English

A writing course designed to enable the student through practice and revision to demonstrate an acceptable standard of written expression. Focus upon description, exposition, and argumentation. Critical reading and thinking are also stressed. Course requirements include completion of a research paper. Course theme varies.

Think you know American Literature? Would you dare to read a blood-spattered Robert Frost poem about a farm boy fatally cutting his hand off with a noisy buzz saw, in “Out, Out-", or will you stay with Frost's quiet and lovely "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening''? How about braving a classic American horror story, "The Damned Thing'', featuring an invisible predator, set in a late 19th-century version of a CSI morgue, and written by a traumatized Civil War veteran--who wrote with a real human skull on his desk. Do you have a taste for the gothic, sympathy for outsiders, or an urge to follow clues and dig up underground history? Take this course, if you do! Starting with our own backyard ghost tour, for example, we will visit a small-town cemetery whose undead creep out to speak their lives in poetry, near the Spoon River in Illinois. Generally, we will try to understand both the fears and desires imagined by literature, and we will do so by placing each text in the context of its place in time. The 20th century is what connects us, the generations of the living, with the dead of the past and the American tradition as a whole. Possible themes include violence, war, trauma, (im) migration, and their impact on the values that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

From stadiums roaring with thousands to solitary runners on empty roads, sport is as much a story as it is a competition. Literature and Sports invites students to explore how writers transform games, athletes, and moments of victory and defeat into powerful narratives about what it means to be human. Across genres like fiction, memoir, journalism, poetry, and cultural criticism, sports narratives raise key questions about human values.

Rather than seeing sports writing as entertainment, we’ll approach it as a site for exploring fairness, excellence, identity, class, and nation. Students will engage with texts that celebrate triumphs and confront controversies, examining the balance between spectacle and labor, passion and profit. The course will challenge students to critically assess their own values and understand how sports reflect and shape broader cultural and ethical ideas. Assignments focus on close reading, critical writing, and creative engagement with sports narratives.

This course focuses on how works of literature depict science and scientists. In 1959, scientist and novelist C.P. Snow declared that there were two cultures, the literary and the scientific, and that this divide prevented us from finding solutions to important problems. Scientists have written literature, and writers have written about science in ways that influence how society understands science and its achievements. The course may be themed around literature and medicine, climate change and the environment, technology and science fiction, or other topics bridging the “two cultures." This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

This course analyzes literature through the lens of gender and sexuality. Students will examine and analyze the cultural conditions which shaped the authors’ lives and the literature they produced. How does literature represent, construct, and challenge ideas about sex and gender? Through a range of texts -- which may include novels, poetry, drama, and nonfiction -- students will examine how literature engages with questions of identity, power, and the body. How are concepts such as masculinity, femininity, androgyny, sexuality, marriage, parenthood, and ambition shaped by social, political, and cultural forces? Students will develop skills in close reading, critical analysis, and argumentative writing, while also reflecting on how literature reflects and influences shifting understandings of sex and gender. By the end of the course, students will be able to articulate interpretations of literary texts and engage with ongoing debates.

Focus on literatures and cultures of the Americas with special consideration of the formation of cultural and individual identity in a variety of texts. Topics include the Culture of War, immigration and assimilation, cross-cultural contact, Sundown towns in the Midwest, among others. Genres of fiction, memoir, graphic novel, and film included. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

An exploration of various forms of 'literature of laughter' - from humor to satire, from comedy to the Absurd - focusing on the uses and effects of comic genres and techniques to express what it is to be human. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

A workshop for students interested in exploring the various forms of creative writing including fiction, creative nonfiction, and/or poetry. Students and instructor work closely together to evaluate the individual and class writing projects in an informal setting. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

This course is for students who love to read and write, but also those of us who like to delve deeper into the meaning of things, who like to question and think critically, who don’t want to be told what to do but discover the rights paths for themselves. Stories allow all these things to be possible. This class explore various fields in English Studies, such as film analysis, literary theory, creative writing, rhetoric, linguistics, education, editing, technical writing, and bookmaking. This course is appropriate for both majors and non-majors. 

This course focuses on the two prose genres—fiction and nonfiction—with a particular emphasis on the narrative subgenres. Students taking the 204 version will work in both genres, but they can select a genre emphasis to weight the assignments toward their preferred genre. Students elevating the course to the 304 version must complete a professional project (such as a writer’s website, a blog, a publication, or a submission package) as well as submit at least two works to Forte. Prerequisite: EN 181 or instructor’s permission. Students cannot take EN 203 if they have already taken EN 303.

A course in the writing of poetry forms and conventions, emphasizing the student's freedom to develop personal style and skill. Student who take EN 206 cannot take EN 306.

The study and practice of writing persuasively and logically.

The past is never over. It repeats. The stories of our parents and great-grandparents are the same ones we read--the tales of Odysseus, Aphrodite, Cinderella, and Rumpelstiltskin. What’s your favorite story? Want to know how to make something new, add a twist to your favorite love story or adventure tale? Want to take your favorite character on another life-altering journey or become a character in that story? Add a character to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer or K-Pop Demon Hunters universe? Join us as we try reimagine the possibilities of the stories that shaped us. EN 211 is an intermediate creative writing and workshop-based class that requires no prerequisites. You will practice and expand your knowledge of the creative writing craft and work across genres.

