- Awesome, Cool Classes You Won’t See Every Semester
ENGL 430.001 TOPICS: BLACK SPORT/BLACK STYLE/BLACK PROTEST WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 - 4:05 LEE
From Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists on the medal podium in 1968 to Dawn Staley’s University of South Carolina basketball team declining an invitation to the White House in 2017—or from Wilma Rudolph participating in sit-ins to desegregate her hometown in 1963 to Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid refusing to stand for the national anthem in 2016—the world of sport has been a site of Black political thought, contestation, and resistance. Indeed, athletics has provided a venue for radical articulations regarding Black liberation like few other public spaces have. The spectacle of sport has also provided venues for radical innovations in Black cultural politics, wherein the styles, gestures, and adornments of Black athletes have as much antiracist charge and efficacy as direct protest or activism. In this course, we will examine the political dimensions of sport in the gestures, utterances, activisms, styles, and perceptions of prominent Black athletes. Figures we may consider together include Jesse Owens, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Florence Griffith Joyner, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Serena Williams, Marshawn Lynch, the 2012 Miami Heat, the 2017 Minnesota Lynx, and the 2015 University of Missouri football team.
ENGL 439.001 TOPICS: FICTION AND MENTAL HEALTH WEB SYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 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. Our lives have only become more stressful with the advent of Covid-19 and the pivot to online teaching. What can fiction possibly teach us about mental health, and how might fiction, and stories more generally, help us achieve and maintain it? In this course, we'll find out. We'll read a variety of contemporary novels and short stories, and a few historical ones, about anxiety, depression, dissociation, and isolation 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 Narrative and Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. We'll also investigate the value of traditional wellness practices including mindfulness and yoga. 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 439.002 TOPICS: TEACHING ENGLISH ABROAD WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 LIU
(Cross-listed with LING 395)
An intensive, hands-on introduction to principles and techniques of teaching English language learners, exposing students to norms of the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), working with non-native English speakers, and discovering TESOL opportunities worldwide.
ENGL 487.001 BLACK WOMEN WRITERS WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 COLLINS
(Cross-listed with AFAM 487 and WGST 487)
Taking an expanded intersectional and diasporic approach, this course will take a deep dive into Black women and nonbinary writers of the 20th and 21st century. Through our readings, we will ask how these Black writers attempt to imagine and actively create new ways of knowing and being the world, through literary, poetic, speculative, or technological means. Key topics will include blackness, embodiment, gender, sexuality, affect, diaspora, history, memory, and futurity. Readings will likely include works by the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Octavia E. Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Angela Davis, Rivers Solomon, N.K. Jemisin, Saidiya Hartman, Akwaeke Emezi, Eve Ewing, Danez Smith, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, and Michaela Coel.
The course will be offered online as a synchronous/asynchrounous mix. Students can expect at least one mandatory live session per week, in addition to, weekly posting to class forums or a blog.
Courses That Satisfy Core AIU & VSR Requirements
ENGL 200.001 CREATIVE WRITING, VOICE, AND COMMUNITY HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 1:15 - 2:30 BAJO
(AIU/VSR)
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. Students will compose fiction, poetry, travel writing, and environmental writing and share their work as center for class discussion.
ENGL 200.004 CREATIVE WRITING, VOICE, AND COMMUNITY WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 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 will be divided into three units:
(1) Self-discovery and Questioning Known Values,
(2) Writing a Community, and
(3) the Value of Attention/What We Value Through Attention.
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. This course fulfills both VSR and AIU requirements.
ENGL 270.001 WORLD LITERATURE HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON MW 2:20 – 3:10 SMIRNOVA
(Cross-listed with CPLT 270)
Selected masterpieces of world literature from antiquity to present.
ENGL 270.002 WORLD LITERATURE HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 4:25 – 5:40 DRISCOL
(Cross-listed with CPLT 270)
Selected masterpieces of world literature from antiquity to present.
ENGL 280.001 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY WEB SYNCH/ASYCH TR 11:40 - 12:55 STERN
(AIU/VSR)
Fiction, poetry, drama and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics and social responsibility.
ENGL 282.001 TOPICS IN FICTION: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE: THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH LITERATURE AND FILM WEB SYNCH MW 2:20 - 3:35 SCHOEMAN
(AIU/VSR)
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: books (fiction, memoirs, and sequential art), films, documentary movies, museum exhibits, oral histories. 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 283.001 TOPICS IN BRITISH LIT: REVOLUTIONARY ROMANTICISM WEB ASYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 FELDMAN
In this exploration of mainly British literature from the Revolutionary Period, we will discuss texts by canonical and non-canonical authors to understand not only the effects of revolutionary thought on literature and society but how these ideas continue to inform the world in which we live. We will read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by some of the most interesting and insightful writers of the era. Classes are taught by the lecture/ discussion method.
