Core & Featured Courses
Literary Theory
LIT 3213.001｜MacDonald｜Core｜Online Live Lecture｜WF 2pm-3:20pm
In some senses as much a philosophy class as a literature class, this course will introduce you to the names and theories attached to many of the approaches currently taken to approaching literature from an analytic perspective. While the various theorists, philosophers, linguists, and psychoanalysts may not, in their own time, have had literature at the front of their minds, later literary scholars would borrow or adapt their theories: to such an extent that anyone studying literature at the graduate level today would be expected to be at least familiar with their basic arguments and how they might be used in a critical context. As such, we will read both the birth and development of more formalist literary criticism—from Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century through the didactic-, New Critical-, and archetypal formalisms of the mid-twentieth century as well as works by seminal figures including Marx, Saussure, Freud, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida whose inquiries surrounding language and the social contexts of literature continue to inform and determine approaches to literary analysis to this day.
Professional & Creative Writing Concentration students take ENG 3822 or LIT 3213 (required for all other English majors)
Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG 3822.006｜Chenovick｜Core｜In-Person｜TR 2pm-3:20pm
This course will explore the kinds of questions literary scholars ask about literary texts and the ways different literary genres call for different kinds of questions and offer different imaginative resources. What makes a lyric poem different from an epic (aside from length)? How does comedy differ from satire? What even is an allegory? Ranging from Classical epic to modern poetry and from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, this class will introduce you to a variety of texts and genres and enable you to write about differing literary tropes and techniques. Some of our course themes will include the relationships between humans and the natural world and the forms of knowledge and relating produced by food and eating. But our guiding questions will how different literary texts do what they do and how to develop critical arguments about the texts and literary strategies you find most compelling.
Professional & Creative Writing Concentration students take ENG 3822 or LIT 3213 (required for all other English majors)
Category One
Comparative Literature
LIT 4061.001｜Ulin｜Cat 1｜Online Live Lecture｜W 7:10pm-10pm
This unique course frees us to explore great writers across national boundaries. We will read myth, folklore, poetry, drama, and fiction and pay special attention to how writers respond to and adapt one another. Note: This online live lecture course requires participation as the attendance grade.
World Literature: Critical Approaches
LIT 4225.001｜Ma｜Cat 1｜In-Person｜WF 9:30am-10:50am
This course offers a critical exploration of world literature through a variety of theoretical lenses, focusing on how texts reflect and contest global histories, power structures, and cultural geographies. We will examine literature not just as artistic expression but as a form of knowledge shaped by imperialism, migration, and environmental change. We will consider how narrative form, language, and genre mediate experiences of place and identity. Students will engage with critical frameworks to interrogate how literature can disrupt dominant narratives and reimagine what the “world” in world literature means.
US Latino/a Literatures
AML 4630.001｜Zamora｜Cat 1｜In-Person｜WF 2pm-3:20pm
Exploring texts from Latinx communities in California, New York, Texas, and Florida, and blending traditional and contemporary works, this course will explore the evolution and shifting Latinx identity discourse across media and literature. In recognition of the ever-evolving media landscape that expedites community dialogues, the course will briefly engage with streaming platform media (e.g. Netflix and YouTube).
This course focuses on questions of historical Latinx identity, intersectionalities within Latinidad (e.g. race, gender, and sexuality), as well as location to understand the reverberating questions that impact Latinidad as we understand it today. Some sample texts include Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet, Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova, and Debí tirar más fotos by Bad Bunny.
Black Literatures
LIT 4355.001｜Fox｜Cat 1｜In-Person｜WF 11am-12:20pm
This course examines literary representations of the black diaspora, with particular attention to experiences of slavery and freedom in Ghana, Bermuda, Turks Island, Antigua, Jamaica, England, Russia, and the United States. Nineteenth-century, autobiographical works by Mary Prince and Nancy Prince will be contrasted with contemporary theory and fiction by Audre Lorde, Marlon James, and Yaa Gyasi. In what ways does this archive of antebellum slave narrative and twenty-first century neo-slave narrative make visible the consciousness and humanity of the enslaved, as well as resistance and self-reclamation? How do these works enable processes of witnessing and the transmission of cultural memory? Can they enact modes of healing or redress? In what ways do these literary works engage themes of sexuality, intimacy, and desire? Do these cultural productions illuminate contemporary complicity? And how do they influence the way we understand black diasporic identity in the present?
Native American LIterature
AML 4640.001｜Medina｜Cat 1｜In-Person｜TR 2pm-3:20pm
This course explores Native American prose, poetry, and oratory in tribal, regional, and national contexts. Students will closely examine how ceremony, cosmology, colonization, and community have shaped Native American literature, storytelling, history, and culture. While this course prioritizes Native America experiences, worldviews, and intellectual traditions it also empowers students to interrogate settler colonial representations of Native American history, culture, and literature. Students will explore the works and words of authors and orators that include but are not limited to: William Apess (Pequot), Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Layli Long Soldier (Lakota), Joy Harjo (Muscogee), Tommy Orange (Cheyenne/Arapaho), and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).
