Fall 2023 Course Descriptions Department of English
Critical Writing:
3100 Critical Writing about Lit: Clare Mullaney
In this course, students will read a range of life narratives in the context of theories of self representation. The course will focus on variations in the genre of life-writing and will include autobiography, biography, memoir, diaries, and graphic or comic forms. Genres might also include addiction narratives, blogs, trauma narratives, eco biography, slavery or freedom narratives, letters, confessions, and testimonials. The course will examine the evolution of biographical & autobiographical texts – and the changing significance attributed to the speaking self. The course will allow students the option of producing a piece of life-writing. They will develop their skills in reading texts within the context of cultural and literary history. This course will provide the opportunity to explore intersections between critical and creative writing in students’ own essays or creative writing projects.
3100 Critical Writing about Lit: Elizabeth Rivlin
As an introduction to the practice of criticism, this course will help you develop the skills needed to read literary texts closely, discuss and form interpretations, and craft and defend arguments about literature. The course begins with Ron Rash’s novel Serena (2008), which will serve as a launching point to discuss texts from a range of cultures and historical moments. All of these texts pick up themes from, or influenced the writing of, Serena. Thus, we’ll be weaving a web of intertextuality (the relationships between texts), studying how genre and history interact with literary texts and allow us to analyze them from multiple perspectives. In addition to reading Rash’s novel, we’ll be exploring poetry, drama, and
fiction by Euripides, Shakespeare, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, and more. Students’ responsibilities will include active reading, regular writing, and engaged participation, including work in peer review workshops.
3100 Critical Writing about Lit: Dominic Mastroianni
This course will help you acquire and develop the skills needed to closely read and interpret literary texts, and to craft and defend arguments about them. The course is oriented less by a particular theme than by a desire to respond to literary texts with sensitivity, intensity, and discipline. Our class meetings will be a series of experiments in close reading, the sort of patient, meticulous attention to textual detail called for by literary texts and practiced by literary scholars. In each meeting, our goal will be to practice thinking together. By reading, talking, and writing we will discover and sort out our responses to the course texts, while keeping in mind the ongoing need to develop more precise and forceful ways of doing so. Anticipated reading: Elizabeth Bishop, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Henry James, Philip Larkin, Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, Plato, Sappho, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens
Global Challenges
3490 Technology and the Popular Imagination: Megan Eatman
This class will examine the intersections of technology and ability/disability in fiction and nonfiction texts. How does technology affect where people place the boundary between ability and disability? How do disability activism and technology intersect? How do engineers, authors, and others imagine abled, disabled, and “optimized” bodies? Students will complete regular reading responses and participate in class discussion. Other assignments TBD.
3560 Science Fiction: Erin Goss
How to Be Differently
This course will work from three assumptions for thinking about, through, and with recent science fiction: 1) Science fiction invites a careful approach to global or broad-minded vision by asking its reader to attend to the small details that make up the imaginary world in which it happens; 2) Science fiction provides concrete bodies through which to imagine abstract concepts; it makes thinking play in the street; 3) As Walidah Imarisha writes, “In science fiction, we don’t have to stay contained within what is possible. We can start with the question, “What do we want?” This course will consider science fiction as a mode of literary production in which authors imagine other ways of being and other ways of structuring lives. They do this through building worlds that ask their readers to imagine what would have to change in order to get to live in them. The class will not be a survey of science fiction as much as an exploration of what it would mean to use it to think about other ways to live. Authors/thinkers may include Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia Butler, Becky Chambers, P. Djélì Clarke, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Neal Stephenson, Martha Wells, and others.
Literature Survey:
3960 British Literature Survey I: Jon Correa
This course offers a survey of British Literature from the oldest surviving texts in Old English to the early eighteenth century. As we trace the development of British literature, we will examine how texts help shape a collective British identity, and how the construction of this national identity intersects with other categories of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability (among others).
