ENGL 360.003      Creative Writing    MWF 1:10 PM - 2:00 PM    KATHERINE SHANKS

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

ENGL 391.001      Great Books of the Western World    MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM   FEDERICA SCHOEMAN

European masterpieces from the Renaissance to the present. 

Satisfies requirements for GLD: Global Learning and GLD: Professional and Civic Engagement Leadership Experiences

ENGL 393.001     Postcolonialism     T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       FORTER

This course explores the literatures that arose to critique and resist the violence inflicted by colonialism on colonized peoples. It is divided into three main units. First, we’ll examine anti-colonial novels by white European authors. The goal here will be to grasp both the strengths and the limitations of anti-colonial thought when articulated from the metropolitan “center” (i.e., from the West or the Global North). Second, we will discuss the work of authors from colonized lands whose fiction and poetry were written during colonialism and sought to imagine its overthrown. This unit is especially concerned with literature as a medium for anti-colonial struggle that nonetheless retained a degree of autonomy from mere propaganda. Finally, we’ll turn to works by colonized peoples written in the wake of decolonization. We will pay particular attention to an abiding concern of this literature: have the labor and racial regimes that characterized colonialism been surmounted in the postcolonial present? Or do they persist in modified (and differently devastating) forms?

Texts: We will read eight or nine of the following (final list TBD): E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; J. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; A. Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; N. el Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor; S. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; H. Kunzru, The Impressionist; T. Dangarengba, Nervous Conditions; Z. Wicomb, David’s Story; F. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts; M. N. Philip, Zong!; C. Abani, Graceland; E. Danticat, Everything Inside; M. Hamid, Exit West; C. N. Adichie, Americanah.

Assignments: informal reading responses (20%); 4pp paper (30%); 8-10pp paper (50%).

ENGL 428B.001         African American Lit II: 1903-Present     TTH 4:25 PM - 5:40  PM           Lee

(Crosslisted with AFAM 428B) 

Our course will survey African American literature from 1903 and onward, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. We will cover some major authors, themes, and movements from this period, as well as a range of genres, including poetry, essay, short story, and novel. Through these wide-ranging texts, we will attempt to consider persistent and intractable questions in Black literary and cultural studies regarding “race,” being, voice, community, sexuality, gender, and history.  

ENGL 431A.001     Children’s Literature      T Th 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM      JOHNSON-FEELINGS

This course introduces students to the field of contemporary children’s literature, encompassing picture books as well as short novels written for audiences of young people. Topics of exploration include (but are not limited to) the history of children’s literature, the world of children’s book prizing, the legacy of Dr. Seuss, the disturbing image in children’s books, and literary/artistic excellence in children’s literature. In some ways, this is an American Studies course; students will consider ways in which children’s literature infuses our culture—“There’s no place like home.” Students will leave the course with an understanding of central issues and controversies in the industry of children’s book publishing and the literary criticism of children’s books. Most importantly, students will explore the relationship between children’s literature and the idea of social justice.

ENGL 439.003      Creative Writing & Community Engagement       T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       MADDEN

This special topics course will explore creative writing and community engagement, creative writing as community engagement. The course will explore tactical urbanism and its focus on human-centered design; public arts projects that disrupt routine, invite reflection, or facilitate human connection; and creative writing as social engagement and social activism. We will also read selected literary works that engage with ideas of identity, belonging, community, and writing as action. We will also meet with writers who are engaged in community projects or community service. You do not have to be a creative writing student or an education student to take the course, though the course will include creative writing assignments and readings on education and service learning.  

The class is a service-learning course. As part of the course, students will work with the instructor Ed Madden, who is completing his term as the city’s poet laureate this fall, to design and implement community arts projects. This course will not satisfy writing workshop requirements for the writing concentration.

ENGL 441.001      Global Contemporary Fiction    T Th 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM       WOERTENDYKE

This course will focus on 20^th-21^st century literature by writers from around the world. We will interrogate what it means to call something “global” and what role literature often plays in its various guises. Globalization is polarizing – variously understood in utopian and dystopian ways. Literature registers the tensions of the global, its retractions and expansions, its surfaces and depths, and its visibility and invisibility, profoundly and beautifully. Ecological crisis, economic disparity, political ambiguity shape so much of contemporary literature – our time in this semester will be spent on untangling the complications, destructions, and possibilities these global issues pose. Contemporary writing mediates the broad range of the global landscapes, challenging readers to confront catastrophe and change through poetry, beauty, art. Authors may include Margaret Atwood, Rachel Cusk, Amitov Ghosh, Moshin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Ondaatje, and Emily St. John Mandel.

ENGL 492.001     Advanced Fiction Workshop     T Th  4:25 PM - 5:40 PM       BLACKWELL

Want to tell better stories, create richer characters, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between form and content? Designed for students with some previous writing experience, this workshop class will focus on your original fiction, though we’ll occasionally break to tackle a craft exercise, consider a published work, argue about writing as an art form, or discuss publishing and other aspects of writing as a way of life and a profession. 

