Awesome, Cool Classes You Won’t See Every Semester
ENGL 439.001 TOPICS: Fiction & Mental Health TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM 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. 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, anger, 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, Existential, 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 340.001 Literature & Law TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Gulick
What can literature and literary criticism teach us about law? This question will guide our journey in this course, which will include a historically and geographically diverse reading list. We’ll pair ancient Athenian drama with post-Holocaust political philosophy, a Chilean post-dictatorship play, and South African literary journalism in order to interrogate law’s relationship to revenge, reconciliation, and reparation. We’ll read a contemporary Caribbean poet’s transformation of a 1791 court decision into a dazzling series of poetic engagements with the slave trade and the legal regime that justified that business. We’ll pair one classic U.S. coming-of-age tale of a tomboy and a mockingbird with a more recent novel about crime, punishment, and the legal legacies of settler colonialism in South Dakota’s Indian country. Titles will likely include Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; NorbeSe Philip’s Zong!; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. Brief and gentle forays into critical theory and legal scholarship will enhance our experience with these literary texts.
You do not need to be an English major or pre-law to take this course. I welcome students from all disciplinary backgrounds who are prepared to read voraciously, write carefully, and approach in-class discussions with enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, candor, and generosity. ENGL 340 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and towards the Law and Society minor.
ENGL 341.001 Literature & Medicine TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Davis
According to Dr. Rita Charon, a pioneer in the field of narrative medicine, the “effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” This course is designed to help students develop that narrative competence regardless of their career plans. The assigned readings offer a range of literary and medical interpretations of sickness and health, suffering and recovery, death and loss. Some works will address the treatment and portrayal of patients by medical practitioners while others will give voice to often-neglected patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives on illness and medical care. Together the readings will demonstrate the ways in which disease is lived in narrative terms while also demystifying the practice of medicine, revealing every physician to be, as the poet Anne Sexton observed, “a human / trying to fix up a human.” The course will focus primarily on American literary and medical works, including a selection of essays, poems, short stories, novellas, autobiographical works, a graphic novel, and a one-act play. Although this course should appeal to students interested in pursuing careers in medicine and health-related fields, any student interested in how literature can help us make sense of human suffering in all its variety is encouraged to register; no medical or scientific knowledge is required.
ENGL 341 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and it also counts towards the Medical Humanities and Culture minor.
ENGL 457.001 African-American English TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Peltier
(Crosslisted with AFAM 442, ANTH 442, LING 442)
A linguist’s take on the structure, development, and use of African American English
In this course, we will examine some of the linguistic features that distinguish African American English (AAE) from other varieties of American English. We will look at the history and emergence of AAE and its’ representation of AAE in literature. We will consider attitudinal issues regarding the use of AAE, especially as they relate to education and the acquisition of Standardized English.
Courses That Fulfill AIU or AIU/VSR
ENGL 200.001 Creative Writing & Community MW 3:55PM-5:10PM TBA
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 200.002 Creative Writing & Community MW 2:20PM-3:35PM 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 200.003 Creative Writing & Community TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Dings
(AIU & VSR)
We will read and discuss stories, poems, and some essays to focus on the relationship of individuals and communities. Specifically, what roles do shared and conflicting values play in the relationship? What is the responsibility of an individual to the society of which he/she/they are a part? What is the community’s responsibility to its members, especially when those members dissent? What difference does it make when individual membership is involuntary instead of voluntary? What difference does it make when assent is acquired through coercion instead of persuasion? Students will engage these matters and others through reading, discussion, and creative writing of their own.
ENGL 200.004 Creative Writing & Community TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Johnson-Feelings
(AIU & VSR)
This section of “Creative Writing, Voice, and Community” is an introduction to writing, giving special attention to the idea of the social responsibility of the artist. Readings and writing assignments will emphasize the exploration of identity and community. Model texts will include short fiction, biography and memoir, poetry and novel-in-verse, written largely for audiences of children and young adults. Workshop participants will be encouraged to write for these audiences. We will offer thoughtful feedback to each other, together creating a workshop community in which everyone is able to take risks and to grow as writers.
ENGL 270.001 World Literature TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Patterson
(AIU)
Memory is essential to every aspect of our lives, from carrying out the simplest tasks to constructing our most deeply held personal and group identities. However, memory is also notoriously unreliable; it selects, embellishes, and depends on all manner of fragile supports. This course will introduce students to a wide range of modern and pre-modern texts from around the world that explore the promises and pitfalls of remembering.
ENGL 280.J10 Literature & Society WEB ASYNCH Stern
(AIU & VSR)
Fiction, poetry, drama and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics and social responsibility. This term, we’ll read classics and banned books, and classics that are banned. Novels, short fiction, and poetry span a range of authors (William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Carol Ann Duffy, Amanda Gorman, Maia Kobabe, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and others), while major assignments offer a range of possible formats, including artwork, reflection, outdoor adventure, and more.
