English

This non-majors course is an exploration of graphic narratives, which bring together the verbal and visual as a way of telling a story. The course begins by investigating the nature and grammar of comics: How do graphic narratives work? What techniques and strategies do writer-artists use to produce meaning? In what ways do colors, shapes, panels, borders, gutters, perspective, page-layout, and speech bubbles influence content? What is the role of the reader in constructing meaning from these verbal and visual texts? How does literary analysis inform our readings of the verbal and visual? As in other English courses, Graphic Narratives aims to provide insights on language and meaning, culture and history, the self and other. Readings will be primarily historical and contemporary graphic narratives and critical scholarship about graphic narratives will offer perspectives on the readings' responsiveness to contemporary social currents. In addition to written analytical responses, class engagement and discussion and presentation, a final project for the course will offer students the opportunity to create their own graphic narrative.

Under faculty supervision, students create academic and community programming to strengthen the English major.

Participation in Crosscurrents, the student literary and visual arts magazine, requires reading manuscripts, discussing submitted work, and collaboratively selecting the literature and visual art work that will appear in each semester's issue. Required weekly meetings also involve active promotion and publicizing of Crosscurrents and managing the Crosscurrents organization as a whole.

This course for non-majors examines the work of women writers anywhere from the Medieval Period to the present, with attention to the historical and cultural context of texts. It asks such questions as the following: what are the canonical issues that arise from a study of women's literature? Is women's literature different from literature by men in some essential way? What forces have worked against women writers and what strategies have they often employed to make their voices heard? How have those strategies shaped the literature that women have produced?

Discoveries about Covid-19, climate change, CRISPR, and the Webb Space Telescope all demand thoughtful translators between the science that has produced the research and the public that is curious about them. This is the task of the reporter and writer who covers the science beat, inclusive of science, health, the environment, and technology. Science Journalism develops skills of translation and interpretation: how to identify, report, and write stories about science, health, the environment, and technology for the public. The course also will grapple with major contemporary science stories as well as with some of the philosophical and ethical issues raised by reporting scientific research to a lay audience. This course requires research, interviewing, writing, and editing, on deadline and with opportunity for revision.

This course is designed for students who intend to pursue a major or minor in English, and should be taken in the first or second year, or as soon as an English major is declared. The course provides a foundation for the study of literature through reading, analyzing, and writing about a variety of literary and non-literary texts. Focusing on the relation between form and content in a range of genres that may include some combination of poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, graphic texts, and film, students develop the critical vocabulary and interpretive frameworks to engage meaningfully with literature. Students are also introduced to basic literary research tools, literary criticism, and disciplinary scholarship. Course content varies by instructor. Required of all majors and minors.

This course immerses students in the craft of journalism to develop the skills and critical discernment required for writing as a journalist. The course is designed to equip students with an understanding of what news is, help students develop the two key journalism skills of reporting and writing of the news, and engage students in critically examining journalists' responsibilities in reporting and shaping public understanding and opinion. The course will introduce the fundamentals of journalistic writing, interviewing, and editing, as well as journalism ethics.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to the interstices of imagination and narrative theory. Students read examples of literary fiction and write several short stories of their own. Students also take one or more stories through deep revision. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to the art and craft of writing poetry. Students experiment with a variety of poetic forms, read the work of poets from many eras, study versification and free verse, expand their range of subjects, and explore different strategies of revision. By the end of the semester, students will assemble a portfolio of their original poetry. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to creative nonfiction, a genre of writing that is simultaneously intensely personal and engaged with the world of the writer; that borrows from lyrical strategies of poetry and narrative strategies of fiction; and that draws on popular forms of writing and journalism. Students read classic examples of creative nonfiction and write several nonfiction essays of their own, each of which goes through revision for a final portfolio. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

This course introduces students to some of the major works of literature written in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlement in the 7th century to the aftermath of the English Civil War in the 17th century. The surviving stories from these centuries are richly diverse in language, form, and genre, and register great shifts, yet also surprising continuities in conceptions of heroism and honor, theories of family and nation, the relationship between the church and the individual, the nature of authority, and humanity's place in the universe. Thus, strategies for thinking critically about this period's literature emerge from a combination of close textual analysis and historical context. Readings may include works by the Beowulf-poet, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Kempe, the Sidneys, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.

