Course Descriptions for Spring 2018
150.001: Study of Literature
TR 0930-1045
Sinae King sinaekg@unm.edu
Welcome to English 150: Introduction to Literature! This course is designed as an introduction to the study, appreciation, and most importantly, enjoyment of literary works of poetry, drama, and fiction for non-English majors. We will discuss why literature, not only the contemporary ones but also those that were created centuries ago still matters to us living in the twenty first century. By observing how literary texts initiate, provoke, and engage in creative as well as critical dialogues with the historical, cultural, and political context of their creation and consumption, we will see how great literary works can still be meaningful even when taken out of their original context of creation. In this perspective, we will apply interdisciplinary approach and look into some of the art and film works inspired by or closely related to the primary texts.
150.002: Study of Literature
MWF 1100-1150Kadeshia Matthews
150.003: Study of Literature
TR 1400-1515
Vincent Basso vbasso@unm.edu
English 150 introduces Non-English majors to the study and appreciation of literature. Over the course of the semester participants will work through a variety of genres and develop the tools and vocabulary necessary to critically discuss literature. Our class will consider literature from different periods, places, and cultures and learn about literary aesthetics, themes, and genre conventions while developing ways to stage arguments about literary works and their adaptations in television and film. Texts will include, but are not limited to: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Assignments include quizzes, short essays, a class presentation, a mid-term exam, and a final project.
220.001: Expository Writing: Identity and Media
MWF 0800-0850
Misty Thomas mthoma08@unm.edu
Media in its various forms influence and reinforce our identities. From television to video games to social media platforms, people interact with both positive and negative representations of gender, sex, race, and class (among others). With this framework as the focus, this course will ask students to actively and critically engage with the media around them. Students will investigate the media that they interact with and analyze the way it interacts with their lives, their sense of self, and how they view other people and the world.
Assignment will include writing a identity memoir that investigates student's sense of identity and how it interacts with popular media. Other assignments include a short proposal, a research paper, and a student-led discussion presentation. Readings will be the novel Ready Player One,a couple short stories found on Learn, and the Pocket Style Manual. We will also be watching movies and television shows as primary texts.
220.002: Expository Writing: Identity at the Crossroads
MWF 1000-1050
Kyle Fiore kfiore@unm.edu
From poetry and memoirs to self-portraits, selfies, movies, and social media, we explore the question of "Who am I?" We also struggle to understand “Who are you?” These two questions have joined and separated us from one another since the beginning of language. How do we see ourselves and others, and how do others see us? How do we make our mark? How do we translate the marks made by those from other countries and cultures? This course focuses on how we define ourselves and other people through art, writing, and activism. We will consider customs and rituals that bring us together and cultural differences that separate us. We will look at the actions people take to make their voices heard, and consider how those voices are received. Students will keep a journal, write a memoir, and create a multimedia project. Short assignments will culminate in a research paper. Authors, artists, and activists studied will include: Joy Harjo, Miranda July, Frida Kahlo, Jamaica Kincaid, Herman Melville, Tim O’Brien, Jordan Peele, George Saunders, David Sedaris, Kira Walker, and others.
220.003: Expository Writing: Race, Gender, and Print Culture
MWF 1100-1150
Amy Gore gorea@unm.edu
What roles do newspapers, books, and other printed material play in shaping our understandings of race and gender? This course explores the impact of the mass publication and dissemination of the printed word on American society, specifically on its ability to reflect, create, or resist stereotypical notions of race and gender. We will explore such items as slave advertisements, early African American and Indigenous books, and such individuals as Samson Occom, David Walker, and Nellie Bly who used the printed word to expose injustice and influence American politics. In this class we will learn and apply types of rhetorical analyses to a variety of genres, considering how the way we speak impacts our message and reaches certain types of readers. We will learn to read a text closely, thinking about how unusual words, phrases, or even punctuation might reveal significant meaning. We will identify and consider the numerous ways in which the manuscript and printed word harnessed types of social and political power in at different points in American history, and we will study selected texts in their original format, analyzing how mediums may impact the message of a literary text. This course will offer several hands-on opportunities with American literature and newspapers as we avail ourselves of library resources.
220.004: Expository Writing: The Cultural Hero
MWF 1300-1350
Mark Caughey mcaughey@unm.edu
This course will explore not only how cultures construct their heroes but also how heroes construct a sense of cultural identity. We will consider both the hero’s ancient origins and its transformation over time and across cultures -- from the epic hero to its latter-day counterpart: the superhero. To that end, we will examine such texts as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Saga of the Volsungs and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Along the way, we will develop a framework that will help us understand how some characteristics of the hero remain constant while others arise from specific cultural beliefs and values. Students will hone their writing and research skills through assignments that include reviews, comparative analyses and annotated bibliographies.
220.005: Expository Writing: Troubling Definitions: The Trickster Figure in American Literature
MWF 1200-1250
Ying Xu yingxu@unm.edu
In this section of 220, we will explore U.S. narrative fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, approaching the trickster figure in American literature to understand how the trickster figure serves as an important tool of subverting dominate discourses and negotiating meanings.