3970 British Literature Survey II: David Coombs
In this class, we will survey the literary history of Britain since 1789, the year that marks the beginning of the French Revolution. As both the term “literary history” and our beginning with the French Revolution suggest, we will pay close attention to how literary texts are influenced by and respond to their historical contexts, focusing especially on: the transformations of British and global society wrought by industrial modernity; the changing status of women and sexual relationships; the expansion of democratic voting rights and the emergence of universal compulsory education; and British imperialism and its legacies. Since we will be surveying a literary history, however, we will seek primarily to understand how our texts’ literariness—their formal qualities as poems, novels, and plays—shapes the way they represent or seek to intervene in history. To that end, students will learn to engage in close analysis of texts from a wide variety of genres in the service of thinking critically about literature and history.
3980 American Literature Survey I: Jonathan Beecher Field
Clemson University’s Undergraduate Announcements describes English 3980 as a course that “Examines key texts of American literature from beginnings of European settlement to the Civil War in historical context.” That is a lot of ground to cover in a semester, and impossible to do in any kind of thorough or comprehensive way. Instead, we will consider a selection of texts that consider the emergence of the United States, a process that includes narratives of settlement and slavery. This iteration of Engl 3980 is tailored especially to Secondary Ed/English majors who plan to pursue a career in teaching at the K-12 level. As schedules permit, we will have alumni and alumnae of this major join us to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by teaching these texts in these times.
3990 American Literature Survey II: Dominic Mastroianni
This course is an introduction to American literature from the Civil War to the present. Over the course of the semester we will read and think together about some of the most vital, beautiful, thought provoking works of later American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose. By participating actively in our course you’ll learn more about American literature, becoming better positioned to think clearly about everyday life in the United States. You’ll also develop the skills needed to closely read and interpret texts, and to craft and defend arguments about them. Anticipated reading: James Baldwin, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Countee Cullen, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson, Mary Oliver, Edith Wharton
Literature I:
4030 The Classics in Translation: Lee Morrissey
Largely Greek and Roman Classics in Translation. Readings likely to include Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, and recent debates over canonical and world literature.
4070 The Medieval Period: Jon Correa
Selected works of Old and Middle English literature, exclusive of Chaucer.
Literature II:
4210 American Literature from 1800 to 1899: Clare Mullaney
This course examines literature composed during what has been named as one of as one of America’s most transformative periods: the nineteenth century, which birthed widespread social, cultural, and political change. Although our class is centered on a specific time, space will be our focus. In his account of what he terms the “long nineteenth-century,” historian Eric Hobsbawm marks 1789 as the beginning of the consolidation of national life, but several texts published throughout the 1800s explore how U.S. borders were being both undermined and solidified through travel, trade, and violence. To that end, we will consider how the nineteenth-century U.S. is framed in different spatial configurations: as nation, as globe, as north versus south, and as the region, all which give rise to distinct literary genres. The Civil War’s national divisions resulted in sentimentalism and the reform novel. And late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers focused on the rural region as a means of consolidating national identity post war. More broadly, the course will consider the importance of historicism as a key methodology for understanding how poems and prose influenced U.S. culture. The class encourages students to read literary texts alongside historical documents—including maps, treatises, abolitionist periodicals, and advertisements. By the term’s conclusion, we’ll collectively consider how history functions cyclically, the past subject to various reiterations in the present.
4260 Southern Literature: Cameron Bushnell
In this course, we will explore Southern literature in its larger Caribbean context. Between the southern states of the United States and the northern countries of the Caribbean there is shared social and economic history. According to historian, Matthew Mulcahey, the British colonists who established Barbados, migrated to Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, and who eventually settled South Carolina Lowcountry, brought plantation society and agricultural practices with them. These daily practices spread further along the Georgia coast and eventually into North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland (2). A similar circulation occurred between the Caribbean, particularly Haiti and New Orleans. Given the close ties between the Caribbean and the South, the literature we study will focus on the triangulation between the Southeast, New Orleans, and the Caribbean. “Southern Literature” will provide a frame for our reading. We will discuss how thinking of the US South as a “northern rim of the Caribbean” affects our understanding of Southern Literature as a genre, a category, and a model for other regional literatures. Our readings of poetry, novels, essays, and cinema will include works such as Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy, Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, Ernest J. Gaines’s Bloodline: Five Stories, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!
