English
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
As Toni Morrison memorably suggests, words give shape and meaning to our experiences, and invite us to bear witness to the experiences of others. In the English department, students learn to appreciate the inherent value of reading and writing, to value the beauty and power of language. At the same time, our students are trained to sharpen their skills for an ever-evolving job market by developing the ability to write clearly and persuasively, to think critically and creatively, and to engage in thoughtful analysis, skills that are always in demand in the global marketplace.
While there are many ways to pursue English studies, the same learning outcomes apply to all of our programs. All students who complete the major in English will demonstrate an ability to:
- Read, analyze and interpret texts, including imaginative literatures, in their relevant cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts.
- Compose texts for a range of audiences and purposes, using effective rhetorical approaches and appropriate media.
- Demonstrate information literacy, such as recognizing the need for sources and locating, evaluating, and using the needed information.
- Employ knowledge of disciplinary methods and standards common to English Studies.
- English Major
- Concentration in Creative Writing
- Concentration in English Studies
- Concentration in Literature
- Concentration in Professional Writing
- Concentration in Teacher Education
- English Minor, choose from these options:
ENGL 1001 Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition 3 Credits
This course introduces students to the academic discipline of rhetoric and composition. Students read nonfiction texts, including rhetoric and composition and cross-disciplinary scholarship, in order to analyze their conventions and craft texts in various genres and modalities for a range of audiences. Students develop effective writing processes, sound research strategies, strong academic arguments, rhetorical awareness, and sensitivity to disciplinarity. The course prepares students to transfer this knowledge to their compositions across the curriculum and across contexts.
ENGL 1002 Texts and Contexts II: Writing About Literature 3 Credits
This course focuses on the development of increasingly sophisticated reading, writing, researching, and inquiry skills through the exploration of literary texts and their contexts. Students will practice close reading techniques, be introduced to key terms and concepts in literary study, and practice writing in a variety of academic and creative genres. The course is intended to foster greater appreciation for the power of literature and literary study as a foundation to all the liberal arts.
ENGL 1010 Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies 3 Credits
This course allows students to develop ways of reading, analyzing, and interacting with texts in English from around the globe. You will focus on such questions as: How are literary texts produced? How do local, national, and global cultures and events affect the way authors fashion their texts? Do literary works produced in different cultures at the same time "speak to each other" across time and space? The course will be run as a combination of lecture and small group discussion and will make use of web-based background materials to provide context and depth to the readings.
ENGL 1020 Introduction to Contemporary World Literature 3 Credits
Students will review recent fiction from around the world, including Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and the Middle East. Students learn strategies for comparing stories and narrative styles from different cultures, subject positions, and sociopolitical frameworks. Students develop a stronger awareness of different types of subjectivity in a global context.
ENGL 1030 Fairy Tales 3 Credits
A study of classic fairy tales in their oldest preserved versions by authors like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm; in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature influenced by the fairy tale tradition; in post-modern literary retellings; and in film and popular culture.
ENGL 1040 World Epics 3 Credits
A study of selected epic literature from various cultures and historical eras. Epics studied might include: The Epic of Gilgamesh; the Odyssey; the Aeneid; the Ramayana; The Song of Roland (medieval France); Sundiata . Emphasis throughout will be on developing skills of textual analysis, thesis development, and argumentation, with attention to such themes as: the synthesis of extended narrative and the stability and instability of texts; oral tradition and literacy; the construction of national ethos; the idea of the hero; masculinity and violence; conquest, subjugation, and empire; diachronic and synchronic conceptions of ethnicity and race.
ENGL 1050 African Diaspora: Literature and Culture 3 Credits
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the African Diaspora, incorporating texts from Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Beginning with colonization in Africa and representations of the Middle Passage, the course covers historical topics such as enslavement and the plantation system, abolition movements, migration within and out of the Caribbean, resistance movements, the Harlem Renaissance, and independence struggles. As we study the Atlantic world and globalization across several centuries, we will examine cultural syncretism, commodity culture rooted in the Triangle Trade, and creative endeavors in literature and the arts (painting and sculpture, film, music, dance, theatre).
ENGL 1060 Ancient Greek Literature 3 Credits
This course surveys major works of ancient Greek literature, emphasizing the content of this literature as a key to understanding classical Greek civilization and as meaningful in a contemporary context. Crosslisted with CLST 1060.
ENGL 1070 Ancient Roman Literature 3 Credits
This course is an introduction to the literature of ancient Rome, a canon that took shape from roughly the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE but covers events as early as 753 BCE. We will read and analyze works of various genres of Roman literature in translation, with authors and works including Plautus, Cicero, Catullus, Sulpicia, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Augustus, Livy, Vergil, Lucretius, Seneca, Tacitus, and epigraphy. These authors and works necessarily span a breadth of disciplines (including but not limited to literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, art history and archaeology, performing arts, philosophy, and religious studies) which offer a multitude of theoretical approaches and models that we can use to explore our material in an interdisciplinary fashion. Our ultimate goal is to gain a basic understanding of the progression of Roman literature and how each work or genre relates to social and political conditions in Rome at the time. Crosslisted with AMED 1070.
ENGL 1080 Myth in Classical Literature 3 Credits
This course introduces students to classical mythology through an examination of the diverse ways in which myth and legend are treated in the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. Students read texts in English translation; knowledge of Greek or Latin is not required. Crosslisted with CLST 1080.
ENGL 1090 Greek Tragedy in English Translation 3 Credits
An intensive study in translation of the surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Knowledge of Greek is not required. Crosslisted with CLST 1090.
ENGL 1100 Greco-Roman Gender & Sexuality 3 Credits
In this course, we will analyze and engage with ancient Greco-Roman works of literature and art to reconstruct Greek and Roman conceptions of gender, sexuality, and interrelated topics: love, masculinity, femininity, homoeroticism, courtship, and marriage, among others. We will then use these investigations as a way to analyze our own modern conceptions of gender and sexuality and explore how issues like the definitions of sex and gender, the dynamics of socio-political power, the creation of community and relationships, and the boundaries of what is legal and moral are necessarily renegotiated from culture to culture and time period to time period. Crosslisted with AMED 1100.
ENGL 1110 International Short Fiction 3 Credits
This course examines works of short fiction from around the world written during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The degree to which and the specific manners in which these works contribute to a characteristically modern sense of human existence and the function of narrative art forms the basis for reading selections. Through textual analysis, students compare and contrast various versions of the modern experience as produced by authors such as Gogol, Melville, Mansfield, Joyce, Lawrence, Cather, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka, Hemingway, Lessing, Borges, Barth, Böll, Mishima, Achebe, Erdrich, and Atwood.
ENGL 1120 19th-Century Russian Novel and World Literature 3 Credits
This comparative study of major Russian authors and their counterparts in France, Germany, England, and the U.S. begins with short fiction and moves to novels such as Père Goriot, Crime and Punishment, A Hero of Our Time, and Madame Bovary. Russian writers include Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Topics include the role of marriage and attitudes towards the family, urban versus rural experience, especially the role of the city, the fantastic in literature, narrative technique, and the development of 19th-century fiction.
ENGL 1130 Literature of the Holocaust 3 Credits
After an introduction to the historical, political, and social background of the Holocaust, this course uses poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction, art, and music to explore the genocide of Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany (1933-1945). The course seeks to discover what transpired during the Holocaust and what it means to our understanding of human nature and of our civilization. Readings and films include Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, Spiegelman's Maus I and II, Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Wiesenthal's The Sunflower, Spielberg's "Schindler's List," Wiltsie's "The Good German," and more.
ENGL 1140 Caribbean Literature: History, Culture, and Identity 3 Credits
This course serves as an introduction to the field of Caribbean literatures in English and English translation, with a focus on the French-speaking Caribbean. We survey a wide range of theoretical and fictional texts (poetry, short stories, novels, theatre), and introduce students to the debate surrounding the formation of Antillean cultural identity/identities. This course examines Caribbean literatures with respect to their language of origin, colonization, slavery, racial experience, landscape, migration, and diaspora, specifically in Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Trinidad, Cuba, and the Netherlands Antilles/Suriname.