Trickster tales have existed globally since the earliest times and nearly everyone can recognize a trickster that one is encountered in a story, whether it be Br’er Rabbit pulling the stunt with the tar baby, the Monkey King overturning the Heavenly Palace, or Coyote adjusting to the changing environment to survive. The trickster discourse goes beyond a simple judgment of real or fake. It is double voiced, borrowing Bakhtin’s term “polyphony” (literarily meaning many voices), which captures the nature of trickster stories in which the author not only places his/her narrative voice between the author and the reader, but allows characters to shock and subvert. Jeanne Roister Smith thus points out the nature of tricksters in her book Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (University of California Press, 1997): “Tricksters shake things up, splinter the monologic, shatter the hierarchies. At this new crisis (or carnival) of American literature, tricksters proliferate, disrupting tradition and mediating change” (xii).
Different cultures have different tricksters, and even for the same American Indian trickster such as Coyote, different tribes assigned different meanings to the figure. Tricksters examined in this course come from five ethnic/racial groups: African Americans, Euro-Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans, covering a rich legacy of folklores such as Uncle Remus’s Br’er Rabbit, Jake tales, Coyote and the Kaupata story in the Southwest, the Monkey King from Chinese classic The Journey to the West, and La Llorona and La Malinche. Major texts include Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Gene Luen Yang’s comic book, American Born Chinese (2006), Maria Cristina Mena’s short stories (1910s), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982).
220.006: Expository Writing: Women Writing America
TR 0800-0915
Annie Lowrance llowrance@unm.edu
This course focuses on advanced expository writing for students who wish to improve their writing skills by learning to critically read, contextualize, analyze, and respond to American women’s writing – specifically short stories - as literary texts with specific purposes. Writing is always in response to something else, and women’s writing is certainly no exception. We will look at how American women from the 19th century to the present challenge and resist narratives concerning race, gender, sexuality, and land dispossession by writing against and sometimes through the popular narrative themes of the time. Our aim will be to both explore the thematic content of women’s writing in the short story form and to become aware of the importance of form and how form dictates message, how it will be received, and by whom. By reading, researching, and responding to women’s writing, you will develop your own skills—and voice—in understanding, speaking and writing to meet the demands of academic and professional writing in diverse disciplines.
220.007: Expository Writing
TR 1230-1345Emma Mincks
220.008: Expository Writing: From Utopia to Dystopia: Exploring Political and Cultural Anxieties in Science-Fiction
TR 0930-1045
Alex Ukropen aukropen@unm.edu
In his book, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, 20thcentury philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel stated that “there is tyranny in the womb of every utopia.” It is no surprise, then, that dystopian fiction often represents the tyrannical and twisted side of an ideology that some might otherwise consider ideal. In this course, we will explore texts that present dystopian societies that represent the dark facets of a socio-political ideology. This course aims to understand both the political climates and anxieties that surround the texts that we will read as well as analyze popular opinions of our time and speculate how they might be portrayed in a dystopian setting.
Starting with the text that coined the term, we will begin with Thomas More’s Utopia and move on from there, reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, excerpts from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and the film adaptation of The Hunger Games among other works in order to understand how these texts deal with real world problems and why the dystopian genre seems to fascinate so many people. We will also study political rhetoric and how an oppressive social system can be advertised in such a way that it seems appealing to some. Moreover, there will be a focus on academic research as well as strategies to improve academic writing techniques and style.
220.009: Expository Writing : X-MEN & Identity
TR 1100-1215
Lauren Perry perryl@unm.edu
This course will cover the expansive history and ground-breaking texts of X-MEN comics from their inception in 1963 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The X-MEN comic titles were the best-selling comics from the mid 60s through the early 80s, due in large part to their status as a band of misfit, international characters. X-MEN introduced the first queer characters along with many other important firsts in comics and pop culture. From their early Silver Age titles to their modern film adaptations, X-MEN graphic novels and characters continue to portray under-represented and disenfranchised voices in global conflicts. They are a symbol of counter culture and the most successful emblem of LGBTQ, female, cisgender, transgender, and mixed race inclusion in mainstream popular culture (along with being written and directed by extremely successful members of these under-represented communities).
This class will sample theoretical framework in conversation with these texts and address issues of identity, politics, the body, race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, and queer theory. It will seek to analyze these texts by reading primary source material in the form of original Silver Age comics, graphic novels, and films featuring various X-MEN characters and narratives. Students will utilize modes of literary analysis and critical thinking to produce writing that focuses on how these texts represent the voiceless, challenge identity and subject conceptions, and how these texts critique the political discourses of their given time periods. The X-MEN not only changed and saved comics as a medium; these texts revolutionized and reinvigorated diversity in popular culture. Students will read theory, research, and produce complex written criticism of these texts and the conversations surrounding them.
220.010: Expository Writing Science Fiction and the Now
TR 1400-1515
Vicki Vanbrocklin vvanbrocklin@unm.edu
Light sabers, space ships, and robots: Science Fiction. No other genre has experienced such dramatic changes. Its roots lie in 18th century gothic literature and has become a staple of modern literature and films. Science Fiction’s longevity has much to do with what inspires its writers. While early scholars called it speculative literature, this class will focus on Science Fiction as a response to culture rather than imagining what the future might hold. These writers are more concerned with their present rather than the future. We will begin with mother of Science Fiction, Mary Shelley and make our way forward with short stories, films, and television show episodes to exam modern day issues such as immigration, class, war, technology, and climate change.
