Fall 2020

Fall 2020

ENGL 202-02 Intro to CW (Strickley)

In this class, we’ll experiment in three forms—poems, short stories, and ten-minute plays—while searching for the most potent mode of expression for our talents and ideas. The aim is not necessarily to decide (once and for all) what kind of writers we are, but rather to discover the range of literary tools at our disposal as writers. The course will be comprised of three major components: the craftshop (wherein we’ll read published work and discuss the elements of craft); the workshop (wherein we’ll write poems, stories, and plays and respond to the work of our peers); and the portfolio (wherein we’ll use what we’ve learned in the course to draft and revise a highly polished work of literary art). Students who invest fully in all three portions of the course will emerge from the class with an enhanced understanding of the art forms at hand; a fluency in the language of constructive (and artful) criticism; and a body of creative work about which they can (and should!) be proud.

ENGL 202-04 Intro to CW (Strickley)

In this class, we’ll experiment in three forms—poems, short stories, and ten-minute plays—while searching for the most potent mode of expression for our talents and ideas. The aim is not necessarily to decide (once and for all) what kind of writers we are, but rather to discover the range of literary tools at our disposal as writers. The course will be comprised of three major components: the craftshop (wherein we’ll read published work and discuss the elements of craft); the workshop (wherein we’ll write poems, stories, and plays and respond to the work of our peers); and the portfolio (wherein we’ll use what we’ve learned in the course to draft and revise a highly polished work of literary art). Students who invest fully in all three portions of the course will emerge from the class with an enhanced understanding of the art forms at hand; a fluency in the language of constructive (and artful) criticism; and a body of creative work about which they can (and should!) be proud.

ENGL 202-50 Intro to CW (Weinberg)

Welcome to the English Department’s online version of ENGL 202: Intro to Creative Writing.  Participants will have the opportunity to explore the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, learning the nuts and bolts of craft.  The first part of the semester will be a primer in four areas of craft: detail/image, voice/point-of-view, character, and setting. You’ll experiment with these foundational elements in writing exercises, and discuss how published writers apply them in their stories, poems, and plays. For the remainder of the semester, you’ll take a closer look at each genre in mini-units, and you’ll be introduced to the creative writing workshop, in which you’ll read the writing of your classmates and exchange constructive criticism on a discussion board, with your instructor closely guiding the discussion.  For your final project, you’ll choose between a full-length short story, a series of poems, or a ten-minute play.  This course is a special offering from the English Department for the fall 2020 semester.

ENGL 280-01 Exploring Popular Culture (Special Focus on Media) (Sheridan)

How has social media shaped our current reading and writing?  In this class, we will read widely: we will read fiction, like Adichie’s Americana, and explore how social media (e.g., blogs) have become characters or plot devices; we will read poetry, like Kaur’s Mill and Honey, and explore the controversy surrounding her use of digital technology (e.g., Twitter and Instagram) to amplify her reach; and, we will read #hashtag activism to examine how social media (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) can play with the everyday stories we tell to shape social movements. We will have short assignments examining what social media allows us to do as well as more traditional academic assignments.  Bring your curiosity and experience with social media.

ENGL 300-01 Intro to ENGL Studies-WR  (Chandler)

This writing-intensive course serves as an introduction to the English major and enables students to develop and practice their skills at reading, discussing, and researching literature, as well as writing about it. ENG 300 will call on students to practice using discipline-specific vocabulary in analyzing literature, explore and adopt strategies for writing argumentative papers, and conduct literary research. Assigned readings will include poetry, drama, and short and long fiction that fits within a broad category of writing about kinship and familial relations. This is a broad topic, which can serve as a springboard for thinking about connections and divergences among the assigned texts. The course will call on you to explore the nuances of the literary texts’ exploration of various matters, as well as the artistic and cultural contexts in which the texts were produced. Student performance will be evaluated through participation, quizzes, informal class reports, essays and an exam.

ENGL 300-02 Intro to ENGL Studies-WR (Golding)

English 300 is a writing-intensive course designed to introduce students to the basic terms, conventions, and scholarly methods of studying literature, including developing an argument with a thesis statement, the terminology used in the field, close reading skills, and discipline-specific research skills—to help prepare you, that is, for further work as English majors. 

