A New Poetry Course with Professors Chang & Hsy

On the eve of the first day of National Poetry Month, the English Department announces a dynamic new course on poetry. This course is ideal for students curious about the relationship between literary analysis and composition practices, and it can be taken to fulfill a requirement for Creative Writing majors (see below):

The ABC’s of Poetry: How Poetry Matters

Fall 2015, T/Th 11:10am-12:35pm

Prof. Jennifer Chang and Prof. Jonathan Hsy

Clockwise from top left: Dickinson, Chaucer, & Agbabi.

How do poems make meaning? In this course, we will approach poetry as a creative practice and a provocative tool for thought, tracing a history of the symbiotic exchange between form and content from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. In asking how poetry matters, we will study poems as not only rhetorical structures and prosodic occasions, but also material objects and encounters.  Poets make poems out of language, among other things, that generates new ways of thinking about the world and new habits of mind. This class is team-taught by a poet (Prof. Chang) and literature scholar (Prof. Hsy), and the class aims to rethink the distinction between literary interpretation and creative composition.

Our class will focus on six poets: Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, and Patience Agbabi. As we read selected poems by these authors, we aim to understand how form and content interact and where theory and practice meet in collaboration and, sometimes, in conflict. This course will give students exposure to poetic forms (lyric, sonnet, ballad, free verse), and it will consider how the physical presentation of any poem shapes its meaning (manuscript, fascicle, printed text, textile, YouTube video, collage, etc). Assignments may include translation assignments, analytical essays, and creative adaptations.

*This course may be substituted for one of the ENGL 3210 (Techniques) requirements toward the Creative Writing major.  

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Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory with Professor Mitchell

Professor Mitchell Reading
Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech

Fall 2015 Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory

Crip/Queer Theory charts out key intersections between Disability, Queer, and Critical Race Studies.  Our goal will be to mine the spaces between historically pathologized sexuality, ability, and racialized statuses. In particular we will focus on questions of "agential materialism" where one cannot only find experiences of oppression, but also alternative ethical maps for living.  How are contemporary theorists beginning to conceive of bodies beyond the limits of social constructivism's passive, culturally inscribed surfaces?  What can the artful navigation of inhospitable social terrains tell us about what crip/queer and racialized lives might offer as viable counter-cultural options outside of homogenizing norms?  Key works covered may include:  Alison Kafer's Feminist Queer Crip, Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics, Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering, Alexander G. Weheliye's Habeas Viscus, Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time, Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's The Biopolitics of Disability, Jose Munoz's Cruising Utopia, Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, and Robert McRuer & Anna Mollow's Sex and Disability.

Thursdays 6:10-8 PM CRN 66741; ENGL 6520.10 Ethnicity and Identity; 3 CR; Rome 771; 8/31/15-12/09-15; Professor Mitchell.

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American Poetry to WWI with Professor McAleavey

A course to consider for Fall 2015!

Walt Whitman
(Library of Congress)

ENGLISH 3620.10   FALL 2015                  American Poetry to WW I

TR 4:45-6:00                        CRN: TBA                  Room: TBA

David McAleavey     Rome 655      202-994-6515           Office Hours: TBA

This course satisfies the CCAS Oral Communication G-PAC requirement.

(Syllabus still subject to change.)

General Description:

This is the first half of a broad survey of American poetry from its beginnings to the present. In 3620, we will read from the 17^th century up into the very early 20^th century. (In 3621, offered in Spring 2016, we will continue forward chronologically, ending with vital living poets.) The two most important poets we’ll be examining in 3620 are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, both of whom did crucial work from mid-century through the Civil War and in the decades after. However, we will start with earlier poets whose work has continuing artistic appeal and historical relevance, Anne Bradstreet (17^thcentury) and Phillis Wheatley (18^th century) among them. From the earlier part of the 19^th-century, we will consider William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier; later poets we will read include Emma Lazarus, E. A. Robinson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

Requirements:

Because this course is designed to address the CCAS oral communication requirement, students will be expected to deliver multiple brief informative presentations about specific poems throughout the semester. These presentations will be graded in terms of their effectiveness. There will be a midterm and a final (formats to be determined), as well as a documented persuasive paper (8-10 pp., prior to Thanksgiving).