4640 Topics in Lit from 1700 to 1899: Erin Goss
Jane Austen
This course will read all of the novels of Jane Austen (yes, all of them). Our task will be to consider what expectations we bring to the reading of Austen in the twenty-first century, what her work might offer us beyond those expectations, and what careful reading of her work can help us realize about our expectations themselves. Our primary topics of consideration will include the social constraints of gender, the representation of race and empire, the formal consideration of the novel and of comedy, and the difficulty of discussing tone. The reading load will be heavy for this class, but the payoff will be worthwhile.
Literature III:
4300 Dramatic Literature II: Vincent Ogoti
This course offers students an in-depth exploration of the principles and progress of drama from the twentieth century to the present, focusing on historical drama and its evolution across diverse geographical, cultural, and historical contexts. The course will examine a wide range of texts, including African and African diasporic drama, which engage the dynamic relationship between theater, history, and society. Through analyzing representative plays, critical readings, and discussion of trends in dramatic literature, students will gain a thorough understanding of the development and transformation of drama over time while fostering an appreciation for the richness and complexity of contemporary dramatic literature.
4310 Modern Poetry: Brian McGrath
The word modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now.” In a general sense, modern poetry is poetry of the now. We will situate this definition of modern poetry in the context of various literary historical periods, including romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism, paying particular attention to 20th and 21st century poetry in English. How does poetry work to engage a now? What
sorts of innovative poetic techniques have poets used to engage not only their historical now, but also, and in a more philosophical sense, the now? In the early twentieth-century American poet Ezra Pound famously called for artists to “make it new” and William Carlos Williams, another American poet, asserted that “Nothing is good save the new.” In this course we will explore the relationship between the now and the new, paying particular attention to poetry. Poets may include Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, Tommy Pico, and others.
Theory and Cultural Studies:
3800 Women Writers: Michelle Smith
This class will consider the relationship of women and time. While theories of time and fictions of time travel have been dominated by men (Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells, among others), women and other marginalized and minoritized groups have propagated their own understandings of time, suggesting new ways of articulating the relationship of past, present, and future. Our first unit will explore the general notion that, over time, women’s lives have gotten “better” or “more equal.” We will consider this progress narrative in (and in light of) histories of feminism and other feminist writings. In our second unit, we will read fictional accounts of time travel by and about women, with special focus on Afrofuturist works by authors such as Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin. Our final unit will introduce recent theories and literary explorations of queer time and crip time. Though this class will explore the (depressing) possibility that time is neither universal nor fair in its effects on differently embodied people, we will also bear witness to individual and communal attempts to construct more hopeful futures out of painful pasts.
4010 Grammar Survey: Brian McGrath
Grammar is a system that puts words together into meaningful units. We’ll study grammar in order to analyze those units and their relationships. We will diagram sentences. Our goal is to understand how sentences are constructed out of words, phrases, and clauses. We’ll begin with parts of speech and move toward more complicated structures, like appositives and nominative absolutes. The better we understand how sentences are constructed, the better readers and writers we’ll become.
4190 Postcolonial and World Literatures: Vincent Ogoti
In this course, students will explore selected postcolonial literature and theory readings, focusing on nationalism, migration, resistance, race, language, and master narratives. The course is organized around the central ideas of postcolonialism, colonial archive, and identity, inviting students to critically examine a diverse range of texts from various geographical, cultural, and historical contexts. Through close reading and analysis, students will explore how these literary works challenge and reinterpret the colonial legacy while fostering a deeper appreciation for the complexities of postcolonial voices and the ongoing dialogue surrounding identity and representation.