This section will be a fully asynchronous online course. In place of live meetings and discussion, you’ll be working entirely online, both independently and in groups; weekly lectures will be delivered via pre-recorded videos, allowing you flexibility in managing your time. There will be weekly deadlines to keep you on track and to keep all groups up to speed. Live office hours are available weekly and by appointment.
ENGL 282.001 TOPICS: American & European Literature & Film MW 2:20PM-3:55PM Schoeman
(AIU)
If you like reading (and watching films), this class is for you. This course is structured around a special topic in literature and film and will give students an opportunity to learn about cultural developments and discourses in America and Europe examined through several literary genres and varied art forms. In order to gain a deeper understanding of these cultural products and their socio-historical contexts, we will use a variety of theoretical tools (philosophy, psychology, feminism, and more).
ENGL 285.001 TOPICS: The Sentence in America TTH 10:05AM-11:20PM Shields
(AIU)
As the basic vehicle of meaning in English prose, the sentence is the foundational form of literature. A number of literary genres feature the sentence: the proverb, the maxim, the aphorism, the adage, the epigram, the motto, the definition, the witticism (“one-liner”). Numbers of American authors made these laconic forms important to their literary work: Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Dorothy Parker, George Santayana, Cole Porter, Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams, Maggie Nelson. Mastery of the acoustics of the sentence is necessary for the effective sound byte in media, the punch line in stand up comedy, the brand phrase in advertising, and the chorus in popular song writing. This writing-intensive 285 course will explore the pithiest sentences in American literature, the anonymous wisdom of the proverbs of the American people, and the most effect mottoes and catch phrases of 21st century commerce. Students will refine their ability to shape sentences to their cogent optimum of effectiveness. Exercises in word choice, and the close study of superlative sentences, will increase the pithiness of student expressions. In a media environment that distracts readers’ attentions, the ability to convey the gist of one’s thought or belief in one elegant phrase or expression is a supremely valuable skill. While academic study is often geared at teaching students how to explicate positions and argue positions with evidence and logic, the world that graduates enter may lack the patience to follow careful expositions. If you cannot convey your position quickly, your listener may shut you off. We will read works by the above-listed American authors, a collection folk sayings and proverbs, discussions on the current theory of branding and motto-creation in business, and also critiques of the simplification wrought by short forms voiced by Susan Sontag in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh.
ENGL 286.001 Poetry TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Waldron
An immersive course in poetry from a global perspective, illustrating the nature and pleasures of the genre, designed for poetry lovers, newcomers to the genre, the curious, and those who seek to expand their freedom and skills of expression while developing close reading competence. This course introduces a range of forms, traditions, and types of poetry with an emphasis on accessible, modern and contemporary texts and their appreciation. Requirements include deep reading, listening, and discussion, and a willingness to engage in creative and analytical exercises that will result in a range of written and spoken responses.
Major Prerequisites
ENGL 287.001 American Literature TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM 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. 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 287.002 American Literature MW 2:20PM-3:55PM Jelly-Schapiro
(Designed for English Majors)
Since the global economic downturn of 2008, capitalism has been subject to heightened levels of contestation in various public forums—from the streets to the ballot box to the television screen. This course will examine how works of contemporary American fiction in particular register and reckon with the political, economic, cultural, and ecological crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century. The novels we read will help us think about how global capitalism is constituted, experienced, and resisted in distinct spaces and places—within and beyond the United States. Though privileging the current moment, we will also think about the connections between the early-modern origins and present-day iterations of capitalist culture.
ENGL 287.003 American Literature TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Keyser
(Designed for English Majors)
This course, designed for English majors, provides an overview of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US literature. Reading poetry, short stories, essays, autobiographies, and more, students will strengthen their close reading skills and also gain a big picture view of literary movements and important authors from these two centuries. From Rip Van Winkle napping in the mountains to Emily Dickinson riding in a carriage with Death to Hemingway’s modern woman rescuing a cat in the rain, US literature is filled with vivid scenes and memorable characters, and together, we will figure out whether we “prefer not to” like Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener” or whether we will sound our "barbaric yawp" like Walt Whitman. Literature is, after all, an invitation both to understand language and theme through a historical frame and also to identify questions that resonate across time and speak to us today. Authors will include Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Joy Harjo, and more. Assignments include reading quizzes, a close reading and comparative essay, a mid-term, and a final exam.
ENGL 287.006 American Literature TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Vanderborg
(Designed for English Majors)
This class examines multiple creations and memories of homelands in American literature: Native American communities and histories, colonists challenging their ties to Britain, successive waves of immigrants to the new republic, and the violent loss of homelands in slavery, as well as speculative American homelands, dystopian or hopeful, that authors have imagined for the future. Get ready to explore the vital languages, geographies, cultural translations, and haunting legacies in each of these homeland visions. Our readings include a vivid range of genres--documents, autobiographies/memoirs (Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Maxine Hong Kingston's blend of family fact and fiction in The Woman Warrior), short stories, poems, a YA novel (M.T. Anderson's sci-fi Feed), a superhero graphic novel (Gene Luen Yang's The Shadow Hero), a film (The Brother from Another Planet), and interactive digital literature (Paisley Rekdal's West on the transcontinental railroad, and the adventure game Kentucky Route Zero)—from the American colonial period through the contemporary period, as well as a unit on homelands in recent American children's books.
