Course Description Archive

ENGL 110 GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

Laura Behling - TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.

This course for non-majors focuses on graphic narratives, which bring together the verbal and visual as a way of telling a story.  The course begins by investigating the nature and grammar of comics: How do graphic narratives work? What techniques and strategies do writer-artists use to produce meaning? In what ways do colors, shapes, panels, borders, gutters, perspective, page-layout, and speech bubbles influence content? What is the role of the reader in constructing meaning from these verbal and visual texts? How does literary analysis inform our readings of the verbal and visual?  As in other English courses, Graphic Narratives aims to provide insights on language and meaning,  culture and history, the self and other.  Readings will be primarily historical and contemporary graphic narratives and critical scholarship about graphic narratives will offer perspectives on the readings’ responsiveness to contemporary social currents.  In addition to written analytical responses, class engagement and discussion and presentation, a final project for the course will offer students the opportunity to create their own graphic narrative.  

Attributes: This course does not satisfy a requirement for the English major or minor. 

ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES

William Kupinse - TuTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.

This course explores why English matters and what it means to study English at the university level.  It will help you to read actively, critically, and creatively, and it will guide you in channeling this reading acuity into original and compelling literary analyses—skills that are essential to further study in English.  In addition, we will consider personal, cultural, and ideological claims about what “literature” is and explore why, in an era dominated by STEM approaches, English is more important than ever.

The course foregrounds questions central to the discipline: What is a literary text? What is genre? Who decides what “counts” as literature, and why? How do literary texts relate to social contexts?  The chances are good that this course will challenge the assumptions and beliefs you have about what it means to be an English major, about the value of different kinds of texts, and about the politics—cultural, academic, ideological—that influence the discipline.  Course requirements include short analytic essays, a creative writing assignment (with the choice of genre open), a group presentation, and a final essay with a research component.

Attributes: Required of all English majors and minors.

ENGL 227 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING FICTION

Laura Krughoff - MWF 10:00-10:50 a.m.

In this course, students will be introduced to the fundamental techniques of fiction writing. We will read, discuss, and analyze the work of master short story writers in addition to reading selections from a helpful book on craft. These readings will be used to model various literary styles and techniques, and the first half of the semester will be spent developing and honing these skills through scene writing. In the second half of the semester, students will write, workshop, and revise two complete short stories. Students will participate in observation-based workshops of their peers’ fiction, a workshop strategy we will discuss in detail in class. There will also be regular quizzes, short writing assignments, and a midterm exam.

Attributes: Creative Writing; Artistic Approaches; IPE Pathway, “Artist as Humanist”

ENGL 229 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE NONFICTION

Tiffany MacBain - TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.

This course is an introductory workshop in the writing of creative nonfiction, a genre that includes memoir, biography, travel writing, historical nonfiction, longform journalism, and the literary essay. Our focus this semester will be on the latter, with special attention to the personal essay—that is, nonfiction shortform writing that reflects your own experiences and thoughts. A literary essay need not make reference to, or be about, literature. Rather, the essay is itself literary, the result of careful attention to style and to elements of composition like structure, exposition, and storytelling. To become familiar with a range of approaches to the personal essay, students read and respond to model essays, and they discuss and experiment with the professional and artistic advice of experts in the field. Writing well takes careful thought and ongoing revision, so the course emphasizes process writing and peer/faculty review. ENGL229 counts toward the Interdisciplinary Humanities Emphasis pathway, The Artist as Humanist.

Attributes: Creative Writing; Artistic Approaches; IPE Pathway, “Artist as Humanist”

ENGL 232 ROMANTICISM, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE

George Erving - MWF 2:00-2:50 p.m.

This version of English 232 focuses on literary art of the Romantic Period (1780-1830), especially its exploration of enduring philosophical questions about the origin and nature of human consciousness: to what extent does the mind create the reality it experiences? What is the mind’s relationship to the body and the external world? What is the significance of creativity, imagination, and art for understanding the various kinds of consciousness that shape human experience? The course then explores the legacy of Romanticism in the cultural movements of the Beat Generation and the 1960s Counterculture, before examining Romanticism’s relation to contemporary ideas in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, religion, and the emerging field of psychedelic studies.

