Fall 2018 Undergraduate Courses

Download the Fall 2018 Course Schedule

Content List: Fall 2018 First Year Seminar Courses

ENGL 1001-001, 002: Freshman Writing Seminar (Fall 2018)

In this course, you will embark on a writing apprenticeship of sorts, honing your voice as you study the work of great essayists (along with a few duds--reading bad writing can help you refine your critical eye, too).

ENGL 1001-003: Freshman Writing Seminar (Fall 2018)

This course offers students an opportunity to practice composition skills in order to write literate, forceful and persuasive essays. Participants will work to develop a clean, efficient writing style.

Content List: Fall 2018 General Literature & Language

ENGL 1220-001, 002: From Gothic to Horror

Ghosts and monsters fill the pages of popular books and appear on our TV and movie screens. This course surveys the literary history of such creations and asks what we can learn from them. We will begin by exploring the origins of the Gothic genre.

ENGL 1230-001, 002: Environmental Literature

This course introduces students to the tradition of American environmental literature dating from Transcendentalism through realist and experimental contemporary literary texts.

ENGL 1260-001, 002, 003, 004: Introduction to Women's Literature

This course introduces literature by women in England and America. We cover both poetry and fiction and varying historical periods while acquainting students with the contribution of women writers to the English literary tradition and investigates the nature of this contribution.

ENGL 1340-001, 001B: Mysticism and the Jewish American Literary Tradition

In this class about Jewish mysticism and the Jewish-American literary tradition, you will enter a world filled with dybbuks and golems, with stories about Ezekiel’s Chariot and the Shekhinah or the female divinity. You will read stories about the creation of the universe about absence, nothingness, and divine constriction that are rarely read in university classrooms.

ENGL 1420-001, 002: Poetry

This course introduces students to reading poetry by examining the great variety of poems written and composed in English from the very beginning of the English language until recently.

ENGL 1420-003: Poetry

This course introduces students to reading poetry by examining the great variety of poems written and composed in English from the very beginning of the English language until recently.

ENGL 1500-001, 002: Masterpieces of British Literature

This course introduces students to a range of major works of British literature, including at least one play by Shakespeare, a pre-20th century English novel, and works by Chaucer and/or Milton.

ENGL 1600-001, 002, 003, 004, 005: Masterpieces of American Literature

Masterpieces of American Literature enhances students' understanding of the American literary and artistic heritage through an intensive study of a few centrally significant texts, emphasizing works written before the 20th century.

ENGL 3000-001: Shakespeare for Nonmajors

Tales of love, lust, jealousy, and betrayal; mirth and mischief; greed and murder; revenge, mercy, and redemption: welcome to the world of Shakespeare!

ENGL 3000-100: Shakespeare for Nonmajors

This course introduces students to the life and work of one of the world's great playwrights. One reason for William Shakespeare's ongoing popularity is the way that his plays ask the big questions: What does it mean to be a person? What is desire? What is the nature of evil?

ENGL 3000-200: Shakespeare for Nonmajors

This HYBRID-ONLINE course introduces students to the life and work of one of the world's great playwrights. One reason for William Shakespeare's ongoing popularity is the way that his plays ask the big questions: What does it mean to be a person? What is desire? What is the nature of evil?

ENGL 3060-014, 015: Modern and Contemporary Literature, Contemporary Fantasy

Since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the United States in the mid-1960s, fantasy has become immensely popular. However, the fantasy that has become and remains popular tends to be that written in a mode very similar to Tolkien’s, involving quests, Dark Lords, battles between clearly distinguished good guys and bad guys.

ENGL 3060: Modern and Contemporary Literature for Nonmajors

This course offers a close study of significant 20th-century poetry, drama, and prose works. Readings range from the 1920s to the present.

ENGL 4820: Honors Seminar

This seminar is designed to help you write an honors thesis that is well-researched, historically and culturally grounded, and responsive to critical trends that have informed your particular topic. It will focus on sharpening the skills needed to write a successful thesis, including research skills, the formulation of an argument, revision, and the ability to summarize and evaluate secondary materials. This class is necessarily a cooperative one and will provide you with a weekly forum in which to exchange...

