English
Chair: Kristin Fujie
Administrative Coordinator: Amy Baskin
The Department of English introduces students to a wide range of British and American literature, taught from a variety of critical perspectives. The department teaches students to read literary texts attentively and to write both effectively and persuasively about literature and its relation to tradition, culture, history, and experience. English courses also share the goal of helping students to think critically and in real time, and to engage with others in the challenging task of interpretation and argument. Courses in creative writing provide an opportunity for majors interested in writing poetry and fiction to develop their skills to an advanced level.
Resources for Nonmajors
All of the department’s course offerings are open to nonmajors except the senior seminar. Preference is given to majors and minors for enrollment in ENG 205 and ENG 206 Literature in English: 19th Century-Present.
The Major Program
Students are encouraged to declare the major early in the sophomore year. The department recommends that students interested in an English major take ENG 205 Literature in English: Medieval-18th Century and ENG 206 Literature in English: 19th Century-Present in the sophomore year, if possible, and no later than the junior year. During this sequence and in close consultation with an advisor, students should chart a program of study that will satisfy major requirements.
During the fall semester of their senior year, majors take the senior seminar. Though seminars vary in focus and content, each addresses its subject in the context of current critical discourse and requires students to write a long, research-based paper. Each seminar gives students the experience of engaging in advanced research, developing independent critical perspectives, and sharing ideas with a small number of students in a seminar setting.
Within the major itself, students may shape their program in a number of ways. The major calls for three electives at any level and allows for choice within requirements at the 300 and 400 levels. Our offerings include courses in British, American, and global literature in English; courses focused on historical periods, particular authors, and special topics; courses featuring a variety of methodologies ranging from manuscript study to considerations of the relationships between literature and philosophy, law, gender, race, ethics, the environment, film, and the visual arts; and structured sequences in three disciplines of creative writing—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students are encouraged to design a major curriculum that suits their particular interests and goals.
Both majors and minors have the option of adding an official concentration in creative writing to their degree. Students pursuing this concentration must complete through the 400-level course in one genre. The department provides sequences in fiction (ENG 200, 300, and 400), poetry (ENG 201, 301, and 401), and creative nonfiction (ENG 203, 303, 403). Individual courses may count toward both the concentration and the major or minor. We believe that formal training in creative writing should include the study of literature. Thus, while the creative writing sequences are open to all students, only majors and minors qualify for the creative writing concentration.
Major Requirements
A minimum of 40 semester credits (10 courses), including the following:
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ENG 205 Literature in English: Medieval-18th Century
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ENG 206 Literature in English: 19th Century-Present
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Two 300-level courses chosen from Category I (literature from the medieval period through the 18th century, up to but not including Romantic literature). ENG 333 and ENG 334 may be applied to this requirement when the subject matter is appropriate. Majors may apply either ENG 331 or ENG 332 toward this requirement, but not both.
Category I
| Ancient Masterpieces and English Literature | ||
| Medieval Literature | ||
| Literature of the English Renaissance | ||
| The Early English Novel | ||
| Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1780 | ||
| Inventing America: Literature of Colonialism and the Early Republic, 1540-1830 | ||
| Chaucer | ||
| Shakespeare: Early Works | ||
| Shakespeare: Later Works |
- Two 300-level courses chosen from Category II (Romantic literature through the literature of the present, including creative writing). ENG 333 and ENG 334 may be applied to this requirement when the subject matter is appropriate. Majors may apply only one of the following courses to the Category II requirement: ENG 300, ENG 301, or ENG 303.
Category II
| Creative Writing: Fiction 2 | ||
| Creative Writing: Poetry 2 | ||
| Creative Writing: Nonfiction 2 | ||
| Romanticism in the Age of Revolution | ||
| The Victorians: Heroes, Decadents, and Madwomen | ||
| Modern British and Irish Literature | ||
| Modern Poetry | ||
| Postcolonial Literature: Anglophone Africa, India, Caribbean | ||
| National Sins, National Dreams: American Literature 1830-1865 | ||
| Getting Real: Post-Civil War American Literature | ||
| American Modernism | ||
| Post-World War II American Literature | ||
| African American Literature | ||
| Topics in Literary Theory/Criticism |
- Any three English elective courses except ENG 244 Practicum, ENG 444 Practicum, ENG 490, and ENG 499 Independent Study
- ENG 450 Senior Seminar (fall semester of senior year).