220.021: Expository Writing: Reading the Nation in 18th Century Popular Culture
Online
Kelly Hunnings kellyhunnings@unm.edu
This course will cover influential aspects of popular culture from the long eighteenth century, specifically from the years 1688 – 1815, and how these share a timely relationship with our own twenty-first conceptions of nationhood. The eighteenth century ushered in sweeping changes to the lives of the rich and the poor, as the rural, agriculturally based economies of Europe began a transformation into a modern industrial era. The early years of the Industrial Revolution brought technological advances that improved agricultural production and sped up the manufacture of goods, laying the groundwork for the factory system that would soon dominate European countries and the newly formed United States of America. Better transportation between distant places made it possible to buy and sell more goods. It is in this time that England became one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world and imposed its power across the globe.
This class will put influential texts and images from eighteenth-century popular culture in conversation with issues of personal identity, shifting borders, material/visual culture, and specifically how these share a relationship with anxieties around the changing status of “the nation.” It will seek to analyze “low brow” documents by reading primary source material in the form of seduction fiction, the gothic genre, instructional guides for young women, and newspaper drawings. Students will utilize modes of literary analysis and critical thinking to produce writing that focuses on how these texts represent conceptions of the nation, anxieties regarding shifting borders, and how these texts and images critique political and social discourse of the period. The eighteenth century not only changed our understanding of the nation, but also how we see ourselves as citizens. Students will read theory, research, and produce complex, criticism of these texts and the conversations surrounding them.
224.001: Intro to Creative Writing
MWF 1000-1050
Mark Caughey mcaughey@unm.edu
This course will introduce students to the craft of writing in the genres of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. In the first half of the course, assignments will stress generative strategies; in the latter half, we will focus on structuring, revising and refining our work. Likewise, while the first few weeks will address issues of craft common to all genres, we will ultimately be focusing on those concerns and conventions that define and distinguish each genre. Although each student will be writing in all three genres, no one will be expected to master any of them. After all, the goal is exploration, not conquest.
Because one cannot be a thoughtful writer without first being a thoughtful reader, we will be engaged in quite a bit of reading -- using stories, poems and essays by established authors as models for our own work. Moreover, students will be expected to give considerable and considerate feedback on their classmates’ writing.
224.002: Intro to Creative Writing
MWF 1300-1350Heather Lapahie
224.003: Intro to Creative Writing
TR 1100-1215Ruben Rodriguez
224.004: Intro to Creative Writing
MW 1700-1815Crystal Zanders
224.005: Intro to Creative Writing
MWF 1100-1150David O’Connor
224.006: Intro to Creative Writing
TR 0930-1045Hayley Peterson
224.007: Intro to Creative Writing
MWF 0900-0950Samuel Nichols
224.008: Intro to Creative Writing
Online
Andrew Bourelle abourelle@unm.edu
Introduction to Creative Writing will expose students to the genres of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Students will read, analyze, and discuss published examples of each, examining elements of craft in the different genres. Students will write in each of the genres and share their work with classmates, giving and receiving feedback as a way to improve their writing and the writing of their classmates.
224.009: Intro to Creative Writing
TR 1400-1515Tatiana Duvanova
240.001: Traditional Grammar
TR 1230-1345Cristyn Elder
248.001: T: Magical Medievalism
MWF 1400-1450
Dalicia Raymond dalicia@unm.edu
This course will examine how medieval magic and magical figures have come to be represented in popular contemporary literature and film. Students will draw connections between the functions of magic in medieval texts and their modern adaptations, as well as look at how medieval concepts and themes involving magic have been used to develop new narratives depicting or incorporating the Middle Ages. Through examining magic in medieval texts and texts using medievalism, students will consider medieval and contemporary social attitudes and understandings of magic and those who are associated with magic.
249.001: Intro to Studies in English
T 1100-1215
Diane Thiel dthiel@unm.edu
English 249 is a one-credit, eight-week class that brings together students majoring in English. It is a required course and must be taken before embarking on the major coursework. Students are introduced to the subfields of rhetoric and professional writing; creative writing; literary studies; and critical theory and cultural studies. Students will be introduced to the life of the department through class visits with faculty members, attendance at departmental events, and a variety of readings and discussions. Some class sessions will include conversations about future employment or opportunities for graduate school. The final task will be to craft a letter of intent documenting an intended course of study.
249.002: Intro to Studies in English
W 1100-1150
Diane Thiel dthiel@unm.edu
English 249 is a one-credit, eight-week class that brings together students majoring in English. It is a required course and must be taken before embarking on the major coursework. Students are introduced to the subfields of rhetoric and professional writing; creative writing; literary studies; and critical theory and cultural studies. Students will be introduced to the life of the department through class visits with faculty members, attendance at departmental events, and a variety of readings and discussions. Some class sessions will include conversations about future employment or opportunities for graduate school. The final task will be to craft a letter of intent documenting an intended course of study.
