Current Courses

Spring 2023

DCD and ENGL 300 & 400 Level

DCD*300*01: Special Topics in Critical Studies (Mukamal)

This special topics course takes a digital approach to a much debated phenomenon: book banning in the 21^st century American education system. We use text methods to evaluate whether the reasons cited for banning books actually corresponds with books’ content; visual methods to explore the books’ messaging and marketing (Bookstagram) and data visualization tools to break down when, where, and why books are banned and which authors and identities are disproportionately affected; accessible sound and motion methods through BookTok debates; and methods of social media analytics to understand how peoples’ choice to read banned books and talk about this reading online influences their belief systems, advocacy, and activism. Because the numbers reveal that literature written for young people is central to these debates, we focus on banned young adult (YA) books from Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) to Adib Khorram’s Darius the Great is Not Okay (2018). We also break down current research about the multifaceted impacts of YA literature to better grasp the stakes of book banning for this population. As the final project, students choose their own banned book from any time period and genre and study it through their own combination of text, visual, sound and motion, and social media analytical methods. Students leave this course empowered to understand and participate in the complex, vital, and ongoing cultural conversation about book banning.

DCD*302*01: Visual Effects (Benn)

This course surveys visual production methods across multiple forms of media, including film, graphic novels and comics, paintings, videogames, and memes. We will examine the technical affordances of each medium, considering how visual representation is specific to form. From camera angles and directorial decisions about how a shot is framed to the (re)production of images in memes, students will understand how each visual format uses its unique characteristics to communicate. Additionally, students will be introduced to a broad array of visual tools and encouraged to produce their own projects inspired by the theoretical material covered in class.

DCD*312*01: Social Media (Laiola)

In this course, we are going to critically and creatively engage with digital social media, focusing in particular on the myriad ways they affect on- and offline culture, and the potentials they introduce for critical and creative expression. We will learn about the rich history of digital social media and "web 2.0," noting in particular the ways key platforms relate to and differ from one another in the ways they invite, cajole, and even force us to participate and socialize with them. As well, we will think about the cultural feedback loops, whereby online culture influences offline culture and vice versa, and the ways front-end expectations, rhetorics, and aesthetics are influenced by algorithmic logic and codes. Finally, while this class's focus is NOT marketing or branding, students will have many opportunities to create content for different platforms and study they ways content moves across these platforms.

DCD*316*01: Digital Resources in the Humanities (Mukamal)

In this intermediate course, we explore creative ways that digital resources in the humanities can highlight underrecognized cultural contributions by individuals marginalized on the basis of intersectional identity factors such as gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality and citizenship status, ability, religion, language, and more. We both examine cutting-edge humanities-centered interdisciplinary projects and create our own projects through a process of critical making. For example, we study the history of feminism and civil rights through interdisciplinary databases including ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers and Women’s Magazine Archive; we engage electronic texts by examining the gender dimensions of instapoetry and both critiquing and contributing original work to the online fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3); we build our own collaborative digital history project using mapping resources; we discover how data visualization software can build awareness around exclusions and inequities; and we investigate how new media projects as widespread as BookTok promote change-making cultural dialogue about issues of representation. We round out the semester with a hands-on critical making experience in the FabLab and Kimbel Library Makerspace.

DCD*488*Q1: Capstone Course (Laiola)

This course is to be taken by DCD majors in their final semester at Coastal, and serves as the culminating experience for the DCD major. Students will gather together all of the work they have done throughout their time in DCD, preparing it for inclusion in a public-facing, professional portfolio of work that tells the story of who they are as DCD professionals. In this way, the course supports students as they transition from their roles as DCD students to that of DCD professionals.

DCD*496*Q1: Social Media Practicum (Laiola)

A hands-on, practice-based "course," where 4-5 students will work closely with faculty advisors to create content for, manage, and strategize the ENGL and DCD social media platforms. Students should be critically familiar and engaged with Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok, as they will be responsible for creating content to represent the English and DCD programs in these spaces. They will learn about social media analytics, growing and cultivating audiences, and the ins and outs of managing a social media presence for a brand or company. Students who have taken Dr Laiola's DCD 312: Social Media class are particularly encouraged to enroll.

ENGL*300*01: Critical Conversations in English (Paster)

ENGL 300 provides students with an introduction to our major and to English Studies in more general terms. This course invites you to examine critical issues and questions current in our discipline with your classmates. At the same time, you will also think extensively about the writing, reading, and research practices that will support genuine meaning making and inquiry as you take classes across the English major. In addition to considering some of the major disciplines that make up English Studies, you will read a rich set of varied texts that introduce these areas (like composition, creative writing, linguistics, and literature), attend the English Future Speakers Events so you get a sense of the varied job opportunities the major can lead to, and analyze undergraduate student research in English to analyze how others are entering the field. This work will help you identify areas of interest and inquiry that resonate with you.

ENGL*301*01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

A course that introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing. An exploratory approach is taken using a combination of contemporary readings, technique-focused studio days, group excursions, sharing, and critique. The course will culminate in the creation of an individual portfolio, and an alternative publication project involving the whole class.

ENGL*301*D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

A distance learning course that introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing. An exploratory approach is taken using a combination of contemporary readings, technique-focused instruction, sharing, and critique. The course will culminate in the creation of an individual portfolio, and an alternative publication project involving the whole class.

ENGL*311*01: Topics in Shakespeare-Claiming Shakespeare, Queering Shakespeare for Our World and Our Fabulous Future (Pillai)

This course may be taken by ENGL, THEA, WGST, and EDUC majors/minors for fulfillment of program requirements.

As humans hurtle towards the second quarter of the 21^st century, our critical consciousness expands to grapple with our growing complexities as individuals, cultures, and communities. We might wonder how our identities and practices can remain relevant in the future that is ahead of us. Along with the four Cs of “critical thinking,” “communication,” “collaboration,” and “creativity” that will become increasingly crucial factors in our wellbeing, our ability to adapt to the many changes around us will be vital to our relevance and growth in the 21^st and 22^nd centuries. This is where studying “Shakespeare” comes in handy. For centuries, cancel culture has failed to shut down “Shakespeare” because Shakespearean storytelling—on the page, the stage, and on screens—has adapted to, reflected, and anticipated the various changes in our societies and environments. Shakespeare has remained a fabulously transformative, cultural artifact that continues to be malleable and manipulable. In this course we will explore 21^st century cultures and practices of Shakespearean storytelling. Specifically, we will study queer and feminist global adaptations, that is, appropriations and remediations that reclaim Shakespearean drama to make it not simply relevant to our present and future but fabulously urgent representations of our time.

No book purchase needed: reading and viewing materials will be made available online. No prior knowledge of Shakespeare needed.

ENGL*332*01: Perspectives on American Literature and Culture-Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction (Lowery)

Deemed the godmother of Afrofuturism, the celebrated African American writer Octavia Butler left behind a career that changed the science-fiction world entirely after her unexpected passing in 2006. As the first ever science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, Butler wrote with an eye toward the future and consistently offered an honest observation of humanity. Though one of a few Black women writers publishing in the white-male dominated science fiction genre, Butler transcended conventions and offered outlooks on not only issues of race, gender, sex, and power, but of empathy, social normativity, environmentalism, and many more. This course will examine Butler’s work alongside some of her contemporaries, Samuel R. Delany, and Charles Saunders, as well as those inspired by it to contextualize the impact of her body of work in the twentieth century. Butler’s legacy, as students will see, speaks for itself as she is an early pillar of Afrofuturism.

ENGL*334*01: Perspectives on British Literature and Culture-The Arthurian Tradition: From Gawain to Tom (Ennis)

King Arthur is the single most significant figure in British literature and culture, and the influence of Arthurian legend has endured for over 1500 years. Whether Arthur is a 5th-century Celtic warrior, the ideal of a noble king, a wronged husband, a Christian champion, or a supernatural demigod depends upon who is doing the telling. From the Round Table to Merlin, from the scandal of Lancelot and Guinevere to the quest for the Holy Grail, we’ll discuss how Arthurian material has been appropriated, assimilated, and modified by different traditions and audience preoccupations. Readings of the legend will include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century account, Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century prose version, the Welsh inflected nineteenth century take by Felicia Hemans, and the “Victorian Arthur” of Alfred Lord Tennyson. We will also make space for humorous and satirical versions, since as Henry Fielding’s popular 1731 play The Tragedy of Tragedies; or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. The final part of the class will allow us to sample contemporary takes on the material, so be prepared to discuss your favorite version(s) of Arthur!

ENGL*338*01: Perspectives on a Single Author: Edgar Allan Poe (Hamelman)

Notwithstanding many personal and professional difficulties, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) carved out a canonical place in American literature and culture. He is that rare author whose imagination appeals to readers of all ages and whose works continually adapt to new historical and social conditions. A perennial touchstone author of American gothic/horror fiction, Poe also mastered other genres such as lyric poetry and satire/hoax, and he more or less originated the detective tale, whose offshoots include innumerable crime dramas pervading American television and cinema. Finally, as a theorist, Poe stood out, arguing against the “heresy of the didactic” common in mid-nineteenth-century popular poetry. In this course we close-read many examples from these genres, analyze Poe’s aesthetics, and contextualize his creations not only in his own era of print but also in our digital/virtual world, where interest in his “relatable” themes and tropes has not diminished.

ENGL*350*01: Language Variation in America (Hasty)

Why do those people up North (i.e., Yankees) talk the way they do? How can those people in the South (i.e., Rednecks) sound so nice yet still so dumb? Why don't the people out West have an accent? Do I have an accent? In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style-related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different from each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so-called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real-world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

ENGL*365*01: Creative Nonfiction I (Hanafi)

This writing workshop is focused on process, with plenty of room for experimentation. We'll read and discuss works of creative nonfiction in print, digital, and visual forms, and encounter different, often innovative, methods of research and arrangement. You'll experiment with creative ways of doing research and generating material, such as being outdoors, browsing the internet, talking, and playing games of chance. As a group, we'll work on getting and giving feedback that's suited to wherever we are in the process. The workshop can be useful for both artists and writers; the skills and techniques you'll develop might be applied to artmaking in many forms.

ENGL*382*01: Contemporary Fiction (Port)

In this course, we will read some of the most compelling and influential works of fiction published in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We’ll explore their diverse literary strategies and investigate how they respond to the unsettling social, political, and technological developments of recent years. Our readings will include multicultural voices of post-imperial Britain and former colonies. They will address urgent concerns such as ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and nationalism; the climate crisis; the effects of rapid technological advancement; and ongoing reverberations of empire, war, and terrorism. Our novels and short stories will include selections from highly regarded authors such as Kamila Shamsie, Bernadine Evaristo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. While fiction can’t solve problems, it can help us help us understand, reframe, and respond to circumstances we face as individuals and on a collective scale. Studying these course texts together will provide an opportunity to reflect productively on individual choices and relationships as well as on some of the pressing challenges confronting our contemporary world.

ENGL*386*01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry-American Poetry, 1993-2023 (Albergotti)

This section of ENGL 386 will look specifically at American Poetry of the last 30 years. We will read broadly and in depth, sampling as much as we can while also trying to bring into focus a sharper view of the landscape of American poetry today. In addition to reading work by a wide variety of practicing poets on the page, we will also have the opportunity to speak with a number of them face-to-face via Zoom visits to our classroom. Part literary studies, part art appreciation, this course will dive deep into the rich diversity of contemporary practice in American poetry in a way that will be useful and illuminating to the student of literature, the aspiring poet, and—dare I say it?—the interested reader. While this is not specifically a creative writing class, students will have the opportunity to write poems to fulfill part of the course’s assignments.

ENGL*392*01: Writing in Professional and Public Setting (Sobota)

Students will explore writing that happens in the 21^st century workplace, where close attention to audience, context and purpose guide a writer’s decisions. We’ll consider how writing occurs in government agencies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions. Course methods will approach textual creation from an ethical and rhetorical perspective, considering ways texts interweave various threads: specialized and general knowledge; information, education and persuasion; public and community relations; and, importantly, citizenship and morality. We’ll analyze and create texts for both print and digital channels, including a feature story, a compilation, an opinion article, and a non-profit blog.

ENGL*411*Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Boyle)

This class serves as the summative experience representing a student’s progress through and completion of the English degree. It provides a forum for both reflection upon and assessment of the student’s experience in the major.

Assignments focus principally on the production of a professional level portfolio that students may utilize in a postgraduate context. Students revise and create written assignments and samples; video and media-ready resumes; and practice telling their professional stories for a variety of audiences. Students are introduced to guest speakers that help them prepare for graduate school; construct a profile through writing and media; and attend events like the English Futures Speaker Series, where they hear from professionals and scholars who have translated their humanities training into an exciting spectrum of opportunities.

The course also includes activities designed to help the department assess its program as well as the opportunity for an exit interview.

ENGL*451*01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language — what we refer to as linguistics. We will go beyond providing an overview of the field, and will draw on real-world language data to emphasize the methods of linguistic analysis and ability in the areas of sound patterns (phonetics and phonology), words and word formation (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), meaning (semantics), and discourse. Over the course of this semester, we will demonstrate how complex and interesting the language system is and how social and historical factors can contribute to language variation and change.

ENGL*453*D1 Development of the English Language (Hasty)

History of the English Language is an introduction to the field of Historical Linguistics, with a specific focus on the development of the English Language from its origins in Indo-European up to our current Present Day English. This course will provide you with the tools to do historical linguistic analysis in order to foster a deeper understanding of not only the history of the English language but also a knowledge of the methods through which this history was uncovered. By the end of the course, you should have an understanding of the following: how and why language changes, how to analyze and represent sounds graphically, how writing systems differ from each other and from speech, how and why languages are grouped together into families, and specific phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical differences between Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Present Day English. To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply historical linguistic analysis to real world language data.

ENGL*457*01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

What do we mean by writing style? This class develops an understanding of style as a choice — or rather, as a set of choices. Every time you choose to write a sentence one way rather than another, you have made a stylistic choice. Your writing has attained a style, however, only when the set of the choices you make add up to something recognizable, consistent, and true. This course is an intensive workshop in improving prose style. We will cover research and citation styles (what many students mean by “style”), but we focus on improving your ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with wit, elegance, and power. We will cover issues of clarity, concision, coherence, cohesion, and other elements of practical style; control of sentence length, rhythm, and pacing; and a variety of rhetorical figures, including tropes of argument. You will both revise previously written pieces and compose new work.

ENGL*459*01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Paster)

Are you interested in writing? Want to take a close look at your writing process and experiment with some new strategies for producing, revising, and rethinking texts? Want to contextualize that work by learning about how the field of composition talks about the social activity of writing? Want to step into new genres as you reflect on all of the writing you compose? This section of ENGL 459 takes a hard look at writing, considering it as both a process and a product, as something we do and something we study. This course will give you an opportunity to build on your existing strategies for crafting a variety of texts as you experiment with approaches that are offered by scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric as “best practices.” In addition to examining (and often critiquing) the work often associated with writing for the college classroom and, in larger terms, academic contexts, this course will also introduce you to the academic field of Composition, a field you might not yet be familiar with. As you read a sampling of rhetorical and writing studies theory, you can expect to question the social and ideological nature of writing and, by extension, the complexities associated with communication and language use itself. As you do this, you will reflect critically on your own writing habits and experiment with new ways of crafting rhetorically effective and engaging pieces.

ENGL*462*02: Fiction II (Ockert)

This is an advanced course in fiction writing and in it we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. You will write at least two original short pieces which will be read and critiqued by the entire class. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. “Greatness,” I’m hoping, will rub off on you. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to read your peers’ writing in a workshop setting. Building on what you’ve learned in previous creative writing courses, we will study contemporary elements of style and seek to understand what makes a good short story good.

ENGL*468*01: Poetry II (Albergotti)

Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Dickinson says it makes her feel “as if the top of [her] head were taken off.” Bishop says that producing it involves “hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.” And Pound says that our job in writing it is to “make it new.” In this workshop course, we’ll see if any or all of those poets are right. And we’ll do our best to say something ourselves, to contribute to a conversation that spans centuries. At the very least, we’ll create some works of art that did not exist before, and that’s usually a good thing. And if we’re very lucky, some of those works will live longer than us. That’s the goal, anyway. So let’s get together and try to make some “memorable speech” (that’s Auden again) by writing in lines as well as sentences. [Note: It is recommended, but not required, that students complete ENGL 368 before enrolling in ENGL 468.]

ENGL*483*01: Theory of Literary Criticism (Smith)

This course will survey major figures and discussions surrounding critical and literary theory in the 20^th century. From the New Critics to the Frankfort School, from Du Bois to Deleuze, we will spend the semester parsing out the relationship between theory and criticism and what both can tell us about how we engage literature today. Throughout the semester you will also have opportunities to put literary theory into practice by producing your own readings of fiction, poetry, and drama. Please email csmith8@coastal.edu if you have any questions.

ENGL*484*D1: Children’s Literature (Arnold)

This distance-learning course takes a scholarly approach to the understanding and appreciation of works appropriate for elementary and middle school children. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of reading levels, genres, themes, and cultures. Assignments focus on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating children’s literature and illustration; using children’s book awards, book lists, and other tools for selecting children’s books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books in any children’s literature library. Members of the learning community in this class are expected to participate actively in online class activities; contribute to a shared class book list through composing an annotated bibliography; gain practice reading aloud and presenting literature in an online environment; develop a working knowledge of tools for locating children’s books; and become familiar with issues and scholarship in the field of children's literature. High-speed Internet access, an updated web browser, and access to the Moodle learning management system are required for this distance-learning course.

ENGL 600 Level

ENGL*602*E1: Principles of Editing and Publishing (Oestreich, K)

Students will work with COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education) to gain valuable skills by learning HTML and the editing skills necessary to then review, write, and copy edit for the COVE digital collective. Tasks may include but are not limited to encoding primary material from a variety of fields (following clear semantic guidelines); facilitating the creation of timelines for specific projects; helping to build COVE's Master Map (Google Map search and place annotation); and copyediting articles and editions at standards that meet or exceed those of traditional academic presses. COVE is getting very close to having 14 million words of content, the equivalent of a 56-volume encyclopedia, and we will be adding to that massive corpus by encoding Talia Schaffer’s Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006), among others. Students will also read articles on the role of digital text creation in English departments, English language writing and reading praxis, and current commercial and academic publication structures.

Student Learning Goals

gain technology, writing, and copyediting skills and publishing experience
contribute to a digital repository that will influence future teaching
create definitive web editions of texts and maintain the consistent journalistic excellence and integrity of the COVE website

ENGL*604*E1: Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

This course will explore major discussions in the field of Rhetoric and Composition from the mid-1960s to the present. Using James Berlin's mapping of the field into three distinct rhetorics—expressivist, cognitive, and social-epistemic—we will see how these trajectories have played out historically in the theory and practice of composition. Similarly, we will spend a lot of time bringing those conversations to more contemporary research in the related fields of creative writing studies, digital rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and composition studies. Along with more conventional academic essays, students will be asked to engage and produce a variety of multimodal compositions. If you would like to discuss the course further, please contact csmith8@coastal.edu.

ENGL*655*E1: Graduate Writing Workshop, Creative Nonfiction (Hanafi)

ENGL*658*E1: Graduate Writing Workshop, Poetry (Albergotti)

In this graduate-level poetry workshop, we will explore a lot of possible avenues to the making of poems. We’ll write and workshop at least seven poems during the semester. Students will receive ample feedback and assemble a polished portfolio of their poems at the end of the course.

Fall 2022

**ENGL 300 *01 Critical Conversations in English: (Smith)**

A research-intensive course that offers English majors the opportunity to examine a critical issue current in the discipline of English studies and to participate in a rigorous exchange about this issue with their peers. Depending on the demonstrated scholarly expertise and active research agenda of the instructor, the course will explore a range of theoretical and historical models of reading and reception. English majors should take the course in the first semester of their junior year (or for more advanced majors, during the second semester of their sophomore year). Sections of the course will be offered in both fall and spring semesters and enrollment will be limited to 20 students. This course may be repeated for credit once under a different instructor.

**ENGL 301 *01 Forms of Creative Writing (Albergotti)**

A course that introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. We will study the elements of craft that apply to a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We will examine poems, stories, and essays by successful writers in an effort to understand their craft; we will produce and discuss our own pieces of writing; and we will develop our abilities to provide effective, helpful feedback to pieces of writing created by others. We will also work on becoming better readers of contemporary literature, not just better writers of it.

**ENGL 301 *D1 Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

In this online-only distance learning course students examine the history, movements, and technical forms of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops.

**ENGL 303 *01 British Literature I (Ennis)**

A survey of representative works illustrating the development of British literature from its beginning through the eighteenth century, with an emphasis on major literary movements understood in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts.

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

This course develops students’ knowledge of a wide range of American literary and cultural texts that are critically analyzed within particular social historical, political, theoretical, popular, and/or aesthetic contexts. Through various overlapping forms of representation (textual, digital, aural, visual) students explore the major social, cultural, and political concerns of British literature and culture, including, industrialization and urbanization, ideologies of class and gender, nation and empire, scientific progress and religious crisis, technological innovation, and modernization. The literary and cultural texts that students read, view, and listen to include canonical as well as lesser-known titles that the instructor selects from theses main sources: poetry, fiction, non-fiction contemporary video, musical lyric, and/or cinema. The course features interactive and diverse approaches to assessment, from traditional papers to digital collaborations that show student engagement with British texts and their literary/cultural contexts.

**ENGL 334 *01 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture: Empire and Its Legacies (Port)**

This section of ENGL 334 will trace the expansion and decline of the British empire, considering the complex dynamics of authority and influence. We’ll see how personal and political landscapes intersect in a range of works, including fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music. With a focus on subjectivity, diversity, and crosspollination, we’ll discuss how “British” national and postcolonial identities have been constructed and challenged over time through a compelling range of individual voices and stories.

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Magical and Other Realisms (Oldfield)**

In this course we'll be reading wold literature in translation with a focus on fiction that chooses to interact with lived human experience in imaginative ways - folkloric, psychological, surrealistic, speculative, magical, weird. Although geographies are in the imaginary, the course will include authors from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe/Eurasia. Some of the featured (real) authors include Julio Cortazar, Haruki Murakami, Sharnush Parsipur, Suzanne Césaire, Bruno Shultz, and Anna Akhmatova. The course will consist of reading, discussion and writing.