ENGL 200.001     CREATIVE WRITING & COMMUNITY     MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM    BAJO
(AIU/VSR)

In this course we will use a workshop format to explore connections between creative writing and community settings. Students will have the choice to write fiction or creative nonfiction. Fiction includes the short story form. Creative nonfiction includes travel, environmental, science and nature writing. Students will submit drafts of their work to the class workshop where merits and possibilities of their submission will be discussed. 

ENGL 200.002      CREATIVE WRITING & COMMUNITY      T Th  2:50 PM - 4:05 PM     TBA
(AIU/VSR)

Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.

ENGL 200.003      CREATIVE WRITING & COMMUNITY     T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM    MADDEN
(AIU/VSR)

Creative Writing, Voice, and Community is an introduction to writing as a form of social engagement with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility. This section will also include a service learning component. We will explore possibilities for creative writing as community engagement and public art. We will look at arts and grassroots organizations, we will examine identity-based and community-based projects, and together we will develop community writing projects. In collaboration with the Columbia poet laureate and the office of One Columbia for Arts & History, students will also create “guerrilla poetry” projects to put creative writing into daily life. Both reading and writing assignments will emphasize the exploration of identity and community. We will focus in particular on poetry and creative nonfiction (memoir).

ENGL 200.004        CREATIVE WRITING & COMMUNITY     T Th  1:15 PM – 2:30 PM       BARILLA
(AIU/VSR)

Creative Writing, Voice, and Community is an introduction to writing as a form of social engagement, in which we will consider the ways our own aesthetic choices engage with the world. The course assignments will explore questions of self-discovery and community and reflect on the development of a personal aesthetic or artistic style. In addition to creating work of our own through exercises and assignments, we will read and analyze outside texts as models. We will also become accustomed to describing and helping further the development of our classmates’ writing, the ultimate goal being the creation of a workshop community in which everyone feels able to take risks in their writing.

ENGL 280.001       Literature and Society       (ONLINE)     T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       STERN
(AIU & VSR)

This section will focus on literary works that help us to think through the conflicts of our present moment. Through reading fiction, drama, poetry, and essays from a wide range of outstanding authors (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Susan Sontag, John Ruskin, Emily St. John Mandel, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and others), we’ll dive deep into current events. Through works foregrounding gender, race, ecology, and economics, this class will explore the role of literature in shaping our ideas about value, possibility, and community. Exams will consist of short weekly quizzes, a midterm and a final; written assignments include options for reflective work, creative interpretation, historical research, and outdoor adventure.

ENGL 285.002     SCIENCE FICTION & the SINGULARITY     WEB     MW 2:20 PM – 3:35 PM     MUCKELBAUER
(AIU)

Mathematician and novelist, Vernor Vinge summarizes a paper he delivered at a NASA conference in 1993 as follows: “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” This event, which Vinge termed “the singularity,” has become a popular topic of debate among scientists and artists alike: are we actually on the verge of a major transformation to our species? Is this superhuman intelligence even possible? And if so, is it desirable? Or controllable? As we will see, Vinge and others focus primarily on the implications of artificial intelligence as the key element of this transformation. However, other contemporary thinkers point to significant changes in bio-technology (for instance, our increasing ability to alter nuclear DNA) as indicating that our near future might look significantly “post-human.” In fact, some have even argued that our society’s increasing dependence on mood-enhancing medications indicates that we are already well on our way to becoming something other than human. But what exactly do we mean by this? What, precisely, does it mean to be human? These are big questions with profound moral, ethical, and even legal implications. In this class we will engage a series of different works (scientific, cinematic, literary, and philosophical) that not only pose these questions, but wrestle with the implications of some possible responses.

ENGL 285.003     FICTIONS of the GLOBAL SOUTH     WEB     T Th 11:40 AM – 12:55 PM     WOERTENDYKE
(AIU)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the U.S. south had deep connections with territories south of what would become the nation’s border. Connected through trade, maritime travels, slavery, and piracy, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana had more in common with Cuba and Haiti than they did with Boston and New York. This course will focus on these fascinating connections between the southern states and its southern neighbors through fiction, newspapers, advertisements, ballads, and visual culture, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

ENGL 286.001       POETRY       T Th  2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       FELDMAN
(AIU)

Poetry from several countries and historical periods, illustrating the nature of the genre.

ENGL 286.002      POETRY      T Th  11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       VANDERBORG
(AIU)

Take a trip through English poetry’s earliest influences and roots to its newest digital forms! Watch the god Apollo draft the world’s first love poem in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Learn how to close read sensational ballads and artful sonnets, both past and present, and investigate a modern collage poem response to Chaucer’s Canterbury Prologue. Have fun writing your own Old English-style riddle poem, blues stanzas, and an erasure poem. Explore rhyming children’s books, Blake’s illustrated poem printings, comics poetry, poetry apps, poems that are games, poems that talk back to you, sculpture and photography poems, a concrete poem film, an interactive documentary poem about the transcontinental railroad, DNA poems implanted in living cells, and digital poem-stories spread out in constellations against a night sky. 

