English Flyers Spring '23

Our student advisory council will be making visits to classes in the coming weeks to talk about the English major and minor at Villanova. Here are some of the flyers they'll be showing:

 

 

You can find our English Alumni Careers Booklet here.

 

 View the complete course booklet here

 UPPER-LEVEL ENGLISH COURSES FOR FALL 2023

Many of these courses also fulfill requirements for other programs and core diversity.

2003 Intro to Creative Writing TR 11:30-12:45, Alan Drew
Designed for students who wish to experiment with composing several kinds of creative writing: short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

2013 Writing of Memoir TR 10:00-11:15, Tsering Wangmo
Memoir is an opportunity to understand life. This writing workshop provides students with practical skills in reading and writing about the events, memories, places that inform their lives.

2018 Nature Writing Workshop TR 2:30-3:45, Cathy Staples
The natural world will be a source for the creative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction pieces students will write in this class. Through readings, field trips, writing exercises, and workshops students will learn to sharpen their language and see more deeply.

2023 Journalism TR 11:30-12:45, Kathryn Szumanski
Introduces students to key techniques of news gathering and news writing. We will also explore the principles and rules that guide the writing of news pieces, editorials, and features.

2061 Editing & Publishing MW 3:20-4:35, Adrienne Perry
Literary publishing in a diverse, compelling field involving both art and commerce. This hands- on class explores the economic, social, and artistic forces that shape contemporary literature. Grapple with what it means to "make culture" while honing editorial skills.

2250 Ways of Reading TR 1:00-2:15, Joseph Drury
An exploration of how we engage, understand, explicate, and enjoy texts of all sorts.

2300 Women in Literature MWF 12:50-1:40, Ellen Bonds
Study of the place of women in literature, with emphasis on modern fiction, drama and poetry written in English.

2306 Harry Potter: Quests/Questions MWF 10:40-11:30, Evan Radcliffe
In this course we will use the tools of literary analysis to discuss all seven Harry Potter novels. Central topics will include how the series evolves; Rowling’s use of novelistic form, character and characterization, and literary models; and the books’ representations of gender, class, and other social issues.

2350 Narrative Television MW 4:45-6:00, Lauren Shohet

Plot, character, voice, point of view in visual, aural, dramatic, and verbal aspects of serial television. What works similarly or differently in television and prose fiction? In television and film?

3260 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics, and Film R 6:00-8:55, Alice Dailey & Chelsea Phillips
We will study a highly influential 16th c. play called The Spanish Tragedy in the context of western culture’s centuries-long fascination with the dynamics of revenge. We’ll work with and as theatre-makers to contribute to a main stage production of the play in spring 2024. (Spring participation encouraged but optional!)

3440 Harlots, Rakes, & Libertines TR 2:30-3:45, Joseph Drury
Discover the Libertine authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, whose witty, scandalous works promoted a freethinking philosophy of sexual pleasure and individual freedom, and provoked critics who blamed them for modern social problems such as prostitution, poverty, and crime.

3535 Gender, Authorship, & Authority TR 4:45-6:00, Mary Mullen
This class studies how and why women writers used pseudonyms and forged collective authorial identities to grapple with gendered expectations. It considers the knotty politics of authorship, biography, and autobiography in nineteenth-century Britain and the twenty-first century.

3621 Contemporary British Novel & Brexit TR 10:00-11:15, Megan Quigley

This course explores British fiction written after the second World War until today. What stories do novelists tell about the meaning of "Britishness" after the British empire? We investigate themes of nostalgia, xenophobia, feminism, and class warfare in stylistically varied novels.

3650 African Drama MWF 11:45-12:35, Chiji Akoma

Examination of the aesthetics, politics, and practices of the theatre and drama in Africa. Focused on written plays, course explores drama performances on stage, television, and movies. Introduces students to role-playing and small-scale adaptation of texts to American contexts.

4015 Why Indigenous Literature Matters MW 1:55-3:10, Kimberly Takahata
This course introduces students to a vivid spectrum of Indigenous literatures, exploring how Indigenous peoples have expressed their truths and imagined their futures. We will ask: what makes something “literary”? Why do Indigenous literatures matter, inside and outside our classroom?

4510 Early American Poetry MW 3:20-4:35, Travis Foster
We will immerse ourselves in four transformative poets -- Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson – while also considering how their lives and work have inspired contemporary culture from prestige television to Taylor Swift.

