Notes:
- All English courses (apart from 0.25 activity units) meet the Artistic and Humanities Perspectives divisional requirement
- There are no prerequisites for 200- and 300-level English courses (unless otherwise noted)
- 300-level courses marked with an asterisk [*] have the option of being taken in the 430-433 range in order to fulfill a 400-level requirement for the English major. Students enrolled in the 400-level versions of these courses will, as part of their coursework, conduct independent projects appropriate to an advanced-level seminar. Students should consult the upper-level descriptions below and the course offerings in myPugetSound to identify the ENGL 4XX section that corresponds to the desired topic.
CONN 202 THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE
Fulfills: 200-level ENGL requirement; Media and Non-Literary Analysis; CONN 200-400; IHE Pathway, Science and Values
GEORGE ERVING – MoWeFr 2:00-2:50 p.m.
This course situates what is being called “the psychedelic renaissance” (the recent movement to legalize psychedelic substances for clinical use in treating various types of mental illness) within several intersecting areas of study: literary studies, philosophy, theology, and the arts. While mainstream media outlets focus on the successes of psychedelic therapies in clinical trials, the decriminalization of psilocybin in several U.S. cities, and financial opportunities for the pharmaceutical industry, far less attention is paid to what it might mean for our society to embrace the use of consciousness-expanding drugs, given their potential to radically challenge our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality and human identity. Our study of the psychedelic renaissance addresses this deficit by assessing it from the perspectives of the humanistic disciplines mentioned above. The course thus serves as a platform for thinking about some of the enduring questions that attend the human condition: Why does anything exist? Is the universe intelligential and purposive or mindless and blindly mechanistic? Does the brain create the mind, or does the mind create the brain? What sorts of consciousness extend beyond our waking state? What do they experience and what do they tell us about the nature of the self and the reality it experiences? To what extent does each of us exist separately from other sentient and non-sentient beings? Does death amount to extinction, or is it a portal through which consciousness transforms?
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Required of all English majors and minors
ALISON TRACY HALE – MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
If you love reading and writing, you’re in the right place! This course will improve your skills as an interpreter and a creator of a variety of texts from the historic to the contemporary. It will also challenge the assumptions and beliefs you have about what it means to be an English major, about the value of different kinds of texts, and about how our field engages with the world around us. Designed specifically for students who plan to major or minor in English, English 220 addresses what it means to study English at the university level, and introduces you to the key creative, critical, and analytical approaches relevant to our shared academic discipline. We’ll read from a variety of genres and traditions, and consider some of the questions at the heart of our collective work: How do we engage meaningfully with text as both readers and writers? What is genre? How do craft and form relate to content? How do literary texts reflect and influence the world around us?
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Required of all English majors and minors
WILLIAM KUPINSE – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
The course investigates questions central to the discipline of English studies: What is a literary text? What is genre? Who should decide what “counts” as literature, and why? How ought we to read a literary text? How do literary texts relate to social contexts? What is the discipline of “English”? This course will likely challenge some of the assumptions and beliefs you have about what it means to be an English major, about the value of different kinds of texts, and about the politics—cultural, academic, ideological—that influence the discipline. Along the way, we will explore why, in an era in which the advent of LLMs and other forms of what is called “AI” propose to make major social and cultural changes, English is more important than ever.
ENGL 226 INTRODUCTION TO JOURNALISM
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis
LAURA BEHLING – MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
This course immerses students in the craft of journalism to develop the skills and critical discernment required for journalists. Introduction to Journalism is designed to equip students with an understanding of what journalism is, and help students develop key journalism skills of reporting and writing news and feature stories, as well as crafting editorials. Throughout the course, we’ll read local and national news media publications, practice effective writing strategies, consider key moments in journalism history, and think about the impact of different types of media in which today’s journalists work. In addition, the course will engage students in critically examining journalists’ responsibilities in reporting and shaping public understanding and opinion. Students will gain an appreciation for an understanding of the fundamentals of journalistic writing, interviewing, researching, and editing, as well as journalism ethics and law. The course requires writing on deadline and writing with revision, attention to current events, and attendance at some campus events in the evening or on weekends.
ENGL 227 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING FICTION
Fulfills: IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist
LAURA KRUGHOFF – TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
In this course, students will be introduced to the fundamental techniques of fiction writing. We will read, discuss, and analyze the work of master short story writers as we study the craft of fiction. These readings will be used to model various literary styles and techniques, and the first half of the semester will be spent developing and honing these skills. In the second half of the semester, students will write two complete, original short stories. Students will participate in observation-based workshops of their peers’ fiction, a workshop strategy we will discuss in detail in class. There will also be regular reading journals, short writing assignments, and a final Artist Statement.
