Winter 2025 Class Schedule: Department of English

Winter 2025 Class Schedule

**Meeting days and times may be subject to change.**

Click on a course title to view the description.

Course	Title	Instructor	Day/Time
English 200	Literary Histories: Snakey Women Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)	Vieytez	MW 9:30-10:50
English 200 Literary Histories: Snakey Women Through the Ages (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) Course Description: In 2016, Taylor Swift’s highly publicized feud with Kanye West and the Kardashians peaked with the release of Kanye’s song, “Famous,” which features a derogatory reference to the pop artist. In response to Taylor’s outrage, Kim Kardashian released a recorded phone call between Taylor and Kanye in which she seemed to approve the controversial lyric, and called Taylor a “snake.” This suggestion of Taylor’s deceit spread quickly through public opinion, and #TaylorSwiftisaSnake went viral across social media platforms. What does it mean to call a woman a snake? What does such a comparison seek to express about someone’s intentions, or even their ethics? And what happens when women accused of sn(e)akiness lean into rather than away from the comparison? We will consider these questions in a winding investigation of snakey women through the ages and across a variety of narrative forms. From the bond between Eve and a serpent in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace to the bond between dragon-rider Rhaenyra Targaryen and her dragon (HBO series, “House of the Dragon”), from Melusine, a medieval folkloric figure cursed with the body of a serpent from the waist down, to Medusa, the monstrous snake-haired woman of Greek mythology, this class will examine how premodern and modern representations of serpentine femininity treat issues of gender and power. Texts may include: Excerpts from the Old Testament; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Melusine; the HBO series “Game of Thrones”; and “House of the Dragon”; as well as selections from medieval illuminated manuscripts and social media.
English 200	Literary Histories: American Nightmare: Race Science from the 18th Century to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Bergh	MW 2-3:20
English 200 Literary Histories: American Nightmare: Race Science from the 18th Century to the Present (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: Is the American dream only a white dream, even a fantasy? Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning 2017 horror film Get Out, in which a white liberal family systematically transplants the brains of their aging family members into the bodies of Black people, satirizes the postracial fantasy of colorblindness. White wealth and flourishing (and eternal youth) are based on a horrifying techno-fix: the exploitation and extraction of Black life, the production of a living nightmare. Peele’s film raises unsettling questions about the American conception of race—questions with deep histories—which this class aims to explore: How has race been mobilized as a structure of white supremacist social control? What has racialization meant for those being racialized? Centralizing the work of Black and Indigenous thinkers, our goal will be to interrogate what race has meant in American culture over time. We will read a selection of excerpts and short texts from the 18^th and 19^th centuries to learn about the development of “race science” as a logic underpinning violently imposed social hierarchies. In tandem with this material, we will analyze Peele’s film and two contemporary novels with historical roots: Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), the story of a young Black man in a “reform school” in 1960s Florida, and Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (2024), which traces the experience of two Indigenous boys at the Carlisle Indian School, an institution designed to destroy Native culture. In doing so, we will aim to investigate the question: What are our contemporary inheritances of these histories?
English 200	Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 200 Literary Histories: Songs and Sonnets (Historical Breadth Pre 1830) Course Description: Beginning with the sonnet craze in the late sixteenth century and ending with twenty-first-century reinventions and deconstructions of the sonnet, this course will explore questions of literary history by taking up the relationship between poetry and popular culture, investigating the ways in which poets draw on the latest trends in popular and literary culture and in turn the ways in which that culture incorporates and transforms poetry—on the stage, in music, and on the screen. Thinking of literary history as a set of conversations in verse across the centuries, we will consider how poets borrow from and respond to one another, experimenting with traditional forms and familiar themes to make the old new. In order to recognize and interpret this experimentation, we will first study those traditional forms, learning to read and interpret poetry. While we will be reading a range of poems in modern editions, we will be situating them in their social, historical, literary and material contexts, analyzing the ways in which these contexts shape our interpretation. Readings may include poetry by Shakespeare, Agbagi, Donne, Hughes, Sidney, Keats, McKay, Rosetti, Yeats, and Eliot. Teaching Method(s): Discussion. Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and discussion board posts. Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6^th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $80 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental); students may also use The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5^th edition, (ISBN: 978-0393979206), approximate cost: ~$10 used. Text will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore.