There will be two papers, a final exam, reading quizzes, and group presentations.
ENGL 288.001 English Literature MWF 2:20PM-3:10PM Graves
(Designed for English Majors)
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.
ENGL 288.002 English Literature TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Jarrells
(Designed for English Majors)
This course provides a survey of British literature from the eighteenth century to the present. Readings will be organized primarily by period and genre: we will read Enlightenment-era biography (Samuel Johnson), Romantic poetry (Charlotte Smith, William Blake), Victorian prose (Jane Austen, Emily Bronte), and the modernist short story (James Joyce) before concluding with a nod to the contemporary novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney). Some close attention also will be paid to historical and thematic links across periods and genres: in particular, to the categories of innocence and experience, understood in terms of the passage from one to the other and as in tension with one another; to the making and remaking of “English” literature; and to the ways that literary works engage, mediate, and often complicate what have come to be called “values.”
ENGL 288.004 English Literature TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Gavin
(Designed for English Majors)
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.
Pre-1800 Literature
ENGL 380.001 Epic to Romance TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Gwara
(Crosslisted with CPLT 380)
Comprehensive exploration of medieval and other pre-Renaissance literature using texts representative of the evolution of dominant literary forms.
ENGL 381.001 The Renaissance TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Shifflett
(Crosslisted with CPLT 381)
Study of major authors of the European Renaissance including Castiglione, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, and Shakespeare among others. Requirements are likely to include two take-home exams and one essay.
ENGL 392.001 Great Books of the Eastern World TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Guo
(Crosslisted with CPLT 303)
This course examines selected literary works in a variety of genres from several Asian traditions. Course materials will be arranged in chronological order. We will read premodern masterpieces such as the much-loved Indian epic the Ramayana, Chinese medieval poems that are still widely read today, and a Japanese puppet play depicting love in the “floating world” of Edo Japan. We will also read modern and contemporary authors including Natsume Soseki, Yu Hua, Aravind Adiga, and Min Jin Lee, who explore a wide array of issues including conflicts between tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial conditions, and the impact of globalization. We will pay special attention to the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were created and the mutual influences between these cultures.
ENGL 405.001 Shakespeare’s Tragedies TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM 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.
ENGL 406.001 Shakespeare’s Comedies & Histories TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Shifflett
Study of Shakespeare's best comedies and romances, with the goals of figuring out what they are teaching us, how they delight us, and why they sometimes disappoint us. Requirements are likely to include two take-home exams and one essay.
Post-1800 Literature
ENGL 340.001 Literature & Law TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Gulick
What can literature and literary criticism teach us about law? This question will guide our journey in this course, which will include a historically and geographically diverse reading list. We’ll pair ancient Athenian drama with post-Holocaust political philosophy, a Chilean post-dictatorship play, and South African literary journalism in order to interrogate law’s relationship to revenge, reconciliation, and reparation. We’ll read a contemporary Caribbean poet’s transformation of a 1791 court decision into a dazzling series of poetic engagements with the slave trade and the legal regime that justified that business. We’ll pair one classic U.S. coming-of-age tale of a tomboy and a mockingbird with a more recent novel about crime, punishment, and the legal legacies of settler colonialism in South Dakota’s Indian country. Titles will likely include Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; NorbeSe Philip’s Zong!; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. Brief and gentle forays into critical theory and legal scholarship will enhance our experience with these literary texts.
You do not need to be an English major or pre-law to take this course. I welcome students from all disciplinary backgrounds who are prepared to read voraciously, write carefully, and approach in-class discussions with enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, candor, and generosity. ENGL 340 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and towards the Law and Society minor.
ENGL 341.001 Literature & Medicine TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Davis
According to Dr. Rita Charon, a pioneer in the field of narrative medicine, the “effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” This course is designed to help students develop that narrative competence regardless of their career plans. The assigned readings offer a range of literary and medical interpretations of sickness and health, suffering and recovery, death and loss. Some works will address the treatment and portrayal of patients by medical practitioners while others will give voice to often-neglected patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives on illness and medical care. Together the readings will demonstrate the ways in which disease is lived in narrative terms while also demystifying the practice of medicine, revealing every physician to be, as the poet Anne Sexton observed, “a human / trying to fix up a human.” The course will focus primarily on American literary and medical works, including a selection of essays, poems, short stories, novellas, autobiographical works, a graphic novel, and a one-act play. Although this course should appeal to students interested in pursuing careers in medicine and health-related fields, any student interested in how literature can help us make sense of human suffering in all its variety is encouraged to register; no medical or scientific knowledge is required.
