Spring 2020 Undergraduate Courses
Content List: Spring 2020 First Year Seminars
Provides training and practice in writing and critical thinking. Focuses on the writing process, the fundamentals of composition, and the structure of argument. Provides numerous and varied assignments with opportunity for revision. Requisites: Restricted to students with 0-56 credits (Freshmen or Sophomore) College of Arts and Sciences majors only. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Written Communication Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Arts Sci Gen Ed: Written Communication-Lower...
Content List: Spring 2020 General Literature and Language
Explores literature in the Gothic mode and aesthetic and critical theories related to modern "horror" genres or their precursors. Introduces literary-critical concepts (such as notions of abjection, repression and anxiety) that developed alongside this branch of literature. Students read canonical works in British and American traditions while reflecting on notions of popular or marginalized literature. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts ...
Introduces students to the tradition of nature writing dating from Romanticism through realist and experimental contemporary literary texts. Students will study key terms and concepts related to the environment such as anthropocentrism, bioregionalism, eco-cosmopolitanism, environmental justice, deep ecology, and posthumanism. They will apply them to different literary genres toward developing critical analyses and environmental readings. Grading Basis: Letter Grade Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Cur...
Focuses of post-WWII American writing and thought about the planet and humanity. We explore how postwar efforts to transform the terrestrial environmental and conquer outer space raise questions about humanity, technology, and nature. We also study how earth and space serve novelists, artists, and film-makers as environments to confront large-scale questions about culture, identity, and power. Taught by Jason Gladstone. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Introduces global literature by women. Covers both poetry and fiction and varying historical periods. Acquaints students with the contribution of women writers to the literary tradition and investigates the nature of this contribution. Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: WGST 1250 Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Human Diversity Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-Global Perspective Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language
Introduces literature by women in America. Covers both poetry and fiction and varying historical periods. Acquaints students with the contribution of women writers to the literary tradition and investigates the nature of this contribution. Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: WGST 1270 Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Human Diversity Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-U.S. Perspective Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language
Introduces students to how to read a poem by examining the great variety of poems written and composed in English from the very beginning of the English language until recently. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language Section 001: How do poets write about America and the American experience? We will answer this question by reading the work of Walt Whitman, America's most inf...
Introduces students to the British literary tradition through intensive study of centrally significant texts and genres. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language
Introduces students to the American literary tradition through intensive study of centrally significant texts and genres. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language
This course explores the evolution of hip hop from its roots in the South Bronx to its worldwide influence in the present day--from Kendrick Lamar to Cardi B, Drake to Megan Thee Stallion. We’ll use the tools of close reading and literary analysis to study hip hop’s many forms and themes. Our primary focus will be on rap’s lyric craft, but we’ll also consider rap within the broader context of hip hop’s other basic elements—DJ-ing, breaking, and graffiti. Hip hop’s aesthetic culture is a means to confront ra...
Introduction to Shakespeare. Introduces students to 6-10 of Shakespeare's major plays. Comedies, histories, and tragedies will be studied. Some non-dramatic poetry may be included. Viewing of Shakespeare in performance is often required. Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only. English (ENGL) and Humanities (HUMN) majors are excluded from taking this class. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution...
Close study of significant 20th-century poetry, drama, and prose works. Readings range from 1920s to the present. Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Literature and the Arts Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language Section 004: Writers and artists of the last 100 years questioned everything: What is the self? What is time? What is literature...
Provides academically supervised opportunity for upper-division students to work in public or private organizations on projects related to students' career goals and to relate classroom theory to practice. Department enforced prerequisite: 3.0 GPA and faculty supervision. Taught by Dr. Rachael Deagman Simonetta. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors). Additional Information: Departmental Category: General Literat...
Content List: Spring 2020 Introductory English Requirements
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. Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) majors and minors only. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language Section 001 and 002: This course teaches how to analyze poetry and prose. It assum...
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. Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) majors and minors only. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: General Literature and Language Section 001: This course will examine the major literar...
Content List: Spring 2020 British Literature to 1660
Provides a chronological study of great figures and forces in English literature from Beowulf to 1660. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: British Literature to 1660
The term “Renaissance” means “rebirth.” But rebirth of what? In this class, we’ll look at the new ways in which English writers began to explore familiar questions about the nature of desire, the limits of power, and the relation of individuals to structures of community, family and faith. How might emergent forms like the public stage play or the epyllion - an imitation of sexy Classical myths - allow writers to work through these questions, while simultaneously reinventing what literature is and does? Rea...
One of England’s greatest writers and most radical thinkers, Milton wrote during a turbulent time. His writing speaks to crises of personal and political liberty that can feel oddly familiar - and equally divisive - in our own moment. Reading and working together, we'll try to get to grips with Milton's innovative forms, including an epic poem - Paradise Lost - that rejects the bondage of rhyme. Along the way, we'll ask some of the big questions: Do we have free will? What is the nature of evil? And how do ...