4420 Cultural Studies: Gabe Hankins
How do we escape from the traumas of the past three years? Should we try? How do we think about that trauma, confront it, represent it? What narratives of escape, normalcy, exceptionality, apocalypse, reconciliation, and repair allow us to live with the death of millions and the reconfiguration of our lives? The subject of this class is television’s use as an escape from the traumas of the past and the present: the uses of television for episodic escape, for serialized apocalypse, for racial recovery and reparation. The method will be derived from the tradition of cultural studies criticism, from the Frankfurt School and early British cultural studies work to current debates in the field. Viewings will include Wandavision, Watchmen, and The Leftovers, and readings will include popular as well as critical work on how to watch and think about television now. Requirements include short papers, weekly responses, and a longer creative or critical project.
4910 Ancient Rhetoric: Tharon Howard
This class begins with an introduction to the study and practice of rhetoric in the Classical Age of Greece around the 4th century B.C. when persuasive public speaking became a crucial element of legal and political power in the state and when “finding the available means of persuasion” for a particular audience were first recorded. We will read Sophists like Gorgias and Isocrates and then examine the transformations brought about by their debates with Plato and Aristotle. From there, we will turn to the rhetorics of the Romans and examine how Cicero’s rhetoric for a republican Rome evolved into Quintilian’s rhetoric for an imperial state. We will follow the development of the forensic, juridical, and epideictic types of speech and consider which is privileged by the rhetorician we are reading and why.
Throughout this 2,500-year-old journey we will explore the political and social circumstances of each rhetorician’s theory and whether that rhetorician saw rhetoric as a means of discovering new, probable truths or whether it was merely a means of delivering already established truth through ornamentation such as the use of schemes and tropes. Ultimately, we will explore how the controversies and debates among classical rhetoricians provided the foundations of our modern debates regarding “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and what should be the appropriate tone and goals for public discourse in modern democratic societies. Throughout the course we will apply the rhetorical principles from the classical period to the design of websites, blogs, tweets, and other forms of social media in order to show how classical rhetoric has critical relevance for the modern student.
Shakespeare:
4110 Shakespeare: Kendra Slayton
“Blood hath been shed ere now,” declares Macbeth, “i’ the olden time, / Ere human statute purged the gentle weal,” delineating between an allegedly violent past and a civilized present (III.4.78–79). And yet, Macbeth speaks these lines in a frenzy of psychological torment brought on by having committed violent deeds himself; his own actions thus complicate his vision of past and present. In this course, we’ll explore Macbeth and other plays along the theme “Shakespeare’s Pasts and Present,” analyzing Shakespeare’s works with some attention to how characters conceive of time and how, in some cases, Shakespeare himself adapts stories from the past to comment on political and sociocultural issues relevant to his contemporary sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition, we’ll consider how modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s works demonstrate how his questions about topics like gender, love, agency, leadership, and aging still move audiences today. Readings will cover examples of Shakespeare’s major dramatic genres, including histories, tragedies, and comedies. Major projects may include quizzes/exams; essays; and a creative adaptation.
Writing and Publication Studies:
3320 Visual Communication: Tharon Howard
The major goal of this course is to provide you with readings and hands-on experiences that will enable you to plan, design, and develop visual communication projects typically found in business and industry. The course is a hands-on survey of visual communication theories and practices where experience with desktop publishing, web authoring, multimedia design, or social media authoring is expected. The class will use computers and the Adobe Creative Suite of software provided by the University, and it will involve completing series of creative, hands-on publishing projects in a studio-type environment. By the end of the course you will be able to demonstrate your creativity, marketing abilities, editing abilities, and, of course, visual communication abilities to potential employers through a variety of 21st Century publishing media.
4780 Digital Literacy: Jordan Frith
This class will examine the history and theories of digital technologies and how they have impacted all aspects of our lives, including how we work, how we construct our identities, and how our spaces are built. The class will also link to disability studies and include hands-on work on accessible design that will teach students how to create equitable and accessible digital texts. Students will leave the class with a deeper understanding of how digital media have changed our world and have hands-on experience designing digital objects using accessibility best practices.
