Academic Catalog

English (ENGL)

ENGL 101  - Writing Workshop  (3 Credits)  

Instruction and practice in the fundamental techniques of expository and argumentative writing: organization development coherence research methods mechanics. Frequent workshop approach with group and tutorial work.

ENGL 202  - Writing Seminar  (3 Credits)  

Allows students to hone their writing skills, while focusing on writing in a particular context of interest to them. Topics vary by section; consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 203  - Writing with Digital Media  (3 Credits)  

A digital writing seminar equipping students with the rhetorical and technical tools to engage in contemporary digital discourse through multimodal composition.

ENGL 205  - The Art of Literature  (3 Credits)  

An introductory course emphasizing the development of the genres of poetry, prose fiction, non-fiction, and drama. Using a historical perspective, students study the role of the reader, the surrounding culture, and the language of the text. The course offers students the tools of critical analysis and encourages the pleasures of close reading and exchange of ideas.

ENGL 206A  - Global Issues in Literature  (3 Credits)  

An introductory course exploring multiple perspectives on a selected global theme or issue as expressed in literature. Attending to the pleasures of literature, the role of the reader, the language of the text, and the social context of literature, the course includes both historical and contemporary texts in traditional and non-traditional forms. It explores the contact zone between Anglo European perspectives and disparate world cultures outside Western Europe and North America.

ENGL 207  - Literature in Performance  (3 Credits)  

A performance course designed to enhance the performer's appreciation and understanding of the great literature of the world--poetry, prose, and drama--by translating the printed page into the spoken word. Experience in presenting material to both adults and children.

ENGL 245  - Introduction to Cinema Studies  (3 Credits)  

Equips students to analyze and understand the art of narrative cinema within the Anglophone tradition.

ENGL 251  - Issues in Literature  (3 Credits)  

Significant literary figures, movements, and topics. Specific topics vary.

ENGL 253  - Games and Culture  (3 Credits)  

A critical exploration of cultural value in video games--including issues of gender, race, sexuality, class, labor and disability--and the ways by which contemporary and historical games demonstrate, respond to, or represent those concerns.

ENGL 295  - Methods of Advanced Literary Studies  (3 Credits)  

This course introduces students to literary theory and its applications, offers a framework for understanding the historical evolution of literacy studies, and introduces students to a range of approaches to the study of texts. The course includes practice in writing commentary on literature. This course is required for English majors and appropriate for other students strongly interested in the analysis of literature.

ENGL 302A  - Introduction to Creative Writing  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: ENGL 295 or permission of the instructor. Introduction to writing fiction and poetry. Primary emphasis on developing student's abilities to write creatively, with periodic attention to examples from established writers.

ENGL 304A  - Creative Writing:Poetry  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: ENGL 302A or permission of the instructor. An intermediate workshop focused on poetic techniques and writing poetry.

ENGL 305A  - Creative Writing: Fiction  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: ENGL 302A or permission of the instructor. This course offers students of Creative Writing the opportunity to concentrate on the creation of short fiction. Students produce a portfolio of three or four polished short stories and also explore a variety of narrative techniques.

ENGL 306  - Topics in Writing  (3 Credits)  

Practice in writing in certain styles and forms. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics and prerequisites.

ENGL 307  - Writing Studies  (3 Credits)  

This course takes writing as an academic focus of study. In this advanced course about composition and the teaching of writing, students are introduced to the history of research and theory related to the writing process and those practices that support novice writers as they develop into more effective writers.

ENGL 308  - Writing Studies and Healing  (3 Credits)  

Advanced study of composition introducing students to research and theory of writing, with focus on the relationship between writing and healing. Practice in writing for personal, academic, and professional purposes.

ENGL 309  - Chaucer and His Age  (3 Credits)  

The study of popular literature in England during the middle ages- with emphasis on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales- Anglo-Saxon heroic narrative- Piers Plowman- and the origins of medieval drama.

ENGL 310  - The Courtly Tradition in Medieval Literature  (3 Credits)  

Development of courtly literature in medieval England, including Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde, works of the Gawain poet, love lyrics and native Arthurian material.

ENGL 312  - Creative Writing: Nonfiction  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: ENGL 302A or permission of the instructor. Introduction to writing creative nonfiction. Primary emphasis on developing students' abilities to write nonfiction creatively, with periodic attention to examples from established writers.