ENGL 341 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and it also counts towards the Medical Humanities and Culture minor.
ENGL 350.001 Intro to Comics Studies TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Minett
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 384.001 Realism MW 3:55PM-5:10PM Woertendyke
Realism is deceptively simple. In this course, we will track literary realism as it emerges with the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. In its pretentions to truth, faith in language, preoccupation with character development over time, and tension between the individual and society, realism can seem naïve to contemporary readers; however, its ubiquity and versatility, across history, nation, language, culture, suggests a sophisticated genre. In this course, we will attend to the philosophical, aesthetic, political, and economic origins of realism and ask how and why it surfaced in modernity. We will read the novels that have formed the theoretical basis of realism in literary criticism, move on to examples of realism at the peak of its critical power, and, finally, turn to works that simultaneously rely upon—and subvert—its formal conventions and philosophical pretentions. At base, we will investigate the capacity of language and narrative to represent the world in different historical moments, including our own.
ENGL 391.001 Great Books of the Western World II TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Dal Molin
(Crosslisted with CPLT 302)
This course will cover European masterpieces from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We will cover the genres of Renaissance comedy, the essay, satire, romantic poetry, the short story, bohemian exoticism, opera, and science fiction. In our investigations of these texts we will consider important themes relating to their historical periods such as the link between politics and literature, philosophy and literature, science and literature, and the role that writers and poets play in the making of (modern) Western society.
ENGL 411.001 British Romantic Literature TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Jarrells
This course will take a rather odd route toward understanding British Romantic literature: through Scotland. The focus of the course will not be only on Scottish-born authors, though we will read a few (Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie, Walter Scott). Rather, we will combine our study of these writers with other writers – from England, Ireland, and America – who either travelled to Scotland, often as literary tourists (Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Keats, Washington Irving), lived there for significant parts of their lives (Mary Shelley, Lord Byron), or borrowed heavily from Scotland’s rich Enlightenment culture (Maria Edgeworth). The idea is to use the so-called Celtic fringe of the nation as a foundation for thinking through notions of Englishness and Britishness more generally, for assessing the uneven development that made Scotland both a recipient and a victim of the excesses of Britain’s empire, and for exploring the geographic distinctiveness that has made Scotland the site of wild, imaginative projections from the mythic figures of Ossian in the eighteenth century to the romantic worlds of Outlander, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones today.
ENGL 428B.001 African American Lit II: 1903-Present TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Lee
(Crosslisted with AFAM 428B)
Our course surveys African American literature from 1903 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 literary genres, including poetry, essay, short story, and novel. We will also delve into Black cultural theory as well as Black visual art, including a guided tour of the Columbia Museum of Art. Through our wide-ranging texts and figures, we will consider persistent and intractable questions in Black literary and cultural studies regarding race, being, voice, labor, community, sexuality, gender, aesthetics, and history.
ENGL 432.001 Young Adult Literature TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Viswanath
This is a survey course in which we will read contemporary literature for young adults that will help us challenge and reimagine the literary canon. We will explore a variety of genres including fiction, poetry, television, and graphic novels. Most important, we will work together to better understand the concept of adolescence, discuss the characteristics of young adult texts and literary criticism, and use that criticism to analyze the texts we read.
ENGL 437.001 Women Writers TTH 8:30AM-9:45AM Keyser
(Crosslisted with WGST 437)
Women and their increasing autonomy were arguably the obsessive topics of modern US literature, and yet women writers often been excluded or underrepresented in publishing. This remains true to this day where the annual VIDA count reveals how many fewer women writers are published or reviewed in major media outlets. This course will provide a survey of literature by twentieth and twenty-first century US women writers. In this class, we will ask about the connections between gender and genre, patriarchy and white supremacy, queerness and character, literary form and social rebellion. Course requirements will include reading quizzes, a mid-term and a final, as well as critical and creative writing. My hope is that the course will inspire students to revisit favorite writers and to discover voices in poetry, prose, and plays.
ENGL 439.001 TOPICS: Fiction & Mental Health TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM 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. 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, anger, 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, Existential, 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: What is Comparative Literature? TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Guo
(Crosslisted with CPLT 300)
What is comparative literature? What is the comparative method? Do we have to compare two or more national literatures? This course helps students understand that, even though the formation of comparative literature as a discipline was intimately linked to the emergence of the modern nation state and the idea of “national literature,” the sphere of comparison has significantly changed. Not only have comparatists come to critique the concept of “national literature,” but they have also taken up new approaches, which have been informed by developments in the larger field of literary and cultural studies over years: postcolonial studies, women’s and gender studies, ecocriticism, digital humanities, etc.
