The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

POLIS, Villanova's Literary Magazine, is now accepting written and visual submissions for their Spring 2020 edition! Submissions can take the form of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography and can be emailed to polislitmag@gmail.com. The deadline to submit is April 1st. Please email them with any questions. They are excited to see your creativity and artistic expression!

Science Fiction & the Literary Studies Classroom ENG 9730 CRN 13021 Dr. Travis Foster Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4-7 PM Most of us are familiar with science fiction from Hollywood films: super heroes, space adventures, dystopian futures. These are no doubt important examples of the genre, but they just hint at its many possibilities. This course aims to help students discover a much more expansive sci fi universe. We’ll sample the genre from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” through—yes, a Marvel film—Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Black Panther, with a particular emphasis on how writers and filmmakers have explored science fiction’s decolonial, antiracist, and feminist possibilities. Students enrolled in the class will take a direct role in designing most of the syllabus, filling in the gaps between Hawthorne and Coogler by adding the short stories, novels, films, and poetry that most appeal to their interests. In addition, we’ll work together to curate a list of critica...

ENG 8000: Literary Theory Dr. Heather Hicks CRN 23045 Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm What's Hot? Introduction to Theory Across the Discipline of English This course will be run as a seminar in which each week, a different graduate faculty member will introduce you to a body of theory that is particularly important within current discussions in their field of specialization. What are some of the major theoretical approaches in medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What about 19th-century American literature and British literature? Modernism? Postcolonial Studies? Irish Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity to meet most of the English faculty members who teach at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory. Assignments will include bi...

Congratulations to Dr. Travis Foster, whose new book Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United Status was just published by Oxford University Press. Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, the book  underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, Dr. Foster argues, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres--including campus novels, the  Ladies' Home Journal , Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how ...