2020-2021 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Courses
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ENG 201 - Peer Learning Assistant
Peer Learning Assistants (PLAs) are undergraduate students who are selected by a faculty member to facilitate teaching and learning activities. These activities may include: providing feedback on drafts of writing assignments, leading small group discussions, working with individual students who are having difficulty, and facilitating group project work (in or out of class & online).
Registration is by instructor permission only
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall/Spring
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ENG 203 - Creative Writing Genre Study: Hybrid Selves - Using Hybrid Forms to Explore Race, Gender, and Sexuality
In this class we will examine and produce works of literary art that challenge our definition of genre. Whatever you want to call them-and we will, of course, wade into the mires of nomenclature-slipstream or hybrid literary art forms such as flash fiction, prose poems, lyric essays, hyperfictions, etc. have become increasingly visible in contemporary literature. Writers such as Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Layli Long Soldier and others are using these forms to explore questions of race, gender, sexuality and all the other ways we exist, and are defined, as people in the world. Our goal will be to approach these texts as scholars and artists for the purposes of understanding how challenging traditional formal expectations allows us new ways to discover, celebrate, express, explode, chart (and many other verbs!!) personal, communal, and national identities in our work.
So, simply, what are hybrid forms? To start, and we can reconsider this as we explore, a hybrid work is a literary object that merges elements of different traditional forms-as in the prose-poem or the lyric essay or the academic memoir. And, of course, even weirder mashups are possible: collage texts, graphic novels, hyperfictions, and bafflers such as Anne Carson’s “fictional essays in poetry.” As Clarkies know, labels can pretty flimsy definitions and obviously designating such pieces ‘hybrid’ implies reductive/conventional definitions of genre. In this class we will investigate what conspicuous awareness or transgression of these formal boundaries exposes and allows.
For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the advanced requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 207 - Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction
This advanced creative writing workshop in fiction offers students who are serious about writing fiction a supportive seminar setting to present their work for discussion and suggestions, to learn how to critique the writings of others, and to participate in discussions about the art and craft of writing fiction, including the use of characterization, setting, plot, conflict, and dialogue. For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course counts as one of the advanced courses.
Prerequisites: ENG 101, 106, 107, 111, or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 208 - Writing the Borderlands
In this bilingual Spanish/English creative writing course, students will write poems, stories, and/or nonfiction pieces in either or both languages. We will examine several texts by Latinx authors as we consider questions of translation, code-switching, audience, and the political choices these writers make when writing in both languages. The first two-thirds of the course will focus on textual analysis, craft lessons, a translation project, and generating new writing, while the last third will be dedicated to writing workshops. The final consists of a 30-page Portfolio of revised writing. There are no language requirements, though some familiarity with Spanish will enrich your experience of the texts. This class counts as an advanced course toward the Creative Writing minor. Meets the Verbal Expression (VE) requirement. Fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 211 - Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry
ENG 211 Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry/Workshop: While a significant part of the class will be dedicated to exploring each student’s poetry through a constructive workshop approach, this course also requires in-depth critical feedback in every class and a series of annotations that address elements of craft. We will look closely at the work of established poets, especially contemporary poets, and trace lineages and influences from particular poets’ work back to their roots. In addition to assigned readings and exercises, a new poem a week is expected. As the semester progresses, students will experiment with revision and create a portfolio of poems representing their best work. This course requires completion of ENG 107 or permission of the instructor. For undergraduate English majors and minors, this course satisfies the Genre (C-1) requirement. For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the advanced requirement.
Prerequisites: ENG 107 or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 212 - The Making (and Breaking) of Poetic Style
Using the early and most recent work of several modern and contemporary poets, we will trace their stylistic development as well as use their work as prompts for our own writing. Part literary study, part workshop, this course will identify the characteristics that constitute “style” and how a style might change over time.
For undergraduate English majors and minors, this course satisfies the Genre (C-1) requirement. For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the advanced requirement.
Prerequisites: ENG 107 or ENG 211 or permission of instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 213 - Utopias/Dystopias: Writing Resistance and Identity
In her 2014 National Book Award speech, science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society… writers who can remember freedom - realists of a larger reality.” In this class we will strive to be the writers Le Guin called for. Animated by the question “What if?”, speculative fiction interrogates received ideologies and questions the naturalness or inevitability of social structures and systems of power, “reality” as we know it. This course considers how minority groups have used speculative fiction as a vehicle for writing alternative conceptions of history, society, and identity. Ranging from visionary utopias to nightmarish yet strangely familiar dystopias, these stories make space for those relegated to the margins, pointing not only to what can be but to what already is. Science fiction, in its circuitous way, does not predict, so much as describe. This creative writing class will involve weekly writing exercises, discussion of science fiction texts, and workshop, and will culminate in a novella-length speculative fiction final project. For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the advanced requirement. This course also fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (D & I) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 214 - Creative Writing Capstone: Multi-genre Advanced Workshop
In this advanced creative writing course, students will spend the semester working on individual writing projects in their chosen genre (poetry, fiction, and/or creative nonfiction, which includes memoir). Central to this class is the workshop, where students will present their ongoing writing for supportive feedback and discussion. Outside readings in literature and on craft will be assigned which correlate with student work. Recommended as the final course for students pursuing a minor in Creative Writing. Prerequisites include any introductory creative writing course and one other creative writing course, or permission of the instructor. For undergraduate Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the Capstone requirement. Seniors only.
Prerequisites: One introductory course (ENG 101 , ENG 106 , ENG 107 , or ENG 111 ) and one advanced course (ENG 206 , ENG 207 , ENG 209 , or ENG 211 ) or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 225 - American Print Culture 1700-1900
The years from 1700 to 1900 witnessed a transformation of print culture from the handpress period to an age of mechanical reproduction. The rapidly increasing availability of inexpensive print technologies had a tremendous impact on habits of publishing, of writing, and of reading itself. In this course, students will examine how the material contexts of print culture in early America affected and were affected by notions of authorship, readership, gender, genre, and popular and elite taste. Some sessions will be conducted at the American Antiquarian Society where students will be able to examine archival material in hands-on workshops. For the final research paper, students will be encouraged to use resources from the AAS, from Goddard Library Special Collections, and/or from the many new digital humanities archives now available online. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-2) requirement.