Content List: Fall 2018 Undergraduate Creative Writing

ENGL 1191: Introduction to Creative Writing

This course introduces students to techniques of writing fiction and poetry. Student work is scrutinized by the instructor and may be discussed in a workshop atmosphere with other students.

ENGL 2021-001, 002, 003: Introductory Poetry Workshop (Fall 2018)

The primary activity in this class will be the reading and discussion of student work, in a workshop format. The workshop will be “craft-driven,” which means we will try to regard each other’s work with writerly eyes, looking at the “how” as rigorously as the “what.”

ENGL 2051-001, 002, 003, 004: Introductory Fiction Workshop (Fall 2018)

The primary activity in this class will be the reading and discussion of student work, in a workshop format. The workshop will be “craft-driven,” which means we will try to regard each other’s work with writerly eyes, looking at the “how” as rigorously as the “what.” There are many ways to tell a story and it is my hope we will explore some of the more interesting ones this next semester.

ENGL 3021-001, 003: Intermediate Poetry Workshop (Fall 2018)

Through group critique, discussion, experimentation, work and play, this course will create a space for you to simultaneously develop your poems and poetics. We will attempt to bridge the gap between intuitive artistic play and an intellectual understanding of the requisite work involved in the writing of poetry.

ENGL 3041-001: Studies in Fiction and Poetry (Fall 2018)

This course examines literary forms and themes with special emphasis on issues related to the craft of poetry and fiction. This course is taught in conjunction with visiting lectures by practicing writers. Does not count as Creative Writing workshop credit. Prerequisite: ENGL 1191 (minimum B). Student may be dropped from course for non-attendance.

ENGL 3051-001: Intermediate Fiction Workshop (Fall 2018)

This is an intermediate course in fiction writing. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Required prerequisite courses are ENGL 1191 and ENGL 2051 (both with B grade minimum). Restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Track or Creative Writing Minor. Students may not take two fiction workshops in the department during the same semester. Students may be dropped from course for non-attendance.

ENGL 3051-002: Intermediate Fiction Workshop (Fall 2018)

This is an intermediate course in fiction writing. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Required prerequisite courses are ENGL 1191 and ENGL 2051 (both with B grade minimum). Restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Track or Creative Writing Minor. Students may not take two fiction workshops in the department during the same semester. Students may be dropped from course for non-attendance.

ENGL 3051-003: Intermediate Fiction Workshop (Fall 2018)

This is an intermediate course in fiction writing. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Required prerequisite courses are ENGL 1191 and ENGL 2051 (both with B grade minimum). Restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Track or Creative Writing Minor. Students may not take two fiction workshops in the department during the same semester. Students may be dropped from course for non-attendance.

ENGL 4021-001: Advanced Poetry Workshop (Fall 2018)

This is an advanced course in poetry writing. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Required prerequisite courses are ENGL 1191, ENGL 2021 and ENGL 3021 (all with B grade minimum). Restricted to students who have declared the Creative Writing Track or Creative Writing Minor. Students may not take two poetry workshops in the department during the same semester. Students may be dropped from course for non-attendance.

Content List: Introductory English Requirements

ENGL 2102-001: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This course provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetry and prose.

ENGL 2102-002: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This course is designed for students in the English major and aims to cultivate in students the practice of reading and writing about literary texts. We will cover the basic concepts and vocabularies of literary criticism, and familiarize ourselves with the central genres of literature—poetry, drama, and the novel—and the specific methods involved in analyzing them. We will ask not just what the meaning of a literary work is, but how meaning is conveyed, and why it is conveyed in such a way. In other words,...

ENGL 2102-003: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This course teaches how to analyze poetry and prose. It assumes some experience with literary analysis but not advanced knowledge. It is divided about equally between poetry and prose, with poetry in the first half. The section on poetry explores, among other things, the relations between poetry and music, including rap and popular song. The section on prose includes both fiction and creative nonfiction. The overall goal is to acquire not only objective knowledge and analytical skill but also new ways of un...