The class has three exams as well as creative take-home quizzes and class preparation assignments. We’ll explore a range of English forms and dialects and many different experiments in lyric and narrative poetry. Come prepared to expand your ideas of what poetry looks like and can do!    

ENGL 287.001       American Literature       T Th 10:05 AM – 11:20 AM       KEYSER

(Designed for English majors)

This class, designed for English majors, provides an introduction to U.S. literature from the early nineteenth-century to the present day. We will read poetry, short stories, essays, and autobiography by some of the best-known writers of the past two centuries. During the course of the semester, we will ask how artistic choices (genre, form, setting, characterization, diction, and tone) reflect the aspirations, philosophies, and politics of these writers. We will also consider the ways that historical and cultural forces (industrialization, the Civil War, the suffrage movement, slavery and emancipation, the Harlem Renaissance, urbanization and mass mediation, etc.) shape the literary movements and ideals of their times.

ENGL 287.003      American Literature       T Th 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM       TRAFTON

(Designed for English majors)

An introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature.

ENGL 287.004      American Literature       T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       DAVIS

(Designed for English majors)

An introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature.

ENGL 287. 005      American Literature       T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       TBA

(Designed for English majors)

An introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature.

ENGL 287. 0016      American Literature      MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM       GREVEN

(Designed for English majors)

In 1820, one English commentator observed, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” By the end of the century, American literature had won, as one critic puts it, “a grudging respect” in the transatlantic literary marketplace. This course focuses on the development of a national literature in the nineteenth-century United States, paying attention to the transition from romanticism to realism. Grounding our analysis in considerations of form, we will explore the ways that literature registered broader conflicts over race, gender, sexuality, and class in the emergent nation. Participation will be graded, and other requirements will include individual presentations, unannounced quizzes, two essays, a midterm, and a final.

ENGL 382.001       The Enlightenment      T Th 2:50 PM – 4:05 PM       JARRELLS

This course provides an introduction to some of the key texts, questions, and arguments of the Enlightenment. What was the Enlightenment, we’ll ask, and why did it happen when and where it did, in eighteenth-century books, periodicals, coffeehouses, letters, and salons? What is the Enlightenment now, we’ll also ask: what does the word, “Enlightenment,” mean today and why has the question of what it is become more and more contentious in recent years, both in literary studies and in public discourse? To address all of this, we will read works by writers from the Enlightenment canon, including Joseph Addison, David Hume, Mary Wortley Montagu, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Immanuel Kant, and by others who responded to their arguments, often with a profound sense of discontent, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. In addition – and finally – we’ll take a look at some twentieth- and twenty-first-century attempts to explain, update, critique, and re-contextualize the Enlightenment.

ENGL 404.001       English Drama to 1660       T Th 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM       GIESKES           

This class will provide an introduction to the rich field of non‐Shakespearean early modern drama. Shakespeare was far from the only playwright working in the period and we will read a selection of plays that held the stage alongside and in competition with his works. We will be reading plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Marston, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and Francis.  We will read plays in all the major genres of the early modern stage—from history to revenge tragedy to comedy.  These playwrights’ careers coincide with or come after Shakespeare’s and they found themselves in various kinds of competition with him and with each other.  They cite each other, parody each other, and criticize each other in overt and covert ways.  This back and forth commentary is an important aspect of the period’s drama and our reading of these plays will attend to this intertextual play which will in turn enrich your reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Three papers, quizzes, one short archival assignment, and a final exam.

ENGL 373.001       Literature & Film of the Holocaust      MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM       SCHOEMAN

This course focuses on the way in which writers, filmmakers, artists and cultural institutions (museums, schools, etc.) have contributed to the construction of an indelible “Holocaust memory” in America and elsewhere since the end of WWII. We will study the representations of the Holocaust through a variety of media and genres: documentaries, feature films, museum exhibits, oral histories and some of the classics of Holocaust literature (in memoirs, fiction, and sequential art). A selection of secondary sources will illustrate the historical context of the Holocaust and enrich our discussions with interesting and discomforting questions from the perspective of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, and more. The main concern of our exploration is not “how” (or “why”) this atrocious genocide happened, but in what way such untellable experiences can be told through the arts. And if they can be told at all.

ENGL 393.001       Postcolonialism     T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       FORTER

This course explores the literatures that arose to critique and resist the violence inflicted by colonialism on colonized peoples. It is divided into three main units. First, we’ll examine anti-colonial novels by white European authors. The goal here will be to grasp both the strengths and the limitations of anti-colonial thought when articulated from the metropolitan “center” (i.e., from the West or the Global North). Second, we will discuss the work of authors from colonized lands whose fiction and poetry were written during colonialism and sought to imagine its overthrown. This unit is especially concerned with literature as a medium for anti-colonial struggle that nonetheless retained a degree of autonomy from mere propaganda. Finally, we’ll turn to works by colonized peoples written in the wake of decolonization. We will pay particular attention to an abiding concern of this literature: have the labor and racial regimes that characterized colonialism been surmounted in the postcolonial present? Or do they persist in modified (and differently devastating) forms?