In this course, we will experiment with various approaches that allow us to examine texts not only across national borders but also across cultures, media, disciplines, and time and space. The class will look at how Mulan’s image changed when she was transplanted from the Chinese context and transformed into a Disney heroine; it will study the relationship between word and text by investigating what gets lost or added when a literary text is turned into a graphic novel; it will explore Shakespeare’s afterlives in contemporary Asia and Africa; it will examine how popular texts such as the Harry Potter series could serve as a window into larger cultural currents and phenomena; and it will seek to understand how the lens of ecocriticism can shed new light on the ancient epic Gilgamesh. With the help of these and other examples, this course hopes to help students learn to apply the comparative approach as well as achieve a solid understanding of the discipline of comparative literature.
Creative Writing
ENGL 360.001 Creative Writing TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Barilla
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 and help create a supportive community of writers. 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 360.002 Creative Writing TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Countryman
This course is an introduction to the practice and methods of poetry and fiction 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 360.003 Creative Writing TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Waldron
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 360.006 Creative Writing MWF 1:10PM-2:00PM TBD
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 465.001 Fiction Workshop TTH 4:25PM-5:40PM Blackwell
What makes a good story? How do you create believable characters? Can you move a reader’s emotions without resorting to sentimentality? This course is for students who have either completed ENGL 360 or have dabbled in writing fiction and want to roll up their sleeves a get a little more serious. We’ll read some published stories to consider how contemporary writers are working with the elements of literary fiction, but most class time will be given to the friendly yet constructive group critique of each other’s writing.
ENGL 465.002 Fiction Workshop MW 3:55PM-5:10PM 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.
Basically, the course will have a three-part structure comprised of writing fiction, workshop discussion, and fiction writing assignments. The assignments are designed to add dimension to the stories students will be composing, to make their work richer and more attuned to contemporary literature.
ENGL 491.001 Advanced Poetry Workshop TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Kinard
The Art of Intention: Designed for students having taken ENGL 360, as well as those with poem-writing or workshopping experience, this course will focus on crafting & revisiting original poetry. Exploring innovations in modern verse, students will work to develop their own poetic sensibilities in regard to style, design, & content through close readings of published collections from contemporary poets as well as their peers in facilitated workshops. With creative discussions & coordinated assignments, students will learn editorial, compositional & prompt-making strategies productive generation, revision & providing feedback. A final portfolio of or near chapbook-length will be turned in as a large component of their final grade.
Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing
ENGL 363.001 Intro to Professional Writing TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Garriott
In this course, students will take up the professional writing of civic engagement. Students in this course will analyze professional genres that intersect professional and activist writing, write their own professional texts (including proposals, letters, and emails) that engage in the professional discourse of civic action, and then produce a multimodal project intended to organize and mobilize civic action. Readings will include chapters about professional and technical writing and civic engagement.
ENGL 387.001 Introduction to Rhetoric MW 3:55PM-5:10PM Holcomb
(Crosslisted with SPCH 387)
Rhetoric is a term we frequently hear in the media where politicians and pundits use it as a synonym for deceptive, empty, bombastic, or even threatening language. But there is so more to rhetoric than these synonyms suggests. Accordingly, this course introduces you to a more comprehensive and capacious view of rhetoric, including the origins of its study in ancient Greece and Rome and its uses and operation in a variety of modern contexts and media. This course falls into three units: the history of rhetoric, modern rhetorical theory, and rhetorical criticism. In addition to organizing our semester, these units correspond to the three major areas of research within rhetorical studies. Thus, by surveying important texts and thinkers in each area, you will gain a foundation in the academic study of rhetoric.
ENGL 388.001 History of Literary Criticism & Theory MW 2:20PM-3:35PM Muckelbauer
On the surface, this course is designed to introduce you to some of the central questions associated with literary and cultural theory. Upon successful completion, you will be conversant with the many divergent strains of contemporary theoretical discourse (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, etc.). You will be able to respond to such fundamental questions as “What and/or how to texts and other artifacts mean?” “What are the roles of the author and the reader in the production of meaning?” or “How are social roles involved in this process?” You will also be able to distinguish different theoretical perspectives - from formalism to postmodernism and structuralism to psychoanalysis (and a host of others). More fundamentally though, this education in theory is intended to encourage you to challenge commonplace ways of thinking (about reading, writing, learning, education, sociality, your life, etc.). Therefore, the true “learning outcome” is that you will learn to (differently) pay attention to the world.
ENGL 460.001 Advanced Writing TTH 4:25PM-5:40PM Rule
How do writers stand out? What about a writer's choices—about their sentences or structure or tiny word choices—make us feel like we're experiencing their "voice"? How do writers shape language to convey their unique perspective, their presence, or distinct personality? This course focuses on these questions, as we puzzle over what it means to say that writing has "voice" and experiment with how to bring out such force in our own writing (and other media). Through study of rhetorical style, sentence-craft, identification and other concepts, students can expect in this class to analyze a range of personal essays and other first-person genres, collect in a commonplace book samples of powerful sentences and excerpts, and develop your own composing projects in a semester-long writer's workshop and portfolio, including a multimodal project in which you literally give voice to your writing. Focusing neither on academic nor creative genres alone, this course will speak to any student interested in improving their facility with and impact in writing across domains.