ENGL 313  - Special Topics in Creative Writing  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: ENGL 302A or permission of instructor. Practice in creative writing in various styles, genres, and forms. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 314  - The Literary Journal: Professional Practice in Publishing and Editing  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite ENGL 302A or permission of the instructor. A study of the contemporary national literary journal. Students also design and produce an on-line journal.

ENGL 316A  - Technical Writing  (3 Credits)  

Study of principles, genres, and processes of technical writing. Attention to analyzing and addressing audience, context, and purpose in written texts; technical writing style; professional ethics; collaborative authoring and editing; composing technologies; accessible information and visual design. Practice in iteratively composing complex texts to varied audiences across genres and media.

ENGL 318  - Sex, Love, and Power in Renaissance England  (3 Credits)  

Exploration of sexuality, sex, and gender in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century England. Special attention to the origins of and alternatives to twenty-first century conceptions of sexuality and gender, and to the symbolic and practical roles of sexuality and gender in Elizabethan society.

ENGL 319  - Shakespeare: The Early Plays  (3 Credits)  

Shakespeare's early development, focusing on the comedies and history plays.

ENGL 320  - Shakespeare:Later Plays  (3 Credits)  

Shakespeare's later development, focusing on the tragedies, problem plays, and final romances.

ENGL 323  - Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity  (3 Credits)  

Exploration of how the emergence of new forms of sexuality resulted from and advanced the development of modernity in England and France, primarily in the later 17th century. Particular attention to materialism, libertinism, increasing individualism, women’s writing, emergence of the novel, same-sex sexualities, and connections to the 21st century.

ENGL 324  - Poetry of Desire  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisite: None. Co-requisite: None. What are the forms of desire? This class will read early modern poems side by side with lyric poetry of our own day to examine sexuality, gender, and how literary and social meaning relate to poetic form. No previous experience with poetry required.

ENGL 325A  - Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature  (3 Credits)  

British literature from 1660-1740. Poetry, plays, and novels by Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fieldin, or others. Emphasis on satire and the bi rht of the novel.

ENGL 326B  - Late Eighteenth-Century British Literature  (3 Credits)  

Novels, poetry, plays, and nonfiction by such writers as Johnson, Burney, Equiano, Sheridan, Austen, and Blake. Emphasis on cultural controversies and literary experimentation.

ENGL 327  - Jane Austen  (3 Credits)  

A study of the six great novels. May also include attention to the shorter works, austen's predecessors, Austen's successors, and/or film adaptations.

ENGL 328  - New World Writing in the Colonial Period  (3 Credits)  

This course examines writings from North America, South America, and the Caribbean during the period of exploration, settlement, and conquest. Selections range from fifteenth-century European travel accounts to nineteenth-century declaration of national independence. Topics include cultural traditions before European contact, paradigms of New World encounters, race and transculturation, Amerindian and African slavery, and revolutions across the hemisphere.

ENGL 329  - Literature and Nation-Building in the Americas  (3 Credits)  

This course examines writings from North America, South America, and the Caribbean in relation to the establishment of independent nation-states starting in the late eighteenth century. Topics include the emergence of national literary traditions, Native Americans and the frontier, race and miscegenation, the experience of industrialization, democracy and dictatorship, New World plantation cultures, and the rise of border literature after the U.S.-Mexican War.

ENGL 330  - Hemispheric Fiction of the Global Age  (3 Credits)  

This course examines the wide cultural impact of modernity and postmodernity on the literatures of North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Topics include the construction of American usable pasts, the impact of immigration into the Americas, environmentalism and multinational capitalism, the emergence of Black cultural and political consciousness, the post-1960s counterculture, aesthetics of technological devastation, and the impact of popular culture on literature.

ENGL 332  - British Romantic Women Poets  (3 Credits)  

This course proposes an alternative female canon to the male pantheon of poets who traditionally have dominated the study of British literature from 1770-1840. Writers include Joanna Baillie, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, L.E.L., Caroline Norton, and Charlotte Smith - all of whom were more popularly and/or more critically acclaimed than their now more famous counterparts.

ENGL 335B  - British Romantic Literature  (3 Credits)  

The study of late 18th- early 19th-century British literary culture. Explores the revolutionary changes occurring in Britain and examines their impact on canonical writers such as Blake, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, and Scott, as well as non-canonical writers whose works had a major influence on the period.

ENGL 336  - British Victorian Literature  (3 Credits)  

British literature from 1830-1914. Emphasis on to pical focus points such as The Woman Question and imperialism. Writers include E. B. Browning, Dickens, C. Rossetti,Tennyson, and Wilde.