Special Topic Fall ‘20: Print Culture at the Margins.
Print culture has always had the capacity to re-inscribe existing cultural, political, aesthetic, and social power structures. In this class, however, we will focus on the capacity of marginalized individuals and communities to challenge those hierarchies through strategic acts of writing and publication. In addition to thinking figuratively about agency “at the margin,” we will also consider the literal physical space of the margin, exploring the ways that these open spaces simultaneously dictate authority and meaning but also invite confirmation, intervention, critique, and reinterpretation.
Course Designation/Attribute: POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 230 - Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century
To claim that “cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion,” was daring in 1954, when Alice Toklas situated herself among the modernists with the bold claim that cooking was a form of art. Yet she was also situating herself within a long literary and philosophical tradition of thinking aesthetic taste alongside gustatory taste. Taking up the idea of food as an aesthetic phenomenon, this course traces a transnational history of literary thinking about food within the long twentieth century, with special attention to the relationship between food and such identity categories as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement or the Theory (E) requirement but does not double-count. Meets the Aesthetic Perspective (AP) requirement. Fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: AP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 231 - Queer Modernisms
Modernist writers often use the term “queer” with what feels like a knowing wink. This is not an anachronism; though the field of queer theory brought the term into wider usage in the 1990s, the rise of literary modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century coincided with a shift in its connotations, as “queer” came to encompass not just difference or oddity, but difference of a specifically sexual variety. In this course we will explore queer modernism from multiple angles, reading works by authors who both lived and wrote about queer lives, tracing their engagement with emerging social and medical discourses of sexuality, and interrogating the role of queerness within modernist innovations in literary form. Taking an intersectional approach to the field, we will also consider how queerness overlapped with and complicated other discourses of difference, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
In addition to canonical queer modernists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, we will read authors who have been relegated to the margins of the field, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Eliot Bliss, and Gale Wilhelm, as we consider the relationship between queerness and canonicity. Our transnational approach will reveal both multiple models of modernism and a wide range of experiences of queerness. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will read widely in contemporary queer theory, focusing especially on texts that see difference as a site of potential solidarity and emphasize literature’s power to challenge multiple, overlapping systems of oppression.
For undergraduate English majors and minors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement or the Theory (E) requirement but does not double-count. This course also fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (DI) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 238 - Contemporary Latino/a Literature
This course examines the contributions to American literature made by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Latino/Latina writers in the United States over the last thirty years. Through a variety of Latino/Latina writing, we will explore the ways in which these writers represent community, class, race, gender, culture, nation, and ethnicity in their works. We will also examine the ways in which Latinas(os) have manufactured identities within mainstream society, as well as the developement of cultural hybrids and other forms of cultural registers. Representative works of various genres will be read and analyzed within a cultural context; the testimonio, the auto ethnographic essay, the narrative (novel and short story), drama, poetry and film. Authors include Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Luis Valdez, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Achy Obejas and Piri Thomas. For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 245 - Mythopoetics
This course examines modes and qualities of literary expression where we will find that narratives and poetry convey different expectations, which are also embedded in a variety of worldviews. Frequently, however, authors will attempt to craft these expectations and worldviews to accommodate nontraditional visions. Toward this end, we will read works by authors who strive to come to grips with their own experiences of the world. For English majors and minors, this course satisfies the Theory (E) requirement.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 248 - Contemporary Literary Theory
Investigates and develops several theoretical approaches to literature in the late-20th and 21st century, attempting to provide glimpses into the range of theoretical issues and concerns. We look particularly at identity formation in contemporary literary, political, economic, cultural and social arenas. May also look at a literary text in relation to theory. General areas of study are selected from among the following: textual criticism, new criticism, psychoanalysis/reader response, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, gay and lesbian theory and Cultural Studies. For undergraduate English majors and minors, this course satisfies the Theory or Criticism (E) requirement.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
Placement Guidelines
N/A
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ENG 250 - Medieval Literature
Explores medieval literary culture of Western Europe by means of literary theoretical and classical texts. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-1)requirement. Themes vary each year, and the seminar can be taken more than once for credit, as long as each time a different theme is chosen. For English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-1) requirement.
SPRING 2021 - The Arthurian Tradition
Centuries of combined myth, legend, and history resulted in the most popular and enduring stories in medieval literature. Arthur and Guinevere, the sorcerer Merlin, the lustful Uther Pendragon, Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Perceval, and the Knights of the Round Table have outlived most popular literary characters from the Middle Ages, and continue to fascinate readers and audiences. This class will examine the tales’ Celtic and British roots, the golden age of French romance, take a detour to medieval Iceland, and examine the Arthurian tradition’s transformative influence on mainstream English literature. All texts but those in Middle English will be read in Modern English translation; no previous Middle English knowledge is required.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 253 - Advanced Studies in Shakespeare
ADVANCED STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE: KINGS, QUEENS, TYRANTS
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
- King Richard II
You might be familiar with pledging allegiance to a flag but what about to a head of state? While one may be a normal way of life for some, the other may stir up a sense of discomfort. The question at the core of that feeling is: what makes someone a person worth following? Perhaps it’s that they have a voice or that they’ve simply been victorious in a contest. A good leader, you might add, has vision, are virtuous individuals, and value people. What does leadership look like in Shakespeare, and what can we learn from those depictions today? This seminar will focus on effective and failed leadership in the forms of kings, queens, and tyrants, but those categories can be extended to all kinds of manifestations, even in the modern world. We will read a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies to determine how those plays not only reflect the historical crises in the early modern period but also anticipate political crises to come. We will examine how politics intersects with cultural perspectives and prejudices around race, gender, disability, and religion. Moreover, we will develop and revise hypotheses about how these plays critique but also reimagine a philosophy of benevolent and effective leadership. Our course readings will begin by analyzing theories about leadership, such as by Aristotle and Machiavelli, available in Shakespeare’s time. From there, we will take a deep dive into plays like Hamlet, Richard II, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear.