Attributes: Literature; Humanistic Approaches; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800

ENGL 247-A DARK ACADEMIA

Alison Tracy Hale - TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.

In this course, we’ll tread the haunted halls of Dark Academia, focusing on the literary manifestations of what emerged in the past decade or so as a popular internet aesthetic. We’ll consider Dark Academia as an offshoot of the Gothic genre and explore its complicated relationship to the elite liberal arts education model it depicts. We’ll also examine what it means that a fascination with such an exclusive, Eurocentric, and frankly white tradition emerges alongside and in conversation with demands for greater educational inclusivity and in relation to the growth of the university as a corporate and neoliberal space. Of course we’ll read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—how could we not? —while spending time on other haunted campuses. Additional texts may include Rebecca Makkai, I have some questions for you; M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains; Mona Awad, Bunny; Farida Abike-Iyimide, Ace of Spades; Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House; and possible films include Dead Poets Society (naturally) and Master (2022, Mariam Diallo). Together we’ll pursue truth, knowledge, tweed, v-neck sweaters, and the meaning of life.

Attributes: Literature

ENGL 247-B WRITING BIKES 

William Kupinse - MW 2:00-3:20 p.m.

This hybrid literature/creative writing/hands-on mechanical skills course explores the connection between imaginative writing and the many cultural transformations wrought by the humble bicycle.  We begin by attending to the bicycle’s contribution to feminist history and activism. As we will see from our reading of Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s A Canterbury Pilgrimage (1885) and Olive Pratt Rayner’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897), bikes were central to both the suffrage and New Woman movements.  The bicycle also played important role in the fight for racial equity in professional sports.  In the 1890s, Marshall “Major” Taylor was among the first Black athletes in the US to gain national attention, and his autobiography The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World (1928) illuminates how sports achievement and sports writing can serve as acts of cultural intervention.  

Although the bicycle initially rose to prominence in Europe and the US, bikes and bike culture quickly spread throughout the globe.  Notwithstanding a few well-publicized bike-friendly cities in Europe/the US (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Portland), the majority of riders who rely on bicycles as their main mode of transport today live in the Global South, with India and Indonesia have particularly large percentages of daily bike commuters.  Where the bicycle thrives, so does bicycle literature; as revolving spokes unwind the road, bike writing’s turning pages unfurl nuanced and intricate stories of nations, communities, and individuals borne on two unmotorized wheels.  Such is the case with Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle (2018), in which the narrator’s search for his absent father’s Lucky brand bicycle uncovers family history lost amid the Chinese Civil War.

Rider-writers continue to turn to the bicycle today as a vehicle of self-authorization, as witnessed by short fiction foregrounding intersectional queer identity in the indie-published anthologies Bikes Not Rockets: Intersectional Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories and True Trans Bike Rebel (both 2018).  We’ll read texts that consider the bicycle as an instrument of climate justice, and others that address its public health potential.  We’ll read writing by famous bicyclists—including former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne—and we’ll do some cycle-inspired creative writing of our own.

Complementing the course’s literary and historical focus is a distinctly hand-on dimension: over the course of the semester, we will build a working bicycle from recycled parts—sourced from the bins at the non-profit Second Cycle in Hilltop and/or donated from the course instructor’s own burgeoning parts horde—which we will then give to someone who needs it for transportation.  Topics to be covered in this hand-on experiential component of the course include wheel-building, headset installation, derailleur and brake servicing/adjustment, and more.  Participants will leave the course with enduring skills of literary and cultural analysis, creative writing, and zero-carbon vehicle fabrication/repair.  

No previous literary, cycling, or mechanical experience is needed to register for this course.  There is no additional materials fee beyond the cost of the required course texts.

Attributes: Literature; ENVH elective

ENGL 277 THE BOOK AS HUMAN ARTIFACT

Priti Joshi - TuTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.