**ENGL 341 *01 African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)**

This course surveys the African-American literary tradition, covering the periods of the antebellum U.S., slavery, post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and postmodernism. Using various genres from and beyond the canon, we will explore the past and the history of African American literary production to engage with speculative futures. Many of our readings will explore topics of resistance to racism and gender discrimination as well as topics about Black life, love, identity, and futures. We will also work to understand the major themes of the African-American literary tradition. These include double-consciousness, uplift, signifying, and more recent speculative understandings of Black futures. Students may take this course to fulfill their English major and minor requirements, and most reading materials will be provided on Moodle.

**ENGL 351 *01 Language, Gender and Power (Fleckenstein)**

The course investigates language structure and usage patterns in the context of gender to achieve a better understanding of the way language reflects the changing roles of women and men. Differences in gender-based language use, language references, and the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors related to these differences are examined in this course.

**ENGL 354 *01 English Grammar and Syntax (Hasty)**

Although we use it every day and often have strong opinions about its proper form and appropriate use, we rarely stop to think about the wonder of Language. You are reading and understanding these sentences, but you have no conscious knowledge of how you are doing this. That is, you have some implicit knowledge of language, but you aren’t able to express how you know the things you know. For example, you know that sentences like Wash your hands! are OK without having a stated word as the subject, but why then is *Ran to the store. bad? You know that the second sentence is bad in some way, yet you can’t really express why (and the “rules” you were taught in grade school don’t seem to help you explain this). The study of the mystery of Language is the science of Linguistics. This class is about one aspect of linguistics: how sentences are structured, what linguists call Syntax. One of the most interesting questions in linguistics is how we subconsciously get from sounds and words to organize those words into what we intend to say (the sentence). By the end of this course you should have gained a solid understanding of modern syntactic theory as well as the ability to apply this theory to a variety of novel sentence structures in English and other world languages.

**ENGL 362 *01 Fiction I (Ockert)**

An introductory creative writing workshop course in which students study published contemporary short stories and create original works of short fiction. Students read and critique both published and student work.

**ENGL 368 *01 Poetry I (Albergotti)**

Poetry I is an introductory poetry writing workshop that focuses on fundamentals and forms. Students will study a variety of poetic forms and techniques and will read a broad range of poems, both classic and contemporary. The majority of the coursework involves the writing and discussion of poems by members of the class. For the final project, students assemble a portfolio of the poems they have produced during the semester, both in original and revised versions, along with reflective discussions of the writing and revision process. ENGL 368 is designed to lay the groundwork for further study in ENGL 468: Poetry II. Students who wish to take ENGL 468 are strongly encouraged to take ENGL 368 first.

**ENGL 379 *01 Special Topics in Film Studies (Oestreich, K)**

Everyone has an opinion on which is better: the book or the film. This course will teach you how to elevate this debate by introducing you to film adaptation theory and principles of film form in order to analyze intermedial (e.g., book to film) adaptations of canonical nineteenth-century British literature. You will read excerpts from novels before studying their adaptations, which may include but are not limited to Frankenstein (1931), Pride and Prejudice (2006), Jane Eyre (2011), Wuthering Heights (2011), The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013-14), Emma (2019), Rebecca (2020), and Persuasion (if it is released in time), as well as the literary parody web series, Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party (2016). By the end of this term, you will have acquired the vocabulary and theoretical background necessary to write analytically about both the original source text and its adaptation.

**ENGL 391 *01 Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)**

This course is designed to expose you to form and content: research methods and knowledge pertaining to the field of New Literacy Studies. Basic concepts in the discipline include an understanding of literacies as multiple and layered, concepts around the “sponsorship” of learners who enter particular discourses, and connections between literacies and communities. When we study this topic, we study not only the skills of reading and writing, but the way the ability to navigate text serves as a resource for individual and groups in their daily lives. For this reason, we will study literacies within the context of a certain time and place, considering how learning and using discourse changes from one historical location and community to the next. The study of literacies coincides with a variety of different fields, including education, English Studies, Composition and Rhetoric, and sociolinguistics; the texts we cover this semester will reflect this diversity while keeping us focused on questions of how language-use impacts groups and individuals. While the questions and interests you bring to the class will guide our discussions, some general questions we will reflect upon during the semester include:

• How do we define literacy and literacies?

• What different perspectives make up conversations in Literacy Studies?

• How do different literacies interact within communities and impact identity?

While this course primarily focuses on literacies in the US – historical and contemporary – we will also incorporate acknowledgement of the transnational nature of language and education to explore interactions as literacies and languages come into contact.

**ENGL 411 *Q1 English Capstone Seminar (Pillai)**

This class provides a forum for both reflection upon and assessment of the student’s experience in the major. Readings and writing assignments will focus on the discipline of English in a postgraduate context, the professional potential of the English degree, portfolio construction, and revision of existing writings for publications. The course will also include activities designed to help the department assess its program as well as the opportunity for an exit interview.

**ENGL 443 *01 Topics in Women Writers: Bridges to Everywhere: Intersectional Storytelling and Feminist Practice (Pillai)**

This course will introduce students to feminist texts, theories, and practices that, through their intersectional storytelling methods, forge social change in diverse environments across the world. In particular, we will focus on the works of writers and directors who examine the interconnectedness of gender, religion, race, age, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, and locationality in peoples’ lived experiences and everyday struggles. No book purchase needed.

**ENGL 451 *01 Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

This course provides an introduction to the theories that structure the field of Composition and Rhetoric to advance students’ knowledge and build vocabulary to discuss reading, writing, and how texts function in the social world. We will combine this theory with practice by writing using different genres and developing research skills. These methods will allow students to explore questions about ways language connects to how we see others and ourselves, critically interrogating literacy learning, discourse communities, and rhetorical theory. Implementing process-based writing will also encourage students to cultivate content and clarity in their writing by working through multiple drafts and learning about effective revision strategies.

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Nonfiction II (Hanafi)**

An advanced creative writing workshop course in which students study published contemporary narrative nonfiction and create original nonfiction essays. Students read and critique both published and student work.

**ENGL 483 *01 Theory of Literary Criticism: (Smith)**

A study of various theories of literary criticism as applied to the major genres (fiction, poetry, and drama) with the aim of establishing standards of judgment.

**ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)**

This course introduces students to the wide variety of young adult literature available for middle and high school readers, along with current issues, trends, and scholarship in the field of young adult literature. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. We will read fantasy and historical fiction, dystopian literature and graphic novels. We will read of the experiences of migrant workers, Native Americans living on a reservation, and Jews suffering through the Holocaust, along with wizards, heroes, anti-heroes, and a host of other characters. Along the way, we will focus our discussions on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating young adult literature and illustration; using book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books. Whether you plan to teach, you consider becoming a librarian, you want to share good books with a child, grandchild, niece or nephew, or you simply want to learn more about the field of adolescent literature, this course has lots for you to enjoy and learn

Spring 2022

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English (Smith)**

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

In this online-only distance learning course students examine the history, movements, and technical forms of creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. Each student will have one essay, two poems, and one short story read and critiqued by the entire class. The philosophy behind the workshop format is to broaden a writer’s knowledge base and provide him/her with further tools with which to sharpen his/her craft.

**ENGL 306 *01: American Literature II (Lowery)**

American literature from the Civil War to the present presents several works that encompass a dizzying array of styles and perspectives on topics as diverse as reconstruction, feminism and gender, naturalism, Local Color writing, the Great Migration, world war, modernism, identity, race, and technology. In this course, we will examine whether such a monolithic understanding of the nation’s literature is even productive or possible. Thus, while we will study the various reading selections with an aim to recognize the development of American literature, we will keep an eye on questioning our conception of what American literature has been, is now, and will be in the future.

The selected readings do not represent American literature in a definitive way, but instead, show us early and present conceptions of the America we have come to understand. We will use the selections to deepen our knowledge about what goes unspoken about the gaps in our nation’s literature. In order to do this sort of evaluation effectively, we must attend to formal elements, thematic contents, historical meaningfulness, philosophical contributions, and cultural identities.

**ENGL 323 *01: Modern British/Irish Literature: 1922, Modernism’s Miracle Year (Port)**

The first half of the twentieth century was a time of rapid changes throughout Europe, many of which resonate in our own time of profound cultural shifts. Technological and scientific advances, economic developments, and social transformations led to new ways of experiencing space and time and new conceptions of human character. The growth of cities, rising consumerism, cross-cultural colonial encounters, and the crises of world wars coincided with—and contributed to—the erosion of long-held certainties about empire, religion, marriage, and morality. These radical changes contributed to a widespread sense of alienation, anxiety, and instability, along with an awareness of creative empowerment and artistic possibility. Artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers responded to their changing environment with innovative aesthetic forms that broke dramatically from the conventions of previous generations.

ENGL 323 begins with an introduction to some of the theoretical and historical foundations of modernism and goes on to explore a number of the most groundbreaking, influential literary texts written by British and Irish authors during this period (approximately 1890-1945). In Spring 2022, we will center our studies on several remarkable works published in 1922, which has been dubbed the annus mirabilis (miracle year) of literary modernism: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Our discussions will be enriched by consideration of related works as well as parallel developments in modernist visual art, film, music, and dance. We will round out our semester by considering contemporary responses to these texts and the ongoing influence of modernist aesthetics today. In addition to learning about these cultural touchstones in their historical and aesthetic contexts, you will sharpen your skills in attentive reading, thoughtful discussion, and effective writing.

**ENGL 338 01: Perspectives on a Single Author: Edgar Allan Poe* (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in America (Hasty)**

In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style-related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different from each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so-called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real-world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

**ENGL 365 *01: Creative Nonfiction I (Burch)**

Literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary creative nonfiction and create original works of creative nonfiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work. This course is writing intensive.

**ENGL 375 *01: Special Topics in World and Anglophone Literature: Philosophy and Literature (Oldfield/Rauhut)**

Creative literature and philosophy both explore human experience in the world, often asking many of the same questions about ethics and embodiment, language and subjectivity, reality and consciousness. In this class, co taught by Dr. Oldfield (English) and Dr. Rauhut (Philosophy), we’ll alternate reading World literary texts, including by Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Borges, with philosophical readings, including by Nietzsche, Freud and Camus. Whether you’ve taken philosophy before or would like to be introduced to it, in this course we’ll see how much literature and philosophy are intertwined while considering their different approaches. Cross listed with PHIL 310 and LIS 375.

**ENGL 392 *01: Writing in Professional and Public Setting (Sobota)**

This course focuses on writing that happens in the world of work. It encompasses texts that inform, persuade, advocate, explain, and guide. These texts are crafted for specific rhetorical situations and involve close attention to audience, context, and purpose. We’ll look at ethical and rhetorical perspectives for a variety of texts that we read and write, considering the ways the following variables are interwoven: specialist and general knowledge; information, education, and persuasion; public and community relations; and, importantly, citizenship and morality. You’ll write a range of texts for print and digital channels, including internal and external messages, public service announcements, feature stories, and institutional profiles.

**ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 453 *D1 Development of the English Language (Hasty)**

**ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 462 *02: Fiction II (Ockert)**

**ENGL 468 *01: Poetry II (Albergotti)**

Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Dickinson says it makes her feel “as if the top of [her] head were taken off.” Bishop says that producing it involves “hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.” And Pound says that our job in writing it is to “make it new.” In this workshop course, we’ll see if any or all of those poets are right. And we’ll do our best to say something ourselves. At the very least, we’ll create some works of art that did not exist before, and that’s usually a good thing. And if we’re very lucky, some of those works will live longer than us. That’s the goal, anyway. So let’s get together and try to make some “memorable speech” (that’s Auden again) by writing in lines as well as sentences. [Note: It is recommended, but not required, that students complete ENGL 368 before enrolling in ENGL 468.]

**ENGL 483 01: Theory of Literary Criticism – Critical Theory: From Information to Insight* (Pillai)**

This course will answer three interconnected questions: what is “theory”; what does theory do; and what can we do with it? In essence theory, also known as critical theory, explores how knowledge works: how it is made or constructed in particular contexts, how it is shared among or withheld from peoples, and how it is challenged or reproduced in societies. In answering the “whats” and “hows” mentioned above, this course will inevitably address a crucial set of “whys,” a few of which are: why is knowledge often packaged as power; why does our excavation of seemingly clear-cut concepts unearth complicated matter; and why is theory crucial both to our pursuits of social change and our understanding of aesthetics?

Critical theory is embedded in interdisciplinarity. Diverse disciplines, including philosophy, history, sociology, politics, media studies, and literary cultural studies intersect in our theoretical analysis of cultural materials, texts, and phenomena. In this course we will study a variety of theoretical texts in diverse media. While some of what we read, watch, and hear in this course may challenge our cultural assumptions, we’ll emerge from the experience equipped with critical thinking tools that enable us to transform information into insight.

Students may take this course to fulfill requirements for their ENGL minor or major. The course is also useful for students interested in taking the praxis tests. No book purchase is needed for this course. Reading/viewing materials will be made available to you on Moodle. Contact tpillai@coastal.edu if you have any questions about the course.

**ENGL 484 *D1: Children’s Literature (Arnold)**

**ENGL 489 01: Gender and Sexuality in Literature- Subversive Pleasures: Histories and Theories of ‘Deviance’* (Pillai)**

In this course we will address two persistently controversial and interconnected questions that inform our expressions, experiences, and performances of gender and sexuality: What is deviance? And what is pleasure? In engaging with these questions, we will also address the historical, socio-cultural, economic, legal, political, philosophical, and psychological contexts within which both pleasure and deviance are continually defined, challenged, and reimagined. Our studies and conversations will hinge on our ability to identify and unearth the often complicated, intersectional logics of individual and collective identity that inform all our notions of pleasure (and pain) and deviance (and conformity). Throughout the semester we will study diverse visual, literary, and theoretical texts—movies/series and music videos, short stories and poems, and excerpts of works by theorists of gender and sexuality—and juxtapose the commonsense and uncommonsense understandings of deviance and pleasure explored within these works.

This is a cross-listed course: students may take this course to fulfill requirements for their ENGL and/or WGST minor or major. No book purchase is needed for this course. Reading/viewing materials will be made available to you on Moodle. Contact tpillai@coastal.edu if you have any questions about the course

Fall 2021

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English - Border Crossings: Migration in Contemporary Literature and Film (Port)**

Refugee, migrant, exile, alien: current news reports and political rhetoric often focus on efforts to cross national borders and attempts to limit such movement. Whether seeking to flee war, escape natural disaster, evade political or religious persecution, or increase economic opportunities, those who cross borders often have fascinating stories to tell. Our course will explore accounts of migration in contemporary fiction, film, and memoir with origins at the US border with Mexico, Ireland, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Our readings will be informed by a selection of theoretical texts on national and cultural identity, boundaries and belonging, language and translation, and the powers and failures of memory. These works provide an opportunity to probe some of the complexities around such concepts as home and homeland, diaspora and exile, race, ethnicity, and tradition, and to consider how these concepts are evolving in a world that has become increasingly transcultural and globalized, and—in reaction—increasingly nationalistic.

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

Students draw technical inspiration and enabling constraints from reading poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction with an emphasis on modernists, post-modernists, and contemporary writers. They share and receive feedback on their own weekly writings, keep a journal and a reading journal, and culminate in a personal portfolio and a collaborative class publication project.

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 311 *01: Topics in Shakespeare – Changing “Shakespeare” in the “Real World” and Our Future (Pillai)**

This course can also be taken as ENGL 338/”Perspectives on a Single Author”

As humans hurtle towards the second quarter of the 21^st century, we might wonder how our identities and practices can remain relevant in the future we’ll inhabit. Along with the four Cs of “critical thinking,” “communication,” “collaboration,” and “creativity” that are expected to play crucial roles in our professional and social lives, our ability to adapt to the many changes around us will be vital to our relevance and growth in the 21^st and 22^nd centuries. This is where studying “Shakespeare” comes in handy. For centuries, cancel culture has failed to shut down “Shakespeare” because Shakespearean storytelling—on the page, the stage, and on screens—has adapted to, reflected, and anticipated the various changes in our societies and environments. In this course we will explore the changing cultures and responsive practices of Shakespearean storytelling. Specifically, we will study its morphology and mutations through “original works,” “adaptations,” “appropriations” and “re/mediations.” We will critically analyze five “Shakespeare” stories told in diverse media and will engage with the following questions: why does a story come to be picked repeatedly by storytellers across cultures? How does it change with the change of hands and the change of time, place, cultures, forms, or media? How does the past embed itself in the future of a story, and how does the future version of a story deal with its past? If “Shakespeare” adapts exceptionally well to humans’ continual experimentations with critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, what can we learn about adaptability from “Shakespeare” that will enable us to be relevant in our futures?

No book purchase needed: reading and viewing materials will be made available online.

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)**

No Dead White Men: One of the clichés about English literature is that it is the study of dead white men; therefore, this section of ENGL 334 is breaking that stereotype by focusing exclusively on the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and cinema written by British women, enslaved persons, and colonized BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) from the end of the eighteenth century through the present day. The literature that was published by these authors tends to be less solipsistic, less interested in the solitary genius and more invested in ameliorating present cruelties by building relationships with their communities – emotionally, politically, didactically, polemically. We are going to read and respond to these traditionally under-represented persons’ takes on human rights, reform, abolition of slave trade, gender roles, war, imperialism, post-colonialism, literature, education, childhood, technological developments, and more.

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – The Question of Evil (Oldfield)**

Does evil exist? Is it natural, spiritual, a survival skill? How do we react when faced with evil? Can we transcend evil? Can one person's evil be another's good? Our species has been exploring these and other questions of evil since we began to reflect on ourselves in narrative, and in this class we'll explore along with them. In ENGL 335 our literature will include folklore, mythology, imaginative fiction, and other narrative arts from a spectrum of eras and cultures on all inhabited continents. Humanity is bound together by our shared questions of evil, and in this class we will bring our voices to this timeless and timely conversation.

**ENGL 337 *01 Perspectives on Genre – Spicing Things Up: Women’s Imaginative Labor and South Asian Diasporic Communities (Pillai)**

Diaspora: the dispersion or spread of groups of people beyond their traditional homelands or points of origin.

This course will introduce students to visual, audio, and written texts produced by women of the South Asian diaspora. From Kamala Harris to Padma Lakshmi the labor of diasporic women’s imaginative work represents the nexus of assimilation and alienation, just as it recalibrates the West’s normative logics of gendered belonging within spaces: within bodies, communities, and nations. Covering a variety of popular media—food shows, fashion journalism, political writing, talk shows, films, and short stories—we will analyze the creative and critical work of women of the South Asian diaspora who adopt intersectional methods to examine the interconnectedness of gender, religion, race, age, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, and location in peoples’ lived experiences.

No book purchase needed: reading and viewing materials will be made available online.

This course is cross-listed with WGST 301.

**ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)**

This course surveys the African-American literary tradition, covering the periods of slavery, post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and postmodernism. Using various genres in the canon, we will explore the past and the history of African American literary production in order to engage with present contexts of struggle. Many of our readings will explore topics of resistance to racism as well as topics about black life, love, and identity. We will also work to understand the major themes of the African-American literary tradition. These include double-consciousness, uplift, signifying, and the neo-slave narrative.

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)**

**ENGL 352 *01: African American English (Childs)**

A course that explores African American English from a linguistics and social perspective. Course content will focus on hypotheses of the development of African American English, linguistic theory as applied to African American English, and social/cultural dimensions of African American English.

**ENGL 355 *01: Introduction to Discourse Analysis (Fleckenstein)**

This course is an introduction to the close analysis of discourse, focusing initially and primarily on conversational discourse while also branching out to consider other types of interaction (e.g., institutional, online, and media discourse). Throughout this course, we will address questions related to discourse in terms of identity (how identities are reflected, created, negotiated, and repaired through talk), relationships (such as how people negotiate hierarchy and equality in interaction), meaning (how meanings are jointly created or not understood), social action (such as how speakers use language to criticize and apologize), culture (the interrelationship between language use and culture), technology (such as how social media is – and is not – changing discourse), as well as social problems (e.g., racial and gender discrimination) and social issues (such as the role of the English language in the U.S.).

**ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)**

**ENGL 368 *01: Poetry I (Albergotti)**

**ENGL 379 *01: Topics in Film Studies – World Film (Oldfield)**

Film has been a dynamic and transnational art since its beginning, and films have influenced each other across eras and cultures in exciting and unexpected ways. This course explores world film from origins to the present, looking at films in both historical /cultural contexts and as works of art that transcend their space and time. In this course we will discuss films from around the world, learn about major film movements, gain knowledge of the technical aspects of film art, and consider the ideas of film theorists. The class will be held in the Student Union movie theater and includes a mandatory lab for film screenings.

**ENGL 393 *01: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (Smith)**

As Judith Butler observed, rhetoric is “concerned with the question of how communication works, how reality becomes presented in language, [and] how we come to accept and transform our sense of reality through the means by which it is presented.” Given this definition, this course is designed to introduce you to the major concepts and theories associated with the rich history of rhetoric ranging from Plato to Posthumanism. While we will certainly spend time reading these texts closely and critically, we will also be using rhetorical theory to see what it can do in the world and how we come to represent that world to ourselves. This, of course, centers on a notion of persuasion, a term often considered synonymous with rhetoric, and how we come to be persuaded to identify with particular ideas and ideologies. But what is persuasion? How is it successfully accomplished? And why is it central to our notion of a deliberative democracy and the formation of a public sphere? Such questions will punctuate our semester as they thread through our discussions, thinking, and writing.

**ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction II (Burch)**

A workshop course in the writing of creative nonfiction. Students learn the craft of this “fourth genre,” developing skills in memoir, personal essay, nature writing, and/or other subgenres of creative nonfiction.

**ENGL 469 *01: Special Topics in Creative Writing: Eco - Justice Writing (Hensel)**

Eco-justice writing confronts the fact that pollution, climate change, and environmental degradation disproportionally affect disadvantaged communities. Students will read and write eco-justice poetry and eco-justice nonfiction. Workshops will give writers the opportunity to receive feedback for revision.

**ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Theory – Theory in a Digital World (Boyle) (Taught in the Digital Commons)**

In this course we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, video games, poems, VR devices, found objects, and Zoom memes, Covid mask art, etc. The fall 2021 course edition will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world—and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza. **Students work on new media/multimodal book in the online publishing platform, Scalar < https://scalar.me/anvc/>

**ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)**

This course introduces students to the wide variety of young adult literature available for middle and high school readers, along with current issues, trends, and scholarship in the field of young adult literature. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. We will read fantasy and historical fiction, dystopian literature and graphic novels. We will read of the experiences of migrant workers, Native Americans living on a reservation, and Jews suffering through the Holocaust, along with wizards, heroes, anti-heroes, and a host of other characters. Along the way, we will focus our discussions on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating young adult literature and illustration; using book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books. Whether you plan to teach, or you are considering becoming a librarian, or you want to share good books with a child, grandchild, niece or nephew, or you simply want to learn more about the field of adolescent literature, this course has lots for you to enjoy and learn.

Fall 2020

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: (Oestreich, K)**

In this section of ENGL 300, we are going to probe the idea of originality, specifically by investigating and discussing intramedial (one medium) and intermedial (two or more media) literary allusion, adaptation, and appropriation. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Invite-Only Dinner Party/Gala Dinner Party (created by Shipwrecked Comedy and produced by Funny or Die) provides the framework for this course. In the series, Poe invites over to dinner an assortment of notable Victorian-era authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and George Eliot. We will first read the literature of several of the authors featured in the web series and then watch the murder mystery web series before finally reading a “cannot be named until the mystery is solved” text. Part of the fun is that in order to understand the jokes and solve the crime, you must first know the literature! We will also be leveraging The COVE (The Central Online Victorian Educator), which is a scholar-driven open-access platform, to publish short, weekly, multimodal writing assignments.

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *02: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 303 *01: British Literature I (Moye)**

This course is the opening survey of British Literature that begins with the Anglo-Saxons and makes it up to Milton. The course is designed to be introductory, but is framed by arguments developed over the semester concerning the rise of English, the shift to a commercial economy, cultural hegemony, and the death of magic. Some works are in translation, but the student is expected to be able to read Chaucer in Middle English with the help of glosses.

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)**

No Dead White Men: One of the clichés about English literature is that it is the study of dead white men; therefore, this section of ENGL 334 is breaking that stereotype by focusing exclusively on the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and cinema written by British women, enslaved persons, and colonized British subjects of color from the end of the eighteenth century through the present day. The literature that was published by these authors tends to be less solipsistic, less interested in the solitary genius and more invested in ameliorating present cruelties by building relationships with their communities – emotionally, politically, didactically, polemically. We are going to read and respond to these traditionally under-represented persons’ takes on human rights, reform, abolition of slave trade, gender roles, war, imperialism, post-colonialism, literature, education, childhood, technological developments, and more.

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Classic/Reboot (Oldfield)**

If the so-called “classics” of world literature are mirrors of distant times and places, why do we keep retelling them? How do old stories, such as Homer's Odyssey, change over time with the retelling, and how do they enmesh themselves into our lives today? In this course, we’ll read “canonical” works from a number of different literary traditions alongside their contemporary retellings in fiction, drama, film and multimedia. This course will include weekly reading and writing as well as a semester paper.

**ENGL 337 *01 Perspectives on Genre – Women of Color (Pillai)**

Word on the Street: The Intercommunalism of Activist Writers

This course will introduce students to texts, genres, theories, and practices of activist writers who, through their mobilization of the written word, forge social justice movements across the world. In particular, we will focus on the creative and critical work of activists of color who adopt intersectional methodologies that examine and address the interconnectedness of gender, religion, race, age, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, sexuality, and locationality in peoples’ lived experiences and everyday struggles. Through their work and writing, the activists build what Maria Lugones calls an “intercommunalism” that is “firmly planted against the logic of boundedness … and binaries that produce hard-edged, ossified, exclusive groups.” In addition to analyzing the course texts as models for/of social justice activism, we will engage and collaborate with local and global activist organizations on diverse transdisciplinary projects that build coalitions across differences and embed their practices and work within non-totalizing frameworks of inclusivity and equity.

This cross-listed course (WGST 301) fulfills students’ program requirements for English and Women and Gender Studies, respectively.

**ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (To Be Announced)**

A survey of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century literature. Emphasis on the classic works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison.

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)**

**ENGL 351 *01: Language, Gender and Power (Childs)**

**ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)**

**ENGL 379 *01: Topics in Film Studies – Russian Film (Oldfield)**

Russia, an artistic powerhouse in all arts, has created some of the world’s great moments of film innovation, emotion, and raw power. Cinema arts burst into reality as a new public art form just as Russia stunned the world with a new experimental government, and film became both a product and a mirror of Russia's journey through the 20th century until today. In this course, we'll consider Russian film as a cultural, historical and artistic phenomenon. This course will include film screenings and weekly writing as well as a semester paper.

**ENGL 386 *01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry (To Be Announced)**

A study of the poetry of a variety of contemporary American and British poets.

**ENGL 391 *01: Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)**

This course introduces the sub-field of New Literacy Studies, with emphasis on how the discipline works in conversation with the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Students will read theoretical, pedagogical, and narrative texts to engage with questions about how we navigate multiple and layered literacies in everyday life as well as in the academy. This class will explore the diversity of the field of New Literacy Studies through historical texts, ethnographic work, and examining the structural side of the relationship between power and discourse.

**ENGL 411 *01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)**

This course introduces the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Along the way, we will work to develop a common vocabulary while discussing the writing process and how texts function in our social world. We will combine theory with practice by writing and researching in the discipline of Composition and Rhetoric and discover methods that will allow students to explore questions about the ways language connects us to others and to ourselves. Implementing process-based writing will also encourage students to cultivate content and clarity in their writing by working through multiple drafts and learning about effective revision strategies.

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction II (Oestreich, J)**

An advanced creative writing workshop course in which students study published contemporary narrative nonfiction and create original nonfiction essays. Students read, critique both published, and student work.

**ENGL 468 *01: Poetry II (Hensel)**

A workshop course in the writing of poetry. Students learn the craft of poetry, have their poems discussed in a workshop setting, and are guided in the preparation and submission of manuscripts for publication. Students will write poems in free verse and in traditional forms, and most of class time is spent in group discussion of student poems.

**ENGL 469 *01: Special Topics in Creative Writing: Writing Comedy (Liebeck)**

This class will chiefly explore comedic fiction, though we will supplement this liberally with the work of essayists, stand-up comedians, poets, sketch writers, and television and film writers in a quest for practical advice on writing the funny. We will examine the structure of jokes, tenets of improve, and the craft of character building and respond with our own creative writing and performance texts. All genres welcome.

**ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Theory – Theory in a Digital Age (Boyle)**

In this course, we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic, and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will rely on direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, video games, poems, VR devices, found objects, and bathroom slogans. The fall 2020 course will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world—and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and a final showcase session where we will mix the nourishment of theory with good food. Students will create a chapter of a media/multimodal book project in the online publishing platform Scalar as a final project <http://scalar.usc.edu/works/index-2/theory-in-a-digital-age-3>.

**ENGL 484 *01 Children’s Literature (Arnold)**

This course is designed to introduce students to the study of works appropriate for the elementary and middle school child. Students will develop an appreciation for children’s literature and an awareness of the wide variety of children’s literature available for elementary and middle school readers. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. Class discussions and assignments focus on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating children’s literature and illustration; using children’s book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting children’s books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books in children’s literature. Members of the learning community in this class are expected to participate actively in class discussion and group work; contribute to a shared class book list through composing an annotated bibliography; gain practice reading aloud, working with colleagues, and presenting literature to a group; develop a working knowledge of tools for locating children’s books; and become familiar with issues and scholarship in the field of children's literature.

Fall 2019

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: Murder by the Book: Crime & Convergent Media (Turner)**

Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing—it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out—we were having ducks for lunch—fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold…~ Agatha Christie, The Hollow (1946)

Popular British historian Lucy Worsley describes murder as one of the first and greatest mass-marketed entertainments of all time. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, this course will examine a range of entertainment media from the so-called “penny bloods” and the Victorian newspaper reports they were often based upon, to canonical British novels, cult-classic television series, millennial screen renditions, and resurrections of neo-Victorian true crime thrillers. We will approach narratives as cultural artifacts, paying particular attention to writing technologies both within narrative structures and across medial platforms. As our texts trace the historical development of the “science” of policing and detection, our analyses will be inspired by forensic methods as models for close reading evidence, textualities, and objecthood. Our goal will be to investigate and participate in the dark—but irresistible—media ecologies lurking around the arts of murder, interrogating how media has shaped the blockbuster crime formula over the past century. Authors may include Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Georgette Heyer, E.W. Hornung, Sheridan Le Fanu, Ngaoi Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, and Ethel Lina White.

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Burch)**

Students examine the history, movements, and technical forms of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops.

**ENGL 301 *02: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 303 *01: British Literature I (Moye)**

**ENGL 322 *01: Latin American Literature in Translation (Oldfield)**

This class will focus on modern and contemporary short stories from across the Spanish speaking regions of North, South and Central America. This course is Cross Listed with LIS 322 and will be co-taught by Professor Jose Sanjines. Combining the English and LIS classrooms will give us a chance to transcend the purely Anglophone perspective and enter into interdisciplinary conversations on the works. All texts will be in English translation.

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

This course develops students’ knowledge of a wide range of American literary and cultural texts that are critically analyzed within particular social historical, political, theoretical, popular, and/or aesthetic contexts. Through various overlapping forms of representation (textual, digital, aural, visual) students explore the major social, cultural, and political concerns of British literature and culture, including, industrialization and urbanization, ideologies of class and gender, nation and empire, scientific progress and religious crisis, technological innovation, and modernization. The literary and cultural texts that students read, view, and listen to include canonical as well as lesser known titles that the instructor selects from theses main sources: poetry, fiction, non-fiction contemporary video, musical lyric, and/or cinema. The course features interactive and diverse approaches to assessment, from traditional papers to digital collaborations that show student engagement with British texts and their literary/cultural contexts.

**ENGL 334 *01 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Port)**

This course develops students’ knowledge of a wide range of British literary and cultural texts that are critically analyzed within particular social historical, political, theoretical, popular, and/or aesthetic contexts. Through various overlapping forms of representation (textual, digital, aural, visual) students explore the major social, cultural, and political concerns of British literature and culture, including, industrialization and urbanization, ideologies of class and gender, nation and empire, scientific progress and religious crisis, technological innovation, and modernization. The literary and cultural texts that students read, view, and listen to include canonical as well as lesser known titles that the instructor selects from theses main sources: poetry, fiction, non-fiction contemporary video, musical lyric, and/or cinema. The course features interactive and diverse approaches to assessment, from traditional papers to digital collaborations that show student engagement with British texts and their literary/cultural contexts.

**ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (Gerald)**

This course is designed to study the relationship between African American writers (their literature, subjects, commentary and beliefs) and the political/economic practices embedded in American society/history. The course addresses recurrent subjects and themes present in African American literature such as: 1) protest and rebellion, (2) alienation, (3) invisibility, (4) self-denial, (5) self- hatred, (6) internal/external racism, (7) societal influences and rules (8) gender roles/ relationships (9) powerlessness (10) Anger and Retaliation.

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)**

In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style- related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different from each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so-called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real-world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

**ENGL 351 *01: Language, Gender and Power (Childs)**

**ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)**

An introductory creative writing workshop course in which students study published contemporary short stories and create original works of short of short fiction. Students read and critique both published and student work.

**ENGL 371 *01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersections (Oldfield)**

What is the difference between explorer and colonizer? Traveler and tourist? Refugee and immigrant? How does the literary journey create and shape our impressions and expectations of the world? This course explores themes of travel ‘East’ and ‘West’ from ancient to contemporary times, considering different perspectives on the traveler, the journey and the encounter. All texts will be in English translation.

**ENGL 386 *01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry (Albergotti)**

This course explores contemporary American poetry of the last 50-75 years. We will spend the first part of the course looking at some of the semi-canonical poets of the mid- 20th century: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Frank O’Hara, and others. In the latter half of the course, we will read a wide variety of ultra-contemporary poets working and publishing right now: Erica Dawson, Patrick Phillips, Ross Gay, Katrina Vandenberg, Gregory Pardlo, and many others. Part literary studies, part art appreciation, this course will dive deep into the rich diversity of contemporary practice in American poetry. It may be of particular interest to young creative writers looking to expand their knowledge of the work being produced right now.

**ENGL 391 *01: Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)**

This course provides an introduction to the sub-field of New Literacy Studies, with emphasis on how the discipline works in conversation with the field of Composition and Rhetoric. Students will read theoretical, pedagogical, and narrative texts to engage with questions about how we navigate multiple and layered literacies in everyday life as well as in the academy. This class will explore the diversity of the field of New Literacy Studies through historical texts, ethnographic work, and examining the structural side of the relationship between power and discourse.

**ENGL 411 *01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis, applying scientific principles to linguistic material. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real world data.

**ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)**

This course will focus on composition and rhetoric as a digital practice. As such, it offers students the opportunity to read and discuss current theories of digital writing as well as explore those theories through new media productions of their own. Using free and open-source software, students will work to compose a variety of inquiry-based media projects—including a podcast and video series—in addition to more conventional modes of academic writing. This multi-genre approach invites students to critically engage what it means to compose and the rhetorical effects of media.

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction II (Oestreich, J)**

**ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Theory – Theory in a Digital Age (Boyle)**

In this course we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic, and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will rely on direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, video games, poems, VR devices, found objects, and bathroom slogans. The fall 2020 course will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world—and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and a final showcase session where we will mix the nourishment of theory with good food. Students will create a chapter of a media/multimodal book project in the online publishing platform Scalar as a final project <http://scalar.usc.edu/works/index-2/theory-in-a-digital-age-3>.

**ENGL 485 *01: Adolescent Literature (Arnold)**

This course introduces students to the wide variety of young adult literature available for middle and high school readers, along with current issues, trends, and scholarship in the field of young adult literature. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. We will read fantasy and historical fiction, dystopian literature and graphic novels. We will read of the experiences of migrant workers, Native Americans living on a reservation, and Jews suffering through the Holocaust, along with wizards, heroes, anti-heroes, and a host of other characters. Along the way, we will focus our discussions on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating young adult literature and illustration; using book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books. Whether you plan to teach, or you are considering becoming a librarian, or you want to share good books with a child, grandchild, niece or nephew, or you simply want to learn more about the field of adolescent literature, this course has lots for you to enjoy and learn.

Fall 2018

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: Murder by the Book: Crime & Convergent Media (Turner)

“[S]omething more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.” ~ Thomas De Quincey, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827)

“Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing—it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out—we were having ducks for lunch—fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold...” ~ Agatha Christie, The Hollow (1946)

Popular British historian Lucy Worsley describes murder as one of the first and greatest mass-marketed entertainments of all time. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, this course will examine a range of entertainment media from the so-called “penny bloods” and the Victorian newspaper reports they were often based upon, to canonical British novels, cult-classic television series, millennial screen renditions, and viral fan-created pastiches. We will approach narratives as cultural artifacts, paying particular attention to writing technologies both within narrative structures and across medial platforms. As our texts trace the historical development of the “science” of policing and detection, our analyses will be inspired by forensic methods as models for close reading evidence, textualities, and objecthood. Our goal will be to investigate and participate in the dark—but irresistible—media ecologies lurking around the arts of murder, interrogating how mediation has shaped the blockbuster crime formula over the past century. Authors may include Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.W. Hornung, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Ethel Lina White, Ngaoi Marsh, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, and P.D. James. We will also integrate screen adaptations of several deadly classics—from Hitchcock to Sherlock—throughout the semester.

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English: Graphene Aesthetics: Stretchy-Strong-Skinny Categories of Millennial Judgment (Pillai)

Through an exploration of these and related questions, our course will focus on the underbelly of aesthetics, on what I refer to as the stretchiest and sketchiest of aesthetic categories. We will study the development of these aesthetics through the lens of cinema, both popular and elite. Through our critical engagement with the films and our readings in aesthetics, we will explore the inextricable if complex connections among established and emergent aesthetic categories. Moreover, we will consider the possibilities of critically empowering hitherto undervalued terms and concepts we use in our everyday aesthetic engagements with our environments.

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Richardson)

ENGL 301 *03: Creative Writing Workshop (Hensel)

This course will introduce you to the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. The class will operate under a loose imitative model; that is, students will read great examples in each genre before writing their own pieces. A heavy emphasis will be placed on concrete imagery, putting the best words in the best order, understanding the interplay between form and content, and revising.

ENGL 301 *D1: Creative Writing Workshop (Ockert)

ENGL 303 01 and 02: British Literature I (Moye)

This course is the opening survey of British Literature that begins with the Anglo-Saxons and makes it up to Milton. The course is designed to be introductory but is framed by arguments developed over the semester concerning the rise of English, the shift to a commercial economy, cultural hegemony, and the death of magic. Some works are in translation, but the student is expected to be able to read Chaucer in Middle English with the help of glosses.

ENGL 305 01 and 02: American Literature I (Hamelman)

English 305 starts from the premise that studying the first two hundred years of American literature is excellent preparation for understanding and appreciating the more popular “canonical” literature, falling under the rubric of romanticism, of the nineteenth century. Themes and subjects that mark colonial and Enlightenment texts c. 1600-1800 are republican politics, the individual vs. the state, nature, the Indian and Other, free market economics, religion and spirituality, dream and vision, and American identity.

Paralleling this issue was the matter of women’s rights, which male and female writers addressed with the same fervor they gave to the slavery question. In English 305 we take what we learn about colonial and Enlightenment literature and culture and then analyze the ways writers of the romantic age diverged from these two earlier periods. Romantic transcendentalists, though drawing much of their inspiration from Puritan mysticism, inhabited a mindset far removed from the dogma we associate with our witch-hunting, introspective forebears in New England, and transcendentalists also rejected tenets of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, morbid romantics like Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville reflect a romanticism having little in common with the Enlightenment rationalism of Benjamin Franklin. In terms of the countless writers that resist categorization as either transcendental or morbid, we will look mainly at a few who tackled the question of constitutional freedom for women and slaves. Colonial-to-romantic American literature encompasses theological, political, social, economic, philosophical, and literary themes, all embedded in a multitude of genres. Reflected in the literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries is a wide range of material that represents a culture renowned as much for its dialectic diversity as for the comic and tragic paradoxes that underlie its ideology of free expression.

ENGL 311 *01 Topics in Shakespeare: Finding the Gaps with Shakespeare (Pillai)

Shakespeare is the English teacher’s go-to guy, the failsafe author whose plays and/or poems fill the gaps in any syllabus: a sonnet here, a play there, and the semester’s reading list on just about any literary topic is full and complete. The ability the Shakespearean text possesses to fill in the gaps or the otherwise uncomfortable vacant spaces in our systems of knowledge has been celebrated over centuries and across cultures. This is partly the reason Shakespeare is a staple in high school and university English curricula. Quite simply, in the context of literature, Shakespeare completes almost any picture.

But that isn’t in fact the entire picture, for the secret value of his works lies elsewhere. Shakespeare’s texts explore our restless incompleteness as mobilized through the contagious forces of paradoxical human experience: pleasure in pain, vengeance in forgiveness, beauty in horror, and grandeur in pettiness, to name just a few. The plays have also the uncanny power to lacerate, that is, slice open the seemingly secure frames within which cultural and moral institutions exist and operate in society. Indeed, what makes Shakespeare fundamental to the world of English studies is his capacity to dissect without closing up (suturing) the various bodies that comprise our social, cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual being.

This course will cover six plays by Shakespeare. In our discussions we will focus on how the plays lacerate, wound, and contaminate us—through social and aesthetic exploration—to reveal critical gaps, both within cultural institutions and our narratives about ourselves.

ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (TBA)

ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)

In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style- related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different from each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so-called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real-world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

ENGL 351 *01: Language, Gender and Power (Childs)

The course investigates language structure and usage patterns in the context of gender to achieve a better understanding of the way language reflects the changing roles of women and men. Differences in gender–based language use, language references, and the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors related to these differences are examined in this writing intensive course.

ENGL 362 *01: Reading and Writing Fiction (Ockert)

A literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary short stories and create original works of short fiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work.

ENGL 368 *01: Reading and Writing Poetry (Albergotti)

Saul Bellow defines the writer as “a reader moved to emulation.” But the desire of readers to emulate writers they are moved by does not guarantee their success. How does someone successfully make the transition from reader to writer? One way is to train yourself to read in a different manner—not as an audience, as a critic, or as a scholar, but as a practitioner, an apprentice, an artist-in-training. This course is based on that premise: that we need to learn to read as writers, a very different task from reading in other contexts. For the first half of the course, we will read poems—some five hundred years old, some published for the first time during the semester—in an effort to better understand the writing of poetry in English. We will study traditional poetic form and free verse, trying to grasp them as tools for use, not phenomena to be observed. In the second half of the course, we will put our learning to the test by writing our own poems and evaluating them in workshop discussion.

ENGL 371 *01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersection (Oldfield)

This course explores the theme of travel and encounter in literature and other arts. Classes will feature a combination of in-class and virtual meetings with Prof. Oldfield from Tashkent State University and elsewhere in Central Asia. While we will be reading about travel and encounter with authors including Homer, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Lev Tolstoy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Italo Calvino, we will also be encountering the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan. Lectures delivered from Uzbekistan will include classes filmed on location from historical landmarks and cultural events, meetings with writers, musicians and other folks, conversations with Uzbek faculty and students, and online discussions with Uzbek students. This Hybrid Course will meet regularly in the assigned classroom throughout the semester and will include live sessions and discussions as well as independent reading, writing and projects.

ENGL 390 *01: Business and Professional Communication (Kellogg)

Academic writing looks very different from writing in professional settings (businesses, nonprofits, government agencies). This course teaches students about the most common genres of writing in the workplace and will help you develop the techniques and approaches used by successful writers on the job. You will investigate and game out career options, compose and revise documents appropriate to your long-term professional goals, learn professional editing skills, and craft a resume and a professional development plan that you will continue to use through your time at Coastal and beyond.

ENGL 391 *01: Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)

ENGL 411 *01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis, applying scientific principles to linguistic material. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real world data.

