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British Culture to 1660

MWF 12:40-1:30 | Mary Dzon

This course will explore some famous as well as more marginal literary works from the medieval and early modern periods, with the focus given to humans and nonhumans or hybrids. Most of the texts we will consider were written in Britain, though some originated in Europe and were influential in England. The theme of premodern beasts/animals will enable us to sample a variety of genres and to explore issues such as personal identity, nature, the human body, gender, society and the environment.

Requirements

Two Exams, short responses, presentation

American Cultures

MWF 1:50-2:40 | Marie Taylor

This course will focus primarily on texts associated with the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. In the first half of the class, we will examine the literary production leading up to the witch trials focusing extensively on the role that colonization, religion, gender, magic, medicine, and race played in setting the stage for the trials. In the middle of the course, we will analyze the trial transcripts, letters, sermons, and other documents associated with the trials themselves. In the last part of the class, we will explore the literary aftermath of the trials and discuss the continued repercussions of the trials today. Along with the trial transcripts, we will also read: excerpts from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report (1588), excerpts from John Smith’s The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1620), Indigenous Treaties, medical treatises, birth narratives, indentured servant petitions, sermons, and scientific treatises, as well as some poems, short stories, and plays.

The aim of this course is twofold. First, it helps us understand the 17th century colonial mindset out of which the trials developed and second, it helps us practice using literary methods to read and interpret texts that are not traditionally considered literary such as maps, sermons, court records, medical treatises, letters, journals, and local histories.

Requirements

Participation, short response papers, a group presentation, and a final project.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Robert Stillman

This class begins with questions. What can film contribute to an understanding of Shakespearean plays and what do Shakespearean films contribute to an understanding of the culture that produced them? Hamlet may well be right to insist that “the play’s the thing,” and yet the sheer number, variety, and popularity of films that mark themselves as “Shakespearean” have challenged critical understandings about what that “thing” might be, about how it is best represented, and about who that Shakespeare is for the directors adapting his plays into film. This course explores a variety of answers to such questions with double intent: both to consider the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays across several genres and to call attention to a variety of remarkable modern and postmodern films that make their own claims to aesthetic achievement.

Requirements

Attendance, two papers, two exams, and quizzes.

TR 12:55-2:10 | DeLisa Gore

This course engages with a variety cultural material, including literature, films, television series, and music to consider how horror, sci-fi, and thriller challenge and explore the social construction of race and its societal impacts. Students will critically examine materials from the early-twentieth century to the present related to contexts such as enslavement, scientific racism, and legal injustice with attention to how these and related topics appear in horror, sci-fi, and thriller.

Requirements

Attendance, two papers, quizzes, and final exam.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Roy Liuzza

An introduction to the language, literature and culture of early Medieval England (roughly 500-1100 AD). This course will give you a reading knowledge of Old English, the ancestor of the language we speak today. In the first half of the class we will concentrate on the structure and vocabulary of Old English. After a midterm exam consisting of translation and grammatical questions, we will have more time to spend on outside reading and critical analysis. Our texts will include prose and poetry; most of them wrestle, in one way or another, with the problems of English in relation to Latin, origins and cultural identity, and the interweaving of Christian and secular cultures.

Requirements

Quizzes, midterm exam, final exam, research project.

Women in American Literature

TR 11:20-12:35 | La Vinia Jennings

English 332 will examine the novels of American women in the twentieth century that treat diverse geographical regions, ethnicities, social classes, and cultures. Discussions will emphasize various institutions—patriarchy, marriage, family, and motherhood—and their impacts on female selfhood and identity.

Requirements

Two research papers, frequent quizzes, limited absences, and consistent participation.

MWF 11:30-12:20 | Erin Smith

In this course, you will gain a greater breadth of knowledge on the history of womanhood in America through the literature they produced. From the “damned mob of scribbling women” in the 1850’s to the strong political presence of women and femme writers in contemporary America, these works will attempt to represent the changing notions of femininity in this country and the way that not only gender, but race, class, region, and sexuality form new models of woman.