For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-1) requirement. Prerequisites: ENG 120 or TA 214 or permission of the Instructor.
Prerequisites: ENG 120 or TA 214 or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 255 - Studies in the Renaissance
WORKING MY NERVES: EMOTIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE
Have you ever used your feelings to get something you really wanted or needed? This course goes beyond Shakespeare and revisits the English Renaissance by examining the work of emotions in literature. I mention “work” intentionally because that is precisely what emotions do - they bring people together and drive them apart; they work upon our own hearts, bodies, and minds. Our course analyzes poetry, prose, and drama to develop an understanding of how happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise stand at the intersection of personal experience and historical or scientific fact. We will discuss texts by writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Elizabeth Cary, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Wear your heart on your sleeve and bring your feelings along for the ride. It’s going to be an emotional rollercoaster. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-1) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 256 - Ecologies in Crisis: View from the Humanities
New Earth Conversation Collaborative
This collaborative asks participants to explore the idea of `ecology’ in cross-cultural perspective, with particular consideration to literary responses to climate change in different cultural and political contexts. We will think comparatively about the representation of ecological crises, and about likenesses and differences in literary portrayals of environmental thought-including relationships between human and non-human species and objects. The course will explore the cultural and philosophical frameworks that govern dominant modes of extraction and commodification, regimes of energy and power, understandings of waste and disposability, and models for food production and consumption. `Ecologies in Crisis’ will be offered as a pilot `collaborative’ for Clark’s program in New Earth Conversations. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies either the Period (D-3) or the Theory (E) requirement, but does not double count.
Course Designation/Attribute: POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 262 - Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature
Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Poetry (C-1), or the Period (D-2) or the Theory (E) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course. This course can be repeated with a different topic.
SPECIAL TOPIC S 2021 - “Tomes of Solid Witchcraft”: Major Women Poets
This course examines how women speak poetically to each other across time, beyond the confines of what Virginia Woolf called the “private house.” We view them as originators of meaning, thematically broaching issues of identity, society, religion, politics, and what it means to be intelligent, articulate, and transcendent of cultural circumstance and restraint. Poems read will be drawn from Charlotte Smith, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 263 - Traumatic Tales: National Trauma in Romantic Literature
The course examines the formation of British national identity through its troubling origins in women’s subordination, class hierarchy, slavery, colonial rule and imperialism. Focusing on the slave narrative, confessional poetry and the political and domestic novel, this seminar will explore the ways in which Romantic writers attempted (and often failed) to articulate an alternative national narrative against the national hegemony, which erased state acts of exploitation and terror. To better understand the concept of national trauma, we will also read extensively in psychoanalytic and critical social theory related to genocide, accidents and torture. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-2) or the Theory (E) requirement. This course also fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (DI) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 272 - Radicalism and the Black Arts Movement
1966 to 1967
The Black Arts Movement remains the most radical realization of a literary culture in the history of the United States. Resulting from centuries of racial oppression, this movement is to be understood as black Americans’ revolutionary use of art to express deep-seated existential rage and political critique in order to generate social change and psychological reconstruction. Accordingly, this course will examine the historical factors responsible for the emergence of the Black Arts Movement and will pay special attention to the thinkers and writers responsible for the articulation of its aesthetic manifestos and the production of its literary canon. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 276 - Ethnic America: Literature, Theory, Politics
In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian asks who “Theory” is for and suggests that the drive to continuously invent “new” and “original” theories about “Literature” is rather a tool to maintain exclusive and elite boundaries around the academy, boundaries which ultimately constrain our imaginations of how we study literature. Taking seriously Christian’s proposal that creative work is itself media for theorizing, especially for artists from marginalized backgrounds, this course examines 20th century and contemporary Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latinx American cultural productions. We ask how these works theorize the historical and present-day geopolitics that shape the how racial and ethnic “Others” come to be in relationship with the United States and the forces that define their belonging within and/or exclusion from the physical and imagined boundaries of the nation, national and cultural citizenship, and political participation. Surveying a broad spectrum of literature, film, memoir, poetry, and theory, students will familiarize themselves with signal debates in studies of race, ethnicity, and migration and gain a foundation in contemporary Ethnic American literature. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-3) or the Theory (E) requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 279 - Fictions of Asian America
With particular emphasis on the multiple meanings of “fiction,” this seminar examines the ways in which the Asian American identity is constructed, imagined and contested in American literature and popular culture. Analyses will focus primarily on how texts and films produced within the last decade maintain or challenge established boundaries of the Asian American identity. Specific issues to be investigated include the model minority discourse and the demands of assimilation and citizenship; ethnic authenticity and hybridity; gender roles and sexual anxieties; cultural memory and nostalgia; and the commodification of Asian cultures and identities. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 282 - American Literary Renaissance
This course examines the literature of the decade of 1850 - 1860 in America - the Age of Emerson, Whitman, Melville,and Thoreau. For English Majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-2) requirement. For English Minors, this course counts as a 200-Level Seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 283 - Visions of Representation
Explores the problematic assumptions of literary representation underlying American realism through selected works of American writers. Conventional interpretations of realist writing are often challenged by issues of race, class, gender, and cultural contexts. Examines works by Twain, Howells, James, Dreiser, Jewett, Cather, Cooke, Chopin, and others. Satisfies the Period (D-2) requirement for undergraduate English majors.
Anticipated Terms Offered: N/A
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ENG 290 - Capstone
During fall semester of senior year, the Capstone seminar offers English majors a final culminating experience, during which students demonstrate their sophisticated engagement with fundamental skills of literary criticism (astute close reading; persuasive argumentation; clear, elegant writing; comfort navigating conventions of citation and style; familiarity with broad contours of literary history; facility with a range of theoretical and scholarly methodologies) first through a shared reading of a text (or texts) on a common theme, and then with a major independent research project. Capstone provides opportunity for each student not only to demonstrate mastery of literary criticism but also to articulate the meaning and import of their own unique course of study in major. Each student develops their final independent project out of their specialized interest and expertise within the English major and/or their sense of interdisciplinary connections with a secondary major, minor, or concentration. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Capstone (F) requirement. Senior English majors only. Only offered in the fall.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Only offered in the fall.
