Lower Level Coursework in English

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Upper Level Coursework in English

Restrictions: None

This course examines issues of representation and identity through the techniques and tropes found in popular television shows. Students will analyze the appeals and consider the ethics of specific patterns of rendering social difference that have become familiar. We will examine how perceptions and judgments may be shaped by televisual techniques, clichéd depictions and notable exclusions in traditional genres and conventional narrative devices of the medium. Discussions and projects will include critical reflections on how we are each positioned as viewers and consumers of television and give close attention to the larger social systems that are contexts for television’s social subjects.

This course explores media as a form of cultural production. Through a variety of critical perspectives, this course is designed as an introduction to analyzing media cultures that may include film, advertising, television, new media, and other forms of mass culture. We will investigate the contexts surrounding media production, the oftentimes unique circuits of transmission, and the ways in which historical and/or contemporary audiences make meaning.

Restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

Students in the Law college may not enroll.

This course considers the cultural ramifications of new media in shaping life experiences, cultural norms and meanings. As interactive digital technologies expand opportunities for social control, networking, instant messaging, file sharing, collaborative authoring, work from home, blogging, and podcasting, this course asks how these technologies impact culture, identity formation, creative participation and concepts of public culture. This course will focus on the effects of digital technologies on our self-concept, social relations, and communal belonging. We will explore these issues within the context of globalization, social justice, equity, and democracy.

Restrictions: None

This online course examines representations of suburban life in contemporary American film, with particular attention to cinematic critiques of suburban culture as normative. Students will view films, read essays on suburban rhetorics and the cultural significance of place and space in daily life, and produce their own critical analyses of the way these films represent, undermine, or celebrate the American dream of home ownership in an idealized setting of family life. Readings, projects, and discussions will attempt to address the relationships between popular films and calls to return to--or dramatically redefine--traditional family values, as well as themes of visual/ spatial rhetoric and persuasion/identification in film more generally.

Restrictions: None

This course introduces students to urban studies, visual rhetoric, and photography, while giving them the opportunity to produce their own images of city scenes. The first unit will cover key concepts in urbanism and photography, the second unit will profile the role and function of techniques particular to the photographic medium, and the final unit will explore the metaphoric capacity of photography and the urban issues it can address through the creation of student portfolios that will be presented to the class.

Restrictions: None

Study of the interrelated areas of the Bible as persuasion, the relationship between preaching and Biblical interpretation, and the problem of representing Biblical faith in a pluralistic society.

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This foundational course focuses on oral performance as a vital cultural practice for sharing thoughts and words, positions and perspectives. Grounded in rhetorical theories of genre, situation, and invention, the class gives students opportunities to prepare and present for live audiences. Thematic focus and assignments will vary, with instruction aimed at developing different types of deliberative, creative, or dramatic skills, and will prepare students to evaluate distinct standards of an oral genre suited to specific audiences, occasions, and contexts. In addition to developing skills needed for classroom and capstone presentations, Public Voices addresses issues of equity and ethics when accessing the powers of speech to participate in communal and civic life.

Restrictions: None

This course introduces students to the theories and processes of literary study--that is, to the problems, questions and issues that constitute literary study as a critical activity and as a profession. Students examine such areas of inquiry as literature's definition, function, and value; the authority of authors, readers, critics and texts; the ""nature"" of texts; and the problem of situating both the text and the reader in history, society and culture. Required for English and Writing majors and minors, this course is open to all students with a serious interest in literary study. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

A writing intensive course applying a range of theoretical perspectives to public discourses including both texts and images. Special attention is paid to the ways in which audiences respond to and are constructed in various forms of appeal and interpretation.

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This course will introduce students to a question or set of questions germane to the study of language and literature produced before 1900.

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Critical approaches to film study, emphasizing the development of film as both an art form and cultural practice, and based on analysis of at least a dozen film texts. Viewing lab required. Fee of $20 to cover the cost of film rentals and video purchases.

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Students will read poetry, prose, and/or drama composed before 1900, becoming familiar with a variety of approaches to interpreting how such texts represent the cultures of the Americas. Frequent writing and revision.

