction to the Professional Study of English

TR 1230-1345 
Jesse Aleman, jman@unm.edu

This course prepares students for literary studies at the graduate level. It will cover fundamental bibliographic, research, and MLA methods; it will introduce students to major ideas in contemporary literary theory; it will consider the cultural poetics and politics of the history of literary studies; and it will prepare students to produce graduate scholarship and writing. It will also introduce students to the English Department's graduate requirements and policies; the department's faculty; and the resources of the UNM's libraries.

501.001: Intro to Profession for Writers 

W 1600-1830
Daniel Mueller, dmueller@unm.edu

In this course, required for MFA students who wish to teach English 224 ("Introduction to Creative Writing"), we will examine the writing life, breaking it down into teaching, publishing, and all the other things we do to support our artistic aspirations. Indeed, we will discuss all aspects of the writing life except the actual fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction we are all--always--in the process of producing. Our reading list will likely include readings by Kim Addonizio, Sven Birkerts, Anne Lamott, Betsy Lerner, D. G. Myers, Dale Peck, Carolyn See, Michael Shurtleff, Stephanie Vanderslice, and others.

511.001: Job Seekers Workshops

MTWRF 0930-1330  (Before semester starts, then intermittantly through the semester)
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu

The academic job market presents a unique set of expectations and challenges. This course prepares students to craft their application materials and navigate the process successfully. Students will learn the timeline for assembling their materials and the expectations for the various documents in an application, including cover letters, CVs, writing samples, and teaching and research statements. In addition to discussions of the job application process and its documents, the course will involve significant workshopping of each student's materials. We will also demystify conference interviews, Skype and phone interviews, campus visits, and job talks. While applying to academic jobs will be the main focus for the course, we will also discuss jobs outside of academia, including the challenge of identifying employment options, distinguishing between CVs and resumes, and justifying the PhD. This course will be especially useful to students finishing their degree, but it is open to students of every level, and it could be helpful for students to take the course more than once. The class will meet intensively for the two weeks before the fall semester begins and then intermittently throughout the semester itself, counting as a fall semester course--not a summer course. This is a three-credit graduate course.

511.002: Feminist Theories

T 1600-1830
Adriana Ramírez de Arellano, ardap@comcast.net  

518.001: Proposal & Grant Writing

MWF 1300-1350
Kyle Fiore, kfiore@unm.edu

This course explores the fine art of raising money for non-profit organizations. You will analyse and/or write effective non-profit documents, including appeals letters, cover letters, brochures, annual reports, case statements and, most importantly, grant proposals. You will study existing non-profit documents and proposals to understand the rhetorical moves they make. You will also learn how to locate and evaluate requests for proposals to ensure the documents you write contains information necessary to persuade a client or funder that they should fund your project. Please note that this is a slash course offered with English 418. As a graduate student, you will also be asked to write a research proposal for your area of study.

518.002: Proposal & Grant Writing

MWF 1000-1050
Kyle Fiore, kfiore@unm.edu

This course explores the fine art of raising money for non-profit organizations. You will analyse and/or write effective non-profit documents, including appeals letters, cover letters, brochures, annual reports, case statements and, most importantly, grant proposals. You will study existing non-profit documents and proposals to understand the rhetorical moves they make. You will also learn how to locate and evaluate requests for proposals to ensure the documents you write contains information necessary to persuade a client or funder that they should fund your project. Please note that this is a slash course offered with English 418. As a graduate student, you will also be asked to write a research proposal for your area of study.

520.001: T: Writing with Class Tropes

TR 0800-0915
Jerome Shea, jshea@unm.edu 

This course focuses on rhetorical tropes and schemes, on recognizing them and using them in our writing. You will develop a store of particularly useful tropes to amaze your friends and confound your enemies. Not only will we write, but we will analyze other writings, leaning to spot the coy apophasis, the elusive hypophora, the flashy chiasmus, the bullying bdelygmia, and many more. No exams, just writing: five or six short papers.