Human consciousness is at once the most basic and most mysterious fact of our existence. It is difficult to describe because it cannot be compare the ground upon which the experience of living rests, including our ability to make comparisons. Moreover, its source remains elusive; no one knows, the brain, a material organ, creates perceptions, ideas, or emotions, all of which are immaterial. Poets, novelists, and philosophers of the Romantic 19th C.) were especially preoccupied with the mysterious nature of consciousness and sought both to describe and explain the puzzling relationship subjective experience and the exterior world that subjectivity negotiates. This course focuses on the ways in which literary art of the British Romantic questions that attend the study of consciousness: Is the mind created by nature, or does it create nature? What is the mind's relationship with the subjective experience of being a self governed by imagination? In what ways are the literary arts uniquely suited to explore the mystery of human also examines how Romantic era authors subsequently influenced poetry and music of the Beat Generation and the 1960s counterculture, as well with contemporary research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, physics, and the burgeoning field of psychedelic studies.

This course explores the literature and culture of the British Isles from the 1830s to the present. Covering three broad and rich periods -- the Victorian era, Modernism, and Postmodernism -- the roughly two centuries under study will be brought into focus by a significant theme (to be determined by the professor) as it manifests itself across the three periods and through particular writers, genres, and movements. Writers under study may include poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Barrett Browning, Yeats, Walcott, and Boland; novelists such as Brontë, Dickens, Woolf, and Rushdie; and playwrights such as Wilde, Osborne, Friel, and Churchill.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from European contact through the early-national era of the late-18th and early-19th Century. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., Colonization, Revolution, Constitutional Debates, Federalism, Early Nationalism). Drawing upon a variety of genres and voices, this course provides students with a foundational understanding of important traditions and transformations in literary history and aesthetics.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from the long 19th Century, spanning the post-Revolutionary era to World War I. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., Transcendentalism, U.S. Expansionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age). Drawing upon a variety of genres, this course provides students with a foundational understanding of important traditions and transformations in literary history and aesthetics.

This course introduces students to significant developments in American literary history from the early 20th century through the contemporary moment. The course offers a thematically structured and comparative approach to literary works in relation to their socio-historical contexts (e.g., WWI and WWII, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall). Drawing upon a variety of genres, this course provides students with a foundational understanding of important traditions and transformations in literary history and aesthetics.

This introductory course engages with developments in American literary history that precede, complicate, or challenge nationalist frameworks. It focuses on the U.S. nation and/or its colonial antecedents through a lens that is transnational or multinational, considering the space we now identify as "America" (U.S) in relation to a variety of identities, traditions, and cultures that have circulated within and around it. The course thus emphasizes an anti-exceptionalist approach to American literature, focusing instead on the circulation of ideas about or in relation to the American U.S. within larger cultural or global contexts. Specific periods and themes vary according to instructor from the colonial era to the present, and may include comparative colonial or imperial literatures, trans-Atlantic traditions, and America in its various international, multi-national or post-national contexts. Course sub-topics might include but are not limited to the following: Anglo-American literary relations, narratives of colonization, Caribbean-American contexts, the Atlantic slave trade, U.S.-Mexico or hemispheric relations, literatures of transnational or international migration, the U.S. in a global world.

This course examines the theoretical foundations and aesthetics of Afrofuturism. The term Afrofuturism was developed in 1993 by scholar Mark Dery and is an all-encompassing term used to describe science fiction work (literature, music, art, etc.) that focuses on Afro-diasporic ways of being and knowing. We will examine the contours of the field of Afrofuturism and decenter traditional science fiction perspectives that erase the existence of people of color in their visions of future worlds. The course will explore the "other stories of things to come." Afrofuturist authors speak into the legacies of colonialism and slavery as well as persistent inequality to examine their impact on imaginings of future worlds and the ongoing technological age. In the course students will read science fiction texts produced by Afrofuturist authors to study the ways that they reimagine the future from the perspectives of Afro-diasporic peoples in the New World.