Category Two
Literature and Environment
LIT 4434.001｜Balkan｜Cat 2｜In-Person｜TR 11am-12:20pm
This course will explore the intersecting histories of literary expression, landscape ideology, environmental philosophy, and the natural sciences. We shall question popular understandings of “environment” and “nature” that have historically privileged such aesthetic traditions as “wilderness” over the economic imperatives of survival, or habitability; and we shall, consequently, consider competing notions of “environmentalism.” We shall query how, in an era marked by cataclysmic shifts to our global climate, we can begin to think collectively about the fate of our species; and we shall consider the virtue of artistic expressions that communicate our collective grief, while also imagining possible worlds beyond the inevitable collapse of current global energy systems.
Major American Writers, 19th C
AML 4311.001｜Furman｜Cat 2｜In-Person｜TR 2pm-3:20pm
Major American Writers: 19th Century will provide you with the opportunity to explore, in some depth, the work of several major 19th century American writers–Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Douglass, Jacobs, Dickinson, and Melville–all of whom helped to forge a distinctive “American” literature. In a very real sense, these writers set about imagining, through their artistic prose and poetry, what it was to be an American. In the most general sense, our goal will be to gain a richer understanding of American culture in the 19th century than afforded by, say, popular media (movies, TV series, etc.) about rugged 19th century individualists roughing it in the woods, the “settling” of the west, slavery, the plight of women, and the rise of the industrial age.
YA Literature
LIT 3333.001｜Fox｜Cat 2｜In-Person｜WF 12:30pm-1:50pm
The aim of this course is to explore representations of adolescence, in literary texts classified as “YA” and texts that take up adolescence as theme. Participants will assess texts (drawn primarily from Black and Latinx cultural contexts) to examine conditions of adolescence and their effects. We will uncover how adolescence intertwines with matters of friendship, sexuality, and violence, as well as ways in which it involves processes of nation, including immigration and assimilation. We will also interrogate renderings of young adulthood as innocent, ignorant, even disposable. Other questions orienting this course include: How is adolescence evoked by the body? How do devices, such as flashback, mediate adolescent longings? How do religion and education regulate adolescent self-expression? In what ways does class privilege inform naiveté? In what respects do gender and race influence one’s upbringing? How might those circumstances be reimagined to alternate ends?
American Pulp Science Fiction
AML 4930.001｜MacDonald｜Cat 2｜Online Live Lecture｜WF 9:30am-10:50am
This course will involve a deep dive into the roots, emergence, and rise of the American era of pulp science fiction up to and during its transition into the New Wave works of the 1960s and beyond. Focusing heavily on the editorial contributions of Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories) and John W. Campbell’s tenure at Astounding Science Fiction. Beginning with the pre-Amazing works of figures like H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, we will read the short stories that defined a genre, including seminal contributions by eventual sf grandmasters like A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. “Doc” Smith, C.L. Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Lee Sprague de Camp, Phillip K. Dick, James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton), Ursula LeGuin, and Samuel Delany. We will focus almost entirely on short fiction as this was the primary medium for Golden- and Silver-age sf.
Contemporary Drama
LIT 4094.001｜Ulin｜Cat 2｜In-Person｜W 4pm-6:50pm
Like to make a scene? We have a course for that.
This Category 2 course will explore key texts of contemporary drama that we read, annotate, and perform together in a weekly class meeting. Ideas explored include the supernatural, family conflicts, and how to represent the present world on stage. We will consider how to interpret a work of dramatic literature as well as what is involved in moving from the page to the stage.
There will be opportunities to present staged scenes in class, to meet with local theatre professionals, and to consider writing drama for public performance. This course will cover the drama of Eugene O’Neill to the present. This course welcomes students from my previous Modern Drama course as well as those interested in theatre and in writing for film and television.
20th Century British Literature
ENL 4273.001｜Schwartz｜Cat 2｜Online Live Lecture｜T 7:10pm-10pm
Course may include British literature from World War I to the end of the 20th century, concentrating on the major movements of modernism and postmodernism. Literary works by Lawrence, Woolf, Eliot, Pinter, Lessing and others may be studied in social and historical contexts, such as the women's and working-class movements, race and immigration and the end of empire.
American Literature from 1865
AML 2020.002｜Hagood｜Cat 2｜In-Person｜TR 12:30pm-1:50pm
This course offers an overview of literature in the United States since the Civil War. It will kick off with works by Booker T. Washington, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, then move on to the Modernists, including Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and William Faulkner, followed by contemporary period, which features Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and James Wright. Prepare to enjoy the greatest writing in American history.
