Instructor: Christopher Reed

This themed Honors section of ENGL 30, “Rhetoric and Composition,” focuses on forms of communication that relate or combine text and image. Topics will include visual rhetoric, writing about art, fusions of poetry and painting, fictions about art and artists, cross-cultural perceptions, and graphic novels. Throughout, the purpose of the course will be to think in new, productive and pleasurable, ways about texts and images, and to develop skills of effective communication.

Tuesday/Thursday 4:35–5:50 p.m.

General Education: Writing/Speaking (GWS)

Instructor: Richard Doyle

Instructor: Claire Bourne

Instructor: Shirley Moody

Instructor: Leisha Jones

From sick lit and queer graphic memoir to romantacy, Young Adult literature sold more than 30 million books last year and is a top viewed sector of BookTok. The staggering popularity of book series such as Twilight, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, etc., solidified YA as a crossover genre now read by teenagers and adults alike. This course examines the history, obsessions, sub-genres, and tropes of YA, including critical close readings of books such as last year’s top selling If He Had Been with Me by Laura Nowlin, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, We Are Not Free by Tracy Chee, Scythe by Neal Shusterman, and Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley. In addition to other readings available on Canvas, we will view a number of YA adaptations like Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret; To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before; Love, Simon; and Speak. Assessments include two exams, one paper, and a YA Book Series Club Project/Presentation.

Tuesday/Thursday 3:05–4:20 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

Instructor: Marcy North

Looking back at the first recorded women writers in Britain, this course traces their innovations, authorial agency, protofeminism, and resistance to misogyny. The texts cover a period from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. Students will read fairy tales, mystical visions, life-writing, defenses of women, poems, plays, and early prose fiction. Students will be encouraged to ask how early women defined themselves, how they navigated the restrictions their cultures placed on women, and why they chose the kinds of writing they did. Discussion topics will include literary craft, early domestic and public culture, tradition and challenges to tradition, authorship complexities like anonymity, character development, women’s reliance on and manipulation of religious topics, and autobiographical elements of literature. There will be opportunities to explore early examples of cross-dressing, the gender ambiguity of anonymous texts, same-sex attraction, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in early Britain. Students will participate in class discussion and complete small in-assignments, in-class group work, and Canvas discussion forums. Assignments will also include short quizzes and two short papers. Early women writers often prove a delightful surprise to modern readers.

Tuesday/Thursday 10:35–11:50 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

International Cultures (IL)

United States Cultures (US)

Instructor: Rosemary Jolly

This course is an introduction to the rapidly growing field of the Health Humanities. In it we will look at different cultural approaches to health globally through films, texts and drawings. There will be several opportunities for students to explore their own topics and interests in stories of illness, health and caregiving. There will be no exam. Topics include economic and eco-anxiety, creative arts as a pathway to wellness-making; and global, comparative contexts of pandemics such as HIV and malaria.There will be creative options for evaluation, such as creative writing, photo-narratives, graphic arts and cell filming, which will be taught in the class as health humanities forms of communication. Students will emerge with solid knowledge of what narrative medicine is; what planetary health is; and how humanities skills complement and critique formal medical practice and other approaches to health-making. If you have interests in a health career, broadly defined, from medical training though to physical therapy or any form of counseling, you may enjoy exploring your interests through the health humanities lens. This seminar will attract self-directed, creative students with a collaborative frame of mind and a willingness to play in a an environment carefully co-ordinated for imaginative risk-taking in a fun environment.

This course may be used toward the Gen Ed: Humanities (GH) requirement; consult with your academic adviser.

Tuesday/Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

Instructor: Patrick Cheney

This Honors version of English 200, “Introduction to Critical Reading,” aims to help students learn the basic principles of reading works critically. The course begins by recognizing that the field of English Studies has an array of important methodologies, including 1) reading texts closely (= close reading); 2) reading texts historically (socially, politically–Old and New Historicism); 3) reading texts formally (in terms of form or genre); and 4) reading texts in terms of gender and/or race. To accomplish this work, the course features several other principles of critical reading: authorship, metaphor/symbol, imitation/influence, voice/subjectivity, perception/seeing the other, literary career, and periodization (classical, medieval, Renaissance, modern, postmodern). For each principle, we will read a literary work or set of literary works, including such authors as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton. Genre will receive special emphasis because of its bedrock foundation, with training in such genres as pastoral, epic, tragedy, comedy, and lyric. Some attention will be devoted to modern works, especially in the unit on periodization. Students will receive training both in reading texts and in writing critically about them. Two 1-page argumentative essays; two 4–5-page argumentative essays; an early quiz; a final in-class test.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 12:20–1:10 p.m.

Honors course

Instructor: Philip Bonanno

This course broadly explores the social, cultural, and historical constructions of the term disability. We will explore the valuable varieties of human embodiment and mindedness that we call disability. Together, we will ask central questions about what counts as “normal,” and who gets to make claims about why that is. Making use of literature, criticism, activism, movies, art exhibits, and memoirs, we will talk about disability history from the perspective of disabled people. This course will take an intersectional approach discussing the different models conceiving of disability, human value, and political agency.

