World Englishes
This course considers varieties of English around the world — on all seven continents — spoken as a native language, a second (or third) language, and a foreign language.
Learn more about this courseFall 2021 Courses
Experiencing World Cultures through Literatures in English
We will read several works of literature in their original forms (in some cases, the English translations of their original forms). We will then view and analyze the various animated, live action, and physical/experiential adaptations that the Disney Company creates through its interpretations of these original texts.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Fiction
This course offers a slow, unhurried reading of two very long novels: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72).
Learn more about this courseStudies in Popular Literature and Mass Media
We will interrogate the influence contemporary tv showrunners and filmmakers have on the way United States citizens narrate their experiences of terrorism, 21st century warfare, global warming, economic collapse, and political alienation.
Learn more about this courseLiterary Masterpieces
In this class, we'll tackle perhaps the most legendary work in all of American literature, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Shakespeare
We will pursue questions through intensive in-depth reading and discussion of six plays that arguably represent what is most Shakespearean about Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, Hamlet, and The Tempest.
Learn more about this courseStudies in Gender and Sexuality
This course will examine the ways in which gender and sexual categories in literature challenge and interrogate social norms.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to the Advanced Study of Literature
Alongside efforts to expand our analytical toolbox and express insightful ideas about literature, this version of L260 asks how poets, non-fiction authors, short story writers, novelists, and playwrights draw on the natural world in their depictions of trauma and conquest.
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to the Advanced Study of Literature
In this course, we’ll learn to practice the tools of literary interpretation (close reading, contextual analysis, theory and literary criticism) as we examine the concept of the planet in literature and culture.
Learn more about this courseMiddle English Literature
How did the Middle Ages conceive of masculinity and femininity, trans and nonbinary genders? Most people might assume that this period of literary history had little to say on these subjects, but they would be wrong.
Learn more about this courseLiterary History 1
In this course, we will survey and sample the earliest literatures in English, from the Old English epic, Beowulf, to the often bawdy stories of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the courtly quest of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to early drama, renaissance love lyrics, and finally to Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost.
Learn more about this courseLiterary History 2
This course surveys of the most significant aesthetic and historical developments in both Britain and in America during this time.
Learn more about this courseEarly Plays of Shakespeare
In this course we will read six plays from Shakespeare’s earlier career, roughly pre-1600. What were the issues that most obsessed the young playwright, and how do they provide a roadmap into how to understand his entire career?
Learn more about this courseLiterary History 3
This class thinks about home, loss, and that pleasurably achy feeling of nostalgia from the early twentieth century to the present.
Learn more about this courseEnglish Poetry of the 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 courseTwentieth-Century British Fiction, 1945-2000
A survey of English prose in the second half of the twentieth century.
Learn more about this courseAmerican Literature and Crisis 1850-1870
This class will think about literature in relation to social crisis.
Learn more about this courseTwentieth-Century American Poetry
This course surveys 20th-century American poetry. We will begin from the modernists (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) and anti-modernists (Robert Frost), registering the importance of the image and imagism to both.
Learn more about this courseCritical Practices
Critical Practices is a course that allows students to think about questions that most literature classes raise but which often aren’t the focus of discussion: What is the function of literature and how does it relate to other disciplines, such as the sciences?
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
In this course we will investigate how writers use the essay form and personal experience to critique life in the United States.
Learn more about this courseLiterature for Young Adults
In this class, we will look at the 20th century creation and transformation of the teen as an American figure from the 1950s to the present as a way to understand the emergence of YA dystopian and apocalyptic literature in the past two decades.
Learn more about this courseAfrican American Literature
This course focuses on Afrofuturism, a speculative form practiced primarily by black writers, artists and musicians.
Learn more about this courseSeminar: British and American Authors
This seminar focuses on the literature of ecological disaster.
Learn more about this courseSeminar: Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies
In this course, we explore questions by looking back to the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—the historical moment in which these modes of knowledge were being established, commercialized, and debated in the public sphere.
Learn more about this coursePublic Speaking - Honors
This course 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 examine the way mathematics and statistics are talked about in shaping public policy and opinion.
Learn more about this courseTopics in Rhetoric and Public Culture
This course will explore the rhetoric of memory, memorials, and monuments, situating them as value formations for personal and cultural identity (and ideology).
Learn more about this courseIntroduction to Digital Rhetoric
This course will pick up with the depths to which digital mediation has impacted (if not infected) everyday discourse, drawing attention to the qualities and considerations necessary to one’s success in digital culture (from writing for machine audiences to crafting digital identities to being attentive to matters of experience design).
Learn more about this courseArgumentation and Public Advocacy
As we learn about different kinds of advocacy you will have the chance to develop your own sense of how you would like to use argumentation as a citizen concerned about the common good.
Learn more about this courseSpeech Composition
The purpose of this course is to develop skills in persuasive writing and speaking.
Learn more about this courseScience, Advocacy, and the Public
The course will cover topics related to public perceptions of science, how to present and explain research to non-expert audiences through speaking and writing, and will explore recent public and scientific controversies related to COVID-19, climate change, vaccine skepticism, and others.
Learn more about this coursePublic Memory in Communication and Culture
This course takes a rhetorical perspective on the contested nature of public memory, primarily in the United States.
Learn more about this courseVisual Rhetoric
Visual Rhetoric focuses on distinctive rhetorical features of visual discourse. This iteration of the course will take up feature film narrative as a cultural instrument of public communication.
Learn more about this courseIntroductory 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 courseIntroductory Creative Writing
This is a course for budding poets and fiction writers and those that have never written poetry or fiction but would like to give it a try.
Learn more about this courseWriting Fiction
W301 is a workshop course in fiction writing, which focuses on the art of the short story.
Learn more about this courseWriting Poetry
In class, we will write, read, and write some more, focusing on craft through close reading of contemporary poetry along with essays on poetics.
Learn more about this courseThe Craft of Fiction
We will cover the most important components of fiction—structure, characterization, plot, description, dialogue, point of view, voice, setting, and revision—by examining published works and writing assignments that focus your attention on elements of craft.
Learn more about this courseThe Craft of Poetry
In this class, craft of poetry, we will be making as many boats as we possibly can, all of them collaborative, all of them metaphorical, all of them good for travel and gathering, all of them good for getting closer to our hearts.
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The College of Arts