4890 Topics in WPS: Susanna Ashton
Life Writing
In this course, students will read a range of life narratives in the context of theories of self representation. The course will focus on variations in the genre of life-writing and will include autobiography, biography, memoir, diaries, and graphic or comic forms. Genres might also include addiction narratives, blogs, trauma narratives, eco biography, slavery or freedom narratives, letters, confessions, and testimonials. The course will examine the evolution of biographical & autobiographical texts – and the changing significance attributed to the speaking self. The course will allow students the option of producing a piece of life-writing. They will develop their skills in reading texts within the context of cultural and literary history. This course will provide the opportunity to explore intersections between critical and creative writing in students’ own essays or creative writing projects.
Writing and Publication Studies (Creative Writing):
3450 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction: Anthony Correale
As an introductory course in writing fiction, we will divide our time between two main objectives: reading as writers and producing our own fiction. The first will involve reading widely, exposing ourselves to a broad range of contemporary voices and styles, and fine-tuning our ability to recognize and appreciate the effects of the many choices that make up a compelling work of short fiction. Throughout, we will be constantly experimenting with the techniques that we study, generating writing and sharing it with one another. Twice during the semester, we will shift our focus entirely to that writing, conducting workshops in which our own stories take center stage.
3450 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction: April Lawson
This course is an introduction to the writing of literary fiction. We’ll study and critique the stories of contemporary master writers, and then write our own. We’ll discuss how stories are generated, and examine the elements of story making—voice, character, character dynamic, structure, atmosphere,
tone, tension, irony, POV, etc.—and use what we learn to improve our own writing and our understanding of narrative in general. For the first half of the class, there will be short, informal writing exercises, and for the second half of the class, a formal workshop experience in which we’ll discuss stories by each class member. A workshop is required for every member of the class. This course will prepare students for the advanced workshop.
3460 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry: Su Cho
In this course, we will learn how to read poetry as writers and experiment with different poetic forms. We will focus on American poetic traditions from the 1960s to the present and write poems in those modes. This will be a highly collaborative class focusing on discovering your unique poetic voice by focusing on creative inquiry, experimentation, and of course, writing your own poems. We will spend much of our time developing a writing community and conducting poetry workshops. The final project will consist of a collection of your own poems and a craft essay.
3460 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry: Stevie Edwards
In this class, we will study a wide range of contemporary poetry. We will focus on reading as writers, meaning that while reading we will search for ideas, craft techniques, forms, and other elements that can be refashioned and reimagined for our own poems. Before we break “rules” in poetry, we need to understand them so that our aesthetic rebellions show intentionality, as opposed to haphazardness. This course focuses on developing a foundational understanding of poetic craft and will include units on imagery, voice, sound and musicality, the poetic line, fixed forms, free verse, prose poems, ekphrastic poetry, and erasure. This class will include a poetry workshop of student work, as well as frequent
discussions of assigned readings. Students will be exposed to Natasha Trethewey, Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, Dianne Seuss, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, and Solmaz Sharif, among others. The final project will be a poetry portfolio, which will include significant revisions of at least six poems written during the semester and a book review of a contemporary poetry collection.
3480 Introduction to Creative Writing: Screenplay: Melissa Dugan
The outcome of the course is to develop a professional approach to creating a polished short script (25- 30 pages). We will work through every step of the screenwriting process from idea, to outline, to revision, to finished script. The class will involve weekly reading, viewing, and writing assignments, as well as regular opportunities for students to read and discuss each other’s work.
4230 Topics in Writing Fiction: Keith Morris
Novel Writing
This course focuses on writing long-form fiction, from long stories to novellas to novels. We’ll read several examples of longer forms from various time periods, and students will write the first 40-50 pages of a longer work of their own. Prerequisite: ENGL 3450
4450 Fiction Workshop: Nic Brown
Students write and workshop their own original works of fiction.