4647 Gender & Sexuality in US Literature TR 4:00-5:15, Yumi Lee

This course examines a fascinating range of contemporary US literary texts to explore the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class and other categories of identity to form our experiences of selfhood, community, national belonging, and power.

4651 Lives of the Undocumented MW 2:30-3:45, Tsering Wangmo
The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. told in their own words through memoir, fiction, poetry, graphic novel, testimony, creative and critical essays.

4652 Letters, Texts, & Twitter MW 1:55-3:10, Kamran Javadizadeh
How does writing bring together distant lovers, friends, family? We'll read letters, the digital forms (social media, instant messaging) that have replaced them, and their representation in novels, poems, and essays to explore how intimacy forms across distance.

4690 Crime Fiction & Gender TR 8:30-9:45, Jean Lutes
In this course, you'll study American crime fiction as an intellectually rich phenomenon that dramatizes social and economic realities, asks fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, and investigates gender and sexuality as well as theft and murder.

4704 Borders in Latinx Literature TR 11:30-12:45, Michael Dowdy
How do borders impact our lives, and how might they be imagined differently? This course examines how “the border” shapes Latinx literatures, from the U.S.-Mexico national boundary to alternative sites and conceptions of borders, including texts by Latinx writers from various national origins and in multiple genres.

5000 Contemporary American Poetry: The Documentary Turn TR 1:00-2:15, Lisa Sewell 

This course will focus on recent contemporary poetry that investigates personal and public histories, incorporating documents, research, and the news as much as it relies on poetic inspiration. We will study the history of documentary poetry and read work about the slave trade, refugee crises around the world, natural and unnatural disasters, and historic events.

HON 5440-100 Poets in the Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Weekend of Oct. 20- 22, 2023, Cathy Staples
The workshop begins on Friday in the Honors seminar room with exercises in memory and observation. On Saturday morning, we’ll take the train into Philadelphia and spend the day at PMA on the parkway. We will write our way through the galleries, using the paintings as well as sculpture and installation as entry points for new poems. On Sunday, we’ll gather to share new work over coffee, tea, French toast, & banana bread.

The English Course Booklet, which is released closer to registration time, will also indicate which courses count toward core diversity requirements, as well as the Writing & Rhetoric Program, Irish Studies, Africana Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, Peace & Justice, Sustainability, etc.

Kamran Javadizadeh in The New Yorker

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh has another piece in The New Yorker, this time a review/essay centered on the recently released book of poems Couplets: A Love Story, by Maggie Millner. Javadizadeh's essay delves into Millner's use of rhyme and other poetic conventions, the relationship of rhyme to eroticism, and the transformation of the self in romantic relationships (among other things). Be forewarned, you will never look at IKEA beds the same way after reading this piece!

You can read the piece in full on The New Yorker's website. 

Professor Joseph Drury publishes "On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa.”

Professor Joseph Drury wrote the afterword for a recently published collection of essays, British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830. This afterword, titled “On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa” takes the essays in the collection as an occasion to reflect on what literary scholars can learn from the history of technology and what historians of technology can learn from literary studies. It argues that the history of technology provides valuable models and terminology for thinking about the uses of literary forms and that literary studies can provide historians with insight into the cultural meanings and imagined uses of technologies, both of which can have a significant impact on their actual development in the real world.

Going Public: A Guide for Humanists (a Writing Workshop): RSVP Now!!!

Interested in putting your literary analysis and research skills to good use and writing for the media? Interesting in meeting Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist at The New York Times Book Review and a contributing writer at The Nation magazine? Come to "Going Public: A Guide for Humanists"--a writing workshop sponsored by the English department--on Wednesday, February 15 at 5:20 in Falvey 205.  If you're interested in attending, RSVP here or follow the QR code on the poster. 

The Program for Public Thinking: Summer Program

 The Summer Workshop provides a space for undergraduate students interested in journalism, criticism, politics, art, and nonprofit work to learn about and practice engaging the public through dialogue and writing. The theme of this year’s workshop is “the future,” and its central questions are: How do we think about the future, especially when we cannot trust that it will be better than the present? What do we owe future generations? Students will learn to address such questions in conversation with various philosophical, political, and religious traditions, as well as with one another. For their final assignment, they will design a public-facing project to foster dialogue on their own college campuses. The inaugural workshop will be taught by Point editors Jon Baskin and Anastasia Berg.