Texts: We will read eight or nine of the following (final list TBD): E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; J. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; A. Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; N. el Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor; S. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; H. Kunzru, The Impressionist; T. Dangarengba, Nervous Conditions; Z. Wicomb, David’s Story; F. D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts; M. N. Philip, Zong!; C. Abani, Graceland; E. Danticat, Everything Inside; M. Hamid, Exit West; C. N. Adichie, Americanah.

Assignments: informal reading responses (20%); 4pp paper (30%); 8-10pp paper (50%).

ENGL 428B.001           African American Literature II: 1903-Present         TTH 4:25 PM - 5:40  PM           Lee

(Crosslisted with AFAM 428B) 

Our course will survey African American literature from 1903 and onward, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. We will cover some major authors, themes, and movements from this period, as well as a range of genres, including poetry, essay, short story, and novel. Through these wide-ranging texts, we will attempt to consider persistent and intractable questions in Black literary and cultural studies regarding “race,” being, voice, community, sexuality, gender, and history.  

ENGL 430.001       Freedom Trains       T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       TRAFTON

(Crosslisted with AFAM 398)

This course explores more than three hundred years of African American writing on the concept of freedom. From slave spirituals to postmodern poetry, from the earliest published volumes of Black verse to some of the most recent, from slave narratives and calls for revolution to domestic fiction and landmarks in queer Black writing, “freedom” has meant many different things to many different people, and in this course we will read a wide range of texts that investigate these meanings. 

ENGL 430.002       Race, Gender, and Graphic Novels      T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       WHITTED

(Crosslisted with AFAM 515)

A scholarly study of comics that focuses on representations of race and gender. Drawing on a wide range of source material from early newspaper comic strips to contemporary graphic novels as well as comics studies scholarship, we will explore: 1) the role that comic books have played historically in both affirming and challenging narratives of exclusion, bigotry, and ignorance; 2) how race and gender impact the way comics explore the meaning of heroism and other virtues in society; and 3) how visual elements of the medium provide fresh, creative perspectives on the cultural representation of marginalized voices.

ENGL 431A.001       Children's Literature       T Th 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM      JOHNSON-FEELINGS

This course introduces students to the field of contemporary children’s literature, encompassing picture books as well as short novels written for audiences of young people. Topics of exploration include (but are not limited to) the history of children’s literature, the world of children’s book prizing, the legacy of Dr. Seuss, the disturbing image in children’s books, and literary/artistic excellence in children’s literature. In some ways, this is an American Studies course; students will consider ways in which children’s literature infuses our culture—“There’s no place like home.” Students will leave the course with an understanding of central issues and controversies in the industry of children’s book publishing and the literary criticism of children’s books. Most importantly, students will explore the relationship between children’s literature and the idea of social justice.

ENGL 432.001       Young Adult Literature       MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM       TBA

Post-World War II literature in a variety of genres whose primary audience is young adults.

ENGL 434.001       Environmental Literature      T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       FELDMAN

Literature of the natural environment and of human interactions with nature, along with critical theories about human/nature interactions.

ENGL 436.001       Science Fiction Literature      MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM       MUCKELBAUER

Representative masterworks of science fiction from the beginnings of the genre to the present.

ENGL 437.001       Women Writers       T Th 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM          POWELL

(Crosslisted with WGST 437)

This section of English 437 will consider how selected U.S. southern women writers have explored their experience of education in imaginative writing since the mid-twentieth century.  Some of the questions we will consider are what a cross-section of southern women writers have suggested that it may mean to learn or teach, what it may mean to learn or teach in the U. S. South in particular, and what it may mean for a woman to learn or teach.  Some of the course texts under consideration include but are not limited to poems, nonfiction, and fiction by authors such as Dorothy Allison, Doris Betts, Claudia Emerson, Gail Godwin, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Flannery O’Connor, Mab Segrest, Lillian Smith, Monique Truong, Alice Walker, and Jesmyn Ward. In addition to completing course readings in poetry and prose, and attending and participating in class activities, participants will complete 3-4 written assignments and demonstrate mastery of course materials on quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

ENGL 441.001      Global Contemporary Literature       T Th 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM       WOERTENDYKE

This course will focus on 20^th-21^st century literature by writers from around the world. We will interrogate what it means to call something “global” and what role literature often plays in its various guises. Globalization is polarizing – variously understood in utopian and dystopian ways. Literature registers the tensions of the global, its retractions and expansions, its surfaces and depths, and its visibility and invisibility, profoundly and beautifully. Ecological crisis, economic disparity, political ambiguity shape so much of contemporary literature – our time in this semester will be spent on untangling the complications, destructions, and possibilities these global issues pose. Contemporary writing mediates the broad range of the global landscapes, challenging readers to confront catastrophe and change through poetry, beauty, art. Authors may include Margaret Atwood, Rachel Cusk, Amitov Ghosh, Moshin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Ondaatje, and Emily St. John Mandel.