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Students in this course gain experience reading a variety of dramatic texts and writing about their reading by engaging in questions related to form, genre, performance, history and culture. Typically the course focuses on a dramatic kind, like comedy or tragedy, or on an issue (representing women) or character type.

Restrictions: None

An examination of the history, criticism, theory and status of a single genre, such as the essay, epic, romance,short story, sitcom, and so on. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies. Intended especially for first- and second-year students.

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What is a Classic? By reading selected classic texts against the critical commentary on them from two (or more) historical periods and/or cultures, students in this course consider whether the classic owes its status to universal literary appeal or to transient critical taste. Frequent writing and revision.

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What is a Classic? By reading selected classic texts against the critical commentary on them from two (or more) historical periods and/or cultures, students in this course consider whether the classic owes its status to universal literary appeal or to transient critical taste. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

What do we need to know in order to read a 400-year-old writer? Does it matter that that writer never expected to be read? How did his contemporaries see him? How have others at other times read and seen him? How do we read/see him? And what exactly are we ""reading"" when we read ""Shakespeare""? By examining a limited number of plays with specified contexts, students confront some of the conventions of reading/seeing Shakespearean playtexts and gain acquaintance with various mechanisms (curricula, performance history, literary criticism, popular culture) that operate to shape ""Shakespeare."" Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

This course interrogates the rhetroic, performances, and discourses of cultural identity and difference. We investigate the ubiquitous role of rhetorical meaning-making in the structuring and cultural productions of identity and difference. In this course, culture is defined broadly to include a variety of conexts, such as nationality, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, and class. Identity is also approached as an analytical category with material consequences. Students gain theoretical and practical understanding of the opportunities and obstacles that exist as individuals and communities communicate within and across cultural differences. This is not a class to teach you about other cultures but to provide you with the theoretical and conceptual tools to help you understand how cultural identities such as race, gender, ability, class, and sexuality are always implicated in our communication with people from different and similar cultural backgrounds.

Restrictions: None

Students will read poetry, prose, and/or drama composed after 1900, becoming familiar with a variety of approaches to interpreting how such texts represent the cultures of the Americas. Frequent writing and revision.

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Students will read poetry, prose, and/or drama composed after 1900, becoming familiar with a variety of approaches to interpreting how such texts represent the cultures of the British Isles and colonies. Frequent writing and revision.

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This course focuses on the constitutive role that African-American literature plays in American literature. Students will learn the history of African-American literature from narratives of enslavement and other abolitionist writings, through Reconstruction and up to the Harlem Renaissance. The course will consider the ways that historical and social forces have shaped, and continue to shape, African-American literature.

Restrictions: None

This course focuses on the constitutive role that African-American literature plays in American literature. Students will learn the history of African-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and up to contemporary works. The course will consider the ways that historical and social forces have shaped, and continue to shape, African-American literature.

Restrictions: None

This course explores literature from the perspective of the cultural work it performs with regard to constructing or challenging racial and ethnic identities, including racialized national, communal and individual identities. The course varies but may examine particular literary traditions (e.g., African American Literature) or particular critical issues (e.g., challenges to the Eurocentric canon).

Restrictions: None

A brief introduction to 20th century literature by and about North Americans of Asian descent. This course aims to provide students with an historical foundation, a literary survey, and an appreciation of some of the contemporary issues related to race, class, and gender identity among Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, and Asian Indians. Includes fiction, poetry, criticism, autobiography/memoir, nonfiction essay, and film. May be used as part of Women's and Gender Studies Concentration.

Restrictions: None

Rhetoric in Popular Culture is a course that critically examines how the signs and symbols we all encounter in daily life work to shape our cultural practices, our political commitments, and even our social identities. By learning to analyze common cultural texts, objects, and spaces through the lens of rhetoric, students will reflect on how particular ideas, values, attitudes, and actions can appeal to publics to become social norms. Examining how these cultural rhetorics operate will also afford students opportunities to consider the consequences of these influences as well as the possibilities for social change.

Restrictions: None

Rhetoric and politics examines the role of rhetoric in public discourses, policies, and practices shaping political life in contemporary U.S. culture. Students analyze the strategies and evaluate the consequences of particular positions taken by politicians, citizens, and activists in relation to popular controversies and national campaigns. Students will study the rhetorical dimensions of electoral politics and protests while also considering how particular texts participate in broader struggles to define political practice, citizenship, and national identity in America.