520.004: T: Blue Mesa Review

TR 1400-1515
Marisa Clark, clarkmp@unm.edu 

521.003: Creative Writing Workshop Fiction

T 1900-2130
Daniel Muller, dmueller@unm.edu 

521:080: Creative Writing Workshop Fiction

Arranged
Luci Tapahonso, tapahons@unm.edu 

522.001: Creative Writing Workshop Poetry

M 1600-1830
Lisa Chavez, ldchavez@unm.edu 

Revision is not simply editing, but should be, as the word suggests, a radical re-seeing of a piece of writing. To encourage the discovery and energy that revision can bring to writing, this graduate level workshop will focus on revision, including revision across genres: ie. transforming a poem to prose and back again, and even to another medium entirely.  (This exercise in radical revision will be graded on process rather than product: ie. how seriously you attempted the exercise, because the point is to experiment). While this workshop is rooted in poetry, it would also be appropriate for writers of other genres who want to try out new strategies for revision and explore another literary genre.  In addition to revising and workshopping writing in progress, we will also do new writing spurred by invention exercises, and we will read work by contemporary poets, including books by recent graduates of the program.

522:080: Creative Writing Workshop Fiction

Arranged
Luci Tapahonso, tapahons@unm.edu 

523.001: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop: Creative Nonfiction

R 1600-1830 
Diane Thiel, dthiel@unm.edu

Creative nonfiction is a genre that stretches back to classical essayists such as Plato and Aristotle, but the term "creative nonfiction" is a relatively new one, the term itself suggesting that the writing is essentially true, though there are a multitude of ways to render a piece. We each find our own creative means of delivery. In this course, we will explore a number of sub-categories, including travel narrative, personal essay, and memoir, among others. Though the sub-genres of creative nonfiction are generally thought of as distinct, several categories often overlap in a single piece. An essay might simultaneously include memoir, reflective writing, personal opinion. It might be a piece which could be called a sense of place essay, while delving deeply enough into history to also be called a historical essay. This course will have a strong focus on memoir and travel writing, but will also delve into the other forms of nonfiction as well. We will read a number of shorter pieces of creative nonfiction by writers such as Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sherman Alexie, Diane Ackerman, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as essays about the writing of creative nonfiction, by writers such as Tracy Kidder, Lee Gutkind, and Margaret Atwood. The course will include extensive and intensive weekly workshop of students' writing and provide a variety of writing exercises to address specific elements of writing creative nonfiction. Students will be responsible for one creatively analytical paper responding to the assigned reading, several informal reading responses, weekly peer reviews, as well as a portfolio of about 35 pages of work.

523:080: Creative Writing Workshop Fiction

Arranged
Luci Tapahonso, tapahons@unm.edu 

537.001 and .002: Teaching Composition

MTWRF (0900-1300 before the fall semester and 1-Hr/week during semester TBD)
Chuck Paine, cpaine@unm.edu & Stephen Benz, sbenz@unm.edu  

This course is designed for new teachers in UNM's Core Writing Program. You will learn and apply current theory and pedagogy in Composition Studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies to guide you as a teacher of diverse student writers. Like the directors of many writing programs across the country, we use a genre approach because we recognize that FYC (first year composition) courses should aim toward helping students gain skills, habits, strategies, and know-how that will transfer to other college courses across the disciplines and to personal and professional environments. We aim to help students develop the capacities that will allow them to negotiate these new contexts and write successfully in them. As Anne Beaufort asks in her College Writing and Beyond, "How can we set students on a life-long course of becoming expert writers," which she answers with "Let them practice learning new genres and the ways of new discourse communities . . . and challenge them to apply the same tools in every new writing situation" (158).  In addition to selected readings on the teaching and research of composition, this course offers hands-on mentoring and classroom materials that you can use during your first semester as a teacher in our program.  This is a rigorous "nuts and bolts" course. We will focus on issues of professional development as a teacher-scholar. The teaching of composition gives you entry into a rich and multi-faceted profession. We will provide many opportunities to reflect on your current and future career in the field through reading, research, class discussion, conferencing, and course projects. This is a three-credit graduate course. 