ENGL 286.001 POETRY WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 DOWDY
Designed for poetry lovers, the poetry curious, students who want to tackle their fears of poetry, and those who love language, this course introduces a range of forms, traditions, and types of poetry. For each poem we read, we will examine its literary, cultural, and historical contexts. Frequent audio and video recordings will highlight the relationships between poetry in print and in performance. Requirements for this discussion-based course include class participation, a poetry recitation, a midterm, and a final.
Prerequisites
ENGL 287.001 AMERICAN LITERATURE: AMERICAN LIFE WRITINGS IN-PERSON TR 1:15 – 2:30 Shields
(Designed for English majors)
Life-writing as a mode of expression has become increasingly central to literary endeavor in the 21st century, but this course will demonstrate that it has been a central concern since the early colonial era. Yet over the course of the years the ways of conceiving of individuals has changed greatly, and the functions of life stories changed commensurately. We shall examine how each mode of viewing human being—as a soul, as a character, as a personality, as a self, as a psyche—defines the particularly of that being against a backdrop of community. And we shall measure the degree to which a person expresses or defies the identity of the community.
One task of a life writing is to suggest where value lies in living—whether in religious faith, social success, family, friends, material wealth, the betterment of a community, in the creation of new forms of life, in the mastery of skills and the means of production. Literary study gives us an opportunity to reflect on the most important stories that Americans have told about how to shape one’s self, one’s work, and one’s interrelations. We will spend time thinking on the positive and negative consequences of acting on ones values or wishes, and which life trajectories hold the most potent promises. We shall also examine the constituents of happiness, grace, accomplishment, fame, security, and power—the six most frequently cited desiderata moving individuals in their self cultivation.
It is a worthwhile thing to learn the constituents of success, the ways to happiness, the reasons for personal failure, and the misunderstandings that prevent self-fulfillment. A supplemental benefit of this course will be to learn something of the ways of human success and failure.
Approach
Instead of using chronology as the basis of class session organization, this examination of American life writings will explore certain themes: technology & power, nature and personal self-government, social disadvantage and the will to succeed materially and culturally. Each session will have a lecture component, with the final 1/3 of class being open to discussion and debate. There will necessarily be a fair amount of historical contextualization of the texts—a series of powerpoints that will uploaded into the documents session of the blackboard site for this course will supply much of this orientation. Some class sessions will be devoted to workshops in either writing or research. On two occasions during the semester oral recordings of my lecture will be uploaded into the blackboard documents section to stand in for class lectures when I cannot be physically present.
ENGL 287.002 Homelands, Rebels, and Aliens: A Survey of American Literature WEB SYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 Vanderborg
(Designed for English majors)
This class examines how key American authors tried to define a national identity based on acts of rebellion and immigration. Who gets included in or excluded from these metaphoric homelands? Is the country symbolized by a melting pot, a “Dream,” a consensus, or a plurality of voices? The course is reading-intensive and oriented toward discussion.
Learning Outcomes
- To gain familiarity with a selection of documents, autobiographies/memoirs, short stories, poems, and novels from the American colonial period to the contemporary period.
- To learn close reading strategies for literary analysis.
Assignments
There will be two papers and a final exam, as well as frequent reading quizzes and posts to our class discussion board.
ENGL 287.003 AMERICAN LITERATURE WEB ASYNCH POWELL
(Designed for English majors)
English 287 provides 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. This section presents competing narratives of U.S. literary history by clustering exemplary works by representative writers from a range of American literary traditions as they deal with selected characteristic themes across several centuries, beginning with nonfiction by Benjamin Franklin and Olaudah Equiano and concluding with poems by Audre Lorde and Billy Collins. The clusters will draw on exemplary works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, to support the exploration of advantages and limitations of thinking about literary history in terms of traditions, what narratives about literary history may reveal about literary influence and innovation in particular, and what they may also obscure. Students may expect up to 15 learning modules with varying content, including lectures, film, class interaction, small group projects, formal and informal writing assignments, and a cumulative final exam.
ENGL 287.006 AMERICAN LITERATURE WEB SYNCH MW 2:20 – 3:35 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 288.001 ENGLISH LITERATURE WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 JARRELLS
(Designed for English majors)
This course provides a survey of British writing from the late eighteenth century to the present. Readings will be organized primarily by period and genre: we will start with some Romantic poetry (Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth), work our way through the Victorian novel (Jane Austen, Jane Eyre) and the modernist short story (Dubliners), and then conclude with a few works from the present (Sally Rooney, Mohsin Hamid). Some close attention also will be paid to historical and thematic links across periods and genres – in particular, to the tensions between revolution and reform, to the idea of “culture” and the development of a national literature, and to the role that literature played in mediating and representing a rapidly expanding British empire.
