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.
ENGL 199 CROSSCURRENTS REVIEW
0.25 Activity Credit
WILLIAM KUPINSE – Th 7:00-7:50 p.m.
Join the editorial team of Crosscurrents, Puget Sound's award-winning student journal of creative writing and visual art—and earn a .25 unit activity credit! No previous editorial or design experience necessary. Meets Thursday evenings from 7 to 8 pm in the Media Room (lower level of the SUB).
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Required of all English majors and minors
PRITI JOSHI – TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
Do you love to read fiction or poetry? Do you write it? Of course, you do – that’s why you’re here! In this course, the introduction to the major/minor, we will build on that love and deepen it. Our entry into the study, analysis, and practice will be framed around the idea of “revision” or “rewriting.” Focusing on a range of poetry (lyric, dramatic monologue, sonnet, etc.), fiction (short stories, novel), drama, and a graphic text, we will consider the ways writers and texts reexamine and reformulate issues – formal, as well as thematic - from multiple perspectives. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the craft and analysis of literary texts, always considering the relation between formal choices and thematic content. Student writing will consist of analytic papers and their own creative work.
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Required of all English majors and minors
WILLIAM KUPINSE – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
The course investigates questions central to the discipline of English studies: What is a literary text? Who decides what “counts” as literature, and why? How should we 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. The semester's reading will cover a range of genres, from contemporary poetry to modernist short fiction to a graphic novel (Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which we'll experience as both a written text and a live musical performance). Along the way, we will explore why, in our current moment, English is more important than ever.
ENGL 232 ROMANTICISM, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE
Fulfills: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800
GEORGE ERVING – MoWeFr 10:00-10:50 a.m.
This course examines the ways in which poets, novelists, and artists of the Romantic era (late 1700s – early 1800s) used their artistry to explore the mysterious origins and nature of human, animal, and plant consciousness. In doing so, they addressed fundamental and enduring questions, such as whether the mind creates or is created by the natural world; what roles reason, emotion, and imagination play in constructing our beliefs about reality; and what ways the arts are uniquely suited to represent the internal landscapes of consciousness. The course also examines how Romantic era authors subsequently influenced the poetry and music of the Beat Generation and the 1960s counterculture, and how their ideas continue to find expression in contemporary philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, physics, and the burgeoning field of psychedelic studies.
ENGL 234 EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Fulfills: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; Upper-level requirement if taken as ENGL 383
ALISON TRACY HALE – MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
On the occasion of the semiquincentennial (1776-2026) of the United States, we’ll journey back in time to the vibrant, violent, and often chaotic world of colonial and early America. This course deliberately complicates a celebratory timeline of US history and instead considers, through the lens of literary history, the events that affected peoples across the spaces now known as the U.S., and their disparate reactions to and interpretations of those events. We’ll read works that have contributed to persistent myths around the settlement and founding of what is now the U.S. as well as those that provided alternative possibilities or posed resistance. You’ll emerge—I hope—with an appreciation for the complexity and fascination of these early works and with a messier, richer understanding of our contested past.
ENGL 242 INTRODUCTION TO NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE
Fulfills: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices; KNOW; IHE Pathway, “Colonialism, Empire, and Resistance”
TIFFANY MACBAIN – TuTh 11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
This course introduces students to the tradition of Native American literature from beginnings to the contemporary moment. Through the study of oral and written literatures spanning three centuries, students develop an understanding of a long and significant literary tradition. They also gain awareness of cultural distinctions, historical contexts, and Indigenous theories, approaches, and ways of knowing. Topics of study include spirituality and religion, survivance, queer Indigeneity, gender, and decolonization.
ENGL 247 POPULAR GENRES: SCIENCE FICTION
Fulfills: Literature
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 297 FUNDAMENTALS OF EDITING
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis
TIFFANY MACBAIN – MoWe 2:00-3:20 p.m.
The course familiarizes students with three types of professional editing: copy, line, and developmental. In each unit, students practice improving the “4 Cs” of a manuscript—clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness—all in service of the “Cardinal C”: communication. To support that work, students develop skills that build proficiency in each area and identify their 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.