In this class, we will all get to be detectives…of objects we cradle in our hands frequently, but don’t often stop to think about: the book! (As we’ll discuss early and often, “book” is used here as a shorthand for “books, scrolls, and tablets, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides, in manuscript, print, and pixels” and more). The class will turn our standard relationship to the book on its head: rather than focus on the contents – what the words and images say – we’ll focus on the materiality of the object itself: its cover, pages, binding, typography, etc. The goal  is to mine the object for clues to the history of the many people and communities who often-silently and largely-invisibly labored to create books, whether with quill-parchment-and-ink or with a wooden press and types or with woodblocks. Books – in their many forms such as handbills, newspapers or newsletters, even zines – have in some cases survived hundreds of years, and we will use these material objects to learn about the societies and cultures that gave rise to them and that they left an indelible impact on. As befits the material focus of this class, we be hands-on with books, newspapers, paper, type, blocks, etc. Our class will take place in the Archives and Special Collections seminar room in Collins library and we will handle objects that are old and in some cases delicate (no gloves needed!). We’ll also spend time learning to make or replicate some of the component parts or features of a “book”: paper, printing, folding, and binding.

This class will be of interest to students in English, History, Art (studio or history), Education, or anyone interested in “getting their hands dirty”!

Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; IPE Pathway, “Visual Culture”

ENGL 328 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING: ECOPOETRY

William Kupinse - TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.

The Fall 2024 semester of Advanced Poetry Writing will bring an ecocritical approach to the study of poetry and to the writing of poems by workshop members.  Working from the recognition that all poems—whether they acknowledge it or not—invoke a worldview with ecological implications, we will consider a range of environmental topics: ecopoetics, Indigenous rights, climate justice, queer ecology, ecofeminism, and much more.  We will consider how poetry engages with the world around us and how innovative forms of expression can bear witness to both individual and collective experience during times of ecological crisis.  

Since our writing develops to the fullest when we study the example of other writers, we’ll consider a range of poets, both established and emerging.  We’ll begin with Tommy Pico’s book-length Nature Poem to think about how a writer negotiates their relationship to tradition, particularly when components of that tradition are hostile to the writer’s own identity and commitments.  For the greater part of the semester, we’ll be working our way through selected poems in the recent collection Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.  All the while, we will be writing and revising our own poems, with assignments that balance opportunities for reflection on environmental topics of each poet’s choosing with open subject, open form assignments.  As a culminating experience for the course, we’ll end the semester with an off-campus poetry reading of student writing.

Attributes: Creative Writing

ENGL 330 THE RISE OF THE NOVEL IN THE U.S.*

Alison Tracy Hale - MW 2:00-3:20 p.m.

This course explores the emergence and increasing significance of the novel in the United States, from the late 18th Century through its cultural dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries, and into the present. It’s a critical truism that the novel and the American nation share a timeline, as both developed through and in service of the cultural dominance of the activities, beliefs, and experiences of the “common,” middle-class, democratic individual. We’ll consider how and why the novel has served as a central cultural form in US history, and what kinds of concerns and voices the tradition has helped to foreground. We’ll focus our exploration through the following questions:

•  What are the formal/thematic/aesthetic elements of the novel? How do they emerge and change over time? How do individual authors interpret, resist, or transform the formal dimensions of the novel? 
• How does each novel relate to its specific historical, social, political, and cultural moment? How does it respond to or intervene in the pressing issues of its era? How do a novel’s context and content interact with its formal/aesthetic concerns? 
• What does it mean to consider a tradition as fraught as that of the “American novel” in 2024? What can these works help us to understand about the politics—broadly writ—of “representation” in both literary and, well, political terms? How and why has the novel as a genre both reinforced and articulated a particular vision of the nation? How has it provided space and inspiration for authors beyond the hegemonic narrative of white America, and how have such authors transformed that tradition to tell their own stories? 

Expect to read a lot! You will likely encounter some of the following authors/works as well as others I haven’t decided on yet: Foster, The Coquette; Brown, The Power of Sympathy; James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie; Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Morrison, Beloved; Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

* Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in the appropriate section of ENGL 431. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 431 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.

Attributes: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800

ENGL 361 SOUTH ASIAN FICTION: REPRESENTING INDIA, WRITING HOME*

Priti Joshi - TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.