Minor Requirements
A minimum of 24 semester credits (six courses), including the following:
- One departmental core course, chosen from the following:
Literature in English: Medieval-18th Century Literature in English: 19th Century-Present - Two literature courses, one of which must be at the 300 level.
- Three elective English courses at any level, including creative writing courses.
Concentration in Creative Writing (optional)
Students must demonstrate proficiency by completing one of the following structured sequences:
Fiction
- ENG 200 Creative Writing: Fiction 1
- ENG 300 Creative Writing: Fiction 2
- ENG 400 Creative Writing: Fiction 3
Nonfiction Writing
- ENG 203 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 1 or ENG 210 Writing and Illness
- ENG 303 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 2
- ENG 403 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 3
Poetry
- ENG 201 Creative Writing: Poetry 1
- ENG 301 Creative Writing: Poetry 2
- ENG 401 Creative Writing: Poetry 3
In rare cases, the 200-level course may be waived by the chair of the department for students deemed eligible to begin the sequence at the 300 level. The chair may authorize ENG 400 and ENG 403 to substitute for each other when a departmental need arises. The concentration in creative writing may be pursued only by those with a declared English major or minor.
Honors
Departmental honors will be awarded by the department to students who produce an outstanding senior thesis.
Students who have produced exceptional work in the senior seminar and who have earned a major GPA of 3.500 or above may be invited by their seminar professor to submit a detailed honors-thesis proposal, due near the start of spring semester. If the department approves an honors proposal, it selects a three-member committee to guide the writing and research. Each candidate for honors may then enroll in ENG 490 Thesis (4 credits, nonmajor elective), and in early April submits the finished thesis to the department for approval. If the honors thesis is approved, the student presents a summary at a departmental forum.
Faculty
Lyell Asher. Associate professor of English. Renaissance English Literature, Shakespeare. PhD 1990, MA 1984 University of Virginia. BA 1980 Vanderbilt University.
Rachel Cole. Associate professor of English. 19th-Century American literature. PhD 2005, MA 2000 Johns Hopkins University. BA 1994 Williams College.
Kurt Fosso. Professor of English. British Romantic Literature, Critical Theory, Classical Backgrounds. PhD 1993, MA 1988 University of California at Irvine. BA 1987 University of Washington.
Kristin Fujie. Associate professor of English and department chair. 19th- and 20th-Century American Literature, Modernism. PhD 2010, BA 1997 University of California at Berkeley.
Karen Gross. Professor of English. Medieval Literature, Classical Backgrounds. PhD 2005, MA 1999 Stanford University. MPhil 1998 University of Cambridge. BA 1997 University of Southern California.
Gerald Harp. Associate professor with term of English. Renaissance, 17th-Century, Poetry. PhD 2002 University of Iowa. MFA 1991 University of Florida. MA 1985 Saint Louis University. BA 1983 Saint Meinrad College.
Andrea Hibbard. Assistant professor with term of English. Victorian Literature and Culture, Law and Literature, Gender Studies. PhD 2000 University of Virginia. MA 1991 Georgetown University. BA 1986 Pomona College.
Michael Mirabile. Assistant professor with term of English. Radical Film, Films Adapting Fictions, American Crime and Suspense Fiction, Postmodernist, Contemporary American Fiction. PhD 2002, MPhil 1998 Yale University. BA 1995 Queens College.
Will Pritchard. Associate professor of English. Restoration and 18th-Century Literature. PhD 1998, MA 1992 University of Chicago. BA 1986 Yale University.
Mary Szybist. Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities. Modern Poetry, Poetry Writing. MFA 1996 University of Iowa. MT 1994, BA 1992 University of Virginia.
Pauls Toutonghi. Professor of English. Fiction, Expository Writing, Creative Writing. PhD 2006, MA 2002 Cornell University. BA 1999 Middlebury College.
Don Waters. Visiting professor, director of the Fir Acres Writing Workshop. Fiction, Creative Writing. MFA 2013 University of Iowa. MFA 2004 San Francisco State University. BA 1998 Skidmore College.
Rishona Zimring. Professor of English, director of the gender studies program. Modern British Literature, Postcolonial Literature. PhD 1993, BA 1985 Yale University.