Requirements

One paper, one group project, one final project.

Black American Literature and Aesthetics

TR 9:45-11:00 | Dionte Harris

This course deepens students’ knowledge of the rich tradition of African-American literature, with a particular focus on queer, trans, and women writers. Focusing on 20th and 21st African American artistic expression—literature, film, music, visual art—we will consider how the writers and artists studied employ race, gender, and sexuality as a medium for social critique and artistic innovation in the Black social imaginary.

Requirements

Active attendance, quizzes, reading responses, short presentation, two papers.

MW 10:20-12:20 | Eleni Palis

This course considers American film as works of art, as historical documents, and as powerful forms of cultural expression. Students will explore American film history, especially the consolidation of and aesthetic norms solidified by “classical Hollywood cinema.” Along the way, we will study American cinema through a variety of lenses, including formalism, genre theory, auteur theory, and with attention to gender, race, class, and sexuality. As we move across time and across the country, students will explore the relationship between American cinema and the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American movies.

Requirements

Course grades will be determined by regular attendance and participation, weekly quizzes, two analytical papers, and two exams.

Children’s Literature

Online Asynchronous | Amy Billone

In this class we will watch the young adult as it floats from innocence to experience and back again in various genres from literature to video games to other forms of media today. We will study fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, Narnia, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games and a number of other works of interest to college students today.

Requirements

Written posts, video replies, final exam, final project (analytical or creative).

TR 9:45-11:00 | Mark Tabone

This course will explore literary, historical, and philosophical approaches to Science Fiction, paying special attention to the genre’s use of “fantastic” tropes and devices to speculate about humanity’s future as well as to critique the state of humanity in the present. As we examine various theoretical approaches to Science Fiction, we will read some of the most influential texts from the genre’s long history.

Requirements

Requirements include attendance, short response papers, two formal papers, a presentation, and an exam.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

MWF 10:20-11:10 | Martin Griffin

We have been dividing utopian and dystopian science fiction and science fantasy modes from each other for so long now that we have come to think that only these two categories exist.  In this course, however, we will take a step back and look at sci-fi texts as not always so easy to toss into one or the other basket.  Some novels, short stories, and TV/movies are deeply interested in the utopia or dystopia they imagine, while others show ambivalence or even try hard to get past that binary.  Sometimes a sense of inaccessible mystery, a tilt toward humor and satire, or an underlying political or religious conviction complicates the picture.  We will read, among others, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries to see how radically different literary or philosophical perspectives on the future can be.

Requirements

Requirements will involve attendance, one take-home paper, one in-class writing exercise with revisions, an in-class mid-term, and a final paper or research project on a topic of the student’s own interest.

MW 10:20-11:10, F Online Asynchronous | Stan Garner

This course examines literary representations of illness, medical care, and biotechnology through the study of fiction, drama, poetry, essays, nonfiction, and film. It asks the following questions: How have writers represented and given meaning to illness and health? How are these states and experiences invested with social meanings? How has literature clarified the stakes of biomedical ethical debates? Finally, how have writers responded to pandemics and other public health crises throughout history? This course will be valuable to English majors, students contemplating careers in medicine and health, and students with other plans who are interested in the human body and the stories we tell about it.

Note: May be taken for Honors-by-Contract.

Requirements

Two papers, weekly Spotlight worksheets, midterm and final exam, attendance and participation.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud

This course explores Gothic fiction, which exploded in popularity in the nineteenth century, starting with its emergence during the French Revolution and continuing to this day with horror movies. We’ll examine Gothic tropes such as monsters and innocents, haunted houses and the return of the dead, concealed and underground spaces, violence, bloodlust and repressed desires, doppelgangers, ancient curses and superstitions, and secret histories that need exposing, among other conventions. We’ll engage with the classic Gothic novels, Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), as well as a number of other literary and filmic works.

Requirements

Two essays, weekly reading responses, and regular online reading quizzes.