ENGL 360.001       Creative Writing       MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM       AMADON

This course is an introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction. We will learn, as a class, ways of responding to creative work and use our discussions as a means of defining our own aims and values as writers and poets. The final goal of this course is a portfolio of original creative work, but peer response is fundamental; both will factor heavily in the final grade. The class will read works by contemporary and canonical writers as a way of expanding our view of what our writing can do. However, this course is designed as a creative writing workshop, and the majority of class time will be devoted to discussing new writing from students.

ENGL 360.002      Creative Writing       T Th  10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       DINGS

This course is an introduction to creative writing which will focus on short fiction and poetry, one-half semester for each genre.  Students will learn fundamental techniques and concepts by reading professional stories and poems as models; students then will write their own original stories and poems to be discussed in a workshop format by their peers and instructor.  All work will be revised before grading by portfolio.

ENGL 360.003      Creative Writing       MWF  1:10 PM - 2:00 PM       KATHERINE SHANKS

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

ENGL 360.004      Creative Writing       T Th  11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       BARILLA

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

ENGL 439.003      Creative Writing & Community Engagement       T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       MADDEN

This special topics course will explore creative writing and community engagement, creative writing as community engagement. The course will explore tactical urbanism and its focus on human-centered design; public arts projects that disrupt routine, invite reflection, or facilitate human connection; and creative writing as social engagement and social activism. We will also read selected literary works that engage with ideas of identity, belonging, community, and writing as action. We will also meet with writers who are engaged in community projects or community service. You do not have to be a creative writing student or an education student to take the course, though the course will include creative writing assignments and readings on education and service learning.  

The class is a service-learning course. As part of the course, students will work with the instructor Ed Madden, who is completing his term as the city’s poet laureate this fall, to design and implement community arts projects. This course will not satisfy writing workshop requirements for the writing concentration.

ENGL 464.001       Poetry Workshop       T Th 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM       COUNTRYMAN

The focus of this course will be writing and revising new poems. Students will refine their ability to articulate their own poetic aims and style, while also expanding their view of what a poem can be and do through readings of contemporary poetry and writing exercises tied to those readings. Peer response will factor heavily into the final grade. The final goal of this course is a portfolio of original creative work. Students should have taken ENGL 360 previously, but those with experience writing poetry or taking creative writing workshops are welcome.  

English 465.001       Fiction Workshop       MW  3:55 PM - 5:10 PM       BAJO

This will be a course in the writing of the contemporary literary short story (novel chapters possible). We will begin by studying stories and essential elements of fiction writing in order to explore the aim and possibilities of contemporary literature.  However, the course will primarily be a workshop for students’ own stories. 

ENGL 492.001       Advanced Fiction Workshop       T Th  4:25 PM - 5:40 PM       BLACKWELL

Want to tell better stories, create richer characters, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between form and content? Designed for students with some previous writing experience, this workshop class will focus on your original fiction, though we’ll occasionally break to tackle a craft exercise, consider a published work, argue about writing as an art form, or discuss publishing and other aspects of writing as a way of life and a profession. 

ENGL 363.001       Intro to Professional Writing      T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       GARRIOTT

Overview of concepts, contexts, and genres used in professional communication. Intensive practice in analyzing, emulating, and creating textual and multimedia documents for a variety of professional, non-academic purposes (including commercial, informative, persuasive, and technical).

ENGL 387.001       Introduction to Rhetoric     T Th  10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       EDWARDS

Over two millennia ago, Aristotle defined rhetoric as "an ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion." Today, the practice and theory of rhetoric continue to evolve. Rhetorical practice offers tools to help us become better speakers, writers, thinkers, and advocates. Rhetorical theory can help us better understand how people use words, objects, images, or even their own bodies to produce, sustain, and challenge arguments about truth, knowledge, and authority in the world. We find rhetoric in speeches and essays, social media posts and memes, signs and statues. We find rhetoric everywhere that people use language and symbols to create consensus, build community, or promote change.

This course explores rhetoric in three areas:

1. Rhetorical history particularly as it emerged from ancient Greece and Rome;
2. Rhetorical practice applied to speaking, writing, arguing, and communicating with others;
3. Rhetorical theory as a means for investigating the nature of knowledge and persuasion, the links between language and influence, and the ways in which culture and power shape our understanding of the world.

ENGL 388.001       History of Literary Criticism & Theory        T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       GLAVEY

Representative theories of literature from Plato through the 20th century.

ENGL 460.001       Advanced Writing       T Th 4:25 PM – 5:40 PM       TBA

Extensive practice in different types of nonfiction writing.

ENGL 462.001       Technical Writing       MW  3:55 PM - 5:10 PM        TBA

Preparation for and practice in types of writing important to scientists, engineers, and computer scientists, from brief technical letters to formal articles and reports.

