Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

This course will introduce students to concepts of gift and sacrifice, two foundational structures of exchange that have ruled economic, social and religious life since the inception of culture.  Both raise fundamental questions about the constitution of communities by means of the binding power of gratitude, or, more ominously, about sacrificial scapegoats.  As Mark Osteen wrote, the study of the gift touches on some of the most fundamental concerns that define our humanity: “freedom and autonomy, calculation and spontaneity, gratitude and generosity, risk and power.”  The study of sacrifice in turn generates a series of unsettling questions: whether conceptions of the sacred are inextricably linked with violence; whether sacrificial rituals escalate rather than contain violence; whether recuperative economies that seek gain out of loss inevitably fuel sacrificial behavior; whether capital punishment is not in effect a contemporary version of ancient sacrificial rites; and whether communities can ever escape the predicament of uniting against a designated scapegoat and resorting to sacrificial ideologies.  These and related questions will form the subject of this course which will focus on foundational texts in literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis and sociology and the representation of gift and sacrifice in the Bible, folklore, literature and film. Texts include Marcel Mauss, The Gift; Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Aeschylus, Agamemnon; William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice and Shirley Jackson, The Lottery.

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

Catalog Description: Techniques and practice in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms: poetry, drama, prose fiction, film. Examies such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Gateway course designed for English pre-majors and majors. Introduces critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks important to studying the literature, language, and cultures of English.

Catalog Description: Introduces students to the study of popular culture, possibly including print or visual media, understood as sites of critical reflection. Particular attention to dynamics of production and reception, aesthetics and technique, and cultural politics. Topics may foreground genres (science fiction; romance) or forms (comics; graffiti

Catalog Description: Examines ideas of method and imagination in a variety of texts, in literature, philosophy, and science. Particularly concerned with intellectual backgrounds and methods of inquiry that have shaped modern Western literature.

Catalog Description: Asks three questions: What is Cultural Studies? How does one read from a Cultural Studies perspective? What is the value of reading this way? Provides historical understanding of Cultural Studies, its terms and its specific way of interpreting a variety of texts, i.e. literature, visual images, music, video, and performance.

Catalog Description: Introduces literature from the Middle Ages and the Age of Shakespeare, focusing on major works that have shaped the development of literary and intellectual traditions of these periods.

Catalog Description: Introduces eighteenth and nineteenth -century literature, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments of the period. Topics include: exploration, empire, colonialism, slavery, revolution, and nation-building

Catalog Description: Introduction to twentieth-century literature from a broadly cultural point of view, focusing on representative works that illustrate literary and intellectual developments since 1900.

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in works of prose fiction, representing a variety of types and periods

Catalog Description: Critical interpretation and meaning in plays, representing a variety of types and periods.

Catalog Description: Introduces American culture through a careful reading of a variety of representative texts in their historical contexts.

Catalog Description: Examines the emergence of Asian American literature as a response to anti-Asian legislation, cultural images, and American racial formation. Encourages thinking critically about identity, power, inequalities, and experiences of marginality.

Catalog Description: Introduction to various genres of African American literature from its beginnings to the present. Emphasizes the cultural and historical context of African American literary expression and its aesthetics criteria. Explores key issues and debates, such as race and racism, inequality, literary form, and canonical acceptance. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 214.

Catalog Description: Literary texts are important evidence for social difference (gender, race, class, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, sexuality, ability) in contemporary and historical contexts. Examines texts that encourage and provoke us to ask larger questions about identity, power, privilege, society, and the role of culture in present-day or historical settings.

Catalog Description: ntroduces the study of the environment through literature, culture, and history. Topics include changing ideas about nature, wilderness, ecology, pollution, climate, and human/animal relations, with particular emphasis on environmental justice and the unequal distribution of environmental crises, both globally and along class, race and gender lines.

Catalog Description: Provides an introduction to manuscript, print, and digital media cultures with a focus on the production and dissemination of literature in English. Topics include the history of the book, reading and reception, orality and literacy, editing and publishing, early computing, and the future of literary writing in a digital era.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Writing papers communicating information and opinion to develop accurate, competent, and effective expression.

Prerequisites:

While 281 has no formal prerequisite, this is an intermediate writing course, and instructors expect entering students to know how to formulate claims, integrate evidence, demonstrate awareness of audience, and structure coherent sentences, paragraphs and essays. Thus we strongly encourage students to complete an introductory (100 level) writing course before enrolling in English 281.