ENGL 288.002 ENGLISH LITERATURE WEB SYNCH TR 10:05 - 11:20 CORIALE
(Designed for English majors)
This course surveys English literature published during the nineteenth century, a time of tremendous social unrest and aesthetic productivity. Writers experimented with a wide range of literary forms (Romantic lyrics, sonnets, blank verse, dramatic monologue, etc.) and visual arts (painting, illustration, photography), which we will explore as we make our way through some of the most important and moving literary works composed in England from 1800 to 1900.
ENGL 288.004 ENGLISH LITERATURE WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 CROCKER
(Designed for English majors)
Because this course is designed to introduce you to influential texts, authors, and movements in early British literature (ca. 800-1688), it is a “canon” course, instrumental in creating the tradition it describes. As we read different works, all of which participate in defining the English literary tradition, we will consider the question of canonicity in relation to the conceptions of personhood that this literary tradition creates. In other words, what kinds of human behavior, human experience, or human expression does the early English canon promote? How do early works construct categories of race, gender, or social station, and how do these expectations differ from or contribute to our own thinking about our own intersecting nodes of selfhood?
Pre-1800 Literature
ENGL 380.001 - EPIC TO ROMANCE WEB SYNCH TR 2:50-4:05pm Gwara
(Cross-listed with CPLT 380.001)
A study of genres, characterization, and salient themes in five major texts: Homer’s Iliad, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Beowulf, Marie’s Lais, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
ENGL 381.001 THE RENAISSANCE WEB SYNCH TR 1:15 - 2:30 SHIFFLETT
Major authors of the European Renaissance including Petrarch, Castiglione, More, Erasmus, Tasso, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Milton. Annotated bibliography, midterm exam, and final comprehensive exam.
ENGL 382.001 THE ENGLIGHTENMENT HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 11:40 – 12:55 GAVIN
The Enlightenment was an intellectual and political movement in Europe and Great Britain that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emphasizing freedom of thought and experimentation. Things we now call "science," "democracy," "nationalism," and "capitalism" all underwent fundamental transformations during this period, which also witnessed the invention of new literary forms like operas and novels. During this course, students will be introduced to the broad outlines of this important moment in literary history, with an emphasis on writers from Great Britain.
ENGL 405.001 SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES WEB SYNCH MWF 9:40 – 10:30 GIESKES
We will read eight plays this semester—plays generally labeled as tragedies, along with one that occupies a slightly different generic niche—deriving from almost the whole span of Shakespeare’s dramatic career. We will also read one play not by Shakespeare (Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy) to provide some context for Shakespeare’s tragic practice. Our goal will be to read the plays closely as literature—objects of verbal art—and as playtexts—scripts for theatrical production. In addition we will attempt to situate Shakespeare’s plays in the context in which they were produced: early modern London. Shakespeare’s plays are intimately involved with that context and our reading will be enriched by an understanding of his times.
Post-1800 Literature
ENGL 350.001 INTRO TO COMIC STUDIES WEB ASYNCH MINETT
(Cross-listed with FAMS 350)
Tackles questions of storytelling, industry, history, culture, legitimation, and audiences. Readings range from Donald Duck to Maus, from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to Fun Home, from Archie to The Avengers, from Persepolis to Lumberjanes, and from Tales from the Crypt to Young Romance.
ENGL 383.001 ROMANTICISM WEB SYNCH/ASYCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 FELDMAN
In this exploration of mainly British but some American Romantic literature, we will discuss texts by canonical and non-canonical authors to understand not only the effects of Romantic thought on literature and society but how these ideas continue to inform the world in which we live. We will read poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by some of the most interesting and insightful writers of the era. Classes are taught by the lecture/ discussion method.
ENGL 391.001 GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD II WEB ASYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 DAL MOLIN
(Cross-listed with CPLT 302)
European masterpieces from the Renaissance to the present.
ENGL 425B.001 THE AMERICAN NOVEL SINCE 1914 WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 FORTER
This course traces several arcs in the history of the US novel from the end of WWI to the early twenty-first century. We will explore the relations between history and literary invention. How does the form of the novel transform in the century under discussion, and how are these changes related to transformations in US society at large? We will also consider the link between authors’ “social locations”—their gender, sexuality, race, class position, and so forth—and their responses to historical circumstances. How do these questions of identity shape how an author depicts US capitalism, racial inequality, and gender dominion? We’ll ask about the different constructions of “American” and “literature” that follow from these questions, especially when the novel is practiced by recent immigrants and others whose relationship to Americanness is unconventional in its angle of approach (i.e., non-citizens and non-residents writing about America). Finally the course explores the role of the novel in memorializing the historical past. We’ll examine the kinds of “pasts” that these books depict, and ask whether their treatments encourage us to view the past as irretrievably lost or as a resource for imagining a freer future. Texts: J. Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; W. Cather, A Lost Lady; D. DeLillo, White Noise; W. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; E. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; N. Larsen, Quicksand; E. Lim, Dear Cyborgs; T. Morrison, Beloved; K. Shamsie, Burnt Shadows. Requirements: two 3pp papers; one 6pp paper; biweekly reading responses.