Modernism and Fanfiction

Students in Dr. Quigley's Modernism and fanfiction class wrapped up the semester brainstorming final project ideas and drinking hot cider around the fire (with Major, the dog). Who knew one class could end with final papers on Henry James, Taylor Swift, T.S. Eliot and Startrek? 

New Podcast on the Way from Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh will soon be releasing a new podcast, "Close Readings." He spoke with us about the podcast's origins, his process, and what we can expect when we listen.

What inspired you to make a podcast? Are there literary or poetry podcasts that you enjoy listening to?

 

I think that for me (as, apparently, for so many!) this is partly a pandemic story. During the early days of the pandemic I found myself listening to podcasts more than had previously been my custom (I wrote a bit about that experience here), usually while walking my dog, and I found that I enjoyed the company that they provided, the peculiar feeling of having a friendly voice or two in your ear while you went about your daily chores. And then also during that time I was able to convince a few of my friends, both scholars and poets, to visit my classes at Villanova. That experience taught me that I quite enjoyed talking to experts for the benefit of curious audiences; I felt like I had a knack for playing the straight man. So then a couple of those strands came together in my mind, and I found myself wondering if I might host my own podcast, where I would talk with a guest about a single poem. That felt like something I could do well (we shall see!) and also like the kind of thing I’d want to listen to, if it existed. Life got very busy and I didn’t return to the idea until recently, when an additional impetus was my sense that the community I’d cultivated on “poetry Twitter” might be in danger of vanishing, or diminishing, or something. And so I thought, better get those conversations going while you can.

 

And yes, there are lots of good literary/poetry podcasts out there. One that I particularly enjoy is David Naimon’s “Between the Covers.” One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that a lot of literary podcasts, perhaps especially poetry podcasts, tend to focus on having poets as guests and contemporary poetry as the topic. I thought there might be space for something more like poetry studies, where my guests, mainly, were scholars and critics, and where we could talk about poems from a whole variety of periods and places. Maybe I’ll have poets on from time to time, but I think of this really as a podcast more about reading poetry than it is about writing it.

 

Can you describe what sort of podcast yours will be? What kind of topics will you cover, and what kind of approach will you take to looking at poems?

 

It will be pretty simple: me and a guest, talking about a single poem of their choosing, for maybe 30-45 minutes each episode. I’m hoping to have conversations where the poem is centered, but where we feel free to digress into things like biography, literary history, literary criticism, theory, etc—but also personal experiences, where they feel relevant. The approach to the poems, beyond that, will depend on the guest and how they tend to read. But what’s especially important to me is that the guests and I have conversations that feel close in the sense of proximate or intimate. “Close Readings” is a bit of a pun for me: both an exegetical reading practice and a kind of friendliness or sociality.

 

How do you go about choosing guests for your podcast?

 

I’ve begun just by thinking about who the poetry scholars are out there whom I already have some relationship with—not because I mean to restrict this to friends, but more so because I want to get the thing established, figure out what I’m doing, and so on, before I go pitching strangers—and whose work I’ve admired and feel as though I might be good at engaging with for a general audience. I’ve also got somewhere in the back of my mind the desire to introduce variety into the series right from the beginning, which means things like asking people who cover very different periods, or who have very different approaches to poetry, or who have had different kinds of life experiences and careers. But really I want mostly to be guided by a simpler question: who would I be excited to talk to?

 

Has anything struck you about discussing poetry in an audio versus a print medium?

 

Not yet, since I haven’t really yet begun! But I’m anticipating/hoping that the conversations will feel easy and casual, not overly scripted at all or really even produced or edited much. In those ways, I’m hoping this will feel much freer for me and easy than writing does. I love to write, but I’m one of those writers who is almost always editing myself as I go, which means that the work of writing can really feel to me like work. I hope this feels more like play.

 

When and how can we listen to Close Readings?

 

I have a teaser episode up already, which people can get on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here. I also just started a Substack newsletter where I’ll be posting some text to go with each episode. People can find that here. I hope everyone subscribes to the podcast and to the newsletter. I’m recording my first proper episodes with guests (very exciting ones!) in the next few days, and I’m going to try to start posting them on something like a weekly basis before the holidays, even, and then certainly on into the new year.