MWF 11:30-12:20 | Doug McKinstry

Students will read short stories spanning the life of the genre. American and British authors will be a primary focus, but five or six continents will be represented. Slight emphasis may be on mystery and sci-fi/fantasy genres. Course requirements will be three open-book tests, two short papers, a journal, and a brief oral report. Class meetings will feature lecture and discussion, small-group activity, a few exercises in creative writing, one or two viewings of film adaptation.

Requirements

Graded class requirements will be three open-book tests, two short papers, a journal, a brief oral report.

Online Asynchronous | Robin Nicks

This course serves as an introduction to the rhetoric and writing concentration of the undergraduate major in English and covers both theory and practice, focusing on multiple modes and genres of writing. Students will learn rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, and social movement theory, among other theories and genres, applying these to analyze and produce rhetoric by and about communities/cultures of which they are members.

Requirements

Three papers, reflections, homework, in-class writings.

M Online Asynchronous, WF 10:20-11:10 | Jeff Ringer

This course invites students to question their assumptions about rhetoric and writing in two distinct, yet related ways. First, it invites students to think about the effectiveness of rhetoric and writing at a subterranean level, in terms of the narrative structures that often operate beneath the surface but shape readers’ responses in profound ways. Students will read rhetorical theory toward that end, conduct analyses of their own writing, and engage in deep revision to achieve the rhetorical goals outlined in that theory. Second, the course invites students to interact with generative artificial intelligence to investigate whether tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, or Google Bard can produce the same kind of narrative-based writing considered during the first part of the course. The course culminates in a public-facing project wherein students convey something about what they learned from the course for an audience of their choosing.

Requirements

Four major projects; discussion boards; attendance and participation.

TR 11:20-12:35 | Tanita Saenkhum

This course, which is writing-intensive, provides students with a foundation in the theory of rhetoric and writing. Through readings, class discussions, and major writing projects, the course explores contemporary theories of rhetoric and their relationships to writing and, subsequently, develops students’ knowledge of rhetoric and writing skills. We will consider ways in which rhetorical situations contribute to strong, audience-focused, organized, and well-established arguments. Specifically, we will closely examine how writers construct their identities, engage audiences, and move readers to action through shared/conflict values. Major writing projects will involve students analyzing published writing from various critical perspectives as well as producing a variety of genres for rhetorical ends. To this end, students will be able to understand “the relationships between community expectations and the individual writer, … [the] community and individuality (Hyland, 2015, p. 33).

Requirements

Discussion posts, three major writing projects, final reflection, attendance & participation.

Writing for Remote Work

Online Asynchronous | Sally Harris

In this fully online, asynchronous class, students develop rhetorical strategies for clear communications and for working in teams remotely. They also hone critical thinking skills by analyzing the content, channels, genres, and audiences of their communications. Students complete seven projects, including genres such as process descriptions, application materials, proposals, and major reports. Additionally, they work in teams strengthening their online collaboration and document creation skills.

Requirements

Quizzes; discussion posts; peer reviews; major assignments such as process descriptions, instructions, reports, and proposals.

Online Asynchronous | Daniel Wallace

This is a great time to be sharing complex ideas with the public. Thanks to new tools that enable writers, organizations, and companies to communicate effectively with an engaged audience, it is possible to earn a living, make a difference, and find a community through serious writing. This course introduces you to the major forms of technical writing: the instructional guide, the complex essay, the proposal, and others. We will approach these forms as if we are each forming our own email newsletter or similar writing enterprise: you will finish the class with a portfolio of technical writing you can show to a future employer or use to begin your own independent venture.

Requirements

Five major assignments, discussions, homework assignments, and a final exam.

Technical and Professional Writing

MWF 10:20-11:10 | Anne Snellen

Several hacks have occurred throughout the 12 Colonies. Though we have received no clear indication of culpability, some veterans of the Cylon Wars worry these hacks may precipitate a larger event, prompting the question, “have we adequately prepared for a full-scale Cylon attack?” To prepare, this class will create technical writing to disseminate to Colonial personnel should a Cylon attack become eminent. To aid in our research, we will study Battlestar Galactica as well as primary sources and other materials. If we are lucky enough to survive Cylon attack, focusing on human adoption of artificial intelligence technology is easily transferable to other disciplines. Those who study digital security, robotics, nuclear safety, political diplomacy and emergency preparedness often use killer robots as a generic stand-in for specific enemies or other disasters. Thus, the writing skills you learn in this class can be transferred to other non-Cylon contexts—should we survive.