ENGL 1150 Dante 3 Credits
This course examines the works of Dante Alighieri, including the Vita nuova, in addition to the "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso" from the Divine Comedy. Students are introduced to the political, linguistic, theological, and poetic ideas that make Dante's works not only significant in the medieval context, but also continue to challenge and inform modern debates. Crosslisted with ITLN 2289.
ENGL 1180 Modern China through Fiction and Film 3 Credits
This course is a study of various cultural aspects of modern China in the 20th century through reading translated fiction as well as films. Students explore topics such as modernity, nationalism, individualism, gender, and cultural identity in the modern cultural-historical context. Also will be discussed are issues particular to fiction and film as representational modes: How do fiction and film narrate history and the complex Chinese experience? How have they both been shaped by and contributed to the socio-cultural transformations? And how do they represent the increasingly diversified cultural and social landscape of contemporary China? Crosslisted with CHIN 2250.
ENGL 1200 American Women Playwrights 3 Credits
This course traces the evolution of plays by women from the Revolutionary War to plays reflecting the 21st-century concerns of African American, Asian, American, and Latina playwrights. Plays are discussed in light of the social, political, and economic climates that produced them. Special emphasis is given to questions of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and class, as we explore how American women, despite considerable obstacles, have developed their own theatrical voices. Our study is further informed by the work of feminist performance theorists. Crosslisted with THTR 1200.
ENGL 1210 American Literature and the Environment 3 Credits
This course aims to explore the ways in which ideas about the physical, "natural" environment have been shaped in American literature. The course will survey a variety of important texts in this tradition and introduce students to the scholarly perspective known as Ecocriticism. Texts may include those by Austin, Cather, Leopold, Muir, Silko, and Thoreau.
ENGL 1220 The Frontier in American Literature 3 Credits
For the last five centuries, the frontier, understood as the place where humanity comes into contact with its apparent absence in the shape of alien beings and landscapes, has been the subject of some of the most lasting and powerful American stories. In this course, students concentrate on some of the major representations of the frontier produced between the 1820s and the present to learn how to recognize and talk about the position that the American western has occupied in our culture. Authors include Cooper, Twain, Cather, and McCarthy; filmmakers include Ford, Peckinpagh, and Eastwood.
ENGL 1230 Ethnic American Literature 3 Credits
This course focuses on stories from writers whose countries came in contact with American colonization. The course examines postcolonial themes in a historical context, and asks what it means to be a writer whose identity is formed by the diasporic flight of one's people. We begin with theorizing postcoloniality and move to a study of 20th century writing by Puerto Rican, Filipino, Vietnamese, and other ethnic American writers. Topics include the influences of English on vernacular literatures and the relationship of the postcolonial to contemporary politics and art.
ENGL 1235 Jewish Identity in Literature 3 Credits
This course explores Jewish identity through literature. Beginning with an investigation into various faith traditions and family practices, we study foundational texts in order to establish essential questions. Units on "Wrestling," "Blessings," "Living in a Broken World," and "Justice" will engage with ethics and morality as well as spiritual and artistic traditions. Texts will range from excerpts from Genesis to modern poetry and novels, with attention also to paintings, films, and other media.
ENGL 1240 American Literature: Myths and Legends 3 Credits
Our national literary tradition has been defined by the stories we tell about ourselves and our conversations about important social and political issues, including race, reform, democracy, suffrage, Native American removal, class, technology, and Manifest Destiny. This course explores how literature reflects, constructs, and questions the dominant image and understanding of the American identity from the Puritans through the nineteenth century. The course leads to developing a term paper drawing on research and using literary criticism. Writers include Bradstreet, Franklin, Wheatley, Irving, Douglass, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, James, and Twain.
ENGL 1245 American Romanticism 3 Credits
This course explores transcendentalism and romanticism during the flowering of intellectual and social life in America from 1830 to 1865. Studying the transatlantic origins of these movements through an interdisciplinary lens, we examine how these writers responded to broad social, aesthetic, and philosophical influences in crafting their unique literary styles. We will also analyze paintings, photographs, film, and material culture to understand how romanticism and transcendentalism defined this age and continues to influence our own. Authors include Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Alcott, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Davis, Whitman, and Dickinson.
ENGL 1250 American Drama 3 Credits
This course examines the development of American theatre from the 18th through the 21st centuries. It includes a study and analysis of the special problems affecting the development and changes in American society as seen through American playwriting and theatre production. Students read over twenty plays that grapple with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and what it means to be an American. The course includes theatre trips. Crosslisted with THTR 1250.
ENGL 1260 American Social Protest Literature 3 Credits
This course explores the long tradition of non-violent social protest in American literature. We examine how many writers have challenged their contemporaries to become aware of important issues - race, women's rights, Native American activism, the environment, war, and poverty. Students keep a journal in which they reflect on the literature and develop strategies for changing themselves and the world around them. A final project asks students to consider ways to raise awareness about a social issue at the University or in the larger community. Selected writers include Stowe, Davis, Thoreau, Crane, Douglass, Steinbeck, King, Wright, and Ginsberg.
ENGL 1270 Romantic Love in Greek and Roman Literature 3 Credits
The course of true love never did run smooth. From Homer's Penelope to Ovid's Remedies of Love we will examine the permutations of romantic desire and its frustrations in the literature of Greece and Rome. Readings also include selections from Sappho's poetry, Sophocles' Women of Trachis, Euripides' Phaedra and Medea, comedies by Menander and Terence, Catullus' poems to Lesbia, Vergil's tale of Dido and Aeneas, selections from the elegies of Tibullus, Sulpicia, Propertius and Ovid, and briefer excerpts from other authors. All readings are in English translation. Crosslisted with CLST 1270.
ENGL 1280 Asian American Cultures, Conflicts, and Identities in Literature 3 Credits
The status of Asian Americans in the US is as much a result of American history as it is Asia’s. This essential liminal characteristic imparts Asian American Literature an unique flavor with questions of reality, the fake and the fabricated. It also leads to a variety of works ranging from experimental forms and genres to narratives of war and oppression to texts that express the physical and psychological effects of people born and bred in cultures and contexts that have disowned them. Students learn to understand the cultural, historical, artistic and political ramifications of this dynamic body of literature.
ENGL 1290 American Short Story 3 Credits
This course covers the rise of this genre form from the early Nineteenth Century beginning with Poe and continues through the realistic/naturalistic periods up through modernist and post-modernist movement through the present. Some of the authors studied include Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, Twain, Cather, McCullers, Welty, O'Connor, Hemingway, Faulkner, Roth, Updike, O'Brien, Lahiri.
ENGL 1300 Literature by Women: Vision and Revision 3 Credits
This study of transatlantic, post-1800 literature by women will adopt Virginia Woolf's notion that "books continue each other." The course will be anchored in such touchstone texts as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Each touchstone work will be grouped with a number of subsequent literary texts responding to and/or revising the earlier work. Readings will reach across centuries and continents. Topics include the social constructions of race, sexuality, gender, class, and beauty, intertextuality, influence, and canon formation.
ENGL 1310 Contemporary Women Writers of Color 3 Credits
This course focuses on works by Latinas, Native, Asian American, and African American women writers, as well as moving beyond the borders of the U.S.to include writers from the Americas, emphasizing the decades from the 1970s to the present. We consider the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class, as these contribute to concepts of identity, for both the individual and the community. Authors may include Gloria Anzaldúa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Lan Cao, Nora Okja Keller, Sky Lee, Ana Castillo, Carla Trujillo, Achy Obejas, Loida Maritza Pérez, Danzy Senna, Dorothy West, and Chitra Diakaruni.
ENGL 1320 20th Century Russian Fiction 3 Credits
In this comparative study, students read works by Russian and Soviet authors in tandem with texts by novelists from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas. From the Silver Age, the course move to post-Revolutionary fiction and versions of dystopia, considers exile, dislocation, relocation, and dual identity, then examines the effects of the Stalin years, and concludes with contemporary fiction of the post-Soviet era. The course sets the literature with its historical, political, and cultural contexts, incorporating material from the arts, as well.