This course offers students an introduction to multimodal composition. Focusing on the theoretical as well as the practical skills of multimodal composing, this course explores the theoretical foundations of multimodal composition, and engage in composing across various mediums. In this course students compose soundscapes using digital content, make short documentary films, and reimagine the commonplace book as a multimodal way of interpreting and analyzing their reading. Students deploy multiple modes of communicating, including linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural ways of composing and creating.

This course is a survey of Native American literature from beginnings to the contemporary moment. Students gain awareness of tribal distinctions and points of critical and socio-political concern within the field of study.

This course offers students an introduction to the development of Shakespeare's plays in an early modern cultural context. Students learn to appreciate Shakespeare's rhetoric and poetics; approaches to genre and literary convention; exploration of political, intellectual, theological, cosmological, epistemological, moral and social constructs; treatment of gender, sexuality, and early modern identity; and creative use of the physical space of various "play spaces" (both public and private) that inspired his dramatic imagination.

This topics course offers an introduction to the fiction of a designated popular genre (fairy tales, sci-fi, detective fiction, romance, etc.), covering constitutive elements of the genre and its history. Readings explore both conventional and experimental iterations of the genre, and consider the relationship between individual works, the conventions of genre, and their specific social contexts. In this course students think about the relationship between formal conventions, subject positions, and historical context, to gain a better understanding of the ways in which popular fiction reflects, refracts, or even challenges popular mores. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Recent topics include "Fantasy Literature," "Superhero Comics," "Afrofuturism," and "Multiethnic Detective Fiction." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course considers the characteristics and functions of literature for young people, from infants to early readers to adolescents. Course content and approach differ by instructor but may explore a variety of genres and forms with regard to historical context, formal and aesthetic dimensions, or political and ideological resonance. The course may take a chronological or thematic approach and may consider texts within a specific national/cultural framework or across borders. Topics covered by the course may include the history and development of a tradition; the circulation and reception of literature for young people; intertextuality and relationships to literary or other genres; engagement with social and cultural developments.

Literary and critical theory asks big questions about literature, culture, and society. How are our identities shaped by race, class, gender, and sexuality? What is the nature of language and meaning? How can culture contribute to social change or reinforce the status quo? In its quest to solve these fundamental problems, critical theory presents surprising and often controversial perspectives on the world. This course will provide an introduction to literary and critical theory by inviting students to read major texts by groundbreaking philosophers, critics, and social thinkers alongside fictional works including Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. Students will encounter in these theories a strange cast of characters ranging from cyborgs and revolutionaries to paranoids and prisoners. At the same time, students in this class will be challenged to rethink their basic assumptions about themselves, their society, and their relationship to literature and culture.

This course is an introduction to the "book" as a material object. We will learn to look at the physical object closely and with new eyes, examining its paper, binding, printing, typography, images, format, and much more. Our purpose is to use the material artifact to learn about the labor of the many people who created books, whether with quill-parchment-and-ink or a wooden press and types. Books -- in their many forms such as broadsides, newspapers, newsletters -- have, in some cases, survived thousands of years, and we will use these objects to learn about the societies and cultures that gave rise to them and that they left an indelible mark on. Our examples will largely draw on the manuscript and print products of Euro-America, but we will also attend to Asia, where papyrus was perfected and moveable type originated.

The course introduces students to three types of professional editing: proofreading, line editing, and developmental editing. Students develop skills that build proficiency in each area, and they identify individual strengths and interests within the editorial field. Topics of study include levels of editing; the editing process; rules of grammar and usage; narrative structure and style; and tools, practices, and philosophies of editing. The course is suitable for students interested in exploring editing as a career or in improving their own writing.