Requirements

Documents included: memos, definitions, forensic analysis, instructions, flow charts, infographics, informal and formal reports, illustrations, and a manual.

TR 8:10-9:25 | Jamal-Jared Alexander

Students are introduced to professional workplace writing, transitioning from writing for academic audiences to writing workplace technical documents. Throughout ENGL 360, students will design and write professional documents, synthesize and evaluate arguments on technology and society, and collaborate in teams to present technical information. Specifically, students will be introduced to game design by thinking and making critical choices while engaging in practice and design application.

Requirements

Attendance and major assignments.

TR 11:20-12:35 | Iliana Rocha

This course provides a focused instruction to the joys and insights of poetry through an attentiveness to craft (tone, persona, voice, literal and figurative imagery, diction, poetic forms, style, symbolism, myth and archetype, allusion, sound). Specific aims of English 363 are to increase the ways we can all become more curious and engaged readers of poetry; to inspire confidence as writers thinking through the work of both established poets and that of our peers; and to provide us with the vocabulary to respond critically to literary texts, as well as to our own poems. In exploring how contemporary poets are in conversation with voices from the past, we will learn that poetry, too, can be an instinctive response to the world.

Requirements

Attendance, literary analyses, class presentations, workshop, and final portfolio.

MWF 10:20-11:10 | TBA

Requirements

MWF 11:20-12:20 | Chris Hebert

This class is for students interested in taking creative writing seriously, even if they have little or no experience. We will study the craft of writing through the discussion of daily readings (mostly short stories from contemporary authors), through a variety of writing exercises, and through the composition of a full-length short story. These full-length stories will be shared with the class, discussed, and revised. The peer workshopping of student work allows for the introduction and sharpening of critical skills vital to the development of astute readers and writers.

Requirements

Attendance, participation, exercises, peer reviews, original story, revision.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Michael Knight

This class is designed to provide an introduction to the craft of writing fiction with a focus on the short story. Students should leave this class with a basic understanding of core elements of the short story form, the ability to recognize how those elements function in published fiction and the ability to put those core elements into practice in fiction of their own.

Requirements

Attendance, participation, writing exercises, writing short stories, workshopping and revision.

MWF 1:50-2:40 | Chris Hebert

When it comes to movies, what dominates the headlines and the public imagination are the actors, the directors, the budgets and box-office earnings. Often lost in the visual spectacle of film is the fact that it begins with the written word. The characters, stories, and themes that loom so large on the screen first emerge on the page.

The goal of this class is twofold: first, to explore the structure and form of screenwriting through the reading and analysis of screenplays, both contemporary and classic. Then to turn that study into practice through a variety of exercises and through collaborative projects, which might include workshops, readings, and the group work of writers’ rooms. The major student project at the core of the class will be a treatment for a feature film with sample scenes. Previous coursework in creative writing and/or film is encouraged but not required.

Requirements

Attendance, treatment, scenes, exercises, responses, peer reviews.

TR 2:30-3:45 | Margaret Dean

Before they are edited, performed, or photographed, films are written. Screenplays create the earliest versions of the characters, stories, and themes that will become iconic—the first step of a collaborative art form. In order to gain an understanding of screenplay structure and form, we will read screenplays by Bong Joon-ho, the Coen brothers, Pete Docter, Greta Gerwig, Spike Jonze, Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, Billy Wilder, Chloe Zhao, and many others. Previous coursework in creative writing and/or film is encouraged but not required.

Requirements

Attendance, weekly script coverage, a variety of exercises, a treatment for a feature film with sample scenes.

