English

100- & 200-Level Courses

Below are descriptions for our 100- & 200-level courses. H after a number indicates the Honors version. Courses that satisfy VolCore requirements are identified in this way:

AH – Arts and Humanities
AAH – Applied Arts and Humanities
EI – Engaged Inquiries
GCI – Global Challenges – International
GCUS – Global Challenges – US
OC – Oral Communication
WC – Written Communication

ENGL 142 | Speaking of Sports

This course presents an introduction to literary representations of sports, one of the oldest and most varied of literary topics, as well as how one talks about those sports. It will explore a wide variety of sports, both individual and team, for both men and women, and it will look at different ways of representing those sports, including poetry, drama, novels, film, television, and audio formats. Students will be asked to think about how one represents not only what it feels like to play a sport, but also what it means to watch or be a fan of a sport, and the way that community forms around different teams, individuals, or activities. Students will learn how to express themselves clearly and effectively in oral presentations, by talking about a topic they are passionate about: sports. They will consider how to present different material to diverse audiences and they will learn how to find information relevant to these presentations.

ENGL 145 | Literature Now (AH)

Literature Now examines how current events, social movements, technological advancements, and cultural shifts are reflected in and shaped by contemporary literature. This class will focus on works created during the last 25 years that provide a range of perspectives. In this class, students will engage with literary discussions that are still in progress, inviting them into a deeper, more open-ended discussion of how literature works. This course will use the familiarity of the present as a window into the history of literature and literary studies.

ENGL 150 | Appalachia Now (AH) (GCUS)

This course presents an introduction to the rich and vibrant literary and artistic culture of Appalachia. Students will experience a wide variety of art that represents the diversity of the region of Appalachia, including short stories, novels, poetry, photographs and films, music, and storytelling.

ENGL 155 | Environmental Literature (AH)

Environmental Literature focuses on literary engagement with living ecosystems by diverse authors. Through genres such as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, graphic novels, and film, students will explore themes that might include storytelling and nature writing; animal, plant, and climate studies; disability and nature; and consumer culture and sustainability. 

ENGL 200 | Language, Linguistics, and Society

Language, Linguistics, and Society, examines how language communicates any variety of meanings, how it functions, and what investments various groups have to frame it.  The course analyzes how these frames have a variety of motives, and how the narratives that develop from these frames shape our point of view about the world we live in, how it works, and what we believe is important.

ENGL 201 | 207H | British Literature (AH)

This course follows the development of British literature and provides an overview of major British texts, authors, schools of thought, events, and literary movements. Literary works are examined from a variety of perspectives. Historical events, religious practices, the rise of theater, political systems, artistic works and artifacts, social customs, and gender norms will figure into the course’s discussions, with key literary texts serving as the focus of analysis.

Note: the Honors section also satisfies the WC category.

Constructions of Sex and Gender in Early Britain

TR 9:45-11:00 | Samantha Murphy

Our class will examine the development of British literature from the epic battles of Beowulf to the pointed satires of the early 18th century. Along the way, we will laugh at Chaucer’s bawdy poems, experience the ‘homely’ Jesus with medieval mystics, get mixed up in the mistaken identities of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, examine how absolutism and incest intersect in a 17th century melodrama, and experience the sexual shenanigans of Restoration comedy. The class will approach literary and cultural works from a variety of perspectives, but our overarching focus will be on the interplay of sexuality and gender in building individual, family, and state identities. In doing so, we will explore the creation of masculinity and monstrosity; the expression of female independence and sexuality through religious practices; household politics and how the roles of husband, wife, parent, and child were negotiated; the fluidity of desire; the idea that anatomy is literally destiny; and how bodies construct and are constructed by the state.

Literary Otherworlds of the British Isles

MWF 12:40-1:30 | Amanda Platz

This class will examine British Literature from the medieval world of Chaucer to the 19th century Romantics and Victorian medievalisms. We’ll explore the fantastical worlds and otherworldly encounters of the knights of the round table in medieval Arthurian romances, the fantastical in the world of Shakespeare, and religious twists on the otherworldly during the English Civil War. We’ll glance at the creation of fictional worlds as satire in the 18th century, and then touch down on the medievalism and fantastical literature of the 19th century. This class will approach literature from a variety of perspectives, but our general theme will be Otherworld’s and the otherworldly in British literature. We’ll examine how fictional worlds and otherworldly adventures have been used as the setting for moral lessons and religious teaching, for political thought experiments, as examination of mental health or issues of gender and colonization, and as settings for some of our favorite children’s stories. 