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459 *02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop (Burch)

ENGL 475 *01 Contemporary Asian Fiction (Moye)

We in the US know very little about Asia and China outside of the myths spread by an ill-informed media that has dubious motives and that is driven by one thing: sensationalism that gets ratings. Very few Americans can name the current leader of China. Very few can name just one of the four Chinese classic novels. Even fewer can name a single contemporary novelist, even though one of them, Mo Yan, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Why is this so? The Chinese were the first group of immigrants to be excluded from the United States, and this tradition of exclusion continues to this day. The central focus of humanities programs has stayed doggedly locked on the developed Western world and specifically on countries like England, France and Italy, despite all the professed efforts to go “global” and to counter marginalization. This course is a small attempt to shift that focus in a significant and lasting way. It promotes Chinese and Asian literature, moving from readings of the classics to the novels and short stories of some of the most accomplished contemporary writers, including the Nobel Laureate Mo Yan. The sophistication and brilliance of these works may surprise you, and the experience of reading them will bring you into a more intimate contact with one of the oldest and most lively cultures in the world. And it may just change how you look at Asia and China from now on.

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Theory in a Digital World (Boyle)

In this course we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, video games, poems, VR devices, found objects, and bathroom slogans. The fall 2018 course edition will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world—and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza. Students will work on new media/multimodal book projects in the online publishing platform Scalar.

ENGL 485 *01: Adolescent Literature (Arnold)

This course introduces students to the wide variety of young adult literature available for middle and high school readers, along with current issues, trends, and scholarship in the field of young adult literature. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. We will read fantasy and historical fiction, dystopian literature and graphic novels. We will read of the experiences of migrant workers, Native Americans living on a reservation, and Jews suffering through the Holocaust, along with wizards, heroes, anti-heroes, and a host of other characters. Along the way, we will focus our discussions on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating young adult literature and illustration; using book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books. Whether you plan to teach, or you are considering becoming a librarian, or you want to share good books with a child, grandchild, niece or nephew, or you simply want to learn more about the field of adolescent literature, this course has lots for you to enjoy and learn.

ENGL 487 *01 Literature Studies in Health, Illness and Aging – “Forever Young” (Port)

The search for the “Fountain of Youth” appears in various forms from classical mythology through recent narratives about cyborgs and cryonics. Unlike gender, sexuality, race, and other aspects of identity that have benefited from extensive academic attention, however, analysis of the cultural meanings of youth and age has only recently emerged as a growing field in cultural studies. This course will consider such concepts as youth, aging, and life stages; rejuvenation, longevity, and the drive to transcend mortality; and some of the ethical questions and social tensions that arise when older people are perceived as an economic burden while youthfulness is marketed as a valuable commodity. Our discussions will draw on literature, cinema, television, advertising, popular science, and other cultural texts. Contextual and theoretical approaches will include the history of science; medical and scientific ethics; futurism and transhumanism; age studies; genre studies; transcultural considerations; and intersections of age with gender, sexuality, race, class, dis/ability, and other categories of analysis.

Spring 2018

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: Spaced Out and Clocked In: Reading Space and Place (Pillai)**

Space is important to us. Not only do we fight wars and file lawsuits over contested spaces (land/property) that we desire to possess, but we also think spatially—about ourselves and about other beings. Even in our everyday language, we root ourselves in space: statements such as “use your inside voice”; “they may seem nice on the outside but really are rotten inside”; and “she needs space in their relationship” draw an indelible if complicated line between identity and space. Space is also understood to be intensely representational: we decorate or design our living spaces to put something of ourselves on display; groups battle over who may or may not use certain public spaces that they feel represent who they are. Indeed, our sense of space defines both our limitations and the ideas we have about transgressing limits.

This course will focus on our constructions of and relations with external and internal spaces and juxtapose them to our sense of identity, performance, and interiority. From the ways in which we adapt our everyday language about space to discuss the polarities of private and public identity to the ways in which spaces function metaphorically to represent our anxieties about identity and difference, we will map the cultural and aesthetic dynamics of space. Some of the spaces and concepts that we’ll explore in our critical conversations include: Green Space; Work Space; Domestic Space; Spaces of Intimacy; Spaces of Exhibition; Spaces of Community; Spaces of Isolation (space as shame); and the Virtual Space (the virtual as space). To engage the diversity of spatial culture, we will study a variety of spatial constructions and media, such as films and dramatic literature, common and uncommon architecture, public parks and private gardens, museums and living rooms, and lost and found objects, analyzing throughout the intersections and nuances of space and identity.

**ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English: Tolstoy (Oldfield)**

What do we live for? How are we influenced by the society around us? Why do soldiers agree to go to war? What is our relationship with nature and animals? How do we deal with death? Why do we fall in and out of love? Why is marriage so difficult? Why can’t we ever seem to do the right thing? Can we ever be happy? Although Russian literature has a reputation for high philosophy, the fiction of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is firmly grounded in the problems of everyday life. Obsessed with justice, class, war, faith, doubt, work, love and death, Tolstoy rebelled against the authorities, refused to pay taxes, got kicked out of the Church, became a vegetarian, and founded the modern civil disobedience movement. All this is poured into his writings along with his close observations of everyday life, making him a perfect subject for critical conversations on the intersections of literature, life, the world, and ourselves. In this class we will work with the writings of Tolstoy and other writers who influenced or were influenced by him. Readings will include short stories, essays, novels, and his masterpiece Anna Karenina.

**ENGL 301 01 and 03: Creative Writing Workshop (Richardson)**

**ENGL 304 01 and 02: British Literature II (Port)**

This section of ENGL 304 will trace the evolution of British literary history beginning with the late-eighteenth century and continuing through the present day. As the United Kingdom begins to negotiate its withdrawal from the European Union—a polarizing and potentially destabilizing “Brexit”--we’ll consider literary works that explore Britain’s evolving position in Europe and its ongoing legacy of empire and migration. From the revolutionary fervor of the Romantic poets to the vibrant richness of contemporary, multicultural Britain, we’ll explore how British writers have understood themselves both as a center of global energies and as an island apart.

**ENGL 306 01 & 02: American Literature II (Hamelman)**

American Literature II picks up where American Literature I (ENGL 305) ends—circa 1870 with the waning of the American Romantic period. Sticking to the traditional divisions of academic periodization, American Literature II (hereafter AMlit2) focuses on texts from the eras of Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Rather than a survey, AMlit2 is designed as a process linked to a historical narrative in which the American republic, despite becoming more multicultural and fragmented, seeks to sustain myths from a receding past while forging ahead into a world where the idea of myth itself falls to pieces under the pressures caused by loss of faith, the uncertainties of capitalism, unprecedented advances in technology, political upheaval, and shifts in sensibility. American writers, like their counterparts in music and art, express themselves in a wide range of sub-movements in which theory, genre, and style overlap (e.g., naturalism, imagism, noir, confessionalism, pop art, southern gothic). AMlit2 explores many of these sub-movements, all the while observing how classic American themes and obsessions such as self-reliance, nature, identity, god, race, and material wealth are reconfigured to reflect new realities, from local to global, facing all citizens of a culture whose claims to a providentially ordained exceptionalism become increasingly difficult to support. What the student will find in AMlit2 is that the best literary products of this 150-year period are indeed exceptional in terms of originality, diversity, and the writer’s conviction that literature possesses, as it did in the Romantic Age, the power to liberate readers from the shackles of ignorance, conformity, and materialism.

**ENGL 316 *01: The British Novel II (K. Turner)**

This course takes as its special focus the incarnations, remediation, adaptations, and remixes of canonical British novels from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. As we encounter some of the most beloved characters in British literature and best-selling novels of the past two centuries, we will examine our own pop culture’s preoccupation?with crime and detection; games and violence; identity and power; gender and class constructs; technological innovation and progress; nostalgia and the past. In our readings we will traverse dominant generic modes, such as romance, the Gothic, realism, and the neo-Victorian novel. Our analyses will help us to theorize issues surrounding the lasting power and entertainment value of specific Victorian narratives, characters, and plot dynamics. What makes an adaptable text? Why won’t these characters die? Why does this story remain attractive to millennial audiences? What other remixes are possible?

**ENGL 352 *01: African American English (Childs)**

**ENGL 365 *01: Reading and Writing Creative Non-Fiction (J. Oestreich)**

This course is designed to help you learn the elements of craft in creative nonfiction and its subgenres. It will operate in four units. In the first, you will learn the building blocks common to all forms of creative nonfiction—concepts such as writing in scene, narration vs. exposition, the importance of place and characterization, and writing to make meaning. Next we will study the forms of five nonfiction subgenres: memoir, the personal essay, the lyric essay, profile writing, and cultural criticism. In the third unit we will workshop several major works of contemporary nonfiction. This unit will be discussion-based, and these discussions will be led primarily by you, in groups of two. For the final unit, you will write an original creative essay (12-15 pages or approx. 3,500 words), which will be read and critiqued by the entire class.

**ENGL 375 *01: Special Topics in World Literature: Folklore and Magic Realism (Oldfield)**

Imaginative fiction has been intertwined with lived human reality since its origins. In this course we’ll compare the merger of language and the world in two fictional approaches – Folklore, which often works to stabilize human experience in a symbolic framework, and Magic Realism, which often seeks to shatter these frameworks - or at least shake them up a bit. Using these fictions we’ll explore varying approaches to lived reality – is there a middle road between symbolic gridlock and semiotic chaos? The course includes myth and folklore from across the world as well as readings from Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Clarice Lispector, Sharnush Parsipur, and Haruki Murakami.

**ENGL 379 *01: Special Topics in Film Studies: Cinematic and Transmedia Adaptations of British Literature (K. Oestreich)**

This course focuses on (1) the major elements of cinema (mise-en-scene, cinematography, narrative, editing, sound, and style) and (2) analyzing adaptation’s history, genres, and critical theory. Films / web series may include but are not limited to: Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), Polanski’s Tess (1979), Coppola’s Dracula (1992), Pemberley Digital’s Emma Approved (2013-14) and Frankenstein MD (2014), as well as the student-led web series, The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (2013-14). By the end of this term, students should have acquired the vocabulary and analytic skills with which they can discuss a film within these contexts. Through lectures and discussion of both written and filmed texts, you will be directed to approach the film screening with attention to particular techniques, scenes, or details. The follow-up discussion of the film will emphasize how the film illustrates material from the readings.

**ENGL 393 *01: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (Smith)**

**ENGL 401 *01: Chaucer (Moye)**

This course focuses mainly on the wildly innovative and slightly subversive Canterbury Tales, charting Chaucer’s movement from the court poet who produces works like the Knight’s Tale to the rowdy redneck poet of the people who talks trash like The Miller’s Tale. In following this movement, we will see how what we consider “modern” and “realistic” literature replaced the poetry of the aristocrats. What caused this shift? We will look closely at the changes rocking medieval society in some detail to answer this question. AND we will meet larger-than-life, power-hungry figures such as John of Gaunt and John Wycliffe.

**ENGL 411 *E1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)**

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis, applying scientific principles to language data. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real-world language data.

**ENGL 453 *E1: Development of the English Language (Moye)**

A study of the origins and development of languages in general, and of English and related languages in particular. No previous knowledge of Old and Middle English necessary.

**ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)**

**ENGL 459 *01: Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)**

This section of ENGL 459 takes a hard look at writing, considering it as both a process and a product, as something we do and something we create. This course provides students with an opportunity to build on their strategies for crafting academic texts as they experiment with approaches that work for them as writers. In addition to examining the work associated with writing for the college classroom and, in larger terms, academic contexts, this course also introduces the academic field of Composition Studies. As students read a sampling of rhetorical and comp theory, they can expect to question the social and ideological nature of writing and, by extension, the complexities associated with the teaching of composition.

**ENGL 459 *02: Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 462 *E1: Writing Workshop-Fiction (Richardson)**

A workshop course in the writing of literary fiction, especially the short story. Students have the opportunity to have their works read and critiqued by a group of fellow writers. We will explore traditional and experimental approaches to structure, place, time, voice, point of view, character, symbolism, and plot in a collaborative setting.

**ENGL 468 *01: Writing Workshop-Poetry (Hensel)**

**ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: “Against the Grain: Critical Disturbance and Other Uses of Theory” (Pillai)**

People have strong feelings about theory. To some it sucks and is confusing, while for others it is worthy of worship. While it’s neither sacred nor profane, theory is equipped to be both fun and exciting because it is equally curious about the sacred, the profane, and everything that’s in between. Perhaps owing to its promiscuous nature, theory can also be a lot of things to a lot of people. For those interested in literature, theory can be a non-literary tool used to understand the art comprehensively. For others interested in popular culture, it can be a device through which the everyday practices and pleasures of peoples are analyzed and connected. For still others interested in the formation and development of social institutions, theory can be the lens that reveals the rips and seams in the seemingly smooth construction of history.

Despite the differences in what we might use it as or for, critical theory is an exploration and “clarification” of the diverse “struggles and wishes” of the time in any given “age.” At the same time, it has the ability to disturb and unsettle those processes of our thinking, knowing, and being that systematically have been embedded in our imagination as commonsense. Theory manages to disturb the/our status quo because it is uncommonsense. Through it we resist the predictability and homogeneity of the processes of understanding or knowledge-making and explore instead the multiple capacities of difference, provocation, and critical empowerment that emerge when we go against the grain of reading texts and contexts.

We will study a variety of theoretical texts and apply them to specific visual artifacts—photographs, paintings, movies, music videos, and installations, for example. Together we will explore the ways in which we can, through our theoretical engagements and playful curiosities, be producers of critical disturbance and uncommonsense.

**ENGL 484 *01: Children’s Literature (Arnold)**

**ENGL 488 *01: Special Topics in World Literature: Women in the Islamic World (Oldfield)**

This course will study literature from four different regions: Caucasus/Central Asia, North Africa, Iran, and Pakistan – with a focus on literature by and about women. The Islamic world is exceptionally diverse, and by working across several cultures we’ll be able to study many views and viewpoints. We’ll also consider the intersection of literature with other arts, such as music, photography, film and architecture. As we explore, we’ll have the chance to question the frames through which we view other cultures and consider what we can learn not only about other people, but also about ourselves. This class will feature special guest lectures by visiting Fulbright Professor Mimouna Zitouni. Readings will range from folklore and Golden Age texts to 20th century novels and short stories.

Fall 2017

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English – Digital Data in the Humanities: (Childs)

Much has been said about the digital turn in the humanities. From the creation, curation, and utilization of digital data on both small and large scales within the humanities, contemporary humanities scholars must be comfortable within the constantly evolving digital space. In this English 300 course, our critical conversations, readings, and analyses will look at the development of digital humanities data sources and utilize them in research projects.

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English – Contemporary Poetry: Form and Freedom, Mystery and Mechanics (Albergotti)

This course will investigate a variety of issues surrounding the practice of contemporary poetry in America. We will read a wide selection of poems and commentary, focusing primarily on the question of form, understanding the free verse is itself a form despite its departure from more traditional formal elements of the art. Part of the course will involve individual students deeply researching the work and career of a single contemporary poet.

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *02: Creative Writing Workshop (TBA)

A course that introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops.

ENGL 303 01 and 02: British Literature I (Moye)

ENGL 305 *02: American Literature I (Hamelman)

Because these topics are fundamental to early American culture, the authors who treat them in a wide variety of genres—memoir, sermon, didactic poem, captivity narrative, satire, speech, letter, diary, and so on—lay the groundwork for what follows during the Age of American Romanticism (c. 1800-1865), when literature tends to express two sides, the transcendental and the morbid, of a new sensibility of feeling. But it is also a time when hard political and social issues absorbed writers. For one thing, the theme of slavery (connected on political and philosophical levels to the theme of the individual vs. the state) came to the forefront of American literary consciousness. Paralleling this issue was the matter of women’s rights, which male and female writers addressed with the same fervor they gave to the slavery question. In English 305 we take what we learn about colonial and Enlightenment literature and culture and then analyze the ways writers of the romantic age diverged from these two earlier periods. Romantic transcendentalists, though drawing much of their inspiration from Puritan mysticism, inhabited a mindset far removed from the dogma we associate with our witch-hunting, introspective forebears in New England, and transcendentalists also rejected tenets of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, morbid romantics like Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville reflect a romanticism having little in common with the Enlightenment rationalism of Benjamin Franklin. In terms of the countless writers that resist categorization as either transcendental or morbid, we will look mainly at a few who tackled the question of constitutional freedom for women and slaves. Colonial-to-romantic American literature encompasses theological, political, social, economic, philosophical, and literary themes, all embedded in a multitude of genres. Reflected in the literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries is a wide range of material that represents a culture renowned as much for its dialectic diversity as for the comic and tragic paradoxes that underlie its ideology of free expression.

ENGL 308 *01 Seventeenth-Century British Literature (Moye)

A study of the major English poets, dramatists, and prose writers of the Seventeenth Century.

ENGL 311 *01 Topics in Shakespeare: “Like the Greatest Spot of All Thy Sex”: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare (Pillai)

Readers who aren’t familiar with the works of Shakespeare might assume his plays are dense, that his language is difficult, and that his stories are dated, irrelevant to the nuances of modern or postmodern (or even post-human) life. Perhaps they might even assume based on the “thee … thou” clichés that his works are incomprehensible or boring. What they don’t know is that Shakespeare’s works are almost always about sex. And sex is always interesting, always relevant. Indeed, a study of Shakespeare’s plays reveals that his works are steeped in issues of sex and sexuality that are trans-historically and transculturally relevant to us. Yes, his plays are difficult—more precisely, they are complex. But this is because in them he uncovers some of the most complex networks that inform the human condition.

In this course we will investigate the network of sexual relations and sexuality as it emerges in five plays of Shakespeare. In these plays the intricacies of sex (repression, convention, transgression, frustration, fruition, reproduction, death, appropriation, competition, satisfaction, and so on) seep into characters’ engagements in other human networks and institutions, including those of family, community, state, religion, politics, and economics. Our close readings of the texts and our analyses of their contexts will reveal that sex in Shakespeare invades all aspects of humanity. It is the peculiar vehicle capable of both propagating and disrupting human culture, just as it is the “sulphurous pit” that both reproduces and dismantles our kind, providing us at once with absolute pleasure and horrific pain.

ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (Gerald)

ENGL 353 *01: Sounds of English (Childs)

This course introduces the systematic study of the sounds of the English language. Beginning with descriptions of the articulation of sounds through discussions of the acoustic properties of sounds and ending with the ways in which sounds work together to form the words that we have in the English language, the course examines all elements of the English sound. English vowel and consonant sounds are not static entities and we examine the variation in such sounds across English dialects. Application of phonetic and phonological methods in "real world" situations is also highlighted. This course is ideal for students interested in linguistics, speech language pathology, foreign languages, English as a second language, and education.

ENGL 355 *01: Southern English (Hasty)

In this course, we examine the fundamental linguistic characteristics of the language(s) spoken in the American South. We will explore the characteristics of Southern English from a variety of levels of abstraction, including sounds, words, grammatical features, sentence structure, and discourse style. We will study these characteristics from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary Sociolinguistic theory. We will seek answers to questions regarding the fundamental features of Southern English as well as its origins, its shared features and socio-cultural history with other varieties (e.g., African American English and Cajun English), and attitudes towards and evaluations of Southern English.

ENGL 362 *01: Reading and Writing Fiction (Ockert)

A literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary short stories and creates original works of short fiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work.

ENGL 368 *01: Reading and Writing Poetry (Albergotti)

ENGL 371 *01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersection (Moye)

This course extends students’ understanding of and experiences in different cultures of the world by examining issues of cross-cultural interaction and transfer of ideas between and within world cultures, historical periods, and/or literary movements. The course will also introduce students to some strategies of literary criticism and research on world authors through examination of critical texts appropriate to the topic. In particular, this course will sharpen awareness of the various intersections between traditions of the East and West.

ENGL 386 *01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry (Albergotti)

A study of the poetry of a variety of contemporary American and British poets.

ENGL 411 *01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 424 *01: Studies in British Literature: Fascism and Resistance (Port)

As Mussolini and Hitler rose to power in Europe in the 1930s, proponents of fascism gained prominence in British politics and culture, as well. This course will center on the political dimensions of British literature published before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War and World War II, with particular attention to voices of nativism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and authoritarian control, on the one hand, and to pluralist, anti-authoritarian perspectives, on the other. We’ll then explore legacies of white supremacism (and resistance to it) in fiction and film of the late twentieth century, and we’ll attend to some of the debates around nationalism, immigration, borders, and “Britishness” animating contemporary culture. Informed by definitions of fascism from a range of theorists and writers, we’ll consider the attractions of authoritarian political movements and the kinds of narratives in which they participate, as well as how writers and other artists have sought to counter such narratives. Throughout, we’ll seek a more nuanced understanding of the complex interrelations among literature, politics, and ideology. Our readings are likely to include fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Spark, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith.

ENGL 451 *01 and 02: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

ENGL 459 *01: Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459 *02: Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 465 *01: Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop (Burch)

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Theory in a Digital World (Boyle)

In this course we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the fundamental texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, videogames, poems, VR devices, found objects, and bathroom slogans. The fall 2016 course edition will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world — and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza.

ENGL 485 *01: Adolescent Literature (Arnold)

This course introduces students to the wide variety of young adult literature available for middle and high school readers, along with current issues, trends, and scholarship in the field of young adult literature. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. We will read fantasy and historical fiction, dystopian literature and graphic novels. We will read of the experiences of migrant workers, Native Americans living on a reservation, and Jews suffering through the Holocaust, along with wizards, heroes, anti-heroes, and a host of other characters. Along the way, we will focus our discussions on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating young adult literature and illustration; using book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books. Whether you plan to teach, or you are considering becoming a librarian, or you want to share good books with a child, grandchild, niece or nephew, or you simply want to learn more about the field of adolescent literature, this course has lots for you to enjoy and learn.

Spring 2017

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English – “Spaced Out and Clocked In”: (Pillai)

Space is important to us. Not only do we fight wars and file lawsuits over contested spaces (land/property) that we desire to possess, but we also think spatially—about ourselves and about other beings. Even in our everyday language, we root ourselves in space: statements such as “use your inside voice”; “they may seem nice on the outside but really are rotten inside”; and “she needs space in their relationship” draw an indelible if complicated line between identity and space. Space is also understood to be intensely representational: we decorate or design our living spaces to put something of ourselves on display; groups battle over who may or may not use certain public spaces that they feel represent who they are. Indeed, our sense of space defines both our limitations and the ideas we have about transgressing limits.