ENGL 2102-004: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This course develops the skills of seeing, hearing, noticing, and describing that are the foundation of literary study. We all have feelings about what we like and don’t like, but can you articulate precisely what it is about that book, that song, that film, that makes it amazing and sets it apart from everything else? Doing so imparts the ability to understand and evaluate complexity in a broad range of fields, making the study of English excellent preparation for any further study and any future life. The...

ENGL 2102-005: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This course provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetry and prose.

ENGL 2102-006: Literary Analysis (Fall 2018)

This is a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetry and prose.

ENGL 2112-001: Introduction to Literary Theory (Fall 2018)

This course provides a survey of contemporary literary and critical theory. It is organized around a series of "keywords" in literary studies that are of established or new resonance in the reading, interpretation, and discussion of texts. Such keywords include, but are not limited to, "dialectics", "ideology", "unconscious", "différance", "discourse", "Orientalism", "postmodernism", "race", "gender", "queer", "environment", and "digital". With each, we uncover their philosophical origins, trace their histo...

ENGL 2112-003: Introduction to Literary Theory (Fall 2018)

Literary theory has a reputation for being difficult, unfairly or not. Whatever the case, everyone approaches literature (or any sort of cultural production — film, painting, sculpture, website, fashion) with some preconception or assumption about how to read it, listen to it, see it, watch it, or otherwise interact with it. What we call “literary theory” (or “critical theory” or just “theory”) formalizes our assumptions on one hand and challenges them on the other. Literary theory pushes us to think harder...

ENGL 2112-004: Introduction to Literary Theory (Fall 2018)

Introduces students to a wide range of critical theories that English majors need to know. Covers major movements in modern literary/critical theory, from Matthew Arnold through new criticism to contemporary postmodern frameworks. Required for all English majors.

ENGL 2112-005: Introduction to Literary Theory (Fall 2018)

This course will sample a variety of modes of theoretical discourse that have influenced contemporary literary and cultural studies. The emphasis in the course will be on breadth of coverage, and on comprehending the fundamental principles and assumptions of each theoretical ethos or orientation. To the extent that time permits, we will also apply selected theoretical approaches to specific works of literature and film.

Content List: Fall 2018 British Literature to 1600

ENGL 3533-001: The Renaissance in England, 1600-1700

The seventeenth century in England was a maelstrom of revolution and historical change, from terrorism and civil war to the rise of the English empire and the beginnings of science. This tumultuous era produced some of the most daring and revolutionary literature that England has ever seen. This course surveys major works in seventeenth-century English literature from Macbeth to Paradise Lost and beyond, including works by Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Donne, Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendi...

ENGL 3553-001: Geoffrey Chaucer

People have been reading Chaucer’s poetry for over 600 years now. Such long-lasting popularity has in part to do with the great variety of his writings. There’s a lot to like (and dislike): deeply moving tragedies, racy stories, philosophical meditations on the meaning of truth, and mocking diatribes against certain types of people. There’s also a great variety in opinions about him: he has been described as a bumbler and the father of English poetry, as deeply religious and mostly secular, as a traditiona...

ENGL 4003-001: Introduction to Old English

Hwæt! English looked a lot different 1000 years ago. Although it sounds “old,” the history of our language has everything to do with how we use English today. Old English and Anglo-Saxon culture are the bases for Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and they are also often used in modern nationalist movements. Learn how to think about “origins” in accurate ways that honor the past without living in it. This course provides an introduction to Old English, the ancient ancestor of Modern English (as Latin is the ancient a...

Content List: Fall 2018 British Literature 1600 - 1900

ENGL 3164-100: History and Literature of Georgian Britain

In 1706 and 1707 the parliaments of England and Scotland ratified Acts of Union that gave birth to the Kingdom of Great Britain. Partly as a result, the Georgian era, named after the reigns of Georges I–IV (1714–1830), was a period of staggering political, economic, social, intellectual, and artistic transformations, during which Britain became a modern nation and an industrial and imperial superpower. In this course we shall study some of the literary and visual works that shaped and responded to the tumul...