250.001: Literary Textual Analysis
MWF 0900-0950Kelly Hunnings
250.002: Literary Textual Analysis
TR 0930-1045
Carolyn Woodward woodward@unm.edu
This English 250 class offers study and practice of literary theory (formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic theory, gender theories, and literary-cultural theories), grounded in analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, and a collection of poetry. You will write six short papers and one final research paper of 8-10 pages.
250.003: Literary Textual Analysis
MWF 1400-1450
Sarah Townsend sltownse@unm.edu
This course will provide an introduction to literary studies by exploring major genres, research methods, and critical and theoretical approaches. Our readings will focus on the topic of visibility and invisibility in Irish and British literature, considering the following questions: What marks the difference between people whose lives are seen and celebrated and those whose existence goes undocumented, unheralded, and forgotten? Is the line between celebrity and inconsequentiality absolute, or can one force the world to take notice of oneself? This course examines literature about individuals who confront these very questions, and critical and theoretical frameworks that will help us answer them. The literature we will read are narrated from backwater villages and urban slums, from dystopian societies, prisons, factories, organ gulags, and places beyond our imagination. They express the deep hopes and paralyzing fears of those on the margins who try—and often fail—to be noticed, heard, rescued, or remembered. Course texts include J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, a selection of witness poetry, Colum McCann’s “Hunger Strike,” Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
265.001: Intro to Chicano-a Literature
TR 1400-1515Jana Koehler
281.001: African-American Literature I
MWF 1000-1050Finnie Coleman
290.001: Intro to Professional Writing
TR 0930-1045
Erin Lebacqz lebacqze@unm.edu
This course serves a dual purpose: to introduce students to the field of Professional Communication itself (including trends in the industry, job options, and applications in the field) and to introduce students to writing for Professional Communication. Thus our assignments will include both research and observation into the industry and field of Professional Commuication, as well as written work prepared for work in the industry. Students will learn first-hand experiences from professionals in the field and will conduct observations of work being done in job placements. Simultaneously, students will develop their own portfolio and resume for future job searches, and practice the writing conventions needed to succeed in this area of work.
292.001: World Lit-Ancient Through 16C
MWF 0900-0950
Doaa Omran Mohamed Domran@unm.edu
Beginning with the earliest literatures of the Ancient World, working up through the Medieval Period and moving into the Early Modern period, this course will explore some of the key works of the world’s literatures through the seventeenth century. Placing memorable plays, poems, and works of fiction in their cultural and historical contexts, we will not only gain a greater understanding of the development of literature and literary traditions in China, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Japan, Persia, Arabia, Europe, India, and the Americas, but we will gain a sense of history and a sense of the differences and similarities that shape the varieties of human experience across time and cultures. As we marvel at powerful tales about love and war, heroic journeys, spiritual pilgrimages, courtly intrigue, and colonial contact we will be alert to the varying degrees that these works display the globalizing tendencies that have culminated in the richly diverse tapestry of the modern world. Readings will include all or parts of such works as the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Ramayana, The Aeneid , and The Tale of Genji; selections from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Bhagavad Gita, and Qur’an; plays by Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and Shakespeare; poetry by Sappho, Catullus, Li Bai, Ono no Komachi, Petrarch, Ibn Hazm, and Farid ud-dun Attar; as well essays, letters and memoirs by Macchiavelli, Ibn Khaldun, Montaigne, and Columbus. Requirements will include several short papers, quizzes, and a midterm and final examination.
293.001: World Lit-17C Through Present
TR 1100-1215
Belinda Deneen Wallace bwallace@unm.edu
This course will introduce students to a variety of literary styles and cultural traditions from across the world as we sample a myriad of literary texts.We will examine global texts representing different historical periods, multiple points of view, and different geographical areas such as Western Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. Promoting a culturally and historically informed reading practice, this section of English 293 will place texts in conversation with one another in order to gain a sense of history as well as an understanding of and respect for the varieties of human experience. To this end, the class will take a comparative approach to analyzing important themes and ideologies. Lastly, students may consider how literary works from different cultures and historical periods relate to contemporary readers’ lived reality, cultural norms, and artistic expressions.
294.001: Survey of Earlier English Lit
TR 1230-1345Jessica Troy
295.001: Survey of Later English Lit
MWF 1100-1150
Feroza Jussawalla
296.001: Earlier American Literature
MWF 1300-1350
Kathryn Wichelns wichelns@unm.edu
In this course we will read key texts tracing the emergence of early notions of American personal and national identity. Beginning with accounts from the seventeenth century, we will focus on ideas about class, race, sexuality and gender as articulated primarily through the divergent expectations and experiences of Europeans and the Native peoples of the Americas. These accounts reveal traces of the critical challenge that Native America presented to European notions of individual and group purpose. Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity by the Narragansett, and Mary Jemison’s memoir of a lifetime spent as an adopted Seneca woman, remind us of the ideological and cultural complexity at the foundation of our own ideas of national origin. Mary Prince's and Harriet Jacobs’s accounts of their enslavement emphasize the global influences on emerging North American ideas about race, commerce, and human identity. Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, a bestseller when it was first published in 1797, suggests that post-Revolutionary American notions of nationality, sexual deviancy, and gender depend upon period-specific assumptions about race and class. Our course culminates in close readings of two of the most famous works to emerge from this era. Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) articulate ambivalent responses to shifting cultural and racial mores. An emphasis on historical and political context will enable us to explore the extraordinary differences among these textual representations, and will allow us better to understand the ways that this tumultuous time inaugurates the struggles of the nineteenth century.
