[IAI Code: F2908] Thoughtful viewing of diverse films, along with ample discussion and critical reading and writing, to gain understanding of cinematic expression and of film's capacity to entertain and to exert artistic and social influence. Same as MACS 104.
Introduction to critical analysis of prose fiction. Explores a wide range of short and long fiction across historical periods; examines narrative strategies such as plot, character, and point of view. Special emphasis placed on good literary critical writing. Course is similar to ENGL 103 except for the additional writing component. Credit is not given for both ENGL 109 and ENGL 103. Prerequisite: Completion of campus Composition I general education requirement.
This survey of British literature introduces students to texts ranging from the early Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Written from a diverse set of perspectives, these texts will cover multiple literary genres (including but not limited to prose narrative, lyric poetry, and drama) and will often be linked thematically.
Introduction to the study of science fiction, the genre that has both contributed to scientific knowledge and attempted to make sense of the changes that have taken place in the world since the Enlightenment, the onset of industrialization, and the acceleration of technology. Texts are taken from a variety of literary and pop culture sources: pulps and magazines, novels and films, comics and TV shows.
Introduction to graphic narratives---comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, manga, webcomics, and so on---from a diverse panoply of cultural, formal, and historical traditions.
Topics course that varies each semester and by section. The topics offered each semester will be listed in the Class Schedule. Approved for letter and S/U grading. May be repeated.
Introduction to the study of literature in the twenty-first century. This course will expand your sense of what literature is and where it happens, including discussion of old and new literary forms (from novels, poems, and plays to comic books, video games, and films). Along the way, students will explore some of the literary and cultural opportunities (such as author readings, scholarly talks, and performances) available to them on a large public university campus, with two goals in mind: to develop your critical interpretive skills and to acquaint you with the discipline of literary studies as it is being practiced all around us today, both inside and outside the conventional classroom.
Introduction to the diverse literatures and cultures of the global Middle Ages (approximately 500-1500 CE). Students will read works by medieval authors in Modern English translation, with particular attention to placing works in their historical and material contexts. Same as CWL 253 and MDVL 201. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Readings in English and continental literary masterpieces with attention to significant cultural influences. Same as CWL 255. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Study in Anglophone and global texts from the period 1600 to 1800, with attention to cultural and historical contexts. Same as CWL 257. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
While Queen Victoria was on the throne (1837-1901), Britain became a world power, but often looked backwards to the lovely worlds of the past. Many of the era’s great literary works reflect this tension between realism and romance: between the realism of being a poor governess and the romance of finding true love in Jane Eyre; the tragedy of losing your best friend and the hope of emotional survival in In Memoriam; the practical work of building a useful device and the fantasy of visiting the dystopian future in The Time Machine. Literature studied in this class will include poetry, prose, drama, and fiction, possibly including works by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Seacole, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Olive Schreiner, or George Bernard Shaw. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
[IAI Code: H3912] This course surveys more than a thousand years of British literature from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance and well into the eighteenth century. But what does "British literature" really mean, especially in the context of an island archipelago populated by multiple nations (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) and repeatedly subjected to foreign rule (either by violent invasion or dynastic succession)? The range of texts we thus characterize as "early British literature" is staggering, and part of our goal in this course will simply be to appreciate the sheer volume and breadth of written work created in Britain and Ireland between the sixth and eighteenth centuries. We will do this through a necessarily selective sampling of historical periods, languages, and genres. Our authors will range from the famous (e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) to the lesser-known (e.g., Marie de France, Lady Mary Wroth, and Eliza Haywood) to the unknown (e.g., the anonymous Beowulf-poet). Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement and ENGL 200.
Study of literature, philosophy, visual and performing arts, social criticism, and popular sciences of the Anglo-American modernist period (approximately 1900-1950), with attention to broad cultural issues. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Arthurian myth and legend is one of the most enduring literary traditions of Western Europe, and the characters of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain and Mordred were as popular in the Middle Ages as they are today. Originating in early medieval Wales, the legends traveled through England to France and Germany and throughout the modern world. Students will study the development of the Arthurian tradition in chronicles, poetry, romances, lais, and fabliaux, comparing variations across cultural and historical boundaries. Same as CWL 216 and MDVL 216. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
[IAI Code: H3905] Representative readings of Shakespeare's drama and poetry in the context of his age, with emphasis on major plays; selections vary from section to section. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Explores the mutual influences of science and literature in some key literary and non-literary texts. Covers scientific texts, literary works, and cultural theory to explore how and why scientific knowledge is intimately linked to literature.
Focuses on novels and short stories produced in Britain and Ireland between approximately 1800 and 1900. Students will learn to read these texts both as exemplars of literary form and expressions of Regency and Victorian culture. Authors taught may include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Olive Schreiner, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Explores the diversity of poetry in English from 1960 to the present, focusing on various poetic movements (the Beats, confessionals, New York school, ecopoetics, postcolonial poetry, poetry of witness, and spoken word). Poets for consideration include Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, Derek Walcott, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, and Mark Doty. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
[IAI Code: H3914] This large-scale survey course offers students background in a wide range of genres, authors, and texts, focusing on "early American literature," which ranges from pre-Columbian indigenous narratives to nineteenth century novels, poems, and plays. The material studied ranges across multiple centuries and continents, and includes a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and gendered perspectives. Writers may include Christopher Columbus, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement and ENGL 200.