ENGL 462.001 Technical Writing TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Anderson
Technical communication skills are more important than ever for professionals, requiring the ability to write, speak and problem-solve independently and as a member of a team. The better communicator you are, the more valuable you are to your profession. The course gives students a chance to learn and practice how to write a wide range of documents such as journal articles, infographics, summaries and abstracts, short progress reports, memos and letters, brief and extended definitions, instructions/processes, and proposals and bids. In addition, students will develop a deeper proficiency in research skills and an effective strategy for managing multi-step projects. Topics for the course include audience analysis, document design and formatting, content organization, accessibility and usability, and conciseness in writing.
ENGL 463 Business Writing 7 available sections on various days and times
All business depends on communication. Research has found those companies that best communicated with their employees enjoyed greater employee engagement and commitment, higher retention and productivity, and better financial performance. Those who are effective communicators with their colleagues and customers enjoy greater professional success; almost two-thirds of employees have specific writing responsibilities such as email, presentations with visuals, memos and letters to audiences inside and external to the organization, formal reports, and technical reports. This course explores audience analysis; planning, drafting and formatting documents; creating visual organizers that tell a story; developing messages for different purposes (persuasive, informative, negative, good news); developing a strong resume and engaging cover letter; conducting a job or internship search. The course offers intensive writing practice for a variety of documents for different audiences and purposes through weekly case studies and submission of two formal portfolios, or collections, of polished, professional-quality documents. The goal is to develop a professional writing style that is clear, complete, correct, saves the reader time, and builds goodwill.
ENGL 468.001 Digital Writing MW 2:20PM-3:35PM 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.
Language and Linguistics (all fulfill the Linguistics overlay requirement)
ENGL 389.001 The English Language MW 2:20PM-3:35PM TBD
(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 3:55PM-5:10PM TBD
(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 450.001 English Grammar TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Liu
(Crosslisted with LING 421)
This course helps students build a solid foundation for grammatical analysis of sentences. It covers the core areas of morphology, word classes, phrases, and sentence structures. Students will gain hands-on experiences through tree diagraming and analyzing the lexical and grammatical features in sample texts. The knowledge and skills gained in the course will benefit students’ writing and editing practices and conducting linguistic, stylistic, and other types of discourse analysis.
ENGL 457.001 African-American English TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Peltier
(Crosslisted with AFAM 442, ANTH 442, LING 442)
A linguist’s take on the structure, development, and use of African American English
In this course, we will examine some of the linguistic features that distinguish African American English (AAE) from other varieties of American English. We will look at the history and emergence of AAE and its’ representation of AAE in literature. We will consider attitudinal issues regarding the use of AAE, especially as they relate to education and the acquisition of Standardized English.
HONORS COLLEGE COURSES (restricted to SC Honors College Students)
ENGL 200.H01 HNRS Creative Writing & Community MW 2:20PM-3:55PM Amadon
(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. 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 HNRS World Literature TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Patterson
(AIU. Crosslisted with CPLT 270)
Memory is essential to every aspect of our lives, from carrying out the simplest tasks to constructing our most deeply held personal and group identities. However, memory is also notoriously unreliable; it selects, embellishes, and depends on all manner of fragile supports. This course will introduce students to a wide range of modern and pre-modern texts from around the world that explore the promises and pitfalls of remembering.
ENGL 280.H01 HNRS Literature & Society TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Stern
(AIU & VSR)
Fiction, poetry, drama and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics and social responsibility. This term, we’ll read classics and banned books, and classics that are banned. Novels, short fiction, and poetry span a range of authors (William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Carol Ann Duffy, Amanda Gorman, Maia Kobabe, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and others), while major assignments offer a range of possible formats, including artwork, reflection, outdoor adventure, and more
ENGL 282.H01 HNRS TOPICS: Secrets & Lies MW 2:20PM-3:55PM Woertendyke
(AIU)
What is secrecy, what does it serve to protect, and what, if any, kinds of deception do secrecy depend upon? Secrecy is ubiquitous, guarding central aspects of our identities and creating a protective layer against knowledge, people, concepts, or things that threaten to invade our personal (and sometimes private) space. The revelation of secrets can produce catastrophe in its wake – Edward Snowden’s leak of classified NSA documents, for example, or on smaller scale, hurt feelings, as when a friend betrays your trusted secrets. Unsurprisingly, then, secrecy is often at the core of narrative - a central mystery around which each strand of the story is moving to protect or reveal. Is fiction just a set of lies or a form of truth? The course will introduce a range of fictional forms in history, literature, and contemporary popular culture. Our aim will be to identify patterns, or keys, of secrecy in various genres including but not limited to diaries, confessions, tales, short stories, life writing, non-fiction essays, novels, and films. Ultimately, we will consider how, and to what effect, secrecy shapes contemporary culture in the United States.