This course will focus on the variety and complexity of writing from India.  We will concentrate largely on novels, introduced to India by the British, and consider whether the genre, a colonial import, was ever “indigenized.” Our focus will be on the ways the novel form struggled simultaneously to absorb, distance, and refashion itself from the British. We will ask the following questions: what role, if any, did the novel have to play in colonialism, anti-colonialism, and nationalism?  Is the novel an appropriate form to represent “Indians”?  How do novels participate in definitions of what constitutes an “Indian” and do these definitions shift in the course of the century?  Can the Indian novel represent the concerns of “home” as well as it does nation?  Does the novel serve the interests primarily of men?  Why have women chosen to write short stories – and avoided colonial topics?  

Readings:  works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Sadat Hassan Manto, Vikram Chandra and others might be included. All readings will be in English.

Note: Asian Studies students are most welcome in the class; please contact Professor Joshi if you have questions

* Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in the appropriate section of ENGL 430. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 430 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.

Attributes: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices; IPE Pathway, “Issues of Race and Ethnicity”; IPE Pathway, “Empire, Colonialism, and Resistance”

ENGL 362 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Tiffany MacBain - TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.

This course focuses on literary and theoretical productions of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and centers Native-American texts of the continental U.S. Students develop an understanding of a long and significant literary tradition and gain awareness of cultural distinctions, historical contexts, and Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing) and approaches. Students also consider their own relationships to these traditions. Topics of study include origins/spirituality, survivance, queer Indigeneity, and decolonization, and assignments vary to encourage different interpretive approaches. Texts will likely include Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk and John Niehardt); The Surrounded (D’Arcy McNickle), House Made of Dawn (N. Scott Momaday), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Louise Erdrich), Whereas (Layli Long Soldier), and Jonny Appleseed (Joshua Whithead). 

 * Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in the appropriate section of ENGL 431. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 431 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.

Attributes: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices; IPE Pathway, “Issues of Race and Ethnicity”; IPE Pathway, “Empire, Colonialism, and Resistance”

ENGL 375 AUTHORSHIP AND A.I.*

Julie Christoph - TuTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.

To repeat Foucault’s famous question, “What is an author?” The seemingly simple definition of authorship (the fact of having written a text) gets increasingly complicated on closer inspection, especially as AI writing tools become more common. Is every writer an author, or are only the “good” ones authors? Are ghostwriters authors? Are plagiarists authors? Is Chat GPT an author? Understanding contemporary authorship necessitates exploration into scholarship in such varied fields as literature, rhetoric, law, and cognitive science. Together as a class, we will build a shared knowledge base by reading some of the foundational and emerging theories of authorship from these fields, and we will consider these theories in light of literary as well as workaday writing, paying attention to how changing laws and social practices shift the meaning of authorship—and the value of individual texts. As the semester progresses, students will seek to apply and explore questions from critical scholarship, choosing primary texts that are relevant to their own individual research projects and making their own attempts at being authors—with and without assistance from AI.

* Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in the appropriate section of ENGL 433. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 433 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.

Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis

ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES

Tiffany MacBain - TTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.

This course will introduce you to the discipline of English Studies. Most of us are here because we enjoy reading and writing. While our personal experiences with text can be productive starting points in textual analysis, the study of English requires discipline—in the twin senses of work ethic and mastery of a branch of knowledge. This course will explore what it means to study English at the university level: in short, it will introduce and help you to develop the essential skills of active reading, critical and creative thought, and textual analysis. In addition, we will consider the nature and applications of English Studies.

ENGL 220 is designed to highlight sets of questions central to the discipline: What is a literary text? What is genre, and how do craft and form relate to content? How do literary texts reflect and influence the world around us? How might we engage meaningfully with text? This course may challenge assumptions and beliefs you have about what it means to be an English major, about the value of different kinds of texts, and about the politics—cultural, academic, ideological—that influence the discipline and that the discipline enables you to influence.

Attributes: Required for all English majors and minors

ENGL 228 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING POETRY

Bill Kupinse - MW 2-3:20 p.m.