Category Three
Studies in Writing & Rhetoric
ENG 4020.001｜Barrios｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜WF 12:30pm-1:50pm
AI writes papers. It makes art. It gives relationship advice. It confidently makes stuff up. Your professors are freaking out about it, your future employers are already using it, and everyone has opinions about whether it’s going to save humanity or destroy it. So…what is actually going on? In this class, we’ll look at what people say about AI, what AI says about us, and what happens when machines start writing. We’ll make AI write weird things. We’ll catch it lying. We’ll figure out why it sounds like *that*. We’ll argue about whether using ChatGPT is cheating, collaborating, or something we don’t have a word for yet. Then we’ll learn to use AI for ideas, research, drafting, feedback, and revision without letting it do our thinking for us. How do you stay smarter than the machine while still making the machine useful? Skepticism encouraged.
Legal Rhetorics and Literacies
ENC 4930.001｜Korankye｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜TR 12:30pm-1:50pm
Matters of the law affect everyone in different ways, but studies and interpretations of the law are often reserved for only legal experts. What if the law were simplified as a systematic, rhetorical, and social phenomenon so that everyone could gain legal rhetorics and literacies? In this course, students will learn to read, write, research, and design legal and quasi-legal documents, such as lease agreements, contracts, intellectual property rights, etc., as genres that encode and reproduce specific configurations of power, legitimacy, and exclusion. The course invites students to ask: Whose law is this? Who designs the law and for what purpose? Whose interests does it serve or work against? Students will redesign legal documents that prioritize inclusion, accessibility, usability, user experience, and justice for marginalized populations.
Professional & Technical Writing Certificate (pre-approved)
RI: Honors Research
ENG 4910.001｜Ma｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜F 2pm-4:50pm
Honors Research builds upon the work completed in Honors Seminar and facilitates the writing of a 20-40 page honors thesis that makes an original intellectual contribution to the discipline. You will continue your training in identifying, reading, evaluating, and contextualizing literary scholarship while adhering to the standards and best practices of research-level literary scholarship. The course may include library research visits, presentations on different research and analytical methodologies, and peer editing workshops. We will work through successive drafts of the thesis in workshops focused on content, style, structure, and tone. Throughout this course, you will be strengthening your argument in dialogue with existing scholarship in order to produce a thesis that can be communicated effectively in its written form and in a conference-style presentation.
Creative Writing
CRW 3010.004｜McKay｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜WF 12:30pm-1:50pm
The writer Toni Morrison once said, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” And, similarly, the poet Ezra Pound said, “Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” The best kind of creative writing—poem, story, essay—comes when we can find fresh and unexpected ways to present language. Stories and poems are only as strong and fresh as the language they contain, and only through strength and originality of language we can achieve depth in our writing. In this course we will approach creative writing in several ways: through exercises designed to help you find new approaches to writing prose and poetry; by reading and discussing works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; by spending significant time on writing as well as on the revision process; by developing your critical eye and ear as you read and critique each other’s work.
Professional Writing
ENC 3213.024｜Korankye｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜TR 11am-12:20pm
Through a rhetorical approach to writing, this course is designed to help students become critical writers, readers, and researchers in their professional fields by practicing with the rhetorical tools, composing techniques, and writing technologies they need to adapt to different workplaces, social situations, and public/civic contexts. Specifically, they will explore the genres of professional writing (e.g., proposals, emails, memos, reports, résumés/CVs, press releases, etc.); develop rhetorical techniques for analyzing professional writing situations and communicating effectively for different audiences/users; and experiment with writing technologies (AI, multimodal tools, and social media) to prepare them become well-rounded professional writers and effective public intellectuals.
Honors Creative Writing Seminar
CRW 4932.001｜Oriogun｜Cat 3｜In-Person｜W 2pm-4:50pm
This is an advanced course where we will be reading and crafting fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction, paying special attention to how form and technique contribute to meaning. We’ll consider questions such as: What makes a story or poem interesting? How do we develop an early vision into a finished work, through the process of revision? And how do the choices we make as writers shape what the reader experiences? Through studying poems, short stories and essays that employ elements of craft in service of the whole, we will acquire techniques for our own writing.
We will generate new works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction to be shared within the workshop space, provide thoughtful and generous written critique of peers’ work, complete weekly writing exercises, participate in discussion of weekly reading assignments, and attend public readings on campus. The class will culminate in a portfolio of revised writing, new work, and a reflection letter. Since all writing is a gradual process of thinking and discovery, greater emphasis will be placed on the revision of your work. More info at See Creative Writing Honors.