 As regards content, we will focus on modern American literature from the period 1910-1950.  Concentrating on the work of a particular period gives us a consistent historical and literary context in which to situate our reading for the semester and allows us to compare and contrast writers and place them in conversation with each other more easily. We’ll read a range of fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose and drama from the period, approaching it through a combination of lecture, small group work and open-class discussion.

ENGL 300-03 Intro to ENGL Studies-WR (Mattes)

This course will cover a range of fiction, poetry, and drama while introducing students to central terms and methods of literary criticism and history. In addition to giving close attention to the “internal,” aesthetic elements of texts, we will consider the social contexts in which such texts are written and read. These contexts include broader social, economic, and cultural currents in which our readings are embedded and to which they speak; changing attitudes regarding issues of art, genre, canon, and more generally, the politics of literary study; and the contributions literary studies make to conversations across disciplines.

ENGL 300-04 Intro to ENGL Studies-WR (Adams)

This course is an introduction to the academic study of literature. We will read texts from various historical periods with a loose thematic focus on the often complicated relationship between individuals and the communities of which they are a part. However, greater emphasis will be paid to identifying and analyzing the basic elements of literary texts, and to coming to see how writers make productive use of those elements in realizing their art.

ENGL 300-50 Intro to ENGL Studies-WR (Adams)

This course is an introduction to the academic study of literature. We will read texts from various historical periods with a loose thematic focus on the often complicated relationship between individuals and the communities of which they are a part. However, greater emphasis will be paid to identifying and analyzing the basic elements of literary texts, and to coming to see how writers make productive use of those elements in realizing their art.

ENGL 301 Literature in English before 1800 (Mattes)

This course tracks the creative and cultural transmissions of early American literature. While students will focus on earlier periods of American literary history, students will also explore how later-day authors register the powerful resonances of earlier writing. In doing so, students will develop an awareness of how past ideas about art, representation, culture, community, and identity are crucial to both historical and modern artists. Text pairings may include Louise Erdrich’s (Ojibwe) poetic riposte to Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century captivity narrative; Laila Lalami’s novelistic illumination of the multiethnic dimensions of colonial encounter in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth-century Relación; Diane Glancy’s rethinking of stories of intercultural encounter recorded in the journals of the Corps of Discovery; Kyle Baker’s use of graphic narrative to tackle the cultural erasures shot through The Confessions of Nat Turner; and a film adaptation of source material from the first Native American novel, John Rollin Ridge’s (Cherokee) The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta.

ENGL 302-01 (Hadley)

ENGL 303-03 SCI and Tech Writing WR (TBA)

ENGL 304-01 Creative Nonfiction (Mozer)

ENGL 305-02 Intermed Fiction Writing (Adams)

This intermediate course offers poets the chance to sharpen their skills as writers, readers, and critics. We will spend class sessions discussing original work by students, but we will also devote much time to reading and discussing poetry (both contemporary and canonical) and to undertaking various writing experiments.

ENGL 309-01 Inquiries in Writing-WR (Rogers)

This section requires permission from the department

English 309, Inquiries in Writing, is a course focused on nonfiction narrative and research writing. In addition to reading Ballenger's Crafting Truth and
discussing creative nonfiction genres such as essays, memoirs, and literary journalism, the class will work on research projects focused on the academic interests of each student. The final portfolio for this course will include about twenty pages of revised writing and a number of journal entries.