539.001: Teaching Professional Writing

MTWRF Aug 3-14, 1200-1600
Tiffany Bourelle, tbourell@unm.edu 

540.001: T: Multimodal & Online Pedagogy

T: 1600-1830 
Andrew Bourelle, abourelle@unm.edu

In this class, you will learn the theory behind online teaching and multimodal composition. Beth Hewett and Christa Ehmann (2004) indicate that teachers are often concerned about teaching online for the first time; however, they suggest that this worry is caused by a lack of proper training. This course will prepare you to teach your online course, helping you understand the best practices of designing a course, facilitating course discussions, holding online conferences, and providing feedback. In addition, the class will also be practical, as you will develop your own course shell to teach in the subsequent semester. The class you'll teach will be part of our online program, eComp, which is based on a multimodal pedagogy, where students are asked to choose their medium in response to the needs of their audience and the purpose of the document. As such, this class will teach you the theory and pratice of multimodal composition, helping you create materials such as assignments and multimodal instructional tools that mimic the texts your students develop.

540.002: T: Pedagogy Teaching Adult ESL Students

W 1900-2130
Bee Chamcharatsri, bee@unm.edu 

542.001: Major Texts in Rhetoric

M 1600-1830
Michelle Kells, mkells@unm.edu 

This course will explore classical rhetorical theory and practice as reflected in literary representations of Western history, education, and democratic political systems. We will examine the Greco-Roman Rhetorical tradition as it has shaped our historical and current roles as citizens, rhetors, and scholars. We will focus on the rhetoric of the Classical Period with a special focus on Gorgias, Isocrates, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero as well as selected texts of influential women rhetoricians Sappho, Aspasia, Diotima, Sor Juana de la Cruz, and Sarah Grimké. Supplementary readings will be included to map the evolution of Athenian democracy and Socratic citizenship as these influence contemporary democratic thought and institutions. This course will emphasize the application and analysis of rhetorical theory (key terms and concepts) through the generation of multi-perspectival interpretations of classical texts.

The rich literary and rhetorical legacy of Western traditions can be examined through diverse rhetorical artifacts including film, poetry, speeches, drama, essays, letters, fiction as well legal treatises and policies.  These different genres tell the stories of collective struggle, achievement, and citizenship that shape current trends in education, law, socio-economic status, government, and political participation.

547.001: Introduction to Old English

TR 1400-1515 
Jonathan Davis-Secord, jwds@unm.edu

Hwæt! In this class, we will return to the earliest recorded form of English and read some of the oldest literature ever written in the language. We will spend the first half of the semester learning the grammar of Old English while working through introductory readings in their original form. We will then move on to Beowulf and translate the first portion of the poem, covering Grendel's gruesome slaughtering of the Danes! We will supplement these translations by occasionally exploring current scholarly approaches to Old English literature. No prior knowledge of Old English required.

558.001: Modern British Literature

W 1600-1830 
M. R. Hofer, mrh@unm.edu

This course in late modern British literature focuses exclusively on writers born in the United Kingdom who brought out major works of poetry, fiction, or hybrid genres between the late 1920s and the late 1960s. One definition of the "late modern" focuses on aesthetically conservative and politically quietist literature that registers skepticism with the formal innovations of early to high modernist experimentation. That is, of course, a reactionary definition--and we will be taking a different view. Our survey of late modernism in the UK will analyze and evaluate how the stylistic, cultural, and conceptual qualities that characterize modernism--which was a transatlantic and, to a lesser extent, continental transplant that thrived from 1913 through the mid-1920s--were continually adopted/adapted by British writers through the onset of postmodernism in the wake of the British Poetry Revival.

*Although this list is subject to revision, students may expect to read and discuss novels by Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, and Christine Brooke-Rose, poems by Basil Bunting, Gael Turnbull, Charles Tomlinson, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, and J. H. Prynne, and work that resists standard categories by David Jones, Bob Cobbing, Tom Phillips, and B. S. Johnson.

