English
Professor Beth W. Capo
Professor Nicholas P. Capo
Professor Catharine O’Connell
Associate Professor Cynthia A. Cochran
Associate Professor Lisa J. Udel
Assistant Professor Kara Dorris
Instructor Matthew Schultz
Why Should You Study English at Illinois College?
“A major strength is the diversity of experience in the faculty; someone was always able to help me. Post-graduate and job-search advice was very strategic and useful. (I still employ some of the tips and resources today!)” – Claire Brakel Packer, ’08
OUR GLOBAL VISION. Our students and faculty come to the English Department because they love to read and write. We explore the literary output of humanity throughout its history, and we endeavor to add to it. We understand that the study and creation of literature allows us to learn not only about ourselves but also about people from our culture and other global cultures. Our faculty members invite our students, both in their thoughts and through their actions, to travel beyond the walls of our classrooms, and many students write for off-campus publications, volunteer at local organizations, or study abroad (most recently to England, Japan, Ecuador, Ireland, Argentina, and Spain).
OUR CURRICULUM. The English curriculum reflects our belief that students should explore many areas of literary activity but also should fully understand the professional possibilities opened to them by the English major and minor. In addition to concentrations in literature and writing, we have designed an editing and publishing concentration and a minor in professional writing. The department’s English Studies course provides students with an overview of the profession and a concentrated exposure to the particular specializations of professors. The curriculum also includes a capstone senior-seminar course that allows students to complete a major, individualized research project. Of course, we want our graduates to be fully prepared for graduate study or employment in a career track, but we also want them to understand that a life without exposure to the beauty and pleasures of the written word truly is a life lived in quiet desperation. We believe in the centrality of literature within the world’s civilizations. We are readers and writers, students and creators of literature, and this work enables us to live meaningful lives.
OUR FACULTY. Our faculty members possess deep knowledge of their specializations and enthusiasm regarding their privilege of sharing the world’s literature with the next generation of English scholars and writers. These specializations range from the common and very important (American literature, British literature, multicultural literatures of the Americas, creative writing, rhetoric and composition) to the unexpected but equally important (Japanese literature, the literature of war, speculative and popular fiction, film, nature and travel writing). Our faculty members have traveled the world, and several have lived and taught abroad.
OUR ALUMNI. Our alumni include professors, writers, lawyers, teachers, editors, librarians, scientists, content managers, marketing specialists, game designers, grant writers, artists, and police officers, and we are proud of the accomplishments of all of them. Within our department’s hallways, students encounter lists of jobs our alumni currently hold and advanced degrees that they have earned. We maintain close contacts with many alumni who have experienced high levels of success in their chosen career paths, and many young alumni accept our invitations to return to campus to share their advice and perspectives with current students. A good number of alumni share the faculty’s delight with travel and exploring the world, with some even gaining valuable global experience as Peace Corps participants, and they maintain the friendships with peers that they formed while studying at Illinois College.
Majors & Programs
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English, Major -
Editing and Publishing Minor, Minor -
Literature, Minor -
Literature and Writing, Minor -
Professional Writing, Minor -
Writing, Minor -
English Teaching Licensure, Teaching Licensure
Courses
EN 104: Writing Foundations
EN 121: Writing
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. This course does not count toward the English major or minor. Students should also enroll in IC 102 (1).
EN 123: Monsters and Myth in the British Literary Tradition
EN 124: Lit a la Mode: Food and Fashion in the British Literary Tradition
This course is designed for majors and non-majors and will survey British literature from the nineteenth century through the post-modern period. Special attention will be paid to food and fashion across these literary periods. The course will attend to the global scope of the literature and to its material and cultural context.
EN 131: American Literature 17th-19th C.: Witch Hunts to the White City
EN 132: American Literature: Between the Living and Dead
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.
EN 145: Literature and Science
EN 171: Global Literatures
EN 172: Multicultural Literature of the Americas
EN 173: Literature of the Middle East and North Africa
EN 176: Introduction to African American Studies
EN 180: LOL: Concepts of Comedy
EN 181: Introduction to Creative Writing
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.
EN 181: Introduction to Creative Writing
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.
EN 182: Journalistic Writing
A study of newspapers and the techniques of news gathering and news writing; writing and criticism of news stories. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.
EN 182: Journalistic Writing
A study of newspapers and the techniques of news gathering and news writing; writing and criticism of news stories. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.
EN 201: English Studies
EN 208: Persuasive Writing
The study and practice of writing persuasively and logically.
EN 208: Persuasive Writing
The study and practice of writing persuasively and logically.
EN 226: Scriptwriting
(See TH 226)
EN 230: Young Adult Literature
EN 236: Narrative in Fiction and Film
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.
EN 245: From Middle-Earth to Outer Space
EN 250: Introduction to Literature: Special Topics
EN 251: Lit Goes Pop! (Culture)
EN 280: Bditing and the Bnglish Language
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.
EN 280: Editing and the English Language
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.
EN 281: Professional Writing
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.
EN 304: Advanced Writing: Fiction
A course in fiction writing for advanced students.
EN 304: Advanced Writing: Fiction
A course in fiction writing for advanced students. May be repeated for a maximum of eight (8) hours.
EN 305: Advanced Writing: Poetry
EN 309: Advanced Writing: Creative Nonfiction
EN 326: Studies in the Renaissance
EN 331: Mapping the English Novel
EN 339: Studies in Global Literature
EN 342: Studies in the Global Long Eighteenth Century
EN 351: Romantic Movement
In addition to examining major writers of the Romantic period in England, from the 1770's-1830's, this course will emphasize the role of material and global culture in the formation of the Romantic imagination. Through the study of material objects-collections brought back from global voyages, scrapbooks, letters, journals, women's collections of objects and ephemera--we will access voices from this period often left out of the Romantic canon. Moving beyond Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron, we will explore this period from multiple perspectives that account for the diverse experiences of people from a variety of social, gender, and racial and ethnic backgrounds, both in Europe and beyond. Special attention will be paid to Romantic writers outside of Europe and to female Romantic authors like Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Austen, as well as to women who contributed to the cultural and literary life of the period through their experiences and collections.
EN 354: Major American Writers
Evolution of American literature from Poe onward to Transcendentalism, Realism, and Naturalism. Focus on such figures as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Dreiser.
EN 354: Major American Writers
Evolution of American literature from Poe onward to Transcendentalism, Realism, and Naturalism. Focus on such figures as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Dreiser.
EN 355: American Women Writers
Focus on the accomplishments, conditions and contributions of American women writers from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings will cover works of fiction, poetry and drama by writers such as Bradstreet, Dickinson, Sedgwick, Stowe, Wharton, Cather, Stein, Hurston and Morrison.
EN 356: Native American Literature
EN 357: Modern American Literature
EN 358: Women Writers: Global Voices/World Visions
EN 359: Japanese and American Modernism
EN 368: Contemporary American Literature
EN 373: African-American Literature
EN 380: Writing for Publication
This course covers the basic procedures of editing and publishing texts. It will use the Chicago Manual of Style as a primary textbook, and it will enable students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes necessary to work effectively as an editorial assistant, editor, new-media writer, or professional writer.
EN 380: Writing for Publication
This course covers the basic procedures of editing and publishing texts. It will use the Chicago Manual of Style as a primary textbook, and it will enable students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes necessary to work effectively as an editorial assistant, editor, new-media writer, or professional writer.
EN 388: Literary Explorations
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.