“A line will take us hours, maybe,” writes W. B. Yeats on the craft of poetry. “Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” This creative writing workshop takes seriously Yeats’s notion that the effect of spontaneity in poetry is achieved through fierce attention and careful revision. By stitching and unstitching multiple drafts of their poems, seminar participants will work to develop the critical skills that will allow them to become more effective writers of poetry. Assignments in this course emphasize writing as a process and include selected reading of contemporary and canonical poems, weekly exercises, in-class discussions, peer reviews, and a final portfolio. We will hold an off-campus reading of class members’ poetry at the end of the term.

Attributes: Creative Writing; IHE Pathway, “Artist as Humanist”

ENGL 236 MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Laura Behling - MWF 10-10:50 a.m.

“Going from knowing who you are to not knowing who you are--that is the American story."
- Gish Jen

Imagined and illuminated. Resisted and rejected. Challenged and celebrated. American literature has responded to all of the personal, social, economic, political, intellectual, and artistic upheaval and change that has characterized America in the last 100 years. It’s done so in new modes and styles of expression, and with readers–you and me–eager to discover the riches in its stories. This course reads key American literary texts from multiple genres from the early 20^th century through today’s contemporary moment and sets them within their cultural contexts. We’ll read and write, judge books by their covers, dive into the contemporary literary prize and publishing worlds, and witness new author-artists emerge. And throughout our examination of American literary history-in-the-making since the early 20^thcentury, we’ll discover the interconnections of literature and culture and determine if American author Gish Jen is right—that “Going from knowing who you are to not knowing who you are” is, in fact, “the American story.”

Attributes: Literature; IHE Pathway, “Issues of Race and Ethnicity”

ENGL 240 DIGITAL WRITING: TEXT, IMAGE, SOUND

Regina Duthely-Barbee - TTh 11 a.m-12:20 p.m.

When we think of writing, alphabetic writing is often the first thing that comes to mind. We have been conditioned to think about writing as black letters on white paper. This course pushes beyond alphabetic forms of communication to consider the ways that text, image, and sound have been deployed in communication, with a particular focus on social justice and alternative knowledge making practices. Composition scholar Claire Lutkewitte claims, “Multimodal composition offers us the opportunity to discover other ways of knowing and communicating ideas besides the ways we know and communicate through traditional print-based writing” (11). Working from this claim, this course will explore the theoretical foundations of multimodal composition and engage in digital writing across various mediums. We will consider the ways that digital writing allows for new, and more expansive forms of communication. We will examine the relationship between text, image, and sound with a primary focus on the ways that digital writing opens a space for more critical language and communication practices. Students will deploy multiple modes of communicating, including linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural ways of composing and creating. This class primarily requires a lot of hands-on project based assignments, digital writing workshops, and peer writing groups.

Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; IHE Pathway, “Artist as Humanist”

ENGL 247 POPULAR GENRES: DETECTIVE FICTION

Alison Tracy Hale - TTH 2-3:20 p.m.

Bring your magnifying glass, your pipe, and your Deerstalker. We’ll begin our investigation with the usual suspects—those prolix lucubrators spawned from the mean streets of 19^th-century urbanity. They will help us exhume the connections between technology and social change that gave rise to a new genre and a new form of hero: the detective. We’ll shine a bright light on the Golden Age and peer into the dark corners of noir as we autopsy the political, social, and ethical anxieties the detective may exacerbate or subdue. From here our investigation will pursue two overlapping and interconnected lines of inquiry: the expansion of investigative fiction across a range of amateur figures and the purposeful re-imagination of the detective and the detective story by writers from an ever-widening range of communities and identities. Our search for the perpetrators will lead us to ask how and to what ends recent and contemporary authors have adopted, adapted, and transformed the topics, tropes, and figures of classic detective fiction in ways that intervene in today’s world. What kinds of aesthetic and political work are being accomplished in these later manifestations, and how are these authors reinvigorating and remaking a formerly formulaic genre? We’ll read some history, some genre theory, and a lot of detective stories in short and novel lengths. You’ll do some forensic and textual analysis and construct a criminal caper of your own. The book list is still need-to-know, but will likely include some of the following authors, mostly but not exclusively from US and British traditions: Poe, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Tey, P.D. James, Paul Auster, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Paula Woods, Glenville Lovell, Stephen Graham Jones…

Attributes: Literature; KNOW graduation requirement; Crime, Law, & Justice Studies elective

ENGL 277 THE BOOK AS HUMAN ARTIFACT

Priti Joshi - TTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.

