Luciana Marques | 2:00-2:50pm MWF

E329 introduces the study of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in natural languages, with examples from English and other languages. Pragmatics is the study of general principles that communicators invoke when producing and interpreting language in context. Discourse analysis studies the properties of specific types of language use in specific settings, e.g., conversational, advertising, legal, medical, educational, as well as such topics as politeness, gender, genre, identity, and culture, all areas of exciting current research and discovery. In this class, you will understand and be able to make analytic use of the essential concepts in the study of pragmatics and discourse analysis; you will become familiar with variant terminology; you will become proficient in basic linguistic analysis and will begin to apply analytic techniques to data you have collected yourself.

Lynn Badia |12:30-1:45pm TR

This course fulfills a Category 3 elective requirement for English majors.

How do we imagine the future in literary texts? From post-apocalyptic landscapes to the alternative worlds of Indigenous futurism, we will analyze a range of speculative realities offered to us in science fiction. This course explores the history of the genre and the topics that continually animate it, including utopia/dystopia/heterotopia, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and resource wars. We will examine science and speculative fiction through a range of media (novels, films, short stories, manifestoes, etc.) and think critically about the questions it poses concerning science, community, ecology, colonialism, and the future of the human species.

William Marvin | 12:00-12:50pm MWF

This course fulfills a Category 4 elective requirement for English majors and world literature for English Education concentrators. It also counts toward the Religious Studies minor.

The gods who emerged from the timelessness of pre-creation, the cannibal gods and the cosmic gods who with war shaped the order of existence, and the gods who loved sacrifice, ruled in discord, and had ado with mortals in the guises of human-and-animal-kind: These are the personified inscrutables that “western myth” built a coherent core of narration around, and to this narration attached plots and characters in endless variety. Even the story-telling itself, like creation, began in time immemorial. Its main cycles coalesced in spite of migrations and the wrack of civilizations, long even before the advent of writing and literature. But literature, when it came, changed everything. No longer was hieratic myth, the mythology of priests, to be solely the property of cult. This course is about how poets in the age of writing reshaped the potential of the gods. We will track the gods’ wanderings from their cultic origins in magic and hymn to their fluorescence in Sumerian and Greek creation myth, Indic and Germanic dragon slaying, Greek siege epic around the war for Helen of Troy, up to the point of the Roman desacralization of the gods in a modern kind of erudite, humane irony. We shall discover furthermore how myth first prompted literary criticism, when readers asked if what Homer said about the immortal gods was true? So, the course will also cover the history of reading myth from classical antiquity to the present, develop this history into a set of critical perspectives, and apply these as hermeneutic tools to the myths as we read them. 

Leif Sorensen | 2:00-2:50pm MWF

This course fulfills a Category 3 elective requirement for English majors.

This class offers a survey of contemporary ethnic writing from the U.S. We will read a range of genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and graphic novels). Because contemporary writing is in dialogue with a range of media, we will also watch films and discuss digital art and storytelling. Our texts include popular commercial blockbusters, critically acclaimed works from mainstream publishers, and lesserknown experimental works from small presses. Focusing on ethnic writing published since the year 2000 will give us an opportunity to think about how ethnicity functions in the twenty-first century U.S. and to consider how different artists imagine the future of identity. Authors covered will likely include Claudia Rankine, Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Valeria Luiselli, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Stephen Graham Jones, and others. Students will write a final project on a topic of their choosing as well as a
series of short papers focused on individual texts.

Lynn Badia | 11:00-12:15pm TR

This course fulfills a Category 2 or 3 elective requirement for English majors.

In this course we will explore how literary narratives shape our knowledge and experience of the natural world. Covering several literary genres over the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, we will gain critical perspective on how literature and narrative shape our planetary and environmental consciousness. Over the course of the semester, we will develop a critical vocabulary for thinking about environmental issues while examining the history of concepts such as “nature” and “wilderness” and their entanglements with literary and cultural projects. Readings will include the work of authors such as Thomas King, Helon Habila, Barbara Kingsolver, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Barbara Sebek | 11:00-12:00pm TR

This course fulfills a Category 1 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.