4460 Poetry Workshop: Desiree Bailey
This course is a poetry workshop. We will write original poems using various prompts, experiments and muses. We will also read each other’s poems and offer constructive feedback/suggestions for the poet to consider. At the end of the course, each poet will submit a final portfolio and participate in our class poetry reading.
4480 Screenplay Workshop: Nic Brown
Students will write and workshop their own original screenplays.
4490 Creative Non-Fiction: Su Cho
For this workshop, we will start small and work our way up— ranging from short personal essays accompanied by illustrations, a memoir using a mother’s letter to her daughter written in a different language, and cultural criticism that weaves Reality TV, religion, and the South together. Creative nonfiction is a vast genre, and while we will explore different forms and modes, we will primarily be focusing on the “personal.” How do we write personal essays without losing control of the narrative? How can we show restraint when we write about things that feel overwhelming? We will answer these questions together through workshop and playing around with different essay forms and lengths. Our final project will consist of at least two creative nonfiction pieces and one introductory essay (with a creative approach).
Senior Seminars:
4960 Senior Seminar: Megan Eatman
What the Law Can Name
This seminar explores law as a constitutive cultural force that shapes shared understandings of identity, community, and justice. By reading legal texts and scholarship on the rhetoric of law, we’ll discuss how social problems are made legally legible and the cultural assumptions and material conditions that inform and result from legal arguments and decisions. We will also discuss a variety of texts (including
fiction, nonfiction, and visual art) that address the limits of what the law can name and explore other models of responsibility and redress. Students will complete regular reading responses, participate in class discussion, and develop a final project in consultation with the instructor.
4960 Senior Seminar: Susanna Ashton
Novel Problems
This Senior Seminar will examine American novels from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. All represent singular challenges to the notion of the novel as a coherent genre. What is an “autobiographical” novel, say? Or a graphic novel? How about a novella? How has this genre evolved? Why the heck are they so long? And what does it mean to read and enter this kind of literary form for hours, days, or weeks? Does size matter? The course will follow the formal and thematic developments of the novel with considerations of the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel’s form, fiction’s engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. We shall read one long novel serially across several months as well as others to be read in more standardized chunks over a few class sessions. We shall listen to at least one of our novels as an audiobook. We’ll read one by candlelight! Can we try to read backwards? The nature of this course will require a significant amount of reading. It will be tremendous stuff, for sure, and much of it will fly by quickly, but there is a hefty page count so be sure to organize your time accordingly. You won’t regret it. These books will have staying power. Some authors we may consider will be Rowson, Jacobs, Morrison, Bechdel, Twain, Tan, Cather, Wharton, James, Stowe, Ellison, Saunders (we’ll probably read 8 novels and some supplementary materials across the semester). Students will be expected to lead some discussions, take a few quizzes, complete two short developmental process essays, and construct a substantial term project (probably not a traditional research paper).
4960 Senior Seminar: Elizabeth Rivlin
Hamlet, Again: Shakespeare and Adaptation
“Who goes there?” is the famous first line of Hamlet. Who or what is Hamlet? Answering that question has occupied actors, audiences, writers, and readers for centuries. We will seek our own answers as we read Shakespeare’s Hamlet in two early editions along with its sources, and as we study several twentieth-century and twenty-first-century dramas, films, and fictions that adapt the play, including Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet (1948), Sulayman Al-Bassam’s drama The Al-Hamlet Summit (2006), Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider (2014), and Lisa Klein’s YA novel Ophelia (2006). As we do these readings and read related criticism and theory, we will ask how adaptations change the essence of this famous work. We will move toward another question: What does Hamlet do in the world? Specifically, what work, whether cultural, political, or aesthetic, do these various Hamlets perform? In studying not one Hamlet but many, we have a unique opportunity to explore not only the meanings attached to Shakespeare’s work in his own day but also how and why we continue to put Shakespeare to work today. Because this is a capstone seminar for the major, we will use these questions to develop and refine skills essential to the English major, including literary analysis, argumentation, and original research. You will write extensively and present your research to the class. There is also an opportunity to do creative work for your final project. Please know that this class is a seminar that depends on your regular and active participation.
