/ In this topic-focused course, students cultivate an appreciation for literature and develop the skills of close reading and analysis. ENGL 150 is writing intensive, so students can expect to develop foundational writing skills in a variety of genres and modes. Topics vary by instructor.
How can stories help us find successful careers and lead purposeful lives? Intended for those considering or already majoring/minoring in English, this course introduces the analytical and written skills of literary studies. Students will practice foundational methods (close-reading, research, citation) and study central genres (poetry, drama, short stories, novels). Taking up such topics as identity discernment in the context of community, we will discover how literary studies can be used to explore diverse ways of living a purposeful life during and beyond college. In this vein, we will also consider how students can apply the skills of literary studies through a variety of careers and vocations. If not a major/minor, email instructor for approval to register. Fall semester.
This course explores the history, genre conventions, and cultural and economic impact of science fiction and/or fantasy literature and media. In particular, students will examine how speculative fiction comments on important societal and cultural issues, including race, class, gender, spirituality, and colonialism.
This course explores queer storytelling in a range of genres and media, including fiction, memoir, poetry, performance, and film. As we investigate how literature shapes the way we understand our relationship to sex, desire, and embodiment, we also engage with a growing body of queer and transgender scholarship in order to think about how our experiences of our bodies are conditioned by our position in the social/political world.
This introductory course examines the basics of filmmaking through an exploration of various genres, including drama, romantic comedy, and the American western, among others. Students will view a wide selection of films and will learn to discuss the uniquely visual and aural narrative components of the medium. Students discuss elements such as film style, mise-en-scène, cinematography, film editing, and film sound.
This course looks at the ways English, Irish, and Scottish writers in the 20th century experimented with the form of the novel in the context of social, political and ideological history. Throughout the semester students will interrogate what “modern” looks like across a variety of novels published from 1900 to the present, as well as how the modern novel differs from Victorian and postmodern novels.
Students learn and practice the elements of craft for creative prose and poetry writing. They read works by published poets, essayists and fiction writers, and share their original works with classmates. They also complete one critical essay devoted to an element of creative-writing craft.
This course concentrates on the development and diversity of the American short story by studying stories from writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Jewett, Wharton, Hughes, Hemingway, Walker, Alexie, Cisneros, Lahiri, and others. The course includes analysis of individual stories as well as collections with an emphasis on the wide range of voices that have contributed to the short story tradition in American literature.
This course offers a historical overview of poetic development from the late 19th century through the contemporary moment in Britain and the United States. It explores modern poetry by poets in the context of modernism – an international, interdisciplinary movement that spanned both world wars and included literature, music, drama, art and film. The course will help students develop and practice their skills at reading and analyzing poetry.
This course provides an overview of the continuity and development of various traditions of literature of the British Isles from the early medieval period up to the French Revolution. Readings aim to develop understanding and appreciation of the broad sweep of English literature, including both canonical works and lesser-read texts. Fall semester.
This course provides an overview of various traditions of literature written in the British Isles and in the many parts of the globe colonized by the British Empire. The course covers various historical movements from the Age of Revolutions to the present and orients students to a broad sweep of English literature while also raising questions about what work the “English” in English literature does. Spring semester.
This course introduces students to the major writers, literary movements and cultural and historical contexts in the U.S. from its origins to the end of the Civil War. Students examine Native American creation stories, trickster tales, encounter narratives, Puritan prose and poetry, the literature of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary War, slave narratives and the rise of romanticism. Fall semester.
This course introduces students to the major authors, periods and literary movements in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War to the present. Students read the works of poets, fiction writers and dramatists beginning in the area of the Civil War and moving into the rise of realism and naturalism, through the modernist movement in the U.S., to the postmodern era. Spring semester.
This course explores twentieth and twenty-first Catholic novels, short stories, film, and drama. It focuses on how the Catholic intellectual tradition has been particularly fruitful for fostering artistic ways of imagining humans’ encounters with the divine. Students analyze how the fiction of Catholic writers has served as a way to engage theological concepts, critique societal injustice, examine religious institutions, and express a diverse variety of faith experiences.
This small-group seminar concentrates on a variety of literary concerns and special interests, ranging from single authors to movements, motifs or themes. Topics vary by semester. Course is repeatable with advisor’s and instructor’s consent.
This course introduces students to rhetoric and composition/writing studies pedagogies in the context of supporting these skills in K12 and other contexts. Students will take a deep dive into grammar through the lenses of rhetoric and style. They will also gain introductory expertise in responding to student writing/feedback, supporting second language/L2 writing/multilingual writers, and employing antiracist/inclusive classroom strategies. ENGL 290 is one of the courses required for all English Education students.
Designed to introduce students to creative nonfiction, a genre that includes the personal essay, memoir and literary journalism. Students read and discuss published essays, practice elements of the genre, share work with classmates, and compose and revise several essays.