ENGL 1330 African American Literary Tradition 3 Credits
This survey course examines the development of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on issues of literacy, authority, and identity. The course traces this tradition's history from Phillis Wheatley's role in defining American poetry and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, to the narratives of enslavement by authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, to the New Negro Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary African American fiction and poetry.
ENGL 1340 Democracy in Black and Indigenous Voices 3 Credits
This course brings together Black Studies and Native
Studies in an exploration of what scholar Tiffany Lethabo
King terms the “Black Shoals”: a new way of seeing
relation and imagining new kinds of futures. In
contemporary poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir, Black
and Indigenous writers act as agents for change,
engaging with the history and institutions of the U.S. that
are based in the violence of settler colonialism and
enslavement. These authors argue for not only full
citizenship but also a radical shift in the institutions of
this country in order to transform the U.S. into real
democracy.
ENGL 1350 Graphic Novels as Thrillers and Chillers 3 Credits
This course will introduce students to the idea of graphic novels as literature that deals with serious subjects, ranging from social, political, cultural, to race-based and sexually sensitive issues, in ways that are hyperbolically dramatic and/or humorous. It has a strong digital component and students will be asked to work with and use a range of multi-modal tools such as blogs, Wiki, Twitter, Animoto, and visual story-telling. Students will be trained to grasp the fact the graphic novels often reflect historical events, prominent ideological and socio-cultural attitudes of the time, and span the spectrum from propelling propaganda to mounting a critique.
ENGL 1360 Book Histories and Futures: Literature in Times of Media Change 3 Credits
The book is a long-established symbol of knowledge and a vessel of literary culture, but the digital revolution has complicated its meaning. This course explores the book's current cultural status and its longer history, as both an object and expressive form. Students will chart the book’s evolution through both historical and theoretical accounts, and literary works that embody and thematically explore these changes. Students will primarily use the techniques of traditional literary analysis, but will also incorporate methods from related disciplines such as visual and new-media studies, narratology, digital humanities, and book studies to address the course’s formally diverse texts.
ENGL 1370 Reading for Pleasure: Principles and Practices 3 Credits
This Magis Core literature course is designed to connect, re-connect, or introduce students to the joys of reading for fun. We will explore the factors that motivate people to read for pleasure; the environments conducive to reading for pleasure; the principles, platforms, practices and pedagogies that support reading for pleasure; and the kinds of literary texts people enjoy reading for pleasure.
ENGL 1410 Imagining Shakespeare 3 Credits
Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer in the English language. This course will investigate how his genius is expressed in comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. We will study how each kind of play influences the others in every part of Shakespeare's career. Plays include The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. We will take a multimedia approach by analyzing performances as well as text. The history of Shakespeare's era and of his critics will be studied as well.
ENGL 1410X Imagining Shakespeare 3 Credits
Corequisite(s): HIST 2228X.
Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer in the English language. This course will investigate how his genius is expressed in comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. We will study how each kind of play influences the others in every part of Shakespeare's career. Plays include The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. We will take a multimedia approach by analyzing performances as well as text. The history of Shakespeare's era and of his critics will be studied as well. This course is linked with HIST 2228X and fulfills the requirements for the interdisciplinary signature element within the Magis Core.
ENGL 1420 Myths and Legends of Ireland and Britain 3 Credits
This course studies the literature of early medieval cultures of Ireland and Great Britain, with special attention to Celtic culture. The course is divided into four parts, focusing on the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge , the Welsh Mabinogion , the Latin Christian legends of Celtic saints, and the Old English epic Beowulf . Critical issues for discussion include: paganism and Christianity; conceptions of law, kinship, and nationhood; warrior culture and the idea of the hero; the status of art and poetry; orality and literacy; the natural and the supernatural; the construction of gender.
ENGL 1420X Myths and Legends of Ireland and Britain 3 Credits
This course studies the literature of early medieval cultures of Ireland and Great Britain, with special attention to Celtic culture. The course is divided into four parts, focusing on the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge , the Welsh Mabinogion , the Latin Christian legends of Celtic saints, and the Old English epic Beowulf .. Critical issues for discussion include: paganism and Christianity; conceptions of law, kinship, and nationhood; warrior culture and the idea of the hero; the status of art and poetry; orality and literacy; the natural and the supernatural; the construction of gender. This course is linked with AHST 1121X and fulfills the requirements for the interdisciplinary signature element within the Magis Core.
ENGL 1430 The Greenworld: English Literature and the Environment 3 Credits
A survey of prose, poetry, and drama, the focus of this course is on the "Greenworld" in early modern English literature. The Greenworld encompasses all visions of the natural world: forests, gardens, oceans, caves, parks, animals, etc., as represented in many different aesthetic forms. Students will be introduced to a number of environmental studies topics, including land dispossession, natural disasters, New World plantations, land stewardship, and animal rights, as these topics appear in literature. Course readings range broadly from Virgil, Montaigne, and Shakespeare to James Cameron's "Avatar," and from the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society to transcriptions of witchcraft trials.
ENGL 1450 King Arthur 3 Credits
A survey of the literature of the legend of Arthur, from ancient Celtic fragments and references to medieval chivalric romances, and on to modern reinterpretations in poems, novels, and film. Particular focus on the romances of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, and the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Attention to such themes as: the construction of nationality; the tension between the individual and culture; the stylized representation of gender and class; the interplay of reality and fantasy; theories of authorship and audience; connections to history-writing and to other literary genres.
ENGL 1610 Irish Literature 3 Credits
The course studies the deep connections between the literature and history of Ireland from 1800 to the present, further developing the ability to read literature closely (to analyze and interpret the figurative language and stylistic features of fiction, drama, and poetry) and to write convincingly about the meanings and ideas that such close reading yields. It also adds to this skill by teaching students to recognize and articulate the inherent links between literature, history, and culture, links which are particularly evident in modern Irish writing, and which are revealed through close reading.
ENGL 1620 Irish Women Writers 3 Credits
The course is an overview of Irish Women Writers, both Anglo and Gaelic, in a variety of genres, from 1770 to the present. Students will explore the fundamental difference between the privileged Anglo-Irish and the marginalized Gaelic Irish. The focus will be on various aspects of women’s issues including gender, folklore, religion, education, work, marriage, motherhood and feminism. Students will examine the oral lament of Eileen O’Connell, the Big House novel of Maria Edgeworth, and the Famine poetry of Eavan Boland. A major literary focus is on the Irish Renaissance and the plays of Lady Augusta Gregory. Students will read an account of an Irish-speaking woman’s life on the Great Blasket Island, a short story about a convent school nun by Edna O’Brien, and story of fairy folklore by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. There will be a research paper on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The Last September. The historic content will include, the Penal Laws, the Great Hunger, and the Irish War of Independence. Our survey will also include samples of Gaelic Irish poetry, and Claire Keegan’s novella of a girl’s coming of age in 1980s Ireland. In our classroom conversations, reflection writings and essays, students will be asked to make informed observations on and between the Anglo and Gaelic perspectives.
ENGL 1630 Literature of Illness and Healing: Wounded Storytellers and Dedicated Healers 3 Credits
What is it like to suffer a stroke, contend with cancer, deal with depression or live with a debilitating disease? While bio-medicine may clinically treat such conditions, it is to literature that we turn to gain a humanistic understanding of the emotional and spiritual impact of illness on wounded storytellers and on the dedicated doctors and nurses who care for them. Readings in various literary genres (memoir, essay, poetry, fiction, drama) and films with medical themes will also explore issues of diversity, noting how gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation affect the illness experience.