This class is designed to teach students about the nuts and bolts of playwriting. It covers topics such as action/plot, structure, character development, dialogue, and setting both in the abstract and in plays written by both professionals and college students. It encourages writers to choose workable ideas, draft them, and improve them through exploration and peer review. The final project is a one-act play.

What is “YA" literature? Should it only be read by Young Adults? How does it fit into literary studies and into popular culture? What can fiction do for Young Adult (or adult) readers? Can it make readers more aware of global diversity and world events? In this course we will read and analyze works of YA fiction and discuss genre, theme, representation, and interpretation. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

Students will read literature and watch movies for how meaning is made both visually and textually. They will analyze stories using basic critical concepts from literary and film studies, such as genre conventions or editing techniques. Special attention will be paid to works with social, global, and philosophical implications. For example, semester organizing themes have included the suffering and sacrifice of children, workplace satire, women and true crime, and the graveyard. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

A course with a topical approach to literary study. The particular topic for a given offering of this course will be indicated in the semester's course schedule. The courses are introductory and appropriate for first-year students.

This course will provide the opportunity to study literature in its historical, social, and popular contexts “then” and “now.” In addition to studying the original literary work, you will also examine a variety of its adaptations, including literary, film, theatrical, and graphic novel adaptations. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

A study of some of Shakespeare’s greatest hits and how these plays have been transformed into movies, from filmed stage productions to contemporary riffs on the characters and storylines. The course will also include analysis of relevant cultural artifacts connected to the plays’ content as well as filmic techniques and principles of adaptation.

Wherever there are words, there are writers, and jobs for writers. The Internet has created a staggering array of new platforms through which writers seek to reach readers. This course will offer students the opportunity to study these new writing landscapes, to participate and publish their thinking and writing, and to learn how to protect against the various hazards of such activity. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

This course studies the types of professional writing, with particular attention to factual, analytical and evaluative, and proposal arguments. Topic selection within the assignment sequence is flexible to allow students to shape more focused study into the themes and conventions of business writing, journalism, science and technical writing, writing for the Internet and social media, and writing about health and medicine.

This course focuses on the two prose genres—fiction and nonfiction—with a particular emphasis on the narrative subgenres. Students taking the 204 version will work in both genres, but they can select a genre emphasis to weight the assignments toward their preferred genre. Students elevating the course to the 304 version must complete a professional project (such as a writer’s website, a blog, a publication, or a submission package) as well as submit at least two works to Forte. Prerequisite: EN 181 or instructor’s permission. Students cannot take EN 303 if they have already taken EN 203.

A course in fiction writing for advanced students. May be repeated for a maximum of eight (8) hours.

A course in poetry writing for advanced students.

A course in the writing of poetry forms and conventions, emphasizing the student's freedom to develop personal style and skill. Student who take EN 306 cannot take EN 206.

A workshop focused on the study and production of the four major genres of contemporary creative nonfiction: the profile, the general-interest article, popular criticism, and the personal or programmatic informal essay.

This course will examine place and space in the English novel, utilizing digital tools like GIS and story mapping to explore the effects of physical, imagined, and hybrid locations on identity. Some examples may include: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Surinam, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Bath, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and London, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and the fictional Island of Patusan, E.M. Forster's A Room with a View and Florence, and Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Bangladeshi London.

Consideration of a genre, period, or theme in transnational literatures, such as European, Japanese, or Russian (in translation). The specific topic will be announced in the course listing and schedule of classes for the semester. Course may be repeated with different topics.

This course explores the extraordinary transformation and disturbance across Britain and its empire during the long nineteenth century, from the revolutionary fervor of the late-1770s to the psychological fragmentation of the fin de siècle. While we will read major authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Oscar Wilde, our focus will extend beyond the traditional canon to include lesser-known women, working-class writers, and colonial subjects, whose writings and material lives illuminate the broader cultural landscape of the century. We will consider how revolutions reshape national and personal identity as well as literary form and authorship. Alongside poetry, fiction, and essays, we will examine scrapbooks, letters, visual ephemera, and personal collections to recover marginalized experiences of gender, class, race, and empire. Special attention will be paid to the intersections of literature with material culture, global exploration, and the everyday lives of those often left out of historical narratives.

Evolution of American literature from Poe onward to Transcendentalism, Realism, and Naturalism. Focus on such figures as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Dreiser.

Developments in American literature from the early twentieth century to the '60s. Readings will cover major works of fiction, poetry and drama.

What does it mean to "make it new?' As countries modernized through industrialization. colonialism, warfare, and increased globalization, artists and writers reacted by breaking away from traditional forms of expressions and experimenting with form, style, and subject. This course will examine how modernism impacted national literatures throuhgout the twentieth century. Texts may include works by William Faulkner and T.S. Eliiot (America), Virginia Wolf and James Joyce (United Kingdom), Junichiro Tanizaki and Hayashi Fumiko (Japan), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), and others.

A study of American literature - fiction, poetry, and drama - from the '60s to the present.

Focus on African-American literature from the period of slavery to the present. Consideration of writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler. Consideration of such artistic forms of music (Blues, Spiritual, Jazz, Hip Hop), genres as the vernacular, the slave narrative, video representation, and speculative fiction.

Topic, area, or authors chosen by the instructor. This course provides the opportunity for the instructor and students to work intensively in a special area of interest. May be repeated with consent of instructor.

A seminar bringing together all junior/senior majors and department faculty in literary study designed to synthesize learning within the discipline, requiring comprehensive proficiency in literary techniques and critical concepts treated throughout the major and culminating in a major project.