World Englishes
The purpose of this course is to use various Englishes, their structures and histories, in order to explore English-speaking cultures around the world, not in isolation but in relation to one another.
Learn more about this courseFall 2019 Courses
Discovering Literature
This course will explore American literary culture through the lens of novels and other types of writing which have sold extraordinary well in the United States over the past two centuries.
Learn more about this courseWomen and Literature
We will explore the luminous art and vibrant literary legacy of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest poets.
Learn more about this courseTough Beat - Gambling and Ethical Choice
We are going to consider the ethical good of gambling—the ways in which gambling teaches lessons of wise decision-making, deliberate choice, and most especially, respect for consequence and the acceptance (when necessary) of failure and loss.
Learn more about this courseLiterary Masterpieces
In this class we will read three masterpieces published in 1856: Gustave Flaubert’s scandalizing novel, Madame Bovary, Walt Whitman’s unprecedented collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, and Herman Melville’s collection of short works, Piazza tales, which includes ”Bartleby the Scrivener” and other amazing tales.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to World Literatures in English
This class will examine the worldwide popularity of the mystery/crime fiction literary genre through the lens of the BBC radio program “Foreign Bodies.”
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Science Fiction
Covering themes such as space travel, alien contact, robotics, technological utopianism, and human evolution, this course will engage the persuasive speculations that seek to extend, critique or even challenge the world in which we live.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Shakespeare
Ever wonder where the phrases “all that glitters is not gold,” “bag and baggage,” “neither a borrower or a lender be,” “give the devil his due,” “melted into thin air,” “one fell swoop,” came from? These are all found in the works of Shakespeare.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Ethnic American Literature
This course provides a general introduction to Ethnic American literature.
Learn more about this courseRepresentations of Gender and Sexuality
Readings in feminist theory and speculative fiction from the 1970s to the present.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Advanced Study of Literature
We will examine how writers, artists, and performers have imagined nightlife—its people and places, its sounds and sights, its ethics and values, its comforts and fears.
Learn more about this courseMedieval and Tudor Drama
We will read widely in early English drama, exploring the literary strategies used to move, teach, and make audiences laugh, discussing issues of performance and staging, and considering the larger social, economic, and religious contexts.
Learn more about this courseLiterary History I
This course will introduce you to important authors, influential texts, and historical and cultural contexts of English literature from its beginnings through the seventeenth century.
Learn more about this courseLiterary History 2
This course offers a broad overview of British and American literature in the 18th and 19th centuries – an era of empire, industry, and revolution, which produced modern democratic states and modern notions of selfhood.
Learn more about this courseLate Plays of Shakespeare
Would you forgive the person who humiliated you in front of the person you love? What about the person who tricked you into believing that your beloved was unfaithful?
Learn more about this courseLiterary History 3
You can’t go home again. Or can you? This class thinks about home, loss, and that pleasurably achy feeling of nostalgia.
Learn more about this courseEnglish Poetry of Early Seventeenth-Century
In this course, we will combine close reading of the poems with individual and collaborative research in the archives to investigate religious revolution, colonial expansion, gendered power, and aesthetic beauty, among other topics.
Learn more about this courseVictorian Literature
This course will trace varying portrayals of children, whether as innocent creatures, imperiled subjects, or corrupting figures themselves.
Learn more about this course20th Century British Poetry
In this survey of twentieth-century British poetry, we will explore some of the most memorable, rapturous, iconoclastic, difficult, innovative poems in the history of English.
Learn more about this courseTwentieth-Century British Fiction
England entered the 20th century as the leader of the industrial revolution and ruler of the largest modern empire. By the end of the century it had shrunk to a deindustrialized service state in a federation. England’s sense of itself was transformed during this period, and each of our texts reflects upon the changing state of the nation. We’ll survey the intellectual history of the period and connect aesthetic innovations -- including new realism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism -- to the era’s philosophical and social developments.
Learn more about this course19th Century British Fiction
We will study five novels that disrupt that pattern by decentering the protagonist and dividing the narrative’s attention or perspective.
Learn more about this courseStudies in British and American Authors
This course will be starting with short stories from Joyce’s anthology Dubliners (1914) and reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), we’ll then settle into Ulysses for a deliberate, careful reading.
Learn more about this courseCritical Practices
We will concentrate on four broad categories from the past 40 years in literary/critical practice: political analysis, psychoanalysis from Freud through Zizek; Actor-Network-Theory; and Affect Theory, which lets us combine the other categories in practical and flexible ways.