Note: Readings for this course will be provided electronically to students.

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English – Tolstoy (Oldfield)

The works of Russian writer Lev Tolstoy open doors into history, political philosophy, psychology, morality, environmentalism, and our own everyday lives. Obsessed with justice, obsessed with class, obsessed with war, obsessed with faith, obsessed with doubt, obsessed with death, and obsessed with the life that slips through our fingers, Tolstoy was a contradictory man who wrote some of the most intriguing prose of his time. In this class we will read several short works and then center on the novel Anna Karenina. Focusing on one writer will give us a chance to follow different pathways into the texts, and the doors you open will be, in many ways, up to you.

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *02: Creative Writing Workshop (Hensel)

English 301 will introduce you to the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. In this class we will focus on elements common to all quality writing, regardless of genre: clarity of thought, specificity in detail and description, precision with regard to diction, and the development of a strong and unique voice.

ENGL 301 *03: Creative Writing Workshop (J. Oestreich)

We will read and write works in three different genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. But we will focus on elements common to all quality writing, regardless of genre: clarity of thought, specificity in detail and description, precision with regard to diction, and the development of a strong and unique voice. We will discuss these issues in detail, and we will read a slew of great poetry and prose in order to see how contemporary writers put these craft elements to use. Then you will practice writing your own pieces. These poems, stories, and essays will be workshopped by your classmates and me, with an eye toward revision and hopefully (someday, fingers crossed) publication.

ENGL 304 *01: British Literature II (Port)

ENGL 304 *02: British Literature II (K. Oestreich)

This section of ENGL 304 will address some of the following questions: What is British literature? What is the relationship between British history and British literature? How have works by writers in the late 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries responded to—and help create—political and social conditions in Britain? Other themes we will consider include: The relations among nature, science, and the imagination; the implications of urbanization; the relevance of gender, class, racial, and sexual difference to literary production; the consequences of British imperialism and the dissolution of empire; and the effects of the ever-increasing pace of technological development.

ENGL 306 01 & 02: American Literature II (Hamelman)

ENGL 316 *01: The British Novel II (K. Turner)

This course takes as its special focus the mysteries of the British novel from the Victorian period into the 21st century. Beginning with a Victorian novel shrouded in mystery, sensationalism, and hidden identities, we will work our way through the Golden Age of detective fiction to some more contemporary media hits. Alongside themes of forensics and detection, games and violence, madness and crime in British bestsellers, we will examine our own pop culture’s preoccupation with blood, criminality, and entertainment. We’ll analyze remediations of classics in the genre, with particular attention to communications technologies. Authors may include Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Le Fanu, Conan Doyle, du Maurier, Sayers, Christie, James, and Gaiman.

ENGL 350 *01 Language Variation in North America (Hasty)

In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style-related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different from each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so-called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real-world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

ENGL 365 *01: Reading and Writing Creative Non-Fiction (J. Oestreich)

ENGL 375 *01: Topics in World Literature: Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russian Literature of Empire and Rebellion (Oldfield)

Called the “end of the world” by Aeschylus, the Caucasus region on the southern border of Russia is still imagined as a place of beauty, danger, conflict, and mystery. 19th century Russian writers Pushkin, Lermontov, Marlinsky, and Tolstoy helped to create these images with their tales of the breathtakingly beautiful mountains and their wild, untamed peoples. At the same time, these writers were soldiers in the Imperial Army, fighting to subdue the very people they so extolled in verse. Continuing into the 20th century, Russia’s ambiguous relationship with the Caucasus has inspired literature, music, art, comedy, tragedy, song and film. In this course we’ll study Russian and Caucasian writing and arts to explore themes of love, hate, empire, war and rebellion in Russia’s southern borderlands.

ENGL 375*02: Special Topics-World and Anglophone Literature (Moye)

Two of the leading writers in China today are Mo Yan and Yu Hua. Both experiment boldly with narrative form and traditional symbolism to produce a sort of storytelling that is irreverent, shocking and, most important, very revealing of what is going on in the Chinese mind during the period of reform. Both writers cover a broad swath of 20th- Century history, giving detailed accounts of what it was like to live through the periods of civil war, communal experiments, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These events shaped the conflicts and issues China is working through today. Unfortunately, these two writers are not widely known in the US, and that is a problem considering that China is now the second largest economy in the world. This class is a small step toward remedying this problem. It will focus on two novels: Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out and Yu Hua’s Brothers. There will be two tests and two papers, one set on each novel.

ENGL 411 *E1: English Capstone Seminar (Kellogg)

ENGL 451 01 and 02: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis, applying scientific principles to language data. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real-world language data.

ENGL 453 *01 History of the English Language (Moye)

A study of the origins and development of languages in general, and of English and related languages in particular. No previous knowledge of Old and Middle English necessary.

ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459 *02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Paster)

ENGL 462 *E1: Writing Workshop-Fiction (Ockert)

This is an advanced course in fiction writing and in it we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. “Greatness,” I’m hoping, will rub off on you. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to read your peers’ writing in a workshop setting. Building on what you’ve learned in previous creative writing courses, we will study contemporary elements of style and seek to understand particular values inherent in important short story writing.

ENGL 468 *01: Writing Workshop-Poetry (Albergotti)

Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Dickinson says it makes her feel “as if the top of [her] head were taken off.” Bishop says that producing it involves “hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.” And Pound says that our job in writing it is to “make it new.” In this workshop course, we’ll see if any or all of those poets are right. And we’ll do our best to say something ourselves. At the very least, we’ll create some works of art that did not exist before, and that’s usually a good thing. And if we’re very lucky, some of those works will live longer than us. That’s the goal, anyway. So let’s get together and try to make some “memorable speech” (that’s Auden again) by writing in lines as well as sentences. [Note: It is recommended, but not required, that students complete ENGL 368 before enrolling in ENGL 468.]

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism – “Against the Grain: Critical Disturbance and Other Uses of Theory”: (Pillai)

Despite the differences in what we might use it as or for, critical theory is an exploration and “clarification” of the diverse “struggles and wishes” of the time in any given “age.” At the same time, it has the ability to disturb and unsettle those processes of our thinking, knowing, and being that systematically have been embedded in our imagination as commonsense. Theory manages to disturb the/our status quo because it is uncommonsense. Through it we resist the predictability and homogeneity of the processes of understanding or knowledge-making and explore instead the multiple capacities of difference, provocation, and critical empowerment that emerge when we go against the grain of reading texts and contexts.

We will study a variety of theoretical texts and apply them to reading specific visual artifacts—photographs, paintings, movies, music videos, and installations, for example. Together we will explore the ways in which we can, through our theoretical engagements and playful curiosities, be producers of critical disturbance and uncommonsense.

Note: Readings for this course will be provided electronically to students.

ENGL 484 *01 Children’s Literature (Arnold)

ENGL 488 *01: Special Topics in World Literature / Cross Listed with RELG 491 Special Topics in Religious Studies - Co-taught with Dr. Ron Green (Oldfield)

This course will compare classic and modern works of Russian and Asian literature focusing on the themes of suffering, faith, doubt, presence, and transcendence. Readings will include Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, The Tale of Genji, and selected works of 20th century literature and film.

Fall 2016

ENGL 300*01: Critical Conversations in English – Language and Power in the Age of Technology: (Childs)

How do we negotiate place and space in an online venue? How do we create self and come to understand others in virtual spaces? This course will explore these questions and more through a theoretical and hands-on look at the creation and negotiation of power and place in an online venue- specifically a MMORPG. From theorists on language and power like Bourdieu, Habermas, and Fairclough to recent work on gaming theory, technology, and language from scholars such as Jager and Baron, we will look at the issues that arise in our language use and creation of self in virtual spaces. This course will require online game play as part of the learning experience.

ENGL 300*02: Critical Conversations in English – The Arts of Murder: A Study in Convergent Media: (K. Turner)

[S]omething more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.~ Thomas De Quincey, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827)

Popular British historian Lucy Worsley describes murder as one of the first and greatest mass-marketed entertainments of all time. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, this course will examine a range of entertainment media from the so-called “penny bloods” and the Victorian newspaper reports they were often based upon, to canonical British novels, cult-classic television series, millennial screen adaptations, and viral fan-created pastiches. We will approach narratives as cultural artifacts, paying particular attention to intersections between current object and media theories, as well as noting the impact of writing technologies both within narrative structures and across medial platforms. As our texts trace the historical development of the “science” of detection, our analyses will be inspired by forensic methods as models for close reading evidence, textualities, and objecthood. Our goal will be to investigate the dark—but irresistible—media ecologies lurking around the arts of murder, interrogating how mediation has shaped the blockbuster crime formula over the past century. Among others, authors will include some of the giants of the detection genre: Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Ethel Lina White, Ngaoi Marsh, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, and P.D. James. We will also integrate adaptations of several deadly classics—from Hitchcock to Sherlock—throughout the semester.

ENGL 301*01: Creative Writing Workshop (Liebeck)

A course that introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops.

ENGL 301*02 and 03: Creative Writing Workshop (J. Oestreich)

ENGL 30301 and02: British Literature I (Moye)

ENGL 305*02: American Literature I (Hamelman)

ENGL 31101 Topics in Shakespeare: Sex-Sphere=Shakespeare: Sexuality in the Plays of Shakespeare* (Pillai)

ENGL 323*01 Modern British/Irish Lit (Port)

In this course on the works of British and Irish writers from the first half of the twentieth century, we will read groundbreaking literary texts while developing a rich understanding of their historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. This exciting period of cultural innovation saw dramatic social and economic transformations, including the rise of consumerism and the expansion of mass culture, along with the erosion of long-held certainties about religion, empire, identity, gender, and sexuality. These rapid and radical changes led to a widespread sense of alienation and anxiety, as well as an awareness of creative empowerment and artistic possibility. We will study fiction, poetry, and drama from Britain and Ireland that participated in and responded to these transformations, including works by W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and others. We will also explore the philosophical foundations of modernism as well as parallel developments in visual art, music, dance, and film.

ENGL 341*01: African-American Lit, 1750-present (Gerald)

ENGL 362*01: Reading and Writing Fiction (Ockert)

A literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary short stories and creates original works of short fiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work.

ENGL 368*01: Reading and Writing Poetry (Hensel)

ENGL 368 is a course in poetry writing designed to help students better grasp poetic craft, technique, and style through a careful examination of sample poems and through the exercise of writing poems. A major portion of the course involves group discussion of student poems in a workshop format.

ENGL 371*01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersection-Magical Realism (Oldfield)

A subset of Latin American fiction? A post-colonial literary hybrid? A type of Surrealism or Fantasy? A response to political repression? A genre as old as Gilgamesh? Magic/al Realism is perhaps not a genre, period or style, but a mode of artistic creation in which multiple worlds intersect and collide with paradoxical, carnivalesque, and sometimes terrifying results. In this class we will consider literature and film as we debate our own conceptions of what magical realism might be, explore how it is connected to specific political and historical situations, and respond to the human and metaphysical challenges with which it confronts us. Geographically, we will read literature from Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Readings will include Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shahrnush Parsipur, Haruki, Murakami, Mo Yan, and Ben Okri, as well as critical essays.

ENGL 401*01: Chaucer (Moye)

ENGL 411*01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 427*01: Studies in Southern Literature (D. Turner)

The American South has been envisioned as a place of cultural backwardness, educational and intellectual stultification, religious fanaticism, red-white-and-blue-blooded patriotism, economic destitution and class struggle, gendered as well as racial intolerance, madness, incest, hard drinking, and so on and so forth... The region has equally been imagined as a slower-paced safe haven from the more insidious incursions of global capital, an agrarian- and ecologically-attuned space of resistance to the larger U.S. urban-industrial-technological complex. This latter version of the South would seem to value family, kin, the past, folkways, foodways, fishing, mountain music, manners magnolias, mint juleps, and so on and so forth… We will explore such contested representations of “southernness,” formulated within as well as outside the region, in a diversity of media and modes (e.g., the pastoral, the primitive, the gothic/the undead, the post southern, and the global South). Mindful that there was/is not merely one South, but many Souths, we will examine the region’s sheer multiplicity: socioeconomic (e.g., yeoman farming, plantation economy, industrial mills, entrepreneurship, military bases), geographic/ecological (e.g., from the mountains of Appalachia to the South Carolina coastal plain, from the pine forests of Arkansas to the swamps of Florida, from the rural hills of southwest Virginia to the urban centers of Atlanta and New Orleans) and ethnic (e.g., Native American, Appalachian, Gullah, Cajun). Finally, we’ll reconceive received forms by putting traditional genres (e.g., novels, short stories, poetry, drama) in play with and against “rival” media, such as film, graphic narratives, memoirs, essays, paintings, daguerreotypes, documentaries, and popular music (e.g., Dixieland jazz, Delta blues, bluegrass, hillbilly, honky tonk, rockabilly, gospel, rock-n’-roll, outlaw country, 60s/70s southern rock, funk, Dirty South hip hop, hickster folk, and Athens scene alt rock). Authors or texts may include: Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner; Tennessee Williams; Flannery O’Connor; Cormac McCarthy; Natasha Trethewey; Yusef Komunayakaa; Pat Conroy; The Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Adam McKay’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart; The Walking Dead.

ENGL 451*01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

ENGL 459*01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459*02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 465*E1 Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop – (J. Oestreich)

Sometimes I will give you in-class writing assignments/exercises which may very well blossom into something beautiful that you would like to include in the portfolio you submit to me at the end of the semester. The exercises are meant to enhance areas of your writing which may still need work—dialogue, character development, setting, motivation, plot—and while I do not believe writing should be taught by compartmentalizing, I expect you to understand elements of style and form. I don’t expect you to have your voice.

ENGL 483*01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Theory in a Digital World (Boyle)

In this course we take on the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and textual performances. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, videogames, poems, VR devices, found objects, and bathroom slogans. The fall 2016 course edition will pay particular attention to how mediation, digital culture, and what we might call the “accelerationism” associated with living in a world of virtual immediacy deflects or deforms the theoretical project. We will approach theory as first and foremost an attempt at action in the world — and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play with these ideas and texts. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza.

ENGL 485*01: Adolescent Literature (Arnold)

In English 485, we will be reading, discussing, and analyzing a range of books dealing with the “young adult” experience, from “classics” like Oliver Twist and Catcher in the Rye to more contemporary works like Harry Potter and Hunger Games. Along the way, we will be thinking about the contexts in which these works were written, the issues the authors’ raise (intentionally or otherwise) dealing with adolescent thoughts and behaviors, and how theoretical approaches in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive learning, education, philosophy, etc., might help us to better understand these works and the world we live in. Students in English 485 will make presentations, lead class discussions, write a paper on a “young adult” work they think should be part of the canon, and complete midterm and final exams.

Spring 2016

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English – Rebellion: (Oldfield)

The world offers many opportunities for rebellion – against tyranny, genocide, cultural oppression, inequality, and social injustice, to name a few. Some rebellions are more subtle, standing against logic, against language, even against oneself. Rebellion can be heroic, and/or it can be negative, violent and cruel. Beginning in the ancient world but focusing on the 19^th and 20^th centuries, this course will in include readings from Aeschylus, The Bible, Dostoevsky, and Marjanne Satrapi.

ENGL 300 *04: Critical Conversations in English – Influence of 19^th Century British Literature on Film: (K. Oestreich)

This section of ENGL 300 will concentrate on the ways nineteenth-century British novels and their modern film adaptations have interpreted and represented men’s and women’s relationships with themselves, their bodies, and their romantic relationships through social constructions of gender and power. We will, therefore, investigate and interrogate the origins and transformations feminine and masculine ideals by analyzing a selection of novels through contemporary feminist and queer theories. In this class, we will also question how the technologies resulting from the Industrial Revolution—from printing presses to power looms to celluloid film—and the entities that provided access to both these books and films—from lending libraries to film studios—have impacted the ways authors and directors write gender and sexuality, both verbally and visually. To this end, we will study book and film history in order to prepare us to analyze print editions and film adaptions of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *02 and 03: Creative Writing Workshop (J. Oestreich)

ENGL 304 *02: British Literature II (Arnold)

This course surveys representative works illustrating the development of British literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on major literary movements understood in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts. In doing so, the class addresses some of the following questions: What is British literature? What is Britain? How do literary works respond to—and help create and change—political and social conditions? More specifically, how have works by writers in the late 18th through the present centuries responded to and helped change those conditions in Britain? Themes we will consider include: changing views of nature, effects of urbanization and industrialization, the impacts of war, British colonialism and imperialism, class and social reform, views of childhood, and shifts in gender roles.

ENGL 306 *01 and 02 American Literature II (D. Turner)

American Literature II is a multi-genre survey of the history of U.S. literature from 1865 to the present. Students will gain an overall understanding of some of the currents and countercurrents of American literature over the past century and a half, engaging with a range of texts and genres germane to American literary history. Moreover, we will also critically assess the relation between these aesthetic forms and contemporaneous historical pressures, including hotly contested issues such as nationhood, globalization, socioeconomics, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. To expand our understanding of U.S. literature within its broader contexts, we will analyze it in connection with theoretical and historical arguments as well as with other cultural forms and artifacts, such as painting, photography, architecture, popular music (e.g., jazz, blues, alternative rock), and cinema.

ENGL 314 *E Eighteenth Century British Literature (Ennis)

British literature of the Eighteenth Century (aka the Age of Reason, The Augustan Age, The Enlightenment, and various other semi-accurate but problematic titles) is simultaneously up-to-date and antique. The satires of the age -- parodies, political attacks, mock epics, and comical critiques – ring familiar to fans of today’s television sketch comedies, comic digital shorts, and irreverent blogs and podcasts. The prose fiction of the time contains most of the elements that would settle into the form we now call the novel. The biography, occasional essay, editorial, review—many forms of writing now commonplace were invented or established in the eighteenth century. Alongside these seemingly contemporary forms, however, were writings that will strike today’s reader as archaic — poetic “essays” with purposes and literary techniques rarely seen in the poetry of the twenty first century, mannered stage dramas that present recognizable situations but are far from realistic, and odd literary experiments that form a counter-tradition that is anything but reasonable. Populated with fops and madmen, viragoes (look it up!) and lexicographers (look that one up too!), this is a tradition worth exploring.

ENGL 316 *01: British Novel II (K. Turner)

This course takes as its special focus the mysteries of the British novel from the Victorian period through the 20^th century. Beginning with a Victorian novel shrouded in mystery, sensationalism, and hidden identities, we will work our way through the Golden Age of detective fiction to some more contemporary media hits. Alongside themes of forensics and detection, games and violence, insanity and crime in British bestsellers, we will examine our own pop culture’s preoccupation with violence, criminality, and entertainment. Students should expect to analyze remediation of classics in the genre, with particular attention to material objects and communications technologies. Authors may include Dickens, Collins, Braddon, Le Fanu, Conan Doyle, du Maurier, Christie, and Gaiman.

ENGL 352 *01: African American English (Childs)

ENGL 354 *01: English Grammar and Syntax (Hasty)

Although we use it every day and often have strong opinions about its proper form and appropriate use, we rarely stop to think about the wonder of Language. You are reading and understanding these sentences, but you have no conscious knowledge of how you are doing this. That is, you have some implicit knowledge of Language, but you aren’t able to express how you know the things you know. For example, you know that sentences like Wash your hands! are OK without having a stated word as the subject, but why then is *Ran to the store. bad? You know that the second sentence is bad in some way, yet you can’t really express why (and the “rules” you were taught in grade school don’t seem to help you explain this). The study of the mystery of Language is the science of Linguistics. This class is about one aspect of linguistics: how sentences are structured, what linguists call Syntax. One of the most interesting questions in linguistics is how we subconsciously get from sounds and words to organize those words into what we intend to say (the sentence). By the end of this course you should have gained a solid understanding of modern syntactic theory as well as the ability to apply this theory to a variety of novel sentence structures in English and other world languages.

ENGL 365 *01: Reading and Writing Creative Non-Fiction (J. Oestreich)

ENGL 375 *01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersection-20^th Century Russian Literature (Oldfield)

The 20^th century in Russia was a time of extreme political and social upheaval, and the pressure cooker of history brought out the very best in its writers. In the USSR, history and literature continuously created and destroyed each other - from Lenin’s Revolution and the Stalinist Terror to Glasnost’ and the fall. Beginning with Tolstoy’s last work, this course will include writings of Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Olesha, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and Tolstaya.

ENGL 390 *D1: Business and Professional Communication (Winner)

Designed to improve practical communication, both written and oral. Students learn business style and formats (the letter, memo, resume, and report), as well as strategies for presenting neutral, negative, and persuasive messages. Students will speak on business or professional topics.

ENGL 409 *01: Theories of Gender and Sexuality (Port)

In this course, we will explore theories that have contributed to current debates about representations of men and women, constructions of femininity and masculinity, and the implications of sexuality and sexual preference. The first half of the course will focus on several key essays in feminist theory. In the second half of the term, we will explore other developments in gender and sexuality studies, including the origins of and recent developments in queer theory and transgender studies. The study of theoretical works will be interspersed with the application of those theories to works of literature. Over the course of the semester we will consider the intersections of gender and sexuality with other categories of identity and difference as we examine the relevance of reading, writing, and other forms of expression to the construction of gender and sexuality.

ENGL 411 *01: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 424 *01: Studies in British Literature: What’s England to America? Performing Englishness in Popular Culture (Pillai)

This course will focus on popular visual culture—films and television shows—and study them in conjunction with specific literary texts to map the trajectory of the idea and aura of Englishness (or Britishness) as developed and mediated through the cultural imagination. What does the performativity of Englishness mean in the context of modern cinema or television? How does a show like The Tudors or Downton Abbey participate in the construction of a consumable identity of English elitism and privilege? How do texts such as these perform and aestheticize historicity or authenticity? How do they navigate the cultural, political, and social differences between the past and present of British nationhood? How, if at all, is the lingering or rekindled enthusiasm for Englishness connected to economies of globalization and Coca-colonization as/through entertainment? The exploration of these and similar questions will inform our engagement with popular texts that are embedded in the trans-historical production of Englishness.