MWF 12:40-1:30 | Laura Hoffer

Along the rich spectrum of creative nonfiction, you will find literary journalism and food writing and travel essays and memoir and flash nonfiction and more.  This course will introduce you to many of those genres and familiarize you with the vocabulary and techniques employed by creative nonfiction writers.  You will investigate a wide range of published material in this course, including a book on the craft of writing creative nonfiction (Writing True) and creative work by established and emerging writers such as Roxane Gay and John Lee Clark. This semester, we’ll also pay particular attention to the personal writing process and consider the many ways an essay can develop from the pre-writing stage through revisions, giving you the opportunity to discover more about your own individual writing process.

Requirements

Short exercises; two longer essays (memoir or personal story and a travel essay); peer workshops; responses to classmates’ drafts; a final portfolio with one revised essay.

TR 2:30-3:45 | Hooman Saeli

English/Linguistics 371 traces the 1200-year history of the English language, from its beginnings as a West Germanic dialect spoken on an island in Europe to its rise as a global lingua franca in the 21st-century. We will uncover the dramatic shifts that have rendered the language’s earliest forms completely unintelligible to modern speakers and along the way, we’ll explore many fascinating questions: Where did the “v” come from in knife/knives? When was double negation (e.g. don’t nobody want…) the rule? We will especially focus on how the history of English is a social one, and how English’s status as an ever-changing language shapes the way we know and use it today.

Requirements

Attendance, two papers, two exams, three presentations, eight homework assignments.

TR 9:45-11:00 | Lisi Schoenbach

This class poses two related questions: “What is literature?” and “What should we do about it?” The “we” of the second question could be broad or specific enough to include literary critics, students of literature, English majors, or the members of this class. We will spend the semester trying to figure out what it means to be a reader of literature. What intellectual, artistic, psychological, and ethical lessons are we trying to learn from literature? What different modes of reading are available to us? Why do different texts seem to invite or benefit from different sorts of readings? We will focus these questions around a variety of theoretical approaches, including feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial. We will spend time developing a shared vocabulary for literary study, sharpening our close reading skills, developing literary arguments, and positioning ourselves within current critical debates.

Requirements

Attendance, two papers, presentation, final exam.

Junior-Senior Honors Seminar

TR 9:45-11:00 | Urmila Seshagiri

“My god, how does one write a biography? And what is a life?” exclaimed Virginia Woolf in 1938. How have writers around the world answered these questions? This seminar takes a deep dive into biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, graphic novels, poetry, and auto-fiction, as well as film, painting, photography, and music. Writers include Woolf, Nabokov, Morrison, Rushdie, Manguso, Kalanithi, Spiegelmann, and others. From traditional coming-of-age narratives to memoirs devoted to food, race, revolution, incarceration, love, grief, and fame, “Life/Writing: Modern Memoirs” asks a question that lies at the heart of the study of language and literature: what are the stakes of telling one’s story?

HONORS SEMINAR: Enrollment is limited to students who have maintained 3.5 GPA in the major and completed two upper division (300 or 400 level) English courses.

Requirements

Regular response papers, one 7-10 pp. essay, one 4-part Reading Journal, in-class Group Presentation, and final Memoir Project.

TR 12:55-2:10 | R.D. Perry

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the most widely read work of English literature in the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s concerns—what is the relationship of poetry to society, how do we construct a good society, what is the importance of political and interpersonal consent, how do other cultures relate to each other, how do we treat those with less power in a culture—are still ours, in part because his culture became our own and in part because he was thinking through essential facets of what it means to be a human. In this course, we will read through almost the entire Canterbury Tales (slowly at first, as you learn Middle English, and then at a steady pace), discussing both the way that Chaucer relates to his culture and how he relates to ours. 

Requirements

Attendance and participation, short responses, translation quiz, one short paper, and one long paper.