Beowulf is much stranger, sadder, and more timely than you think. Experience the poem in its original language, using the skills built in Introduction to Old English (Engl 4003/5003)! Students will produce daily translations, and seminar-style class discussions will involve both linguistic and literary aspects of this enigmatic poem. Reading List: Beowulf Taught by Dr. Tiffany Beechy.
Spring 2020 British Literature 1660-1900
Marc Bousquet, an English Professor at Emory University, lit a powder keg with his 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education jeremiad, “The Moral Panic in Literary Studies.” Bousquet warned: “Combined with evidence of lowered public interest in reading traditional literature and plummeting enrollment in traditional English majors, many faculty members in traditional literary studies have engaged in a backlash discourse against the new or renascent fields, a ‘moral panic’ in defense of traditional literary studies....
Provides an interdisciplinary study of England in one of its most vibrant cultural and historical periods. Topics include politics, religion, family life, and the ways contemporary authors understood their world. Taught by Dr. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only. Additional Information: Arts Sci Core Curr: Historical Context Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: British Literature after 1660
The period of English history that runs from 1660 into the early 19th century was a period of extraordinary change. Great Britain became by 1800 the most powerful nation in the world. During the period we will study, it experienced a revolution that brought in a new ruling family; it gained and lost an empire; its cities, especially London, grew explosively; the industrial revolution began: the novel as a literary genre is born; women and the working classes begin to assert their rights, and much else besid...
Vast and icy oceans, fields of daffodils, dark satanic mills. The Romantic period (roughly 1789-1832) was fraught with contradictions: country and city, nature and art, beauty and sublimity, revolution and reaction. Authors of the period used their writing to make sense of these and other seemingly irresolvable splits in their world: Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn has constructed an ordered pleasure garden atop a sublime ice cave; William Blake suggested the marriage of Heaven and Hell. Debates about the nature of ...
We will explore the astonishing range of dramatic experimentation that redefined the theater in the past one hundred fifty years. After getting a feel for the forms behind modern drama such as the well-made play, historical tragedy, and the melodrama, we will read plays that define realism and naturalism, symbolism and expressionism, various forms of avant-garde performance, modernism and post-modernism. We will work together to tackle such authors as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Sam...
Content List: Spring 2020 American Literature
This course explores American literature as a site of cultural intersection between European settlers and indigenous peoples. We will read early American texts in conversation with films portraying those encounters, bringing a critical and historical lens to both. For example, we will read Jacques Cartier with Hochelaga: Land of Souls (2017), the Jesuit Relations with Black Robe (1991) Guaman Pomo de Ayala, Hernan Cortés, and Mayan codices with Apocalypto (2006). The course requires standard English rea...
For this semester the subtitle of American Poetry will be “The Visionary Tradition.” And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. —Hart Crane There’s one great vein of religious feeling that expresses contempt for the world and pity for mortal man; it stresses the transience and tragedy of life and the constraints of the human condition. It counsels stoicis...
Content List: Spring 2020 Literatures in English, 1900 to the Present
A hybrid form, graphic narrative combines the innovative visual/verbal framework of the cartoon and the longer storytelling form of fiction and nonfiction. A term first coined in the US in 1978, graphic narratives have become a mainstay popular genre. This course will examine its popular appeal and also how this form allows for the grappling of difficult topics, whether it be the Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, climate change, gay and queer topics, racism, and the Palestinian occupation. Requirem...
T.S. Eliot wrote several of the most important poems of the twentieth century. He was also a major critic, a playwright, and a publisher. His work remains a troubling mix of brilliantly subversive “raids on the unconscious” and deeply conservative reactions against modernity. To read Eliot is to encounter other writers—major modernists whom he influenced and published (among them Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, and Djuna Barnes), writers he venerated and ransacked (“mature poets steal,” Eliot wrote), and oth...
This course considers how the legacy of slavery, including the Middle Passage, is rewritten in 20th and 21st century novels in English. We will consider not only how that history is remembered, but how its legacy lives on. We’ll begin with slave narratives to consider the narrative form and content: exile and natal alienation, social death, education and coming to consciousness, the journey to freedom, and yearning for Jubilee. We will also situate these novels within the broader contexts of racial justic...
This course will begin with some central figures behind and within English language 20th-century poetry and then split up into interest groups according to the students’ own enthusiasms and desires to explore. The central figures will include Whitman, Dickinson, Pater, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes. The primary medium will be close and joyous attention to the poems themselves as well as the kinds of activities that can bring us imaginat...