Representative visual texts include: The Tudors (specific episodes); Sherlock (specific episodes); Luther (specific episodes); The Office (specific episodes); Pride and Prejudice; Macbeth; Dr. Who (specific episodes); Spectre (the 2015 James Bond film); Love Actually; The King’s Speech; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; The Man Who Knew Too Much; Shakespeare Wallah

Representative literary and critical readings include: Henry the Fifth; The Roaring Girl; The Tempest; Specters of Marx (excerpt); The Location of Culture (excerpt); An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (excerpt); What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (excerpt)

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

ENGL 453 *01: Development of the English Language (Moye)

A study of the origins and development of languages in general, and of English and related languages in particular. No previous knowledge of Old and Middle English necessary.

ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

A writing intensive course that focuses on the essential processes of research and writing. The course covers the details of format and matters of style for MLA, APA, and Chicago. Students receive help with every step of the process in completing their writing projects.

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459 *02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 462 *01 Writing Workshop – Fiction (Liebeck)

ENGL 468 *01: Writing Workshop - Poetry (Hensel)

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism (Hamelman)

This course introduces, explicates, and elaborates ways to define and interpret literature and culture. Doing so requires us to study signs, codes, grammars, and systems—linguistic, aural, visual, and otherwise—that create what human beings call “reality.” We will discover the amazing number of ways to approach an understanding of the most important term of all: representation. What is representation? How have different writers from different historical periods explained it? What is our own relationship to representation? Does a transcendent Truth inform representation, or is it an arbitrary, fluid combination of signs that can’t be reduced to one final meaning? Why are some representations considered beautiful and canonical, others trashy and disposable, some superficial, some profound? Questions such as these will accumulate with each assignment, ranging over philosophy, psychology, linguistics, rhetoric, sociology, semiotics, hermeneutics, theology, political economy, media studies, and literary criticism. Despite its reputation for being difficult, theory is a democratic, non-elitist discipline. Studying its key principles and themes improves our daily thinking—that is, it helps us decipher the verbal, visual, and aural language that shapes our lives, and in the process it empowers and liberates the reader.

ENGL 484 *01 Children’s Literature (Arnold)

Fall 2015

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: (Howes)

This course surveys methods for approaching text in English Studies to pose questions around the ideological formation and representations of the Southern Appalachian region. Using close reading, genre analysis, and “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe), students will work with historical and contemporary depictions of people and place to cultivate an understanding of how texts represent communities and how we, as readers and writers, represent texts. Readings will include methodological works (Toni Morrison, Charles Bazerman, Krista Ratcliffe) in conversation with historical and contemporary fiction and non-fiction (William Harney, Dorothy Allison, Eileen Fisher).

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English—Stretchy and Sketchy Aesthetics: Examples from Cinema: (Pillai)

Terms such as “beautiful,” “sublime,” “horrible,” and “monstrous” have solid aesthetic roots established through centuries of philosophical, high cultural, and popular discussion. We use these terms sparingly in our everyday engagements, for we respect their aesthetic and semantic worth. On the other hand, we throw around words like “cute,” “weird,” and “hot” uncaringly in casual conversation about things, places, and people. We stretch and compress them uncannily to suit our various aesthetic needs and social contexts. Why? What do these and other terms connote aesthetically? What about them makes them flexible in our semantics, and how might they represent shifts in the core of our cultural, social, ethical, and economic makeup—key aspects that inform our aesthetic judgment? How, if at all, might it be possible for us to take these terms and concepts seriously? Through an exploration of these and related questions, our course will focus on the underbelly of aesthetics, on what I refer to as the stretchiest and sketchiest of aesthetic categories. We will study the development of these aesthetics through the lens of cinema, both popular and elite. Through our critical engagement with the films and our readings in aesthetics, we will explore the inextricable if complex connections among established and emergent aesthetic categories. Moreover, we will consider the possibilities of empowering critically hitherto undervalued terms and concepts we use in our everyday aesthetic engagements with our environments. You do not need to purchase any texts for the course because all materials will be made available to you through the library’s website.

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Adams)

This course introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. We will focus on developing your creative writing skills, craft vocabulary, and understanding of the writing process. We become better writers by becoming better reader; therefore, for inspiration and advice, we will read and discuss published work about the craft of writing. We will also read and discuss contemporary poems, stories, and essays by some of the best writers working today. Using the techniques we glean, you will write your own creative work—three poems, one story, and one essay—to learn about the writing process and about what these genres share and what makes each unique. Your creative work will be work shopped by the class, with a focus on discovering and fostering your individual interests, strengths, and talents.

ENGL 301 *02: Creative Writing Workshop (Hensel)

ENGL 301 *03: Creative Writing Workshop (J. Oestreich)

This course introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. We will focus on developing your creative writing skills, craft vocabulary, and understanding of the writing process. We become better writers by becoming better reader; therefore, for inspiration and advice, we will read and discuss published work about the craft of writing. We will also read and discuss contemporary poems, stories, and essays by some of the best writers working today. Using the techniques we glean, you will write your own creative work to learn about the writing process and about what these genres share and what makes each unique. Your creative work will be work-shopped by the class, with a focus on discovering and fostering your individual interests, strengths, and talents.

ENGL 303 01 and 02: British Literature I (Moye)

ENGL 305 *02: American Literature I (Hamelman)

Having some knowledge of the first two hundred years of American literature helps students understand and appreciate the widely known literature of the nineteenth century. Issues addressed by colonial and Enlightenment writers c. 1600-1800 are republican politics, the individual vs. the state, nature, the Indian and Other, free market economics, religion and spirituality, dream and vision, and American identity. Authors address these subjects in a wide variety of genres (e.g., memoir, sermon, didactic poem, captivity narrative, satire, speech, letter, and diary), laying the groundwork for what follows during the Age of American Romanticism (c. 1800-1865), when literature tends to express two sides, the transcendental and the morbid, of a new sensibility of feeling. But the Romantic Age is also a time when political and social issues absorbed writers. For one thing, the problem of slavery (connected on political and philosophical levels to the theme of the individual vs. the state) came to the forefront of American consciousness. Paralleling this issue was women’s rights, which both male and female writers faced with the same fervor they brought to slavery. In English 305 we look at some highlights of the colonial and republican periods and analyze ways that nineteenth-century writers mirrored or diverged from their predecessors. For instance, so-called transcendentalists, though drawing much of their inspiration from Puritan morality and mysticism, did not manifest the dogmatism of their New England forebears. Meanwhile, “dark” romantics like Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville reflect a romanticism having little in common with the Enlightenment optimism of Benjamin Franklin. In terms of the countless writers that resist categorization as either transcendental or dark, we will read a few who tackled the question of freedom for women and slaves. Colonial-to-romantic American literature encompasses political, social, and religious themes embedded in genres that provide insights into the paradoxes of American culture.

ENGL 311 *01 Topics in Shakespeare—“Finding the Gaps with Shakespeare” (Pillai)

Shakespeare is the English teacher’s go-to guy, the failsafe author whose plays and/or poems easily could fill the gaps in any syllabus—a sonnet here, a play there, and the semester’s reading list on just about any literary topic is full and complete. The ability the Shakespearean text possesses to fill in the gaps or the otherwise uncomfortable vacant spaces in our systems of knowledge has been celebrated over centuries and across cultures. This is partly the reason Shakespeare is a staple in high school and university English curricula. Quite simply, in the context of literature, Shakespeare completes almost any picture. But that isn’t in fact the entire picture, for the secret value of his works lies elsewhere. Shakespeare’s texts explore the restless incompleteness of being mobilized through the contagious forces of paradoxical human experience: pleasure in pain, vengeance in forgiveness, beauty in horror, and grandeur in pettiness, to name just a few. The plays have also the uncanny power to lacerate, that is, slice open the seemingly secure frames within which cultural and moral institutions exist and operate in society. Romeo and Juliet, for example, cuts open romantic love and puts on display the messy entrails of the institution that has long been celebrated by humans as a prime motivator of their diverse energies. Indeed, what makes Shakespeare fundamental to the world of English studies is his capacity to dissect without closing up (suturing) the various bodies that comprise our social, cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual being. Ironically, then, even as we use his works to fill in the gaps in our endeavors to gain a well-rounded education about our world, the formidable power of his texts lies in the energy and artistry with which they draw attention to the very gaps and gashes that reveal the incompleteness of our narratives about ourselves. This course will focus on three functions of the Shakespearean text in the context of social, cultural, and aesthetic exploration: “laceration”; “wounding”; and “contagion.” We’ll study two comedies and two tragedies—we will not study Romeo and Juliet, incidentally—along with four modern films that aren’t adaptations of the plays at all but might nonetheless be called Shakespearean because they exhibit similar critical qualities of puncturing social and cultural institutions in order to lay bare their/our insides.

ENGL 318 *01: The Victorian Age (K. Turner)

This course will focus on sensation and the media as we study the major literary and cultural currents of the second half of the British nineteenth century. Our business will be texts specializing in the creepy, the bizarre, the criminal, and the strange—and the ways in which the popular press broadcast it all, inspired authors, hooked the public, and created a literary genre. As we analyze the Victorian addiction to crime and mystery, we will examine our own pop culture’s preoccupation with crime, drama, and entertainment. Students will have the opportunity to present on topics of individual interest, to analyze remediations of classics in the genre, and to contribute to the class blog. Authors may include Dickens, Braddon, Browning, Trollope, Tennyson, Bronte, Collins, Du Maurier, Galsworthy, and Conan Doyle.

ENGL 323 *01 Modern British/Irish Lit (Port)

ENGL 339 *01: Popular Fiction (Osborne)

What makes popular fiction popular? Why do we find pleasure in reading these texts? How are the various genres (detective, hard-boiled crime, western romance, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and thriller) structured and what cultural viewpoints do these formulas reinforce? As we read and discuss sample of each genre, including works by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Louis L'Amour, Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Octavia Bulter, we will be looking at the texts through the critical lenses of literary theory, including psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and structuralist approaches. We will also use this study of popular fiction to raise questions about authorship, readership, literary value, and the mass marketing strategies used to sell these texts.

ENGL 341 *01: African-American Lit, 1750-present (Gerald)

ENGL 353 *01: Sounds of English (Childs)

ENGL 362 *01: Reading and Writing Fiction (Richardson)

This course is a literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary short stories and create original works of short fiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work. ENGL 362 offers an opportunity to learn about the craft of fiction, to write and think creatively, to incorporate revision into your writing process, and to develop as an articulate, generous critic of creative work. Our focus will be on learning how to read fiction as writers do—which is to say, to read for craft. To accomplish this, we will read and discuss material on craft (the forms, techniques, and tools fiction writers use) alongside contemporary short stories by some of today’s best writers. Your time will be divided between reading published short stories to learn about craft, writing your own short stories, and reading and commenting upon the work of your fellow student writers. As we go, we will build a writing community based around student participation. At the end of the course you will be equipped to read fiction as a writer does, examining the building blocks, and you will have used this insight to hone your own fiction writing skills.

ENGL 368 *01: Reading and Writing Poetry (Albergotti)

A course in which students sharpen their skills in reading poetry from the perspective of the writer, examining the elements of craft that are employed by poets to create effective poems. The second half of the course is a poetry workshop in which students write their own poems and offer constructive feedback to the poems written by their classmates. [Prerequisite: English 201, English 301, or consent of the instructor.]

ENGL 371 *01: Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersection (Oldfield)

A subset of Latin American fiction? A post-colonial literary hybrid? A type of Surrealism or Fantasy? A response to political repression? A genre as old as Gilgamesh? Magic/al Realism is perhaps not a genre, period or style, but a mode of artistic creation in which multiple worlds intersect and collide with paradoxical, carnivalesque, and sometimes terrifying results. In this class we will consider the literature as we debate our own definitions of what magical realism might be, explore how it is connected to specific political and historical situations, and respond to the human and metaphysical challenges with which it confronts us. Readings will include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Shahrnush Parsipur, Mirakami Haruki, Mo Yan, and Ben Okri.

ENGL 386 *01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry (D. Turner)

We will encounter diverse poems by contemporary Anglophone poets, tracing lines—poetic, political, ecological/geographic, ethnic, economic, gendered, human/post human—from the mainland U.S. stretching out across the Atlantic basin and back again. Our readings include work by well-established poets, such as Charles Wright (current U.S. Poet Laureate), Natasha Trethewey (previous U.S. Poet Laureate), Saint Lucian Derek Walcott (1992 Nobel Laureate), Irishman Seamus Heaney (1995 Nobel Laureate), and Yusef Komunyakaa (1994 Pulitzer Prize winner), surrounded by a chorus of influential earlier voices (Wallace Stevens, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath) as well as strong emerging voices in current poetry. And all our readings will approach one vast, multifarious poetical subject: death. We will thus recalibrate the field of contemporary poetry through the theoretical lens of undeadness, which describes a continuum of posthumous phenomena, from funerary rites and mourning practices, to the effect of traumatic spectacles and flashbacks, to forms haunting from beyond death (ghosts, zombies, and other human/nonhuman hybrids), to the psychical afterlife of remembering the dead. Through such posthumous poetics, we’ll discover that poetry is not dead, but is very much undead at present. We will also attend to various poetic forms and techniques and think about what might be distinct about poetry vis-à-vis other genres and media (e.g., fiction, painting, photography, film, popular music/lyrics). How do contemporary poetries adapt to competing media and genres, and how do other media adapt poetic structures into their modes?

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real world data.

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

ENGL 459 *02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Paster)

This course takes a hard look at writing, considering it as both a process and a product, as something we do and something we create. This course provides students with an opportunity to build on their own strategies for crafting academic texts as they experiment with approaches that work for them as writers. In addition to examining the work associated with writing for the college classroom and, in larger terms, academic contexts, this course also introduces the academic field of Composition. As students read a sampling of rhetorical and comp theory, they can expect to question the social and ideological nature of writing and, by extension, the complexities associated with the teaching of composition.

ENGL 465 *01 Creative Writing Workshop—Non-Fiction (J. Oestreich)

This is an advanced course in fiction writing and in it we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to read your peers’ writing in a workshop setting. Building on what you’ve learned in previous creative writing courses, we will study contemporary elements of style and seek to understand particular values inherent in important short story writing. Reading the writings of published and unpublished work will introduce you to diverse ideas and also provide you with practice in responding to ideas by questioning, affirming, refuting, complicating, reflecting, and critiquing. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. “Greatness,” I’m hoping, will rub off on you. Sometimes I will give you in-class writing assignments/exercises which may very well blossom into something beautiful that you would like to include in the portfolio you submit to me at the end of the semester. The exercises are meant to enhance areas of your writing which may still need work—dialogue, character development, setting, motivation, plot—and while I do not believe writing should be taught by compartmentalizing, I expect you to understand elements of style and form. I don’t expect you to have your voice

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism (Boyle)

We will begin this course with an exploration of the following terms: Thinking, Acting/Making, Being (in the world). In many senses, these three terms represent the major trajectories of Western critical and theoretical expression. They also give us insight into the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and texts that dialogue directly or indirectly with one of the above key terms.

The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, videogames, poems, found objects, bathroom slogans, YouTube videos, your experience as a server in a local theme restaurant, that recent insult from your mother regarding your attire, essays, your draft poem for your writing workshop, the design on your plastic water bottle, and anything else we can get our hands on, to better understand the challenging but incredibly exciting theory texts we will study. We will do as much because theory is first and foremost an attempt at action in the world and through writing – and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play -- with language, texts, images, and canonical thought. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously “known,” locked within some singular claim to expertise and “institutional closure,” it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza. Click here for online sample collection of materials for an example module (Plato, The Matrix, and a Claymation short on the Allegory of the Cave).

ENGL 484 *01 Children’s Literature (Arnold)

In this class, you will develop a scholarly appreciation for children’s literature and an awareness of the wide variety of children’s literature available for elementary and middle school readers. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. Class discussions and assignments focus on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating children’s literature and illustration; using children’s book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting children’s books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books in children’s literature. Members of the learning community in this class are expected to participate actively in class discussion and group work; contribute to a shared class book list through composing an annotated bibliography; gain practice reading aloud, working with colleagues, and presenting literature to a group; develop a working knowledge of tools for locating children’s books; and become familiar with issues and scholarship in the field of children's literature.

ENGL 485 *01: Adolescent Literature (Campbell)

Spring 2015

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English—Dirty Rotting Scoundrels: Untimely and Timely Villains in Renaissance Drama and Modern Cinema (Pillai)

This course will focus on the contagion and allure of villainy. Specifically, we will map the ways in which villainy invades our imagination, systems, and beings, filling us with the paradoxical experiences and affects of pleasure in pain. We will concentrate on Renaissance, postmodern, and posthuman villains, while keeping in mind the long and dense cultural/literary history of villainy. (After all, the enigmatic appeal of the villain is an old story; in the West alone the villain dates back to Satan and to Cain, and all Western literary and cinematic villains share their ancestry with these two figures.) Renaissance drama offers audiences some of the most alluring antagonists in English literature. Faustus and Mephistopheles (Doctor Faustus), Iago (Othello), Edmund (King Lear), and De Flores (The Changeling) are just some characters in the drama that form the topsoil of Renaissance villainy—they are the visible villains who bear the cross or the skull and crossbones of grim fascination. Beneath the topsoil, however, lurk the subsoil and substratum. Here we find servants, clowns, witches, men of the cloth, widows, and pimps, to name only a few of the semi–visible and invisible components of the complex network that shapes the terrain of Renaissance villainy. Together the villainous figures of the plays both delight our senses and challenge our everyday sensibility and morality. In recent visual narratives, villains continue to vie for the limelight and often steal the show from the heroes who, even as they stand for and do the right thing, remain relatively insular and unexciting: The Joker (Batman/Dark Knight), Loki (Thor; The Avengers), Cruella deVil (One Hundred and One Dalmatians), Darth Vader (Star Wars), Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs), Anton Chigur (No Country for Old Men), Cersei Lannister Baratheon (Game of Thrones), and even the Shark (Jaws) are memorable specifically because they invite us into a world that they share with us. Indeed, it is their ability to share the/their world with us that makes villains contagious forces. In the context of literature and cinema, then, the "banality of evil" is anything but ordinary, and the villain is anything but boring.

We will study five Renaissance plays in conjunction with five films from the recent past. Through close readings of the texts we will anatomize, historicize, criticize, and theorize the functions, logics, ethics, and affects of villainy in literature and popular culture, tracing both the differences and similarities among the dirty rotting scoundrels of the past and present imagination.

If you need further details regarding the course materials, please contact Dr. Pillai or stop by and chat with her in EHFA 207 during her office hours.

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English—Dostoevsky (Oldfield)

This class will focus on one author and one book, Feodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Love, hate, murder, Grand Inquisitors, petty devils, Holy fools, saints that stink, faith, doubt, evil, ridicule, scandal, passion, hope, despair, transcendence—you will find it all in the lives of the Brothers K and their decadent, creepy father whom one of them, it seems, has killed. A mystery novel that wanders far beyond its bounds, The Brothers Karamazov is also a window into 19th century Russia during a time of intense turmoil and change. This book has attracted many human minds since its publication in 1880, and we will enjoy swimming with the thoughts and theories of others while sinking into it ourselves. Reading intensive, writing intensive.

ENGL 301 *01 and 02: Creative Writing Workshop (Adams)

This course introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. We will focus on developing your creative writing skills, craft vocabulary, and understanding of the writing process. We become better writers by becoming better reader; therefore, for inspiration and advice, we will read and discuss published work about the craft of writing. We will also read and discuss contemporary poems, stories, and essays by some of the best writers working today. Using the techniques we glean, you will write your own creative work—three poems, one story, and one essay—to learn about the writing process and about what these genres share and what makes each unique. Your creative work will be work–shopped by the class, with a focus on discovering and fostering your individual interests, strengths, and talents.

ENGL 304 *01: British Literature II (Oestreich)

This section of ENGL 304 will focus on British literature, primarily novels that explore the relationships amongst British history, politics, money, sexuality, and the home. Using these texts as a focal point, we will address how authors in the late 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries responded to and helped change political and social conditions in Britain, as well as how technology impacted both the form and content of their literature. Other themes we will consider include: the implications of urbanization; the relevance of gender, class, racial, and sexual difference to literary production; the consequences of British imperialism and the dissolution of empire; the effects of the ever–increasing pace of technological development; etc.

ENGL 304 *02: British Literature II (Arnold)

A survey of representative works illustrating the development of British literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on major literary movements understood in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts.

ENGL 306 01 and 02 American Literature II (Hamelman)

American Literature II picks up where American Literature I ends—circa 1870 with the waning of the “age of Romanticism” (still referred to in some quarters as the American Renaissance). Sticking to the traditional divisions of academic periodization, American Literature II (hereafter AMlit2) focuses on texts from the Ages of Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Rather than a survey, AMlit2 is designed as a process tentatively linked to a historical narrative in which the American republic, ever more “multicultural” and “fragmented,” seeks to sustain myths from a receding past while forging ahead into a world where the idea of myth itself falls to pieces under the pressures caused by loss of faith, the uncertainties of capitalism, unprecedented advances in technology, political upheaval, and deconstructive shifts in sensibility. American writers, like their counterparts in music and the plastic arts, express themselves in a wide range of sub-movements in which theory, genre, and style overlap (e.g., naturalism, imagism, noir, confessionalism, pop art, southern gothic). AMlit2 explores many of these sub-movements, all the while observing how classic American themes such as self-reliance, nature, identity, god, and the American Dream are reconfigured to reflect new realities, from local to global, facing all citizens of a culture whose claims to a providentially ordained exceptionalism become increasingly difficult to support. What the student will find in AMlit2 is that the best literary products of this 150-year period are exceptional in terms of originality, diversity, and the writer’s conviction that great art possesses, as it did in the Romantic Age, the power to liberate readers from the shackles of ignorance, conformity, and materialism.

ENGL 316 *01: The British Novel II (K. Turner)

"I cannot live without brain–work. What else is there to live for?"—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890)

This Spring's offering of ENGL 316 will investigate selected nineteenth– and twentieth–century British novels, with special attention to overlaps and intersections in form and content between material culture, writing technologies, emergent forms of social media, and more than a hint of mystery. Authors may include, among others, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier and, reaching into the twenty–first century, Neil Gaiman. Alongside these narratives, we will examine recent film and televisual adaptations of course texts and popular period pieces (e.g., Great Expectations, Downton Abbey, Sherlock, The Forsyte Saga)—and put our brains to work on the experiment of updating a vintage text for millennial consumption.

ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)

Why do those people up North (i.e., Yankees) talk the way they do? How can those people in the South sound so nice yet still so dumb? Why don't the people out West have an accent? Do I have an accent?

In this course, we will answer all these questions and more. We will study the differences in the varieties of North American English from a scientific perspective being guided by contemporary sociolinguistic theory. While regional variation is one of the most salient aspects of American English, we will also study social, ethnic, gender, and style–related language variation. Along with understanding how different varieties of English are linguistically different form each other, we will also explore issues related to the social evaluation of individual dialects regarding the perceptions and attitudes of speakers and hearers of these varieties. We will address issues related to the so–called "Standard" English ideology and even seek to uncover linguistic profiling and discrimination. The course will be discussion based and will involve a good deal of classroom participation and presentation. Students will be asked to complete original sociolinguistic research by collecting data on actual real–world language variation and presenting their findings in both oral and written form.

ENGL 351 *01: Language, Gender, and Power (Childs)

The course investigates language structure and usage patterns in the context of gender to achieve a better understanding of the way language reflects the changing roles of women and men. Differences in gender–based language use, language references, and the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors related to these differences are examined in this writing intensive course.

ENGL 365 *01: Reading/Writing Creative Nonfiction (J. Oestreich)

This course is designed to help you learn the elements of form and craft in creative nonfiction and its subgenres. It will operate in four units. In the first, you will learn the building blocks common to all forms of nonfiction—concepts such as writing in scene, narration vs. exposition, the importance of place and characterization, and writing to make meaning. Next we will study the forms of seven nonfiction subgenres: memoir, the personal essay, the lyric essay, the fragmented essay, literary journalism, profile writing, and cultural criticism. In the third unit, we will workshop some of the major works of contemporary nonfiction. This unit will be discussion–based, and these discussions will be led primarily by you, in groups of two. For the final unit, you will write an original creative essay, which will be read and critiqued by the entire class.

ENGL 375 *01: Special Topics: World and Anglophone Literature—Russian Literature and Revolution (Oldfield)

A statue chasing you through the streets of St. Petersburg. A nose that walks by itself. A man in love with mosquitoes. An apartment turned into a cave. And by the way, in this world 2x2=5. Along with diving into the darkest corners of the human soul and soaring to the heights of philosophical enquiry, Russian Literature is filled with absurd, extreme, and exquisitely painful play. And unforgettable characters. And questions that will follow you around for years. In this class we will read literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries not only as masterworks of narrative, but also in context of a tumultuous Russia driving towards Revolution and Civil War. Readings will include Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Zamyatin. Reading intensive, writing intensive.

ENGL 390 *D1: Business and Professional Communication (Winner)

ENGL 409 *01: Theories of Gender and Sexuality (Port)

ENGL 453 *01 Development of the English Language (Moye)

An introduction to the general principles concerning the design and function of human language, and an overview of the history of grammar with emphasis upon modern grammatical theory. Illustrative material is drawn from the English language, modern European languages, and others.

ENGL 457 *01 Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

What is a writing style? In my view, style is a choice — or rather, a set of choices. Every time you choose to write a sentence one way rather than another, you have made a stylistic choice. Your writing has attained a style, however, only when the set of the choices you make adds up to something recognizable, consistent, true.

This course is an intensive workshop in improving prose style. We will briefly cover research and citation styles (what many students mean by "style"), but our main focus is on improving your ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with wit, elegance, and power. We will cover issues of clarity, concision, coherence, cohesion, and other elements of practical style; assert control of sentence length, rhythm, and pacing; and learn about a variety of rhetorical figures, including tropes of argument. You will learn dozens of terms for patterns of style and master tricks you didn't know existed. You will both revise previously written pieces and compose new work.

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Smith)

This course will focus on composition and rhetoric as a digital practice. As such, it offers students the opportunity to read and discuss current theories of digital writing as well as explore those theories through new media productions of their own. Using free and open–source software, students will work to compose a variety of inquiry–based media projects—including a podcast and video series—in addition to more conventional modes of academic writing. This multi–genre approach invites students to critically engage what it means to compose and the rhetorical affects of media.

ENGL 459 *02 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

This course provides an introduction to the theories that structure the field of Composition and Rhetoric to advance students' knowledge and build vocabulary to discuss reading, writing, and how texts function in the social world. We will combine this theory with practice by writing using different genres and developing research skills. These methods will allow students to explore questions about ways language connects to how we see others and ourselves, critically interrogating literacy learning, discourse communities, and rhetorical theory. Implementing process–based writing will also encourage students to cultivate content and clarity in their writing by working through multiple drafts and learning about effective revision strategies.

ENGL 462 *01 Writing Workshop—Fiction (Ockert)

This is an advanced course in fiction writing and in it we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. Additionally, you'll have the opportunity to read your peers' writing in a workshop setting. Building on what you've learned in previous creative writing courses, we will study contemporary elements of style and seek to understand particular values inherent in important short story writing. Reading the writings of published and unpublished work will introduce you to diverse ideas and also provide you with practice in responding to ideas by questioning, affirming, refuting, complicating, reflecting, and critiquing. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. "Greatness," I'm hoping, will rub off on you. Sometimes I will give you in–class writing assignments/exercises which may very well blossom into something beautiful that you would like to include in the portfolio you submit to me at the end of the semester. The exercises are meant to enhance areas of your writing which may still need work—dialogue, character development, setting, motivation, plot—and while I do not believe writing should be taught by compartmentalizing, I expect you to understand elements of style and form. I don't expect you to have your voice

ENGL 468 *01 Writing Workshop—Poetry (Hensel)

A workshop course in the writing of poetry. Students learn the craft of poetry, have their poems discussed in a workshop setting, and are guided in the preparation and submission of manuscripts for publication. Students will write and read examples of poems in free verse and in traditional forms, and a large amount of class time will be devoted to group discussion of student poems.

ENGL 480 *01: Technical Editing: Special Topics in Technical Communication (Reid)

An intensive workshop focusing on the design and construction of professional writing documents related to technical communication including user guides, job aids, grant and proposal writing, and hypermedia authoring. A semester–long scientific study is conducted and is accompanied with a technical report. May be repeated for academic credit.

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism (Hamelman)

This course introduces, explicates, and elaborates ways to define and interpret literature and culture. Doing so requires us to study signs, codes, grammars, and systems— linguistic, aural, visual, and otherwise—that create what human beings call "reality." We will discover the amazing number of ways to approach an understanding of the most important term of all: representation. What is representation? How have different writers from different historical periods explained it? What is our own relationship to representation? Does a transcendent Truth inform representation, or is it an arbitrary, fluid combination of signs that can't be reduced to one final meaning? Why are some representations considered beautiful and canonical, others trashy and disposable, some superficial, some profound? Questions such as these will accumulate with each assignment, ranging over philosophy, psychology, linguistics, rhetoric, sociology, semiotics, hermeneutics, theology, political economy, media studies, and literary criticism. Despite its reputation for being difficult, theory is a democratic, non–elitist discipline. Studying its key principles and themes improves our daily thinking—that is, it helps us decipher the verbal, visual, and aural language that shapes our lives, and in the process it empowers and liberates the reader.

ENGL 485 *01: Adolescent Literature (Campbell)

An extensive study of works appropriate for the adolescent. Required of all Secondary English Education students.

Fall 2014

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: English and the Internet (Childs)

Much recent conversation in the media and in education circles has discussed the role that "the internet", that is electronically mediated communication, has had on the status of present–day English and more importantly the effects that it will have on the future of English. In this course, we will look at the English language and its relationship with "the internet" and consider the effects that e–mail, emoticons, twitter, facebook, and others have had on the status and development of English and more importantly the ways in which English speakers are using these resources. (ENGL 300 emphasizes critical thinking, analytical writing and textual analysis as the foundations of success in the major. Texts—connected by generic, thematic or historical factors—will be the means to introduce English majors to some of the research methodologies, critical "conversations," and professional factors that are central concerns in the discipline.)

ENGL 300 *02: Critical Conversations in English: The Gothic Experience (Bachman)

The fog–enshrouded castle . . . dank dungeons . . . sinister villains . . . supernatural spirits . . . damsels in distress . . . scandalous secrets . . . ghostly apparitions . . . dark doubles . . . terrifying nightmares . . . dreadful curses . . . mysterious strangers . . . violent death . . .

This section of ENGL 300 will examine the origin and forms of Gothic literature in eighteenth–century England and investigate its myriad transformations and returns in both literature and film in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty–first centuries. Following current scholarship, we will pose questions about belief in the supernatural, representations of violence, the significance of fantasy and fear, and the role of gender, race, class, and sexuality. (ENGL 300 emphasizes critical thinking, analytical writing and textual analysis as the foundations of success in the major. Texts—connected by generic, thematic or historical factors—will be the means to introduce English majors to some of the research methodologies, critical "conversations," and professional factors that are central concerns in the discipline.)

ENGL 301 *01: Creative Writing Workshop (Adams)

This course introduces the fundamentals of composing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and other types of creative writing using a combination of example readings and writing workshops. We will focus on developing your creative writing skills, craft vocabulary, and understanding of the writing process. We become better writers by becoming better reader; therefore, for inspiration and advice, we will read and discuss published work about the craft of writing. We will also read and discuss contemporary poems, stories, and essays by some of the best writers working today. Using the techniques we glean, you will write your own creative work—three poems, one story, and one essay—to learn about the writing process and about what these genres share and what makes each unique. Your creative work will be work–shopped by the class, with a focus on discovering and fostering your individual interests, strengths, and talents.

ENGL 301 *02: Creative Writing Workshop (Ockert)

This course is designed to help you learn the fundamentals of creative non–fiction, poetry, and fiction writing. In addition, through the careful analysis of both published and unpublished work, your critical awareness will be challenged and enhanced. We will dissect the construction of essays, poems, and short stories, gain practice in writing these genres, and participate in peer–centered workshops. The philosophy behind the workshop setting is to broaden a writer's knowledge base and provide him/her with further tools with which to sharpen his/her craft. While not everyone in the class will "get" what you want from your piece, not everyone will "miss" it. The point is that more scrutinizing eyes on your work will help widen your own.

ENGL 303 01/ENGL 303 02: British Literature (Moye)

This course is pre–medieval and pre–modern. It is also post–medieval and post–modern. As old yin rolls over into new yang and old yang rolls into new yin, the old does indeed become new again. So that makes Old English also at some point New English. That's what Borges says:

I ask myself from time to time what reasons Move me to study, as my night comes on And with no hope of mastery or precision, The language of the harsh Angles and Saxons. Wasted by the years, my memory Keeps letting fall the word repeated in vain, And in much the same way my life goes on Weaving and unweaving its weary history. Perhaps (I tell myself) it's that the soul Knows in some secret and sufficient way That, destined, as it is, never to die, Its vast grave sphere encompasses the whole. Beyond this arduous task, beyond this verse Waits, inexhaustible, the universe. Jorge Luis Borges (trans. R.G. Barnes in Poetry 162 (1993): 159)

Or as Peter Allen's lyrics warn us, "Don't throw the past away...You might need it some rainy day...Dreams can come true again...When everything old is new again." Peter Allen –MetroLyrics

So, this class is about what you might need on some rainy day, about the secret treasures you can have in your mind and heart: the lessons and beautiful poetry left us by wise ones from the past. In English 303, you get to read King Alfred, who was deservedly called "Alfred the Great." You get to read a master poet who tells us stories dredged up from the deep, deep darkness of the prehistoric past and works to make us realize that these old fears and hopes continue to be expressed in new ideologies and symbolic frameworks that serve to orient us and order chaotic human experience. And then comes Chaucer's Wife of Bath. And then the PTSD knight Malory. And then Shakespeare's King Henry IV. The course ends with the courageous Aphra Behn and with the equally courageous John Milton. These writers are still worth reading. Students will find that they are new in their oldness. The professor will simply try not to kill them off by turning them into marble monuments.

ENGL 305 *02: American Literature I (Hamelman)

A survey of representative works illustrating the development of American literature from its beginnings through the mid–nineteenth century, with an emphasis on major literary movements understood in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts. Having some knowledge of the first two hundred years of American literature helps students understand and appreciate the widely known literature of the nineteenth century. Themes that concern colonial and Enlightenment writers c. 1600–1800 are republican politics, the individual vs. the state, nature, the Indian and Other, free market economics, religion and spirituality, dream and vision, and American identity. Authors address these subjects in a wide variety of genres (memoir, sermon, didactic poem, captivity narrative, satire, speech, letter, and diary), laying the groundwork for what follows during the Age of American Romanticism (c. 1800–1865), when literature tends to express two sides, the transcendental and the morbid, of a new sensibility of feeling. But the Romantic Age is also a time when political and social issues absorbed writers. For one thing, the problem of slavery (connected on political and philosophical levels to the theme of the individual vs. the state) came to the forefront of American consciousness. Paralleling this issue was women's rights, which both male and female writers faced with the same fervor they brought to slavery. In English 305 we look at some highlights of the colonial and republican periods and analyze ways that nineteenth–century writers mirrored or diverged from their predecessors. For instance, transcendentalists, though drawing much of their inspiration from Puritan morality and mysticism, did not manifest the dogmatism of their New England forebears. Meanwhile, morbid romantics like Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville reflect a romanticism having little in common with the Enlightenment optimism of Benjamin Franklin. In terms of the countless writers that resist categorization as either transcendental or morbid, we will read a few who tackled the question of freedom for women and slaves. Colonial–to–romantic American literature encompasses political, social, and religious themes embedded in a multitude of genres that provide insights into the paradoxes of American culture.

ENGL 311 *01: Play It (Again), Bill: Adapting and Adopting Shakespeare (Pillai)

We love hearing a good story over and over, now adding to it, now subtracting from it, now turning it over its head to see how the narrative withstands our interventions, how it struggles with our struggles, resists our opposition, adopts our acceptance, and flirts with our critical embraces. Good stories come to be adapted; sometimes they improve as the result of their brushes with other good stories and storytellers. It is no secret that, for the most part, William Shakespeare adapted older stories, retelling them in unforgettable fashion. What's more, while most of the sources of his plays have been forgotten by all save for a few scholars, Shakespeare's own works have spread like rhizomes and prompted other adaptations that suit the meanderings of times, cultures, media, and forms. From contemporary reaction pieces to paintings, sculptures, novels, and, of course, cinematic narratives, Shakespeare's works have managed not merely to escape extinction, they have triumphed over the awe inspiring, if frightening, phenomenon of decay—no small accomplishment for a man who most likely wrote his last play in 1613 and who died soon after in 1616. Indeed, Shakespeare's oeuvre lives on in adaptation: as a persistent ache or lingering giggle at the memory of a cruel joke; as a hydra–headed god or reassuring monster. But it does so not without the creativity of those of us (gods and monsters ourselves) that have followed in the wake of Shakespeare. After all, if adaptations have been at the core of our cultural substance for as long as literature and art have existed, it is because we are creatures of habit. When we find a good story, we do everything in our capacity to make it live with us and even beyond us. How we do this speaks as much of our aesthetics, economics, politics, philosophies, and theologies as it does of the story in whose crevices we discover and invent pleasures.

This course will focus on the hows of adaptation. We shall study five plays by Shakespeare and consider at least the following questions: how does a story come to be picked by a storyteller? How does it change with the change of hands and the change of forms or media? How does the process of adaptation ensure the survival of a story? How does memory complicate the future of the story? How do formal choices made in the present anticipate the future? These and similar questions that inform the praxis and theories of adaptation shall be our focal concerns in the analysis of Shakespeare's drama. We will study the plays in conjunction with diverse adaptations and appropriations of the same: in films by popular directors, in the visual arts, and in other shorter pieces of literature. At this point we do not know much about Shakespeare's life or his process of composition. But of two things we can be certain: he knew how to pick stories; and he knew how to retell them better than most others in the business. That his works continue to be a formidable influence on other wordsmiths and artists makes Shakespeare studies an exciting field that is as much about adaptability as it is about the dynamic interplay of words, ideas, and images.

ENGL 323 *01: Modern British and Irish Literature (Port)

In this course on the works of British and Irish writers from the first half of the twentieth century, we will read groundbreaking literary texts while developing a rich understanding of their historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. This exciting period of cultural innovation saw dramatic social and economic transformations, including the growth of cities, the rise of consumerism, and the expansion of mass culture, along with the accompanying erosion of long–held certainties about religion, empire, identity, gender, and sexuality. These rapid and radical changes led to a widespread sense of alienation and anxiety, as well as an awareness of creative empowerment and artistic possibility. We will study fiction, poetry, and drama from Britain and Ireland that participated in and responded to these transformations, including works by W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and others. We will also discuss the philosophical foundations of modernism as well as parallel developments in visual art, music, dance, and film. Coursework will include quizzes/informal writing, three papers, a presentation, and a final exam.

ENGL 329 *01: Autobiographies, Journals, and Memoirs (K. Turner)

This course will focus on one of the most popular genres of the digital age: the personal essay. We will read literary, historical, and contemporary examples of autobiographical writing—from tweets to canonical diaries––in order to establish basic conventions and then give particular attention to the ways in which we can mine our personal experiences to perform cultural critiques. Students will have the opportunity to produce and publish their own essays on a variety of topics according to their individual interests.

ENGL 333 *01: The American Novel: "Adaptations" (D. Turner)

A study of selected American novels. We will encounter a spectrum of significant novels by major American writers. The novels under scrutiny will reflect something of the sheer variability of the novel form: from "highbrow" to more popular even "pulp" versions (as Mickey Spillane, one of the bestselling detective writers of his era and long–time resident of Murrells Inlet, SC, quipped, "If the public likes you, you're good"), from coming–of–age and marriage plots to hardcore detective noir to experimental modernist forms and mythological magic realism. Through these works, we will explore issues of national and transnational definition, social and economic tensions, aesthetic and intellectual movements, and shifting attitudes about gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Moreover, our understanding of the novel need not be bound to its print form, but should consider the interplay between various genres and new media. Therefore, matters of adaptation will be crucial to our discussions. We will take into account emerging scholarship in the fields of genre studies and new media development. How do American novels adapt to competing media and genres, and how do other media adapt the American novel into their modes? Texts may include: Ethan Wharton, Ethan Frome; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me, Deadly; Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia; Daniel Wallace, Big Fish; and Annie Proulx, Close Range. We will examine cinematic adaptations of these source texts as well as other cross–modal exchanges between fictive and filmic media, such as David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008); Joseph Anthony's Tomorrow (1972); and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

ENGL 362 *01: Reading and Writing Fiction (Adams)

This course is a literature and workshop course designed to study published contemporary short stories and create original works of short fiction. Students will read and critique both published and student work. This course offers an opportunity to learn about the craft of fiction, to write and think creatively, to incorporate revision into your writing process, and to develop as an articulate, generous critic of writing. For inspiration, and to gain insights into the craft of fiction, we'll read and discuss published stories and craft essays. Your time will be divided in large part between reading published work, writing your own fiction, and reading and commenting upon the fiction of your fellow student writers, which we will discuss in workshop. Emphasis will be on student participation and the building of a community of literary peers.

ENGL 368 *01: Reading and Writing Poetry (Albergotti)

Saul Bellow defines the writer as "a reader moved to emulation." James Longenbach says that "To write one poem, you have to read a thousand of them." These are just two examples of the many successful writers who have attested to the central role of reading in the development of any writer's growth. But is it enough simply to read as readers do, or do writers read in a different way? This course explores the special way that writers read—not simply to be entertained or to investigate a text's aesthetic, social, or historical value, but to understand the artistry that lies behind the words on the page, to discover strategies and avenues for poem–making, and ultimately to find ways to contribute to an artistic conversation in English that's been going on since Beowulf. The first half of the course focuses on learning to read in this "writer's way." The second half is a poetry workshop. Students write two short papers and four poems, and they collect the poems (in original and revised forms) in a final portfolio.

ENGL 371 *01: Special Topics in World Literature: East/West Intersections - Magical Realisms (Oldfield)

Magical Realisms. A subset of Latin American fiction? A post–colonial literary hybrid? A type of Surrealism or Fantasy? A response to political repression? A genre as old as Gilgamesh? Magical Realism is perhaps not a genre, period or style, but a mode of artistic creation in which multiple worlds intersect and collide with paradoxical, carnivalesque, and sometimes terrifying results. In this class we will consider literature and film as we debate our own definitions of what magical realism might be, explore how it is connected to specific political and historical situations, and respond to the human and metaphysical challenges with which it confronts us. Geographically, we are going to concentrate on Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Readings will include Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Clarice Lispector, Shahrnush Parsipur, Murakami Haruki, and Italo Calvino, as well as critical essays. Films will include Pan's Labyrinth, Time of the Gypsies, and Orpheus.

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Hasty)

This course is an introduction to the scientific study of the nature and structure of human Language, what we refer to as linguistics. Yet, we will go beyond a mere overview of the field. Instead, this course seeks to provide you with the tools to do linguistic analysis. Towards the end of the course you should have a solid over view of the linguistic system and how fantastically complicated and interesting it is. The course will be framed in terms of 4 guiding questions: What is the nature of the cognitive system that we identify as Language? How is this system used in the production and comprehension of speech? How is this system represented in the brain? What are the necessary components of Language? To foster and assess these objectives, you will complete a series of problem sets and exams which will ask you to apply linguistic analysis to real world data.

ENGL 480 *01: Technical Editing: Special Topics in Technical Communication (Kellogg)

Technical editing refers to a set of skills and practices much valued in today's workplace. Technical editors improve technical documents: that is, they take existing documents written to accomplish specific, often highly complex purposes and make those documents clearer for their intended audiences. Technical editing includes both copyediting (editing for grammar, style, and other local issues) and comprehensive editing (editing for purpose and usability, including issues such as organization and design). This course seeks to develop your ability to edit complex technical, professional, and scientific documents. After successfully completing this course, you will have a set of skills that you can put to use immediately, adding value to a variety of workplace environments. Through exercises and revision assignments using a range of practices, this class will allow you to gain a technical editing skill set. We will also cover careers available to technical editors and strategies for breaking into the technical editing job market. The class will culminate in a technical editing portfolio you can use in a job search.