Learn more about this courseCritical Practices
The aim of this course is to familiarize students with some of the leading problems and debates comprising the field of literary theory.
Learn more about this courseRecent Writing
We will ask: “What is Irishness?” and “How did Irish literature respond to the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, and to the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger some ten years ago?” “How has it responded to its troubled history, which includes its colonial past, the Famine, immigration, and shocking discoveries of the abuse of young women in so-called “Magdalene Laundries”?
Learn more about this courseFeminist Literary and Cultural Criticism
Review of foundational works in queer theory, as they emerge and diverge from feminist theory.
Learn more about this courseLiterature for Young Adults
In this course we will look at literature focused on the period of young adulthood as a rich resource for the work of identity and its many contexts.
Learn more about this courseBritish and American Film Studies
We’ll study the relation of novels and films, while referring to some of the historical, political, and philosophical questions surrounding colonialism and postcolonialism.
Learn more about this courseAfrican American Literature
This course explores the changing nature of African American narrative from its earliest inception in the slave narrative to its dynamic possibilities in the 21st century.
Learn more about this courseSeminar: British and American Authors
We will parse Baldwin’s memoirs, tracing his techniques for narrating self-becoming. We’ll also, study Baldwin’s reinvention of the essay form as an improvisational space for demonstrating the contingent relationship among American gender politics, American citizenship, and African American identity.
Learn more about this courseSeminar: Literary Form, Mode, and Theme
We’ll consider the 18th century origins of gothic (Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto), as well as works from the Romantic heyday of the mode (by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, James Hogg), but will also trace its continuance in the horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Stoker’s Dracula (and the lesser known Carmilla by Sheriden Le Fanu).
Learn more about this coursePublic Speaking (Honors)
Prepares students in the liberal arts to communicate effectively with public audiences.
Learn more about this courseTopics in Rhetoric and Public Culture
This course will explore how various kinds of feminist rhetoric address key public issues.
Learn more about this courseTopics in Rhetoric and Public Culture
Not only will we explore the rhetoric of memory, memorials, and monuments, situating them as value formations for personal and cultural identity (and ideology), we will PRODUCE digital monuments; that is, we will make creative and critical artifacts that engage in what Gregory L. Ulmer calls “electorate citizenship.”
Learn more about this courseArgumentation and Public Advocacy
Argumentation techniques are powerful tools that can be used for pure self interest and consolidating power.
Learn more about this courseRhetoric, Law and Culture
This course takes you directly into the day-to-day performance of legal deliberation and judgment by mining the treasure-house of rhetorical resources that sustain and nurture our jurisprudential practices.
Learn more about this coursePublic Memory in Communication and Culture
This course takes a rhetorical perspective on the contested nature of public memory in the United States. It directly supports the Fall 2019 Themester Theme: Remembering and Forgetting. R355 will examine what public memory is, how it is perpetuated in societies, how and why it is configured to privilege some historical interpretations over others, and how it is modified over time.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Creative Writing
This class is designed to introduce students to a range of poetry and fiction, and in the process introduce them to a range of techniques and craft elements with which they will improve their own (or begin their own!) writing.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Creative Writing
Introduction to the art of creative writing.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Argumentative Writing
Focuses on argumentation as a process of inquiry.
Learn more about this courseCommunity Service Writing
This course offers students the opportunity to serve with a local community organization and to advocate for its mission, events, and/or initiatives through storytelling.
Learn more about this courseWriting Fiction
W301 is a course in fiction writing. This semester, we will build a story, step by step, concentrating our attention on the component parts of a narrative.
Learn more about this courseWriting Poetry
In this class, we will be analyzing poetry by breaking it down into basic elements—like music, the line, imagery, and figurative language—and examining the ways in which these elements work together to create an effective whole.
Learn more about this courseWriting Creative Nonfiction
In this class, you will build upon your writing skills by studying and writing three modes of creative nonfiction--the personal essay, the lyric essay, and literary journalism.
Learn more about this courseThe Craft of Fiction
Our objectives in W381 are reading and writing literary fiction with a focus on aesthetic quality. What are your literary tastes? Have you discovered or refined them?
Learn more about this courseAdvanced Fiction Writing
Revision is considered the final stage of writing but what is it, exactly? What does the process entail? What constitutes a revision? How do other writers revise? And what are the rules writers can follow to make revision a cornerstone of their writing process?
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The College of Arts