ENGL 310-01 Writ Abt Lit Nonmajor-WR (Sheridan)

ENGL 310-50 (Johnson)

ENGL 325-01 Intro to Linguistics (Cruz)

ENGL 333-50 Shakespeare I  (Stanev)

Shakespeare lived in an age of exploration, fantasy, and imagination, but also in a time of widespread fears of the new and different. For his contemporaries, the visible and the invisible worlds often came to a clash. Among the more prominent of those clashes was his interest in monsters and the supernatural, and in their collective capacity to reflect and challenge the world of cultural, social, and political change that the Renaissance is famous for. Shakespeare’s plays also actively imagined The Other by transforming racial, cultural, or gendered differences into notions of strangeness and unease. This course will study plays that problematize and examine supernatural elements, as well as forms of “othering”, set in the context of warfare, colonial conquest, visions and fantasies of self and others, gender, sexuality, social taboos, ritual, sport, and games. From the archetypal monster Caliban in The Tempest tothe deformed protagonist of Richard III, from the witches of Macbeth and the goblins and preternatural storms of KingLear, to the monstrous sin of Pericles, and to the diverse cast of fairy folk in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we will survey Shakespeare’s interest in the odd and the unusual. In addition, we will watch selected scenes from adaptations of the plays under discussion, as well as musical or animated adaptations of Shakespearean material, and consider how the visual and aural staging of supernatural/othered elements works to channel specific ideas about the social and cultural relevance of the fantastical in the past and in the present. The course learning outcomes would ideally allow you to 1) develop broader awareness of Shakespeare’s dramatic works within the rich social and cultural currents of late Tudor and early Stuart England; and 2) learn in depth about Shakespeare’s interest in the invisible and odd, especially in connection to significant early modern ideas, such as dynastic continuity, opportunism, alienation, sexuality, skepticism, scientific thought, exploration, and colonial enterprise. The learning outcomes will be assessed through participation in class, a midterm examination, a brief position paper, and a final research essay.

ENGL 369-01 Minority Trad Amer Lits-AHD1 (Anderson)

ENGL 373-02 Women & Global Lit-AHD2  (McDonald)

ENGL 373-03 Women & Global Lit-AHD2  (Wise)

The course will take us around the world as we examine a variety of texts and artifacts produced by women and featuring women (500 to 1600 CE)—in response to the structures that defined their living spaces, work, creativity, and friendships.  Two short papers; one research project; and two exams.

ENGL 373-50 Women & Global Lit-AHD2  Contemp Amer Women’s Short Stories (Hadley)

This course addresses a number of issues as they are represented in a selection of short stories by contemporary American women writers. Where questions of gender and sexuality thread throughout the semester’s reading, the course units are loosely framed around three general topic areas: “Family / Marriage / Parent-Child Relations,” “Race / Culture / Immigration,” and “Sexuality / Romance / The Body.” In particular, we will be looking at the ways in which women experience and represent an increasing awareness of their many forms of “difference” at the turn of the 20^th century, particularly in terms of African-American, ethnic, and post-colonial literary traditions.

ENGL 375-01 LGBTQ Lit in US-AHD1 (Kopelson)

This section of ENGL 375 LGBTQ LITERATURE takes a deep dive into five 20^th century American novels that help us examine literary representations of (racialized, classed) “LGBTQ” identities in the century before such a moniker was a cultural possibility. Thus, the course aims to remind you of, or acquaint you with, recent queer histories and experiences in and of the US. Most novels read have a significant autobiographical component and one is a graphic novel: Nella Larsen’s Passing; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Audre Lorde’s Zami; Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues; and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will be our main texts.

In addition to the novels, we will read (and write about) literary criticism of each text under study. Course requirements also include two essay examinations (with an option to write a paper of your own invention instead) and class participation.

ENGL 401-02 HON: Mysteries & Detectives-WR  (Stansel)

Mystery and detective stories have long been dismissed as mere escapism. And yet they are consistently among the most popular genres in both film and books. Is this really only a matter of escapism? Do detective stories not illuminate anything more than our base human instincts and naïve need for tidy resolutions? Author Joyce Carol Oates, bucking conventional—and often snobbish—sentiments, said that the detective “is the very emblem of our souls.” This Honors seminar course will examine the originators of the mystery stories, though special attention will be paid to contemporary iterations of the genre. Through stories, novels, films, stage plays, and games, we will try to understand the tropes and conventions of mystery writing and formulate theories of the genre. How do they work? How do they fail? What do different subgenres (hardboiled, noir, “cozies,” cat-and-mouse, con artist stories, etc.) have in common and where do they diverge? How does race and gender play into our conceptions of these stories and what they might be? And ultimately, why do they, in all their forms, endure?