ENGL 1700 Writing the Self: Autobiography 3 Credits
Autobiography holds a special place in its presentation of the writer's self, enlisting the reader's belief in the author's "confession" while crossing the line between fictional work and truth. This course examines autobiography and related genres, including memoir, diaries, and personal essays and considers their purpose: what do these authors reveal about themselves, and why? How much is convention, how much is truth? What impact do race, gender, class, nationhood, and ethnicity have on the construction of identity? Writers may include Franklin, Shepard, Douglass, Barnum, Johnson, Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, Malcolm X, Wright, Baldwin, Stein, Walker, and Cisneros.
ENGL 1710 Literature and the Visual Arts 3 Credits
This interdisciplinary course will examine the dynamic relationship between literature and the visual arts. Special attention will be paid to literature written in English during the 19th and 20th centuries, a time when writers and cultural critics were increasingly interested in the visual arts in general (painting, sculpture, photography, film, etc.) and the impact of the new mass media in particular. These artists forged a unique and significant relationship between their bodies of work and the visual arts; several of the writers studied worked in the tradition known as "ekphrasis" (e.g., poems "speaking" to a work of art). Writers of focus might include Blake, Poe, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Siddall, Wilde, Wharton, and Larsen.
ENGL 1720 Literacy and Language 3 Credits
This course examines the concept of literacy as it is represented in fiction and non-fiction texts. Reading widely, in memoirs, essays, fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama, we will consider individual experiences with literacy, language, and schooling, as well as the relationship between literacy and power. The course includes a service learning experience that connects issues from the course to the real context of a local elementary school.
ENGL 1730 You Are Here: Reading and Writing Place 3 Credits
In this course, activities will help students develop confidence in engaging complex texts and ignite interest in post-course reading and deep appreciation of literature. Students will learn to read closely and to look at intertextuality (the way texts "talk" to each other) as well as connecting these texts to history and culture. Students will continue using their literary and critical vocabulary, practicing their writing and speaking and research skills, and will continue their habits of integrating sources.
ENGL 1740 Mirror, Mirror: Myths, Fairy Tales, and Creative Writing 3 Credits
This course, with its dual emphasis on literature and creative writing, will explore the generative possibilities of reading and reconsidering myths and fairy tales. Our focus will be on contemporary writing inspired by core narratives; we’ll explore the ways new work addresses older tales, discuss the reception of classical myths (primarily Greek), including the centering of (some) marginalized or hidden perspectives, and study writing craft. Our topic will lead us to other genres and art forms, an interdisciplinary approach to enrich our understanding of the creative process. Students will submit a story-length piece of original fiction for peer review.
ENGL 1801 Creative Writing 3 Credits
This course fosters creativity and critical acumen through extensive exercises in the composition of poetry and fiction.
ENGL 1802 Creative Writing: Poetry I 3 Credits
This workshop course concentrates on the analysis and criticism of student manuscripts, devoting a portion of the course to a discussion of major trends in contemporary poetry and significant movements of the past. The course considers traditional forms, such as the sonnet and villanelle, as well as modern experimental forms and free verse. Students learn how to prepare and submit manuscripts to publishers.
ENGL 1804 Creative Writing: Drama 3 Credits
This course teaches the writing of one-act plays for the stage in a workshop format that involves envisioning, writing/drafting, and regular revision of seed-ideas and subjects. The process requires skillful, imaginative handling of the formative elements of drama, including plot, character, language or speech-action, envisaged staging, and form. It also involves timely submission of assignments and drafts of scenes and whole plays for periodic in-class readings and feedback. Students are expected to submit at specified times midterm and final drafts that demonstrate the technique or art of playwriting as well as conform to the general requirements of the course.
ENGL 1805 Creative Writing: Fiction I 3 Credits
An introduction to writing fiction in a course that focuses on elements of craft, including character, setting, perspective, and conflict. Coursework will include close readings of published stories and novels (with an emphasis on writing techniques and narrative strategies), writing prompts and exercises, drafts of original fiction, and a substantive revision. Students will participate in discussions and peer review in a workshop format.
ENGL 1806 Creative Writing: Nonfiction I 3 Credits
This course offers students the opportunity to study and practice the art and craft of literary nonfiction. Students will study the work of accomplished writers in the field, both past and present, as a foundation for analyzing and critiquing each other's manuscripts in workshop format. Forms studied and practiced will include the memoir, personal essay, and reflective essay.
ENGL 1832 Business Writing 3 Credits
This course investigates the demands of business writing, including designing documents that visually display information and invite readers to read either quickly or thoroughly. The course stresses theoretical issues as well as practical skills. Students practice writing skills on a variety of projects including memos, proposals, reports, collaborative writing, and writing as part of the job-hunting process. Learning goals include understanding the purposes of writing in business and industry, writing with a clear sense of audience, becoming familiar with document design and electronic communication, ethical and cross-cultural issues, and reviewing scholarly writing and research in this academic field.
ENGL 1835 Technical Writing 3 Credits
This course investigates the theory and practice of writing in technical fields, introducing students to types of oral, written, and hypertext communication that technical writers use in workplace settings. In-class writing activities, workshops, and lengthier projects familiarize students with the styles, organizations, and formats of various documents, and prepare students for the special demands of technical writing. The course also introduces students to research and scholarly writing in the academic field. This course is suitable for advanced undergraduate students preparing for writing-intensive careers or graduate school, as well as technical writing professionals and practitioners who wish to plan, research, and write more effectively.
ENGL 1839 Grant and Proposal Writing 3 Credits
This course prepares students to write effective proposals and reports. Students learn to define and write problem statements, objectives, plans of action, assessment documents, budget presentations, and project summaries. In addition, they sharpen their teamwork, editing, writing, audience awareness, and design skills as they engage in collaborative projects with non-profit organizations in the community. Relevant historical and ethical considerations are discussed. A service learning component is included in this course.
ENGL 1850 Professional Presentations: Writing and Delivery 3 Credits
The ability to speak confidently and convincingly is an asset to everyone who wants to take an active role in their workplace and community. This interdisciplinary and writing-intensive course provides students with the necessary tools to produce audience-centered presentations and develop critical-thinking skills. It also introduces the techniques of argumentation and persuasion, and the use of technology in presentations.
ENGL 2001 Rhetorics that Matter: Personal, Public, Political 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course supports students in contributing to public discourse that surrounds identities, causes, and topics of personal significance. Building on the knowledges and skills developed in ENGL 1001, students will develop public composing projects that demonstrate sophisticated rhetorical strategies, sensitivity to genre, and understanding of rhetorical ecologies beyond classroom walls. An intersectional lens is used throughout the course, with attention paid to how personal identity, community, and discourse intersect to create cultural marginalization and privilege.
ENGL 2002 American Poetry 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course surveys a range of significant works of American poetry. It is an introduction to various movements (e.g., transcendentalism or modernism), various schools (e.g., New Formalism), and the turn to a multi-lingual and multi-vocal poetry found in the Harlem Renaissance and Spoken Word movements. The course pays particular attention to form, while grounding understanding of form within a socio-historical context. Readings may range from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Pedro Pietri, Joy Harjo, and others.
ENGL 2003 English Epic 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
Study of large-scale, verse narratives created or received as English national epics, or composed in the epic tradition. Texts will represent the major time periods of earlier English literary history and might include : Beowulf from the Old English period; Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene from the Elizabethan period; John Milton's Paradise Lost from the seventeenth century; Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock from the eighteenth century. Critical attention will be paid throughout to changing and competing conceptions of England, nation, and epic.
ENGL 2004 Literary Fairy Tale Tradition 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course is a survey of the fairy tale as a literary genre which traces the development of the literary tradition from sixteenth-century Italy to the Brothers Grimm and nineteenth-centuries authors including Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, and studies Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to note connections to the genre of the novel. Also follows the persistence of fairy tales in modern, post-modern, and contemporary fiction, and in popular film. Requirements include a research paper on a fairy tale or author of the student's choosing. Not to be taken by students who have taken ENGL 1030.