Courses
ENG 100 Introductory Topics in Literature
Content: Emphasis on a particular theme, genre, or movement in literature. Topic will be announced each time the course is offered. Recent topics have included literary representations of childhood, Gothic literature, experimental fiction, and films adapting fiction. May be taken twice for credit with change of topic.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 105 The Art of the Novel
Content: Major works in English, American, and European fiction, from the 17th century to the present. Goals include increasing awareness of the particular kinds of knowledge and perception that the novel makes available; considering the variety of ways in which novels braid moral and aesthetic concerns; understanding how novels respond both to everyday human experience and to previous literary history; and heightening appreciation for the range of pleasures that the novel can afford. Writers may include Cervantes, Sterne, Austen, Flaubert, Kafka, Woolf, Nabokov, Kundera, Pynchon.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 125 Jane Austen
Content: Close study of Jane Austen's six major novels (
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 150 Films Adapting Fiction
Content: Close reading and analysis of films and works of modern literature. Establishing parallels between literary and cinematic arts, we will reflect on the adaptation by film directors and screenwriters of works of fiction: the movement or transition from page to screen. Examination of how models of criticism are shaped by formal features integral to the art of the cinema (cinematography, editing, performance, special effects, etc.). Recurring topics will include genre, spectatorship, narrative, identification, and intertextuality. A central aim will be to specify the conventions of a variety of literary and cinematic genres: the thriller, crime fiction and film noir/neo-noir, the Gothic or horror story, science fiction, and meta-cinema or critical cinema (films about other films). Special emphasis will be placed on "free" or "distant" adaptations of works of fiction, on films that creatively rethink the very concept of "adaptation."
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 200 Creative Writing: Fiction 1
Content: The first in a sequence, this class studies the work of 25 contemporary fiction writers. These stories pair with weekly craft exercises, which consider story writing through the lens of scene structure, subtext in dialogue, and a variety of other viewpoints. By semester's end, students write and revise a complete short story.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 201 Creative Writing: Poetry 1
Content: Elements of poetry such as imagery, rhythm, tone. Practice in the craft. Frequent references to earlier poets.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 203 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 1
Content: Nonfiction writing has evolved over the past 50 years, as a kind of "new journalism" has pushed writers to bring the personal and subjective into the work they do. We will read examples of personal essays, memoirs, narratives, and investigative journalism. The curriculum is mostly contemporary, with nods to the history of the form throughout the centuries. Weekly reading and writing exercises, and a long-form work as a portfolio.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall, spring, and summer.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 205 Literature in English: Medieval-18th Century
Content: Foundations course for the English major/minor. Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of English literature. Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 206 Literature in English: 19th Century-Present
Content: Foundations course for the English major/minor. Introduction to ways of reading and writing about literature; historical development of literature in English. Romantic period to the present.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 209 Introduction to American Literature
Content: Selective survey of American literature in English from the colonial period through the present. We will discuss the development of peculiarly American ideas, questions, genres, and styles, as well as the ways they have changed through time. We will also consider what it means to categorize literary works by nation in the first place; i.e., what is at stake in the concept of a national literary tradition.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 210 Writing and Illness
Content: Examination of how writers find words to articulate perceptions and experiences of illness, diagnosis, treatment, convalescence, loss, grief, consolation. Ways in which literary forms and language such as storytelling, description, detection, reminiscence, metaphor, and elegy give illuminating expression and meaning to private experiences of physical, emotional, and intellectual encounters with illness. Reading of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to explore varied perspectives, including writing by medical practitioners and researchers, as well as writing by and about literary figures both past and present. Students will produce commentaries on the readings and experiment with literary forms and language, including nonfiction genres such as memoir.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 218 Renaissance Medicine in Literature
Content: Examination of the confluence of politics, domesticity, and medicine in the Renaissance. Using topics from across Europe, consideration of how the plague affected the development of culture, how the Inquisition informed who might become a doctor, and how fears about witchcraft slowed the progress of science. Focus on narrative accounts and dramatic representations of illness; understanding historical ways of knowing to promote both a sense of the depth of human understanding and a spirit of humility in the face of past science's many missteps.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 235 Topics in Literature
Content: Focused study of a particular theme, genre, or movement. Topic will be announced each time the course is offered. May be taken twice for credit with different content; registration for subsequent sections must be done via the registrar's office.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Every third year, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 240 The Brontës: Legends and Legacies
Content: Exploration of the mythology that has attached itself to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, including how they simultaneously contributed to and distanced themselves from mid-Victorian literary culture, as well as negotiated cultural expectations and anxieties about the growing feminization of the novel. Includes reading of their novels, letters, journal entries, poems, and juvenilia.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Every third year, fall semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 241 Text and Image
Content: How writers and artists have understood the relationship between words and images. Topics may include image texts (e.g., decorative alphabets, medieval devotional images, graphic novels); iconoclasm; literature in dialogue with the visual arts (e.g., ekphrasis, William Blake's poetry); past theorizers about the nature of art and literature (e.g., Horace, Pope Gregory the Great, Giorgio Vasari); and modern critics (e.g., Ernst Gombrich, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag).