ENGL 206 | 217H | Introduction to Shakespeare (AH) (WC)

This course invites students into the worlds of Shakespeare: the richly imagined worlds of his plots, characters, settings, and themes; the historical world of early modern England, an era of monarchy and rebellion, religious conflict, global exploration, and debates over gender and sexuality; and the worlds of scholarship that debate Shakespeare’s work and legacy. Working closely with the language of his plays, we will also explore questions about reading fictions, world-making, and theatrical performance in Shakespeare’s time and our own.

ENGL 209 | 218H | Introduction to Jane Austen (AH) (WC) (GCI)

This course offers an overview of Jane Austen’s work, its context in Regency England (1810-20), and a study of her writing style during her literary period. We will generally read at least a couple of novels by Austen in parallel with contemporary adaptations of her work in fiction, film, and other genres. We also discuss Austen’s contributions to the “romance” genre and the marriage plot, as well as her trademark realism, her use of satire and irony, her memorable characters, and the role played by women in Regency culture and literary history.

ENGL 210 | Disability and Literature (GCUS)

This course explores literary representations of physical, cognitive, and other forms of disability. It poses the following questions: What stereotypes have been applied over the centuries to people whose bodies and minds deviate from what society defines as “normal?” What has “normal” meant at different historical moments? How have writers with disability reclaimed their experience, challenges, and abilities as a way of celebrating the spectrum of human embodiment? The course will also look at the medical and social models of disability; the intersections of disability with race, gender, and socio-economic status; and the literary strategies that writers with disability have employed to tell their stories. Genres include fiction, non-fiction forms such as the memoir, graphic narratives, poetry, plays, and film. Topics and texts may vary.

ENGL 221 | World Literature (AH) (GCI)

The course emphasizes the literary, cultural, and human significance of selected Western and non-Western great works. The class looks at their cultural/historical contexts and the enduring human values that unite different literary traditions. Special attention is given to critical thinking and writing within a framework of cultural diversity as well as comparative and interdisciplinary analysis.

Not offered Fall 2025.

ENGL 225 | Introduction to African Literature (AH) (GCI)

This survey of modern African literature looks at a fairly turbulent period in African history—the onset of colonialism followed by the era of decolonization. We explore modifications to traditional arts and Western genres to represent modernizing Africa. We read some literary-critical and historical essays for context as well as representative poetry, fiction, and drama. Where literary texts depart from Western conventions, students are encouraged to investigate the ways a literary text functions as a cultural argument and the ways non-Western cultures tell or dramatize stories. Major authors include Achebe, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, La Guma, Ngũgĩ, and Soyinka.

ENGL 226 | Introduction to Caribbean Literature (AH) (GCI)

The course focuses on Anglophone Caribbean literature and popular culture from its beginnings during the era of slavery to the present. We cover a variety of genres including slave narratives, autobiography, memoir, Bildungsroman, fiction, short story, a play, and probably some poetry. We pay attention to themes in the literature including slavery, displacement, migration, romance, the search for identity, the allure of England, American consumerism, and the touristic commodification of the Caribbean. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze Caribbean texts, situate them in an emergent literary tradition, and explain the larger contexts. Major authors include Equiano, Mary Prince, Claude McKay, Erna Brodber, Kamau Brathwaite, Lamming, Lovelace, and Naipaul.

Not offered Fall 2025.