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Tucker	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 202	Introduction to Creative Writing	Barcelona	WF 9:30-10:50
English 202 Introduction to Creative Writing Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively. Teaching Methods: Discussion. Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio. Texts include: A course reader.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Curdy	TTh 11-12:20
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Anowe	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 206	Reading and Writing Poetry	Curdy	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 206 Reading and Writing Poetry [Prerequisite to English Major in Writing] Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Sears	MW 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Bouldrey	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Scanlon	TTh 12:30-1:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 207	Reading and Writing Fiction	Donohue	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 207 Reading and Writing Fiction Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement. Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Webster	MW 12:30-1:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Scanlon	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 208	Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction	Bresland	TTh 2-3:20
English 208 Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work. Prerequisites: All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.
English 213	Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830)	Law and Wisecup	MW 11-12:20
English 213 Introduction to Fiction (Historical Breadth Post 1830) Course Description: This course examines relationships among fictional texts that adapt, rewrite, and re-envision each other, through adaptation, translation, and remediation (texts that bring one medium into another). This course places three classic texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sophocles’ Antigone, and the Codex Borgia (a pre-Columbian Indigenous book from Mexico) into conversation both with their contemporary retellings and with the objects and texts that went into their composition. But rather than straightforward adaptations, the contemporary texts transport questions into new contexts, or remix pieces of classic texts to tell different stories. We’ll follow these fictional relationships—of stories that travel throughout the world—to examine questions of justice, reproduction, labor, war, and colonialism. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week; one required discussion-section per week. Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview 3^rd Edition, 2012), ISBN 9781554811038. Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), ISBN 9780143128793 Yuri Herrara, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009), ISBN 9781908276421 Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (2019), ISBN 9781640094277 Tommy Orange, There There (2019), ISBN 9780525436140
English 283	Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830)	Shannon	TTh 11-12:20, plus discussion section
English 283 Introduction to Literature and the Environment: Green Worlds (Historical Breadth, Pre AND Post 1830) Course Description: This course examines relationships among fictional texts that adapt, rewrite, and re-envision each other, through adaptation, translation, and remediation (texts that bring one medium into another). This course places three classic texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sophocles’ Antigone, and the Codex Borgia (a pre-Columbian Indigenous book from Mexico) into conversation both with their contemporary retellings and with the objects and texts that went into their composition. But rather than straightforward adaptations, the contemporary texts transport questions into new contexts, or remix pieces of classic texts to tell different stories. We’ll follow these fictional relationships—of stories that travel throughout the world—to examine questions of justice, reproduction, labor, war, and colonialism. Teaching Method: Two lectures per week; one required discussion-section per week. Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview 3^rd Edition, 2012), ISBN 9781554811038. Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), ISBN 9780143128793 Yuri Herrara, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009), ISBN 9781908276421 Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (2019), ISBN 9781640094277 Tommy Orange, There There (2019), ISBN 9780525436140
English 285	Topics in Literature and Culture: Introduction to Literary Theory	Wolff	MW 12:30-1:50
English 285 Topics in Literature and Culture: Introduction to Literary Theory Course Description: This course is about learning how to read closely, that is, how to “do” a deeply informed comparative close reading. Tailored to the time constraints of the quarter, it introduces students to a series of episodes in the recent history of the study of literature and culture: the influential heroes of these episodes are engaged intellectuals who have together helped to inform how we read today. Pairing a handful of shorter primary texts with field-defining theorists and readers of the past and present, students will not only build fluency in the vocabulary of “literary theory,” they will emerge as more worldly, technically savvy, and theoretically sophisticated readers themselves. In this course, we are not interested in theory for its own sake, but in the ways the thing we call “theory” — like literature — is not only shaped by, but helps to shape the world around us. Teaching Method: Brief lectures and engaged discussion. Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; short writing assignments; one presentation; and a final project. Authors may include: Germaine de Staël, William Hazlitt, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavio Paz, Franz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Paolo Freire, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow, Barbara Johnson, and Lauren Berlant. All texts for the course will be available on Canvas.
