ENGL

This course offers students an introduction to multimodal composition. Focusing on the theoretical as well as the practical skills of multimodal composing, this course explores the theoretical foundations of multimodal composition, and engage in composing across various mediums. In this course students compose soundscapes using digital content, make short documentary films, and reimagine the commonplace book as a multimodal way of interpreting and analyzing their reading.

This introductory course engages with developments in American literary history that precede, complicate, or challenge nationalist frameworks. It focuses on the U.S. nation and/or its colonial antecedents through a lens that is transnational or multinational, considering the space we now identify as "America" (U.S) in relation to a variety of identities, traditions, and cultures that have circulated within and around it. The course thus emphasizes an anti-exceptionalist approach to American literature, focusing instead on the circulation of ideas about or in relation to the American U.S.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from the early 20th century through the contemporary moment. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., WWI and WWII, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall). Drawing upon a variety of genres, this course provides students with a foundational understanding of important traditions and transformations in literary history and aesthetics.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from the long 19th Century, spanning the post-Revolutionary era to World War I. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., Transcendentalism, U.S. Expansionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age). Drawing upon a variety of genres, this course provides students with a foundational understanding of important traditions and transformations in literary history and aesthetics.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from European contact through the early-national era of the late-18th and early-19th Century. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., Colonization, Revolution, Constitutional Debates, Federalism, Early Nationalism).

This course explores the literature and culture of the British Isles from the 1830s to the present. Covering three broad and rich periods -- the Victorian era, Modernism, and Postmodernism -- the roughly two centuries under study will be brought into focus by a significant theme (to be determined by the professor) as it manifests itself across the three periods and through particular writers, genres, and movements.

Human consciousness is at once the most basic and most mysterious fact of our existence. It is difficult to describe because it cannot be compare the ground upon which the experience of living rests, including our ability to make comparisons. Moreover, its source remains elusive; no one knows, the brain, a material organ, creates perceptions, ideas, or emotions, all of which are immaterial.

This course introduces students to some of the major works of literature written in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlement in the 7th century to the aftermath of the English Civil War in the 17th century. The surviving stories from these centuries are richly diverse in language, form, and genre, and register great shifts, yet also surprising continuities in conceptions of heroism and honor, theories of family and nation, the relationship between the church and the individual, the nature of authority, and humanity's place in the universe.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to creative nonfiction, a genre of writing that is simultaneously intensely personal and engaged with the world of the writer; that borrows from lyrical strategies of poetry and narrative strategies of fiction; and that draws on popular forms of writing and journalism. Students read classic examples of creative nonfiction and write several nonfiction essays of their own, each of which goes through revision for a final portfolio. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to the art and craft of writing poetry. Students experiment with a variety of poetic forms, read the work of poets from many eras, study versification and free verse, expand their range of subjects, and explore different strategies of revision. By the end of the semester, students will assemble a portfolio of their original poetry. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.