ENGL 403-01 Advanced CW (Griner)

Welcome to English 403.  This course is designed to help writers hone their craft. I expect to see all of you improve as writers, readers and critics.  That doesn’t necessarily mean I expect you to become more polished writers; in some cases it may mean you’re more willing to take risks, while in others it may mean you’ll gain greater expertise in things you already do well.  Class participants will also be expected to deepen their reading practices and to provide thoughtful feedback on their peers’ work and insight into the work of published fiction writers. Beyond that, the most important goals are probably the ones you discover and define.  The focus of the course is student work.  We’ll read published pieces, and have various exercises, designed to help improve writing, generate ideas, etc., but the majority of class periods will be taken up with workshops. Please keep in mind that this is a multi-genre course.  While there is no requirement that you write in more than one genre (though you are free to do so), you will be asked to read and critique poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and perhaps drama, and you should be prepared to do so.

ENGL 405-01  (Schneider)

ENGL 414-01 Brit Lit Shks Neocl-WR  (Ridley)

ENGL 419-01  (Ryan)

This writing-intensive course will take up a range of questions related to mid-nineteenth-century American poetry. We’ll investigate the roles that poetry reading and writing played in Americans’ lives, with particular attention to the materialities of the form (periodical publication, volume publication, poems within letters or copied into blank books, etc.) and the social and cultural practices with which it was associated (courtship, mourning, etc.). Featured poets will include Dickinson, Whitman, and Poe—all widely read in our own time—as well as figures who were considered important in their own moment, but less so in ours (e.g., Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood, Longfellow, and Whittier). We’ll also read key African American poets (Frances Harper, George Moses Horton) whose work has come increasingly into focus via recent scholarship.

 ENGL 423-01 Afr-Am Lit 1845-Pres (Chandler)

This writing-intensive course will focus on the development of key genres in African American literary tradition, including the lyrical poem, autobiography, the short story, and the theatrical comedy. Exploring texts from each genre will allow us to consider how writers have developed, used and revised literary conventions in African American literature. English 423 will also examine the relationship between texts and their social and cultural contexts, paying careful attention to the ways the literature addresses audience and responds to longstanding racial tensions and inequities in American society. Students’ learning will be evaluated through participation, quizzes, informal class reports, essays, and exams.  

ENGL 450-01 Coop Intern in English

This coop course is designed to accompany an internship that has been approved for three hours of credit. The course requires descriptive and reflective writing about the internship, in the form of weekly reports, as well as a final research project, a portfolio and evaluation by the intern’s site supervisor.

ENGL 470-01 Digital Publishing  (Strickley)

In its history as a publisher of innovative literary and visual art, Miracle Monocle has produced fourteen high-impact, digital issues. This course will offer students a front-row seat to the process of selecting and editing work for publication in the journal. In addition to addressing many of the challenges specific to digital publishing—web design, social media integration, online submission management—students will also earn hands-on experience in maintaining an editorial calendar, corresponding with contributors, and building editorial consensus—skills that are directly translatable to a career in print or digital publishing. Students will also address many of the ethical and technical issues still problematizing the global shift to a digital media environment. The course will culminate in the publication of the fifteenth issue of Miracle Monocle. 

ENGL 480-01 Digital & Visual Composition  (Johnson)

The concept of "writing" has grown from words on the page exchanged between writer and public to a dynamic collection of technologies (images, videos, words, sounds)  circulating across the uneven and often messy communicative landscape that is the digital universe. 

 This course combines insights from Visual Design, Composition and Rhetoric, and the Digital Humanities to accomplish two goals. First, to explore the dynamic world articulated through visual and digital texts ranging from corporate websites to infographics to Youtube videos. Some of the questions we will address include:

• How has communication changed in the face of the digital?
• What is the nature of literacy as we enter into the 2020s?
• What is the nature of a multimodal text?
• What social, ethical, and theoretical challenges have emerged for writers in the digital age?