ENGL 231 | 237H | American Literature: Beginnings to the Civil War (AH) (GCUS)

How did the U.S. and its diverse literary tradition get its start? Why are texts written long before Independence considered “American”? Did Pocahontas really save John Smith from execution at the hands of her father, Powhatan? Why did Black Hawk claim that “land cannot be sold,” and how did an Englishman in his late 30s become the most persuasive rhetorician of the American Revolution? Find out the answers to these and other questions about our national origins as we explore early North American literatures from the period of colonialism until the Civil War. We’ll examine encounters and tensions between Native Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores and explore how African-Americans used language to challenge racial oppression. We will grapple with central aspects of Early American Literature, including colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, religious separatism and Puritanism, American exceptionalism, feminism, revolution and national independence, Enlightenment thinking, Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, Dark Romanticism, slavery, abolitionism, and Civil War. Throughout, we’ll focus on how written texts both established and contested the nation-state, the individual, and the divine.

Note: the Honors section also satisfies the WC category.

ENGL 232 | 238H | American Literature: Civil War to the Present (AH)

This course traces the development of American literature from 1865 until the present day. Students will read major works of American fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction, examining them from a variety of perspectives and situating them within ongoing debates about the meanings of American cultural history. Authors to be read might include James, Stephen Crane, Eliot, Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, Stevens, Wright, Tennessee Williams, O’Connor, Bishop, Morrison, Ashbery, Barthelme, Wilson, and Harjo.

Note: the Honors section also satisfies the WC category.

ENGL 233 | Major Black Writers (AH) (GCUS)

In this course, we read the beautiful and profound works of the Black American literary tradition as they engage issues of enslavement and freedom, racism and resistance, community and kinship, literacy, love, and citizenship. Moving from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, our reading might include poetry, slave narratives, autobiographies, short stories, plays, and novels. Paying attention to the historic contexts of these texts, we learn to read and write about the themes that emerge in these literatures. Major Black Writers that we might study include Phillis Wheatley Peters, Frederick Douglass, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Yaa Gyasi, among others.

Not offered Fall 2025.

ENGL 250 | Popular Fiction (AH)

Whodunit?: The Detective Story

TR 12:55-2:10 | Sally Harris

In Whodunit?, we become literary detectives, searching for clues to the connections among detective stories from different periods and in different genres. As a class, we will read British and American detective short stories, novels, and plays from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as one or two from the twenty-first century. Through detective stories, we will learn about plot and character development, narrative techniques, and the relationship among literature, society, justice, and power.

Narrative Game Design

TR 2:30-3:45 | Hank Backer

How do interactive media and passive media tell stories differently? What are game mechanics, user-interface, and in-game systems, and how do these game design concepts allow developers to tell important stories? This class is divided into four units, each featuring a different genre of interactive media: Unit 1 asks that students play The Last of Us, a third-person action/adventure title, Unit 2 explores 2-D platformers, Unit 3 discusses roguelikes and finally Unit 4 allows students to pick their own esport while discussing other esports in class. Our interest in gaming as a class will focus on game narratives and world-building, and how these various genres each approach storytelling in a unique way.

ENGL 251 | 247H | Introduction to Poetry (AH) (WC)

Introduction to Poetry invites you to learn more about the language, history, and analysis of poetry by reading and examining poetry in detail. We will be looking at both classic and contemporary works as we think about form (meter, rhyme, rhythm, and other technical aspects) as well as literary-historical context in order to help us better inform our understanding of the genre. This course prepares students to appreciate poetry as a distinct mode of artistic expression while gaining critical tools for the perceptive reading and enjoyment of poems.

ENGL 252 | 248H | Introduction to Drama (AH) (WC)

Humans perform stories to understand themselves and the world they live in. This course introduces students to the pleasures of reading and writing about drama, one of the oldest and most vital literary genres. Students read comedies, tragedies, and other genres from a variety of countries, cultures, and historical periods to experience the history of drama as an international art form. In addition, because drama is designed to be performed as well as read, students view clips from video productions of individual plays. No experience reading or seeing drama is required.

ENGL 253 | 258H | Introduction to Fiction (AH) (WC)

English 253 invites students to read diverse fictional styles and genres published from the eighteenth century to the present. Students will trace how fiction emerges from a cultural and historical context and engages with social debates over gender, race, sexuality, class, economics, religion, philosophy, and the environment, among others. Readings will emphasize the novel but may also include novellas and short stories. While this course focuses on literary analysis, it also encourages students to take pleasure in reading fiction. The class may also address the works’ aesthetic merits and contemporary relevance; fiction as it relates to questions of truth, lies, and plausibility; and the implicit contract between authors and readers.