ENGL 2005 Greco-Roman Literature in Depth 3 Credits
This course focuses on one author from Greco-Roman antiquity and engages with their literary work(s) in English translation. Each successive offering of this shell course focuses on a different author or text, so students may take this course multiple times for credit. Topics will include the historical circumstances that formed the author and text; thematic considerations that allow insight into the constructions of ancient culture; comparisons and contrasts between ancient beliefs about institutions like relationships, family, politics, war, and religion and modern ones; and the reception of ancient literature and narratives in later cultures.
ENGL 2011 Age of Chaucer 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A survey of the literature of late-medieval England, focusing on its richest period, the second half of the fourteenth century - the age of Chaucer and his contemporaries. Students will gain access to the Middle English language, and study examples of the main genres of medieval literature, including religious and secular lyric, mystical writing, courtly romance, religious drama, chronicle, and comic narrative. Literature will be considered within its social and historical contexts, with special attention to representations of social order, and challenges to that order, notably the Great Rebellion of 1381.
ENGL 2013 Shakespeare I 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
In the first half of Shakespeare's career, comedy, tragedy, and history plays express both the spirit of the Elizabethan age and their own identities as different genres that reference each other. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV, and Much Ado About Nothing are among a selection of ten plays that explore dimensions of love, religion, and politics. We learn how critics have approached Shakespeare in many different ways, and how to evaluate and respond to critical opinion. Multimedia presentations show how performance and text combined enrich our understanding of this great writer.
ENGL 2014 Shakespeare II 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
The second half of Shakespeare's career begins with bright Elizabethan comedies (As You Like It, Twelfth Night) and transitions to the darker Jacobean tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear). These troubling modern visions lead through problem plays to the anti-heroic late tragedies and the romances (The Tempest), exploring issues of racism, colonialism, and social justice. We learn how critics have approached Shakespeare in many different ways, and how to evaluate and respond to critical opinion. Multimedia presentations show how performance and text combined enrich our understanding of this great writer.
ENGL 2015 Introduction to 18th Century British Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This selective survey of 18th-century English literature includes authors such as Pope, Swift, Gray, Jonson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Burns, and Montague.
ENGL 2016 Victorian Poetry and Poetics 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines the poetry and theories of poetry posited by Victorian men and women who explored concepts of identity vis-à-vis Victorian notions of culture, religion, science, politics, and sexuality. Beginning with Arnold and ending with Wilde, the course covers both poetry and literary movements such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Decadence, aestheticism, and symbolism.
ENGL 2019 20th Century British Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A survey of major developments in twentieth-century British, Irish, and Anglophone Post-colonial literature. 20th-Century England is shaped by rapid technological changes, the breakdown of Victorian mores and orthodox beliefs, the devastation of the Great War, the advent of psychoanalysis, and the height and decline of the British empire. Students learn to recognize and evaluate how these events relate to the new, experimental styles of Modern, Postmodern, and Postcolonial writing. Authors studied range from early figures such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce to contemporary stars such as Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, and Zadie Smith.
ENGL 2031 Early American Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A study of the origins of literature of the Americas with an emphasis on the Puritans and early Republic through 1830. We begin with the oral history of Native Americans and the literature of colonization and exploration. We also explore the rich tradition of spiritual autobiography, poetry, narrative history, and sermons among the Puritans. Turning to the eighteenth-century, we examine captivity narratives and democratic writing of the Revolutionary period, with an emphasis on the impact of the slave trade, colonization, Independence, and contemporary issues of the post-colonial period.
ENGL 2033 American Women Writers of the 19th Century 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A study of American female writers who have made an impact on the world through their fiction, journalism, or poetry. The course is organized thematically around a set of topics related to nineteenth-century women's lives and selves: gender and domesticity, suffrage, slavery, labor, frontier life, sexuality, and social activism. African-American and Native-American women's writings and those of other ethnicities also form an integral part of the tradition. Writers may include Alcott, Beecher, Cary, Child, Chopin, Dickinson, Fern, Freeman, Gilman, Jacobs, Kirkland, Harper, Keckley, Jewett, Piatt, Ruiz de Burton, Sin Far, Spofford, Stowe, and Wharton.
ENGL 2043 American Literature: 20th Century to the Present 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A survey of 20th Century American Literature to the present within the socio-historical context of diverse and overlapping literary and cultural traditions of the United States, such as (though not limited to) Native American, African American, Anglo American, and Asian American. Writers might include Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Yezierska, Hughes, Hurston, McNickle, Bellow, Okada, Kerouac, Rich, Plath, Welch, Gaines, Jen.
ENGL 2045 Edith Wharton and Her Circle 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A study of fiction by American realist Edith Wharton in the context of her peers, including writers she read and those she inspired. While Wharton serves as a focal point, the course also examines the works and ideas of such influential figures as Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Chekhov, James, Crane, Dreiser, and Freeman, as well as adaptations of Whartonian themes by such novelists as Larsen, Bushnell, von Ziegesar and Tóibín. Topics include the social construction of "whiteness," the art of social climbing, turn-of-the-century gender crises involving masculinity and the New Woman, and the social and cultural transformations wrought by the modern city.
ENGL 2062 The Harlem Renaissance 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines African American literature and culture from Washington's Up from Slavery and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, through the 1920s and the Great Depression, to the eve of U.S. participation in World War II. Grounded in U.S history, the course explores fiction, poetry, and other forms of cultural production such as painting, sculpture, film, and music. It examines the aftermath of Reconstruction, the effects of the Great Migration, and the responses to Du Bois's call for a "Talented Tenth." The Harlem Renaissance provides the major focus, as do the debates about whether there was such a movement at all. The course looks towards the development of a contemporary Black tradition in literature and culture.
ENGL 2063 African American Women Writers 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course offers a survey of writing by African American women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on autobiography and fiction. Beginning with Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and examining late-nineteenth-century fiction by authors such as Harper, the course examines issues of redefining womanhood, participating in racial uplift, and coming to voice as both women and as writers. Moving through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the course may include writers such as Larsen, Fauset, Hurston, Petry, Morrison, Lorde, Naylor, Sapphire, Blackman, Youngblood, and Packer.
ENGL 2064 African American Fiction, 1940 to Present 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A comparative study of novels by African American men and women, beginning with Richard Wright and Ann Petry in the 1940s, continuing through the 50s and 60s with writers such as Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, and ending with major novelists from the 1970s, such as Charles Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison. The course focuses on topics such as family, religion, education, and urban experience, education, gender and sexuality, and shifting definitions of Blackness. Narrative techniques offer a main thread of discussion throughout the course.
ENGL 2075 Modern Women Writers 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British "sisters in error" (as described by poet Dilys Laing). We consider literature and its contexts - social, historical, political, ideological, artistic, and more. Among the concerns raised by these women are the following: the body, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, vocation, the making of art and the artist, the homosocial, patriarchy, the struggle for individuality, relations between the sexes, tensions between True Woman and New Woman, and what it means to be "modern." The reading list embraces fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose. Writers of focus may include Bowen, Chopin, Dinesen, Eaton, Gilman, Glaspell, Hurston, Larsen, Mansfield, O'Connor, Parker, Porter, Spencer, West, Wharton, and Woolf.
ENGL 2081 Native American Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course focuses on Native American literature from the early 20th century to the present. Grounded in Native studies theory, this course considers the ways in which Native writers past and present grapple with, and assert agency against, the effects of settler-colonialism on their cultures. Writers might include Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkala Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louis Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, David Heska Wanbli Weiden.
ENGL 2082 Latinx Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This is an introductory course on the literature produced by Latinos in the U.S. The course approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary lens, examining the literature from not only the tools available in literary studies but history and sociology, as well. The course will address historical, contemporary political and socioeconomic issues affecting Latinos (the most historically prevalent of which have been immigration status, language regulation, and racial/ethnic discrimination) and connect them to cultural production. We read such authors as Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Ed Vega Yunque, various Nuyorican and Chicano Poets, and others to better understand the literary and cultural products of the now largest minority group in the United States. Course readings and discussions are in English. Spanglish is welcomed.