[IAI Code: H3910D] An introduction to the study of early African American literary and cultural production, ranging from the earliest writings by African descended people in British North America in the eighteenth century to the end of World War I. At each turn, we will situate texts in their cultural and historical contexts, attending not only to the specificity of a particular text's moment, but also to the forces of contingency and tradition at play in the construction of literary, cultural, and political communities. Throughout our discussions we will think about both the "African-ness" and "American-ness" of African American literature as collective and imaginative processes. Early African Americans wrote for a variety of reasons—philosophical, political, pleasurable, instrumental—and protesting slavery and racism was just one (albeit an important one) among many of those reasons. We will read letters, poems, sermons, songs, constitutions and bylaws for religious and civic organizations, stories, and texts that defy easy categorization. Writers may include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances E.W. Harper, William Wells Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Ida B. Wells. Same as AFRO 259 and CWL 259. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Introduction to the study of the dominant genres or types U.S. cinema. Examines the elements that constitute genres (such as visual and narrative patterns), the formation and reshaping of genres by filmmakers and the entertainment industry, the social and cultural factors that influence the genre cycles and subgenres, and the landmark works of each genre. The course treats several genres in historical perspective or focus on a single genre.
Explores key issues in America cinema during the second half of the twentieth century, connecting central problems of film studies (e.g., authorship, genre, narratology, style, gender analysis, and the spectacle of violence) to moments of major transition in the American film industry (e.g., the Red Scare and the end of the Production Code in the 1950s; the emergence of the New Hollywood and the breakdown of the studio system in the 1960s; and the rise of the mega-blockbuster in the 1970s). Same as MACS 273. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Studies a variable selection of popular film genres produced and circulated in Asia (e.g., martial arts, horror, musicals, anime, melodramas, science fiction, monster movies, comedy) that have an impact across the region, with emphasis on East and Southeast Asia, and beyond. Takes a historical and transnational comparative approach to analyzing shifting narrative and visual and other cinematic realizations of each genre across different contexts, including Western reception and cross-cultural adaptations. Same as CWL 276 and EALC 276.
Examination of selected postcolonial literature, theory, and film as texts that "write back" to dominant European representations of power, identity, gender and the Other. Postcolonial writers, critics and filmmakers studied may include Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Aime Cesaire, Ousmane Sembene, Chinua Achebe, Michelle Cliff, Mahesweta Devi, Buchi Emecheta, Derek Walcott and Marlene Nourbese-Philip. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Introduction to Asian American literary studies and culture through the reading of major works of literature selected from but not limited to the following American ethnic subgroups: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Pakistani, and Vietnamese. Same as AAS 286. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Study of selected topics. Approved for both letter and S/U grading. May be repeated to a maximum of 6 hours. Students may register in more than one section per term. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.
Introduction to the critical frameworks and methods that have had the greatest impact on the field of literary studies. Students will read, discuss, and write about numerous theoretical approaches, which might include (but are not limited to) critical race studies, environmental theory, feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and structuralism. No previous background with theory is required. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor. Restricted to English majors.
Language variation and change from the earliest forms of English to the present day, with emphasis on the rise of Standard English and the social, geographic, and cultural aspects of linguistic change in English. Credit is not given for both ENGL 310 and ENGL 311.
Explores topics on representations of non-heteronormative sexuality in canonical and recovered historical texts and in contemporary literature, on literature by LGBT authors, and on theories of sexuality that pertain to systems of textual and cultural meaning. Same as GWS 325. May be repeated in separate terms to a maximum of 6 hours, if topics vary.
Writing-intensive, variable-topic course designed to improve English majors' ability to produce clear, well-organized, analytically sound and persuasively argued essays relevant to English studies. Introduces students to research techniques through the examination of critical texts appropriate to the course topic. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement; one year of college literature or consent of instructor. For majors only.
Extended investigation of major subjects and issues in cinema and other media; topics vary and typically include studies of author/directors, genres, historical movements, critical approaches, and themes. Same as MACS 373. May be repeated with permission of English advising office to a maximum of 6 hours if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college-level course in film studies or literature.
Advanced-level work in the field of Writing Studies. Building upon a traditional disciplinary understanding of writing as rhetoric, this course invites students to call upon sociological, anthropological, and/or ideological approaches to the study of writing in order to understand the myriad ways that writing makes meaning(s). See Class Schedule for topics. May be repeated in separate terms to a maximum of 6 hours. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.
Advanced study of selected topics. Approved for both letter and S/U grading. May be repeated in the same or separate terms to a maximum of 6 hours. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor.
Study of selected topics. Restricted to English and English education majors with a 3.33 average who are working towards the degree with distinction in English or in English education. May be repeated to a maximum of 6 hours. Prerequisite: Enroll in undergraduate advising office.
An open-topic, discussion-oriented seminar aimed at majors who have shown high skill and intensive interest in the area of English studies. May be repeated up to 6 hours in the same term to a maximum of 12 hours. Prerequisite: A 3.33 grade point average or consent of the English Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies. Restricted to 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.
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.
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.
Same as AAS 495, FAA 495, GWS 425, and THEA 468. See FAA 495.