ENGL 427.001 SOUTHERN LITERATURE IN-PERSON TR 4:25 – 5:40 SHIELDS
While it is not unusual to speak about regional consciousness existing in parts of the United States—New England, the Midwest, the Plains States, there is only one region that sought to isolate itself from the nation, indeed set up as an independent nation itself, and that is the South. It is also the only region whose literature is so distinguished from the common themes and methods of “American Literature” to warrant study as a body of work. This class will explore that body of work, defining the characteristic values, historical issues, racial pathologies, religious investments, politics, and popular culture. This course will explore the Native, African, and Euro-American folk cultures, its roots music, its languages, its concern with nature and agriculture, the consequences of racial slavery, its literary aesthetics, and the formation of various communal identities within the South—Appalachian, Tidewater, Lowcountry, Gullah Geechee, Cracker, Creole, Latino-southern.
While important southern written works in various genres by various writers will occupy our study, we will not neglect the equally important and influential oral traditions of story-telling, singing, and preaching that have been signature modes of southern communication. Writers discussed include Zora Neal Hurston, John Pendleton Kennedy, Bobbie Ann Mason, William Faulkner, E. A. Poe, Frederick Douglass, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren.
Approach
This course will emphasize primary sources—texts, oral performances, musical recordings, and films, rather than historiographical interpretations. Since the region is thematicized conspicuously in novels, poems, songs, and other creative expressions, framing our engagement with the South in terms of the expert opinions of academic commentators interposes too great a mediation between student and subject.
ENGL 428B.001 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II WEB ASYNCH TRAFTON
(Cross-listed with AFAM 428B)
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important issues, themes, and texts associated with African American literature from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. The selections we will cover will include novels, short stories, investigative journalism, poetry, biography, and more.
ENGL 430.001 TOPICS: BLACK SPORT/BLACK STYLE/BLACK PROTEST WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 - 4:05 LEE
From Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists on the medal podium in 1968 to Dawn Staley’s University of South Carolina basketball team declining an invitation to the White House in 2017—or from Wilma Rudolph participating in sit-ins to desegregate her hometown in 1963 to Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid refusing to stand for the national anthem in 2016—the world of sport has been a site of Black political thought, contestation, and resistance. Indeed, athletics has provided a venue for radical articulations regarding Black liberation like few other public spaces have. The spectacle of sport has also provided venues for radical innovations in Black cultural politics, wherein the styles, gestures, and adornments of Black athletes have as much antiracist charge and efficacy as direct protest or activism. In this course, we will examine the political dimensions of sport in the gestures, utterances, activisms, styles, and perceptions of prominent Black athletes. Figures we may consider together include Jesse Owens, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Florence Griffith Joyner, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Serena Williams, Marshawn Lynch, the 2012 Miami Heat, the 2017 Minnesota Lynx, and the 2015 University of Missouri football team.
ENGL 431A.001 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE WEB SYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 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 WEB SYNCH TR 8:30 – 9:45 JOHNSON-FEELINGS
The subject matter of this course is contemporary American young adult (YA) literature. Students will examine texts that are in some way related to central ideas about America and Americans of various backgrounds and experiences. Discussion topics will include the meanings of literary excellence in the young adult literature world, the politics of the children’s book publishing industry, and current issues and controversies in the field, including awards, censorship, gender, authorship, race, and more. Most importantly, students will give attention to the relationship between literature and social justice.
ENGL 437.001 WOMEN WRITERS WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 GULICK
(Cross-listed with WGST 437)
This section of ENGL 437 will focus primarily on contemporary women writers of color from outside the United States. Reading across a wide range of genres including autobiography, graphic fiction, poetry, prose essays, and science fiction, we will pay special attention to how feminism gets imagined, challenged, and redefined by writers from the global South. Key topics will include migration, human rights, affective performance (how emotion is expressed and interpreted in gendered ways), historical memory, and formal experimentation. Throughout the course, we’ll take an intersectional approach to gender, class, race, and sexuality—that is, we’ll address all these issues as interconnected rather than separating them out from one another. Authors will likely include Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jamaica Kincaid, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nawal al Saadawi, Marjane Satrapi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Nnedi Okorafor.
You do not need to be an English or Women’s and Gender Studies major in order to take this course. But you should plan to read voraciously, write carefully, engage with textual material that may be personally as well as intellectually challenging, and approach discussions with inquisitiveness, candor and generosity.
This course will be offered online as a synchronous/asynchronous mix. Students can expect at most one mandatory live session per week.