In this class, we will all get to be detectives…of objects we cradle in our hands frequently, but don’t often stop to think about: the book! (As we’ll discuss early and often, “book” is used here as a shorthand for “books, scrolls, and tablets, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides, in manuscript, print, and pixels” and more). The class will turn our standard relationship to the book on its head: rather than focus on the contents – what the words and images say – we’ll focus on the materiality of the object itself: its cover, pages, binding, typography, etc. The goal is to mine the object for clues to the history of the many people and communities who often-silently and largely-invisibly labored to create books, whether with quill-parchment-and-ink or with a wooden press and types or with woodblocks. Books – in their many forms such as handbills, newspapers or newsletters, even zines – have in some cases survived hundreds of years, and we will use these material objects to learn about the societies and cultures that gave rise to them and that they left an indelible impact on. As befits the material focus of this class, we will be hands-on with books, newspapers, paper, type, blocks, etc. Our class will take place in the Archives and Special Collections seminar room in Collins library and we will handle objects that are old and in some cases delicate (no gloves needed!). We’ll also spend time learning to make or replicate some of the component parts or features of a “book”: paper, printing, folding, and binding.

This class will be of interest to students in English, History, Art (studio or history), Education, or anyone interested in “getting their hands dirty”!

Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; IHE Pathway, “Visual Culture”

ENGL 329 ADVANCED CREATIVE NONFICTION

Tiffany MacBain - TTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.

If you’ve ever been hooked by a journalistic deep-dive into a subject, maybe on Serial or in the Atlantic, you know the power of a complex narrative that results from sniffing out a good story, interviewing the right people, and conducting scrupulous research. In Advanced Creative Nonfiction, students will try their hand at these skills. To learn the craft, students will study published essays in the genre, attuning themselves to the elements of a well-told tale. Class will be run as a workshop in which students perform textual analysis and develop their own writing through exercises and the steady composition and revision of their own nonfiction prose. Students will share their thoughts and their writing with their peers, and participate in peer-review and self-reflection. The primary project will be to research, write, and revise a substantial piece of longform journalism, along with a sample pitch or submission proposal of their project to a magazine or journal.

This course assumes students’ basic familiarity with the genre of creative nonfiction, whether through their own writing or their reading of memoir, the literary essay, or longform journalism. ENGL229 (Introduction to Creative Nonfiction) and ENGL226 (Introduction to Journalism) are not prerequisites, but they are good precursors to this course. That said, anyone is welcome to join!

Attributes: Creative Writing

ENGL 338 AMERICAN CARNIVALESQUE LITERATURE*

Laura Behling - MW 2-3:20 p.m.

Step right up! This course will examine contemporary American carnivalesque literature (texts shot out of the “canon,” so to speak)-- set in circuses, traveling fairs, carnivals, and theme parks (critically acclaimed, popular, or cult favorites—and sometimes all three at once!) of the last half century. These lively texts will take their place under the big top alongside Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who theorizes about the “carnival sense of the world,” tracing its lineage back to medieval carnival traditions, in which established hierarchies, social roles, and acceptable behaviors were upended (and permitted to be so) (Rabelais and His World). Complementing the literary texts will be sideshows of “cultural connections,” moments throughout the course that link the literature to its socio-historical contexts. Our readings will focus on these literary spectacles and our discussions will discern what the carnivalesque turn in American literature suggests about our contemporary America and its populace. Just who are the performers? Who is the audience? Why are we so enthralled? Does a world populated by alligator wrestlers (Swamplandia!) or a sinister traveling troupe (Something Wicked This Way Comes) return to proper balance, or is the contemporary American world fundamentally changed in their wake?

^{*Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in ENGL 431, Section A. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 431 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.}

Attributes: Literature

ENGL 353 THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE*

John Wesley - MWF 11-11:50 a.m.