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ENG 292 - Toni Morrison
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison forever reconfigured how the world studies literature and race. Reading her novels, poetry, and non-fiction, we will examine how Morrison’s writing enhances African American literary theory by critiquing the role race plays within the literary canon and society as a whole. Implementing Morrison’s strategies such as removing the white gaze and discovering the Africanist presence, we will explore the historical and psychological themes of race, colorism, the ancestor, motherhood, multigenerational trauma, and love. The course is discussion and inquiry-based, so students must read, participate, moderate, and challenge themselves to think critically. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement or Theory (E) requirement but does not double-count. Meets the Aesthetic Perspective (AP) requirement. Fulfills the Diversity and Inclusion (DI) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: AP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 293 - Special Topics in African American Literature
Special Topics in African American Literature. For undergraduate English majors this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course. May be repeatable for credit.
SPECIAL TOPIC SPRING 2020: AFROFUTURISM: THEN AND NOW
This course traces the speculative strain in 20thand 21stcentury African American literature, music, film, and visual art. The course is designed to help students refine their theoretical approaches to the study of second wave Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative tradition, and to help sharpen and broaden their critical thinking and analytical faculties through a study of selected works. During the course, students will evaluate the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Outkast, Kara Walker, and Marvel’s Black Panther.
SPECIAL TOPIC FALL 2019: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN GOTHIC
What is the African American Gothic? Scholars agree that African Americans have utilized the Gothic to highlight the horrors of the African American experience beginning with slave narratives up to the present day with films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In this course, we will examine and discuss the evolution of the use of the Gothic within African American literature starting with the era of chattel slavery. We will begin with the connection of the white fear of slave rebellion and how it connects to the concept of black monstrosity. It is through the basis of race creation, and the fear of the other, that we will follow the evolution of African American Gothic, focusing on historical atrocities such as Jim Crow segregation and police brutality. This course will investigate the African American Gothic utilizing philosophical, psychoanalytic, sociological, and historical approaches. It is a discussion-based course with minimal lecturing, so students are expected to read, participate, moderate, and be an active citizen in this class. For undergraduate English majors this particular rendition of the course satisfies the Period (D-3) or the Theory (E) requirement but cannot double-count.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 294 - African American Literary and Critical Race Theory
Utilizing the theoretical approaches found in African American literary criticism of the 20th and 21st century, this course will evaluate the complex relationship of racial thought in African American literary theory. Creating an understanding of the relationship of literature to the larger experience of African Americans, students will analyze the dialogue of racial identity, Black feminist/womanist thought, Poststructuralism, queer theory, intersectionality, cultural studies, essentialism, and critical race theory from the 1920s to today. For undergraduate English major and minors, this course satisfies the Theory (E-1) requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: AP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 296 - Writing the Thesis
This course is designed to guide students through the thesis-writing process, focusing on the technical and structural challenges involved in crafting a multi-part argument. We’ll think about how to make sure ideas are expressed clearly, cogently, persuasively, and within the standards of the discipline. Our approach will emphasize both the writing process and the finished product, combining reading and discussion with peer workshops. This course is required for all English Honors and MA thesis writers planning to complete their theses this semester.
Corequisites: ENG 297 - Honors
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 297 - Honors
Honors in English Senior Year
Invited and interested students are asked to identify an area of interest with an adviser and apply in writing to the department chair with a brief description of the project in the spring of their junior year. Once accepted into the Honors program, and with the adviser’s approval, students register for ENG 297 Honors in English for one credit in each of the two semesters of their senior year. The adviser and the student will agree on the project’s stages; the final thesis is due at the end of the spring semester. A second reader, chosen by the student and the adviser, participates in the final evaluation. Details are available in the handbook for English majors.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 298 - Internships
Academic experience taking place in the field with an opportunity to earn credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered for variable credit every year
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ENG 299 - Directed Study
When asking a faculty member to sponsor directed study courses (299), the student should: 1) demonstrate competence to deal with the materials as literature and 2) present a well thought-out proposal. The student must take the initiative in selecting readings or carrying out the special project. Offered for variable credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 300 - Pedagogy I
A one-on-one with a departmental faculty member on pedagogy.
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ENG 301 - Pedagogy II
An advanced one-on-one with a department faculty member enabling the graduate student to acquire expertise in teaching. TAs only.
Prerequisites: ENG 300
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ENG 302 - Pedagogy III
For second-year graduate students who have been awarded a teaching assistantship. Advanced mentoring and classroom assignments as arranged with individual department members. Information available from the chair.
Prerequisites: ENG 300 and ENG 301 .
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ENG 303 - Pedagogy IV
A continuation of ENG 302 . See its listing for a complete description.
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ENG 325 - American Print Culture, 1700-1900
The years from 1700 to 1900 witnessed a transformation of print culture from the handpress period to an age of mechanical reproduction. The rapidly increasing availability of inexpensive print technologies had a tremendous impact on habits of publishing, of writing, and of reading itself. In this course, students will examine how the material contexts of print culture in early America affected and were affected by notions of authorship, readership, gender, genre, and popular and elite taste. Some sessions will be conducted at the American Antiquarian Society where students will be able to examine archival material in hands-on workshops. For the final research paper, students will be encouraged to use resources from the AAS, from Goddard Library Special Collections, and/or from the many new digital humanities archives now available online
Special Topic Fall ‘20: Print Culture at the Margins.