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Kate Flint Visual Culture Events: April 16 and 17

Kate Flint presents a cultural history of
flash photography and race (April 16)

Interested in the relationship between words and images? Artsy or literary? Think of yourself as both?

Thanks to a generous gift by Sharyn Rosenblum to the English Department, as well as to the generosity of the Department of Fine Arts & Art History, as well as the Visiting Artist and Scholars Committee, we are delighted to announce two upcoming events designed specifically for you!

“Light Skinned: Flash Photography and the Representation of Race.”

*A talk by Kate Flint (Thursday, April 16, 6.15 pm; Smith Hall, Room 114)

AND

“Dickens and the intersection of literary and visual culture.”

*A seminar with Kate Flint (Friday, April 17, 10am; Rome Hall, 771)

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the University of Southern California, where she is currently Chair of the Department of Art History. Prior to this, she taught at Bristol, Oxford, and Rutgers. Her research spans the C19th and C20th, and is both interdisciplinary and transatlantic.

Professor Flint’s areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural and literary history, visual culture, women's writing, gender studies, and transatlantic studies. Most recently, she has published The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008), which looks at the two-way relations between Native Americans and the British in the long C19th, and explores the intersections of modernity, nationhood, performance, and popular culture. Her previous works include The Victorians and The Visual Imagination(Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993), both of which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize, as well as Dickens (Harvester, 1985). She is General Editor of the Cambridge History of Victorian Literature(2012) and has co-edited Culture, Landscape and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2000), and edited Victorian Love Stories (Oxford University Press, 1996) as well as a number of works by Dickens, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Anthony Trollope for Penguin Classics and OUP World's Classics.

Professor Flint’s talk at GW will be from her current book-in-progress, Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination. According to Professor Flint, “This is a cultural history of flash photography, and is about technology, change, and what it means to make something – or someone – visible. I discuss paparazzi, documentary and news photographers and sleazy, violent, invasive uses of flash, and balance these with examples of wonder, beauty, and aesthetic experimentation. I ask questions about duration – how long is that “flash” in which something happens?  I show, too, how poets and novelists borrow flash’s associations - not least, as the words and images I'll talk about demonstrate - when dealing with the sudden illumination of black skin.”

Following Thursday’s talk, on Friday morning, April 17^th, at 10am in Rome 771, Professor Flint will teach a seminar open to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as interested faculty, on the intersection of literary history and visual culture. She’ll do this through discussion of Dickens's "Somebody's Luggage." Here's a Project Gutenberg link to that document: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1414/1414-h/1414-h.htm.

Anyone interested in connections between written and visual works is encouraged to attend this event. Students--and faculty--who work outside their own disciplinary boundaries will be able to ask Professor Flint about the trajectory of her own career in English and Art History departments.

Coffee and muffins will be served at the morning seminar. Please come!

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Trey Ellis at GW: Friday, March 27

Trey Ellis

The GW English Department is pleased to welcome Trey Ellis as part of the Jenny McKean Moore Reading Series. Ellis, currently an associate professor in the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University, is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of several novels, Platitudes, Home Repairs, Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood, and Right Here, Right Now, which received an American Book Award. His work with films includes the 1995 film The Tuskegee Airmen, which won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy, and the 2003 TV movie Good Fences, which was shortlisted for the PEN award and nominated for a Black Reel award. Ellis is a prolific essayist, primarily known for his piece titled New Black Aesthetic in which he coined the term “cultural mulatto” and discussed racial characterizations and their relationship to a new aesthetic movement. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post. The discussion will be held on Friday, March 27 in Gelman Library, Room 702 beginning at 7:30pm.

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