This course is designed to familiarize students with women's experiences, as well as with the ways in which society shapes notions of gender. The course also provides ways to identify and analyze how a society's notions of gender shape the ways in which a society sees and organizes itself. Class members examine the construction of women's societal roles and their personal experiences, discussing points of congruence and dissonance. As an interdisciplinary course, reading and discussion material are drawn from fields such as religion, sociology, psychology, political science and literature, among others, so students can examine the view, status and contributions of women. Class sessions consist of a mixture of lectures, guest speakers, films and discussion. Crosslisted with WGS 001.

This course explores literature from the perspective of the cultural work it performs with regard to constructing or challenging gender identities. The course varies but may examine particular literary traditions (e.g., literature by women of color) or particular critical issues (e.g., (de)constructing masculinity in the writings of women).

Restrictions: None

This course explores crucial facets of feelings as cultural phenomena and political forces, such as the gender dynamics of the body/mind split, the role of pathos in social movements, and the interests benefiting from depictions of the "healthy" and "well-adjusted" citizen. Drawing on recent writing in the "affective turn" in the humanities and earlier work on "structures of feeling," this course considers the rhetorical policing of the boundaries between stability/instability, acceptance/resistance, and normality/deviance in specific emotional and political states of being and becoming.

Restrictions: None

This course explores the idea, experience, representation, and feeling of home as a site of intimate belonging and of social status. As a place or places where we locate personal identity as well as public values, home may serve as a complex origin of memory, joy, pain, loss, and longing. For some, home is a real or imagined sanctuary of privacy, intimacy, or luxury, while others find it a source of deprivation, repression, or abuse.We will personally and critically reflect on the ideals and structures that place and displace residents in the individual, familial, and communal homes that anchor our relations to our selves and to each other.

Restrictions: None

This course will introduce students to a question or closely related set of questions germane to the study of the processes and production of writing and/or to a particular genre of writing not represented by courses numbered 81-99. Frequent writing and revision.

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An introduction to the systematic study of the English language and of language in general. Words; sounds; grammar and structure; language and culture; world languages and development of English; language and the brain; language growth in the child; variations and dialects; writing systems.

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This course examines our past and present cultural beliefs and anxieties about artificial intelligences, looking at popular works that have spoken to audiences' fears of, and hopes for, intelligent machines that interact with humans and participate in human life. From calculating murderers (eg: HAL 9000) to protective companions (eg: Baymax), how have we viewed these artificial persons, and what have imagined becomes of natural, biological human who live lives integrated with AI?

Restrictions: None

This course explores contemporary conceptions of sexual identity with particular emphasis on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and queer identities. The course examines theories and practices of representing sexuality, including conventions for talking about or censoring talk about sex. Writing assignments are designed to help students think critically and creatively about the complex phenomenon of human sexuality. Frequent writing and revision. May be used as part of Women's Studies concentration.

Restrictions: None

This course will explore a variety of forms of nature writing: science writing, personal essays, manifestos, poetry, natural history, film, and writings about place. Most of the readings will be short, but we may also read longer works. Student writing will be a combination of journal writing, creative writing, and critical writing. Discussions will range from detailed questions about craft (such as use of narrative time or value of anthropomorphism) to larger questions about human perception of the natural world.

Restrictions: None

This course will address the troubled status of the concept of class in American public discourse and the class politics of texts that shape social relations and popular culture in daily life. Students will be introduced to rhetorical approaches to defining and analyzing class and consider different means of drawing attention to class interests in public arenas. In addition, we will examine the ways that rhetorics of class intersect with discourses of race, gender and sexuality to form and maintain relations of power in contemporary culture.