Print culture has always had the capacity to re-inscribe existing cultural, political, aesthetic, and social power structures. In this class, however, we will focus on the capacity of marginalized individuals and communities to challenge those hierarchies through strategic acts of writing and publication. In addition to thinking figuratively about agency “at the margin,” we will also consider the literal physical space of the margin, exploring the ways that these open spaces simultaneously dictate authority and meaning but also invite confirmation, intervention, critique, and reinterpretation.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 330 - Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century
To claim that “cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion,” was daring in 1954, when Alice Toklas situated herself among the modernists with the bold claim that cooking was a form of art. Yet she was also situating herself within a long literary and philosophical tradition of thinking aesthetic taste alongside gustatory taste. Taking up the idea of food as an aesthetic phenomenon, this course traces a transnational history of literary thinking about food within the long twentieth century, with special attention to the relationship between food and such identity categories as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 331 - Queer Modernisms
Modernist writers often use the term “queer” with what feels like a knowing wink. This is not an anachronism; though the field of queer theory brought the term into wider usage in the 1990s, the rise of literary modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century coincided with a shift in its connotations, as “queer” came to encompass not just difference or oddity, but difference of a specifically sexual variety. In this course we will explore queer modernism from multiple angles, reading works by authors who both lived and wrote about queer lives, tracing their engagement with emerging social and medical discourses of sexuality, and interrogating the role of queerness within modernist innovations in literary form. Taking an intersectional approach to the field, we will also consider how queerness overlapped with and complicated other discourses of difference, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
In addition to canonical queer modernists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, we will read authors who have been relegated to the margins of the field, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Eliot Bliss, and Gale Wilhelm, as we consider the relationship between queerness and canonicity. Our transnational approach will reveal both multiple models of modernism and a wide range of experiences of queerness. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will read widely in contemporary queer theory, focusing especially on texts that see difference as a site of potential solidarity and emphasize literature’s power to challenge multiple, overlapping systems of oppression.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 338 - Contemporary Latino/a Literature
This course examines the contributions to American literature made by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Latino/Latina writers in the United States over the last thirty years. Through a variety of Latino/Latina writing, we will explore the ways in which these writers represent community, class, race, gender, culture, nation, and ethnicity in their works. We will also examine the ways in which Latinas(os) have manufactured identities within mainstream society, as well as the development of cultural hybrids and other forms of cultural registers. Representative works of various genres will be read and analyzed within a cultural context; the testimonio, the auto ethnographic essay, the narrative (novel and short story), drama, poetry and film. Authors include Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Luis Valdez, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Achy Obejas and Piri Thomas
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 340 - Introduction to Graduate Study in English
Since many forms of literary theories proliferate, Prof. Levin strongly recommends that M.A. candidates take a course in literary theory to complement this course. Introduction to Graduate Studies will examine theories and methodologies pertinent to the study of literature by way of a focus on a special topic. For fall 2019, the special topic will be `Literary Studies in a Global Context’. What is the role of the humanities in the present moment? How does literature respond to pressing issues such as global inequality and climate change? How has literature imagined modes of globalization from the early modern to contemporary periods? M.A. candidates not specifically exempted are required to take this course.
Prerequisites: Seniors by permission only
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every fall semester
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ENG 345 - Mythopoetics
This course examines modes and qualities of literary expression where we will find that narratives and poetry convey different expectations, which are also embedded in a variety of worldviews. Frequently, however, authors will attempt to craft these expectations and worldviews to accommodate nontraditional visions. Toward this end, we will read works by authors who strive to come to grips with their own experiences of the world. Texts will include Eliot’s Four Quartets, Joyce’s Ulysses, Plath’s Ariel, and representative poems by Wallace Stevens.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 348 - Contemporary Literary Theory
Investigates and develops several theoretical approaches to literature in the late-20th and 21st century, attempting to provide glimpses into the range of theoretical issues and concerns. We look particularly at identity formation in contemporary literary, political, economic, cultural and social arenas. May also look at a literary text in relation to theory. General areas of study are selected from among the following: textual criticism, new criticism, psychoanalysis/reader response, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, gay and lesbian theory and Cultural Studies.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 350 - Medieval Literature
Explores medieval literary culture of Western Europe by means of literary theoretical and classical texts. Themes vary each year, and the seminar can be taken more than once for credit, as long as each time a different theme is chosen.
SPRING 2021 - The Arthurian Tradition
Centuries of combined myth, legend, and history resulted in the most popular and enduring stories in medieval literature. Arthur and Guinevere, the sorcerer Merlin, the lustful Uther Pendragon, Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Perceval, and the Knights of the Round Table have outlived most popular literary characters from the Middle Ages, and continue to fascinate readers and audiences. This class will examine the tales’ Celtic and British roots, the golden age of French romance, take a detour to medieval Iceland, and examine the Arthurian tradition’s transformative influence on mainstream English literature. All texts but those in Middle English will be read in Modern English translation; no previous Middle English knowledge is required.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 353 - Advanced Studies in Shakespeare
ADVANCED STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE: KINGS, QUEENS, TYRANTS
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
- King Richard II
You might be familiar with pledging allegiance to a flag but what about to a head of state? While one may be a normal way of life for some, the other may stir up a sense of discomfort. The question at the core of that feeling is: what makes someone a person worth following? Perhaps it’s that they have a voice or that they’ve simply been victorious in a contest. A good leader, you might add, has vision, are virtuous individuals, and value people. What does leadership look like in Shakespeare, and what can we learn from those depictions today? This seminar will focus on effective and failed leadership in the forms of kings, queens, and tyrants, but those categories can be extended to all kinds of manifestations, even in the modern world. We will read a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies to determine how those plays not only reflect the historical crises in the early modern period but also anticipate political crises to come. We will examine how politics intersects with cultural perspectives and prejudices around race, gender, disability, and religion. Moreover, we will develop and revise hypotheses about how these plays critique but also reimagine a philosophy of benevolent and effective leadership. Our course readings will begin by analyzing theories about leadership, such as by Aristotle and Machiavelli, available in Shakespeare’s time. From there, we will take a deep dive into plays like Hamlet, Richard II, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 355 - Studies in the Renaissance
WORKING MY NERVES: EMOTIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE
Have you ever used your feelings to get something you really wanted or needed? This course goes beyond Shakespeare and revisits the English Renaissance by examining the work of emotions in literature. I mention “work” intentionally because that is precisely what emotions do - they bring people together and drive them apart; they work upon our own hearts, bodies, and minds. Our course analyzes poetry, prose, and drama to develop an understanding of how happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise stand at the intersection of personal experience and historical or scientific fact. We will discuss texts by writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Elizabeth Cary, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Wear your heart on your sleeve and bring your feelings along for the ride. It’s going to be an emotional rollercoaster.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 356 - Ecologies in Crisis: Views from the Humanities
New Earth Conversation Collaborative
This collaborative asks participants to explore the idea of `ecology’ in cross-cultural perspective, with particular consideration to literary responses to climate change in different cultural and political contexts. We will think comparatively about the representation of ecological crises, and about likenesses and differences in literary portrayals of environmental thought-including relationships between human and non-human species and objects. The course will explore the cultural and philosophical frameworks that govern dominant modes of extraction and commodification, regimes of energy and power, understandings of waste and disposability, and models for food production and consumption. `Ecologies in Crisis’ will be offered as a pilot `collaborative’ for Clark’s program in New Earth Conversations.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 362 - Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature
Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature. This course can be repeated with a different topic.