In this intensive fiction workshop students produce a portfolio of original fiction which undergoes many revisions, building upon techniques of plot and structure, point of view, character, setting, tone, voice, metaphor, motif. Students explore techniques of published short stories from the writer's perspective as they develop their own techniques and writing. Because good writing does not happen in the absence of obsessive, persistent, close readings, this is a reading and writing intensive course. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

This intensive poetry workshop builds upon the skills and concepts introduced in ENGL 228, culminating in a substantial final portfolio of student work. Readings in this course highlight the craft issues to be mastered by studying canonical and contemporary poems, from Shakespeare to spoken word. By revising multiple drafts of their poems, seminar participants develop the advanced skills needed to become more effective writers of poetry. The workshop format stresses writing as a process and includes weekly exercises, self-assessment essays, in-class discussions, and peer reviews. The workshop may conclude with a public reading of student work or other cumulative project. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

This course assumes a familiarity with creative nonfiction, for example, memoir, travel literature, the literary essay, investigative journalism, and style guides and published essays as models of technique and to gain familiarity with a variety of sub-genres. The resulting textual and formal analyses students' own approaches to writing nonfiction prose. Throughout the semester, students engage in process writing and peer review. The course's creative-nonfiction essay.

This course explores the aesthetics and politics of the novel form. The course may focus on a particular national iteration or cultural tradition of the novel (e.g., British, American, Postcolonial), a specific formal approach or subgenre (detective fiction), or a historical or thematic subset of the genre (the rise of the novel, the sentimental novel, the roman à clef). In addition, the course may emphasize the theoretical underpinnings of the genre as a specific category of historical production, engaging theories of the novel and issues raised by the novel's formal and historical particularity. Themes and texts vary by instructor. Recent topics include "Rise of the Novel in the U.S.," "Contemporary Speculative Fiction," and "Multiethnic Novels." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course examines the genre of autobiography as it has evolved over time. Students consider how autobiographies written at specific points in history relate to the social, political, and aesthetic trends of the period; how the "non-fictional" genre of autobiography may be distinguished from fictional forms such as the Bildungsroman; and what characterizes major subgenres such as spiritual autobiography, slave narrative, autoethnography, and memoir. Themes and texts vary by instructor. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course focuses on one or more genres of popular writing. Examples include detective fiction, science fiction, fan fiction, westerns, romance novels, fantasy, or non-fiction. Students engage popular texts through rigorous literary analysis to ponder how such "light entertainments'' are inextricably linked to aesthetic, historical, and social circumstances. Possible topics include the relationship between popular literature and "the literary''; the relationship between popular literatures and their historical or cultural contexts; the ideological work of genre fiction; the possibilities, limitations, and permeability of genres; as well as the politics of race, class, and/or gender in popular genres. Themes and texts vary by instructor. Recent topics include "Irrealism" and "True Crime." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

Considered one of the greatest poems in the English language, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic that takes the reader from hell to heaven and everywhere in between. This is a story of identity and purpose within a seemingly infinite cosmos; of human responsibility to knowledge, the earth, and each other; and, especially, of the origins of suffering and injustice, and a blueprint of hope within a grand reconfiguration of what it means to be heroic. In presenting this archetypal narrative -- one that continues to resonate with readers of religious and non-religious persuasions alike -- Milton lifts Adam, Eve, Satan, and a host of demons and angels from their spare figurations in the Bible, and fleshes them out with rich descriptions, interiority, and speeches that in turn take inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman models as well as medieval Christian writings. The course therefore studies not only the entirety of Paradise Lost's twelve books, but also some of the primary source materials with which the poem is built, including excerpts from the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, and even Milton's earlier poetry and prose. Because textual influences are always refracted through one's own situation, culture, and reading practices, the course will also attend to some key aspects of Milton's life, especially his public involvement in the turbulent political and religious contexts of seventeenth century England -- contexts that would inevitably shape the imaginative retelling of how deception, betrayal, and violence entered the world in the first place.