In this new incarnation of Shakespeare in the English curriculum, we will study six plays, one of which will be selected by students. Students will have the option to study a play by one of Shakespeare’s popular contemporary playwrights. Theatre historians estimate that 25,000 people per week attended performances in and around London, totaling 50 million visits between 1576 and 1640. Shakespeare remains the most familiar of those who wrote for this flourishing institution. We will study how different plays recast important issues in the playwright’s culture. Shakespeare's era was one of rapid change and, for many of his contemporaries, a time of disruptive upheaval in the social order and cultural values. How do Shakespeare's plays register and intervene in debates about politics, religion, gender, family, and other social conflicts? In addition to reading the plays in their historical contexts, we’ll consider recent screen productions as creative appropriations that speak to our own moment.

Aparna Gollapudi | 9:00-9:50am MWF

This course fulfills a Category 1 or 4 elective requirement for English majors.

In this course, we will study a selection of Shakespeare's plays, from tragedies and comedies to histories and romances. While we will focus on elements such as Shakespeare’s use of dramatic conventions and modes, his dramatic vision, his figurative language, etc., the course also emphasizes the plays’ status as theatrical performance. We will also place these texts in their social and historical context, examining the issues of class, politics, nationalism, race, gender, and sexuality in these plays.

Ryan Claycomb | 4:00-5:15pm TR

This course fulfills Category 2 or 4 elective requirement for English Majors.

From our earliest texts, Americans writing in English have believed that the world is always watching us; in response, we imagine ourselves as always on stage. Our drama reflects this: an understanding that we perform who we are in public, that the vagaries of American place can and must be represented in stage space, that the groups of people that we invite to the theatre reflect those people we invite into our American communities. American drama, then, doesn’t just happen to be America, or even about America—it’s often at its best working to enact America. As such, we will examine the representational messages of plays from across this history, and how those messages influence their audiences.

The semester will cover a range of historical periods and styles: 19th-century sentimental drama, social realism, expressionism, epic theatre, agit-prop, and even performance art. We will examine these plays and styles both for the political positions they espouse and for the way that these styles and forms use the stage to achieve specific artistic and social ends.

Tobi Jacobi | 9:30-10:45am TR

This course is for English majors and minors across all concentrations. It is required for Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy concentrators.

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.” ~Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations (1997-2006)

This course will explore the bridges, edges, boundaries, and possibilities of literacyas central to our lives. We’ll begin with these questions: How do borders—real and imagined— influence our experiences as readers and writers? How might encounters with geographic, psychological, familial and professional boundaries shape and be shaped by our language and literacy practices? We will explore the consequences and possibilities through conversation, writing, and critique. We will explore a multiplicity of narratives and diversity of literacy experiences by reading and responding across historical contexts (U.S. and beyond) and looking deeply in our own neighborhoods through some local archive work. Texts will include a prison memoir, a graphic novel featuring a (slightly) alternate reality,
and a heavily annotated map of a well-known metropolis—to name a few—as well as community-based and critical texts.

As a class we will establish (and inevitably challenge) some working definitions for our key concepts and apply them across varied contexts. Our primary goals, then, will be 1) to locate literacies within/across diverse geographies and contexts; 2) to define, interrogate, and challenge the relationship between literacy, borders, and counter/narratives through course readings and experiences; and 3) to reflect upon and make sense of the implications of these insights through a community-based project.

Assignments will include short response papers, experimental writing, a research project, and, perhaps,
even map-making.

Mark Bresnan | 10:00-10:50am MWF

This course fulfills Category 2 or 3 elective requirement for English Majors.

This course focuses on the very recent past, asking students to consider how contemporary literature fits into the long tradition of literature written in English. When reading the last decade, how useful are national boundaries, especially in contrast to ethnic and cultural categories? Is the literature of the last decade fundamentally different than what came just a few years before it? How have advances in information technology changed the status and content of contemporary literature? How does a book become "literature" in contemporary culture? We will explore these questions by reading a broad range of literary work including both familiar genres (novels, poetry, essays) and less familiar forms: a graphic novel, a young adult novel, an experimental poetry collection, a collage essay, and a work of e-fiction.

Aparna Gollapudi | 1:00-1:50pm MWF

This course fulfills a Category 1 elective requirement for English majors.