What do we do when we study literature? In this course, we will explore some of the ideas and practices that make literary study distinct from other ways of reading and writing. Each unit of the class will pair study of a literary text with a particular orientation toward literary criticism: structures and forms; surfaces and depths; and affects and ecologies.
This course teaches students to write effectively in a professional context. In it, students will become acquainted with the basic genres of professional communication, such as research briefs, project/grant proposals, public outreach documents, web design, résumés, and cover letters. They also learn a range of strategies for controlling their argumentation, organization, and prose style in a professional setting. Importantly, students will conduct this work on behalf of a local non-profit organization. In that way, they will be asked to apply the skills learned in this course for a variety of real-life leaderships, each with its own strongly held values.
This course covers the fundamental principles of writing short stories: plausibility, plot construction, point of view, characterization, setting, style and the use of evocative details. The approach is workshop/tutorial. Some readings in short fiction and in theories of fiction are required.
This course focuses on the writing of poetry. The approach is workshop/tutorial. Students read and critique each other’s works; they also read works by currently publishing poets.
Beginning with one of the most important texts in the African-American literary canon, Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative, the course traces the historical trajectory from antebellum autobiography to the contemporary protest novel in African-American literature. The course analyzes these texts in relation to a variety of social, political and artistic historical moments: the rise of slavery, reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black arts movement and the civil rights movement.
This course examines race and gender in Native American, U.S.-Latinx, African-American and Asian-American texts in the contemporary United States (1960s to present). Students investigate themes such as immigration, dispossession, and solidarity as they study the political and cultural underpinnings of the texts.
Through exploring literary texts by women, this course analyzes how the construction of “woman,” sex and gender has changed over time and investigates how it intersects with issues of race, class, sexuality and nationality. By using feminist literary theory, the course engages the most pressing issues in the field, from ideas of women’s literary voice to claims that challenge female authorship altogether. Special topics may include contemporary women writers, gender and 19th-century novel, medieval and early modern women writers, and ethnic women writers.
Writing for the World introduces students to the myriad ways writing works its way into the real world. Course themes include the exploration of real-life writing genres (e.g., feature articles, profiles, reviews, grant proposals, blogs, podcasts, social media marketing), copy-editing and publishing, digital and multimodal writing, informational writing, visual rhetoric, and more. Features of the class include collaborative projects, engaged writing workshops, and relating writing experiences to one’s personal goals and career interests. Prerequisite: a lower-division WI course. Spring, annually.
This course studies American novels of the 19th century that were produced during a creative and industrial heyday in American literary history. Students explore examples from romantic, gothic, sentimental, abolitionist, naturalist and sensation novels, focusing on such issues as canonicity, popularity, “masterpieces,” readership and accessibility.
This course traces the development of the American novel from 1900 to the present, placing examples of the genre within the changing social, artistic, political and historical patterns of the 20th-century United States.
This course leads students in the close and careful study of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in modern English translation, following its protagonist through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Students will explore the historical, theological, and artistic context of this great medieval poem, as well as ponder what it might teach us about human nature and values, ethics, and the purpose of life.
This course explores the literary and intellectual developments that took place between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries in Europe. It shows how aspects of medieval religion, philosophy, and aesthetics influence the ways we think, read, and write today. Special topics may include medieval romance and chivalric quests, dreams and visions, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and devotional literature, among others.
This course examines the flowering of culture—in the areas of literature, music, dance and art—that took place predominantly during the 1920s for black Americans in Harlem, N.Y., a movement that has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. The course places this cultural renaissance, or rebirth, within the historical context out of which it grew—the modernizing America in a post-WWI era, the rise of jazz and the blues, and the Great Migration, among other factors. We will study writers, intellectuals, and visual and performing artists whose work demonstrates the debates and major contributions of this historical movement.
This course explores the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, including the "Canterbury Tales," “Τroilus and Criseyde," and/or his dream poetry in the original Middle English. Students will pay close attention to the poet's language and style, as well as discover the medieval world that he inhabited.
This course addresses concepts of American culture through the dual lenses of literary texts and community-based learning. The course explores individuals and communities in crisis or transition as a result of poor health, poverty, immigration, homelessness, and gendered, sexual, racial or ethnic discrimination. Throughout the semester, paired students regularly volunteer at local community service agencies and expand their knowledge of these concepts by writing reflection journals as well as various forms of researched persuasive critical writing (literary analysis, opinion editorials, grant proposals and newsletters). Students will examine their service-learning experiences and writing as connected to the literature in the course, in order to consider their own vocations in the world.
This course examines Milton's major works, including his masterful Biblical epic "Paradise Lost." In particular, students will explore how Milton responded and contributed to the literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific thought of seventeenth-century England.