ENGL 228 INTRODUCTION TO WRITING POETRY
Fulfills: IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist
WILLIAM KUPINSE – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
“A line will take us hours, maybe,” writes W. B. Yeats on the craft of poetry. “Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” This creative writing workshop takes seriously Yeats’s notion that the effect of spontaneity in poetry is achieved through fierce attention and careful revision. By stitching and unstitching multiple drafts of their poems, seminar participants will work to develop the critical skills that will allow them to become more effective writers of poetry. Assignments in this course emphasize writing as a process and include selected reading of contemporary and canonical poems, weekly exercises, in-class discussions, peer reviews, and a final portfolio. We will hold an off-campus reading of class members’ poetry at the end of the term.
ENGL 229 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE NONFICTION
Fulfills: IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist
TIFFANY ALDRICH MACBAIN – TuTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
This course is an introductory workshop in the writing of creative nonfiction, a genre that includes memoir, biography, travel writing, historical nonfiction, longform (literary) journalism, and the literary essay. Our focus this semester will be on the literary essay, with special focus on the personal—that is, shortform nonfiction that reflects your own experiences and thoughts.
A literary essay need not make reference to, or be about, literature. Rather, the essay is itself literary, the result of careful attention to language, style, and elements of composition like scene, imagery, structure, and storytelling. To become familiar with a range of approaches to the personal essay, students read and respond to model essays, and they discuss and experiment with various techniques. Writing well takes careful thought and ongoing revision, so while students compose three essays during the semester, each is workshopped in class, and two are significantly revised for a final portfolio. Students also have the opportunity to work one-on-one with me. Additional coursework includes responding to assigned texts, practicing writing skills, and providing feedback to peers.
ENGL 245 SHAKESPEARE
Fulfills: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800
JOHN WESLEY – MoWeFr 10:00-10:50 a.m.
We’ll read eight plays, two from each genre of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. There are a few works I really love to teach whenever I offer this course (for example, Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and 1 Henry IV), but for the rest I’m open to suggestions, so if there’s a play you’d really like to study this term, send me an email with your interest and I’ll consider putting it on the syllabus! Discussions and assignments will explore the meaning of villainy, deception, love, death, and forgiveness in works written over four centuries ago, but whose stories continue to move audiences to this day. As this is an English course, we will be experiencing these plays primarily as scripts, but remembering that these same texts are what actors and directors interpret in order to build their play worlds (and this is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in Shakespeare’s day). So, in addition to investigating the plays’ language, characters, and plots—and their responsiveness to early modern theatrical, political, and cultural contexts—we will consider how skills of close reading are essential to dramaturgy.
ENGL 247 SCIENCE FICTION
Fulfills: Literature; KNOW
LAURA BEHLING – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
It’s tempting to only tell you that science fiction is a literary genre that depicts a future or alternative world, introduces new scientific inventions or ideas like time travel, has alien life forms who come into contact with humans in outer space or on planet Earth, and touts astonishing technology that far outstrips human understanding and even replaces it. And that as a speculative genre, science fiction contains these imagined elements that don’t yet exist in our real world in order to consider the consequences of these technological and scientific advances. Science fiction, Octavia E. Butler says, “frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.”
But science fiction is more than all that. Science fiction is complex, with richly nuanced detail, and really, it’s about the society beneath the surface—our society. Ray Bradbury (of Fahrenheit 451 fame) wrote that “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done.” If all that sounds like a great way to spend a semester, then I’ll see you in ENGL247 Science Fiction, and together we’ll read Butler, Ted Chiang, William Gibson, and the latest Hugo and Nebula award winners, among others. As Philip K. Dick put it, “If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
ENGL 330 THE RISE OF THE NOVEL: The (Early) American Bestseller!*
Fulfills: Literature; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 431
ALISON TRACY HALE – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Come explore the formal, political, and cultural dimensions of the novel in the United States through some of the most popular works of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. We’ll consider how these commercially successful works provide insight into the development of the novel as a genre, how they illuminate the values and conflicts of the national imaginary, and what they tell us about readers from long ago. We’ll likely encounter some of the following genres and texts: sentimental romance (Charlotte Temple), sensational exposé (Monks of Monk Hall), tales of adventure and derring-do (The Algerine Captive; The Hidden Hand; Riders of the Purple Sage), fictional histories (The Marrow of Tradition).
A caveat: bestsellers cater to the broadest taste of the reading public of their era, and as such reflect the beliefs and biases of those eras. We won’t excuse those attitudes, but you should expect to encounter in these older texts instances of language, plot, and other elements that violate contemporary values.