ENGL 4524-001: Advanced Topics in Romanticism, William Blake

This class will cover contexts & works of the visionary poet and artist William Blake. Expect field trips to CUAM and to Special Collections, some hands-on printmaking, and to do independent research for a final paper.

Content List: Fall 2018 American Literature

ENGL 2115-880: American Frontiers

This course considers the backdrop of the American West in literature, film, photography, and computer gaming. We will focus on a range of narratives and images depicting this wide swathe of American geography while simultaneously cultivating close reading skills, digital media analysis and film analysis that will aid you in deeper insights at the textual level. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: U.S. context.

ENGL 3235-001: American Novel

This course surveys the American novel. Covers the early development of the American novel, its rise in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and its contemporary expressions. Students will be introduced to theories of the novel, the major movements and authors, as well as the characteristics that define the American novel as unique.

ENGL 4665-001: Studies in American Literature After 1900, Personal Writing in Modern America

This course studies modern American writers writing about their own lives. In addition, students will have a chance to do their own personal writing. We will consider not only writing that presents itself as autobiography or memoir but also fiction based on the writer’s own life. The texts will include (subject to change) essays and stories by such writers as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriquez, and E. B. White plus three longer works: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak. Memo...

Content List: Fall 2018 Genre, Media, and Advanced Writing

ENGL 2036-001: Introduction to Digital Media in the Humanities

This course will serve as a humanities-based introduction to digital media structures such as the digital archive and reading/writing software that fundamentally affects what we ourselves are able to read/write; theories and methodologies for undertaking digital media scholarship in the humanities; and, finally, digital textualities ranging from text messaging, blogging, and games to digital fiction and poetry. Ideally, this course will give you the critical skills you need to understand and navigate a 21st...

ENGL 3226-001: Folklore, Buffalo in Folklore

This course explores buffalo in American folklore from its earliest appearances in American travel narratives and colonial records. We will look at how British and French colonists related to the American continent through its inhabitants, buffalo being primary occupants. We will read texts that consider how Native Americans related to bison as kindred relations, and we will also analyze writings that reflect how colonists twinned indigenous peoples and buffalo in the American imaginary and its policies. We...

ENGL 3796-001: Queer Theory

This course surveys theoretical, critical, and historical writings in the context of lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gay literature. Examines relationships among aesthetic, cultural and political agendas, and literary and visual texts of the 20th century. Same as LGBT 3796

ENGL 3856-100: Topics in Genre Studies, Comics & Graphic Novels

How does the comic book work, both on the page and in the world? In answering this, we'll go back to the comic book's beginnings and work our way book by book all the way up to now, where comic book movies are dominating the box office. Expect to read a comic book a week, or more—trade editions, graphic novels, single-issue, web comics, all of it. Expect to have to make your own comic, to show you understand the grammar and syntax of panels and pages. There'll be capes and tights, there'll be indie and unde...

ENGL 4026-001: Special Topics in Genre, Media and Advanced Writing, Black Romanticism

How black is Romanticism? This question will be the central concern of our course, which will investigate the roots of British and American culture in the routes of trans-Atlantic economic trade of the late eighteenth century. We will contest the implied racial and national purity of British culture by examining its production at the hands of racial and ethnic others. If the economic vitality of late eighteenth-century England derives from the traffic in black slaves and the labor of black sailors, somethi...

Content List: Fall 2018 Studies of Ethnicity, Race, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality

ENGL 2767-001: Survey of Post-colonial Literature

This course introduces students to the work of authors from formerly colonized nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on prose fiction, we will examine how postcolonial writers engage with issues of national identity and decolonization; negotiate the competing imperatives of English and vernacular literary traditions; and formulate both personal and collective strategies of self-representation. Possible texts include Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Jo...