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Instructor: Oliver Baker

This course studies how American literature represents the history of economic inequality in the United States from the nineteenth-century to the present. We will explore where and how American literature tells the story of the struggle of the working classes and oppressed peoples in North America to win equality and liberation. We will also examine how literary representation helps us perceive underlying social contradictions such as economic inequality. Some of the authors whose works we will study include: Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Ann Petry, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Tomás Rivera, Américo Paredes, Ana Castillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Course assignments will consist of reading responses and essays. No exams or quizzes.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 2:30–3:20 p.m.

General Education: Humanities (GH)

General Education: Social and Behavioral Sciences (GS)

General Education – Integrative: Interdomain

Instructor: Hannah Doermann

This course will introduce you to key terms and frameworks, fundamental questions, and current debates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies. We will discuss ideas about gender and sexuality in history, literature, and popular culture alongside academic texts from the field of queer theory. Students will learn about the contested construction of “gay,” “lesbian, “bisexual,” “transgender,” and “queer” as identity categories through the histories of queer communities, movements, and cultures in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. After an introduction to these queer histories, we will examine how queer experiences are imagined across contemporary popular culture, focusing on popular novels, films, TV shows, and cultural production on social media. Alongside these popular texts, we will read theoretical texts in queer theory to examine how the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and nation create shifting ideas about what is “normal.” We will talk about how queer studies provides us with ways to think about various contemporary political and social issues such as reproductive justice, queer and trans youth experiences, decolonization, and migration. Examining ideas about gender and sexuality in academic, personal, and cultural contexts, this course will allow students to think about their lives, experiences, and communities through the lens of queer studies.

Instructor: Michael Anesko

Tuesday/Thursday 10:35–11:50 a.m.

The Nineteenth Century Time Period or Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Kevin Bell

This course investigates literary and conceptual works alongside narrative, documentary and experimental films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each film or text we consider is composed as a creative and critical investigation of Western or Western-controlled capitalist societies that are either approaching or already in the throes of a cataclysmic end. This demise has been dreamed, theorized and put into motion by the traumatized and dispossessed but not yet extinct victims of those social orders. Each film or novel, in its unique aesthetic figurations of image, sound, texture and theme, analyzes and eviscerates post-industrial cultures continuing to thrive in longstanding practices of racial capitalism. This coinage from political theorist Cedric Robinson refers in part to the rooting and structuring of Western commercial modernity in practices of what Karl Marx termed “original” or “primitive accumulation;” itself briefly explained as a process of “taking land, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation” as exemplified by centuries of Native American extirpation. It refers comprehensively to ongoing and systematic practices of exploiting the labor and dispossessing the wealth of racialized populations.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Jeffrey Nealon

Tuesday/Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

Writing Across the Curriculum course

The Nineteenth Century Time Period or Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Wil Fine

Instructor: Paul Kellermann

Instructor: Brian Lennon

Suitable for students in any area, from the liberal arts and communications to IT, computer science, engineering, and business, who are interested in literary approaches to digital media. Covers early examples of computer-generated literature, time-based or streaming electronic or digital literature, and new media poetry as an extension of print literature; includes a focus on the literary and cultural history of password authentication and the importance of randomness in expressive and creative computing; and examines depictions of new media as literary experience and cultures of new media in contemporary speculative fiction. Incorporates a micro-course in AI literacy. Many materials are web-based; others are in book form. Applied and analytic assignments with creative alternatives. No exams. For ENGL majors, this course satisfies the 20th century or later period requirement and counts toward the Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

Instructor: Shirley Moody

Black American Writers—Read Until You Understand: Taking our cue from Farah Jasmine Griffin’s 2021 “love letter to Black Literature,” Black American Writers will consider how sites of learning, education, reading, and writing operate as recurring themes in Black literature. We’ll consider how schooling shapes coming of age stories, how learning functions in relation to ideals like justice and democracy, and how education is tied to pursuits of freedom, knowing, and self-definition. We’ll read texts from Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Tracy K. Smith, Ralph Ellison, Percival Everett, and Colson Whitehead, as well as consider our own educational journeys. We will situate texts in their various historical and cultural contexts, learn key literary concepts and terms, carry out close readings, and write persuasively about literary works. What I look for from students is thoughtful, creative, and open-minded engagement in class discussions, readings, and activities.

Tuesday/Thursday 1:35–2:50 p.m.

Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

United States Cultures

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Instructor: Sean Goudie

Tuesday/Thursday 3:05–4:20 p.m.

Nineteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Media Studies Concentration

Fulfills Diversity Requirement

Instructor: Robert Edwards

We will spend the semester reading Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, his most innovative, experimental, and influential work—full of memorable characters, great stories, and occasional scandal. Chaucer writes at a moment of intense cultural change. We will look at the various contexts (historical, social, literary) that bear on the Tales and draw on the criticism and scholarship. At the start, we will review the fundamentals of Chaucer’s language so that we can read and perhaps hear him in his own idiom. But our focus will be on a close critical reading of the texts—the same skill required for reading a modern novel, short story, or poem. There will be several short quizzes to check in on your progress, a midterm to pull ideas together, and in the second half of the semester a project on one of the Tales. You will have a chance to develop the project in a short abstract, do preliminary research on your topic, and write a final paper (10-12 pages). There is no final exam. Your participation in class discussion and discussion posts remains important throughout the course. This course fulfills the requirement that English majors take one 400-level course from the medieval period through the sixteenth century. No previous work in early period courses is expected; non-majors welcome.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 9:05–9:55 a.m.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

International Cultures (IL)

Instructor: Steele Nowlin

Tuesday/Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

Medieval through Sixteenth Century or Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Scott Smith

This course surveys the long tradition in Western literature that depicts the intrusion of supernatural forces into social order. The fantastic or horrific elements of these tales might be their best-known traits, but such literature can also express social desires and fears, as well as ruminate on personal and political history. The supernatural, in other words, works to reveal those individuals and institutions that face it. This course explores a range of forms and genres from the medieval to the early modern, investigating issues raised by individual texts and considering possible connections between them.

Writing Across the Curriculum

Medieval through Sixteenth Century or Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Instructor: Deborah Lutz

The Victorians mastered the immersive novel: complete worlds for the reader to dwell in for a time. What did it feel like to be alive in a big city in nineteenth-century Britain? What were the smells, tastes, and the feelings on the skin? How was it to be: in love, poor, rich, an outsider, haunted? In this course we will explore and discuss these feelings, emotions, and experiences through stories and poems. The vast changes influencing the lives of writers and those around them during Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837-1901, will also be studied. Many of the difficulties and darknesses that trouble our time, as well as the heady interests and endeavors, have their origins here.

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 1:25–2:15 p.m.

The Nineteenth Century Time Period

Instructor: Karrieann Soto Vega

Perhaps you have heard prevalent descriptions of political communication through accusations of “dangerous rhetoric” or the common false equivalence of rhetoric as disingenuous speech: “that’s just rhetoric.” But what exactly is rhetoric? This course tackles that question by surveying different understandings of rhetoric from antiquity to today. Simple dictionary definitions would categorize rhetoric as “the art of persuasive speaking or writing” (Oxford), typically from the Greco-Roman tradition. However, more contemporary conceptions expand this definition to include diverse cultural traditions, goals, and communication strategies. Considering different temporal and spatial locations of rhetorical traditions, via academic readings and new media examples, you will be expected to engage in rhetorical analysis of cultural dynamics in this socio-political moment and to cast new directions for rhetorical efforts in the future.

Tuesday/Thursday 3:05–4:20 p.m.

Fulfills the Department of English diversity requirement

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period or Twentieth Century to the Present Time Period

Rhetoric and Writing Concentration

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Instructor: Daniel Tripp

Instructor: Leslie Robertson Mateer

Our assignments will allow experience with a variety of technologies to accomplish audience-centered professional communication. We will write and design technical descriptions and instruction sets, and experience the conventions of composing and designing texts for online audiences. Some major topics are the accessibility, readability and usability of documents. We will also test the usability of our work with face-to-face mock usability testing.

Tuesday/Thursday 12:05–1:20 p.m.

Professional and Media Writing Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Claire Bourne

What is a Shakespeare play? A script? A performance? A book? This seminar operates under the working assumption that it is all of these things. To this end, it explores the creative processes by which plays attributed to Shakespeare were “published” on stage and page in early modern England, with special emphasis on their various material forms. We will use digital resources and items in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library to study (1) scribal documents produced by playhouse personnel to facilitate performance in London’s earliest commercial theaters; (2) the strategies used by printers and publishers to turn playhouse manuscripts into books designed for reading; and (3) the various ways in which book makers and book artists have creatively leveraged the form of the book to mediate performance (examples range from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first century and focus on the outstanding collection of fine-press and artists’ books in Special Collections). We will also consider the role of readers, editors, book collectors, libraries, actors, and directors in shaping the reception of individual plays as well as the Shakespeare canon more broadly.

Tuesday/Thursday 3:05–4:20 p.m.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Garrett Sullivan

The “master of suspense” Alfred Hitchcock is recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers in history. He also exemplifies the concept of the auteur: a director who exercises such complete control over all elements of the moviemaking process as to described as a film’s sole “author.” What are we to make of it, then, when Hitchcock adapts preexisting works of literature? How can we reconcile the necessarily collaborative nature of moviemaking with the claims of auteur theory? And, more broadly, how do we conceptualize the process whereby a work of literature is translated into the entirely different medium of film?

Tuesday/Thursday 4:35–5:50 p.m.

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration

Writing Across the Curriculum course

Instructor: Marcy North

Tuesday/Thursday 9:05–10:20 a.m.

International Cultures (IL)
United States Cultures (US)

Medieval through Sixteenth Century Time Period or Sixteenth Century through Eighteenth Century Time Period

Literary and Cultural Studies Concentration