ENGL 463       Business Writing       (7 available sections on various days and times)

Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal articles and reports.

ENGL 468.001       Digital Writing       T Th 2:50 PM – 4:05 PM       HAWK

This course will examine recording, editing, and distribution of sound as a form of digital writing. In a contemporary world where writing is mostly digital, we often overlook the presence of sound--music that accompanies video, voice published as podcasts, noise remixed into an ambient art form or as background for daily life. In order to understand the rhetorical effects of sound compositions, this course will read and discuss important works in the field of sound studies and offer an introduction to using open source digital audio editing tools for writing with sound. Students will write and produce their own short podcast series.

ENGL 370.001       Language in the USA       T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM        McCULLOUGH

(Crosslisted with LING 345)

Linguistic examination of the structure, history, and use of language varieties in the U.S., with a particular focus on regional and sociocultural variation and relevant sociolinguistic issues.

ENGL 389.001       The English Language      MW  2:20 PM - 3:35 PM       TBA

(Crosslisted with LING 301)

Introduction to the field of linguistics with an emphasis on English. Covers the English sound system, word structure, and grammar. Explores history of English, American dialects, social registers, and style.

ENGL 389.002      The English Language       MW  3:55 PM - 5:10 PM       TBA

(Crosslisted with LING 301)

Introduction to the field of linguistics with an emphasis on English. Covers the English sound system, word structure, and grammar. Explores history of English, American dialects, social registers, and style.

ENGL 439.004       Language, Gender, and Sexuality       T Th  2:50 PM - 4:05 PM       CROWLEY

(Crosslisted with LING 305 & WGST 430)

ENGL 450.001       English Grammar      T Th  1:15 PM - 2:30 PM       LIU

(Crosslisted with LING 421)

This course focuses on English grammar for future educators in both English and Linguistics. We begin by examining the scholarly debate over grammar’s role in the classroom while developing some potentially fresh perspectives on the subject. We’ll then move on to our main focus: a deep dive into the particularities of English grammar, from word classes to phrases and clauses. Along the way, we’ll develop strategies for presenting (at least) some of this material to students. We’ll end with a unit on stylistics and explore ways in which we can reinforce instruction in grammar by using its terms and categories as a vocabulary for analyzing literary and non-fiction texts.

ENGL 200.H01      CREATIVE WRITING & COMMUNITY      T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       COUNTRYMAN

Creative Writing, Voice, and Community is an introduction to writing as a form of social engagement. By examining creative work by established writers, we will discover formal strategies we can put to use in creative assignments. Both the outside texts and writing assignments are geared toward helping us to explore and assert our own identities and aesthetic values. In addition to reading and analyzing outside texts and creating poems and stories of our own, we will become accustomed to describing and helping further the development of our classmates’ writing, the ultimate goal being the creation of a workshop community in which everyone feels able to take risks in their writing. 

ENGL 270.H01       World Literature       MWF 1:10 PM - 2:00 PM      PATTERSON

(Crosslisted with CPLT 270)

Selected masterpieces of world literature from antiquity to present.

ENGL 282.H01       Fiction and Mental Health       T Th 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM      JACKSON

Attending school can be stressful for all of us, but according to a 2019 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, America's colleges are currently witnessing a "student mental health-crisis."  In the last decade, the number of students visiting campus counseling services for depression and anxiety has grown by forty percent.  What can fiction possibly teach us about mental health, and how might fiction help us achieve and maintain it?  In this course, we'll find out.  We'll read a variety of contemporary novels and short stories about anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, and trauma but also consider fictions about healing, happiness, and wellness.  We'll probe the boundaries of what counts as fiction by reading clinical case histories and memoirs, and we'll investigate how fiction has operated in therapeutic practices such as Bibliotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. We'll cover a wide range of approaches to interpreting and analyzing fiction and along the way learn about some basic concepts in mental health and wellness. Assessment will be by a variety of essays and short take home assignments.  This class is not a substitute for attending counseling, but our emphasis will be on reading fiction in ways that are not only perceptive but also helpful and hopeful.

ENGL 283.H01       Fictions of Enlightenment       T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM      JARRELLS

This course will look at how literary works, and especially novels, serve as laboratories for experimenting with Enlightenment-era ideas about nature, individualism, sympathy, equality, and progress. How, we will ask, do such ideas play out in fictional worlds, with their variety of characters and multiple moving parts? The authors we will read will mostly be eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors: Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley among them. In addition, as we think along with and through these literary works (and a few more from the twenty-first century), we will ask how or whether Enlightenment ideas themselves might be fictions necessary for living in the world(s) we actually inhabit.