Film & Major Electives:
3370 Creative Inquiry: Angela Naimou
Every Campus a Refuge at Clemson
This Creative Inquiry seeks students who want to combine study of contemporary migration (including literary texts by migrant and refugee writers) with a university-wide initiative to collaborate with community organizations and resettled members of the Clemson area. Students will gain experience in writing and research on migration, advance community-based projects, and volunteer directly in the community as part of the effort to provide holistic support for refugee resettlement while recentering our university’s core commitments to education and service to community. Please note: the CI pairs study with practice and community partnerships, and students will play leading roles in the ECAR initiative. Interested students should contact Dr. Naimou anaimou@clemson.edu for details and requirements early.
3570 Film: Eddy Troy
This course examines foundational approaches to film studies. Students will learn to identify and analyze cinematic uses of sound, editing, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and color. The course will also cover the role of distribution, industry norms, and reception in shaping cinematic forms. Students will practice strategies for writing critically about film by crafting arguments that address technique and form. Films will be selected from both Hollywood and a range of national cinemas spanning movements across film history.
3570 Film: Amy Monaghan
To study the moving image is to study history, art, economics, technology, and philosophy. This course offers an introduction to film studies. It focuses on detailed analysis of (primarily Hollywood narrative) films, looking closely at the ways in which the elements of cinema come together to make, or unmake, meaning. We will cover the basic elements of film grammar, from cinematography to editing to sound; how that grammar is used to create different kinds of narratives, including documentaries; and how
certain values of storytelling style have been privileged over others. We will also consider questions posed by film theory.
3850 Children’s Lit: Hannah Godwin
This course will examine works of fantasy in children’s fiction and visual culture from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Considering our chosen texts alongside critical readings from the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, we will investigate how and why writers and illustrators turn to the fantastic in engaging child readers. By elucidating the relationship between literary form and historical contexts, our work together will demonstrate how our texts draw upon energies of the magical or supernatural to construct imaginary worlds unlike our own. We will foster a critical awareness of genre, interrogating distinctions between high fantasy, low fantasy, and magical realism. You will encounter key literary terms and devices, perform close readings within written and verbal contexts, take responsibility for moderating discussion, complete a midterm exam, compose creative work, design a final project, and demonstrate clear investment in our course objectives. I look forward to learning with you! Texts may include: Lewis Carroll’s The Nursery Alice, Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, Robert San Souci’s Cendrillon, Salman Rushdie’s Luka and the Fire of Life, Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea, Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe, and Eden Royce’s Conjure Island.
4370/4990 South Carolina Review: Keith Morris
Students in this course will be involved in the publication of Clemson University’s internationally distributed literary magazine, The South Carolina Review. The course focus includes: Selection of stories, poems, and art work for publication; Editing of selected poems/stories; Layout and production using
InDesign. Students will also be responsible for individual projects in such areas as photography, website administration, and marketing. Students develop skills in literary analysis, editing, marketing, production, and design that will prove valuable to those interested in careers in publishing or further study in graduate writing programs. Prerequisite English 3450 or permission of instructor.
4370/4990 LitFest: John Pursley
Student Directors of the Clemson Literary Festival
Students will engage in a discussion and examination of ideas and issues in contemporary literature and will make selections and begin preparations for the 17th Annual Clemson Literary Festival. Students will gain valuable insight into the culture of contemporary literature by planning the festival at every stage,
coordinating multiple events, and working one-on-one with festival authors both before and during their visits to Clemson. Student interaction may extend to conversations and planning with local business owners, city officials, literary booking agents, editors, campus organizations, and various friends of the festival.