ENGL 2083 Asian Diasporas: Challenges to Citizenship 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines the explosion of Asian American fiction/cinema to study diasporic, migratory, refugee, socio-cultural and ethnic identities. Together with fiction and cinema, we will study historical and political documents that deal with the interpellation of citizenship challenges of Indian, Afghan, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Korean, Hawaiian-Pacific, and Sri Lankan subjects as seek to be integrated into the State and into US cultures. We study how Asian Americans authors assert their presence to claim American citizenship, while challenging racist, sexist, and xenophobic stereotypes of "aliens" as outsiders and foreigners.
ENGL 2091 Gender and Sexuality in Film and Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines the way gender and sexuality are represented in film and literature, beginning with an overview of lesbians and gays in film history with Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet. The course then moves through popular films and novels from the 1960s to the present day, looking at the ways attitudes about gender are enmeshed with representations of homosexuality. Themes and topics include: What is the relationship between gender and sexuality? How are concepts of masculinity and femininity presented in novels and on screen? How have these representations changed as our culture's rules about gender and sexuality have become less rigid? The course aims to develop an analysis of current cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality, as they are revealed in film and literature.
ENGL 2092 Contemporary Children's Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course explores children's literature published in the United States between 1950 and the present. The course will give you both the chance to re-acquaint yourself with books that you enjoyed as a child and encounter books you missed when you were young. You will develop what critic U.C. Knoepflmacher calls "the double perspective," that is, the ability to consider books written for children as both a child and an adult reader. You will read literary criticism on children's literature, as well as information on careers in children's books publishing.
ENGL 2170 Themes in Creative Writing 3 Credits
This course provides an opportunity for students to study how a single theme is treated by a number of writers in the diverse genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and to experiment with writing in all three genres as well. Topics will vary by year, but students will get the opportunity to write creatively and analytically on the theme in a course that combines techniques of literary study with those of creative writing.
ENGL 2220 Teaching/Writing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course is designed to enhance students' skill as writers and their preparation as future teachers of writing in elementary and secondary schools. The course explores four significant questions: How do students learn to write? What experiences encourage good writing? How can your own experience as a writer inform your teaching? And, What do professional or state standards (such as the Common Core State Standards) require students to know about writing? Students have opportunities to write in a variety of genres and for a range of audiences. This course will help students develop the knowledge, skills, and competences to meet the NCTE/NCATE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of Secondary English Language Arts.
ENGL 2230 Global Englishes: Introduction to Linguistic Grammar. 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course offers students an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of linguistics, with a focus on the linguistic grammar of English. We will examine the grammatical rules of English by studying the main branches of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) and applying those principles to additional areas of study, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics. This course’s focus on Global Englishes allows us to extend our analysis of English grammar to considerations of English’s relationship to globalization, language varieties, language policy and planning, and education. This course is designed for students seeking to learn more about the structure of English grammar and how it shapes communication.
ENGL 2290 Writing and Responding 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course introduces the field of contemporary composition theory. Composition theorists consider ways of responding to the words of other people in a manner that is thoughtful, careful, and provocative. At the same time, they learn that by responding to the work of others, they ultimately become better writers and better thinkers themselves. This course focuses specifically on the response types appropriate for one-to-one work with writers. Students also gain hands-on experience in the course by writing extensively, sharing writing with other class members, critiquing student texts, and engaging in trial tutoring sessions. This course is a prerequisite for anyone wishing to apply for a paid position as a peer tutor in the Fairfield University Writing Center.
ENGL 2310 Rhetorics of Resistance 3 Credits
Through the reading of rhetorical theory, scholarship, and case studies, this course introduces students to the use of rhetoric within
social movements. The course explores the connections between personal identities, "everyday activism," and political protest. Students will analyze the rhetorical moves made within social movements and will translate rhetorical theory into rhetorical action by contributing to a social justice movement of their choosing. Hands-on workshops in a variety of composing strategies and technologies will be offered.
ENGL 3011 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course introduces students to Middle English language and literature through a close study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, focusing on his Canterbury Tales . Students analyze the stylistic forms and representations of 14th-century society through tales, selected for their generic and stylistic variety, that include the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane.
ENGL 3014 Renaissance Eros 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course explores eroticism in literature and visual culture in the Italian and English Renaissance(s), a time period from the late fourteenth century to the early seventeenth century. Topics of study include desire, sexual love, and beauty, the philosophy of friendship, the legacy of Petrarchanism, the pervasiveness of same-sex desire, cross-class relationships, and female sovereignty. The course offers a variety of interpretive models to analyze the complex role of eros in the works of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Plato, Shakespeare, Lyly, Marlow, and Montaigne.
ENGL 3019 James Joyce 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
An intensive study of James Joyce's comic novel Ulysses, emphasizing thorough close reading of the text, understanding the work relative to Joyce's other fictional masterpieces, and extensive reading of related criticism and scholarship. Highly recommended: students should have read at least one complete work by James Joyce before taking the course.
ENGL 3021 Life and Print Culture in 18th Century London 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
What was it like to live in 18th Century London? This course will explore daily life in London from the Great Fire to the French Revolution, using novels alongside other forms of popular literature (pamphlets, ballads, broadsides, cookbooks, and newspapers) to trace what ordinary people talked about and care about in their workaday world. Popular art such as Hogarth's engravings will show us what London and its people looked like. The course will investigate how to evaluate and discuss all forms of popular print culture within the larger context of literature.
ENGL 3022 Race, Culture, and British Travel Narrative, 1682-1789 3 Credits
Eighteenth-century Britain transformed the world in ways that are still with us, and the world also transformed eighteenth-century Britain. As growing overseas colonies and the transatlantic slave trade made Britain into a global superpower, its increasingly literate population eagerly consumed
accounts of faraway places and peoples––real, fictional, and everywhere in between. This course will take an in-depth look at these texts, typically referred to as “travel narratives,” with a special emphasis on how they reflected and shaped eighteenth-century ideas about difference among
peoples and societies––the kinds of difference that today might be called “race” or “culture.”
ENGL 3030 Edith Wharton 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1000-level course.
A study of the major literary works by the American realist and cultural critic Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Discussions will address the social constructions of gender, cultures of consumption, models of marriage and divorce, women’s rights, lives of the privileged and unprivileged, cross-generational and cross-class relations, aesthetic representations, and recent film and TV adaptations of Wharton’s fiction. Readings will include well-known novels such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Age of Innocence, short stories especially gothic tales, poetry, memoir, and writings on architecture, design, travel, and literary criticism.
ENGL 3031 Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): 1000 level core literature course.
A study of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, including her contemporaries and those she influenced. Through literary
analysis and creative activities, we study how Dickinson’s poems create rhetorical situations and act as vehicles for artistic
expression and social concern. The course explores poetic form and contemporary lyric theory as well as various topics, such as
media and the Civil War, elegies and nineteenth-century consolatory fictions, religious discourse, literary celebrity, the construction
of gender and racial identity, and the biopic. Writers may include Whitman, Emerson, Keats, George Eliot, Tennyson, the Brontës,
the Brownings, Moore, Bishop, and Frost.
ENGL 3032 American Romanticism 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course explores transcendentalism and romanticism during the flowering of intellectual and social life in America from 1830 to 1865. Studying the transatlantic origins of this movement in philosophy, religion, and literature, we examine how these writers responded to literary influences and crafted their unique style. The course also focuses on the relationship between literature and American culture, including a study of the visual arts and material culture. Authors include Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Alcott, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Davis, Whitman, and Dickinson.
ENGL 3033 American Realism and Naturalism 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines the literary modes of representation known as realism and naturalism. We will consider the ways in which literature represents, responds to, and shapes the extraordinary transformations in American culture from 1865 through the turn into the twentieth century. The course will consider literature and its contexts: social, historical, political, ideological, artistic, etc. Writers may include Chesnutt, Chopin, Crane, Davis, Dreiser, Du Bois, Eaton, Freeman, Gilman, Howells, James, Jewett, Norris, Twain, Washington, and Wharton.