ENGL 285.H01 HNRS TOPICS: The American Uncanny: Poe, Hawthorne & Melville MW 3:55PM-5:10PM Greven
(AIU)
Arguably the most important writers of pre-Civil War America, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville were masters of the short story. This class studies their major tales and considers the development of the Gothic genre, issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the antebellum American publishing scene. Course requirements include two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
ENGL 287.H01 HNRS American Literature TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Jackson
(Designed for English Majors)
English 287H is a survey of American Literature from its colonial beginnings in the fifteenth century to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. A survey of this kind cannot, by definition, be comprehensive or all-inclusive, so, 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. Our class will have three goals: 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; to encourage you to read closely and carefully, understanding how those works worked as art; and to help you develop as writers of critical academic prose, through a series of essays and short assignments.
ENGL 288.H01 HNRS English Literature TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Crocker
(Designed for English Majors)
This course is designed to introduce you to influential texts, authors, and movements in British literature: it is a “survey” course, instrumental in creating and preserving the tradition it describes. What does it mean to survey, and how does surveying create categories, histories, or traditions? How is domination bound up with surveying, and why do we still use this method of literary study? Do students need to be able to survey a field, or a body of literature, to understand their own assumptions, entanglements, and affinities? How does the survey establish a dominant narrative of literary history, and thereby privilege specific forms of race, gender or status? How does the survey generate elite forms of culture, and are students from underrepresented groups under- or dis-served by a collection of texts that institutionalizes or historicizes different eras or forms of social oppression? The texts we study all think about surveying; this thematic unity will allow us to ask several pressing questions: how does British literary history (in particular) inform our own understandings of Empire, sovereignty and nation, as well as freedom, individuality, and rebellion? Across a millennium of British history, what can we see if we take up the survey as a critical mode of literary self-study? At a moment when the humanities are under attack and in decline, what is the place of the survey of British literature in the field (or major) of English language and literature?
ENGL 340.H01 HNRS Literature & Law TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM Gulick
What can literature and literary criticism teach us about law? This question will guide our journey in this course, which will include a historically and geographically diverse reading list. We’ll pair ancient Athenian drama with post-Holocaust political philosophy, a Chilean post-dictatorship play, and South African literary journalism in order to interrogate law’s relationship to revenge, reconciliation, and reparation. We’ll read a contemporary Caribbean poet’s transformation of a 1791 court decision into a dazzling series of poetic engagements with the slave trade and the legal regime that justified that business. We’ll pair one classic U.S. coming-of-age tale of a tomboy and a mockingbird with a more recent novel about crime, punishment, and the legal legacies of settler colonialism in South Dakota’s Indian country. Titles will likely include Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; NorbeSe Philip’s Zong!; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. Brief and gentle forays into critical theory and legal scholarship will enhance our experience with these literary texts.
You do not need to be an English major or pre-law to take this course. I welcome students from all disciplinary backgrounds who are prepared to read voraciously, write carefully, and approach in-class discussions with enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, candor, and generosity. ENGL 340 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and towards the Law and Society minor.
ENGL 360.H01 HNRS Creative Writing TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Countryman
This course is an introduction to the practice and methods of poetry and fiction 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 463.H01 HNRS Business Writing TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Anderson
All business depends on communication. Research has found those companies that best communicated with their employees enjoyed greater employee engagement and commitment, higher retention and productivity, and better financial performance. Those who are effective communicators with their colleagues and customers enjoy greater professional success; almost two-thirds of employees have specific writing responsibilities such as email, presentations with visuals, memos and letters to audiences inside and external to the organization, formal reports, and technical reports. This course explores audience analysis; planning, drafting and formatting documents; creating visual organizers that tell a story; developing messages for different purposes (persuasive, informative, negative, good news); developing a strong resume and engaging cover letter; conducting a job or internship search. The course offers intensive writing practice for a variety of documents for different audiences and purposes through weekly case studies and submission of two formal portfolios, or collections, of polished, professional-quality documents. The goal is to develop a professional writing style that is clear, complete, correct, saves the reader time, and builds goodwill.
SCHC 350.H01 HNRS Nature Writing & The 21st Century Southern Sublime TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Powell
“Sublime in the southern wilderness is always closed in, cramped by trees, cliffs, hills. Everything closes in on you down here, everything close enough to touch, both the beautiful and the ugly. If you can’t see beauty in closeness, you’ll never really see it in the South.” -- John Lane, Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River (2004)
Writers inspired by the green spaces of the U.S. South have long made the representation of those landscapes a distinctive feature of the region’s literature. This section of SCHC 350 considers how selected twenty-first century U.S. southern writers explore the possibilities of imaginative environmental writing to envision a southern landscape for our own time and beyond. Whether seeded with nostalgia or ravaged by apocalypse or both at the same time, the fields and streams of southern spaces continue to be fertile material. As we read, we will use these selections to develop a critical framework for understanding contemporary scholarship on southern literature about the environment, including ideas about the pastoral tradition, ecocriticism, wilderness theory, geopoetics, the new southern studies, and the southern sublime. Some of the course texts under consideration include but are not limited to poems, nonfiction, and fiction by Wendell Berry, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Kwame Dawes, Blas Falconer, Nikky Finney, Ashley M. Jones, John Lane, J. Drew Lanham, Lorraine M. López, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Ron Rash, Janisse Ray, Atsuro Riley, Karen Russell, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In addition to completing course readings 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.