297.001: Later American Literature
MWF 1200-1250
Amy Gore gorea@unm.edu
This course surveys the development of U.S. literary history through the lens of print culture. Beginning with literary selections from the Civil War and ending with the twenty-first century, this course will consider the material conditions of print and their role in shaping modern American literary production. While this is a survey course, we will have several thematic questions to guide us: What impact did the medium of print have in shaping American literature, especially with its developing industrial and technological production? How did print mediums, combined with social and political circumstances, create new genres? How did print culture offer opportunities for the voices of marginalized peoples? This course will offer several hands-on opportunities with American literature as we avail ourselves of library resources. In addition to the continued development of their critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, through this course students will have a better understanding of literature’s relationship with American social, political, and cultural history.
304.001: Bible as Literature
Online
Kelly Van Andel kvanande@unm.edu
This course studies biblical stories within their literary and historical contexts, and it examines how the authors of the Bible utilize literary forms and tools such as the parable, proverb, allegory, and so on to convey particular messages. It additionally stresses the importance of the Bible as a source of English and American literature. Units of study include Narrative, Poetry, the Synoptic Gospels, the Letter, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament in English and American Literature. There are two exams and one short paper or presentation.
305.001: Mythology
MWF 1300-1350
Nicholas Schwartz nschwar@unm.edu
This course is designed to introduce students to a variety of mythological traditions that are most necessary to learn and recognize for the study of American and British literature and culture. As such, our focus will be primarily—but not only—on the Western mythologies which most often exerted a major influence on these literatures and cultures. This does not mean, however, that we will spend all of our time reading those myths which feature prominently in Ancient Greek and Roman Literatures. The scope of this course is broad, both geographically and temporally speaking. Texts include the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh and other related myths, the Judeo-Christian Bible, along with works from the classical and medieval periods like Homer’s Odyssey and selections from Norse myth, amongst others. Students will not only develop a valuable familiarity with these various mythological traditions, but they will also be exposed to a number of different ways of reading and analyzing them.
315.001: Interdisc Approaches to Lit
TR 0930-1045Andrea Mays
320.001: Advanced Expository Writing
TR 1400-1515
Michelle Kells mkells@unm.edu
This course will apply rhetorical theory to the analysis of diverse literary and rhetorical genres centering on themes of place and belonging: fiction, poetry, film, field exercises, argumentative essays, and narratives. Selected readings and course assignments will be of interest to undergraduate students in English concentrating in Rhetoric and Writing, Literature, and Creative Writing. The content of the course will be equal parts: Rhetoric; Philosophy; Myth; Ecology.
321.001: Inter Creative Writ Fiction
TR 1230-1345Jacob Trujillo
321.002: Inter Creative Writ Fiction
TR 1600-1715Jacob Trujillo
322.001: Inter Creative Writ Poetry
MWF 1200-1250Cedar Brant-Smith
323.001: Inter Creative Writ Nonfiction
TR 1100-1215
Michelle Brooks mbrooks7@unm.edu
This class will consist of discussing creative nonfiction in all its forms. Students will present essays for workshop and respond to other students’ stories. We will also read contemporary creative nonfiction and discuss publication strategies.
323.002: Inter Creative Writ Nonfiction
MW 1530-1645
Marisa Clark clarkmp@unm.edu
This intermediate creative nonfiction course will introduce you to the many possibilities of creative nonfiction, with emphasis on memoir, the personal essay, lyric essays, and flash nonfiction. The writing you do for the class will ask you to draw from past experiences and passions, as well as current interests and observations. You will read published pieces and do short exercises intended to target various craft elements of literary nonfiction and generate material for full-length works, and of course, you will draft, workshop, and revise your own literary-quality essays. Class discussions will concern elements of literary craft, naturally, but also the special kinds of responsibility that fall on writers of nonfiction.
324.003: Introduction to Screenwriting
M 1330-1600Matthew McDuffie
336.001: T: Classic Fairy Tales
TR 1530-1645Susanne Baackmann
338.001: T: Modern Russian Culture
TR 1400-1515Irina Meier
341.001: Premodern Japanese Literature
TR 1100-1215Lorna Brau
345.001: Supernatural Japan
TR 1530-1645
Lorna Brau
347.001: Viking Mythology
TR 0930-1045
Staff
349.001: Beowulf to Arthur
MWF 1200-1250
Lisa Myers myersl@unm.edu
This course is designed as an introductory survey to the literary works produced in England in the Middle Ages, c. 700-1500. While most texts will be read in Modern English translations, class lectures will provide some background on the development of the English language. The class will focus on both the specialized terminology and literary devices particular to medieval English texts as well as the cultural, social and political factors that influenced the development of English literature. Readings will introduce students to a wide variety of medieval genres and will include epic, lyric poetry, romance, mystical revelation and outlaw tale as illustrated in such works as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, Sir Orfeo, The Showings of Julian of Norwich and the Rhymes of Robin Hood.