ENGL 3034 American Modernism 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course explores the wide ranging cultural dynamics of American literary modernism (roughly 1920-1950) in the works of writers such as Hurston, Hemingway, Yezierska, Eliot, Hughes, Falkner, Matthews. Topics to discuss include, but are not limited to, time, space, gender, nationality, race, and ethnicity.
ENGL 3035 Contemporary American Literature and Culture 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course examines significant developments in American Literature and Culture from the period following World War II to the present. The course explores the turn to cultural studies in the field of literary studies that occurred during this period, allowing us to examine non-traditional literary texts such as music, film, graphic novels, and games. We ground our discussion heavily in literary theory.
ENGL 3036 Seminar on Toni Morrison 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
A comprehensive study of the works of Toni Morrison, the course situates her novels and nonfiction prose in their historical and cultural contexts. Attention to narrative techniques as well as to theoretical approaches from a range of disciplines offers students the opportunity to explore topics including gender and slavery, violence and trauma, identity construction, Black masculinity, commodity culture and racialized identity, law and civil rights, accommodation and resistance, family structures, community, geography and location/dislocation/relocation, ethics and relation, and Black female sexualities.
ENGL 3051 Literary Theory 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
The course examines the major theoretical approaches to the study of literature that developed in relation to important political and intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Despite highly significant differences, we presuppose that all literary theories pose similar questions: What is literature? Why does literature matter, and how do critics assign aesthetic value? This course studies the way various schools of theories have answered these questions. Included in our study are Formalism/New Criticism, Post-structuralism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminist theory, Gender and Queer Studies, Post-colonialism, and others. Course readings range broadly from Kant to Derrida, Freud to Spivak.
ENGL 3052 Cultural Studies Theory 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This interdisciplinary course examines the concept of culture as it is constructed, sustained, and contested within the United States and the United Kingdom. Readings focus on the history, theory, and practice of culture (high and mass) in the two countries. Class discussions focus on the interactive impact of our understanding of the term "culture" upon contemporary societies as it factors into nationhood, race, gender, class, sexuality, and media. As a way of understanding the various theories that undergird the experiential manifestations of culture, students will be exposed to print/visual texts and multimedia forms of expressions circulating in society.
ENGL 3072 All About Eve 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course surveys the literary and artistic representation of the legendary first woman of the Judeo-Christian tradition from Genesis to the present, with attention to both feminist and antifeminist traditions. The course centers on a reading of Milton's Paradise Lost . Other authors include Christine de Pizan, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mark Twain, and Ursula Le Guin. In a final research paper, students locate and interpret depictions of Eve in contemporary popular culture. Non-English sources are read in English translation.
ENGL 3073 Literature for Young Adults 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
During the past two decades, adolescent literature has proliferated, grown more diverse, and improved in richness and quality. The course explores the major current authors, poets, and illustrators of works written for young adults. Topics include theories and purposes of reading literature in the classroom, criteria development for evaluating adolescent literature, reader response in the classroom, reading workshop, and adolescent literature integration across the curriculum.
ENGL 3074 The Woman Question: Early Feminism and 19th Century Transatlantic Literature 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course will examine the issue properly known as the Woman Question through some of the major works of 19th-century literature. Because the philosophical and political debates concerning Woman's role preoccupied not only 19th-century America but also Victorian Britain, we will consider American and British discussions as part of a transatlantic conversation. The course begins with early Victorian literature, moving across the Atlantic to the 1840s and 50s, when a group of "domestic feminists" became the most popular writers in the U.S. The course closes at the fin de siècle, when the conventions of sentimental fiction and "True Womanhood" were being superseded by realism and naturalism, and when an explicitly anti-domestic image of womanhood began to be formulated around the figure of the "New Woman." Authors may include Brontë, Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stowe, Fern, Jacobs, Christina Rossetti, Taylor, Mill, Patmore, Linton, Dickinson, Alcott, James, Ibsen, Harper, Gilman, Chopin, Freeman, and Wharton.
ENGL 3075 Caribbean Women Writers 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course offers a Pan-Caribbean study of women's writing, primarily contemporary fiction. Setting the novels in a context that begins in the Middle Passage or comparable forced migration to the Americas, we examine the interconnections between those traumatic experiences and the relations established and demanded by imperialism. Topics for discussion include spaces and languages of resistance; genealogies, family trees, roots; memory and exile; political activism and its consequences; labor and socioeconomics; the role of education in colonialism and in immigrant life; and challenges to conventional categories of identity. Authors may include Marshall, Hopkinson, Kincaid, Condé, Danticat, Santiago, Santos-Febres, Obejas, McWatt, Brand, Collins, Mootoo, Espinet, Lara, and John.
ENGL 3076 Global Women's Fiction 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This comparative study of fictional works by women begins with a discussion of issues raised in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and focuses on writers from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawn from a wide range of world literatures and cultures, authors may include Aleramo, Djebar, al-Shaykh, Aidoo, Truong, Valenzuela, Menéndez, Roy, Dangarembga, Gordimer, Olsson, Rachlin, and Lispector. Topics include narrative techniques, women's relationship to the polis, women's participation in public culture and their artistic creativity, gender and sexuality, cross-class relations between women, and contemporary issues linked to globalization.
ENGL 3077 Nonstop Metropolis: Literature and Culture in NYC 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This course explores literary and visual evocations of the city from an interdisciplinary and theoretical perspective. In many ways, a city is as much a mental construct as a physical one, referred to as image, idea, myth, metaphor, vision, catalyst, and more. The course considers how such terms apply to representations of a metropolis, as well as how the city can be viewed as artifact or fiction. Drawing upon theories from geography, architecture, sociology, and urban studies, we examine the traditional dichotomy between city and country, the relationship between gender and sexuality and urban representation, and the ways that community is defined and envisioned in contemporary urban contexts.
ENGL 3078 People, Power, Politics: Postcolonial Adaptations 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
This is a hybrid course that examines the interconnections between literary and film mediums. Looking through a postcolonial lens, we will analyze both selected texts of literature (novels, autobiographies, nonfiction essays) and their corresponding film adaptations (documentaries, biopics, dramas). The theme of Postcolonial Identities and Global Transformations will be of focus alongside
foundational theoretical essays to ground our critical orientation. Literary and cultural theorists include Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, Carol Boyce Davies, Edouard Glissant, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
ENGL 3080 Food For Thought: Consumption and Contemporary Culture 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): One 1000-level English literature course.
We know that food is an integral part of our lives as we know that what we (choose to, like to, and are compelled to) eat is a fundamental element of who we are. We rarely stop to consider, however, the ramifications of these choices around these most elemental of rituals. Food studies orients us towards the seriousness of questions around what we eat, with whom, and under what circumstances. Through an analysis of literature, cinema, and critical scholarship, in this course we will consider questions of choice, equity, displacement, and deprivation that surface prominently in our practices around consumption.
ENGL 3120 Creative Writing: Poetry II 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1802.
In a workshop setting, the class discusses six assignments, writing about a painting or writing in a structured form such as a sestina or sonnet. In addition to looking at models that illustrate individual assignments, the class reads collections by six poets and discusses a book on traditional forms.
ENGL 3140 World of Publishing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course introduces students to the field of publishing, particularly book and magazine publishing. It provides students with a solid foundation in the publishing field (e.g., selecting and editing manuscripts, book/magazine production, and marketing) and offers students practical hands-on experience similar to that of an internship position at a magazine or publishing house. In addition to attending lectures and participating in discussion, students work on the University's literary magazine, Dogwood.
ENGL 3150 Creative Writing: Fiction II 3 Credits
This advanced creative writing course is for students who already have experience with basic elements of craft and with the process of writing and revision. Advanced students will submit original work in an intensive workshop, provide extensive feedback for their peers, and prepare a final portfolio with a revision and reflection. Discussions of published fiction will focus on narrative strategies and structure.
ENGL 3160 Creative Writing: Nonfiction II 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1806.
This advanced workshop builds upon students' experience in creative nonfiction and allows students to practice the art of memoir in a workshop setting. Students will read in subgenres such as Adversity/Transformation, Family/Generational, Political/Social, and Spiritual Memoirs and comment extensively upon their peers' work while reading exemplary work in the genre.