This course is concerned with the endurance of the "Jane Eyre" story (itself an elaboration of the Cinderella myth). Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), students examine a variety of stories, novels, and films that rework aspects of Brontë's vision. Students study the context of each revision and its commentary on the original text and examine shifts in the critical and feminist reception of these texts. Texts vary, but are selected from the following: Braddon, Gissing, James, Woolf, Forster, du Maurier, Rhys, Kincaid, Balasubramanyam, Winterson. Students produce both creative and analytic work.

This course explores the theoretical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the gothic literary tradition in the U.S. from its late 18th-century inception to the current day. Along with a variety of primary literature, students consider foundational theoretical texts (Freud, Lacan) and secondary sources relevant to the uniquely American iteration of the Gothic, particularly those that interrogate the tradition's functions as dark counter-narrative to progressive U.S. ideology. Authors may include the following: Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, Crane, James, Wharton, O'Connor, Faulkner, Jackson, Capote, Whitehead.

The discursive negotiation between illness (its politics, histories, and personalities) and language is at the heart of this course. Through a close examination of a variety of texts (novels, plays, comics, film, etc.) that take illness as their central subject matter, students explore a series of questions including: What influence does illness (epidemic or personal) have on narrative? What is the relationship between social and political attitudes toward disease and the way texts characterize healthy and sick? What are the recuperative or reformative functions of narrative? Texts under study will be drawn largely from the 20th and 21st centuries and will include a number of theoretical and critical readings on illness and narrative.

This course studies the Christian Bible using the interpretive framework of literary studies. What kinds of knowledge, insight, and debates are produced when this collection of books -- one that has inspired countless other artistic and cultural expressions over the centuries -- is read as literature? Approaching the Bible in this way is to give special attention to questions about its authorship, historical contexts, source materials, and genres, as well as to the particular kinds of images, narratives, and motifs that weave in and out of its passages. Composed and compiled at various times over a millennium in ancient Israel and beyond, the Bible is, among other things, a richly diverse record of humans making sense of their world, purpose, and experiences in light of a deeply relational God who nonetheless transcends human comprehension. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that these authors so often turned to poetic and other literary devices as a way to articulate the mysterious connection between the earthly and the heavenly, time and eternity, suffering and salvation, justice and mercy. Students will consider how the Bible's many stories, chronicles, teachings, prophecies, and apocalypses might have spoken to their original audiences, and how they have been interpreted since, including by modern scholars of religion, history, and literature.

This course focuses on "Bollywood" cinema from the 1950s (immediately following India's independence) to the present. It asks why Indian popular cinema has a wider global audience and appeal than Hollywood and who is watching Bollywood films. In tracing the development of Indian cinema, the class addresses the ways films articulate the new nation's dreams and desires, fears and follies, anxieties and growing pains.

This course examines the city as a social, cultural, and historical construct. Drawing on texts from a variety of genres, as well as cultural products that may include diaries, maps, photographs, and motion pictures, students consider one, two, or three selected cities as they have developed over time. The course highlights the function of rhetorical and ideological constructions such as "the city," "citizenship," and "urbanity," and explores the symbolic and political associations of such terms. The particular cities, topics, materials, and historical scope are determined by the instructor. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course examines the origins, rise, and prevalence of true crime narratives. Emerging from execution sermons, sensational journalism, and hard-boiled detective fiction, true crime is legitimated by Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, which sets in motion a wave of serious and even literary works dealing with criminality and violence. Recent decades have seen the rapid expansion of the genre via multiple media including weekly television "newsmagazines," documentary films and series, and, of course, podcasts. The course will consider the formal aspects of true crime narratives across multiple media and delve into its social and political implications, including its intersections with and impacts on cultural understandings of crime and criminality, race, gender, policing, and the justice and carceral systems. Please note that some of the material in the course includes images or descriptions of violence that may be upsetting.

This course is an introduction to some of the variety and complexity of fiction from India. It focuses primarily on novels and short stories written in English and considers the role they played in colonial, anti-colonial, and nationalist struggles and in definitions of who constitutes an "Indian." It also engages post-colonial theorists of the last two decades, including G. Viswanathan, P. Chatterjee, B. Ashcroft, A. Loomba, H. Bhaba, and H. Trevedi. The course studies the work of literary writers selected from among the following: Tagore, Anand, Narayan, Rushdie, Ghosh, Roy, Sahgal, Hariharan, Chandra, Desai.