351.001: Chaucer
MWF 1000-1050Nicholas Schwartz
352.001: Early Shakespeare
MWF 1100-1150Lisa Myers
353.001: Later Shakespeare
MWF 1400-1450Gerard Lavin
353.002: Later Shakespeare
Online
Marissa Greenberg marissag@unm.edu
The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, The Sonnets – Shakespeare wrote some of his most powerful and enduring works in the second half of his career. In this fully online course you will read, discuss, and analyze a selection of Shakespeare’s later plays and poems. You will use a variety of online resources, like performance databases and podcasts by experts in the field, to develop your knowledge and comprehension of Shakespeare’s works and the broader contexts of their composition, performance, and reception. Special attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language: You will acquire and demonstrate facility with Shakespeare’s seemingly foreign vocabulary and complex poetry by performing both close readings and recitations. Through a range of analytical activities, including small group discussion and individual skills-based assignments, you will apply your understanding to construct your own arguments about Shakespeare’s works. Assessment will also include a capstone project and an exam.
355.001: Enlightenment Survey
TR 1400-1515
Carolyn Woodward woodward@unm.edu
Wondrous things upon the earth? With microscope and telescope, in drops of water, across oceans, and in the expanse of the heavens, people marveled at a plurality of revealed worlds. Shocking ideas were formulated and published during this time, sometimes at people’s peril as they challenged not only received opinion but sometimes church and government authorities in philosophical treatises, clandestine literature, visual narrative, travel writing, newspapers, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and the novel. Major figures include John Locke, Mary Wortley Montagu,Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the naturalist Gilbert White. We’ll read selections from writers of African origins living in London, North America, and the Caribbean, as well. The semester will close with Jane Austen’s extended thought experiment on reason and passion in her novel Sense & Sensibility.
360.001: T: Ralph Ellison
MWF 1400-1450Kadeshia Matthews
388.001: T: A Cinematic Tour de France
W 1600-1830Rajeshwari Vallury
388.002: T: Youth & Resistance in Film
MWF 1400-1450
Jesus Costantino jcostantino@unm.edu
In this course, we will examine the relationship in cinema between youth culture and political resistance, a tense relationship that deepens in the post-World War II era and continues into the present. Is it possible for a commercial medium like film to have a truly revolutionary politics? Is rebelliousness just the personal style and emotional affect of adolescence? Do we outgrow our revolutionary spirit? Why are movies particularly interested in these questions? And why are American cinema and culture so frequently the reference points for filmmakers (and filmgoers) around the world who seek to understand, articulate, or experience more fully the relationship between youth and rebellion? In order to answer these questions, we will look at example films made since 1950 in the United States and abroad. Ultimately, our goal will first be to uncover what makes film ideally suited to the contradictory impulses of revolutionary aesthetics and youth-driven commodity culture, and second, to examine why this problem is so frequently expressed in the idiom of American cinema.
411.002: ST: Writing the Southwest
OnlineDavid Dunaway
414.002: Documentation
Online
Julianne Engberg newmark@unm.edu
This online Documentation course in advanced technical communication will focus on creating various kinds of documentation to serve specific audiences’ and clients’ needs. This course will prepare you to write technical documents in professional and organizational contexts (business, government, nonprofit agencies) and this class will model the document-creation practices common in technical writing careers. Students will learn what technical writers and editors do and what skills they need. We will also learn about other tasks in the content development process, such as creating visual content and editing. Specifically, students will focus on writing instructions, procedures, product descriptions, and other texts/multimodal outputs that help users to solve problems. A key component of this online course is group collaboration, as this course seeks to model to “remote” workplace nature of many technical writers’ careers today, which require synchronous and asynchronous collaboration using a variety of communication tools.
416.001: Biography & Autobiography
R 1600-1830Michelle Kells mkells@unm.edu
ENGL 416/516 Biography offers critical examination of the genre of biography (autobiography and memoir) across the subfields of English Studies (Rhetoric, Creative Writing, and Literary Studies). This course will provide models, practice, and feedback through writing workshops and the theoretical study of biography as craft. In addition to practicing the rhetorical art of narrative (and story-telling), students will cultivate a meta-discourse about biography as genre (form and function).
The course will include exploration of: Rhetorical Biography; Political Biography; Literary Biography; Personal Biography (autobiography and memoir/creative non-fiction). Students will analyze examples of each form toward discovering frameworks for their own original manuscript as well as examine various public and academic venues as platforms for publication of their scholarly and creative work.
417.002: Editing
Online
Stephen Benz sbenz@unm.edu
This course focuses on editing as a professional practice. Along with perfecting advanced copyediting skills, you will learn about "information design": the creation of documents that are complete, accurate, correct, comprehensible, usable, and appropriate for readers. Because editors must often be responsible for a document from its inception to its presentation as a finished product, you will also learn about layout and document design, as well as contemporary production processes. Successful completion of this course will provide you with the foundation necessary for a future career in the field.
