Notes:
- All English courses (apart from 0.25 activity units) meet the Artistic and Humanistic 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 7-7:50 p.m.
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.
ENGL 220 INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES
Required of all English majors and minors
REGINA DUTHELY – MoWeFr 11-11:50 a.m.
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.
ENGL 231 MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
Fulfills: Literature, Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; IHE Pathway, The Global Middle Ages
JOHN WESLEY – TuTh 12:30-1:50 p.m.
We will begin with the first stories written in the English language (ca. 700), and then continue reading for the next thousand years or so until we end up in hell (Paradise Lost). Along the way, we’ll study all or parts of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, King Lear, and much more. We will think about how this literature is shaped by its historical contexts, and what it has to say to readers in the twenty-first century. This means we will ask not only how our texts play on the social, political, and religious expectations of their original audiences, but also how they engage age-old questions about what it means to act courageously, to live a good life in the midst of suffering, to reconcile competing views of human purpose, and to seek a just society. During our exploration, you will probably recognize character types, plots, and questions that continue to live in the stories we tell ourselves today. But with that sense of familiarity, you will also encounter the strange, weird, and wonderful, just as you might expect in stories written in and for cultures so far removed from us in space, time, and cosmology.
ENGL 242 INTRODUCTION TO NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE
Fulfills: Centering Marginalized Voices, Literature; KNOW; IHE Pathway, Empire, Colonialism, and Resistance; elective for Honors
TIFFANY ALDRICH MACBAIN – TuTh 11 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
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.
ENGL 246 GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis
LAURA BEHLING – MoWeFr 9-9:50 a.m.
This course explores graphic narratives by investigating the nature and grammar of
comics:
Why is storytelling central to human life? What distinctive qualities distinguish narratives delivered through strictly textual narratives from sequential art—usually combining graphics with texts? The course considers how graphic narratives work, studying and analyzing the techniques and strategies writer-artists use to produce meaning. In what ways do colors, shapes, panels, borders, gutters, perspective, page-layout, and speech bubbles influence content? In our readings, we’ll think about how word and image can express contemporary social currents and reify and challenge reading and literary analytical practices. We’ll ask what the role of the reader is in constructing meaning from these verbal and visual texts, and student will try their hand at creating a graphic narrative. And finally, throughout the semester, we’ll consider if comics are, ultimately, as former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath suggests, “what novels used to be—an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal”?
ENGL 249 POPULAR GENRES: DARK ACADEMIA
Fulfills: Literature
ALISON TRACY HALE – TuTh 9:30-10:50 a.m.
In this course, we’ll tread the haunted halls of Dark Academia, focusing our attention on the literary manifestations of what emerged in the past decade or so as a popular internet aesthetic. We’ll consider Dark Academia as an offshoot of the Gothic genre and explore its complicated relationship to the elite liberal arts education model it depicts. We’ll also examine what it means that a fascination with such an exclusive, Eurocentric, and frankly white tradition emerges alongside and in conversation with demands for greater educational inclusivity and in relation to the growth of the university as a corporate and neoliberal space. Of course we’ll read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—how could we not? —while spending time on other haunted campuses. Additional texts may include Rebecca Makkai, I have some questions for you; M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains; Mona Awad, Bunny; Farida Abike-Iyimide, Ace of Spades; Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House; and possible films include Dead Poets Society (naturally) and Master (2022, Mariam Diallo). Together we’ll pursue truth, knowledge, tweed, v-neck sweaters, and the meaning of life among the ivory towers.
ENGL 253 WRITING BIKES
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis
WILLIAM KUPINSE – MoWe 2-3:20 p.m.
This hybrid literature/creative writing/hands-on mechanical skills course explores the connection between imaginative writing and the many cultural transformations wrought by the bicycle. Readings in genres encompassing journalism, fiction, and autobiography illuminate the central but often unacknowledged role of the bicycle in the suffrage and New Woman movements, in labor organizing, and in the fight for racial equity in sports. The course places a particular emphasis on cycling’s relationship to contemporary social and political contexts, attending to issues of accessibility, inclusivity, and environmental justice both in the US and globally. Along with its focus on literary and cultural analysis of the bicycle’s past and present impacts, this course also provides students with instruction and experience in basic bicycle repair and maintenance.