ENGL 439.001 TOPICS: FICTION AND MENTAL HEALTH WEB SYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 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. Our lives have only become more stressful with the advent of Covid-19 and the pivot to online teaching. What can fiction possibly teach us about mental health, and how might fiction, and stories more generally, help us achieve and maintain it? In this course, we'll find out. We'll read a variety of contemporary novels and short stories, and a few historical ones, about anxiety, depression, dissociation, and isolation 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 Narrative and Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. We'll also investigate the value of traditional wellness practices including mindfulness and yoga. 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 487.001 BLACK WOMEN WRITERS WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 COLLINS
(Cross-listed with AFAM 487 and WGST 487)
Taking an expanded intersectional and diasporic approach, this course will take a deep dive into Black women and nonbinary writers of the 20th and 21st century. Through our readings, we will ask how these Black writers attempt to imagine and actively create new ways of knowing and being the world, through literary, poetic, speculative, or technological means. Key topics will include blackness, embodiment, gender, sexuality, affect, diaspora, history, memory, and futurity. Readings will likely include works by the following: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Octavia E. Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Angela Davis, Rivers Solomon, N.K. Jemisin, Saidiya Hartman, Akwaeke Emezi, Eve Ewing, Danez Smith, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, and Michaela Coel.
The course will be offered online as a synchronous/asynchrounous mix. Students can expect at least one mandatory live session per week, in addition to, weekly posting to class forums or a blog.
Creative Writing
ENGL 360.001 CREATIVE WRITING WEB ASYNCH 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 360.002 CREATIVE WRITING WEB ASYNCH DINGS
This course will explore strategies for producing compelling creative work in different genres. At the beginning of the course, we will work with elements of short fiction, and move in more experimental directions as the course proceeds. The course will function primarily as a workshop, in which students will share work in progress with other members of the class. The course will also involve reading and discussing published models, as well as numerous writing exercises. Students will produce a portfolio of original creative work, which they will turn in at the end of the course for a final grade.
ENGL 360.003 CREATIVE WRITING HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 10:05 - 11:20 COUNTRYMAN
This course is an introduction to the practice and methods of creative writing. In this class, students will work toward the completion of a final portfolio, due at the end of the semester. As a class, we’ll respond to student work as it is created and develop a vocabulary for describing what we see happening in one another’s stories and poems. We’ll think of writing as an ongoing process and a mode of "serious play." The class will also read works by a spectrum of outside writers, which we’ll examine alongside and in conversation with students’ work.
ENGL 465.001 FICTION WORKSHOP HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 4:25 – 5:40 BAJO
This course explores the intricacies of the literary elements studied basically in English 360 to teach students how to write literary short stories. Students will use models and discussion to gain an understanding of the level of story composition at stake in this course, then they will begin submitting new stories of their own to workshop assessment in order to discover how to enhance readerly impact. The course is designed for writers aspiring to the profession or to students of literature who wish to deepen their perspective on language by exploring the other side of the printed page.
ENGL 491.001 ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP WEB SYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 FINNEY
Undergraduates will study the lives of poets and engage in a close reading of their poems. The many questions these poets from around the world pursue as they do their work; their particular ways of capturing the beautiful and the unexpected, deciphering what matters on and off the page, the act of writing and the fact of being a writer, all of this and more will guide the classroom conversation. Undergraduate students are expected to write original work, support each other’s progress, and engage constructively in the evaluation of the work of their peers.
Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing
ENGL 363.001 INTRODUCTION TO PROFESSIONAL WRITING WEB ASYNCH BROCK
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 WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 ERCOLINI
The term rhetoric, particularly in contemporary political discourse, is often used to mean empty speech (opposed to action) designed to dress things up to look better than they are (deception about actual conditions or issues). Rhetoric, however, has a rich, complex, and important history that distinguishes responsible discourse from that which is deceptive, shallow, and unethical. Rhetoric can furthermore be characterized as an orientation, a way of seeing, a way of knowing. This course examines this robust field of rhetoric in three dimensions: the history of rhetoric (particularly ancient Greek and Roman) as a set of practices, pedagogies, and ways of encountering the world; rhetoric as a critical practice of reading, interpretation, and intervention; and finally as the site of various contemporary theories and debates on the relation between persuasion and knowledge, the nature of language and its influence, and how everyday culture and experience perform important political and social functions.
ENGL 388.001 HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 GLAVEY
This course will survey the developments that have shaped the way scholars and critics have studied literature and culture across the twentieth century and into the twenty–first. The class will offer a brief introduction to many different ideas in the hopes of multiplying our sense of what it might mean to read and interpret a text. Many of our readings—though generally short—are notoriously difficult or confusing. It is quite possible that you will find much of this material challenging and even frustrating (though some of you will no doubt be familiar with these ideas from other courses). Confusion is completely appropriate, and my aim this semester is to create a space where we can all feel comfortable talking about what does and does not make sense to us, what seems obvious and what impossible. By the end of the course, students will:
- become conversant with the major thinkers and schools of thought that have defined the professional discourse of literary and cultural studies;
- experiment with applying different theoretical approaches to literary texts in exploratory and collaborative interpretive exercises;
and engage in meaningful debate about relations among aesthetics, history, race, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as language and representation.