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism (Boyle)

We will begin this course with an exploration of the following terms: Thinking, Acting/Making, Being (in the world) In many senses, these three terms represent the major trajectories of Western critical and theoretical expression. They also give us insight into the principal problems associated with how we revise, represent, and reproduce cultural, linguistic and literary knowledge. Since this course ranges across a vast historical spectrum, serving as both an introduction to and a survey of the principal texts of literary and cultural theory, we will resort to direct engagement with themes, objects, attitudes, and texts that dialogue directly or indirectly with one of the above key terms. The course will be organized around modules that will employ literature, films, advertisements, comics, videogames, poems, found objects, bathroom slogans, YouTube videos, your experience as a server in a local theme restaurant, that recent insult from your mother regarding your attire, essays, your draft poem for your writing workshop, the design on your plastic water bottle, and anything else we can get our hands on, to better understand the challenging but incredibly exciting theory texts we will study. We will do as much because theory is first and foremost an attempt at action in the world and through writing - and we will respect its call to action and eschew the notion that theory is too difficult, too abstract, or too remote. We will also play –– with language, texts, images, and canonical thought. We will play hard. Because, as one important contemporary theorist reminds us, when theory becomes something rigorously "known," locked within some singular claim to expertise and "institutional closure," it simply stops being theory. Classes that are not discussions are boring. So plan for an experience filled with lots of voices, multimedia, some disagreements, and at least one pizza. Online sample collection of materials for an example module ( Plato, The Matrix, and a Claymation short on the Allegory of the Cave)

ENGL 484 *01: Children's Literature (Arnold)

This course introduces students to the study of works appropriate for the elementary and middle school child. In this class, students develop an appreciation for children's literature and an awareness of the wide variety of children's literature available for elementary and middle school readers. Readings range from classic to contemporary and cover a variety of levels, genres, themes, and cultures. Class discussions and assignments focus on critically reading, categorizing, analyzing, and evaluating children's literature and illustration; using children's book awards, booklists, and other tools for selecting children's books; and understanding the importance of including multicultural books in children's literature. Members of the learning community in this class are expected to participate actively in class discussion and group work; contribute to a shared class book list through composing an annotated bibliography; gain practice reading aloud, working with colleagues, and presenting literature to a group; and become familiar with issues and scholarship in the field of children's literature.

Spring 2014

ENGL 300 *01-Critical Conversations: Writing the Digital Age (Paster)

This section of ENGL 300 will examine writing practices associated with digital environments, the ways in which e-spaces function, and the possibilities associated with writing for the web. To come to critical understandings of how web writing often works, students will explore their own experiences as digital writers, will investigate one digital site in an in-depth way, and will write for the web. This course pushes students to consider the ways in which they are situated as writers in digital settings and the potentials and limitations of electronic textual practices. Through reflective writing, analyses of digital spaces, and a researched digital text, students will examine how technological writing genres support and inhibit certain kinds of communication as they consider the rhetorical effectiveness and design elements of their own digital writing.

ENGL 300 *02-Critical Conversations: Techno-Romantics: Literature and Media Between the Early Romantic Era and the Present (Boyle)

In two recent works (see HERE and HERE) that consider our private and public desires amid digital 2.0 culture, mediated communication is described as a stream of nostalgia, an unceasing flow of intensities of disconnected feeling, and a realm of existence where we have “become mesmerized by our own looking” (Jodi Dean). Both the Romantic era and our present moment are particularly concerned with what we might call “virtual” experience. The virtual at our moment is often synonymous with being present “online,” or with the effects of “Real Life” that show up in digital or networked environments. In Romantic period literature, the virtual makes an appearance through notions of how one can be moved (literally, and materially, in some cases) from one place or experience to another (transported or conveyed through words, affections, or media). Peter Otto argues that traditional interpretations of Romantic literature distract us from the presence of the virtual through references to the individual imagination. We will look at where a distinction between imagination and virtual experience might lead us.

ENGL 301-Creative Writing Workshop (Adams)

This course is designed to help you learn the fundamentals of creative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction writing. In addition, through the careful analysis of both published and unpublished work, your critical awareness will be challenged and enhanced. We will dissect the construction of essays, poems, and short stories, gain practice in writing these genres, and participate in peer-centered workshops. The philosophy behind the workshop setting is to broaden a writer's knowledge base and provide him/her with further tools with which to sharpen his/her craft. While not everyone in the class will “get” what you want from your piece, not everyone will “miss” it. The point is that more scrutinizing eyes on your work will help widen your own.

ENGL 304 *01-British Literature II (K. Oestreich)

This is a survey of representative works illustrating the development of British literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on major literary movements understood in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts. This section of ENGL 304 will address some of the following questions: How did British literary works respond to-and help create and change-political and social conditions? More specifically, how have works by writers in the late 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries responded to and helped change those conditions in Britain? Other themes we will consider include: The relations among nature, science, and the imagination; the implications of urbanization; the relevance of gender, class, racial, and sexual difference to literary production; the consequences of British imperialism and the dissolution of empire; and the effects of the ever-increasing pace of technological development.

ENGL 306 *01-American Literature II (D. Turner)

This is a survey of texts associated with American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in relation to their intellectual, social, and political contexts. How do these works envision what “America” means, and what perspectives do they offer on the nation's pasts and futures as well as its connections or conflicts with other regions and nations? We examine interrelated artistic achievements, such as music (Dixieland and bebop forms of jazz, Mississippi Delta blues songs, and contemporary rock/pop), photography (Margaret Bourke-White's photojournalism and Ansel Adams's monumental landscapes), painting (cubism, Norman Rockwell's Americana, and Andy Warhol's pop art), and film (The Crowd, Dr. Strangelove, Psycho, and The Royal Tenenbaums).

ENGL 330 *01-Realism and Naturalism: The Human Beast (Bachman)

Greed! . . Lust! . . . Sex! . . . Passion! . . . Betrayal! . . . Adultery! . . . Revenge! . . . Violence! . . . Murder! . . . If you love happy endings, forget it. In this course, we will toss aside our delicate sensibilities and immerse ourselves in narratives that showcase the darker and more depraved side of human nature. More specifically, we will explore the historical phenomenon of literary naturalism-a movement praised for its commitment to truth and objectivity by its practitioners and condemned as sordid and shocking by its critics-as it emerged in nineteenth-century French literature and its subsequent development in and influence on American literature, drama, and film.

ENGL 354 *01-Grammar and Syntax (Hasty)

Although we use it every day, and although we all have strong opinions about its proper form and appropriate use, we rarely stop to think about the wonder of Language. You are reading this and understanding this, but you have no conscious knowledge of how you are doing it. You know that these sentences (*Sally’s brother doesn’t like herself. *It was expected Harry to leave early. *Who do you wonder what bought?) are bad in some way, yet you can't really express why (the “rules” Ms. Crabtree taught you in grade school don't seem to help you with any of these problems). The study of this mystery is the science of Linguistics. This class is about one aspect of how language works: how sentences are structured, what linguists call the study of Syntax. Syntax studies the level of Language that lies between words and the meaning of utterances: sentences. It is this level of Language that mediates between the sounds that someone produces (organized into words) and what they intend to say. One of the most interesting questions in the scientific study of Language is how we subconsciously get from sounds and words to meaning. This is the study of syntax.

ENGL 365 *01-Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction (J. Oestreich)

This course is essential for anyone enjoys, well, reading and writing creative nonfiction. The class operates in four units. In the first, students become familiar with the building blocks common to all forms of literary nonfiction-concepts such as writing in scene, narration vs. exposition, the importance of place and characterization, and writing to make meaning. Next we study the forms of seven nonfiction subgenres: memoir, the personal essay, the lyric essay, the fragmented essay, literary journalism, profile writing, and cultural criticism. In the third unit we dissect and analyze major works of contemporary nonfiction, including essays by David Sedaris, Cheryl Strayed, and David Foster Wallace. This unit is discussion-based, and these discussions are student-led. For the final unit, students write an original creative essay, which is read and critiqued by the entire class.

ENGL 375 *01-Special Topics in World Literature: The Post-Modern Muslim: Literature and Film from the Islamic World (Oldfield)

Do Muslim writers view the world differently? Is the “Islamic world” really a separate “world,” or is it part of “our world”? Have creative movements, such as post-modernism and magic realism, impacted Muslim cultures along with globalization and war? In this course we'll read a selection of outstanding works from countries including Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia, and Uzbekistan. After considering foundational texts such as the Arabian Nights, we'll focus on 20th century masters including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Egyptian feminist Naawal El Saadawi, and the notorious Salman Rushdie. We'll also watch a series of films and consider other arts, such as music, photography, and architecture. As we explore, we'll have the chance to question the frames through which we view other cultures and consider what we can learn not only about other people, but also about ourselves.

ENGL 390-Business and Prof Communication: Real World Writing (K. Turner)

This section of ENGL 390 is designed to help students-those who enjoy writing and/or those whose future career field will involve writing-to continue to develop practical and marketable writing skills and experience. We will explore a range of nonfiction genres on multiple topics in order to examine how rhetoric impacts real-world economic, environmental, political, and entertainment decisions as well as shapes contemporary culture at large. We will go beyond textbook approaches to communications strategies and take an innovative and creative hands-on approach to the study of professional communication. Students will experiment with proposals and pitches, blogging, and leveraging social media networks throughout the semester, culminating in a student portfolio that reflects their digital literacy experience.

ENGL 401 *01-Chaucer (Moye)

This course is an in-depth study of the language and poetry of The Canterbury Tales and of the late medieval culture that produced them. The fourteenth century was a tough time to be alive, yet people prospered. Especially people like Chaucer's father, who was a wine merchant. The English drank wine, not ale, and they even fought a long war with France to keep possession of the wine producing region of Bordeaux. So a wine merchant was in a position to make an awful lot of money and would regularly have contact with government officials like custom agents. Through his father's connections, Chaucer made his way into the court of the warrior King Edward III and rose to prominence. This course considers the role of this court poet as someone who has a unique, close up perspective on all the multitude of events that led to the decline of chivalry, the decline of the church, and the rise of a merchant economy. He can give us an inside look at the lifestyle of the nobility and at the behavior of ordinary citizens. What Chaucer shows us is the chaotic jumble of a society in transition from a feudal economy to a modern market economy. The course also will offer instruction in Middle English. The assignments will primarily be glosses of passages, and the instructor will bring in manuscripts and other materials for students to study.

ENGL 453 *01-Development of English Language (Moye)

English 453 is a very fun class to teach and to take. The student gets to find out how the English language got so screwed up and to trace how the development of the language is connected to shifts in the economy, culture and political situation. The class starts with instruction in basic phonology and an overview of world languages; then, begins the study of Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English. We go from Beowulf to Shakespeare and Daniel Defoe, from the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest to the so-called Enlightenment or Age of Reason. There are five tests, two in class and three to take home.

ENGL 457 *01-Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

What is a writing style? In the view of this teacher, style is a choice - or rather, a set of choices. Every time you choose to write a sentence one way rather than another, you have made a stylistic choice. Your writing has attained a style, however, only when the set of the choices you make adds up to something recognizable, consistent, true. This course is an intensive workshop in improving prose style. We will cover research and citation styles (what many students mean by “style”), but we focus on improving your ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with wit, elegance, and power. We will cover issues of clarity, concision, coherence, cohesion, and other elements of practical style; control of sentence length, rhythm, and pacing; and a variety of rhetorical figures, including tropes of argument. You will both revise previously written pieces and compose new work.

ENGL 462 *E1-Fiction Writing Workshop (Ockert)

This is an advanced course in fiction writing and in it we will analyze the multiple ways a short story can be written. Additionally, you'll have the opportunity to read your peers' writing in a workshop setting. Building on what you've learned in previous creative writing courses, we will study contemporary elements of style and seek to understand particular values inherent in important short story writing. Reading the writings of published and unpublished work will introduce you to diverse ideas and also provide you with practice in responding to ideas by questioning, affirming, refuting, complicating, reflecting, and critiquing. Although it is impossible to teach you to be a great writer, it is possible to teach you the ways in which published writers have organized their thoughts and ideas onto the page. “Greatness,” I'm hoping, will rub off on you. At times, you will be given in-class writing assignments/exercises which may very well blossom into something beautiful that you may like to include in the portfolio you submit to me at the end of the semester. The exercises are meant to enhance areas of your writing which may still need work-dialogue, character development, setting, motivation, plot-and while I do not believe writing should be taught by compartmentalizing, I expect you to understand elements of style and form. I don't expect you to have your voice tuned just yet so I challenge you to take risks in discovering it.

ENGL 468 *01-Poetry (Hensel)

This is a workshop course in the writing of poetry. Students learn the craft of poetry, have their poems discussed in a workshop setting, and are guided in the preparation and submission of manuscripts for publication. Students will write, and read examples of, poems in free verse and in traditional forms, and most of class time will be spent in group discussion of poems.

ENGL 483 *01-Theory of Literary Criticism (Hamelman)

The subject of literary theory and criticism is both vast and abstract, which is why we must concentrate as we confront unfamiliar concepts, conflicting points of view, diverse styles, and scores of technical terms coined by theorists who pioneered new ways to define and interpret literature and culture. We will quickly learn that to study literary theory and criticism means to study signs, codes, grammars, and systems-linguistic, aural, visual, and otherwise-that create what we call “reality.” In this course we will take a daring leap into texts that show us the amazing number of ways we can approach an understanding of the most important term of all: representation. What is representation? How have different writers from different historical periods explained it? Does a transcendent Truth inform representation, or is it an arbitrary, fluid combination of signs that can't be reduced to one final meaning? Questions such as these will proliferate with each assignment on the syllabus, which has been designed so that each author enters a dialogue started or continued by earlier authors.

ENGL 485 *01-Adolescent Literature (Campbell)

We will read a range of “young adult” literature (moving chronologically from Oliver Twist and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Hunger Games, Percy Jackson and City of Bones). We will consider what adolescents read, how they read, and why they read. We will look at theories of adolescent thinking and behavior and see what insights we can gain by applying these theories to the ways young adults are depicted in literary works. We will also study the roles such works play (or should play) in middle school and high school classrooms. This will be a class built around student input, student participation, and student presentations. We will have fun, but we will also work hard to advance our understanding of the history, scope, and importance of a field of literature that is barely studied despite its popularity.

Current Courses

Spring 2023

DCD and ENGL 300 & 400 Level

ENGL 600 Level

Fall 2022

ENGL 300 *01 Critical Conversations in English: (Smith)

ENGL 301 *01 Forms of Creative Writing (Albergotti)

ENGL 301 *D1 Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)

ENGL 303 *01 British Literature I (Ennis)

ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)

ENGL 334 *01 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture: Empire and Its Legacies (Port)

ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Magical and Other Realisms (Oldfield)

ENGL 341 *01 African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)

ENGL 351 *01 Language, Gender and Power (Fleckenstein)

ENGL 354 *01 English Grammar and Syntax (Hasty)

ENGL 362 *01 Fiction I (Ockert)

ENGL 368 *01 Poetry I (Albergotti)

ENGL 379 *01 Special Topics in Film Studies (Oestreich, K)

ENGL 391 *01 Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)

ENGL 411 *Q1 English Capstone Seminar (Pillai)

ENGL 443 *01 Topics in Women Writers: Bridges to Everywhere: Intersectional Storytelling and Feminist Practice (Pillai)

ENGL 451 *01 Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 465 *01 Creative Nonfiction II (Hanafi)

ENGL 483 *01 Theory of Literary Criticism: (Smith)

ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)

Spring 2022

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English (Smith)

ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)

ENGL 306 *01: American Literature II (Lowery)

ENGL 323 *01: Modern British/Irish Literature: 1922, Modernism’s Miracle Year (Port)

ENGL 338 *01: Perspectives on a Single Author: Edgar Allan Poe (Hamelman)

ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in America (Hasty)

ENGL 365 *01: Creative Nonfiction I (Burch)

ENGL 375 *01: Special Topics in World and Anglophone Literature: Philosophy and Literature (Oldfield/Rauhut)

ENGL 392 *01: Writing in Professional and Public Setting (Sobota)

ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)

ENGL 453 *D1 Development of the English Language (Hasty)

ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 462 *02: Fiction II (Ockert)

ENGL 468 *01: Poetry II (Albergotti)

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism – Critical Theory: From Information to Insight (Pillai)

ENGL 484 *D1: Children’s Literature (Arnold)

ENGL 489 *01: Gender and Sexuality in Literature- Subversive Pleasures: Histories and Theories of ‘Deviance’ (Pillai)

Fall 2021

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English - Border Crossings: Migration in Contemporary Literature and Film (Port)

ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)

ENGL 311 *01: Topics in Shakespeare – Changing “Shakespeare” in the “Real World” and Our Future (Pillai)

ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)

ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)

ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – The Question of Evil (Oldfield)

ENGL 337 *01 Perspectives on Genre – Spicing Things Up: Women’s Imaginative Labor and South Asian Diasporic Communities (Pillai)

ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)

ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)

ENGL 352 *01: African American English (Childs)

ENGL 355 *01: Introduction to Discourse Analysis (Fleckenstein)

ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)

ENGL 368 *01: Poetry I (Albergotti)

ENGL 379 *01: Topics in Film Studies – World Film (Oldfield)

ENGL 393 *01: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (Smith)

ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)

ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)

ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)

ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction II (Burch)

ENGL 469 *01: Special Topics in Creative Writing: Eco - Justice Writing (Hensel)

ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Theory – Theory in a Digital World (Boyle) (Taught in the Digital Commons)

ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)

Fall 2020

ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: (Oestreich, K)

ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *02: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)

ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)

ENGL 303 *01: British Literature I (Moye)

ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)

ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)

ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Classic/Reboot (Oldfield)

**ENGL 300 *01 Critical Conversations in English: (Smith)**

**ENGL 301 *01 Forms of Creative Writing (Albergotti)**

**ENGL 301 *D1 Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 303 *01 British Literature I (Ennis)**

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 334 *01 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture: Empire and Its Legacies (Port)**

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Magical and Other Realisms (Oldfield)**

**ENGL 341 *01 African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)**

**ENGL 351 *01 Language, Gender and Power (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 354 *01 English Grammar and Syntax (Hasty)**

**ENGL 362 *01 Fiction I (Ockert)**

**ENGL 368 *01 Poetry I (Albergotti)**

**ENGL 379 *01 Special Topics in Film Studies (Oestreich, K)**

**ENGL 391 *01 Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)**

**ENGL 411 *Q1 English Capstone Seminar (Pillai)**

**ENGL 443 *01 Topics in Women Writers: Bridges to Everywhere: Intersectional Storytelling and Feminist Practice (Pillai)**

**ENGL 451 *01 Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Nonfiction II (Hanafi)**

**ENGL 483 *01 Theory of Literary Criticism: (Smith)**

**ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)**

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English (Smith)**

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 306 *01: American Literature II (Lowery)**

**ENGL 323 *01: Modern British/Irish Literature: 1922, Modernism’s Miracle Year (Port)**

**ENGL 338 01: Perspectives on a Single Author: Edgar Allan Poe* (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in America (Hasty)**

**ENGL 365 *01: Creative Nonfiction I (Burch)**

**ENGL 375 *01: Special Topics in World and Anglophone Literature: Philosophy and Literature (Oldfield/Rauhut)**

**ENGL 392 *01: Writing in Professional and Public Setting (Sobota)**

**ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 453 *D1 Development of the English Language (Hasty)**

**ENGL 457 *01: Form and Style in Writing (Kellogg)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 462 *02: Fiction II (Ockert)**

**ENGL 468 *01: Poetry II (Albergotti)**

**ENGL 483 01: Theory of Literary Criticism – Critical Theory: From Information to Insight* (Pillai)**

**ENGL 484 *D1: Children’s Literature (Arnold)**

**ENGL 489 01: Gender and Sexuality in Literature- Subversive Pleasures: Histories and Theories of ‘Deviance’* (Pillai)**

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English - Border Crossings: Migration in Contemporary Literature and Film (Port)**

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 311 *01: Topics in Shakespeare – Changing “Shakespeare” in the “Real World” and Our Future (Pillai)**

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)**

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – The Question of Evil (Oldfield)**

**ENGL 337 *01 Perspectives on Genre – Spicing Things Up: Women’s Imaginative Labor and South Asian Diasporic Communities (Pillai)**

**ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (Lowery)**

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)**

**ENGL 352 *01: African American English (Childs)**

**ENGL 355 *01: Introduction to Discourse Analysis (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)**

**ENGL 368 *01: Poetry I (Albergotti)**

**ENGL 379 *01: Topics in Film Studies – World Film (Oldfield)**

**ENGL 393 *01: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (Smith)**

**ENGL 411 *Q1: English Capstone Seminar (Childs)**

**ENGL 451 *01: Introduction to the Study of Language and Modern Grammar (Fleckenstein)**

**ENGL 459 *01 Advanced Composition and Rhetoric (Howes)**

**ENGL 465 *01 Creative Non-Fiction II (Burch)**

**ENGL 469 *01: Special Topics in Creative Writing: Eco - Justice Writing (Hensel)**

**ENGL 483 *01: Theory of Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Theory – Theory in a Digital World (Boyle) (Taught in the Digital Commons)**

**ENGL 485 *D1 Adolescent Literature (Arnold)**

**ENGL 300 *01: Critical Conversations in English: (Oestreich, K)**

**ENGL 301 *01: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *02: Forms of Creative Writing (Liebeck)**

**ENGL 301 *D1: Forms of Creative Writing (Ockert)**

**ENGL 303 *01: British Literature I (Moye)**

**ENGL 332*01 Perspectives on American Literature and Culture (Hamelman)**

**ENGL 334 *02 Perspectives on British Literature and Culture (Oestreich, K)**

**ENGL 335 *01 Perspectives on World and Anglophone Literatures and Culture – Classic/Reboot (Oldfield)**

**ENGL 337 *01 Perspectives on Genre – Women of Color (Pillai)**

**ENGL 341 *01: African-American Literature, 1750-present (To Be Announced)**

**ENGL 350 *01: Language Variation in North America (Hasty)**

**ENGL 351 *01: Language, Gender and Power (Childs)**

**ENGL 362 *01: Fiction I (Ockert)**

**ENGL 379 *01: Topics in Film Studies – Russian Film (Oldfield)**

**ENGL 386 *01: Topics in Contemporary Poetry (To Be Announced)**

**ENGL 391 *01: Introduction to new Literacy Studies (Howes)**