Shakespeare I: Early Plays

TR 11:20-12:35 | Heather Hirschfeld

This class will explore the shape of Shakespeare’s early career as a writer for print and performance. Our texts will include a variety of dramatic and poetic forms, which we will link together by a recurrent interest in how Shakespeare thought about the stage and how his characters think on it. We will pay special attention to theatrical conventions — cross-dressed actors, soliloquies, plays-within-plays – and how they speak to persistent social and cultural concerns. We will begin with a selection of sonnets and Comedy of Errors before moving to the romantic confusions of Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night. We’ll then turn will turn to the controversies of Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus before finishing the semester with Hamlet.

Requirements

Attendance, short responses, one paper, final exam.

MWF 1:50-2:40 | Anthony Welch

A survey of Shakespeare’s dramatic works after 1600, including the ‘problem comedy’ Measure for Measure, three great tragedies (Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth), and two enigmatic late romances (The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest). In our journey across the dark and beautiful landscape of these plays, we will explore some key concerns that preoccupied Shakespeare in his final decade as a dramatist, such as the tangled web of gender, race, and power; the joys and torments of sex, marriage, and generational change; and the meaning of human action under the sway of time and death. We will also study Shakespeare’s language and dramaturgy, situate his writing in the social world of early modern England, and see how his plays have been interpreted by generations of editors, performers, and literary critics.

Requirements

Weekly discussion board posts, two short exercises, and two critical essays.

Houses of Fiction: British Modernism and its Legacies

TR 12:55-2:10 | Lisi Schoenbach

This course explores the confluence of two powerful and overlapping legacies: the legacy of the British empire and the legacy of the British novel. As the British novel struggled to reinvent itself through radical innovations in form, style, and subject matter, it was continually forced to reckon with its own literary-historical, national, and political pasts. We’ll examine modern British novels that imagine narrative innovation by returning to established narrative traditions, that articulate new freedoms by returning to convention, and that can only imagine new social relations by remembering political histories of domination.

Requirements

Attendance, two papers, presentations, final exam.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Dawn Coleman

Before viral videos and Instagram influencers, podcasts and streaming TV, Americans had novels. The diverse casts and suspenseful stories of nineteenth-century novels made them popular entertainment, a retreat from the pressures of modern life. Yet novels were also a major form of public discourse. They spoke to contentious political issues and transformed dry abstractions into memorable stories that people cared about. In this course we will read and analyze novels and a few short fictions that engaged and provoked nineteenth-century readers and that continue to reward attention today. We will consider how these works responded artistically to their historical contexts and how they represent issues that still affect us, such as racial and gender inequities and the pressures of capitalism on our individual lives and intimate relationships. Authors studied include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Henry James.

Requirments

Attendance, active class participation, informal writing assignments, two take-home exams, and a 6- to 7-page formal essay

TR 2:30-3:45 | La Vinia Jennings

English 436 provides a critical introduction to prominent, twentieth-century, American novels written between 1920 and 1980 and their defining socio-political themes and stylistic elements. The class will identify, compare, and contrast the driving political, historical , cultural, and aesthetic forces at work in and between these selected works.

Requirements

Two research papers, frequent quizzes, limited absences, and consistent participation.

Topics in Black Literature

TR 2:30-3:45 | Dionte Harris

This course will survey the exciting fields of Black feminist, trans, and queer critical thought. We will consider race, gender and sexuality as categories for critical and literary analysis while also taking into consideration how these categories provide the conditions of possibility for alternate ways of being in the world. We will not only learn about Black queer lives but also about creative possibilities and resources for our own being and writing. Topics of discussion include race, gender, and sexuality, black study, queer study, questions and theories of the Human, social death, bodily vulnerability, Black feminist, trans and queer practices of world-making, Black queer becomings, Black life and aliveness.

Requirements

Active attendance, quizzes, response posts, short presentation, analysis paper, research abstract, annotated bibliography, and research paper.

MWF 12:40-1:30 | Ben Lee

This course is designed to help students develop a rich sense of the poets and poetic approaches that helped shape modern poetry. We’ll survey British, American, and cosmopolitan poetry from the first half of the twentieth century, reading poets in relation to one another and in light of wider cultural and historical developments (including racialization, industrialization, abstract art, mass warfare, and the rise of mass culture). Among the poets we’ll consider are Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Loy, H.D., Hughes, Stein, Stevens, Toomer, Williams, McKay, and Auden. Key terms orienting our discussions will include symbolism, imagism, avant-gardism, and vernacular modernism.