418.001: Proposal & Grant Writing
TR 1100-1215Todd Ruecker
420.001: T: Blue Mesa Review
MWF 1400-1450
Mark Sundeen marksundeen@unm.edu
This class introduces you to the production of UNM’s national literary magazine, Blue Mesa Review. We receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of submissions each year from authors hoping to see their stories, essays, or poems published in our journal. Your primary responsibility in this course is to assess these submissions—collectively called “slush”—for possible publication in BMR. In addition, you will keep an informal journal about your participation in slush, attend discussion meetings, and write a few short papers. This class requires you to be self-motivating; in some respects, it is very much like an independent study. You must be able to keep up with the workload on your own—and often on your own time. You will also practice writing blog posts—short personal pieces of opinion and criticism—that may be selected for publication on the Blue Mesa Review blog.
420.002: T: Prose Stylistics
TR 0800-0915
Jerome Shea jshea@unm.edu
Prose Stylistics is a wide ranging course that tries to find out what makes for good prose (and what makes for wretched prose). We will study periodic sentences and running sentences, noun style and verb style, parataxis and hypotaxis. We will ponder such questions as “What do we mean by ‘voice’?”; “What assumptions do we bring to prose that we don’t bring to poetry?”; and “What do we mean by ‘high style’ and ‘low style’?” We will question whether prose is transparent or opaque, and what the ramifications of that are. Five or six short papers, no exams.
421.001: Adv Creative Writ Fiction
TR 1230-1345
Daniel Mueller dmueller@gmail.com
In English 421:"Advanced Fiction Workshop," students produce the primary text for the course. To augment our discussion of original fiction, examined through the critical lens of craft, I'll assign exercises meant to broaden each writer's skill set and approaches to storytelling and outside readings of published stories and craft essays. Writers will produce by the end of the workshop a portfolio of fiction of publishable quality.
422.001: Adv Creative Writ Poetry
TR 1400-1515
Lisa Chavez ldchavez@unm.edu
This is an advanced creative writing workshop in poetry. This class presupposes a certain understanding of the genre: ie. at least a basic understanding of the use of image, line, and form. Our goals in this course will be to hone craft skills, try new styles and forms of poetry, and practice revision skills. We will read the work of published authors (and some may visit our class!) and focus on workshopping student poems.
423.001: Adv Creative Writ Nonfiction
MWF 1300-1350
Mark Sundeen marksundeen@unm.edu
This is a workshop-based course for writing memoir, personal essay, lyrical prose, narrative journalism, and any hybrid thereof. Each student will submit three pieces over the course of the semester to be discussed in class. Workshops will focus on five basic elements of craft: voice, character, theme, structure, and plot. Lessons will include strategies for revision and short assignments to experiment with new genres. We will also hone the skill of providing verbal and written feedback: learning to comment on peers’ work with insights that are honest, kind, and constructive. We will read and evaluate essays by contemporary innovators of creative nonfiction, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Jamison, Domingo Martinez, Sherman Alexie, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, David Foster Wallace, and Jenni Monet.
424.001: Creative Writing Wrk Script
R 1730-2000Matthew McDuffie
441.001: English Grammars
TR 1230-1345
Bethany Davila bdavila@unm.edu
Studying grammar doesn’t have to be boring! This course helps students approach the study of grammar from different perspectives, all while attending to language politics, language attitudes, and language use. Projects include studying prescriptive and descriptive language rules, examining language as it is used, engaging with controversies involving stigmatized languages and grammars, and analyzing our own and others’ academic writing using corpus linguistics.
442.001: Major Text in Rhetoric
TR 0930-1045
Charles Paine cpaine@unm.edu
If we want to understand rhetoric in theory and practice, we need to go back to its historical sources, to the Greeks (who literally invented rhetoric) and to the Romans. This course will focus primarily on the works of the ancients, though we’ll continually cycle back to contemporary practice and theory, to contemporary issues. We’ll begin with selections from Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Then we’ll exploring the ideas of the Sophists, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Lysias. From here we move to Plato’s attack on rhetoric and on the Sophists, and we’ll spend a great deal of time with Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric as a true technē (or “art”). We’ll finish the semester examining the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, some modernist poets, and the American rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke. Throughout this odyssey, we’ll examine these ideas not merely as historical curiosities, but as ideas that help us understand and critique our current arts of discourse, how they work and how we (ought to) teach, study, and use them. Throughout the course, we’ll discover and forge connections between the rhetorical tradition and contemporary writing and speaking, often exploring contemporary and ancient texts as a way to ground our theories and do some rhetorical inquiry. These texts will come in a variety of mediums (visual, electronic, mixed modes, etc.)
For a typical class session, you’ll watch an online lecture (usually given by me), which will free up our in-class time for discussion, problem posing, and exploring your ideas and projects. You’ll be reading mostly primary texts, but we’ll also learn to do rhetorical analyses—taking texts apart to see what makes them effective or not. You’ll also complete several shorter assignments and a semester project that explores a question that is especially important to you.