ENGL 460.001 ADVANCED WRITING WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 4:25 – 5:40 HAWK
This course will focus on writing about music with extensive practice in various genres of popular music criticism. Topics such as close listening, rhetorical structures, historical context, subcultural analysis, and digital media will be discussed in support of nonfiction writing. Students will be expected to do the readings diligently and be prepared to write about songs, albums, artists, scenes, and genres of their choice.
ENGL 462.001 TECHNICAL WRITING MW 2:20 – 3:35 TBA
Preparation for, critical examination of, and extensive practice in types of writing important to technical communicators. Genres explored include brief memos, instructions and procedural documentation, formal proposals, reports, and usability tests.
ENGL 462.001 - TECHNICAL WRITING MW 2:20-3:35 TBA
Preparation for, critical examination of, and extensive practice in types of writing important to technical communicators. Genres explored include brief memos, instructions and procedural documentation, formal proposals, reports, and usability tests.
ENGL 463.001 BUSINESS WRITING TR 11:40 – 12:55 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 463.002 BUSINESS WRITING TR 1:15 – 2:30 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 463.003 BUSINESS WRITING MWF 12:00 – 12:50 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports
ENGL 463.004 BUSINESS WRITING MWF 10:50 – 11:40 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 463.005 BUSINESS WRITING TR 2:50 – 4:05 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 463.006 BUSINESS WRITING TR 4:25 – 5:40 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 463.007 BUSINESS WRITING MW 5:30 – 6:45 TBA
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal
articles and reports.
ENGL 468.001 DIGITAL WRITING WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 11:40 - 12:55 RULE
Students will develop a rhetorical framework through which to explore, analyze, and create ranging and changing digital genres, including analysis and composition in video, audio, image and social networking, as well as alphabetic language. Students will develop skills, knowledge, and creative rhetorical strategies for composing all manner of savvy and effective digital content -- critical experience for any twenty-first century life and career.
Language and Linguistics (all fulfill the Linguistics overlay requirement)
ENGL 389.001 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN-PERSON MW 2:20 – 3:35 SMITH
(Cross-listed with LING 301.001)
The English Language introduces linguistics through an in-depth exploration of many aspects of English. We will examine the English sound system (phonetics and phonology), word structure (morphology), grammar (syntax), and meaning and usage (semantics). We will also consider other aspects of English, including its acquisition by children, its history as a language, and its social context.
ENGL 389.002 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN-PERSON MW 3:55 - 5:10 BREWER
(Cross-listed with LING 301.002)
The English Language introduces linguistics through an in-depth exploration of many aspects of English. We will examine the English sound system (phonetics and phonology), word structure (morphology), grammar (syntax), and meaning and usage (semantics). We will also consider other aspects of English, including its acquisition by children, its history as a language, and its social context.
ENGL 439.002 TOPICS: TEACHING ENGLISH ABROAD WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 LIU
(Cross-listed with LING 395)
An intensive, hands-on introduction to principles and techniques of teaching English language learners, exposing students to norms of the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), working with non-native English speakers, and discovering TESOL opportunities worldwide.
ENGL 450.001 ENGLISH GRAMMAR WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 LIU
(Cross-listed with LING 421)
This course has two main goals. The first one is to help students build a solid knowledge foundation in the grammar of modern English. To this end, we begin with definitions of some key terminology (e.g., grammar, prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, morphemes, parts of speech, etc.) which enable students to discuss grammar with precision. We then move to grammatical analysis in a step-by-step fashion, that is, from words to phrases and then to clauses. We also touch on how grammar varies across registers (e.g., spoken vs. written) and sub-registers (e.g., academic writing vs. fiction). The second goal is to help students develop practical skills in applying grammar knowledge in academic and professional settings, particularly pedagogies to integrate grammar teaching into secondary school English Language Arts classes.
ENGL 455.001V LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY IN-PERSON TR 11:40 – 12:55 DONATH
(Cross-listed with LING 440)
Patterns in language use as a reflection of social group memberships or the negotiation of interpersonal relationships; special attention to social dialects and stylistic differences in American English.
HONORS COLLEGE COURSES (restricted to SC Honors College Students)
ENGL 280.H01 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 2:50 – 4:05 STERN
(Restricted to Honors College students)
Fiction, poetry, drama and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics and social responsibility.