ENGL 297 FUNDAMENTALS OF EDITING
Fulfills: Media & Non-Literary Analysis
TIFFANY ALDRICH MACBAIN – MoWe 3:30-4:50 p.m.
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.
ENGL 328 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING: ECOPOETRY
Fulfills: Creative Writing; elective for Environmental Arts and Humanities
WILLIAM KUPINSE – TuTh 2-3:20 p.m.
The Spring 2027 semester of Advanced Poetry Writing will bring an ecocritical approach to the study of poetry and to the writing of poems by workshop members. Working from the recognition that all poems—whether implicitly or explicitly—invoke a worldview with ecological implications, we will consider a range of topics: environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, queer ecology, ecofeminism, the climate crisis, 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 inform thought and inspire action during times of ecological crisis. All the while, we will be writing and revising our own poems, with assignments that balance opportunities for reflection on environmental topics of the poet’s own choosing with open subject, open form assignments.
ENGL 344/431 AMERICAN VISIONARIES: FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND WALT WHITMAN
Fulfills: Centering Marginalized Voices, Literature; KNOW
TIFFANY ALDRICH MACBAIN – TuTh 2-3:20 p.m.
Through the study of Douglass's and Whitman's work and biographies, students understand major concerns of the nineteenth century, including enslavement and abolitionism; shifting ideas about gender and sexuality; the possibilities and limitations of American ideals like freedom, equality, and self-reliance; and the role of narrative, oratory, and poetry in the formation of national culture.
ENGL 348/431 ILLNESS AND NARRATIVE: DISCOURSES OF DISEASE
Fulfills: Literature; IHE Pathway, Science and Values; elective for Bioethics; elective for Science, Health, Technology, and Society
LAURA BEHLING – MoWeFr 11-11:50 a.m.
Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit—Life!
Emily Dickinson #156
Illness and Narrative explores how the experiences of illness and health are shaped by language, and how in turn, language shapes the stories we tell about illness and health. The course will focus on a variety of diverse historical and contemporary literary texts, including novels, plays, essays, graphic texts, and film, with theory to help us think through the narratives. We’ll consider how different cultures imagine health and healing in literary forms, and we’ll investigate and imagine, through metaphor and fact, the meaning of embodied experience. We’ll be challenged in our understanding of illness and health, power and weakness, body and mind. And we’ll think imaginatively, visually, and empathetically through 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? Who tells the stories of illness and health, and how do they compare as storytellers? This course especially invites students in literary studies who want to be challenged to think about the relationship between illness and narrative in culture today, as well as students in other Humanities disciplines and those interested in Health Studies or the health professions.
ENGL 375 INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Fulfills: Media & Non-Literary Analysis
ALISON TRACY HALE – MoWe 2-3:20 p.m.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a branch of rhetorical analysis that focuses on the relationships among language, ideology, and power: that is, how language produces and reproduces power relations at the individual and group levels, how it shapes individual and group identities, negotiates status, and reinforces social and political dominance. It shares with literary close reading a careful attention to the specific details of language--word choice, syntax--and context, applying those and other analytical tools to "real world" instances of language from an explicitly critical, political stance. In this class, we'll consider how our own language positions us as individuals in a social realm, how social and cultural groups navigate their relationships with each other and with institutions of power via language, and how language can be used to resist oppression and control. Join us as we explore questions like the following: how does our individual language use reflect/position us in social relations? How do different groups constitute, enact, and maintain distinct identities via language? How is language (and its usage) "gendered"? We'll look at sources like archival materials, news and media, social media and dating apps, and even take a brief foray into the world of forensic linguistics--the use of rhetorical analysis to solve crimes.
ENGL 381/432 MAJOR AUTHORS: WILLIAM BLAKE
Fulfills: Literature, Literatures and Cultures Before 1800; IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist
GEORGE ERVING – MoWeFr 10-10:50 a.m.