This course would be of interest to those who are fascinated by the nature of human communication. It will be of practical use for those whose futures will require them to communicate effectively, to interpret communications with greater sophistication, and to persuade others (i.e., pretty much everyone nowadays). Some key theoretical questions include: Can rhetoric help us induce the truth or only belief? How do language and other symbolic systems (images, sounds, spaces, etc.) function? What’s the relationship between logic (or dialectic) and rhetoric? What good is rhetorical training and why teach or study rhetoric, writing, literature, or communication generally—does it make us better speakers, better thinkers, more savvy consumers of rhetoric?
444.001: Practicum: Tutoring Writing
TR 1400-1515
Erin Lebacqz lebacqze@unm.edu
In this practicum, students will first discuss and analyze theories in the fields of composition and pedagogy, learning to develop their own approach to tutoring, editing, or teaching writing. We will then apply this theory to a real life situation: students will be paired with online English 110, 120, or 219 students and will serve as tutors for these students, helping them revise their papers. English 444 thus helps students develop a broad theoretical basis for helping others develop their writing skills, purpose, and voice, while also including practice in the field. It's a theory class, internship, and resume-builder all in one! Assignments include analyses of lower-division student papers and lower-division student writing levels, and research into studies in the fields of composition and pedagogy.
449.001: Middle English Lang
R 1600-1830
Anita Obermeier aobermei@unm.edu
This course provides an introduction to those principal dialects of Middle English, demonstrated by selected readings, in the context of the development of the language from Old English to Early Modern English (c. 1150-1500). We will be looking at the language both diachronically (the historical development) and synchronically (the differentiation of dialect features at a given time). The primary goal of the course is to familiarize students with the range of texts available in different dialects during the period. At the end of the course, students should, for example, be able to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original North-West Midlands dialect with a full appreciation of the contribution of the language to the artistry of the poem, and to recognize its difference from the London dialect of Chaucer. Assignments will include take-home exercises, a midterm, a final, and a group translation project.
451.001: Old Norse
TR 1400-1515Staff
459.001: Irish Literature
MWF 1400-1450
Sarah Townsend sltownse@unm.edu
From rustic cottages and urban tenements to aristocratic Big Houses, the Irish home plays an important role in the nation’s cultural and political memory. At times the home becomes an object of nationalist nostalgia and a microscopic encapsulation of the nation at large; nonetheless, Irish homes have also functioned as places of trauma and violence during and after colonization. Although much of the violence is literal and external – Irish homes were confiscated by colonial landlords, raided in wartime, burned or vandalized during the Northern Irish Troubles, and often reduced to states of dire poverty – other forms of homegrown violence like religious coercion, physical and sexual abuse, racism, sexism, and class antagonism also root and fester in the privacies of the domestic sphere. Our literary investigations will trace narratives of domesticity and dispossession alongside their historical moments, asking how the figure of the home registers both modern Ireland’s greatest hopes and its gravest disappointments. We will conclude our course in the contemporary moment, where the short-lived Celtic Tiger economic boom has given way to a recession and housing crisis, and where literary critiques of late capitalism have appeared in the form of chilling ghost stories. Our course materials include plenty of drama, some poetry and nonfiction, and two novels, including James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, which we will read nearly in its entirety. Short historical readings and visual materials will anchor the literature in time, and you can expect to leave the course not only with literary expertise but also with a sound understanding of Irish history and culture (please note that no prior knowledge about Ireland is required). Assignments will include short written responses, several essays, a final exam, and a Twitter-based creative daybook project called #abqulysses2016, which connects our reading of Ulysses to everyday life in Albuquerque.
462.001: American Realism & Naturalism
MWF 1000-1050Kathryn Wichelns
466.001: African American Lit
MW 1400-1515
Finnie Coleman coleman@unm.edu
In this course, we explore the first century of the African-American novel – arguably the most tumultuous 100-year period in African American cultural history. Bookended by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s momentous Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, we begin our study of this period with William Wells Brown’s Clotel: or, The President's Daughter (1853) and close with James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). African American religious traditions, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, segregation, Black nationalism, lynching, and the struggle for civil rights will dominate our discussions as we tease out the complex cultural politics of the Reconstruction period, appraise the flowering of literature during the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance, question the economic and social realities that coalesced in Black communities during the Great Depression and World War II, and assess the cautious optimism that characterized the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Our reading list includes well-known novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). These better-known novels help us to grasp the dominant themes that circulated in all genres of African American literature during this fecund period. Our list also includes more obscure novels like Martin Delany’s Blake (1861) and Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899) and the Hindered Hand (1905). These lesser-known novels will help us to understand the complicated internal racial politics that governed the rise of the so-called “Talented Tenth,” the pervasiveness and durability of “intra-racism” and “colorism,” and the “pride of the rising tide” that accompanied the birth of the Black middle class and the rise of the “New Negro.” At every opportunity, we will discuss ways in which we might recruit the metanarratives of yesterday to help us to make sense of mutations in racism and White Supremacy in our own “tumultuous” historical moment.
487.001: Poetry: Mind & Imagination
W 1600-1830N Scott Momaday