This course considers the Native American literary tradition and related historical and critical developments. Emphases vary by semester but are selected from major concerns and movements within the tradition and may include oral literatures, "mixed-race" and tribal identities, forced assimilation, literary colonialism, and American Indian nationalism. Students gain mastery of a critical vocabulary specific to the subject and, with increasing sophistication, articulate their own responses to the literature.

This course considers African American literature in its aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Focusing on both the history of African American literary production and representations of African Americans in literature, this course addresses literary genres such as slave narratives and pivotal cultural movements as the Civil Rights Movement. The course examines the relationship among literary aesthetics, race/racialization, and social context selecting from a broad range of historical periods as the Antebellum era to the contemporary "post-racial" moment. Topics may include the Black Atlantic, Black Feminist Literature, and Neo-Slave Narratives.

This course explores important works of Asian American literature, including poetry, novels, nonfiction, and drama. This course considers Asian American literature's historical emergence and relationship to canonical American Literature, attending to the way that literary form mediates authors' responses to socio-historical circumstances like migrant labor, exclusion, immigration, forced internment, assimilation, and racialization. At the fore are theoretical questions about how these works engage and challenge notions of identity in light of pervasive social stereotypes and the ways the investments and injuries of identity inform the form and function of chosen works, even contesting the idea of an Asian American Literature. The course studies the work of such writers as Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fae Myenne Ng, John Okada, Chang-Rae Lee, Sigrid Nunez, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

This course explores the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and sexual identity as expressed in literature. Students explore literary texts that address the intellectual, social, cultural, political, and philosophical contexts from which gendered and sexual identities emerge and in which they are contested or negotiated. The course addresses some or all of the following topics in any given semester: sexual politics and power; the relation of imperialism and racism to questions of gender; and the influence of gender on writing as an act of self-definition and political or social identification. The course may emphasize material from the historical literary tradition or contemporary authors. It may also address identities comparatively or focus on a specific category of identity as it emerges or develops over time. Themes and texts vary by instructor. Recent topics include "Medieval Women Writers," "Early American Masculinity," "Desire and the Queering of Domestic Fiction," and "Queer Self / Queering Self." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings. Satisfies a Gender and Queer Studies elective.

Ranging in breadth from antiquity to the present, this course familiarizes students with a tradition of writing about art and literature and debates about the meaning and meaningfulness of literature. Core concerns may include historically changing definitions of the literary, arguments about the value of art and literature, methodological approaches to the study or interpretation of texts, the relationship between art and culture or society, theories of language and representation, and the relationship between representation and identity. These works address such fundamental questions as how and why do we read literature? How does literature work and what might it mean? And what is the connection between literature and the extant world? Because the field of criticism and theory is so broad and varied, particular emphases vary by instructor. Areas covered may include Classicism, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Hermeneutics, New Criticism, Reader-Response, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Cultural Criticism, New Historicism, Cognitive Theory, Speculative Realism, and Narrative Theory.

The aim of this course is to come to an understanding of our English-language ancestries and to develop a critical appreciation for the lexicons that we carry with us in every utterance or essay, text or tweet. This offering is unlike other English courses, and in fact more closely resembles courses in history, foreign language, and science. Students examine the development of the English language from its Indo-European roots to the present day, gain the knowledge to approach pre-modern texts with confidence (including the rudiments of Old English and Middle English), develop sensitivity to the ways language functions and changes, and explore the current state of English as a world language.

This course examines major concepts and theorists within the rhetorical tradition from antiquity to the present. Issues central to the course include whether the goal of rhetoric is necessarily persuasion, and whether the mode of presentation in speech or writing alters the meaning of rhetoric. Students explore the implications of rhetorical theory for daily life, particularly through the intersections of rhetorical theory and writing instruction, political and social activism, and visual media.