ENGL 285.H01       Digging to America      T Th 10:05 AM – 11:20 AM       POWELL

The study of literature is a dynamic part of a liberal arts education, strengthening skills in argumentation, critical thinking, and analysis, while suggesting roles imaginative writing can play in national and community dialogue and in individual readers’ lives. This course pursues these goals by introducing selected eras and issues in American literature not through a systematic survey, but through substantial reading in a few notable works that have explored the idea of an American self.  The special topic of this section is "Digging to America" (borrowed from Anne Tyler's novel of the same name).  Some of the course texts under consideration include but are not limited to poems, essays, and fiction by Julia Alvarez, Annette Clapsaddle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jennine Capó Crucet, Allen Ginsberg, Joy Harjo, Josephine Humphreys, Kalani Pickhart, Claudia Rankine, Anne Tyler, and Richard Wright.  In addition to completing course readings in poetry and prose, and attending and participating in class activities, participants will complete 3-4 written assignments and demonstrate mastery of course materials on quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

ENGL 285.H02       Understanding Food Culture      MW 2:20 PM – 3:35 PM       SHIELDS

A guide to the practical and intellectual study of foodways, treating the written sources, ingredients, culinary techniques, and institutions of food in a given locality.  Students will learn how to research food historically, judge the value of ingredients, articulate their understanding of foodways, and master basic knowledge about elements of food preparation. While the instructional examples will be taken from the foodways of South Carolina, the techniques of investigation will be applied to other parts of the Southern region.  

Issues:  How does regional agriculture influence the development of a local cuisine?

How does agricultural and culinary syncretism operate in the formation of southern foodways generally, and Carolina foodways particularly out of African, Native American, and European food traditions?

What economic, scientific, aesthetic, and religious innovations alter the practice of food preparation and consumption over history? 

ENGL 286.H02      POETRY      T Th 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM        VANDERBORG

Take a trip through English poetry’s earliest influences and roots to its newest digital forms! Watch the god Apollo draft the world’s first love poem in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Learn how to close read sensational ballads and artful sonnets, both past and present, and investigate a modern collage poem response to Chaucer’s Canterbury Prologue. Have fun writing your own Old English-style riddle poem, blues stanzas, and an erasure poem. Explore rhyming children’s books, Blake’s illustrated poem printings, comics poetry, poetry apps, poems that are games, poems that talk back to you, sculpture and photography poems, a concrete poem film, an interactive documentary poem about the transcontinental railroad, DNA poems implanted in living cells, and digital poem-stories spread out in constellations against a night sky. 

The class has three exams as well as creative take-home quizzes and class preparation assignments. We’ll explore a range of English forms and dialects and many different experiments in lyric and narrative poetry. Come prepared to expand your ideas of what poetry looks like and can do!    

ENGL 287.H01       American Literature       MW  3:55 PM - 5:10 PM       GREVEN

In 1820, one English commentator observed, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” By the end of the century, American literature had won, as one critic puts it, “a grudging respect” in the transatlantic literary marketplace. This course focuses on the development of a national literature in the nineteenth-century United States, paying attention to the transition from romanticism to realism. Grounding our analysis in considerations of form, we will explore the ways that literature registered broader conflicts over race, gender, sexuality, and class in the emergent nation. Participation will be graded, and other requirements will include individual presentations, unannounced quizzes, two essays, a midterm, and a final.

ENGL 288.H01       English Literature       T Th 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM       TBA

An introduction to English literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature. Designed for English majors.

ENGL 360.H01       Creative Writing       T Th  11:40 AM - 12:55 PM       DINGS

This course is an introduction to creative writing which will focus on short fiction and poetry, one-half semester for each genre.  Students will learn fundamental techniques and concepts by reading professional stories and poems as models; students then will write their own original stories and poems to be discussed in a workshop format by their peers and instructor.  All work will be revised before grading by portfolio.

ENGL 462.H01       Technical Writing       M W 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM       TBA

Preparation for and practice in types of writing important to scientists, engineers, and computer scientists, from brief technical letters to formal articles and reports.

SCHC 350.H01       HNRS: The BIRTH and DEATH of the BOOK:  Gutenberg to GOOGLE       T Th  11:40 AM – 12:55 PM       JACKSON

With the all-pervasiveness of the Internet calling into question the very future of the book as a viable technology, it seems like an especially good time to explore the book’s past. Where do books come from? How are they printed, published, and promoted? How are they shipped, stored, sold, and read? How long have they been around, and how much longer are they likely to be so? 'The Birth and Death of the Book' invites you to explore the history of the book as a technology, as a means of information storage and retrieval, as a commodity, an art form, and as a way of understanding the world. It will introduce you to the history of the book from the beginning of the first millennium to the beginning of the second, ranging across continents, cultures, and centuries. You'll also get to explore the ways in which the book has been threatened with extinction or irrelevance by other forms of communication including telephones, televisions, and especially computers.  Does book have a possible future? Our class begins with a unit on the mechanics and psychodynamics of communication, ranging from the invention of writing in Sumeria, three and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ, to the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth-century. Our concerns here will be with the ways in which the spoken word, the written word, and the printed word create particular ways of looking at the world. We’ll also consider magic, bookcases, memory, concrete poetry, and why the physiology of the cow may have influenced the shape of books. Our second unit will introduce you to the world of print in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, when reading, printing, and publishing enjoyed unprecedented influence and technological refinement. We’ll consider the printing, publishing, shipping, and reading of texts and also the fetish for fancy bindings. Our final unit will consider the book in the twenty-first century, investigating the crisis in reading habits and literacy and by exploring the influence of TV, computers, corporate media mergers, and hypertextuality on the book today and tomorrow.  Remember: In this class, you are not only a student, but also an expert.  I look forward to learning from you!