ENGL 3377-001: Multicultural Literature, First Nations Film

This course examines contemporary films by First Nations directors, emphasizing works by women and LGBTQ2 filmmakers. We will view films across a range of genres, horror, fantasy, romance, documentary, sci-fi, and so on. The films will cover a range of issues germane to First Nations communities, including residential schools, treaty rights, sovereignty, reconciliation, 60s Scoop, food sovereignty, and so forth, and classes will include lectures and reading materials that will provide you with the necessary...

ENGL 3767-001: Feminist Fictions

This course examines a series of literary texts to consider how writers across the world have used fiction to creatively stage and reimagine gender and sexuality. Attends to the formal and narrative techniques by which these texts call attention to the fictionality--and thereby the creative malleability--of gender itself. Some cinematic and performance texts will also be included.

ENGL 4277-001: Topics in Women's Literature, 19th and 20th Century Women's Poetry

This course will track developments in women’s poetry over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in Britain and the U.S. We’ll consider the variety of styles they used to address questions ranging from marriage to science, motherhood to work, religion to politics. Although not all the poets we read might be classed as “feminist,” we’ll also consider the work of women poets alongside developments in feminism over the course of two centuries. Poets may include Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ...

Content List: Fall 2018 Literatures in English, 1900 to the Present

ENGL 2058-001: Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature

In this course, we will explore the remarkable literary innovations that developed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will focus in particular on modernism, postmodernism, and the contemporary, with close attention to the work of major writers, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett and Toni Morrison.

ENGL 3008-001: Developments in the Novel Post-1900

This course will aim to survey the central formal modes and literary movements of the novel in the twentieth-and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, it aims to introduce students to the major stylistic incarnations of the novel form, especially modernism, naturalism, postmodernism, social realism, postcolonial fiction, and science fiction. The course draws from a sampling of key British, American, and world authors to give students a sense of the various types of writing that have emerged over the course o...

ENGL 4018-001: Global, Transnational & Postcolonial Approaches to Post-1900 Literature, The Novel in Global Capitalist Modernity

Like a pebble dropped in a pond, globalization is a force that has over the course of history rippled across the world, incorporating its furthest reaches into the political, social, economic, and cultural logic of capitalist modernity. It is at once an agent of connectivity and communication on an unprecedented scale, and a catalyst of crises (such as financial meltdowns, poverty and inequality, socio-political disenfranchisement, urban decay, techno-alienation, cultural homogenization, environmental ruin...

Content List: Fall 2018 Critical Studies in English

ENGL 4039-001: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Posthuman/Postnature

The course considers a selection of contemporary American ecofictions in the context of posthuman and postnatural theory. These ecofictions rework the category of “nature” outside of a realist narrative framework but still take their bearings from notions of environmental degradation and sustainability. In the wake of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene (in which the divisions between nature and culture, human and extra-human scales have been destabilized) these fictions depict “postnature”—a...

ENGL 4039-002: Critical Thinking in English Studies, The Decadent 1890's

In the 1890s, certain cultural critics considered civilization to be on the verge of collapse, degenerating into a world dominated by sensual appetites. Yet it was also a period of the new, the “New Woman,” the “new sciences,” the “new imperialism.” It was a period of exciting developments in thought about gender, sex, politics, class, race, art, literary and aesthetic forms. We often think of it as a transitional period between staid Victorian grandiosity and Modernism, but the decade has avant-garde and r...

ENGL 4039-003: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Premodern Others

As we reach the one-year mark of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, we now recognize how a July 2017 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education foretold the scene that unfolded in Virginia just one month later. The Chronicle explains that “Alt-right online forums have co-opted themes from the Middle Ages and created memes that feature a battle cry from the Crusades, “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” to advocate for violence against nonwhite people.” The article goes on to suggest, in Suzanne Akbar...

ENGL 4039-004: Critical Thinking in English Studies, Premodern Others

As we reach the one-year mark of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, we now recognize how a July 2017 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education foretold the scene that unfolded in Virginia just one month later. The Chronicle explains that “Alt-right online forums have co-opted themes from the Middle Ages and created memes that feature a battle cry from the Crusades, “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” to advocate for violence against nonwhite people.” The article goes on to suggest, in Suzanne Akbar...

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