In this senior-year capstone required for students in the Topics in English concentration of the English major (and optional for those in English and English Teaching concentrations), students will work in dialogue with their classmates and professor to develop a major project of their own design: a single thesis-like paper, an electronic project, or a connected portfolio of smaller projects. Capstone projects will consolidate students' previous study of English and help each student assess what they have learned, bringing their studies to a sense of completion and providing a direction for their future interests. 3 undergraduate hours. No graduate credit. Prerequisite: Restricted to senior English majors.
An introduction to English linguistics with emphasis on the phonetic, syntactic, and semantic structures of English; language variation, standardization, and change; language legislation and linguistic rights; English as a world language; and the study of language in American schools. Same as BTW 402. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours.
Introduction to the form of English spoken and written prior to about AD 1100. Exploring concepts of cultural, historical, and linguistic change, students will learn to read Old English texts in the original. Readings include examples from the prose tradition (e.g., Bede's story of the poet Cædmon and Ælfric's Lives of Saints) as well as poetic texts (e.g., The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer). Same as MDVL 407. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours.
A selection of Chaucer's major works read in Middle English. Instructors will usually emphasize either the Canterbury Tales or Troilus and Criseyde and the dream visions, but alternate combinations of texts are possible. Students will also be introduced to Chaucer's fourteenth-century context. Same as MDVL 411. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced topics course exploring the literatures of medieval Britain and Ireland, concentrating on texts in Old and/or Middle English but with some attention to Celtic, French, Latin, and Norse texts in translation. Same as CWL 417 and MDVL 410. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced topics course devoted to dramatic practice in the medieval and/or early modern British Isles. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Survey of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Reading assignments will reflect the generic diversity and historical breadth of Shakespeare's work. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced study of poetry and prose written between the reign of Elizabeth I and the late seventeenth century. Authors may include Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, John Donne, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and others. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced study of British literature between 1660 (the restoration of Charlies II to the throne) and 1800. The course focuses on poems, plays, novels, and nonfiction works from the period, paying particular attention to issues of gender relations, colonialism, imperial expansion, the slave trade, and class tensions. Writers covered may include Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Joseph Addison, Bernard Mandeville, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eliza Heywood, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Focused study of the major male and female playwrights who wrote between 1660 (the reopening of the theaters after the Interregnum) and roughly 1800. Particular attention will be devoted to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of theatrical performance, and to the major issues dealt with on the London stage: sexual morality, the role of women in a patrilineal society, and the problems of empire, trade, and colonialism. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Focused study of British and Anglophone fiction in the eighteenth century. Authors may include Defoe, Swift, Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Burney, Walpole, Radcliffe, and others. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Focused study of British literature between roughly 1785 and 1832. Authors may include Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Austen and others. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
From Jane Austen's witty couples to Charles Dickens's haunted reformers and Bram Stoker's aristocratic vampires, the characters, stories, and novels created by British writers in the nineteenth century still fascinate us today. This research class gives students a chance to read deeply in the prose fiction of this period; texts may include William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
This course will examine British and Irish modernism, one of the most dynamic, provocative, and experimental periods in literary history. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rapid introduction of new technologies, the upheaval of global politics, the radical transformation of gender roles, and the traumatic fallout from two world wars. The period's literature and art processed these turbulent cultural experiences through extreme formal experimentation, and this course will consider many of the key works emerging from the modernist and avant-garde movements. Among the authors we'll study are Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Beckett. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
This course considers how the unresolved problems of the past continue to haunt the literature of contemporary Britain, Ireland, and the postcolonial Anglophone world. These "returns of the repressed" range from personal traumas and difficult truths that have not been fully processed to groups of people who have suffered systematic inequality and violence. The texts we will read in ENGL 442 address the traumatic collapse of the post-war British empire, focusing not only on Britain's uneasy relationship to immigrants and postcolonial subjects but also on shifting gender roles, changing conceptions of sexual identity, and anxieties about literature's continued relevance in the context of new media. Readings may include works by Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Inspired by waves of radical thought and experimental writing that swept across Europe around 1800, Romanticism came late to America and stayed longer than it did across the Atlantic. This class examines the period known as "American Romanticism" (1820-1865), which saw the rise of a rich national literature even as the nation itself teetered on the edge of collapse, tested by economic panics, westward expansion, brawling electoral politics, and fierce debates over the future of slavery. Writers appearing in this course might include Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
After the Civil War the United States entered a period of accelerating modernization and change. This course addresses how the nation's writers helped build modern America in response to a host of exciting and daunting developments in economics, science, and politics, including the enfranchisement of African Americans, Jim Crow segregation laws, growing income inequality, the rise of unions and anarchist movements, the invention of the automobile and the department store, new sciences such as including Darwinism and psychoanalysis, and American empire-building in places like Hawai'i and the Philippines. Writers studied might include Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Zitkala-Sa, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