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 243 Women Writers
Content: Varies according to instructor. May focus on the common themes and patterns of influence in British, American, or international literature by women, or on close scrutiny of two or more authors.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 244 Practicum
Content: Content: Literary Review (1 credit): Production of a first-rate literary review. In weekly workshops, students become familiar with all the processes involved (editorial, layout, printing, business, distribution) and develop advanced skills in at least one of these areas. May be taken four times for credit. Content: Peer Tutoring in Writing (2 credits): Designed for any student interested in learning theories and methods for teaching writing one-on-one; required of students interested in becoming tutors in the Writing Center. Content: Senior Poetry Broadsides (1 credit): A course of five evening sessions, resulting in a single-poem broadside written, designed, and printed by each student in the Advanced Poetry Workshop (ENG 401). The broadsides are featured at the Senior Poetry Reading at the end of the semester. Content: Watzek Archive (1-2 credits): Students engage in a variety of projects involving the Watzek Library Archives. A member of the Special Collections staff acts as supervisor.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Sophomore standing and consent required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 1-2.
ENG 251 Radical Film
Content: Examination of innovative techniques in cinema and the implications they hold for determining the meanings of particular films. Viewings of short films, full-length independent films, and films made within Hollywood studios that break from narrative, generic, and stylistic conventions. Readings in film criticism and film theory will inform discussions, giving a basis for approaching films from historical and cultural perspectives. Review of some of the major influences on the experimental American cinema, including surrealism, expressionism, Soviet montage, and global new wave movements.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 258 Women and Film
Content: Survey of key chapters in the history of women and film, through the analysis of films as texts and a survey of written works examining the representation of women in film and their role in, or exclusion from, the film industry and independent filmmaking. Topics include stardom, actresses in genres such as screwball and melodrama, women directors, and women in world cinema. Readings include guides to film form, feminist film theory and criticism, historical scholarship, memoirs, and biographies. Class meetings will combine discussion, lecture, and film analysis, and students will write analytically and creatively in a series of commentaries and longer essays. All films must be viewed in full either at scheduled group screenings or individually in preparation for class discussion.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 271 Law and Literature
Content: Students will bring legal cases and constructs to bear on their understanding of works of fiction while using literary interpretation methods and narrative theories to construe legal documents and trials. To what extent can we read spectacular trials as storytelling contests that pit one genre against another? How do some of the same theories of character and representation inform literary interpretation and legal doctrine? How does the literary device of the unreliable narrator illuminate the problem of testimonial injustice? What is the relationship between legal and poetic justice? Historical and thematic focus may vary.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Every third year, fall semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 276 Animals and Animal Rights in Literature
Content: Investigation of the literary history of animal being and rights, chiefly in English/Anglophone poetry and fiction circa 1770-2000 but extending back to Homer, Genesis, Aesop, Aristotle, Descartes, and other authors' works prior to the outset of the animal-rights era and its key texts by Anna Barbauld, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (esp. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), William Wordsworth, Anna Sewell (in Black Beauty), and others. We'll explore what such narratives reveal about the complexity and ethical perplexity of our relationships to nonhuman creatures, and the uncanny vistas they help us to glimpse. We'll also read some relevant, fairly recent animal-rights theory and philosophy, and students will conduct some basic research.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 281 From Scroll to Codex: Working With Medieval Manuscripts
Content: History of the development of the book from scroll to printing press; paleography and editing; history of manuscript illumination in the West, of reading practices, and of how social developments changed the nature and uses of books. Students work with medieval manuscripts and early printed books.
Prerequisites: None.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 300 Creative Writing: Fiction 2
Content: The second in a sequence, this class shifts from the reading of contemporary fiction to the emulation of these models, and students' creation of original work. Some exercises and free-writes are assigned, but the bulk of the course is focused on generating short stories to be workshopped by the class. The readings focus on the process of writing itself and its psychology.