This course investigates the enigmatic and shifting term "culture" by examining how writers, theorists, and artists express themselves when responding to a variety of circumstances, events, or existing forms of expression. Texts under study include literature, journalism, critical theory, photography, and film, as well as the places that mediate these texts (bookstores, museums, cinema houses, the classroom, the Internet). In approaching culture through these different mediators and media, students also investigate strategies to express such encounters in their own writing. Because this course requires students to experience culture in a hands-on way, attendance at a number of activities (including a museum visit and film viewing) is expected.

This course considers how imaginative writing can intervene in the most existential of neoliberalism's myriad catastrophes: the climate crisis. Through the reading of contemporary novels, poetry, nonfiction, and ecocritical theory, course participants will explore literature's ability to illuminate the environmental injustices of the present perilous moment and to help realize a just and sustainable future for all. Emphasizing writing as a form of activism, ENGL374 studies the work of authors from around the globe, including Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Nnedi Okorafor, Cherie Dimaline, and Camille Dungy. Discussion of course readings encompasses a range of topics essential to understanding climate justice, including Indigenous rights, immigration justice, ecofeminism, and queer ecology. The course has three main assignments: an essay in which students place an ecocritical concept and a literary text in conversation; a creative writing assignment in which students themselves produce a short piece of climate change literature in a genre of their choosing; and a collaborative, student-designed final project that uses the skills and knowledge developed during the semester to engage the climate crisis beyond the classroom.

Special Topics in Rhetoric, Literacy, and Composition will familiarize students with theories in the field of rhetoric, literacy, and composition studies (RLC). Courses under this number will provide an in-depth examination of key intellectual movements and figures that inform the development of rhetoric, literacy, and composition studies. Through these courses students will gain a critical appreciation for the conceptual frameworks that shape understandings of the relationships between language, literacy, and culture. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course explores the nature, form, and function of a selection of narratives, reflecting on how a story unfolds depending upon the medium through which it is told. Drawing on theories of narratology, students consider the techniques that writers employ to convey their stories and, in turn, how filmmakers translate these techniques for cinema audiences. To facilitate this exploration, concentration is placed on the narrative mechanics that are unique to specific genres, auteurs, or movements. Themes, texts, and films vary by instructor. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This course investigates the external forces that shape what authors write and how readers read. Rather than study the stories contained within the pages of a book, students concentrate their analyses on the economic and cultural influences that affect the production and reception of books, whether the stories they tell are old or new, fiction or nonfiction, bestsellers or cult hits. Although there are opportunities in this course to study the internal mechanics of the books in question, such investigations serve and are subordinated to inquiries involving the culture of the book in the marketplace. Topics for such inquiries might include the history of the book, the publishing trade, the forms in which texts are transmitted, censorship, intellectual property, marketing and marketability, booklists and book clubs, professional and amateur reviews, and the politics of prize selection.

This course investigates how texts might generate and require a literacy that is visual before it is lexical. By tracing the relationship between words and images in a variety of genres including illustrated novels, photographic essays, comic books, film, and zines, students explore how images convey, argue, and narrate cultural, political, and personal stories. In addition to these primary texts, readings include seminal essays in semiotics and cultural studies that enable students to examine the distinctions between visual literacy and print literacy, the relationship between word and image, and what it means to be visually literate.

Courses under this number may explore either a single theory or small group of literary theories, as well as their application. As opposed to a broad survey of theory, this course aims to give students a deep knowledge of particular theoretical fields, resulting in conceptual and lexical fluency that will contribute to literary analysis across the curriculum. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Recent topics include "Contemporary Black Feminist Theory" and "Theories of Language and the Law." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

The selected author of study for any given term varies according to the instructor's specialization. For example, students might spend a semester studying William Blake, the Romantic period poet and artist, in relation to the mysterious subculture of London's artisan class, the political ideas advanced by the French Revolution, and the author's own battle with forces of social injustice and intellectual oppression; or Katherine Mansfield, the fascinating, fierce, and brilliant modernist whose interrogations of patriarchy and heteronormativity have made her a pivotal figure in early 20th-century studies of feminism and queer theory. Other recent offerings have studied the life and works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Herman Melville, and Jane Austen. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