SPECIAL TOPIC SPRING 2021 - “Tomes of Solid Witchcraft”: Major Women Poets
This course examines how women speak poetically to each other across time, beyond the confines of what Virginia Woolf called the “private house.” We view them as originators of meaning, thematically broaching issues of identity, society, religion, politics, and what it means to be intelligent, articulate, and transcendent of cultural circumstance and restraint. Poems read will be drawn from Charlotte Smith, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 363 - Traumatic Tales: National Trauma in Romantic Literature
The course examines the formation of British national identity through its troubling origins in women’s subordination, class hierarchy, slavery, colonial rule and imperialism. Focusing on the slave narrative, confessional poetry and the political and domestic novel, this seminar will explore the ways in which Romantic writers attempted (and often failed) to articulate an alternative national narrative against the national hegemony, which erased state acts of exploitation and terror. To better understand the concept of national trauma, we will also read extensively in psychoanalytic and critical social theory related to genocide, accidents and torture.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 364 - Queer Victorians
The Victorian period was full of writers addressing what we now consider themes of “queer” sexuality and gender. Often, however, these themes have gone unrecognized. Victorian texts, which hold a multivalent emphasis on kinship, desire, matrimony, domesticity, and familial life, stand as a rich resource for analyses of same-sex desire, gendered and sexual subjectivities, and closeting and homophobia. Through texts by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Charles Dickens we will look at depictions of nonnormative desires and identities and resistance to heteronormativity. We will also explore gender and sexuality through intersectional frameworks that consider how class, race and nationality impacts gender and sexual identities. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will deploy queer theory to understand the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Through this “disruptive” knowledge, we will question norms of sexuality and gender and the oppression and violence that such hegemonic norms justify.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 372 - Radicalism and the Black Arts Movement
1966 to 1967
The Black Arts Movement remains the most radical realization of a literary culture in the history of the United States. Resulting from centuries of racial oppression, this movement is to be understood as black Americans’ revolutionary use of art to express deep-seated existential rage and political critique in order to generate social change and psychological reconstruction. Accordingly, this course will examine the historical factors responsible for the emergence of the Black Arts Movement and will pay special attention to the thinkers and writers responsible for the articulation of its aesthetic manifestos and the production of its literary canon. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the Period (D-3) requirement.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 376 - Ethnic America: Literature, Theory, Politics
In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian asks who “Theory” is for and suggests that the drive to continuously invent “new” and “original” theories about “Literature” is rather a tool to maintain exclusive and elite boundaries around the academy, boundaries which ultimately constrain our imaginations of how we study literature. Taking seriously Christian’s proposal that creative work is itself media for theorizing, especially for artists from marginalized backgrounds, this course examines 20th century and contemporary Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latinx American cultural productions. We ask how these works theorize the historical and present-day geopolitics that shape the how racial and ethnic “Others” come to be in relationship with the United States and the forces that define their belonging within and/or exclusion from the physical and imagined boundaries of the nation, national and cultural citizenship, and political participation. Surveying a broad spectrum of literature, film, memoir, poetry, and theory, students will familiarize themselves with signal debates in studies of race, ethnicity, and migration and gain a foundation in contemporary Ethnic American literature.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 379 - Fictions of Asian America
With particular emphasis on the multiple meanings of “fiction,” this seminar examines the ways in which the Asian American identity is constructed, imagined and contested in American literature and popular culture. Analyses will focus primarily on how texts and films produced within the last decade maintain or challenge established boundaries of the Asian American identity. Specific issues to be investigated include the model minority discourse and the demands of assimilation and citizenship; ethnic authenticity and hybridity; gender roles and sexual anxieties; cultural memory and nostalgia; and the commodification of Asian cultures and identities.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 382 - American Literary Renaissance
This course examines the literature of the decade 1850 - 1860 in America - the Age of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 383 - Visions of Representation
Explores the problematic assumptions of literary representation underlying American realism through selected works of American writers. Conventional interpretations of realist writing are often challenged by issues of race, class, gender, and cultural contexts. Examines works by Twain, Howells, James, Dreiser, Jewett, Cather, Cooke, Chopin, and others.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 390 - Departmental Colloquium
Provides graduate students with guidance, expertise and resolution for the writing of the master’s thesis. The chief requirement is an oral presentation, ordinarily given in the student’s final semester of course work. Participation and registration are required; however, the colloquium does not carry course credit and is not included as one of the eight courses needed to fulfill M.A. requirements.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every semester
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ENG 392 - Toni Morrison
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison forever reconfigured how the world studies literature and race. Reading her novels, poetry, and non-fiction, we will examine how Morrison’s writing enhances African American literary theory by critiquing the role race plays within the literary canon and society as a whole. Implementing Morrison’s strategies such as removing the white gaze and discovering the Africanist presence, we will explore the historical and psychological themes of race, colorism, the ancestor, motherhood, multigenerational trauma, and love. The course is discussion and inquiry-based, so students must read, participate, moderate, and challenge themselves to think critically.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually or Bi-annually
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ENG 393 - Special Topics in African American Literature
Special Topics in African American Literature. May be repeatable for credit.
SPECIAL TOPIC SPRING 2020: AFROFUTURISM: THEN AND NOW
This course traces the speculative strain in 20thand 21stcentury African American literature, music, film, and visual art. The course is designed to help students refine their theoretical approaches to the study of second wave Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative tradition, and to help sharpen and broaden their critical thinking and analytical faculties through a study of selected works. During the course, students will evaluate the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Outkast, Kara Walker, and Marvel’s Black Panther.