American literature in the age of Modernism includes some of the most influential and provocative writing in the nation's history. American writers responded to a series of upheavals including changing gender and race relations, World War I, the "Roaring Twenties," and the Great Depression by pursuing both boundary-breaking themes and revolutionary experiments in form. Readings will include a generous selection from such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Dashiell Hammett, D'Arcy McNickle, Carson McCullers, and many others. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Examines American literature from the end of WWII to today, an era when U.S. society, politics, and culture came under pressure from such upheavals as the feminist movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the rise of neoliberalism--all of them occurring under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. While writers struggled with the changes and dangers of a nation and world in such unprecedented flux, the poetry, plays, fiction, memoirs, and films they produced in response to this new precariousness forged a fertile artistic moment, in popular literature that sustained previous traditions (in realism, science fiction, children's literature, and romance) and in an avant-garde opposed to all forms of social and literary conformity. Writers studied might include Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas Pynchon, Amiri Baraka, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Alice Walker. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Intensive study of the work of one or two major authors. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary. May be repeated for graduate credit if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced topics seminar exploring literary expressions of minority experience in America. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Graduate students may repeat as topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced seminar on any of a variety of topics in literature and culture, including those that bridge traditional historical periods, focus on themes or movements, and cross disciplinary boundaries. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced seminar devoted to topics in British, American, and Anglophone fiction from approximately 1800 to the present day. Continental fiction in English translation may occasionally be considered. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary. May be repeated for graduate credit if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Advanced topics seminar exploring the intersection of literary study and other scholarly disciplines. The disciplines students study vary each term, but past courses have examined connections between literature and psychology, forensic science, environmental studies, and the law. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary; Graduate students may repeat if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
From the developing field of "ecocriticism" to new historical examinations of canonical writers such as Thomson, Thoreau, or the "nature poets", to the new field of Science Studies, this advanced seminar examines a range of specialized topics related to literature and the environment. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. May be repeated in separate semesters for graduate credit if topics vary; for undergraduates to a maximum of 6 undergraduate hours if topics vary with permission of the English advising office. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Introduces students to the challenges of "turning data into narrative." With a focus on students' professional development as writers, this course emphasizes the research and rhetorical skills required to communicate current scientific research in earth and environmental science through non-fiction narrative forms--the investigative essay, long-form journalism, personal memoir, and op-ed--aimed at a general audience. Same as ESE 477. 3 undergraduate hours. No graduate credit.
Study of the history and theory of written composition. This course explores basic rhetorical principles, various theoretical perspectives in the field of composition/rhetoric, and helps students form practical approaches to the guidance of, response to, and structuring of student writing. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.
Examines the relationship of computer technology to the larger field of writing studies. Topics include a historical overview of computers and other writing technologies; current instructional practices and their relation to various writing theories; research on word processing, computer-mediated communication, and hypermedia; and the computer as a research tool. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: Junior standing and consent of instructor. Students must have a basic knowledge of word processing.
Same as CLCV 430, CWL 430, GER 405, SLAV 430, SPAN 436, and TRST 431. See SLAV 430.
Introductory course in methods and techniques in research and literary criticism.
Reviews theory and research on the social and historical development of writing systems, including consideration of the relationship between oral and written language, writing and other graphic representation systems, alternative technologies, the evolution of writing systems, and the social functions of literacy. Same as CI 563. Prerequisite: Admission to the graduate programs of a unit offering the graduate specialization in Writing Studies, or consent of instructor.
Intensive study of selected texts, genres, themes, or theoretical issues in medieval British literature (usually focusing on either Old English or Middle English texts), or of scholarly methods in medieval studies (such as editing, paleography, or bibliography and methods of historical research). Same as MDVL 514. May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of medieval studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Shakespeare's work or consent of instructor.
Seminar dedicated to the study of texts, genres, themes, and/or theoretical issues from the non-Shakespearean literature of the early modern period (approximately 1500-1700). 4 graduate hours. No professional credit. May be repeated in separate terms to a maximum of 16 hours, if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Renaissance studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of eighteenth-century studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Victorian studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of modern British studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American studies or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American literature or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of graduate study of literature or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of graduate study of literature or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One year of graduate study of literature or consent of instructor.
May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to criticism or consent of instructor.
Focuses on the diverse research paradigms that are often employed in the study of writing processes. Topics will vary each term. Examines past and current writing research in the topic area with an emphasis on the critical examination of research designs and the influence of epistemologies on the interpretation of data. Same as CI 565. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in writing studies or consent of instructor.
Examines the relationships among writing studies, theories of pedagogy, and the practice of the writing teacher and administrator. Also focuses on particular problems or particular schools of thought. Typical topics include Writing Program Design and Administration; Writing, Thinking, and Problem Solving; The Classroom as a Research Site; Collaborative Learning; and Writing Across the Curriculum and Discourse Communities. Requirements will vary with instructors and topics. Same as CI 566. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in writing studies or consent of instructor.
Focuses on the modes of inquiry central to writing research. The course topic will vary each term and may address such issues as cognitive research and writing, ethnographic research and writing, and discourse analysis and writing. Same as CI 569. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in writing studies or consent of instructor.
Inquiry into theory and research in one or more areas of digital scholarship, including new media studies, digital humanities, social media studies, and/or critical code studies. Same as CI 586. 4 graduate hours. No professional credit. May be repeated in separate terms up to 8 hours, if topics vary.
Independent study under the guidance of a member of the graduate faculty. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours.
Seminar on undergraduate pedagogy for new graduate instructors. Individual sections will focus on the teaching of film, literature, or rhetoric. 0 to 4 graduate hours. No professional credit. Approved for Letter and S/U grading. May be repeated by PhD students to a maximum of 8 hours as topics vary. Credit is not given for more than 8 hours, but course may be repeated for no credit. Prerequisite: Graduate standing in the Department of English or consent of instructor. Students needing the proseminar for their programs will be given priority enrollment.
Guidance in writing theses for doctoral degrees. Approved for S/U grading only. May be repeated up to a maximum of 16 hours. Prerequisite: Doctoral candidate standing.