This course explores the major plays and poems of William Shakespeare. In addition to situating Shakespeare’s works within their historical, political, and literary context, this course also examines their enduring cultural and artistic impact around the world. Fall semester.
This course guides students in a deeper dive into an author’s body of work. The choice of author varies depending on the instructor. Prerequisites: ENGL 305 or 306.
This course covers 20th- and 21st-century literature composed by writers grappling with colonialism or its enduring legacy. Students will read and respond to a variety of postcolonial literature and cultures, which may include poetry, short fiction, novels, film and postcolonial theory. The course usually covers literature written in English from India, Pakistan, Africa and the Caribbean, but may also explore literature from other countries or continents with a history of colonialism.
Since its rise to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, detective fiction has remained one of the most enduringly popular genres of narrative. In this course, we will examine the development of the detective story and track the figure of the detective from their early days to the present moment. Along the way, we will ask what the rise in crime fiction has to do with the growth in national policing and the expansion of global imperialism.
Students will consider how concepts of heroism and wisdom pervade human cultures and how they evolve. The interdisciplinary approach includes a range of texts from around the world as we consider how humans have struggled to evaluate what we consider brave and wise.
Students critique each other’s fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction and study the works of contemporary writers and poets. The class includes individual tutorial sessions. Students are expected to complete a course portfolio of selected original works. Prerequisites: ENGL 304, ENGL 307 or ENGL 308.
This seminar completes the English major by offering students a chance to explore literary writing, theory and history through a signature project, and to connect their knowledge and skills to vocations beyond college. Students should register for ENGL 499 in collaboration with this course unless otherwise advised. Prerequisite: ENGL 350.
This course allows staff and students to explore together topics of special interest.
An internship experience allows students to apply their studies in a supervised work situation. Students benefit from an inside look at different kinds of organizations by having a chance to work in their field of study and by gaining experience with state-of-the-art equipment and practices. Prerequisites: junior or senior standing and instructor’s consent.
All English majors are required to collect and submit a senior English portfolio (one essay or writing assignment from each ENGL course taken, plus a self-evaluative introductory essay) in order to fulfill the ENGL 499 graduation requirement. During their four years of coursework, English majors electronically store their essays and writing assignments, and the final portfolio is built from this stored written work. Senior English majors enroll in ENGL 499 during their final semester, and completed portfolios are due at the conclusion of the semester. Prerequisite: senior standing.
This course introduces students to the American novel tradition from the early nineteenth through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students learn about the major genres, artistic movements, and historical transformations of American literary history. Through debate, discussion, and analysis, students consider and critique what it means when we identify a novel as “classic” or “great.”
What do we do when we study rhetoric, composition, and writing studies? This course asks students to explore the wide range of writing studies methodologies (the overarching strategies and rationale of your research, and the lens through which you analyze) and writing studies methods (the specific tools/procedures to collect and analyze data and answer your research questions). Students will grapple with the practical, theoretical, and ethical issues involved in writing-related research. Spring semester, even-numbered years.
This course involves the study of dramatic works written between 1949 and 1993, focusing particularly on innovations in form and content that date back to Ibsen’s work in the late nineteenth century. Students will discuss avant-garde trends of the twentieth century but will largely focus on the shadow cast by nineteenth-century realism onto British, Irish, and American drama as well as the postwar emergence of absurdism.
Rock and Roll Movies is an interdisciplinary examination of the advent and journey of rock and roll music as it has been represented onscreen from 1955 through 2021. The class focuses specifically on the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s through the height of its influence in the late 1970s and examines the deathless mythologies that helped to shape not only the future of popular music but also the emergence of subversive subcultures that continue to inform signifiers of rebellion and anti-mainstream subcultures well into the 21st century. A distinctly visual art form, rock and roll has long been a source of interest to filmmakers caught in its thrall; we’ll be listening to, reading about, and watching the ways that cinema has reflected, reinforced, and reshaped the powerful cultural narratives of rock throughout the 20th century and lamented its demise in 21st century nostalgia markets.
This small-group seminar concentrates on a variety of literary concerns and special interests, ranging from single authors to movements, motifs or themes. Topics vary by semester. Course is repeatable with advisor’s and instructor’s consent.
The concept of race, it is generally acknowledged, originates at the dawn of modernity with the colonization of the New World and the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade. In this course, we will turn instead to the preceding period and explore how early English literature, primarily that written in the fourteenth century, conceives of, represents, and articulates human difference centuries prior to the emergence of modern racial ideologies. We will place these literary works in conversation with other historical sources including visual art, archaeological and legal records, and maps. At every step of the way, we will also consider whether and how these materials speak to issues of race and racism in the United States today.
This seminar completes the English major by offering students a chance to explore literary writing, theory and history through a signature project, and to connect their knowledge and skills to vocations beyond college. Students should register for ENGL 499 in collaboration with this course unless otherwise advised. Prerequisite: ENGL 350.