 Second, we will practice composing digitally in order to reflect on the processes of creating multimodal texts including invention, rhetorical craft, drafting, and revision. The course, then, becomes a workshop-driven space designed to give students experience creating their own digital texts. Ultimately, through these workshops students will have the opportunity to engage with a specific issue or personal project in that displays what they have learned about the nature of digital and visual texts.   

ENGL 491-02 Int. Theory New Crit-Pres  (Biberman)

ENGL 501-01 Independent Study

 (This section requires permission from instructor)

ENGL 504-01 ADV CW II: Poetry (Maxwell)

This course will revolve around writing poems and developing confidence about reading poetry and providing feedback on peers’ work. Our reading focus will be on poems of social engagement. In our foundational text, American Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, Michael Dowdy identifies poets working in this vein as those who “create sites, forms, modes, vehicles, and inquiries for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining dominant norms, values, and exclusions,” and the anthology illustrates the ways in which poems of social engagement can accommodate the personal, the private, and the public. This is to say, you won’t be asked to write overtly political poems, though you are welcome to try out any content you’d like. In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack brings together the poetic and the ethical in the “poethics” she describes and champions. Our goal in the course will be to occupy a “poethical” position and engage in writing experiments that prioritize investigation of—and interaction with—the world “on its terms.” Participants will submit poems for workshop; produce new work in response to prompts and challenges; read published work by such writers as Juliana Spahr, Nomi Stone, C.D. Wright, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Harryette Mullen, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and Cathy Park Hong; and visit the Archives and Special Collections to develop an investigative poetry sequence.

ENGL 509-01 Special Topics: Transmedia Storytelling in Theory & Practice (Sheridan)

As recent events have made abundantly clear, digital media are changing the way people live, play and work. This is having a ripple effect on job placements.  Professional writing students are often hired or intern with organizations that expect students to compose for that organization’s digital media platforms. And yet, personal experiences on social media do not inherently prepare students to create or support the public face of an organization. This class explores two frameworks, Transmedia Storytelling and Design Thinking, that can help students understand how to meet those expectations.

 We will explore these concepts by dividing the class into three parts. First, we will read professional writing texts from the academy, industry, and non-profits that address the changing needs of workplace writing. Second, we will focus on “transmedia storytelling”—when composers engage, persuade or inform users through a variety of delivery channels (e.g., social media, television, film) in ways that coordinate the user’s experience. Without knowing this name, you’ve experienced transmedia storytelling in pop culture or with businesses many, many times (e.g., the synergy and sales in Marvel comics and movies). Third, we will address Design Thinking, a key Professional Writing concept that focuses on innovation, work practices, and human-centered problem solving. 

In addition to reading about how digital writing technologies mediate what we see, know, and do, we will work with a range of digital tools since I believe this learning-by-doing will more fully inform, challenge, and/or support our learning. Don’t worry— we will have weekly support from UL’s Digital Media Suite. No previous media experience is required. 

ENGL 522-01 Structure of Mod ENGL (Stewart, Jr)

Examination of the structure of modern English language; emphasis on grammatical terminology and systems of classification. Students collect and analyze linguistic examples, spoken and written. Recommended for prospective English teachers.

ENGL 550-01 AFR-Amer Wrtg & The Sea  (Anderson)

The sea has been foundational to Black America--not only because of the Middle Passage, but because generations of African American took to the sea to travel around the world, gain literacy, acquire freedom, find gainful employment, secure geographical and cultural knowledge, build seaport communities, and spread news and ideas throughout the African diaspora.

 The sea also helped lay the foundations of African American literature: mariners wrote the first six autobiographical narratives in the tradition, Phillis Wheatley was influenced by the maritime economy of Boston, and Frederick Douglass came to understand freedom while living in the seaport of Baltimore.

This course examines African American experiences at and by the sea through two-and-a-half centuries of literature that encompass the Middle Passage, work at sea and on shore, civil rights, travel and exploration, the bliss of recreation, and concern for the environment.