Restrictions: None

An introduction to the practice of drama, this course will explore a variety of approaches to both reading and writing plays. Traditions and theories that have helped shape and continue to influence plays and playwriting will be discussed in relation to the student's own work in this genre. Writing assignments include both critical and original scripts. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

An introduction to the practice of poetry, this course explores a variety of approaches to both reading and writing poems. Traditions and theories that have helped shape and continue to influence contemporary poetry are discussed in relation to the student's own work in this genre. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

An introduction to reading and writing short fiction. The course explores the traditions, theories and practices that have shaped short stories, with emphasis on the fiction of the later 20th century. Writing assignments include both critical papers and original stories. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

An introduction to reading and writing non-fiction. Different sections may focus on essay writing, life writing, literary journalism, travel writing, scientific writing, and so on. Emphasis is on the student's own production of texts, as well as on traditions and practices of the particular genre. Activities will include frequent writing and discussion of papers. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

This course engages students in a synchronic (present-day) analysis of the phonological, morphological and grammatical structure of current American English. Prescriptive practices (""correctness"") are considered within a socio-linguistic context. Students are asked to develop a vocabulary to talk about language and style systematically and scientifically, and to produce deep-structure, hierarchical sentence analyses.

Restrictions: None

This course focuses on the development of the English language from pre-English through the Old and Middle English periods, to the Early Modern and Modern period. In addition to historical changes and developments in the phonological, morpholigical, and lexical and grammatical systems of English, students will consider the cultural implications of those changes over time, as evidenced by the existence and continuing development of creoles and ""World Englishes.""

Restrictions: None

Analysis of how the material environment of architecture, clothes, furniture, music, signage, tools, toys, and other objects operates as a field of persuasive appeals and how it influences and constrains the formation of identity and community.

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This course provides students with training in teaching public speaking, preparing them to work as tutors in the Speaking Center or apply to be graduate teaching assistants in a speech communication program. Students will participate in all sessions of a speech communication course with an experienced instructor, consult with the supervising professor to analyze pedagogical techniques, design short presentations, peer tutor students, and evaluate classroom dynamics. The final project will require students to research pedagogical materials and draft a sample syllabus or annotated bibliography of their own.

Restrictions: None

This course is designed to serve the needs of tutors and future teachers of writing. Students will be introduced to competing theories of writing development and explore their implications for various approaches to instruction. The primary concerns of the course will be learning strategies for responding to writing. Students will simulate tutoring sessions in class, and work with current tutors in The Writing Workshop. Topics to be discussed include the relationship between writing and reading, responding to "error," promoting fluency and critical analysis, responding to cultural differences, and revision strategies. (Registration is by permission only.)

Restrictions: None

This course will introduce students to the critical study of visual texts in popular culture, such as advertising images, architecture and national iconography. Students will learn different approaches to analyzing visual texts and consider the merits and limitations of applying traditional frameworks of rhetorical criticism to visual imagery and spatial relations. In addition, the course will examine techniques used by media critics and satirists who draw attention to the politics of visual culture by refiguring its symbols.

Restrictions: None

This course invites students to develop a capacity to analyze language closely at the phrase and sentence level, and thus, to become more aware of the stylistic qualities of written prose. Students will gain some familiarity with grammatical and rhetorical terms as they focus on what constitutes ""style"" in a given text, and how style and ""substance"" are related. Through frequent writing and revision, students will work to gain control over their own style, and will become more adept at shaping their language to suit their own writing purposes.

Restrictions: None

This advanced creative nonfiction writing workshop will focus on nonfiction flash narratives (flash essays of fewer than 1000 words). The goal will be for each student to compose a collection of flash nonfiction by the end of the semester, which means students should expect to write, at minimum, 25 pages of formal writing and revision. This course requires active participation as it is discussion and workshop based. Students also will analyze and discuss assigned readings, including flash nonfiction collections and flash memoirs. ENG 093 recommended.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course will focus on two genres of life writing: autobiography (primarily based on verifiable information) and memoir (primarily based on the author's memories). The course will address remembering and capturing the past; vividly describing people and places; incorporating dialogue, emotion, historical context, and humor; and other components of effective life writing. The class will also examine the ethics of life writing. Over the course of the semester, students will explore the strategies discussed in class by writing and revising their own memoirs. Frequent writing and revision.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course will explore the possibilities for writing within and against traditional generic boundaries. Students read works situated within genres (essays, poetry, drama, and fiction), as well as experimental cross-genre works, to increase their understanding of genre (as a concept and as practice), of the changing historical construction of literary genres, and of the numerous possibilities for writing. Students write within each genre, then experiment with writing that complicates or breaks down the boundaries between them. This course requires frequent writing and revision. Prerequisites: one of the following: ENG 90, 91, 92, or 93 or instructor permission.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course-- intended for those who have previous experience with reading and writing poetry-- will explore further the practice of poetry. Students will read essays on poetry and poetics, write poems, and discuss elements of craft within the broader context of literary studies. The course emphasizes critical analysis of selected texts, including student work. Frequent writing and revision. Prerequisites: ENG 091 or 113 or instructor permission.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course-- intended for those who have previous experience with reading and writing fiction-- will read and analyze published fiction, write their own fiction, and discuss elements of effective fiction writing. This course emphasizes the critical analysis of selected texts and discussion of student work. Frequent writing and revision. Prerequisite: ENG 092 or 113, or instructor permission.