4500 Film Genres: Aga Skrodzka
This course focuses of the essay film as a genre of personal, ethical, and political filmmaking that is experiencing a global renaissance. The screenings will include films by Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Jean Vigo, Agnes Varda, Dziga Vertov, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sarah Polley, Marlon Riggs, and Arthur Jafa. We will explore the essay film as a genre that is steeped in the long literary tradition of the essayistic writing and study how the film form speaks to that tradition.
4510 Film Theory: John Smith
This course is a survey of the major developments in film theory, with a closing look at media theory. We will study primary texts in the history of film criticism and examine how selected films from Hollywood and other cinemas illustrate key theoretical issues explored by these texts. The course is divided into three units. In Classical Theory, we will read theory written between the 1910s and the 1950s, when cinema was young, and explore topics including film as art, mass culture, and realism. In Contemporary Theory, we will read theory from the 1960s to the present day and explore topics including semiotics, narrative, gender, race, and spectatorship. In Film and Media Studies, we will consider theoretical differences between film and television, particularly as they relate to viewing practices and media today. This course aims to teach you the fundamentals of film theory, and to introduce you to media theory; to help you appreciate the cultural moments in history, including our own, in which this theory is written; to help you feel more confident in both working through dense analytical writing and using theoretical tools in your own critical engagements with film or television.
4540 Selected Topics in International Film: Aga Skrodzka
This course focuses on how film and other modes of visual mediation comment, critique, instill, and challenge alterity and difference as connected yet distinct aspects of the human condition. We will read Sara Ahmed, Emmanuel Levinas, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Nawal El Sadaawi, Trinh Minh-ha, Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, Helene Cixous, Achille Mbembe, among others, and move to examine how difference (via categories of race, ethnicity, gender, social class, ability, religion, nationality, immigrant status, etc.) plays out on screen, paying close attention to the ethics of that process. Whether it works to provoke alienation or to summon identification, the image in itself speaks of the distance involved in mediation. We will critique this distance as a force that shapes all communication.
4580 Adaptations of World Classics: Keri Crist-Wagner
Adapting the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Turning comic books into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is arguably one of the most successful ventures in popular culture. This class will examine and discuss the adaptation of both modern and classic comics into the films, shorts, and television shows of the MCU. Students will study adaptation theory, history and form of comics, and will have the opportunity to experiment with their own adaptations of comics titles. Selections will include Iron Man (2008), Avengers (2012), Hawkeye (2021), WandaVision (2021), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), among others.
WCIN 4550 History of Non-Western Cinema: Maziyar Faridi
Iranian New Wave and Art House Cinemas
Iranian cinema is widely recognized as one of the most prominent “national cinemas” in the world. Much of this international acclaim comes from what cinema historians have called the Iranian “new wave” and “art house” films. These films introduced an aesthetics that was radically foreign to not only the international film festivals but also Iranian viewers. Our seminar interrogates the very idea of “national cinema,” focusing on the emergence of these cinematic movements in Iran and the political context to which they responded. Engaging with some of the most internationally-acclaimed Iranian films and scholarly studies on them, our course will also provide an opportunity to think critically about the imagined dichotomies between East and West, global and national. As such, we will consider the ways through which the studied films create new cinematic worlds in their intertextual dialogues with other cinemas of the world. Our journey begins by examining a new cinematic language that deviated from Iranian commercial cinema and imagined new political and aesthetic sensibilities in 1960s Iran. And we will gradually move toward contemporary international films that have inherited and complicated this cinematic language beyond the borders of Iran. The films in our syllabus come from a wide range of genres, including the social dramas of Oscar-winning Asghar Farhadi, the playful children’s films of Abbas Kiarostami, the feminist poetic documentary of Forugh Farrokhzad, and some of the most recent experimentations with the film medium in the works of Shahram Mokri and Alireza Khatami, among others. At the end of the semester, the students will have the opportunity to attend a Q&A session with an award-winning filmmaker.