Notes:
- There are no prerequisites for 200- and 300-level English courses
- 300-level course topics marked with an asterisk [*] have the option of being taken in the 430-433 range to fulfill a 400-level English major requirement. Students enrolled in the 400-level versions of these courses will, as part of their coursework, conduct independent research appropriate to an advanced-level seminar. Students should consult the descriptions below and myPugetSound for the ENGL 400-level number that corresponds to each designated topic.
Fall 2025 course times/descriptions are still being finalized, so please be aware that information on this page might change before registration begins
ENGL 110 GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
Laura Behling - TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
This course explores graphic narratives by investigating the nature and grammar of comics: Why is storytelling central to human life? What distinctive qualities distinguish narratives delivered through strictly textual narratives from sequential art—usually combining graphics with texts? The course considers how graphic narratives work, studying and analyzing the techniques and strategies writer-artists use to produce meaning. In what ways do colors, shapes, panels, borders, gutters, perspective, page-layout, and speech bubbles influence content? In our readings, we’ll think about how word and image can express contemporary social currents and reify and challenge reading and literary analytical practices. We’ll ask what the role of the reader is in constructing meaning from these verbal and visual texts, and students will try their hand at creating a graphic narrative. And finally, throughout the semester, we’ll consider if comics are, ultimately, as former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath suggests, “what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal.”
Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis
CONN 202 PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE
George Erving - MoWeFr 2:00-2:50 p.m.
tba
Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; 200-level English Course; Honors Minor; IHE Pathway: “Science and Values”
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Tiffany Aldrich MacBain - TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
Most of us have gravitated toward English because we enjoy reading and writing. While our personal experiences with literature can be productive starting points, the study of English requires discipline—in the twin senses of work ethic and mastery of a branch of knowledge. This course explores what it means to study English at the university level: In short, it introduces and helps students to develop the essential skills of active reading, critical and creative thought, and textual analysis. The course also considers how and why to apply this study to the world beyond the classroom.
ENGL220 is designed to highlight sets of questions central to the discipline: What makes writing literary? What is genre, and does it matter? How do craft and form relate to content? How does literature reflect and influence the world around us? This course may challenge assumptions and beliefs students have about what it means to be an English major and why our work matters.
Attributes: Required of all English majors and minors
ENGL 228 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING POETRY
William Kupinse - MoWe 3:30-4:50 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 idea that what seems offhand spontaneity in poetry is actually the result of careful attention and sustained effort. By stitching and unstitching multiple drafts of our poems, we develop the imagination and critical skills that enable us to grow as poets. Assignments in this course emphasize writing as a process and include the study of canonical and contemporary poems, weekly exercises, in-class discussions, and critiques of peer writing. Each workshop member will produce a collection of approximately six poems by the semester’s end, which will culminate in a public reading by the workshop members.
Attributes: Creative Writing; IHE Pathway, “The Artist as Humanist”
ENGL 231 MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
John Wesley - MoWeFr 10:00-10:50 a.m.
In this course, we will read the first stories written in the English language (ca. 700), and then we’ll continue reading happily for the next thousand years or so until we end up in hell (i.e., Paradise Lost). Along the way, we will spend time with Beowulf in the smoky aftermath of a dragon battle, Sir Gawain as he marches reluctantly to a showdown with the Green Knight, Alison of Bath as she defends the pleasures of sex to her semi-horrified male interlocutors, Cordelia as she defies the father she loves, and yes, with Satan as he fashions a grand palace in hell and a grand plan to ruin humanity. We will think about how this literature is shaped by its many historical contexts, and what it has to say to readers in the twenty-first century. This means we will ask not only how our texts play on the social, political, and religious expectations of their original audiences, but also age-old questions about what it means to act courageously, to live a good life in the midst of suffering, to reconcile competing views of human purpose, and to seek a just society. During our exploration, you will probably recognize character types, plots, and questions that continue to live in the stories we tell ourselves today. But with that sense of familiarity, you will also encounter the strange, weird, and wonderful, just as you might expect in stories written in and for cultures so far removed from us in space, time, and cosmology.
Attributes: Literature; Literatures and Cultures before 1800; IHE Pathway, “Global Middle Ages”
ENGL 240 DIGITAL WRITING
Regina Duthely - TuTh 11:00 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, images, and sounds 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 aimed toward social justice. Students will deploy multiple modes of communicating, including linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural ways of composing and creating. This class requires a lot of hands-on project based assignments, digital writing workshops, and peer editorial groups.
Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; IHE Pathway, “The Artist as Humanist”
ENGL 247 DETECTIVE FICTION
Alison Tracy Hale - TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
We’ll begin with the genre’s origins on the mean streets of the 19th-century and consider the shifts in technology and the social changes that gave rise to a new kind of hero: the detective. We’ll scrutinize the formal elements of these tales as we delve into the so-called Golden Age and peer into the dark corners of noir, tracking all the while the kinds of political, social, and ethical anxieties the figure of the detective navigates. We will then broaden our scope, exploring how and to what ends recent authors continue to reinvigorate and remake the form, and what kinds of aesthetic and political work these later manifestations accomplish. Expect to read a LOT: a bit of history, some genre theory, and a lot of detective fiction. Our authors are selected from the following list and beyond, with an emphasis on US and British traditions: Poe, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Tey, P.D. James, Paul Auster, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Paula Woods, Cheryl Head, Henry Chang, Glenville Lovell, Naomi Hirahara, Stephen Graham Jones….
Attributes: Literature
CONN 278 THE BOOK AS HUMAN ARTIFACT
Priti Joshi - TuTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.
In this class, we all get to be detectives…of an object we cradle in our hands frequently, but don’t often stop to think about: the book! (As we’ll discuss early and often, “book” here is 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, layout, 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, 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 welcomes students interested in “getting their hands dirty”: those in Art (studio or history), Education, English, History, and more.
Attributes: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; 200-level English course
ENGL 327 ADVANCED FICTION WRITING
Laura Krughoff - TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
In this advanced fiction workshop, we will consider what it means for a writer to develop a body of work. While we will continue to practice and hone the fundamental skills and techniques used in narrative prose, the expectation in this course will be that you are ready to produce complete works of short fiction and are beginning to explore your own voice, aesthetic, subjects, and themes as a writer. To this end, our work will be two-fold: we will read selections from collections of short fiction to examine how important contemporary short story writers in English pursue particular themes, return to and re-examine various topics, and develop a recognizable style or aesthetic. You will simultaneously produce three complete short stories, each of which will be workshopped either as a full class or in a small group. Additionally, toward the end of the semester you will participate in the production of a class anthology that explores a particular theme, genre or subject. Each student will write an introduction to the anthology, exploring the points of connection and resonance among the stories and the editorial choices that went into creating the anthology.
Attributes: Creative Writing
ENGL 346/432A JANE EYRE: AFTERLIVES AND COUNTERPOINTS
Priti Joshi - MoWe 3:30-4:50 p.m.
When Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, it took the English-reading literary world by storm. The novel initiated a conversation about women’s disempowerment and status, and we will locate it in its historical moment, one convulsed by rapid industrial changes, revolutionary ideas, working-class demands, the abolition of the slave trade, slave uprisings in the British colonies, new ideas of race, and an expanding empire. We will study the relation of Jane Eyre’s nascent feminism to radical movements of its day and consider its appropriations as well as displacements of these movements. Over the years, Brontë’s novel has entranced many, irritated some, and spawned parodies, pastiches, satires and rewritings. We will read several afterlives and counterpoints, texts that intertextually draw on its tropes of schooling, upward mobility, the governess, the madwoman, colonial careers, independence, marriage. Our corpus will span three centuries and draw on works from Britain, the US, Africa; from colonial and postcolonial perspectives; from print and visual media. Each text highlights something the original suppressed or neglected, offering us new approaches to reinterpreting Brontë’s text and simultaneously examining novel approaches to the empowerment plot. In short, we will examine both Jane Eyre’s continuing popularity as a trope for women’s lives and rebellion, as well as the various ways the novel and myth have been critiqued and transformed.
We will read/watch some combination of the following: Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative; Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, stories by Sherlock Holmes; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning, My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman, I Walked With a Zombie.
Required work of the course: two creative rewritings, regular Canvas postings, argument papers.
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 432. This will not overlap with or repeat a previous section of ENGL 432 if taken with a different topic.
Attributes: Literature; Gender and Queer Studies
ENGL 347/431A GOTHIC AMERICAN LITERATURE
Alison Tracy Hale - MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
US national identity has long claimed to be based on progress, reason, and optimism; the literature you will read in this course deliberately challenges and undermines that narrative, revealing that the American dream is instead—and has always been--an American nightmare. Once derided as an escapist form of sensational fiction, the gothic is now understood as central to the expression, articulation, and management of significant tensions in American culture and identity. We will explore how a genre first associated with the haunted castles, demonic noblemen, and ancient mysteries of Europe is re-envisioned in particularly “American” ways and in accordance with uniquely American anxieties, especially as it reveals the contingencies and precarity—political and psychological—of our understanding of selfhood. We’ll consider a gothic paradox: whereas the gothic “genre” in the US is inescapably intertwined with the history of white supremacy (and with its critique), as a “mode” the gothic has nonetheless provided a rich and generative field for writers of color from Charles Chesnutt to Toni Morrison, Stephen Graham Jones, and Colson Whitehead among others, in whose hands it has functioned to resist, re-envision, and recreate literary traditions and historical practices. Course texts will range from the 18th to the 21 st Century and include challenging theoretical works along with primary sources.