Prerequisites: ENG 200.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 301 Creative Writing: Poetry 2
Content: Discussion of student work with occasional reference to work by earlier poets. Students develop skills as writers and readers of poetry.
Prerequisites: ENG 201.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 303 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 2
Content: Conducted in a round-table form, with students producing about half of the work to be studied, this peer-review-centered course features sections of writing workshop and craft in which students will produce two short, original nonfiction pieces in memoir or personal-essay form. Some familiarity with major nonfiction writers is assumed, and these writers form the core of the touchstone texts.
Prerequisites: ENG 203 or ENG 210.
Usually offered: Annually, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 309 Ancient Masterpieces and English Literature
Content: Study of stories from antiquity that have influenced countless generations of writers and artists. This course traces these works' influences in English literature, both in early-modern translations (chiefly of Homer) and via literary adaptations and allusions, including a few from the Romantic and Victorian eras. Students will grapple with awesome tales of gods and monsters and gain a better understanding of such foundational literary genres as epic, tragedy, and lyric. Texts may include works by Homer, Sappho, the King James Bible, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, as well as later responses to antiquity such as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," Milton's "Samson Agonistes," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," and Tennyson's "Ulysses."
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 310 Medieval Literature
Content: Study of the literature and culture of the European Middle Ages, with an emphasis on England. Topics vary, but may include romance and epic; travel, including for trade, pilgrimage, and crusade; saints, devotional life, and mysticism; Jewish/Christian/Muslim interactions; human/animal relations; chivalry and humanism; autobiography and the self; the political, social, and religious contexts that affected the emergence of English as a literary language. English readings may include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Margery Kempe's Book, Julian of Norwich's Revelations, The Cloud of Unknowing, St. Erkenwald, Sir Orfeo, Mandeville's Travels, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and the poetry of Robert Henryson, as well as poems and plays by anonymous writers in Old and Middle English. Readings will be in the original and translation. May be repeated twice for credit. See registrar's office for assistance.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 311 Literature of the English Renaissance
Content: Developments in poetry, fiction, and drama during the Elizabethan period and the 17th century. Genres such as the sonnet and sonnet sequences; the pastoral, heroic, and Ovidian verse; satire; examples from non-Shakespearean dramatists; comedy; tragedy. May include Browne, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Marlowe, Marvell, Milton, Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Surrey, Wyatt.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 312 The Early English Novel
Content: The process by which, over the course of the 18th century, the novel became Britain's preeminent genre. Topics include the relation of novel to romance, debates over the morality of fiction, claims of novels not to be novels, women as readers and writers, and the period's various subgenres (e.g., epistolary novel, gothic novel, sentimental novel). Possible authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, Jane Austen.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 313 Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1780
Content: An introduction to British literature written in "the long 18th century." Covers the full range of the period's genres - plays, poems, essays, prose narratives - and includes many of the period's major authors (George Etherege, John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, John Gay, Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith). Particular attention paid to the relation between satiric and sentimental depictions of human existence.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 314 Romanticism in the Age of Revolution
Content: Marked by the seismic shift of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, the British Romantic period (1785-1832) was an age of many revolutions: political, industrial, and scientific; social, sexual, and literary - a watershed for poetry (Lyrical Ballads) as for painting and the novel (Frankenstein). The epoch's birth of modernity occurred amid rebellion and reform, abolition and feminism, solitude and travel, producing new, still-enduring conceptions of nature, imagination, and feeling. Authors may include Blake, Equiano, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Mary and Percy Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Hemans.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 315 The Victorians: Heroes, Decadents, and Madwomen
Content: Study of the literature and culture of the Victorian period (1837-1901). Juxtaposes fictional and nonfictional depictions of urbanization and class conflict; considers how the information explosion, industrial revolution, and resulting commodity culture created new anxieties about the meaning of art; examines tensions between Darwinian scientific theory and religious faith; explores the gender politics of Victorian sensation fiction and children's fiction; and investigates how imperial expansion informed the literature of the period. Authors may include Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Wilkie Collins, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 316 Modern British and Irish Literature