ENGL 333 THE DIARY AS FORM AND PRACTICE*
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 433
TIFFANY ALDRICH MACBAIN – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
Have you ever kept a diary or wanted to? Whatever your answer, your reasons may stem from cultural associations with the diary form—the expectation, for instance, that you write something every day, or that you record only deep thoughts or perform endless introspection, all in a carefully selected notebook you stash away. Maybe you’ve steered clear of the practice for these very reasons, insisted that the notes you keep on an app or a calendar or a social media page aren’t diary entries, but a journal, perhaps, or a calendar. After all, there’s no navel-gazing or formal practice to what you write, only lists, jottings, and gaps. What if I were to tell you that, to diary scholars, there’s as much meaning in those lists and omissions as in an ongoing saga written in gel pens on the tear-stained pages of a notebook?
This course considers the diary form in its past and present iterations, primarily (but not exclusively) in U.S. culture. Students read a variety of diaries in published and in manuscript form to learn to distinguish between and develop analytical techniques specific to narrative diaries—those with a fully realized diarist-protagonist and a discernible story arc—and so-called “ordinary” diaries of the sort one might find in a musty old trunk or tucked away in an archive…or on your Notes app. The course emphasizes women’s diaries because, like other forms of life writing (letters, lists, daybooks), the diary form gains currency from its potential to broaden our access to the experiences of women, whose writing, historically, is more often private than published, but it is not limited to women’s writing. A final unit on diary fiction asks students to examine elements of the form—like daily, dated entries and intimate details—from the perspective of a different genre. Students write two essays and complete smaller, supporting assignments, in addition to undertaking the semester-long project of keeping a diary in a form of their choice, e.g., written (analog or digital), photographic, fiber, video, or voice.
ENGL 335 GENDER & GENRE
Fulfills: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices
LAURA KRUGHOFF – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
This course takes as its jumping-off point the canonical work of English modernist literature, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography. In a 1928 review of the novel for The New York Times, Cleveland B. Chase attempts to summarize the plot of the text: “Mrs. Woolf’s hero-heroine is hundreds of years old. At the beginning of the book Orlando is a boy of 16, melancholy, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 36, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life. Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Mrs. Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory. In doing so she has left the book perhaps more confused than was strictly necessary.” Chase understands Woolf’s primary concern in the novel to be the elusiveness and malleability of time; however, its long afterlife in adaptation for the stage and the screen indicates that the enduring thematic heart of the text is its fantastical encounter with gender. Adapted at least a dozen times as a film, stage play, and opera between 1977 and 2023, Orlando’s miraculous and rather inconvenient transition from a young Elizabethan nobleman into a Victorian lady during their stint as an ambassador to Turkey is always the central focus.
While noting the novel’s reliance on literary artifice that is difficult to capture in a visual medium, in her 2023 LA Review of Books article comparing three film adaptations of the novel, Julia Sirmons suggests “Orlando’s themes of transition and transformation are so compelling that the novel itself is begging to be transformed.” Indeed, the seemingly inexhaustibility of Orlando’s adaptability suggests for Sirmons that “literature and cinema can take us beyond or away from the conventional bounds of selfhood and into more flexible, more insightful and playful realms.”
The question for us, then, is as follows: how do genre and form inform, circumscribe, explode, and/or ramify what we can think and say about gender? Woolf’s novel is, notably, humorously, and impossibly mis-genred as a biography. A film is not a novel and never can be, and yet the version we will watch is often described as a faithful adaptation (though the film brings the title character into the 1990s, roughly 45 years after the publication of the novel). Another “adaptation” you might choose to watch is actually an experimental work of documentary filmmaking. What constitutes reality, fidelity, or truthfulness in these forms? In any form?
The primary way we will engage with the texts that serve as the backbone of this course is creative. In Unit One we will engage with fantastical fiction, reading Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. Both authors have spoken in interviews about the way Orlando lurks behind their very contemporary novels. During this unit, you will explore fiction writing by writing and workshopping four short (or partial) works for fiction that imaginatively play with gender.
In Unit Two, we will turn our attention to experimental memoir. We will read In the Dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Machado, in which Machado tells and retells her story of experiencing intimate partner violence in the context of a same-gender relationship through multiple generic iterations of her narrative. And we will read Dear Senthuran: a Black spirit memoir by Akwaeke Emezi, which uses the epistolary form to tell Emezi’s story of their own personal, spiritual, and artistic unfolding. As we read these works of memoir, you will write and workshop four short pieces of creative nonfiction.
Finally, in Unit Three we will consider how CN Lester blurs the boundary between personal narrative and theoretical scholarship in Trans Like Me: Conversations for All of Us to argue for a more capacious and more accurate understanding of gender in our contemporary context. The semester will culminate with a portfolio where you collect one revised and polished work of fiction, one revised and polished work of creative nonfiction, and a short reflective essay that utilizes Lester’s hybrid approach of personal and academic writing to locate your own experience of gender in our semester’s inquiry.