Requirements

Attendance, participation, two short essays, a longer final essay, a final exam, and a brief in-class presentation.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Urmila Seshagiri

International. Modern. Novel. The exciting and beautiful literary works we’ll read in this course span 20th- and 21st -century fiction from Czechoslovakia, England, Argentina, South Africa, France, Nigeria, the United States, and Italy. As we study novels, novellas, and short stories by Kafka, Rhys, Borges, Coetzee, Morrison, Ishiguro, Adichie, Ernaux, and Lahiri, we will investigate how literary forms respond to political history; we will study global aesthetic innovations; and we will also consider the complex relationship between the arts and the state. We will watch feature films by world-renowned directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Mira Nair, Agnès Varda, and Jafar Panahi. Our primary works will be supplemented with documentaries, interviews, essays, and literary criticism.

Requirements

Reading responses, one short (4-6 pp.) and one long (8-10) pp. essay, in-class group presentation, midterm.

MWF 1:50-2:40 | Lisa King

Every day we are inundated with multiple streams of information in countless forms: online news channels, newspapers, social networks, blogs, political satires and cartoons, advertisements, and much more. We navigate them constantly, but to what extent are we aware of how this information affects us? Given there is no “neutral” statement, how attentive are we to the way information is shaped as it is communicated? What functions as persuasion?

This class is designed to prompt critical thinking and writing about how communication and persuasion are constructed, consciously and unconsciously, in public, academic, and personal contexts. Beginning with a review of rhetorical basics from the Greco-Roman tradition and then working through contemporary theories of persuasion, in this class you will have a chance to explore how those principles of persuasion function. Student work will involve tracking what and how local, state, and national issues are debated, analyzing persuasive strategies, and critically engaging in those debates yourself for a variety of audiences.

Requirements

Attendance and class discussion, 10 discussion posts, four formal writing projects, and construction of a digital media scrapbook.

TR 9:45-11:00 | Jamal-Jared Alexander

Given the global nature of contemporary workplaces, knowing how to communicate effectively with an international audience is even more important for technical & professional communicators. This course explores the importance of cultural humility by learning the communication practices/customs of people from different cultures and countries. Students will learn how to communicate with high-context and low-context cultures, and how media and marketing play a vital part in medical, business, and technical discourse. This course prepares students to make informed and effective decisions as technical communicators in a global work environment.

Requirements

Attendance and major assignments

Writing for Publication

MW 9:10-10:00, F Online Asynchronous | Sean Morey

This course will explore digital forms of publication that go beyond traditional print formats. In particular, this class will research and examine how AI is changing, or could change, the publishing landscape. We will consider how to research, write, and edit for AI platforms, including the professional, legal, and ethical implications for incorporating AI into publishing. While we will focus on emerging formats such as AI, we will also incorporate a few traditional genres such as proposals and abstracts.

Requirements

One proposal, one paper, one multimodal project, discussion posts, and attendance; contract grading will be used for assessment.

TR 12:55-2:10 | Iliana Rocha

Development of skills acquired in basic poetry-writing course. A continuation of English 363, this course is an intensive practice in the craft of poetry and exploration of the imaginative process. Readings and assignments will investigate different impulses—formal, textual, tonal, thematic—in order to generate our own poetry, as well as to develop a sense of poetics (why and how we write). We will also consider how contemporary poets, specifically, raise personal, communal, ethical, and political dilemmas. As an advanced poetry workshop and reading seminar, we will delve into these contentions while building and contributing to our literary communities. We will work in the spirit of a shared experiment, as the goal of this course is to launch from introductory groundwork into advanced risk-taking.

Requirements

Attendance, literary analyses, class leadership, workshop, final portfolio.