ENGL 3161 Magazine Writing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
Magazine Writing will introduce students to the history and wide range offered by this format, which has introduced new genres and offered a place
for experimentation and change. This interdisciplinary course overlaps with both journalism and creative writing, allowing students to explore and
discuss advanced options for portraying the self and others in nonfiction. Assignments may include immersion reporting, experimental memoir, and
long-form essays. Meets program requirements in Digital Journalism, and counts as Creative Writing “Intermediate” workshop.
ENGL 3201 Persuasive Writing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course sharpens students' skills in argument and encourages a clear, forceful prose style. Students practice writing skills in a variety of projects including resumes and cover letters, editorials, formal proposals, and public service announcements designed for video podcasts. Students will learn how to analyze an audience and use key features of persuasion such as concessions, disclaimers, rebuttals, and effective leads. The course examines the ethical responsibilities of a persuasive writer in business and civic life.
ENGL 3236 Issues in Professional Writing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course investigates a variety of issues relevant to contemporary professional writing. In addition to surveying theoretical positions in the discipline, the course emphasizes preparing effective written products for academic and professional settings. In-class writing activities, workshops, and lengthier projects prepare students to think critically in this dynamic and ever-changing profession while familiarizing them with the writing styles, organizations, and formats of various documents. Topics include writing for public relations, multimedia writing, and technical and professional editing. This course is suitable for advanced undergraduate students preparing for writing-intensive careers or graduate school. Students may take this course twice under different topics.
ENGL 3237 Multimedia Writing 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
The purpose of this class is to encourage students to question how rhetoric functions in and through multimodal texts. Specifically, our goal throughout this course is to answer the question: what makes for an effective multimodal text? We will examine how meaning is construed through the use of images, sounds, arrangements, colors, shapes, sizes, movement, and fonts. We will analyze the ways rhetors construct multimodal texts, and we will also create our own multimodal texts. Together we will learn to use Photoshop, iMovie, Dreamweaver, CSS, and HTML in order to create rhetorically savvy multimodal texts.
ENGL 3310 Queer Rhetorics and Theories 3 Credits
This course examines the rhetorics and theories crafted by LGBTQIA+ activists, academics, and icons in the cause of queer liberation. Topics include LGBTQIA+activists’ responses to and shaping of historical and cultural metanarratives; the impact of rhetorical mode on activists’ resistance to homophobia, transphobia, heterosexism, and other forms of bigotry; and rhetorical ecologies and the reception LGBTQIA+ rhetorics have
received. An intersectional lens is used throughout the course, with attention paid to how race, gender, economic class, geographical location, citizenship status, disability, and more impact bigotry and alliance, both out- and inside LGBTQIA+ communities.
ENGL 3315 Feminist Rhetorics 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s):ENGL 1001.
What does it mean to read the world through a feminist rhetorical lens? What happens when we consider texts, language, human interaction, and communities and systems using feminist rhetorical perspectives? This course begins by exploring these inquiries and aims to expose students to the varied perspectives, practices, theories, and subtopics related to Feminist Rhetorics, a subfield of Rhetoric & Composition. Through course projects,
students will write for different audiences and purposes while gaining an understanding of feminist rhetorics, including methods for examining everyday rhetorical situations. Students will compose in various genres and collaborate with peers on a regular basis.
ENGL 3320 Writing the Feature Story 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1870.
Students learn how to generate and develop feature story ideas, including human-interest stories, backgrounders, trend stories, personality profiles and other softer news approaches for use by newspapers, magazines, and web sites. The course stresses story-telling techniques and use of alternative leads. Interviewing, web research and rewriting techniques are stressed.
ENGL 3360 Literary Journalism 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1870.
This course focuses on the use of story-telling techniques in writing creative nonfiction. Students learn how to make factual articles come alive by incorporating techniques such as narrative, dialogue, scene-setting, pacing, conflict and resolution. The course emphasizes interviewing and advanced research techniques used in writing these creative nonfiction articles for newspapers, magazines, books, and online sources. There will be substantial reading and analysis of classics in the literary journalism field.
ENGL 4150 Advanced Portfolio Workshop 3 Credits
This is a capstone course for Creative Writing concentrators who want to work on longer creative projects (novel, memoir, collection of short stories, essays, or poems; or some combination thereof). The course will be run as a workshop class, with students submitting creative work in one (or more) of the three genres, to be read and critiqued by the faculty member and students. Students can expect to submit a minimum of 50 pages of prose or 30 pages of poetry or some equivalent of the two. Students will also be required give a final public reading of their work during the semester.
ENGL 4900 Special Topics (Shell) 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
This course is an umbrella under which a variety of courses can be taken on an experimental or temporary basis, exploring different writing styles and approaches.
ENGL 4952 Publishing Practicum 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): Junior standing.
Students apply material learned in ENGL 3140 as they serve in a senior editorial role as a Managing Editor in the preparation of the University's national literary magazine, Dogwood. Enrollment by permission only.
ENGL 4960 Independent Writing Project 3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
Students undertake individual tutorials in writing and can obtain credit for writing for The Mirror, The Sound, or for other projects of personal interest. Only one independent writing project can be counted toward fulfilling the five field electives required to complete an English major. The department will consider exceptions only if multiple Independent Writing Project courses cover different subject areas and approval in advance is obtained. Enrollment by permission only.
ENGL 4970 Digital Publishing in the Humanities 3 Credits
Students work as editors and peer reviewers for Apollon, a digital journal publishing double-blind, peer-reviewed undergraduate humanities research. In addition to learning about research in the humanities by evaluating submitted essays, students acquire multiple applied skills. They write and post calls for papers; manage submissions; compose rejection, acceptance, and resubmission letters; compose reader’s reports; maintain professional correspondence with contributors; market and publicize the journal; and edit accepted submissions. Students learn to use Google analytics;
curate existing digital content, including podcast and video; evaluate digital humanities submissions; develop an ebook for each issue; create content and maintain an archival system. Enrollment by permission only.
ENGL 4980 Internship 1-3 Credits
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1001.
The internship program allows students to gain on-site experience in the fields of journalism, publishing, and public relations through supervised work for local newspapers, magazines, publishers, and news agencies. These positions are available upon recommendation of the department intern supervisor, under whose guidance the students assume the jobs, which require 10 to 15 hours a week. Students may take one internship for credit toward the English major. Students may take a second internship for elective credit. The internship workshop is held in the evening, once a month. Enrollment by permission only.
ENGL 4990 Independent Study 1-4 Credits
ENGL 4999 Literature Capstone 3 Credits
The capstone seminar course provides Literature Concentration students with a cohort experience in which they integrate their literature coursework and produce a substantive research project. The capstone course functions as a seminar in which the students begin the semester with shared readings and discussion on a theme chosen by the instructor, including theory and research methodology. Students are encouraged to consider presenting their research in either traditional or digital format.
Professors
Bayers, chair
Boquet
Davis
Epstein
Gunter
Huber
Kelley
Orlando
Pearson
Petrino
Associate Professors
Xie
Assistant Professors
Allred
Dutta
Jones
Libatique
Perez
Visiting Assistant Professor
Bodach
Brown
Buckner
Dimyan
Sirios
Assistant Professors of the Practice
Briggette
DiBiase, C.
Ferrara
Laughlin
Wilgar
Zamin
Lecturers
Adams, K.
Aleo
Bellas
Brelsford
Burlinson
Chakraborty
Crow
Denby
DiBuono
Durkin
Ferree
Gardner
Hosten
Huminski
Huntington
LeQuire
McHale
McKay
Nicolosi
Novack
Otfinoski
Parrish-Morgan
Petrella
Randal
Schwartz
Shedd
Sobocinski
Sweeney
Weitzer
White
Faculty Emeriti
Bowen
Gannett
Garvey
Menagh
O'Driscoll
Rajan
Regan, M.
Rinaldi, J.