Dangerously seductive rakes, pretty flirts, crotchety old men, garrulous servants, ruined maidens, saintly wives, good-hearted beaux, merchants both greedy and generous – these are the colorful characters that thronged the stage from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century. This course studies some of the most significant plays produced by this thriving theatre culture. Comedy was by and large the more popular genre, so we will be reading some hilarious plays with razor-sharp wit and rollicking farce. Our exploration of tragedies, though more limited, will focus on important milestones in the changing notions of tragic experience in the period. The course will not only contextualize the plays within the socio-cultural milieu but also study them as constructs meant for performance by enacting particular scenes. The aim of the course is to encourage students to be perceptive readers and interpreters of dramatic literature by introducing them to the exciting world of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama.

Lynn Shutters | 3:30-4:45pm TR

This course fulfills a Category 1 elective requirement for English majors.

The Crusades are often imagined as a simplistic ideological conflict between medieval Christians and Muslims centered on Jerusalem. The reality is much more complex: this series of wars spanning from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries encompassed multiple peoples, places, and political and cultural imperatives. In this class we’ll examine medieval literary representations of the Crusades to consider the many ways in which medieval authors re-imagined these wars as well as their reasons for doing so. We’ll also examine Western representations of Islamic cultures more generally to get a sense of the broader spectrum of European attitudes towards Muslims. Finally, we’ll study some Islamic accounts of the Crusades and European Christians. While we’ll mostly read literature in translation, we’ll also study a few texts in Middle English. No prior experience with Middle English is required, but you should be
ready and willing to work with it in this class.

Paul Trembath |1:00-1:50pm MWF

This course fulfills a Category 3 elective requirement for English majors.

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Gerald Delahunty | 1:00-1:50pm MWF

This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. For English Educations concentrators only, it fulfills both the capstone and a Category 4 upper-division English requirement. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 4 elective.

English is currently the world's most used language. It is written and spoken across the globe as a first language, a second language, a foreign language, and as a lingua franca, especially for such special purposes as diplomacy, education, science, and business. This course will briefly trace the history of English from its Indo-European origins, through its establishment as a West Germanic language in England, its near-death experience and subsequent transubstantiation as a result of the Norman Conquest, its efflorescence during the Renaissance, its travels and travails as it spread beyond Britain to the rest of the British Isles and thence to worlds new and not so new as Pilgrim warriors and the Honorable East India Company gave it precarious perches west and east, which the engorgement of empire congealed into solid footings, establishing its now undisputed position as the language-to-know for world travelers, diplomats, entrepreneurs, and scholars. Along its way, English has butted up against
all of the world's major and many of its minor languages, cultures, and societies, destroying some, borrowing from many, lending to others, so that it now has unprecedented expressive resources and influence, but also so much internal variation that native speakers can find it hard to understand each other and it seems to be coming apart at its dialectal seams. Is it still a single language? Has it already divided into several languages, as Latin did into the Romance languages? (How can we tell?) How is it responding to the competition from Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, and Spanish, the world's next most-used languages? All are welcome; no linguistics background needed.

Todd Mitchell | 2:00-3:45pm TR

This course fulfills the capstone requirement for all majors. For English Education concentrators only, it fulfills both the capstone and a Category 3 upper-division English requirement. English majors who already have the capstone can count it as a Category 3 elective.

Graphic literature is one of the fastest growing areas in publishing, education, and critical studies, with some graphic memoirs recently winning awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Printz Award.

In this interactive course we'll take a practitioner's approach to help us better understand graphic texts and the many ways form and content interact. This means that in addition to reading and discussing a diverse range of graphic memoirs, we'll work on creating our own graphic memoirs to explore the multitude of choices writers and artists make when creating graphic texts. Formal elements such as page layout, placement of text and images, use of different drawing and writing styles, as well as the process of producing graphic texts (outlining, scripting, dummy creation, drawing, inking, lettering, and coloring) will be discussed. The course will combine analytical work with creative work to meet the entwined goals of increasing critical literacy while developing creative skills.

Students will participate in critical discussions of diverse graphic memoirs, presentations on the evolving form, frequent creative activities, and several workshops of their developing creative work. Art and design skills are not necessary. Even stick people can tell a powerful story (as some of the texts we'll look at will demonstrate).

The course will culminate with students creating a graphic memoir portfolio of 15-25 pages of original work, along with a 4-7-page analytical essay discussing the texts they encountered during the course, and how these texts influenced their creative exploration of their selves. Overall, students will be encouraged to use graphic memoirs to better understand themselves and the creative process, and the creative process to better understand graphic texts.