TR 4:05-5:20 | Margaret Dean

This class is for students with experience in fiction writing who are looking to challenge themselves by taking on longer, riskier, and more complex writing projects. Throughout the semester we will build on skills and concepts learned in earlier creative writing courses to develop and broaden our understanding of how fiction works and what it can do. Workshops throughout the semester will give students the chance to learn from discussions of works-in-progress.

Requirements

Each student will design an ambitious fiction project tailored to their own interests. Midterm and final portfolios will include original fiction as well as work on craft and/or reflections on published fiction.

Special Topics in Rhetoric

M Online Asynchronous, WF 12:40-1:30 | Jeff Ringer

Multiple voices in the mid-twentieth century predicted the death of religion in the face of rising secularity, yet in the early twenty-first century in the United States and elsewhere, religion and spirituality persist, though in arguably changed forms. This course investigates the nature of “religious” rhetorics in the wake of secularization, and it does so by first asking students to grapple with what “religious” rhetorics might even mean in our twenty-first century, postsecular context. Students will then investigate vernacular religious creativity, or the ways in which diverse social contexts shape the faiths, beliefs, and practices of individuals and groups. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetorical possibilities and constraints that arise from such creativity. Final projects can take the form of a social movement analysis or of an interview-based qualitative investigation into a focused population.

Requirements

Two major projects, each with multiple parts/drafts; discussion boards; attendance and participation.

TR 9:45-11:00 | Rima El abdali

ENGL/LING 471 probes language as it is socially situated. In many ways, we wear our language like we wear our clothes. In what ways does our talk reflect who we are or want to be, in what ways does our language change depending on who we interact with, with what interactional goals in mind, and based on which linguistic repertoires that are available? We will read about the theories that inform our understanding of socially situated language, explore them by reading the work of others who have applied (and in many cases, been the origin of) these theories, and use our knowledge to draw conclusions about our own language and the language of those around us.

Requirements

Attendance and participation, Terminology & concepts quiz, Response papers/discussions, Final research project.

TR 11:20-12:35 | Rima El abdali

This course introduces students to phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics of major social and regional varieties of American English with attention to their origins, functions, and implications for cultural pluralism.

Requirements

Attendance and participation, final paper, response papers/discussions.

Fairy Tale, Legend, and Myth: Folk Narrative

Online Asynchronous | Amy Billone

What makes fairy tales popular today? In this class we will study the evolution of popular fairy tales from Greek mythology to the Arabian Nights through versions of stories by Basile, Straparola, Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. We will simultaneously trace the cinematic and televised adaptation of these stories by Disney and other major media outlets.

Requirements

Written discussion posts, video replies, final exam, final project (analytical or creative).

Special Topics in Literature

MWF 3:00-3:50 | Mary Dzon

This course will examine how medieval writers and artists envisioned the end of human history and the transition from death to eternity of every individual. The majority of our literary sources will be from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, but we will also consider some earlier sources, including biblical and ancient apocalyptic texts. Besides considering how approaches to eschatology changed over time, we will focus on recurrent motifs and issues, such as the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, legends of the Antichrist, representations of Christ as Judge and the role of angels, saints and demons at the Last Judgment, the development of “Purgatory,” calamities such as the plague, and modern appropriations of apocalyptic themes. We will study related artistic works and material objects, from illustrations in Books of Hours to stained glass windows to talismans and dramatic productions.

Requirements

Response Papers, a midterm exam, a presentation, and a term paper.

Special Topics in Film

MW 1:50-3:50 | Eleni Palis

This course is designed to introduce students to the depth and breadth of film theory, spanning from the earliest attempts for viewers, thinkers, writers, and scholars to define film as a medium, a technology, an art form, and an experience, to contemporary scholarship on how film has changed in a post-digital, post-theory world. Along the way, we’ll consider foundational scholars debating aesthetics of realism, auteurism, film feminism, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity-informed approaches, structuralism and post-structuralism. The main objective of this class is to foster fluency with a wide array of film theoretical terms, debates, and methodologies.

Requirements

Weekly readings, weekly quizzes, two papers.