ENGL 328 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING: ECOPOETRY
Fulfills: Creative Writing
WILLIAM KUPINSE – TuTh 11:00-12:20 P.M.
This course brings an ecocritical approach to the study of poetry and to the writing of poems by workshop members. Working from the insight that all poems—whether implicitly or explicitly—invoke a worldview with ecological implications, we will consider a range of environmental topics: ecopoetics, environmental justice, queer ecology, place attachment, climate change, the Anthropocene, and much more. Over the course of the semester, we will consider how poetry engages with the world around us, how innovative forms of expression can bear witness to both individual and collective experience, and how poetry can provide solace and inspire action during our time of ecological crisis.
Since our writing develops to the fullest when we study the example of other writers, both established and emerging, ENGL328 will explore a range of poems and poets with ecological commitments. We'll begin the semester by considering just what ecopoetry is through the lens of Tommy Pico’s book-length Nature Poem. From there, we'll move to the collection Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, which will be our main course text for the rest of the semester.
At the same time, we will be writing and revising our own poems, alternating between poem prompts that invite reflection on specific environmental themes and open topic, open form assignments, with a required revision thrown into the mix. At the semester’s end, we will gather off-campus for a poetry reading featuring the work of the writers in our class.
ENGL 329 ADVANCED CREATIVE NONFICTION
Fulfills: Creative Writing
TIFFANY MACBAIN – TuTh 2:00-3:20 p.m.
If you’ve ever been hooked by a journalistic deep-dive into a subject, maybe on Serial or in the Atlantic, you know the power of a complex narrative that results from sniffing out a good story, interviewing the right people, and conducting scrupulous research. In Advanced Creative Nonfiction, students will try their hand at these skills. To learn the craft, students will study published essays in the genre, attuning themselves to the elements of a well-told tale. Class will be run as a workshop in which students perform textual analysis and develop their own writing through exercises and the steady composition and revision of their own nonfiction prose. Students will share their thoughts and their writing with their peers, and participate in peer-review and self-reflection. The primary project will be to research, write, and revise a substantial piece of longform journalism, along with a sample pitch or submission proposal of their project to a magazine or journal.
This course assumes students’ basic familiarity with the genre of creative nonfiction, whether through their own writing or their reading of memoir, the literary essay, or longform journalism. ENGL229 (Introduction to Creative Nonfiction) and ENGL226 (Introduction to Journalism) are not prerequisites, but they are good precursors to this course. That said, anyone is welcome to join!
ENGL 353 THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE*
Fulfills: Literature; Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 430; GLAM elective
JOHN WESLEY – MoWeFr 10:00-10:50 a.m.
The Bible is a unique artifact of the ancient world in the sense that nothing else written in the so-called Ancient Near East has survived into the present day with quite the same level of proportion, textual integrity, and relevance. Where did these writings come from? Who wrote this down, for whom, and to what purpose? And, most pertinent to this course, what kind of knowledge do we gain about this book—or, to be more accurate, this anthology of books—when we study it as literature? To read the Bible as literature (in our case, the Christian Bible) is to ask questions of it that we would of any text in an English class, such as those related to matters of source material, cultural history, genre, figurative language, narrative development, and style, as well as interpretation (which, for this text, has been ongoing for more than two millennia, and involves issues of translation, too!). While such an approach will have inevitable crossover with religious studies, history, linguistics, theology, and even archaeology, it will be good to keep in mind that the primary aim of this course is to develop a literary appreciation of the Bible rather than determine the veracity of religious or theistic claims. As Kenneth Burke once wrote, “Whether or not there is a realm of the ‘supernatural,’ there are words for it.” In this course, we will study some of those words.
