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. This course does not count toward the English major or minor.

This course is designed for majors and non-majors and will survey British literature from the Medieval period through the long eighteenth century. Special attention will be paid to monsters and myths across these literary periods. The course will attend to the global scope of the literature, to its cultural context, and to the persistence of "othering” across periods and genres. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

This course is designed for majors and non-majors and will survey British literature from the nineteenth century through the post-modern period. By reading poetry and prose, special attention will be paid to one or more specific literary traditions. Within these traditions, the course will explore specific genres and themes such as the gothic, feminism, fairy tales, and disability. By reading texts throughout the time period, the course will explore how British traditions influenced the writers who came after. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

This is an introduction to American Literature from its beginnings until the 1890s. It goes beyond just books by looking at the fascinating places, people, and periods that produced the texts, in addition to sampling the many types of writing that have helped Americans tell their stories, from bloody captivity narratives on the frontier to haunting gas-lit ghost stories in the city. Themes might include “The Devil in the 'Howling Wilderness"', “Revolution: Reason Armed'', “American Renaissance: The Transparent Eyeball'', “Conditions of the Working Class'', “Women Write the Weird'', and “Black in the White City: Chicago's Columbian Exposition.'' This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

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.

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.

Consideration of varying themes as they appear in texts from diverse cultures around the world. Genres of fiction, autobiography, graphic novel, and film included. This is an introductory course appropriate for first-year students.

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.

This course is an introductory survey of contemporary literatures of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We will read works of fiction, non-fiction, and verse; we will view films, video, and art; and we will listen to music keeping in mind the cultural and historical contexts influencing the production of these texts. We will consider questions of national identity; the dialectic between gender, politics, and religion; and anti-colonial movements and the West, among others. 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. 

The study and practice of writing persuasively and logically.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

An exploration of Native American literatures, primarily of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of “writing as witness/' identity and assimilation, oral and written storytelling, Red Power and Indigenist movements studied. Includes contemporary writers such as James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, LeAnne Howe, and Sherman Alexie. Several films and attendance at local pow wow.

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

A critical investigation of representative works by major women writers that reflect the social, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic standards of women's literature worldwide from the late 19th century to the present. Readings will cover fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama by writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Buchi Emecheta, Simone de Beauvoir, Nadine Gordimer, Arundhati Roy, Christa Wolf, and Virginia Woolf, among others.

Examination of literary Modernism as it manifests in America and in Japan. Specifically, we will examine how literature in both countries embodied and expressed the many cultural changes both societies underwent in the years between World Wars. Key themes include alienation, mass culture, urbanization, cosmopolitanism, race, gender, class, and the politics of experimental form and style.

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.