Note:  Seminars are open to Juniors and Seniors, limited to 12 students.

ENG 401, Reported Creative Nonfiction/R 1-3:45 pm
Professor Cynthia Lewis
This creative writing seminar will focus on combining the essential elements of creative nonfiction with the fruits of academic research and reportage-in both the library and the field (as through interviewing). Students will define appropriate projects almost immediately and set about researching them under the guidance of the instructor and other professionals. The research will culminate in a piece of reported creative nonfiction, prepared for publication, ranging from 8000 to 10,000 words. Weekly meetings will be devoted to discussing a wide array of reading in the genre, presenting research to the class, and revising drafts in a workshop setting. Readings will include works by such writers as John McPhee, Malcolm Gladwell, Eric Schlosser, Thomas Mallon, Jane Goodall, Joan Acocella, and many others. Ideally, students who enroll will have taken a creative writing course at the 200 level or higher.

ENG 472, Joyce/Nabokov/R 1-3:45 pm 
Professor Kuzmanovich
Like most seminars, this one requires intensive attention to the themes and techniques of these two writers who (together) still have 128 books in print and whose combined works have elicited over 9,000 critical pieces just since 1963 even though they published all of their writing in the 20th century. Ulysses and Lolita continue to sell well over 100,000 copies per year. We will concentrate on (1) their much-imitated styles (Joyce's "High Modernist" and Nabokov's supposed "post-modernist"/"metafictional") since they have provoked quite a few theoretical debates and been used as examples (pro and contra) for just about every contemporary critical approach; (2) their tendencies to generate their narrative authority from events in their own lives, especially their respective feelings as exiles; (3) their depictions of (a) Love in its various forms; (b) the big bogey, Death; and (c) the last member of that robust triumvirate, Art.
CAVEAT: Works in this course not only contain but also provoke language and situations which some students may find objectionable.
REQUIREMENTS: Discipline and imagination to read thoughtfully, confidence to do independent and careful scholarship, some ability to function in a group (deliver and withstand therapeutic badgering), suspended disbelief in the transfigurative power of art...
TEXTS: Fargnoli & Gillespie, James Joyce A-Z; Coyle: James Joyce; Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, Ulysses; Nabokov: Gift, Lolita, Speak Memory, Bend Sinister, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions.

ENG 483, Contemporary American Fiction/M 1:30-4:20 pm
Professor Alan Michael Parker
This is an advanced course in the theory and practice of reading contemporary American fiction. In this course we will explore narrative, that is, what a story says in relation to how it says so; we will also formulate a number of historical readings of current trends, and consider American fiction in the context of larger cultural shifts.

For this course, a seminar paper or an extended work of original fiction will be required as a final project.  The seminar's primary texts will include the following novels and short story collections, along with numerous secondary sources and a fair bit of literary theory. 
Texts: Frank Chin, Donald Duk; Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections; Jaime Hernandez, Maggie the Mechanic; Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth; Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn; Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel; Victoria Redel, Loverboy; Philip Roth, Indignation; Susan Steinberg, Hyrdroplane; Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge; Ashley Warlick, Seek the Living.

ENG 485, Moby-Dick: Texts and Contexts/M 1:30-4:20 pm
Professor Annie Ingram
This course explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick within a range of literary, cultural, and historical contexts from the early 19th to the early 21st centuries that his "mulligatawny" of a novel has inspired. This seminar, designed for advanced English majors, has several aims: to become familiar with the mid-nineteenth century texts and contexts that influenced Melville in his writing of Moby-Dick; to read Moby-Dick slowly and thoroughly, savoring its complexity over the course of six weeks-a rare luxury; to learn (or further develop) critical approaches to literature that consider context as well as text, including those that involve interdisciplinary perspectives; to engage the wider community in our soundings of the novel, through a campus-wide "Davidson Reads Moby-Dick" series of events; to encounter other texts in dialogue (directly or indirectly) with Moby-Dick, especially those that foreground issues of multiculturalism and transnationalism; and to dive deeply and immerse ourselves in one of the world's great novels.

ENG 494, Disability and Literature/W 1:30-4:20 pm
Professor Ann Fox
What does disability have to do with literature?
Tiny Tim...Laura Wingfield...Richard III...Captain Ahab...Frankenstein's monster...the literary tradition in English is rife with representations of disability. These representations are sometimes used metaphorically, as representations of extreme innocence or evil. Likewise, they might reduce the experience of the disability to a conquerable challenge, or to a fate worse than death. The new field of Disability Studies asks us to reframe our understanding of disability history, question socially defined categories of normalcy and ability, and understand and learn about the presence of "disability culture." And its widely diverse members are also using literature to tell their own stories in a vibrant new literary and performance tradition. Literature is and has been obsessed with the disabled body, both as metaphor and actual subject-an extension of the degree to which disability has loomed in the larger societal imagination in one way or another across centuries.

Rather than trying to catalogue all the examples of disability in literature, this seminar seeks to use disability studies as a genesis point and theoretical framework through which to examine several core questions about disability, literature, and the problems and opportunities arising from the intersection of the two. We will:

• Reconsider representations of disability in literature. We'll ask how these are used as "narrative prosthesis." In other words, how are such depictions used as literary devices? What beliefs do these images promote about disability? 
• Examine how "disability" and "normalcy" are culturally constructed categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality. How does disability intersect with these other identity categories? 
• Study contemporary writing and performance from disability culture. This writing establishes history, explores identity, refutes/reclaims stereotypes, and promotes discourse within the disability community. We will look at genres ranging from memoir to fiction to performance to film.
• Consider how a "disability aesthetic" of literature might be conceived. How can disability contribute to the reconsideration of the processes and products of literary creation?

ENG 493, Margaret Atwood: From the Wordmines/T 1-3:45 pm
Professor Elizabeth Mills
This seminar focuses on a single contemporary author who writes in multiple genres: short fiction, novels, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We will study and discuss works from each genre. One special opportunity for the seminar will be Atwood's visit to Davidson on February 25, 2010, when students will have an opportunity to meet and talk with the author about her work. During the semester, each student will have major responsibility for organizing and leading one class discussion; will write multiple short essays; will make a formal, oral presentation summarizing his or her research; and will present a theoretically sound, carefully revised and documented paper related to Atwood's work. Texts include: Alias Grace, Blue Beard's Egg, Bodily Harm, Cat's Eye, Life Before Man, Moral Disorder, Negotiating with the Dead, Oryx and Crake, Selected Poems, Surfacing, The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Robber Bride.