SCHC 350.H02 HNRS American Autobiography TTH 8:30AM-9:45AM 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. In particular, seminar participants will look at the intersection between conceptions of childhood and the idea of the “American Dream” as Americans craft and live their lives. Readings will be representative of a cross-section of American experiences in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, region, religion, language of origin, and more. Readings will include texts created for audiences of adults, young adults, and children.
SCHC 351.01 HNRS Love & Relationships in British Literature: Chaucer to Austen TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Gavin
A seminar in British literature, with a particular focus on examining representations of courtship, romance, and marriage, and tracing change from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will survey works by major authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, William Wycherley, Oliver Goldsmith, Eliza Haywood, and Jane Austen. Our selections will include poetry, drama, and fiction. Requirements include careful reading and participation in class discussion, as well as three short papers.
SCHC 353.H01 HNRS Transformations of the Book in Postmodern Literature TTH 4:25PM-5:40PM Vanderborg
How have the idea and the material form of the book changed over the mid-20th and early 21st centuries? This course examines a selection of post-World War II Anglophone texts that have radically redefined the book and the way it communicates. These texts experiment with typography, page layout, narrative sequence, and illustration, and they offer new perspectives on the relationship between print and electronic books. Beyond e-books, too, are there online games that might be considered books? Interactive digital archives? We'll also look at texts from bio art--poems coded as DNA and implanted in bacterium as living books or texts that deal with nonhuman communication.
SCHC 354.H01 HNRS Lessons from the Hive: Creative Writing & the Practice of Beekeeping TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Barilla
This course, team-taught by a creative writing professor and a local beekeeper, will combine creative writing with hands-on engagement with bee colonies. In doing so, it will offer the opportunity for students to engage creatively with the ecological and literary context of beekeeping while responding more broadly to intriguing questions about human interactions with the natural world. Students will have the chance to witness and participate directly in the life cycle of the bees through their service learning, which will involve checking on the welfare of local hives during several important junctures in their life cycle. This service experience will then serve as inspiration for creative work that engages imaginatively with the cultural and ecological implications of this practice. The course will also contextualize these experiences by delving into the natural and literary history of honeybees and through readings that make connections to broader questions about the human relationship with other species and the natural world. For example, we might pair the service experience of checking on the hives with "Stung," an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert on the health challenges facing contemporary hives, and then engage with such questions through short fiction or nonfiction narrative. Or we might consider the science and culture of collective behavior such as decision-making and quorum-sensing, a point of significant research in contemporary swarm robotics research. Reading in this area, such as E.O. Wilson's research on social insects, might then lead to narratives that explore the implications of such work creatively. The course grade will be primarily assessed through a portfolio of creative work, which will include a final creative project. Students are responsible for their own transportation to the service sites.
SCHC 398.H01 HNRS Asian American Culture in the 21st Century TTH 11:40AM-12:55PM Lee
The pandemic era of 2020-2022 has brought into relief the paradoxical visibility of Asian Americans as victims of racist violence during a concurrent zeitgeist of unprecedented cultural representation. The latter boom indexes not only the slightly longer twenty-first century phenomenon of mainstream visibility, shaping the legibility of a distinctive Asian American culture, but also the intramural space for resource and resilience amidst the current era of anti-Asian hatred. This course will examine this century’s variety of representations made by Asian Americans, with a particular focus on the tensions between contemporary cultural production and anti-Asian racism. We will pose large, intractable questions in cultural theory regarding transnationalism, digital algorithms, model-minoritization, cultural appropriation, people-of-color solidarity, and psychic and physical violence, in addition to our querying the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and geography in Asian American identity-formation. Ultimately, we will emphasize the triumph of Asian American social life in the contemporary era by asking ourselves how a coherent, prevailing “we” has come into view despite anti-Asian cultural and political conditions. Items covered may include Asian American presence on YouTube and TikTok, as well as in antiracist activism, Hip-hop, fashion, food, film, and electoral politics. TV and film we may sample include Fresh Off the Boat (2015-2020), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens (2020-), Minari (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022); cultural phenomena we may discuss include 88 Rising, #StopAsianHate, #VeryAsian, Linsanity, Yang 2020, and Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now (2022). We may also periodically host Asian American speakers from music, film, food culture, journalism, and politics.
SCHC 450.H01 HNRS Hawthorne & Henry James: Gender, Romance, and Realism MW 2:20PM-3:35PM Greven
American literature's transition from Romance to Realism comes alive in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. Focus will be on issues of representation (gender, sexuality, race, and class), theories of fiction, literary influence, and the significance of the novel to modernity.