Restrictions: None

Our social-commercial-informational networks re-draft reality in real time, and present new challenges to the tradition of "authorship," the boundaries of "game play," and the credibility of individual meaning-making, while generative AI mechanizes the production of text. Writers, how do we write in a world where "extended engagement" is measured in characters or seconds, "fake" and "real" are weaponized messages of rhetorical warfare, and concepts underlying authorship like "free will" and "originality" have been coopted to advance brands and poison politics? In this course we will read and write our way through questions of this kind, as well as subject our conceptions of the changing world to critical analysis, so that we might come to a better understanding of the role of the author in the networked world.

This course examines the theory and practice of adapting narratives into new mediums and/or for new audiences, and asks essential questions about what defines a ""story"" in the face of radical transformations, how those transformations can reflect changes in culture and interpretation, and why certain elements of a text may be stable or unstable over time. Forms may include (but are not limited to): folk tales, literary fiction, staged performances, television, film, and video games. Students can expect to analyze the adaptations and transformations of others as well as create original adaptations themselves. Frequent writing and revision.

This course will allow students to explore comics as literature, art, and design, and to create comics of their own. Readings may include Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics; Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; selections from online comics including The Oatmeal, xkcd, and Existential Comics; as well as essays and theoretical readings that consider comics as both visual and literary art. Students in this course will create approximately eight pages of comics, write several responses and essays that engage with readings and reflect on individual practice, and will engage in frequent drawing and writing exercises. The course will culminate in a polished comic of at least five pages. Course requires no prior experience in drawing. No prerequisite.

Restrictions: None

The goal of Community Writing is to provide students with an engaged-learning experience that utilizes their interest in workplace- and socially-engaged writing within a mutually beneficial and jointly negotiated partnership with a campus or community organization. It consists of a workplace portion and an academic portion. Students will learn to complete writing projects, research, and deliverables on behalf of a selected non-profit community organization according to their guidelines and timetable. They will spend time learning about the organization's mission and the social needs it addresses. They will interact with the providers working within the organization and the individuals served by the organization with the goal of producing written content that supports the partner's mission. The academic portion of the course asks students to consider service and writing as a form of engaged rhetorical practice. Students will learn about the social concerns addressed by our community partner through readings and activities, personal reflection, site visits, and group discussion; reflect on the difference between writing in classroom and professional settings; and build critical competence and self/communal esteem through literacy practices that support both personal and public discovery.

Students in this course at the advanced level will explore a focused issue or set of issues in the process and production of writing. Section-specific course descriptions and, in some cases, prerequisites, will be available before registration. Frequent writing and revision. General prerequisites: ENG 038, 039, 086, 090, 091, 092, or 093 or instructor permission. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

This course will consider the rhetorical aspects of space and place by studying how spaces become places: the process through which certain locations come to create a “sense of place” and the meaning and function of those places in public culture. Readings and assignments will address how communication about, in, and through places plays a role in social identities and practices.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course will explore, in-depth, a particular topic or approach to theory and criticism, or a closely-related group of topics and approaches. Students will be asked to familiarize themselves with the key principles and methods of the topic or approach, as well with the specialized vocabularies and usages particular to it. Examples of such topics include Poetics, Aesthetics, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Feminist Theory, and Post-Colonialism. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

Topics for sections of this course will focus on pre-1900 texts and on literary practices and genres specific to the time period or national culture within which those texts were written. Thus, a version of the course might focus on the 19th century Gothic novel or on 17th century metaphysical poetry in ways that examine the cultural and historical context surrounding the production and reception of the texts. Such courses will ask students to work intensively with the language and conventions of the texts and with its contemporary as well as modern critical reception and interpretation.