Catalog Description: Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes--words, images, sound, design, and gesture--and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of the ways and means of making a poem.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the theory and practice of writing the short story.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Experience literature from the inside. In this class, members of the creative writing faculty and other practicing writers discuss their poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, literary inspiration, artistic practice, and the writer's life. Lecture and discussion.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified humanities course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified social science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Expository writing based on materials presented in a specified natural science course. Assignments include drafts of papers to be submitted in the specified course, and other pieces of analytical prose. Concurrent registration in the specified course required.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of, and exercise in, applying important or influential interpretive practices for studying language, literature, and culture, along with consideration of their powers/limits. Focuses on developing critical writing abilities. Topics vary and may include critical and interpretive practice from scripture and myth to more contemporary approaches, including newer interdisciplinary practices.

Catalog Description: Provides an introduction to contemporary literary, cultural, and critical theory and modern antecedents. Explores frameworks used in study of literature and culture by scholars today.

Catalog Description: Overview of Cultural Studies with a focus on reading texts or objects using cultural studies methods and writing analytic essays using cultural studies methods. Focuses on culture as a site of political and social debate and struggle.

Catalog Description: Introduces Marxist theory and methodology. Explores how and why Marx's writings, Marxist theory, and materialist methods have become central to the study of literature and culture over the course of the twentieth century.

Catalog Description: Introduction to the development of the religious ideas and institutions of ancient Israel, with selected readings from the Old Testament and New Testament. Emphasis on reading The Bible with literary and historical understanding.

Catalog Description: Readings of major tests and writers in postcolonial literature and culture. Surveys some of the most important questions and debates in postcolonial literature, including issues of identity, globalization, language, and nationalism.

Catalog Description: Examines writings by and about people of the Americas, with a focus on intersections of gender, colonialism, race, sexuality, and ethnicity.

ENGL 320 & German 390A: Medieval Literature and Culture

Adapting Arthur: Retelling the Story of the Once and Future King

The Arthurian stories appeared in the Middle Ages and have not ceased to fascinate audiences up to date. Mark Twain tells the stories of King Arthur and his noble knights to condemn slavery, Winston Churchill to evoke the British fighting spirit during World War II, and the 12th century clergyman Geoffrey of Monmouth to legitimize the rule of his patrons. This class offers a survey of this important narrative tradition, including the medieval manuscripts, Monty Python, and a comic about a transgender knight. Students will deal with medieval, modern, and contemporary material and in the process will learn how to access pre-modern narratives. The Arthurian material serves as a case study to discuss the human need to retell stories in order to make sense of reality. We will explore this rich medieval tradition by examining German, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and French narratives in a variety of media. As we will explore various materials from medieval manuscripts to blogs, students will gain a better understanding of the importance of materiality in regard to storytelling and experiment with these forms by themselves. Over the course of the quarter, students will create an e-portfolio that includes their reading blog posts and a creative review.

All material will be available in English translation. There are no prerequisites for this course. Course fulfills VLPA requirement.

Catalog Description: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poetry, with attention to Chaucer's social, historical, and intellectual milieu.

: The course will offer a broad overview of the political, intellectual and literary history of the Romantic period (1789-1850), focusing on the works of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. We will begin with an investigation of the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics and of radical developments during this period in religion (the opposition to Christianity), philosophy (the revolt against empiricism), aesthetics (the prevailing interest in the sublime and the emergence of the aesthetics of the picturesque), art (the change from the tradition of portrait paintings or paintings on historical subjects to landscape paintings in which the main subject is represented by nature as the human figure diminishes in size and significance), and gardening (the change from the formal garden to a landscape that more nearly resembles the uncultivated look of the wilderness, according to standards set forth by picturesque aesthetics). After three weeks on these introductory topics, we will turn to an in-depth study of Blake's poetry and art work, and move on to the literary collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth. We will focus on Coleridge's and Wordsworth's unusual dependence on each other, personal as well as literary, beneficial as well as disabling, and their appropriation of each other's themes and poetic genres.

TEXTS: William Blake      

                   Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton)

                   Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford UP).

                   America: A Prophecy & Europe: A Prophecy (Dover).

               Samuel Taylor Coleridge

                   Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton)

               William Wordsworth  

                   Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton)          

Catalog Description: Examines the high water mark of the realist novel, as well as its fragmentation into popular genres like science and detective fiction and the emergence of literary modernism. Possible authors include: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Corelli, Olive Schreiner, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad.

Catalog Description: Examines literary works from Victorian Britain and its empire (1837-1901), paired with contemporary social, scientific, and historical developments such as industrialization; urbanization; child labor; imperial expansion; scientific ideas of evolution and geologic time; changing ideas of gender/sexuality; mass education and mass literacy; and the popularization of print media.