The Bible is a unique artifact of the ancient world in the sense that nothing else written in the so-called Ancient Near East has survived into the present day with quite the same level of proportion, constancy, and relevance. Where did these writings come from? Who wrote this down, for whom, and to what purpose? And, most pertinent to this course, what kind of knowledge do we gain about this book—or, to be more accurate, this anthology of books—when we study it as literature? To read the Bible as literature (in our case, the Christian Bible) is to ask questions of it that we would of any text in an English class, such as those related to matters of source material, cultural history, genre, figurative language, narrative development, and style, as well as interpretation (which, for this text, has been ongoing for more than two millennia, and involves issues of translation, too!). While such an approach will have inevitable crossover with religious studies, history, linguistics, theology, and even archaeology, it will be good to keep in mind that the primary aim of this course is to develop a literary appreciation of the Bible rather than determine the veracity of religious or theistic claims. As Kenneth Burke once wrote, “Whether or not there is a realm of the ‘supernatural,’ there are words for it.” In this course, we will study some of those words.

^{*Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in ENGL 430, Section A. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 430 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.}

Attributes: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800

ENGL 374 WRITING CLIMATE JUSTICE*

Bill Kupinse - TTh 2-3:20 p.m.

This course explores how imaginative writing can intervene in the most existential of neoliberalism’s myriad catastrophes: the climate crisis. Through our reading of contemporary novels, poetry, nonfiction, and ecocritical theory, we will seek to understand literature’s role in realizing an environmentally just and genuinely sustainable world.

Emphasizing creative writing as a form of activism, we will study the work of writer-activists from around the globe–Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Dungy, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Nnedi Okorafor, Donna Haraway, and Cherie Dimaline, among others. Within the inclusive category of climate justice, we will consider a range of topics, including Indigenous rights, immigration justice, ecofeminism, and queer ecology. For students registering for this course as ENGL374, there are three main assignments: an essay in which students engage an ecocritical concept and a literary text in conversation; a creative writing assignment in which students themselves produce a short piece of climate change literature in a genre of their choosing; and a collaborative, student-designed final project that uses the skills and knowledge developed during the semester to engage the climate crisis beyond the classroom. For students taking the course as their senior seminar (i.e. those registering for ENGL 430-B), additional requirements include discussion leadership and a research-oriented expansion of their ecocritical/literary essay.

^{*Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in ENGL 430, Section B. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 430 if taken with a different topic. See note at top.}

Attributes: Literature; Environmental Policy & Decision Making general elective

ENGL 383 INDUSTRY, ENSLAVEMENT, AND EMPIRE*

Priti Joshi - TTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.

In 1813, Britain abolished the slave trade and in 1834, it abolished slavery in its colonies (where it had kept it safely hidden). The labor of enslaved peoples had, of course, funded Britain’s mega-growth into the world’s largest industrial empire. This course takes up matters of enslavement, industrialization, and Britain’s empire. Threaded through debates about Abolition and enslaved peoples, industrialism and the “condition of the working classes,” and Britain’s growing reliance on its empire (for labor and markets) were questions of gender – women and their “proper” place, men and masculinity. We will use these frames as the lens through which we approach key texts of the period: Mary Prince’s History (the first narrative by a Black woman published in Britain); Dickens’ Oliver Twist; Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton; Wonderful Adventures by Mary Seacole (referred to as the “Jamaican Florence Nightingale”); Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone (considered the first detective novel); and H. Rider Haggard’s She (a gothic-adventure tale that beggars belief).

^{*Students who wish to study this topic in order to satisfy a 400-level requirement for the English major must enroll in ENGL 432, Section A. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 432 if taken with a different topic.}

Attributes: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices

ENGL 397 THE WRITING INTERNSHIP

Regina Duthely-Barbee - MW 3:30-4:50 p.m.

This seminar supports students as they negotiate the transition from the classroom to the workplace. Students consider how the skills they have developed as English majors translate to the field—whatever that field may be—and identify and utilize opportunities for mentoring and professional skill building that good internships deliver. Course readings and discussions guide students to develop critical and practical perspectives about the work they produce and the workplace culture they encounter, and writing workshops hone students' technical and professional writing. The course includes a strong reflective component to encourage students to consider their personal and professional development and to explore career goals.

Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; Experiential Learning graduation requirement