This course studies the works of William Blake (1757-1827), British Romantic period poet, painter, political radical, and, to use his own words, “visionary prophet." Aided by the William Blake Digital Archive and a variety of critical essays written by some of the most influential scholars in Blake studies, we examine Blake’s early works and minor prophecies from various interpretive angles—formal, artistic, mythical, psychological, political, theological, philosophical—and immerse ourselves in his composite art, where verbal and visual elements create a uniquely profound aesthetic, intellectual, and for some, spiritual experience.
ENGL 434 ADVANCED PROJECTS IN CREATIVE WRITING
Instructor permission required for enrollment
Fulfills: Creative Writing; 400-level requirement for the English major
LAURA KRUGHOFF – MoFr 12-1:20 p.m.
Advanced Projects in Creative Writing is designed to facilitate the research, writing, and revision of a long-form creative project in any genre: a poetry chapbook, a collection of short stories or a novella, a work of dramatic literature, or a substantial work of creative nonfiction. As is true with any Senior Seminar, each student’s final project for this course will be grounded in thorough and original research. Over the course of the semester, we will read a work of dramatic literature, two poetry collections, a flash memoir, and a novel that each gives a glimpse into what a deeply researched creative work might look like. Students will identify a point of creative curiosity, create a research plan for grounding their project, and identify the genre most suited to the project and their own creative inclination and training. A significant portion of the class time will be dedicated to workshopping drafts of student projects and identifying strategies for moving from early drafts to completed works of literature.
CONN 278 THE BOOK AS HUMAN ARTIFACT
Fulfills: Media and Non-Literary Analysis; IHE Pathway, The Artist as Humanist; IHE Pathway, Visual Culture; ENGL 200-level; CONN 200-400
PRITI JOSHI – TuTh 3:30-4:50 p.m.
In this class, we will be detectives…of objects we cradle in our hands, but don’t often think about: the book! (a term that includes pages between boards, and also scrolls and tablets, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides, material in manuscript, print, and pixels). Here, rather than focus on the contents – what the words and images say – we’ll focus on the materiality of the object itself: its cover, pages, binding, typography, layout, etc.
Our goal is to mine these material objects for clues to the people and communities who silently and invisibly labored to create books. Many books – whether with quill-on-parchment or with types or woodblocks—or newspapers or handbills and receipts have survived hundreds of years; we will examine them to learn about the societies and cultures that gave rise to them and that they left an indelible mark on.
This class is “applied humanities” and hands-on. We will handle objects that are old and, in some cases, delicate (no gloves needed!). We’ll also replicate some of the component parts or features of a “book”: paper, printing, folding, and binding. Students interested in “getting their hands dirty” (including those from Art, English, History, SOAN, politics, material sciences) are most welcome.
CONN 353 THE BIBLE
Fulfills: 300-level English course (Literature, Literatures and Cultures Before 1800); elective for Religion, Spirituality, and Society; elective for GLAM; CONN 200-400
JOHN WESLEY – MoFr Noon-1:20 p.m.
The Bible is not a single book but a library: a collection of narratives, poems, laws, prophecies, letters, wisdom literature, and apocalyptic visions composed and collected over many centuries. This course approaches that library as literature while asking what becomes visible when literary study enters into conversation with other ways of understanding biblical texts. How does knowledge of the history and archaeology of the ancient Near East change the way we read a biblical story? What can literary analysis reveal that historical inquiry cannot—and vice versa? Beginning with the ancient contexts in which biblical texts emerged, we will examine their literary forms, historical circumstances, and relationships to surrounding cultures. We will also consider how these writings came to be collected as “the Bible” and interpreted over the past two millennia and into the present. Throughout the course, literary interpretation will provide our point of departure, while history, archaeology, biblical studies, religious studies, and theology offer complementary—and sometimes competing—ways of seeing the same texts. By bringing these approaches into conversation, we will explore how reading across disciplines can produce a richer and more holistic understanding of the Bible and its meanings.