Restrictions: None

This course concentrates on topics in popular culture and representations of identity. Each version of the course will devote attention to a particular set of issues in the production and reception of specific popular cultural and/or identity formations -- for instance, the politics of 21st-century memes, a century of detective fiction, the birth and death of the soap opera, gender in contemporary horror fiction and film, technologies of reproduction in science fiction/fantasy. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

This course serves as a survey to the interpretation of cinema and/or television as mass culture forms. Each version of the course will take a broader approach to the history of cinema and television studies in relation to the cultural context in which such media were produced and consumed (e.g. early cinema history, French cinema, World cinema, suburbs and the rise of television). The course will attend to issues of genre definition, representation and narration, production and reception, or, more generally, to the ""cultural work"" such texts and practices perform. Outside film screenings will be a feature of this course. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

Restrictions: None

This course is designed to have students perform an intensive critical analysis of a particular topic in cinema studies. Topics may be arranged according to genre, movement, author or theoretical approach (i.e. historical film noir, the Nouvelle Vague, Hitchcock/Wilder, film theory and the aesthetics/politics debate). Students should anticipate a more rigorous theoretical, historical and formal examination of the cinema. Outside film screenings will be a feature of this course. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

An examination of the history, criticism, theory and status of a literary genre, such as the epic, romance, short story, essay and so on. May be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

A study of the works of one or more major writers whose works were composed, for the most part, prior to 1900 with an emphasis on understanding the figure's importance in historical context as well as her or his legacy. Primary texts will be supplemented by secondary texts (such as literary criticism, biography, and/or adaptations) that discuss the figure(s). The figure(s) to be studied may vary. May be repeated once for credit when the topic changes.

Restrictions: None

This course familiarizes students with the conventions of detective fiction. Time periods and geographical focus vary by semester; some semesters may focus more heavily on British traditions, African American texts, international novels, and/or the origins of the genre. Students will study the development of the detective as a literary figure, narrative techniques, and the relationship between social identities (including racial, gender, and religious identities)and genre. Assigned authors may include Raymond Chandler, Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Walter Mosley, Louise Penny, Edgar Allen Poe, and Dorothy Sayers. Focuses primarily on novels and short stories but may also include films.

Restrictions: None

Restrictions: None

This course focuses on an interdisciplinary understanding of ""landscape"" conventions within a transatlantic context. We will read theories about art history and aesthetics (particularly in history and landscape painting) by Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Ruskin, Thomas Cole, Asher Durand and others. We will examine paintings, prints and drawings by John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Frederic Church, 19th century American women painters and amateur travellers. Our focus will be on how different aesthetic modes reflect and produce different understandings of ""nature"" and the human presence in the landscape. We will look at art/writing in the context of colonialism, economic change, the rise of the middle class, travel/tourism and other contexts that shape 19th century identity (both national and individual) in Anglo-American contexts. We will also consider ways that writing and the visual arts share certain concerns--but also represent nature, humanity, history and divinity in different ways.

Selected readings in fiction, poetry and non-fiction written for young adults, with emphasis on contemporary novels. Discussions explore the relationship of the adolescent characters to adults and peers, the rites of passage in each story, and the contrasting narrative viewpoints from which these stories are told. Some attention to teaching this literature to junior high and high school students.

Restrictions: None

This course critically examines depictions of women and gender in horror fiction and film, with an emphasis on film. Primary texts are horror films and horror fiction from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Our reading is framed by theoretical and critical writing on gender and horror. Students will analyze horror film as genre, read horror fiction, and create critical essays.

Argumentation and Advocacy introduces students to theories and practices of public argument by offering critical appraisals of the roles that argument and advocacy play in contemporary culture. Students will practice argumentation and advocacy by creating, evaluating and critiquing arguments. They will theorize the practice by considering how various forms of argument and advocacy function in particular cultural and political contexts.