ENGL 338  - British Victorian Novel  (3 Credits)  

This reading-intensive course will cover writers such as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. It also may include significant precursors (such as Austen) and/or successors (such as Ford).

ENGL 340  - Modern British Fiction  (3 Credits)  

Studies in the forms, themes and politics of British fiction, with special emphasis on the genre of the novel, from approximately 1945 to the present.

ENGL 342  - Contemporary British Fiction  (3 Credits)  

Studies in the fomrs, themes and politics of British fiction, with special emphasis on the genre of the novel, from approximately 1945 to present.

ENGL 345  - Film, Text, and Culture  (3 Credits)  

Advanced study in narrative and non-narrative films, focusing on the analysis of films as texts and in relation to other texts (literary, visual, musical, etc.). Consideration of film text as they originate in, and express, human society.

ENGL 348  - Literature of the Great War  (3 Credits)  

This class focuses on literary representations of World War One (1914-1918) and its far-reaching effects on individuals, nations, social hierarchies, ideologies, and institutions. Readings by both combatants and non-combatants will cover multiple literary genres and will articulate the public and intimate experience of this conflict.

ENGL 350  - Electronic Literature  (3 Credits)  

A survey of born digital literature including: hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, playable media, net.art, and other genres of literary work produced and experienced through computers.

ENGL 352  - African American Literature Pre-1900  (3 Credits)  

A chronological exploration of poetry, short stories, plays, slave narratives, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction written by people of African descent in the United States before 1900. In addition to its primary focus on literature, the course also explores the connections between early African American literature and history, politics, gender, class, race, psychology, and economics.

ENGL 353  - Asian American Literature  (3 Credits)  

The study of texts produced by Asian American authors of diverse national or ethnic backgrounds. Introduces Asian American literacy criticism and theory.

ENGL 354  - African American Literature Post-1900  (3 Credits)  

A chronological exploration of poetry, autobiographies, non-fiction, short stories, novels, plays and neo-slave narratives written by people of African descent in the United States after 1900. In addition to its primary focus on literature, the courses also explores the interconnections between African American literature and history, politics, psychology, popular culture, and economics.

ENGL 355  - American Romanticism  (3 Credits)  

Expressions of and challenges of 19th -century American romantic ideology in prose and poetry. May include such writers as Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Alcott, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.

ENGL 356  - American Realism   (3 Credits)  

Exploration of literary realism in American fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Includes writers across a spectrum of race, gender, class and geogpahical focus, such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Stephen Crane.

ENGL 357  - Southern Literature  (3 Credits)  

A representative survey of the literture of the U.S. South from the early nineteenth century until the present.

ENGL 358  - Modern American Fiction  (3 Credits)  

Studies in the forms, themes and politics of American fiction, with special emphasis on the genre of the novel, between approximately 1900 and 1945.

ENGL 360  - Postcolonial Studies  (3 Credits)  

Studies in contemporary postcolonial literature from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia representing the impact of colonialism and its aftermath on individuals, communities and culture.

ENGL 366A  - Modern Poetry  (3 Credits)  

Explorations of modern themes and techniques in the works of major modern writers, chiefly British and American.

ENGL 369  - Women and Modernism  (3 Credits)  

A study of women's literature in the period called Modernism (roughly 1890-1945), positioned in its sociohistorical context. We will also consider gendered theories of the traditional Modernist aesthetic and the usefulness of codified definitions of Modernism in reading women's writing.

ENGL 371  - Contemporary Poetry  (3 Credits)  

Studies in poetic themes, techniques, forms, and theories or movements since 1945, including discussion of social and historical contexts.

ENGL 378  - Science Fiction  (3 Credits)  

A study of the development of science fiction as literature in an historical and sociocultural context , with an emphasis on contemporary works. Students will explore the genre through the major themes and motifs, and as a phenomenon of pop culture.

ENGL 381  - British Literature to 1800  (3 Credits)  

Survey of British literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to roughly 1800, not including Romanticism.

ENGL 382  - British Literature from 1800 to the Present  (3 Credits)  

Survey of British literature from Romanticism to the present.

ENGL 384  - Disability and Literature  (3 Credits)  

This course takes for its focus the complex intersection(s) of disability and literature. Throughout the semester we will consider the various ways in which literary representations of disability from the nineteenth century to the present have embodied a range of pejorative, enabling, and/or ambivalent possibilities.

ENGL 385  - Contemporary American Fiction  (3 Credits)  

Studies in the forms, themes and politics of American fiction, with special emphasis on the genre of the novel, from approximately 1945 to the present.