Content: A survey of literary works that reimagine and expand the scope of the novel and short story, beginning with and emphasizing early-20th-century experiments with form and ending with consideration of recent and emerging new voices. Responses to crises and aftermaths of two world wars, major cultural changes, and global geopolitical shifts, producing fiction that gives voice to transition, instability, and possibility. Radical innovations by modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; novels that pose challenging philosophical and social questions; writing that pushes boundaries, reinvents tradition, and envisions new horizons. While emphasis is on fiction, some poetry will be included as well. Authors may include Joyce, Woolf, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 318 Modern Poetry
Content: A variety of experiments in anglophone poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring what a poem can mean and be. May include Owen, Stein, Auden, Moore, Loy, Bishop, Plath, Baraka, Levertov, Knight, and others. More recent poets may include Yusef Komunyakaa, Jorie Graham, Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, Jane Wong, Nikky Finney, Ada Limón, and more.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 319 Postcolonial Literature: Anglophone Africa, India, Caribbean
Content: Literary works and essays exploring the literary and cultural issues that arise from the questioning and collapse of the colonial world order. Topics include decolonization and national allegories; authenticity and the invention of tradition; constructions of race; the role of women in empire and the nation; adolescence and the novel of education; Western travel and primitivism; violence and trauma. Authors include Chinua Achebe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Aimé Césaire, J.M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, E.M. Forster, Una Marson, Arundhati Roy, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 320 Inventing America: Literature of Colonialism and the Early Republic, 1540-1830
Content: This is a course built on questions: What is America - a land, a nation, a culture, an ideology? How did people imagine America and the American experience before the U.S. was founded, or in decades immediately following its constitution? Which of these early ideas has influenced the way we live and think today? What counts as "early American" literature - Native American tales as well as Puritan captivity narratives? How about the writings of Spanish conquistadors? What do our answers say about who Americans are, who they (we?) were, who we would like to be moving forward, who we would like to have been all along? Texts may also include autobiographies, sermons, essays, poems, and novels.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 321 National Sins, National Dreams: American Literature 1830-1865
Content: Literature from the tumultuous decades preceding the Civil War, when the nation was consumed with debates over slavery, religion, Indian removal, national expansion, national identity, and the rights of women and wage laborers. What is a person, and who will count as one? How do we constitute communities? What is our relationship to history and the future? How can we avoid living lives of quiet desperation? Texts include high art and popular fiction; slave narratives; adventure, romance, and protest fiction; lyric poetry; experimental nonfiction. Authors include Apess, Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Davis, Dickinson, and Whitman.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 322 Getting Real: Post-Civil War American Literature
Content: Study of American literature from the 1870s through the early 20th century. Course will cover several overlapping, sometimes adversarial literary trends (realism, regionalism, naturalism), all of which are informed by animating tensions associated with slavery and its aftermath; urbanization, immigration, and displacement; the emergence of the New Woman; and the rise of social Darwinism. Recurring themes include realism and its relationship to romance; literary excursions into the "lower" regions (of class hierarchy, the physical body, the psyche); conflict between human subjects and the variant forces (biological, social, historical) that define them; and imaginative engagement with the pre-Civil War past, especially as it touches upon persisting fault lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Readings may include works by Twain, Zitkala-Sa, Jewett, Chesnutt, Chopin, James, Dreiser, Norris, and Wharton.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 323 American Modernism
Content: Study of American literature between 1900 and World War II, especially the interwar years. Readings consist of short stories, novels, and poetry, supplemented by essays and manifestos. Broad topics include literary "modernism" (is it a historical period? an attitude? a style?); American modernism's relationship to European modernism and 19th-century realism; "stay-at-home" modernism vs. "expat" modernism; and the place of African American literature and the Harlem Renaissance within American modernism at large. Emphasis on formal experimentation as a response to global transformations (World War I, the first sexual revolution, technological advancement, innovations in the visual arts) and its expression of various feelings and attitudes inspired by the perceived complexity, multiplicity, and newness of the modern world. Readings may include longer works by Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. Poetry by Eliot, H.D., Mina Loy, Williams, Hughes, Toomer, Stevens, and Marianne Moore.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 324 Post-World War II American Literature
Content: Exploration of changes to language and discourse apparent in novels and stories as they engage with mass media (film, television, etc.), popular culture, and technologies contributing to a shrinking (globalization) and precarious (atomic and nuclear) world during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Readings of challenging and provocative narratives in relation to questions of identity, metafiction, parody, and fictional genre against the cultural-political backdrops of postmodernism, the Cold War, and consumerism. Authors may include Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Susan Choi, Octavia Butler, Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin, Philip K. Dick, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Safran Foer, William Gibson, and J.D. Salinger.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 326 African American Literature