559.001:  Domesticity and Dispossession in Modern Irish Literature

R 1600-1830
Sara L. Townsend, sltownse@unm.edu 

In his 1943 St. Patrick’s Day radio address, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera shared his vision of an Ireland whose “countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads…with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, and the laughter of comely maidens.” Yet, the literary and historical record betrays de Valera’s calculated idealism, revealing a vast history of dispossession and domestic privation in colonial and postcolonial Ireland. This course traces the figure of the house in Irish fiction, drama, and poetry from the Act of Union to the present, focusing primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries. We begin with the Anglo-Irish Big House, asking how this architectural signifier of the colonial relation collapses over time, both literally and figuratively, beneath the burden of conveying civilization, tradition, and ancestry. From there, we turn our attentions to the many contexts in which Irish homes were regarded as potential incubators of dissent and radicalism: famine evictions, wartime raids, clearings of Traveller encampments, sectarian assaults on homes during the Northern Irish Troubles. In the second half of the course, we explore Irish homes as sites of trauma, considering how tensions in Irish society—about gender, sexuality, race, and class—rot and fester in the privacies of the domestic sphere. The course will conclude with a unit on the recent housing crisis, and we will study the phenomenon of Ghost Estates (abandoned housing and commercial developments) alongside literature that similarly imagines the depredations of late capitalism as a type of haunting. Primary works by Maria Edgeworth, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, Samuel Beckett, Bernard MacLaverty, Patrick McCabe, Edna O’Brien, Tana French, Conor MacPherson, and others. Critical and theoretical readings by Katie Trumpener, Seamus Deane, Lee Edelman, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Sarah Cole, Giorgio Agamben, David Harvey, and others will complement our literary investigations.

587.001: The Landscape of American Poetry

T 1600-1830
N. Scott Momaday, natachee@unm.edu

This course will cover American poetry from 1850-2000, dealing especially with the development of the lyric poem.

610.001: Critical Regionalism

T 1600-1900 
Melina Vizcaino-Alemán, mviz@unm.edu

This theory seminar focuses on the concept of critical regionalism, from its inception as an architectural style to its development into a cultural studies paradigm. We will put the concept within the broader context of post-modernism and post-modern theories about space, and we will consider the ways critical regionalism responds to, resists, and/or reproduces the post-modern world. The reading load is theory-heavy and includes the most influential twentieth-century thinkers, including Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Fredric Jameson. The class also becomes familiar with the interventions of ethnic scholars in the areas of borderlands studies, the black Atlantic, and critical indigenous studies, including Mary Pat Brady, Glori a Anzaldúa, Paul Gilroy, and Jodi A. Byrd. In-between these theory readings, the class will consider literary, media, art, and film texts as analytical case studies of critical regionalism, and it will also begin to consider other aesthetic frames and historical periods to think about the concept. Assignments include an oral presentation and a final research project.

660.003: Race and the African American Novel

R 1600-1930 
Finnie Coleman, coleman@unm.edu 

In this seminar, we will explore a range of literary genres and movements, but with a signal difference; we will seek to tease out the often heavily nuanced differences in the genesis of African American literature and the genesis of American literature more generally.  For example, we will want to understand anachronism in literary “periodization” that results in Richard Wright’s embrace of naturalism in Native Son (1940) when Crane, Dreiser, Chopin, and others relied on naturalism most heavily in the late 19th century.  How do we explain away the postmodernist elements in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1925); a novel written decades before the events of WWII that supposedly ushered in Postmodernism?  This course will be a bit broader in scope than the typical seminar in that we will focus on rhetorical strategies and literary conventions that allowed Black writers to “speak the truth to power” at different watershed moments in American history.  We will begin with the rhetorical strategies found in Phillis Wheatley’s poetry before mounting an examination of structure, form, and performance in “saltwater” and “homegrown” domestic slave narratives.  Our study of these narratives will set the stage for our reading of early Black Nationalism from David Walker’sAppeal to W.E.B. DuBois’ iconic Souls of Black Folk.  After completing important contextual work, we will turn our attention to race, identity, resistance, and the genesis of the African American novel; the core project of our course.  We will read “foundational” novels by Sutton E. Griggs, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin as well as lesser-known works by Frances E.W. Harper, Ann Petry, Ernest Gaines, and perhaps John Edgar Wideman. The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement punctuate our study of the novel before we close the semester with a pedagogically centered discussion of race, slavery, identity, and (re)memory, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  Privileging hybridity over any particular school of thought we will engage a diverse set of theorists that will include Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Barbara Christian, Michael Awkward, Henry Louis Gates, Paul Gilroy, Edward Said, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Houston Baker, Cynthia Young, Deborah McDowell, Ann duCille, bell hooks, Valerie Smith, Hortense Spillers, and others.