Possible readings would include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, James H. Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Johnson, and August Wilson

ENGL 551-50 Starting Your Novel  (Strickley)

Every novel begins with a great idea, but not every great idea makes for a compelling novel. How do you know if your idea is strong enough to sustain a book-length work? What are the tried-and-true methods for transforming ideas into pages? In this online workshop, the focus will be carefully establishing the groundwork for the composition of a novel. Students will pre-write their way through a cast of characters, major plot points, and thematic concerns; they'll learn the value of an outline; and they’ll experiment with voice and point of view. If you’re comfortable with rolling writing deadlines and with the idea of interacting with others online, this is the right workshop for you; if not, a conventional creative writing course might be a more appropriate choice.

ENGL 551-51 Starting Your Novel  (Strickley)

Every novel begins with a great idea, but not every great idea makes for a compelling novel. How do you know if your idea is strong enough to sustain a book-length work? What are the tried-and-true methods for transforming ideas into pages? In this online workshop, the focus will be carefully establishing the groundwork for the composition of a novel. Students will pre-write their way through a cast of characters, major plot points, and thematic concerns; they'll learn the value of an outline; and they’ll experiment with voice and point of view. If you’re comfortable with rolling writing deadlines and with the idea of interacting with others online, this is the right workshop for you; if not, a conventional creative writing course might be a more appropriate choice.

ENGL 555-01 Coop Internship-CUE (Chandler)

This coop course is designed to accompany an internship that has approved for three hours of credit. The course requires descriptive and reflective writing about the internship, in the form of weekly reports, as well as a substantial final research project, a portfolio and evaluation by the intern’s site supervisor.

ENGL 567-01 Contemp. African Fiction-WR;CUE (Willey)

The critical canon of African literature often focuses on the literature of the 50s, 60s and 70s, the realist novels of fight for independence and the slightly more cynical postcolonial novels of disillusionment.  Since the turn of the 21^st century, however, the scholarship has opened up space to explore many of the lesser known (and respected!) genres of writing that are emerging from young authors on the continent and living in the diaspora. In this class, we will explore the genres of recent African fiction from the graphic novel Aya of Yop City to Nnedi Okorafor’s sic fi novel, Who fears Death, to the epic genealogy of Uganda, Kintu by Jennifer Makumbi.  We will take a dip into a short story cycle, Lesley Arimah’s What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, which also asks us to think about recent engagements with magical realism and fabulism.  Throughout the semester, we will be asking questions about genre conventions, intended audiences, and the literary imagination in an increasingly globalized world.

 Reading list:

Half of a Yellow Sun  (romance)

Who fears Death (Science Fiction)

Kintu (epic)

What it Means when a Man Falls from the Sky  (short stories—magical realism)

Aya: Life in Yop City (graphic novel)

ENGL 574-01  Literatures of Dissent in American Culture

This course examines traditions of protest and political engagement in multi-ethnic American literature, from 1960 to 1994. Throughout the semester, we will read dissenting voices in such texts as Lakota author and activist Vine Deloria, Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. In doing so, we will consider the relation between contemporary American literature and various historical moments and movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, and the protests following the 1992 LA riots. In doing so, we will consider how these literatures intersect with broader literary traditions as well a questions of class, gender, sexuality, and race in the United States. Across our readings, we will explore a central tension: while these texts offer sometimes radical challenges to social and political institutions in the US, they also worked within literary traditions that made such critiques legible to wider publics. In looking at this recent literary history, we will reflect on our current moment, when issues of race, sexuality, and indigenous sovereignty continue to be at the forefront of cultural and political debates. Assignments include discussion board posts, three short response papers, and a substantial research paper. (Literature Post-1900)

ENGL 599-01 Podcasts or Airwaves 2.0 (Schneider)

The rise of podcasting can to some extent be explained by the expansion of digital recording mediums, which have made it easier to record and distribute content across a variety of platforms.  But in other ways, the podcast seems to buck the sort of trends that define new media: they aren't multimedia, resembling radio more than anything else; they are long, despite claims that consumers no longer have much by way of attention spans; and they often follow release schedules that make binging difficult.  In this class, we'll look at a variety of podcasts and literature on podcasting to see what we can make of the success of podcasts as a cultural form.  Students will be asked to listen to at least three different podcasts, write responses and critical papers, and, optionally, to create their own podcast episode.