Restrictions: None

Content-based course with discussion and creative projects. This course looks at the ways scholars and writers have attempted to systematize the English language through descriptive linguistics, prescriptive grammar rules, categories of rhetorical persuasion, syllogism, metaphor, and narrative structures, and asks how reasonable language is? additional questions may include: why is natural human language such a challenge for machines? What attempts have been made to systematize language, and why is language resistant to these attempts?

To read original texts written during the 1000 year period beginning with the epic poem, Beowulf, and ending with Chaucer and Malory requires specialized knowledge not only of the (developing) English language of the period, but also of medieval interpretive practices. Different versions of this course may focus on such topics as the Arthurian tradition, courtly love and the medieval love lyric, early epic and heroic literature, saints' lives, homilies and ecclesiastical histories. Students will gain some familiarity with the language(s) of medieval England and Scotland, contemporary cultural practices, authorship and deliberate textual obscurity, and the Christian exegetical tradition. They will also consider modern theoretical and critical responses to medieval literatures. Sections which focus on Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse epics will read those texts in translation. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

This course examines cultural texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and/or eithteenth centuries, focusing critical attention on what makes these works both ""early"" and ""modern."" Study will likely be organized by period, national tradition, theme, and/or genre, and may consider topics like the construction of subjectivity, literacy, nationhood, colonialism, and the like. Past topics, for example, have included revenge in the English Renaissance, early modern women writers, and literature from the scene of Atlantic encounter. This course may be repeated once for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

Restrictions: None

The study of a variety of texts from the British Isles and its colonial territories published between 1800-1899, with sustained attention to the way fiction as well as non-fiction interacted with the social issues of the time, including contested notions of ""British"" identity, the Industrial Revolution, social class mobility, gender roles, scientific debates, race relations, and imperialism.

Restrictions: None

Students in this course will focus their attention on a particular topic, question, issue, or problem germane to the production, reception, interpretation, or analysis of British literary and/or filmic texts of the 20th Century. This course encourages students to explore a narrowly focused body of work, such as a particular genre or form or works dealing with a particular theme or question, and to consider it principally in terms of developments and tensions in British society and of what it may have meant to be and to write ""British"" during the 20th Century.

Restrictions: None

To read original texts written during the 1000 year period beginning with the epic poem, Beowulf, and ending with Chaucer and Malory requires specialized knowledge not only of the (developing) English language of the period, but also of medieval interpretive practices. Different versions of this course may focus on such topics as the Arthurian tradition, courtly love and the medieval love lyric, early epic and heroic literature, saints' lives, homilies and ecclesiastical histories. Students will gain some familiarity with the language(s) of medieval England and Scotland, contemporary cultural practices, authorship and deliberate textual obscurity, and the Christian exegetical tradition. They will also consider modern theoretical and critical responses to medieval literatures. Sections which focus on Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse epics will read those texts in translation. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic varies.

Restrictions: None

This course will focus on the Salem Witch Trials (1692) as an entry point into thinking about the role of writing in the American "colonial" experience. We will read 17th century documents, including legal documents from the trials, sermons, poetry, and personal writing; explanations of the events from a variety of fields and eras (including legal history, trauma studies, and race studies); and literature that seeks to extend the legacy of the trials through fiction, drama, and film. This course is less focused on understanding exactly what happened and more focused on how the meaning of the 1692 trials has been constructed, contested, extended, willfully misunderstood, and amended. Crosslisted with Honors.

Restrictions: None

Students will study a genre, social issue, historical period, aesthetic movement, or collection of related texts written between 1800 and 1900, exploring the interconnections among history, ""American"" identity, and what we call ""literature.""

Restrictions: None

The study of a variety of literary writing in America during the 20th century. Fiction, poetry and other writings, including film, considered principally in terms of developments and tensions in modern American society and of what it may have meant to be "American" during this period.

Restrictions: None

This course will explore recent literature (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama), focusing on one genre or working across genres. Students should anticipate studying a variety of styles/forms, connecting literature to contemporary experience and culture.

Restrictions: None

The city of Detroit, Michigan has a powerful presence in the American imagination that teaches us about race relations, American identity, labor relations,violence, and cultural richness. Students in this course study how understanding Detroit’s history, representations of that history, and its present-day existence contribute to our understanding of American society more broadly. Assigned texts from multiple disciplines and genres (fiction, cultural history,news coverage, music, films, scholarly articles, art history, and poetry) form the basis of this study of Motown.