Catalog Description: Explores fiction, poetry, and drama in English from the period of 1900-1945. Considers the literature in socio-historical context. Modernism, realism, imperialism, and questions f nationality may be foregrounded.

Catalog Description: Study of recent fiction by diverse writers with attention to contemporary ideas in all kinds of forms.

Catalog Description: Explores the workings and evolution of short fiction. Introduces the distinct styles and pruposes of short fiction, such as the realistic, the fantastic, the explicitly instructive, and the non-didactic descriptive, as well as the historical development of the short story from the simple tale and fable to the psychologically complex narrative.

Catalog Description: The study of the development of and specific debates in the related genres of fantasy and science fiction literatures.

Catalog Description: Explores American fiction, poetry, and prose during the latter half of the nineteenth century. May include such representative authors of the period as Twain, Dickinson, DuBois, Crane, Wharton and Chopin, along with supplementary study of the broader cultural and political milieu.

Catalog Description: Selected writings, novels, short stories, plays, and poems by African American and African-descended writers in or from the United States. Study of the historical, cultural, and intellectual context for the development of literary work by such writers, including attention to identity, power, and inequality. Offered: jointly with AFRAM 358.

This course offers an introduction to the environmental humanities. Literature, culture, and the environment are explored in their interlinkages along five examples: the study of food and consumption, animals and the post-human perspective, waste, climate change, and the question of diversity loss in the age that has recently been called the Anthropocene of the Age of the Human by atmospheric scientists. The Anthropocene is a concept that describes the scale of human impact on the Earth in geological terms. The concept was first pronounced by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen when they measured thin layers of carbon deposit in the Earth around 1800 and consequently announced a new geological epoch in which humankind has a significant influence on the Earth’s atmosphere. The idea is that human impact is growing in the area of land use for food production, ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and species extinction. We will explore the cultural dimension of the concept of the Anthropocene and how the study of literature and culture can contribute to an understanding of the historical, ethical, and aesthetic dimension of this new era of the human. The course is organized into five modules on food and consumption, animals and the post-human, waste, climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Catalog Description: Wide-ranging introduction to the study of written and spoken English. Includes the nature of language; ways of describing language; the use of language study as an approach to English literature and the teaching of English.

Catalog Description: Examines historical, linguistic, economic, and sociopolitical forces involved in the diversification of Global/New Englishes. Attention to changing power relations, language hierarchies, and inequalities associated with the teaching, learning, and use of English. Explores current debates on linguistic imperialism and resistance, concepts of 'mother tongue', nativeness, comprehensibility/intelligibility judgments, and language ownership.

Catalog Description: Explores evolution of English sounds, forms, structures, and word meanings form Anglo-Saxon times to the present. Topics include the history of standardizing practices, colonial/post-colonial English, the evolution of English words, and textual history. Prerequisite: either ENGL 370, LING 200, or LING 400.

Catalog Description: Concentration on the development of prose style for experienced writers.

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft verse. Readings in contemporary verse and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Intensive study of various aspects of the craft of fiction or creative nonfiction. Readings in contemporary prose and writing using emulation and imitation.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284

Catalog Description: Advanced work in cultural studies.

Catalog Description: Themes and topics offering special approaches to literature.

Catalog Description: Readings may be English or American and drawn from different periods, or they may concentrate on different types -- gothic, experimental, novel of consciousness, realistic novel. Special attention to the novel as a distinct literary form.

Catalog Description: Reviews the research, core debates, and politics tht have shaped the practice, teaching and study of writing. Introduces theoretical and methodological approaches that inform the teaching and learning of writing

Catalog Description: Surveys basic issues of language variation: phonological, syntactic, semantic, and narrative/discourse differences among speech communities of North American English; examines how language policy can affect access to education, the labor force, and political institutions.

Catalog Description: Intensive verse workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student poetry.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Intensive prose workshop. Emphasis on the production and discussion of student fiction and/or creative nonfiction.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 383, 384

Catalog Description: Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken.

Catalog Description: Tutorial arranged by prior mutual agreement between individual student and instructor. Revision of manuscripts is emphasized, but new work may also be undertaken.

Catalog Description: Survey of current issues confronting literary critics today, based on revolving themes and topics. Focuses on debates and developments affecting English language and literatures, including questions about: the relationship of culture and history; the effect of emergent technologies on literary study; the rise of interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Catalog Description: Survey of current issues confronting literary critics today, based on revolving themes and topics. Focuses on debates and developments affecting English language and literatures, including questions about: the relationship of culture and history; the effect of emergent technologies on literary study; the rise of interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities.

Catalog Description: Seminar study of special topics in language and literary study. Limited to seniors majoring in English.