Content List: Spring 2020 Undergraduate Creative Writing
Introduces techniques of fiction and poetry. Student work is scrutinized by the instructor and may be discussed in a workshop atmosphere with other students. May not be taken concurrently with ENGL 2021 or ENGL 2051. May not be repeated. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Introductory course in poetry writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 1191 (minimum grade B). Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Introductory course in fiction writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 1191 (mimimum grade B). Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Intermediate course in poetry writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 2021 (minimum grade B). Restricted to Creative Writing minor students or students with a sub plan of Creative Writing. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
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. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 1191 (minimum grade B). Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Intermediate course in fiction writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course ENGL 2051 (minimum grade B). Restricted to Creative Writing minor students or students with a sub plan of Creative Writing. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Advanced course in poetry writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course ENGL 3021 (minimum grade B). Restricted to Creative Writing minor students or students with a sub plan of Creative Writing. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Advanced course in fiction writing. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 3051 (minimum grade B). Restricted to Creative Writing minor students or students with a sub plan of Creative Writing. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergraduate Writing
Designed to give students practical criticism of their script writing and technical format requirements. Either stage plays or screenplays are studied, as announced. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of ENGL 3021 or ENGL 3051 (minimum grade B). Restricted to Creative Writing minor students or students with a sub plan of Creative Writing. Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities Departmental Category: Undergradu...
Content List: Spring 2020 Critical Studies in English
Concerned with developments in the study of literature that have significantly influenced our conception of the theoretical bases for study and expanded our understanding of appropriate subject matter. Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of ENGL 2102 and ENGL 2112 (all minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) English (ENGL) or Humnanities (HUMN) majors and minors only. Additional Information: Arts Sci G...
Content List: Spring 2020 Genre, Media, and Advanced Writing
Sections 001 and 002: Students hone their writing skills in this course by learning how to analyze sentence structure in several literary texts. They will also practice writing about literature for both academic and general audiences, while using their refined knowledge of syntax to craft their own sentences. At the same time, students will build their research skills, learning how to evaluate academic literary criticism. Two shorter writing assignments, a formal analysis of a poem, and a scholarly literatu...
We all know that computers do not have feelings. Yet how might we leverage technology to think about what it is to be human; to identify the emotional state of a speaker; to anticipate the affective response a text aims to produce in a reader or audience member? Or what kinds of questions can you ask about 100 novels that you can’t ask when reading a single book? What insights about human creativity arise from taking advantage of computer programs capable of working with very large data sets? These are just...
This class will engage in close readings of thirteen or fourteen American feature films and a number of shorts that best typify distinctly American genres like screwball comedy, or American treatments of standard genres like slapstick comedy, farce, satire, and black comedy. We will trace several motifs - the romantic couple, acceleration of movement, the team, the outcast - through several films. Using classical, traditional and contemporary theory and criticism, we will attempt to arrive at general and ...
Why do people find trashy books so delicious? This course will take up one of the most popular kinds of trashy books – the romance – and investigate how and why it emerged. We will explore what romances are about -- lovers, quests, overcoming obstacles, lost children returned to their parents, fantastical beings, and magical objects – and what they do for their readers – satisfy fantasies, act as propaganda, and conceal reality. Our readings will include Arthurian romances, such as the Lais of Marie de ...
Our world is undergoing exponential change. No one knows what is coming ahead, but we all know it is coming fast. We live in what Yuval Noah Harari calls “an age of bewilderment.” Art is one way of understanding our situation. Overwhelmingly, the art of the moment is comics. Comics are a deeply ambivalent artform. Not that long ago, if you were over six years old, being seen in public with a comic signaled a certain idiocy. Teaching and studying comics, even reading them, were activities best marked by scar...
This course considers a selection of recent 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 cate...
Content List: Spring 2020 Studies of Ethnicity, Race, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality
In this course we will read a variety of women writers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanticism (1750-1832) is often called the Age of Revolution because it overturned all kinds of traditional, conformist thinking as well as sparking revolutions in America and France. During this dynamic era, writers challenged established social hierarchies, slavery, and tyranny and capitalism. Most specifically this era defied conventional gender and other social constructions and advocated for the rights of women fo...
This course explores European and American discourses, ideologies, and representations of the Middle East from the 19th century to the present. How, we ask, was a region as ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically diverse as it is vast rendered amenable to the European imperial enterprise and its more recent, American incarnation? Taking our cue from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), and drawing on a range of historical case studies from the Napoleonic Invasion of Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) ...
This seminar provides a selective overview of historic and contemporary trends in Native American and Indigenous Studies academic scholarship as well as contemporary Indigenous methodologies and theory. The readings cover a range of Eurowestern disciplines and Indigenous epistemic practices, allowing the course to be accessible to students from a range of majors. The course’s primary goal is to teach students Native American and Indigenous Studies methods and to ensure mastery of implementing these approa...