ENGL 254 | Themes in Literature (AH) (WC)

Death, Dying and the Undead

MWF 12:40-1:30 | Molly Granatino

This course explores the ways the universal human experience of dying (and the condition of being dead) is represented in literature, from carpe diem poetry to ghostly visitation. The reading assignments for each class session highlight a particular theme, discussed in tandem with the formal elements of poetry, short stories, and novels. The course begins with a poetry unit where students are presented with diverse takes on death, such as the glory/horror of dying in battle, dying young and living well before death. The next unit introduces students to the Gothic and Southern Gothic literary traditions via short stories, touching primarily on themes of murder and sudden death. The third and final unit examines the undead through novels about ghosts, vampires, and the lingering legacy of an unburied body.

ENGL 255 | 257H | Public Writing (WC)

In our lives, we occupy multiple public communities beyond school—social, professional, political, online, service, faith, and others. We engage both as readers and writers with numerous public texts to help us understand and respond to these communities and the issues that affect us. In this course, you will both analyze and produce public writing for various “rhetorical ecologies”—interconnected webs of communicative situations. You will gain a thorough understanding of how people respond to public issues by rhetorically analyzing how events unfold through public texts as well as by evaluating the genre conventions of these texts. Then you will craft your own rhetorically-minded public writing to inform and persuade others to take action.

ENGL 260 | Special Topics in Professional Writing (WC)

Intro to Legal Writing

TR 11:20-12:35 | Marcel Brouwers

This course introduces students to fundamental document genres used by the legal community. Building on a review of American civics, precedents, and legal traditions, students will work with real and hypothetical cases to draft appropriate documents that require careful examination of the issues at play. This course gives undergraduate students interested in legal careers exposure to the kinds of writing law students will be interpreting and generating, including memos, briefs, and summaries.

ENGL 263 | 277H | Introduction to Creative Writing (WC)

English 263 offers an introduction to creative writing with an emphasis on composing fiction and poetry. We will study successful models of stories and poems, learning a vocabulary for discussing the craft of writing. Assigned readings (from contemporary authors) will stimulate discussions and provide models for what creative writing is and can be. Low-stakes writing exercises will give us a chance to try out the techniques we are learning to observe and describe. Formal responses to our peers, analysis of readings, and presentations will help us sharpen our analytical and formal writing skills

ENGL 278H | Honors Themes in Literature (AH) (WC)

Not offered Fall 2025

ENGL 281 | Introduction to Film Studies (AH)

This course introduces students to the critical skills necessary for understanding and analyzing narrative cinema. Students will watch selected world cinema features and learn how to “read” images as film-texts. The course will emphasize specific aspects of film style and narrative form through analysis of scenes from films screened each week and from a range of outside examples. Relevant historical and cultural background will also be used to inform readings of movies shown. As they learn the vocabulary of filmmaking and film criticism, students will also be asked to consider the politics of image-making and the power of cinema.

ENGL 285 | DH 200 | Introduction to Digital Humanities (AH) (EI)

This course is an introduction to methods and topics in Digital Humanities (DH) and is the foundation course of UT’s DH minor. The class will explore humanities approaches to technology and its role in society and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will acquire technical skills and learn about current issues such as AI and ethics, digital media and communications, user experience, and beyond by balancing scientific and computational methods with humanities practices such as analysis, critical thinking, and artistic creation. Topics include metadata and digital archiving; crowdsourcing; text encoding and visualization; digital storytelling; social-media network analysis; and digital gaming. Readings throughout the semester will contextualize each of these topics alongside intersectional themes. In the spirit of DH, all of the class readings are open-access or available through the UT libraries page.

ENGL 295 | Writing in the Workplace (WC)

This writing-intensive course focuses on workplace communication and professionalism. In this course, students analyze the rhetorical elements of workplace texts, as well as the rhetorical situations in which they are created and read, so they can produce professional communications that respond appropriately to a variety of workplace situations and audiences. By emphasizing the importance of audience and contextual awareness, this course prepares students to communicate with professionalism in their future workplaces.