SCHC 350.H02       HNRS: Circe Speaks; Contemporary Feminist Retellings of Myth and Epic       T Th 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM       KEYSER

Greek and Roman myths and epics have long been imagined as the bedrock of Western culture. Contemporary women writers in English take a drill bit to that bedrock, or, at the very least, they carve it into new shapes and forms that reveal feminist takes on long-standing tropes of abandoned wives, persecuted nymphs, and seductive sirens. In this course, we will read a range of recent retellings of classical myths and epics—with tones ranging from satirical to tragic—in order to understand how feminist writers challenge received cultural narratives about women characters, gender roles, patriarchal power, and imperial ambition. Texts for the course will include Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Nina MacLaughlin’s Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.

SCHC 354.H01       HNRS: Multicultural American Autobiography      T Th 10:05 AM – 11:20 AM        JOHNSON-FEELINGS

The focus of this course is American life stories, whether told through traditional autobiography/ memoir or through song lyrics, children’s literature, visual art, or some other genre or medium. Seminar participants will look at the intersection between conceptions of childhood, citizenship, and the idea of the “American Dream.” Readings will be representative of a cross-section of American experience in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, region, religion, language of origin, and more. Readings will include texts created for audiences of adults, young adults, and children.

SCHC 450.H01       HNRS: Specculative  Identities:  Race, Gender, and Science Fiction      T Th 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM       COLLINS

Following Octavia Butler’s inquiry “What good is science fiction?” this literature course takes a deep dive into the science fiction genre as written by women, women of color, and nonbinary writers. The course will explore how these writers use literature to contribute to historical and ongoing conversations about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.  It will ask the following questions: a) What is science fiction and what are the conventions of the genre? b) What topics and themes seem to be popular with these authors? Or what do aliens, robot and cyborg bodies, and space exploration have to do with race and gender?  c) Most importantly, how are these writers using science fiction and fantasy conventions to imagine the future and critique the present? Readings will include those of Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Rivers Solomon, James Tiptree Jr., Alyssa Wong, N.K. Jemisin, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and others.

SCHC 451.H01       HNRS: Ideas of the Poet, Ancient to Modern       T Th 2:50 PM – 4:05 PM       SHIFFLETT

Where do poets come from? Are they made or are they born? What--really--do they do, and what are they for? What is/are their special role/s in society? People have been asking such questions for thousands of years--indeed, until the twentieth century, this is what "literary theory" was mostly about. And yet there is little consensus even today about the answers. We will study high points of this long debate, while often relating it to contemporary issues in literature and the arts. Requirements are likely to include a class presentation, a research paper or equivalent creative project, and a take-home final exam.

SCHC 452.H01       HNRS: Tasting Where You Are, Knowing What You Eat:  Tracing the South's Flavor Heritage     MW 3:55 PM – 5:10 PM       SHIELDS

Shrimp and grits, pimento cheese, barbeque: where did all of these wonderful dishes come from? This food studies course explores SC's most famous dishes and how they came to be signatures of the Palmetto state. Students will have the opportunity to explore a cross current of food related questions: how does the physiology of taste operate; how did certain SC dishes become famous; and, how does the current food industry approach flavor? Particular interest will be paid to how food changes in places over time and what economic, aesthetic, cultural, and medical forces influence these changes. The course will instruct students on methodologies of archival research to prepare them for their projects in the course, which will include: a profile of an ingredient of a dish from another state (GA or NC, for example), conducting historical research in newspapers, cookbooks, agricultural journals, and manuscript archives to trace the ingredient's heritage, and students will complete a visual/photo essay on their family's foodways, tracing locality, typical grocery visits, holiday traditions, family recipe collections, and their own "signature" foods. Cooking demonstrations will be held when appropriate during class as well to help students learn and research the south's flavor heritage.

SCHC 457.H01       HNRS: Reading the Medieval Book      T Th 4:25 PM – 5:40 PM       GWARA

Using original pre-modern manuscripts in the Irvin Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, this course explores how medieval books are manufactured, illustrated and utilized from around 1100 to 1600. Topics include: major genres of medieval books, including bibles, liturgy and devotional compilations; the social function of manuscripts; exceptional specimens in facsimile such as the Ellesmere Chaucer and Très Riches Heures; textual transmission; provenance; biblioclasty and the modern booktrade; the global book. Students will be asked to make presentations in small groups on assigned manuscripts. Grading will include these presentations, a mid-term, final exam and class preparation/engagement.