ENGL 338 AMERICAN CARNIVALESQUE LITERATURE*
Fulfills: Literature; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 431
LAURA BELING – TuTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
Step right up! This course will examine contemporary American carnivalesque literature (texts shot out of the “canon,” so to speak)-- set in circuses, traveling fairs, carnivals, and theme parks (critically acclaimed, popular, or cult favorites—and sometimes all three at once!) of the last half century. These lively texts will take their place under the big top alongside Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who theorizes about the “carnival sense of the world,” tracing its lineage back to medieval carnival traditions, in which established hierarchies, social roles, and acceptable behaviors were upended (and permitted to be so) (Rabelais and His World). Complementing the literary texts will be sideshows of “cultural connections,” moments throughout the course that link the literature to its socio-historical contexts. Our readings will focus on these literary spectacles and our discussions will discern what the carnivalesque turn in American literature suggests about our contemporary America and its populace. Just who are the performers? Who is the audience? Why are we so enthralled? Does a world populated by alligator wrestlers (Swamplandia!) or a sinister traveling troupe (Something Wicked This Way Comes) return to proper balance, or is the contemporary American world fundamentally changed in their wake?
CONN 352 PARADISE LOST: LITERATURE, GOD, AND THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING
Fulfills: 300-level ENGL course; Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; CONN 200-400
JOHN WESLEY – MoFr 12:00-1:20 p.m.
The fundamental premise of this course is that exploring and articulating responses to the problem of suffering make up an essential stage of our journey on this earth, regardless of whether one is atheist or agnostic, Christian or Buddhist, SBNR or done. If God exists, how can evils be explained? How does one reconcile claims of God’s goodness and justice with the observable facts of evil and suffering in the world? As you may gather, addressing these questions will draw us into related conversations about human purpose, the nature of creation, the possibility of an afterlife, how we define good and evil, and yes, what it means to sit with the reality of lived suffering, our sense sometimes that life is deeply unfair, and our own inevitable mortality. Mainly, we’ll be using literature to focus our discussions—including John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—perhaps because works of the imagination may be the most appropriate tool for thinking about questions that often seem to defy reason and modern epistemologies (but may touch on something true nonetheless). But into these literary approaches we will weave theological responses from a variety of perspectives (including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim), as well as philosophical works (including the philosophy of science). I recognize that all this sounds a bit heavy, but I hope/think this course will be a positive experience for students, and perhaps even (strangely) fulfilling. Also, I welcome students of all backgrounds and with any worldview, whether you’re just starting to think about these questions, or whether they’ve been with you for years. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like further information about course content and approach.
CONN 355 BLACK FEMINIST THEORY*
Fulfills: 300-level ENGL requirement; 400-level ENGL requirement if taken as ENGL 433; Centering Marginalized Voices; Media and Non-Literary Analysis; CONN 200-400
REGINA DUTHELY – TuTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.
This course is an examination of Black feminist theory as an intellectual, political, and lived methodology. The course examines how race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability operate as interlocking systems of power and resistance. Students will engage foundational and contemporary texts by scholars and activists, alongside cultural texts, political manifestos, and grassroots organizing practices. Emphasis is placed on Black feminism as both critique and praxis—connecting theory to activism and collective liberation. Through reading, discussion, and projects, students will develop the analytical tools to understand Black feminist theory’s transformative contributions across several disciplines, while also reflecting on its relevance to contemporary struggles for justice. Together we will trace the recent history of Black feminist scholarship, activism, and knowledge production.
ENGL 382 IRISH LITERATURE REVIVAL*
Fulfills: IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist; Literature; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 432
WILLIAM KUPINSE – MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
“Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” asks Yeats in his poem “Man and the Echo,” musing whether the one-act Cathleen ni Houlihan was responsible for the 1916 Easter Rising. “Certainly not,” Paul Muldoon would answer a generation later, rephrasing the couplet: “If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / would certain men have stayed in bed?” Whether or not we believe that a single literary text could be responsible for a political uprising, what is certain is that the literature produced in Ireland from the late nineteenth-century through the end of World War II shaped Ireland’s politics and its sense of national identity. This course will examine the development of Irish literature written in English during this period, and our reading will include poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction. We will consider a wide range of writers, but give particular emphasis to J. M. Synge, Lady Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce (whose Ulysses we will read in full). Course requirements for ENGL382 include regular participation in class discussion, a seminar presentation, a midterm essay, and a final paper. Students taking the class as ENGL432 have additional requirements described on the syllabus. Whatever level you are taking this course as, we will work together as a team and learn from each other as we explore the remarkable literature of the era.