ENG 285.H01 TOPICS IN AMERICAN LIT: SEEING IN BLACK AND WHITE: RACE AND VISION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE WEB ASYNCH TRAFTON
(Restricted to Honors College students)
This is a course that takes selections from contemporary African American writers that highlight issues of race. Specifically, these readings each ask questions regarding the structure of race and of race relations, especially as they appear in late twentieth-century American culture, and especially as they involve issues of vision and visibility. Our authors ask this: since race is at least in part a function of sight – of some people seeing other people who look different than themselves – then what can be learned about race and race relations by artistically challenging our preconceptions about both what and how we see? Using such texts as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks, and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, we, along with our authors, will investigate these issues. At the conclusion of this course, students will be expected to be familiar with the principle features of the texts on the syllabus, including the characteristics of specific authors and texts as well as their varying contexts more generally; they will also be expected to show mastery of the skills involved in crafting an analytic essay appropriate for a 200- level English course.
ENGL 286.H01 INTRODUCTION TO POETRY WEB SYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 VANDERBORG
Calling all poetry lovers—or anyone curious about poetry’s unique forms and themes! This class offers a brief history of narrative and lyric poetry, starting with translated selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Old English poetry, and then moving to Middle English poetry and early modern ballads. We conclude with examples of modern and postmodern poetry—including a poetry book made up of 500 index cards, visual collage poetry, and a poem translated into DNA bases and then implanted into a living organism.
We will use the Norton Anthology of Poetry (at campus bookstore) as the main text, supplemented by additional poems. Each class includes a brief lecture followed by extensive discussion.
Learning Outcomes:
1. Gain a critical vocabulary for analyzing poetry
2. Learn scansion techniques
2. Practice close reading poems
3. Gain familiarity with important genres and poems from the classical to the modern periods
Assignments:
There will be two midterm tests and a final. Quizzes and brief class preparation assignments
will be used to gauge understanding of the material. Participation during class is
important, and you will also be asked to post at least four questions or comments
to the discussion board on the class website during the term. There are lots of creative
quiz substitution options as well—such as close reading palimpsest poems, exploring
digital poetry, and writing your own Anglo-Saxon riddle poem!
ENGL 287.H01 AMERICAN LITERATURE WEB SYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 JACKSON
(Designed for English majors) (Restricted to Honors College students)
English 287 H is a survey of American Literature that will introduce you to texts from colonial beginnings of what we now call America in the fifteenth century, to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. We'll focus on texts that cluster around recurrent thematic questions. These include: What is America? Who are Americans? Is there one fixed definition? Are humans fundamentally flawed, basically neutral, or inherently good? What defines us best: our souls, our heads, or our hearts? How do we come to terms with human suffering and the prospect of death? What is literature, and what is it good for? What is reality, and how can it best be depicted? Other themes will emerge through class discussion, and we’ll be both flexible and accommodating in how we approach what we read. Our class essentially has four goals. The first is to introduce you to the sweep of American literary history and suggest something of its power and significance, especially by understanding what various works meant in their historical context. The second is to encourage you to read closely and carefully, understanding how those works worked as art. The third and final goal is to help you develop as writers of critical academic prose, through a series of essays and shorted writing assignments. The last, and perhaps most important, is to consider how literature has helped people negotiate tough times and determine what value it might still have for our lives today.
ENGL 288.H01 ENGLISH LITERATURE WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH T 10:05 – 11:20 CROCKER
(Designed for English majors) (Restricted to Honors College students)
Because this course is designed to introduce you to influential texts, authors, and movements in early British literature (ca. 800-1688), it is a “canon” course, instrumental in creating the tradition it describes. As we read different works, all of which participate in defining the English literary tradition, we will consider the question of canonicity in relation to the conceptions of personhood that this literary tradition creates. In other words, what kinds of human behavior, human experience, or human expression does the early English canon promote? How do early works construct categories of race, gender, or social station, and how do these expectations differ from or contribute to our own thinking about our own intersecting nodes of selfhood?
ENGL 360.H01 CREATIVE WRITING WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 BARILLA
(Restricted to Honors College students)
This course will explore strategies for producing compelling creative work in different genres. At the beginning of the course, we will work with elements of short fiction, and move in more experimental directions as the course proceeds. The course will function primarily as a workshop, in which students will share work in progress with other members of the class. The course will also involve reading and discussing published models, as well as numerous writing exercises. Students will produce a portfolio of original creative work, which they will turn in at the end of the course for a final grade.
ENGL 360.H02 CREATIVE WRITING HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 1:15 – 2:30 COUNTRYMAN
This course is an introduction to the practice and methods of creative writing. In this class, students will work toward the completion of a final portfolio, due at the end of the semester. As a class, we’ll respond to student work as it is created and develop a vocabulary for describing what we see happening in one another’s stories and poems. We’ll think of writing as an ongoing process and a mode of "serious play." The class will also read works by a spectrum of outside writers, which we’ll examine alongside and in conversation with students’ work.