Content: In this class, we will study the African American literary tradition from slavery through the present. Topics will include the particularity and plurality of the African American experience; Black authors' participation in and departures from the broader tradition of American literature; and discussion of what it means to define oneself and one's community, other people and their communities, or a literary tradition with reference to race. Authors may include Wheatley, Douglass, Jacobs, Sejour, Washington, Du Bois, Chesnutt, Hughes, Bennett, Toomer, Larsen, Ellison, Baldwin, Wright, Brooks, Giovanni, Baraka, Lorde, Morrison, Butler, Cole, Dove, Trethewey, Smith.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 330 Chaucer
Content: The poetry of Chaucer in its literary, historical, social, and religious contexts. Topics may include the relationship between the sacred and the profane, the representations of men and women in 14th-century English society, the rise of the vernacular in the later Middle Ages, medieval attitudes toward poetry and authorship, the influence of continental European literary forms on English traditions, manuscript culture and ways of reading and writing before the advent of printing, the characteristics of different medieval literary genres, and the critical reception of Chaucer. Readings, predominantly from The Canterbury Tales, are in Middle English.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 331 Shakespeare: Early Works
Content: Critical reading of plays representative of the development of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. Usually covers six or seven plays and selected poetry, typically including The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 332 Shakespeare: Later Works
Content: Critical reading of plays representative of the development of Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, romances. Usually covers six or seven plays and selected poetry from 1604 to 1611, typically including Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 333 Major Figures
Content: Detailed examination of writers introduced in other courses. Figures have included Austen, Blake, the Brontës, Ellison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf. May be repeated for credit with a change of topic; however, registration for subsequent sections must be done via the registrar's office.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 334 Special Topics in Literature
Content: Intensive study of a particular theme, genre, or movement. Topic will be announced each time the course is offered. May be taken twice for credit with different content; however, registration for subsequent sections must be done via the registrar's office.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Every third year, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 340 Topics in Literary Theory/Criticism
Content: Emphasis on a particular topic in literary theory and criticism, to be chosen by the professor. Topics may include theories of meaning, literature and ethics, feminist literary theory, speech-act theory and performance studies, and theories of value. May be taken twice for credit with change of topic.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Alternate Years, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 400 Creative Writing: Fiction 3
Content: Third in a series and primarily a writing workshop, emphasizing secondary readings that consider life as a writer after graduation, including the world of publishing, MFA programs, agents, and internships. Students complete a long project (a suite of short stories; a novella; and, potentially, the beginning of a novel). Small class size emphasizes individualized instruction.
Prerequisites: ENG 200 and 300.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 401 Creative Writing: Poetry 3
Content: An opportunity for experienced student writers to develop their skills as poets and work on a sustained project. A workshop in which at least half of class time will be spent discussing student writing, with an emphasis on revision. Work will include the examination of literary models.
Prerequisites: ENG 301.
Restrictions: Senior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 403 Creative Writing: Nonfiction 3
Content: Third class in a series; primarily a writing workshop. Students focus exclusively on developing a series of pieces through drafts and the peer-review process in either memoir, long-form journalism, or research-based essay. The small class size models a publishing house or editorial workshop at a magazine. The semester culminates in a public reading of work.
Prerequisites: ENG 203 or 210. ENG 303.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 444 Practicum
Content: Experience in editing, writing, and other aspects of publishing. Specifics vary depending on placement with a sponsoring publishing house, journal, or related enterprise. May be repeated for credit.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 1-4.
ENG 450 Senior Seminar
Content: Varies in focus and content. Subjects addressed in the context of current critical discourse. Students write a long, research-based paper.
Prerequisites: ENG 205, ENG 206, and two 300-level literature courses.
Restrictions: Senior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 490 Thesis
Content: Independent research project, based upon revision of senior seminar paper, suitable for granting departmental honors. Details determined by student in conference with supervising faculty members.
Prerequisites: ENG 450 and permission of department to pursue honors.
Restrictions: Senior standing required.
Usually offered: Annually, spring semester.
Semester credits: 4.
ENG 499 Independent Study
Content: Opportunities for well-prepared students to design and pursue an advanced, substantive course of independent learning. Details determined by the student and the supervising instructor.
Prerequisites: None.
Restrictions: Junior standing and consent required.
Usually offered: Annually, fall and spring semester.
Semester credits: 1-4.