Restrictions: None

An intensive study of literature from South Africa ranging in date from the late nineteenth century to the present. Students will consider the ways in which writers use fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to capture, represent, and comment upon the complexities of South African life and culture during and after apartheid. This course investigates representations of issues such as the long-term effects of apartheid on race relations, gender relations, and economic inequality. More broadly, the course considers how the literature of this nation raises and addresses broader questions of what it means to form human identity, the troublesome propensity of human beings to oppress and inflict suffering on others, and the sometimes surprising methods in which suffering people survive assaults on their bodies as well as their imaginations. This course satisfies the Global/Multicultural Understanding AOI requirement.

Restrictions: None

This course is an introduction to Latino/a literature and film, especially to their cultural influences and effects. Readings are studied in context with the history of relations between Latin American/Caribbean countries and the United States, with Anglo-American representation of Hispanics, and with contemporary cultural issues such as bilingualism. May be used as part of Women's and Gender Studies Concentration.

Restrictions: None

This course explores the special problem of writing and reading about war. Students study how writers have attempted to make sense out of the experiences of war and of war's psychological, social, political, and cultural aftermath. The course may focus on a particular war - Civil, World War II, Vietnam, Gulf, for instance - or it may examine the phenomenon of war from a chronological and/or cross-national perspective. In any case, the texts (stories, essays, poems, films, documentaries, etc) are placed in a historical context.

Restrictions: None

Understanding and expression are shaped by the complex interplay of colonial relations. The class examines how the character of colonial discourse and the resistance to colonial forms of discourse, power, and identity shape social life and key controversies of the contemporary world including race relations, gender controversies, forms of nationalism, and relations between "nature" and "culture."

Restrictions: None

The terms ""myth"" and ""archetype"" account for diverse cultural practices and a range of theoretical understandings studies in such disciplines as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, folklore and literary theory. To understand how myths and archetypes function as representational systems within cultural and literary narratives -- ancient or modern-- we will draw from different theoretical frameworks as we construct ways of reading through a given set of national myths (e.g., Old Norse, Greek and Roman, Babylonian), or mythic systems or subjects (e.g., creation, the hero, the divine child).

Restrictions: None

This course considers ways in which critical theories are embodied in reading and writing practices. Students read, discuss and write about texts in critical theory and engage in specific critical/theoretical practices.

Restrictions: None

The course is designed to familiarize students with the different ways theorists have studied and defined language and discourse. Theories constructed by philosophers, psychologists, linguists and social theorists are examined, and students become involved in critical analysis of the epistemological assumptions of these theories. May be used as part of Women's and Gender Studies Concentration. Prereqs: sophomore standing at time of registration.

Ranging from 0-6 credits, travel seminars take place primarily off campus, with some class meetings occurring on campus before travel and the possibility of on-campus class sessions after travel.

Restrictions: None

This seminar fulfills the capstone requirement for Writing, Rhetoric and Media Studies, & English majors. The specific topic of the seminar will be determined by the instructor, but all capstone seminars are summative, providing students with an opportunity to reflect on their development and direction at the end of their undergraduate experience. Toward that end, students will undertake a semester-long project, tied to the seminar topic, but providing opportunities for students to reflect critical on the text they are producing and to participate in conversations that extend the project beyond the classroom. This course may be taken to fulfill other upper-division requirements and electives, with advisor approval, instead of as a capstone seminar.

Restrictions:

Students with a classification of Freshman or Sophomore may not enroll.

Enrollment is limited to students with an major in English, Writing or Secondary Teacher Education.

Readings, conferences, reports and a research paper/ semester portfolio under the direction of a faculty member. The student defines the topic and schedule of activities in consultation with a faculty mentor.

This course is designed to enhance students’ writing internship experience, providing the opportunity to use, develop, and reflect upon their writing in a professional setting. Students may obtain their own internship or can be placed through the course. Prerequisites: 60 hours in college credit; one writing course from English, CPBA or SJMC or advisor approval. This course also serves as an elective in the Non-Profit and Public Management track of the Management in Organizational Leadership major, CPBA