SCHC 398.H02 AFRO-ASIAN CONNECTIONS IN AMERICAN CULTURE WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 1:15 – 2:30 LEE
(Restricted to Honors College students)
Amongst minoritized racial groups in the United States, perhaps no two communities are considered to have less in common than African Americans and Asian Americans. While Black Americans face everyday violence (anti-Blackness) under a regime of white supremacy, Asian Americans are arranged by that regime as a “model minority.” While Asian Americans are considered, by and large, voluntary immigrants, with many arriving in the second half of the twentieth century, the majority of African Americans link their lineage back to Middle Passage and the unceasing violence of anti-Blackness under chattel slavery. While African American cultural history is viewed as a powerful and autonomous source of group pride, cohering a Black “we,” Asian Americans, with seemingly no single cultural vernacular, are often considered not to have a coherent “we” at all.
On the other hand, there is a rich history of collaboration and connection between them: anticolonial thought in the middle of the twentieth century linked the political destinies of both groups to each other (generating the term “Asian American” itself). There was, for instance, an Asian American charter member of the Black Panther Party, Richard Aoki; there have been Asian American intellectuals deeply involved with the Black Radical Tradition, such as Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama; and pioneering Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois theorized the global racialization of Asians long before racist immigration law changed to allow Asian entry into the United States. Even the Los Angeles riots of 1992—commonly thought of as an exemplary moment of intractable, violent contestation between Blacks and Asians—can be viewed as a moment of these groups negotiating and contesting white supremacist conditions.
This course will examine the political fissures, cultural vicissitudes, and liberation-focused collaborations between African Americans and Asian Americans in the contemporary period. We will study recent theoretical frameworks that bring Blackness and yellowness into view together in the post-Civil Rights era, such as racial formation, racial triangulation, racial melancholia, and comparative racialization. We may consider films that examine Blackness and yellowness together, like Do the Right Thing, Get Out, Rush Hour, and LA 92. We will also study contemporary popular cultural figures at the intersection of these social formations, such as Aziz Ansari, Awkwafina, Ice Cube, Eddie Huang, MC Jin, Kendrick Lamar, Jeremy Lin, Lilly Singh, and the Wu-Tang Clan.
SCHC 450.H0B BEYOND THE WALL: READING U.S. LATINX LITERATURE WEB SYNCH/ASYNCH TR 10:05 – 11:20 DOWDY
A wide-ranging introduction to the literatures and cultures of U.S. Latinas/os, spanning national groups and historical geographies. Moving from the U.S. obsession with the U.S.-Mexico border to other sites and spaces of Latinx cultures, the course will read a broad range of texts by Chicana/o (Mexican American) and Puerto Rican writers, as well as texts by writers descended from other Latin American nations.
SCHC 450.H06 MELVILLE AND SHAKESPEARE WEB SYNCH MW 3:55 – 5:10 GREVEN
Melville's discovery of Shakespeare ignited the writing of Moby-Dick, widely considered the greatest American novel. This course reads key Melville and Shakespeare works alongside one another. Topics include themes of gender, sexuality, race, class, and theories of literary influence.
SCHC 451.H02 TOLKIEN’S LEGENDARIUM WEB SYNCH TR 11:40 – 12:55 GWARA
Nations often have culture heroes from a pseudo-medieval past. The Celts of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany esteemed King Arthur, “quondam rex et futurus.” Americans admire Luke Skywalker, a “knight” from “a long time ago.” The French revere the fictional Roland more than the historical Charlemagne. Tolkien’s characters from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are transatlantic culture heroes of comparable preeminence. For many they are literary heroes of our time. Surveys of “favorite books” in Britain and the US usually include LOTR alongside novels assigned in school. But no one ever assigned LOTR in a classroom. It’s 1,000 pages of epic fantasy full of dense language, mythic histories and inscrutable characters with ethnic identities of granular verisimilitude. Tolkien clearly spent decades living in his head, imagining the world of Middle Earth. His construct was inevitably suffused with his deeply held views of human nature. The subject of this course will be the grand themes suffusing Tolkien’s complex legendarium.
SCHC 452.H02 INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: COMING OF AGE IN LITERATURE HYBRID WEB/IN-PERSON TR 2:50 – 4:05 JARRELLS
In this course, we will survey British Literature from the eighteenth century to the present by looking at what William Blake called “the two contrary states of the human soul”: innocence and experience. What characterizes these two states? What is the relationship between them? How have writers used the passage from one state to the other to explore issues about growing up, moving on, and losing or maintaining a sense of self? And how do these categories serve as useful occasions for reflecting upon and perhaps critiquing the conditions of the world we live in? These are some of the questions we will ask as we read and write about selected works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, James Joyce, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, and Zadie Smith.