Courses under this category organize texts into the study of particular and discrete movements. These movements may be defined literarily, historically, politically, or culturally, among other possible groupings. The course may focus on self-defined literary movements or movements that have been defined retrospectively. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Recent topics include "Irish Literary Revival" and "Rhetorics of Resistance: Contemporary Activist Movements." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

This category designates courses that organize the study of literature into discrete historical eras and their significant cultural, aesthetic, or political concerns. "Eras" courses differ from historical surveys in that they focus on a single historical period, rather than bridge multiple historical periods, thus emphasizing depth within the period over breadth encompassing multiple periods. The emphasis on literary texts is balanced with attention to secondary sources and literary scholarship. The course also includes perfecting methods of literary analysis, instruction on writing about literature, and challenging writing assignments. The course topic is determined by the instructor. Recent topics include "Victorian Underworlds," "Dante, Chaucer, and the City," "Frontier Mythologies," and "Forms of Identity in Post-1965 US Literature." Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming offerings.

An experiential seminar in which each student develops a passion project that translates ideas and critical skills learned in humanities classrooms into a public-facing demonstration of the humanities' potential beyond the university. This seminar supports students in translating their knowledge, experience, and skills to the professional or the public sphere, and in communicating the significance of their work. The seminar has two components: fieldwork and classwork. Students work collaboratively with peers and the professor in the classroom to conceive of and hone their projects, and with the campus, local community, or wider world to realize components of it.

Course topics and emphases are determined by the instructor. Intended for English majors with junior or senior standing, advanced seminars are designed to facilitate in-depth examination of a specific topic, independent study, and the production of substantial work in fields related to faculty and student interest. Generally, the early part of the term is devoted to building a shared expertise that will inform the student's independent research later in the semester. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming topics.

Course topics and emphases are determined by the instructor. Intended for English majors with junior or senior standing, advanced seminars are designed to facilitate in-depth examination of a specific topic, independent study, and the production of substantial work in fields related to faculty and student interest. Generally, the early part of the term is devoted to building a shared expertise that will inform the student's independent research later in the semester. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming topics.

Course topics and emphases are determined by the instructor. Intended for English majors with junior or senior standing, advanced seminars are designed to facilitate in-depth examination of a specific topic, independent study, and the production of substantial work in fields related to faculty and student interest. Generally, the early part of the term is devoted to building a shared expertise that will inform the student's independent research later in the semester. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming topics.

Course topics and emphases are determined by the instructor. Intended for English majors with junior or senior standing, advanced seminars are designed to facilitate in-depth examination of a specific topic, independent study, and the production of substantial work in fields related to faculty and student interest. Generally, the early part of the term is devoted to building a shared expertise that will inform the student's independent research later in the semester. Please consult the department website for information on current and upcoming topics.

Intended for English majors with junior or senior class standing, the advanced creative writing workshop facilitates the writing and revision of an original work: a collection of short stories, a novel or novella, a chapbook or volume of poems, a play, a film script, or other substantial piece of student writing. Like the literary and rhetorical scholarship seminars, this course devotes the early part of the semester to building a shared expertise that will inform creative projects in multiple genres; the latter part of the semester involves the production of a polished manuscript.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

This scheduled weekly interdisciplinary seminar provides the context to reflect on concrete experiences at an off-campus internship site and to link these experiences to academic study relating to the political, psychological, social, economic and intellectual forces that shape our views on work and its meaning. The aim is to integrate study in the liberal arts with issues and themes surrounding the pursuit of a creative, productive, and satisfying professional life. Students receive 1.0 unit of academic credit for the academic work that augments their concurrent internship fieldwork. This course is not applicable to the Upper-Division Graduation Requirement. Only 1.0 unit may be assigned to an individual internship and no more than 2.0 units of internship credit, or internship credit in combination with co-operative education credit, may be applied to an und