SPECIAL TOPIC FALL 2019: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN GOTHIC
What is the African American Gothic? Scholars agree that African Americans have utilized the Gothic to highlight the horrors of the African American experience beginning with slave narratives up to the present day with films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In this course, we will examine and discuss the evolution of the use of the Gothic within African American literature starting with the era of chattel slavery. We will begin with the connection of the white fear of slave rebellion and how it connects to the concept of black monstrosity. It is through the basis of race creation, and the fear of the other, that we will follow the evolution of African American Gothic, focusing on historical atrocities such as Jim Crow segregation and police brutality. This course will investigate the African American Gothic utilizing philosophical, psychoanalytic, sociological, and historical approaches. It is a discussion-based course with minimal lecturing, so students are expected to read, participate, moderate, and be an active citizen in this class.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 394 - African American Literary and Critical Race Theory
Utilizing the theoretical approaches found in African American literary criticism of the 20th and 21st century, this course will evaluate the complex relationship of racial thought in African American literary theory. Creating an understanding of the relationship of literature to the larger experience of African Americans, students will analyze the dialogue of racial identity, Black feminist/womanist thought, Poststructuralism, queer theory, intersectionality, cultural studies, essentialism, and critical race theory from the 1920s to today.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 396 - Writing the Thesis
This course is designed to guide students through the thesis-writing process, focusing on the technical and structural challenges involved in crafting a multi-part argument. We’ll think about how to make sure ideas are expressed clearly, cogently, persuasively, and within the standards of the discipline. Our approach will emphasize both the writing process and the finished product, combining reading and discussion with peer workshops. This course is required for all English Honors and MA thesis writers planning to complete their theses this semester.
Corequisites: ENG 397 - Master’s Thesis
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 397 - Master’s Thesis
The M.A. Thesis is written in consultation with the student’s first and second readers, on a topic in the field of the student’s special interest. At a point during the writing process, the first reader and M.A. candidate seek out a third reader. The first reader must be a member of the English Department.
Prerequisites: Permission of thesis adviser.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every semester
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ENG 399 - Graduate Directed Study
Directed Study Courses (399) are an effective way to deepen knowledge in a particular topic or field. If interested in a directed study, the M.A. candidate should have a well thought-out proposal with a sense of what the goal for the course would be before talking with the professor who has expertise in the topic or field. The student and faculty member will work together on determining a reading list and /or what the special project will entail. In order to have an appropriate title recorded on your transcript, please consult with the professor. Offered normally for 1 unit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered for variable credit every semester
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ENG 1000 - Introduction to Composition
Focuses on the writing process: prewriting, writing and rewriting. Discussion and writing activities will include all steps of the writing process beginning with developing ideas and carried through organizing, writing and editing. Students will experiment with different techniques and learn to adapt to different college writing situations.
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ENG 1060 - Introduction to Fiction Writing
Students experiment with weekly creative writing exercises from which they can develop poems, short stories, memoirs and essays. Students will write both in class and in homework assignments and share selected pieces with colleagues in the classroom.
Anticipated Terms Offered: rarely
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ENG 1130 - Writing to Heal
An exploration of writing as a tool in maintaining health and well being. We will look at the medical and psychological research that supports the belief that writing boosts in the immune system, reduces emotional distress, and lessens physical pain for some people. Through hands-on practice and group sharing we will become familiar with the ways in which the literary arts are tools for personal growth.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1150 - Intermediate Composition
Competent expository writing skills are mandatory for college and professional success. Clarity, focus, development, organization, grammar and style are emphasized in this workshop-style course. Students write various types of essays to expand their methods of expression, increase their basic writing skills and experiment with individual writing styles. The course also covers the full process of researching, organizing, writing and documenting research papers.
Prerequisites: ENG 1000 - Introduction to Composition
Anticipated Terms Offered: various
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ENG 1160 - Artful Thunder: Introduction to Poetry and Song
Through the analysis and discussion of roughly two dozen British and American poems and songs, this course introduces students to the reading of lyric, from the English Renaissance to the contemporary period. This course meets the English major C-1 requirement)
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: 201905
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ENG 1220 - Critical Thinking
Regardless of university major, Critical Thinking is the integral element in education. Critical Thinking deals with language, particularly the process by and through which evaluation of ideas, and their subsequent validity, is established in academic discourse. Therefore, it is both reflexive and reflective. In this course, students engage in the process of Critical Thinking and its practical application. The evaluation of ideas from multiple disciplines will be primary, as well as a focus on rhetorical argument, with an eye to habits that hinder thinking, errors affecting validity, deductive and inductive reasoning, and moral dilemmas.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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ENG 1230 - Writings of Place and Nature
“It is not down in any map; true places never are,” Herman Melville wrote in “Moby Dick.” We are increasingly disconnected from the spirit of the natural world and our sense of place in this burgeoning technological age. The goal of this course is to reawaken our inherent connection to the earth, and place, in order to helps us see the world more clearly and understand it more deeply. We will study “nature writing” by those who have a special connection to the earth anchored a certain place, from Emerson and Thoreau to contemporary authors. As time permits we will conduct field studies, a film study, and be visited by an author. This course will explore what place can teach us, how it shapes our vision and sense of self along with our world view. Through reading and discussing essays, poems, and works of nonfiction, we will learn how we can be more aware of the world that sustains and surrounds us. Writing for this class will include creative pieces as well as analytical essays, and there will be a final project addressing a place of your choosing.
Prerequisites: VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: VE (summer only)
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1320 - Green Fire: Modern Fantasy
This course examines the rise and development of the fantasy novel in the 20th Century by looking into its beginnings in Britain, and its adoption and expansion by American authors. While the readings for the course are necessarily limited to major figures in both countries, mention will be made to other practitioners of the genre, such as Lewis and Rowling, as well as landmark associations between the authors such as the Inklings.
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: 201905
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ENG 1480 - Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath
We will embark on an examination of the poetic works of two remarkable American poets: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Our focus will be on close readings of specific poems as well as reviewing supporting background materials.
Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE placement
Course Designation/Attribute: VE (summer only)
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1490 - F. Scott Fitzgerald
This course will provide an in-depth study of F.Scott Fitzgerals’s works. Along with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, we will read a selection of short stories. Discussion will center on Fitsgeralds’s texts in the historical context in which they were written and our contemporary society. We will also watch and analyze film adaptaions of his works. This course welcomes students who are just discovering Fitzgerald and his work and those who are ardent students of Fitzgerald.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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ENG 1570 - Literary Satire
This course will wxplore the literary genre known as satire. Questions we will discuss include: What is satire? Why do authors choose to use it? How does it differ from parody? Over the course of the semster we will read Johnathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to enhance our understanding of satire.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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ENG 1650 - Introduction to Digital Humanities
An introductory humanities course that focuses on the ways digital technologies have influenced traditional approaches to reading and interpretive analysis. Generally, the course aims (1) to encourage/reinforce an appreciation for classical humanistic methods (e.g., close reading), (2) to advance basic technical competencies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Python using relevant modules for application in new Digital Humanities projects, (3) to inspire critical habits of mind rooted in relevant scholarship about the intersections between humanistic studies and computer programming. These aims are to be assessed according to in-class exercises, writing assignments, quizzes, and a final project.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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ENG 1670 - Children’s Literature
No doubt everyone has a children’s book they remember loving or having a particular impact. When books appeal to a child’s interests in natural, interesting ways, they develop a realtionship with literature that will last a lifetime. Students will learn how to recognize best literature for children, compile a children’s literature book summary, participate in discussions of the genre, and create an original example of literature for children.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1680 - Eastern Thought/Western Literature
Examines the influence of Eastern philosophic and religious traditions on Western literature of the twentieth century. We look at the basic ideas and tenets of Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen, as well as the poetics of haiku, and then look to how those premises affected both the poetry and fiction of modern literature in Europe, England, and America. Authors discussed may include Huxley, Hesse, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Pirsig, and Ginsberg.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1700 - Afrofuturism
This course traces the speculative strain in 20th and 21st century African American literature, music, film, and visual art. The course is designed to help students refine their theoretical approaches to the study of the second wave of Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative tradtion, and to help sharpen and broaden their critical thinking and analytical faculties through a study of selected works. During the course, students will evaluate the work of W.E.B.Du Bois, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Janelle Monae, Sun ra, Outksat, Kara Walkeer, and Marvel’s Black Panther.
Anticipated Terms Offered: 201905
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ENG 1750 - Post-Colonial Literature
This course will provide an introduction to post-colonial literature and theory. We will explore how authors confronted colonialism in their respective countries and their representations of the repercussions in a post-colonial world. Over the course of the semester we will read literature from Africa and India, including (but not limited to) Chinua Achebe, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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ENG 1870 - Philosophy Of Horror
We read horror literature from the 18th century to the present, focusing on the popularity of the genre in relation to the desire to be frightened. Students look at historical differences in what constitutes “dreadful pleasure,” as well as the various psychological reasons for its persistence and popularity in Western culture.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1910 - Dystopian Literature
This course will explore the dystopian genre in literature. We will discuss how the authors portray their fears in the text and whether or not they still resonant today or have, in fact, come true to certain extents. We will read Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell’s 1984, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep (as well as watch sections of the movie it inspiried, Blade Runner)) and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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ENG 1920 - Survey of Enviromental Writings
As concerns about climate change have become dire and widely acknowledged, environmentalism has entered the mainstream. Environmental disasters are consistently reported in the press, while questionable gadgets and products are marketed to us as as ‘eco-friendly.’ Thi cultural concern and ambivalence about nature echoes strongly in our litereatures. Nature writers both carve out new environmental philosophies, and they can reflect existing perspectives about nature and our place within it. In Environmental Writings, we will read a series of texts written between the 19th and 21st centuries that address various environmental isms, and more broadly nature as a whole. These texts will include nonfiction and fiction prose, as well as poetry.
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 1930 - Rumplestiltskin to Ravenclaw: Children’s Literature From Golden Age to Silver Screen
This course will survey the history of children’s literature from the 1800’s to the early 2000’s. Addressing works by such authors as Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and J. K. Rowling, we will examine how society’s conception of childhood has changed over the past two hundred years. Supplementing our primary texts with contemporary work in the relatively new field of childhood studies, this course will also explore what children’s fiction has to tell us about cultural values and institutions. Among other things, we’ll consider the role children’s literature has played (and continues to play) in the culture of imperialism and the construction of gender and sexuality, and its increasing commercialization via film series and franchises.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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ENG 2010 - Secrets of the Sisterhoods: Inside the Red Tent
Throughout history, have women been observers in a man’s world, or simply participants and leaders in different ways? How do women of varying time periods and cultures view the world and their roles in it? These questions and more will be explored via modern and historical fiction novels, essays, films, discussion and oral history documentation, focusing on “global sisterhood.”
Anticipated Terms Offered: varies
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ENG 2030 - The Witch in Literature
This course examines the figure of the witch as she appears in English and American literature from the Medieval period to the 20th century. Focus will not only be on the appearance of the character in fiction, poetry, and drama; but also on the psychological, historical, and mythological connections to those appearances.
Course Designation/Attribute: VE (Summer Only)
Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies
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ENG 2050 - Mythologies
The purpose of this course is to expose students to various systems of myth from a number of global cultures. We will examine both the similarities and differences of the myths and consider why this is so. In addition, we also will examine the idea of mythic thinking, or consciousness, and why such forms of thought and image are deemed necessary for the psychological and moral health of the cultures in which they form an inherent, and crucial part.
Course Designation/Attribute: GP (summer only)
Anticipated Terms Offered: varied
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ENG 2140 - Fiction on the Fringe: Crimes, Addictions and Psychoses
An examination of selected 20th century works of fiction that deal with the social or psychological outcast(s). We will focus on each author’s construction of narrative, point of view, characterization, language and imagery. Questions regarding alternative versus traditional morality, the differentiation between marginal versus mainstream ethos will also be central to our investigations. Works studied include: “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, “Girl Interrupted”, “American Psycho”, “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” and “Lolita.”
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