ENGL 386  - The Graphic Novel  (3 Credits)  

A study of the graphic novel form, including the analysis of graphic novel texts, the integration of related critical theory, and experimentation with producing graphic narrative. Specific topics and themes may include formal approaches to the medium, as well as issues of race, class, and gender as represented in graphic novels.

ENGL 387  - South Asian Literature and Cinema  (3 Credits)  

Explores contemporary South Asian literature and film from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and its diasporas. We will analyze emerging ideas of nationhood, and the changes in gender dynamics and the structures of class and caste through the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

ENGL 390  - Special Studies in Pre-1800 Literature  (3 Credits)  

Studies in significant literary figures, movements, and topics in pre-1800 literature. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 391  - Special Studies in Pre-1900 Literature  (3 Credits)  

Studies in significant literary figures, movements, and topics in pre-1900 literature. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 392  - Special Studies in Post-1900 Literature  (3 Credits)  

Studies in significant literary figures, movements, and topics in post-1900 literature. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 393  - Special Studies in Literature of Historically Marginalized Groups  (3 Credits)  

Studies in literature of historically marginalized groups that center on the intersection of literature with age, class, disability, gender, postcoloniality, race, religion, and/or sexuality. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 394  - Special Studies in Literature and Culture  (3 Credits)  

Studies in significant literary figures, movements, and topics in literature and culture. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 399  - Community Service Learning  (1 Credits)  

Prerequisite: 12 hours in any English, Linguistics, or Communication course work.Community service learning at approved sites. May be repeated up to three times for credit in the major. Fulfills Experiential Learning Requirement.

ENGL 411  - Studies in Drama  (3 Credits)  

Major problems, themes, movements, or figures in drama. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics

ENGL 413  - Studies in Poetry  (3 Credits)  

Major problems, themes, movements, or figures in poetry. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 415  - Studies in the Novel  (3 Credits)  

Major problems, themes, movements, or figures in the novel. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 445  - Studies in English Literature to 1600  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, movements, themes, or problems in English literature to 1600. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 447  - Studies in English Literature, 1600–1800  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, movements, themes, or problems in English literature, 1600–1800. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics

ENGL 449  - Studies in English Literature, 1800–Present  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, movements, themes, or problems in English literature, 1800 to the present. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 451  - Seminar in New Media  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, genres, movements and texts in contemporary and emerging new media. Consult the Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 455  - Studies in American Literature to 1900  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, movements, themes or problems in American literature through the 19th century. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 457  - Studies in American Literature, 1900–Present  (3 Credits)  

Significant figures, movements, themes, or problems in American literature of the 20th century. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 458  - Seminar in American Long Poems  (3 Credits)  

Study of long poems by primarily modern and contemporary American writers and of their complex relationship to epic, lyric, novel, and drama. Includes among its theoretical approaches an overview of genre theory.

ENGL 460  - Seminar in Critical Theory  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisites: ENGL 295 or permission of the instructor. Significant figures, movements, themes, and methodologies in critical theory. Consult Schedule of Courses for specific topics.

ENGL 470  - Seminar in Creative Writing  (3 Credits)  

Prerequisites: ENGL 304A or permission of instructor for ENGL 470A (Poetry); ENGL 305A or permission of instructor for ENGL 470B (Fiction); ENGL 312 or permission of instructor for ENGL 470C (nonfiction); ENGL 304A, ENGL 305A or ENGL 312 or permission of instructor for ENGL 470D (multi-genre). Advanced workshop in creative writing.

ENGL 474  - Seminar John Milton   (3 Credits)  

A study of the poetry and prose of John Milton, with an emphasis on Paradise Lost.

ENGL 478  - Seminar in Oscar Wilde  (3 Credits)  

This seminar studies the majority of Wilde's works across the many genres in which he wrote, including his famous plays.

ENGL 480  - The Peer Tutoring of Writing  (1 Credits)  

The review and study of principles of effective writing, study of writing formats and expectations for various disciplines, and training in tutoring fellow students. May be repeated for a total of four credits.

ENGL 491  - Individual Study   (3 Credits)  

Individual study under the direction of a member of the staff. By permission of the department. Only three credits of individual study may be counted toward the English major.

ENGL 492  - Individual Study   (3 Credits)  

Individual study under the direction of a member of the staff. By permission of the department. Only three credits of individual study may be counted toward the English major.

ENGL 499  - Internship   (1-6 Credits)  

Supervised off-campus experience, developed in consultation with the department. Up to three credits may be counted toward the English major.