ENGL 358 TRUE CRIME IN THE U.S.*
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 431A; Crime, Law, and Justice elective
ALISON TRACY HALE – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
We are a nation obsessed with True Crime. Every week it seems there’s a new podcast, Netflix series, or “ripped from the headlines” true crime show. In this course, we will explore the proliferation and popularity of true crime through several interrelated questions: Where and when did the genre we know as true crime arise? What are the thematic, generic, and formal characteristics that define “true crime”? Why are Americans so fascinated by these gruesome topics? And perhaps most importantly, what are the implications of our fascination with the genre, and how does its popularity impact our attitudes about “real world” issues of crime and justice? Drawing on a variety of modes—from essays to novels, memoirs, podcasts, and documentaries--we’ll consider the relationships between true crime and issues of gender and race, and explore how the genre intersects with larger concerns about policing and justice, economic policy, and social inequity. Please be aware that we will unavoidably be dealing with unpleasant, occasionally gruesome, and disturbing representations of violence, including sexual violence, and that those representations will not always be respectful. While I deliberately avoid material that is primarily sensationalistic, I urge you to think carefully about whether you are emotionally able to immerse yourself in this topic for an entire semester.
ENGL 381 MAJOR AUTHORS: THE IMMIGRANT AUTHOR IN AMERICA*
Fulfills: Literature; Centering Marginalized Voices; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 431B
LAURA BEHLING – TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
“The United States are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote in the mid-19th century, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” And some of these masses of people, from seemingly every land under the sun, became writers, capturing their experiences of being an immigrant in America. But for every narrative of a dazzling new world were stories suggesting a more complicated reality. In the late 20th century, author Julia Alvarez, herself an immigrant (from the Dominican Republic) now in America, writes how “lucky we were to have our papers, to be free” to journey to the U.S. But “For weeks that soon became months and years, I would think in this way. What was going on right this moment back home? I would remember the big house in Boca Chica, the waves telling me their secrets, the cousins sleeping side by side in their cots, and I would wonder if those papers had set us free from everything we loved” (“Our Papers, 16).
Through readings of historical and contemporary literature placed within relevant historical and cultural contexts and informed by theoretical perspectives, this course will critically examine the idea of the “immigrant author” as a major author in the American literary canon. Just who is an immigrant author? What are the aesthetic conventions of the works of immigrant authors? How has the immigrant author responded to the American experience over time? And how do we, as sophisticated and informed readers of immigrant authors, envision the worlds they have created and continue to create?
ENGL 397 HUMANITIES IN THE WORLD
Prerequisites: Junior or senior standing
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; Experiential Learning
LAURA BEHLING – We 5:00-7:50 p.m.
Your world. Your passion. Your project.
What do you want to create that demonstrates the vitality of the Humanities in the world?
Think of ENGL 397 as the place to realize your ideas, a place to develop a passion project for your world—your passion, your project--that translates ideas and critical skills learned in humanities classrooms into a public-facing demonstration of the humanities’ potential beyond the university. Along the way, you’ll engage in acts of translation, translating your knowledge, experience, and skills to the professional or the public sphere, and communicating the significance of your work. There are two components to this seminar, classwork and fieldwork. As our readings and discussion take us through the current state of the Humanities, you’ll develop and hone your project, engaging collaboratively with peers, the campus, local community, or wider world to realize components of it. And as a culminating experience, you’ll share your projects during the English Department’s end-of-the-year celebration, Wordstock.
CONN 371 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE* (meets ENGL 300-level requirement)
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis, Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; 400-level requirement if taken as ENGL 433; CONN 200-400; KNOW
JOHN WESLEY – MoFr 12:00-1:20 p.m.
This course examines the development of the English language from its roots in Indo-European to the present day. Our exploration will be divided into three units of study, each one speaking to the others. The first part of the course will be devoted to acquiring the methods and vocabulary needed to describe the language and its changes. Here, students will be introduced to a number of concepts from linguistics and the philosophy of language, including where these fields intersect with discourse analysis and poststructuralism, which will help us think critically about the constructive hypothesis about language. The second part of the course will resemble a course in foreign languages and linguistic anthropology: we will trace the development of the language from Indo-European to the Old English of King Alfred and Beowulf, to the Middle English of Chaucer, to the Early Modern English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, to the development of a conception of “correctness” in the eighteenth century as represented by Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. In the third and final part of the course, we will return to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and study a selection of contemporary sociolinguistic issues. Here, readings and discussions on the English language will engage matters of personal and group identity, changing notions of correctness, and the consequences of the language’s globalization for other languages and cultures. This course is unlike most other offerings in the English Department, and can at times be quite technical, especially when studying linguistics and Old English (Germanic) grammar. Students are assessed by in-class tests, a final exam, and a research paper.