Note: students taking this course as ENGL 431 to satisfy a 400-level major requirement will be required to meet additional expectations appropriate to a senior seminar.
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.
Attributes: Literature
ENGL 374/430A WRITING CLIMATE JUSTICE
William Kupinse - TuTh 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
Although ecology and economics both come from the Greek word for dwelling-place, the latter entity now imperils the former, as the neoliberal economic practices that dominate our politics and our planet threaten the home we share with all living beings. 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 explore 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, including Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Dungy, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Nnedi Okorafor, Donna Haraway, John Lanchester, and Cherie Dimaline. Within the inclusive category of climate justice, we will consider a range of topics, including Indigenous rights, immigration justice, ecofeminism, and queer ecology. As ENGL374, this course has 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 430A), additional requirements include discussion leadership and a research-oriented expansion of their ecocritical/literary essay.
ENGL374 has no prerequisites and welcomes interested students from all disciplines. It confers program credit for English majors/minors, as well as for the Environmental Arts and Humanities (ENVH) and Environmental Policy and Decision Making (ENVP) programs.
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.
Attributes: Centering Marginalized Voices; Bioethics; Environmental Arts and Humanities; Environmental Policy and Decision Making; Science, Technology, Health and Society
ENGL 381 MAJOR AUTHORS: KATHERINE MANSFIELD
William Kupinse - TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Shortly after Katherine Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, her friend and sometimes rival Virginia Woolf confided in her diary that Mansfield’s prose was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Mansfield’s talent was indeed formidable, and despite a career cut tragically short, she left behind a remarkable legacy of short fiction, poetry, essays, journals, and letters. Modernism, that literary revolution that both reflected and effected the profound transformations of the early twentieth-century, would have looked quite different without Katherine Mansfield. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, Mansfield emigrated to England at the age of nineteen, where she would soon make a name for herself as a regular contributor to O. R. Orage’s The New Age, one of the quirkiest and most influential of the periodicals in which modernism was incubated. Over the next decade, she went on to publish several important collections of short fiction: In a German Pension, Prelude, Bliss and Other Stories. As her tuberculosis worsened, Mansfield lived variously in Italy, Switzerland, and France. Throughout these changes of address, Mansfield maintained a precarious living penning book reviews and stories for the periodical press; saw through to publication The Garden Party and Other Stories, the final book she published in her lifetime; and discussed at length the writer’s craft in her brilliant and luminous letters.
This course will explore the many aspects of this fascinating, fierce, and brilliant modernist: the prolific contributor to modernist journals such as The New Age, Rhythm, and The Atheneum; the cultural critic whose interrogations of patriarchy and heteronormativity have made her a pivotal figure in modernist studies of feminism and queer theory; the expatriate whose colonial experience gave her special insight into European imperialism; and, most of all, the innovator who expanded the boundaries of what language could accomplish.
In addition to reading Mansfield’s major works of fiction and poetry, we will also consider her letters, journals, and essays. We will complement our study of these primary texts with Kathleen Jones’s biography, Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller, and select critical works by Gerri Kimber and other noted Mansfield scholars. Finally, we will also attend to Mansfield’s literary circle by reading works by D. H. Lawrence (who modelled the character Gudrun in Women in Love after Mansfield), John Middleton Murray (Mansfield’s famously awful second husband), and, of course, Virginia Woolf. Course requirements for this discussion-based seminar at the 300-level include midsemester and final essays and a presentation; students taking the course for their senior seminar (for which they would register for ENGL 432B) will write a final paper with an additional research component.
Attributes: Literature; IHE Pathway: “The Artist as Humanist”
ENGL 383/431B AMERICAN FRONTIERS
Tiffany Aldrich MacBain - TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered the speech “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it, Turner relies upon well-trodden images to describe the American frontier: it is a tabula rasa, the “outer edge of the wave” of westward expansion, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” While Turner ultimately declares that “the frontier has gone”—closed, retreated—he argues that it forged “the striking characteristics” of the “American intellect.” Today the idea of the North American frontier continues to loom large in the United States cultural imaginary, and yet Turner’s iteration tells only part of the story—and a largely fictional part, at that.
This course examines literature from the nineteenth century and earlier to trace the development of national ideologies and mythologies indebted to experiences and imaginings of the North American frontier. Rather than limit ourselves to popular representations of a mid-nineteenth-century space west of the Mississippi, we cross temporal, spatial, and cultural borders to achieve a fuller understanding of the literary history of the concept of "frontier," and push against it. We consider the ways in which texts that articulate a variety of experiences connect with and complicate each other. Primary texts include pre-contact oral narratives, exploration and conquest narratives, captivity narratives, pioneer narratives, and Native American literature.
* 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.
Attributes: Centuring Marginalized Voices; Literatures and Cultures before 1800; IHE Pathway, “Empire, Colonialism, and Resistance”
**All ENGL courses count towards the “Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives” core requirement