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Austen and Other Genres	Thompson	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: Austen and Other Genres Course Description: As a critical methods seminar for English majors and minors, English 300 will enhance your interpretive, analytic, and argumentative skills. To that end, this class explores new ways to read Jane Austen in both her historical context and our contemporary moment. Whether you’re a stranger to Austen or a devoted Janeite, this class will give you surprising insights into her connections to the social, domestic, and aesthetic movements of her time. We will pair three Austen texts with three earlier novels: Pride and Prejudice and Mary Hays’s radical feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799); Emma and Daniel Defoe’s criminal autobiography Moll Flanders (1722); Northanger Abbey and the mass-popular Gothic novel A Sicilian Romance (1790) by Ann Radcliffe. We’ll accompany each pairing with critical texts in contemporary feminism and queer studies; narratology; and genre studies (on the Gothic). The class will conclude by looking at some contemporary TV or film renderings of Austen (e.g., Bridgerton, Clueless, or Pride and Prejudice). Attendance at first class meeting is mandatory. Required texts: Jane Austen, Emma. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551113210 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114798 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781554814893 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114514 Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551112176 Anne Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199537396
English 300	Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: TBA	Xu	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 300 Seminar in Reading & Interpretation: TBA Course Description: TBA
English 309	Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Spoken Word and the Radiophonic Imagination	Bresland	TTh 11-12:20
English 309 Advanced Creative Cross-Genre Writing: Spoken Word and the Radiophonic Imagination Course Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, instrumentation and silence. This course places equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We act as writers, performers, producers as we listen deeply into contemporary radio practice. We also encourage one another to experiment, to try weird ideas, to take risks. We will investigate what it means to write for the ear (as opposed to the page or screen), and we will learn to connect with the listener. In the process of producing multiple audio works, we will acquire numerous audio production skills. We will write frequently, speak frequently and in varied styles. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. We will also compute a fair bit as we learn to use audio editing software to produce polished, multilayered soundscapes. By winter’s end, we will be more practiced writers, more accomplished multimedia performers and producers, possess a greater number of technological skills and a greater range of artistic expression.
English 310	Studies in Literary Genres: English Country Houses and Far Beyond (Pre 1830)	Thompson	TTh 2-3:20
English 310 Studies in Literary Genres: English Country Houses and Far Beyond (Pre 1830) Course Description: TBA
English 311	Studies in Poetry: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Post 1830)	Froula	MW 9:30-10:50
English 311 Studies in Poetry: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Post 1830) Course Description: “Make It New”: Ezra Pound borrows this slogan from an ancient Chinese emperor’s bath tub: “As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new.” But what is "it"? In our seminar we'll explore poetry as an art of words, voice, song, speech, story; of describing, expressing, transforming, translating, and revealing worlds visible and invisible; of hiddenness and discovery, paradox and mystery, epiphany and surprise, the everyday, the extraordinary, and the otherworldly. Reading selected poems and related prose texts on poetics by Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H. D., Williams, Bishop, Hughes, Brooks, and other poets both earlier and later, we'll see how particular poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems across historical moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll practice close reading, analytic, and comparative skills to discuss, appreciate, and write about the formal and linguistic virtuosity by which poets create poems-as-worlds that enrich the resources of English poetry: verse lines and forms, sound patterns (meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, rhetorical tropes, figurative language, personae, voices. We’ll visit our Special Collections Library to learn about print culture and to see first editions of some of the works we'll be studying. We’ll conclude with a Poetry Fest for which everyone will choose and read, recite, or perform a poem for the class.
English 312	Studies in Drama: Staging America (Post 1830)	Davis, N.	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 312 Studies in Drama: Staging America (Post 1830) Course Description: This class examines U.S. playwriting as not only an august and expansive tradition but also, for the last 100 years, a crucial medium by which production teams, public audiences, and private readers have co-participated in critical self-reflection on what “America” means to them/us. After a three-week unit devoted to plays and writers that hugely influenced the trajectory of U.S. drama (O’Neill, Bonner, Odets, Miller, Hansberry, Baraka, Kennedy), the bulk of the course privileges artists and texts that sustained but also stretched that legacy from the 1980s onward. These writers (Wilson, Kushner, Parks, Hwang, Baker, et al.) often take America as their explicit subject, in emblematic microcosm or as grand-scale macrocosm, in ways this course will unpack with curiosity and nuance. At the same time, we will sharpen our attention to the structures, semantics, styles, and stagecraft that make these plays such compelling objects of literary analysis as well as cultural-historical contemplation. Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussion. Evaluation Method(s): Writing exercises (papers, practice exercises, annotations, etc.), possible group activities or presentations. Texts include: The America Play and Other Works, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559360920); Angels in America (Pt. 1 & Pt. 2), Tony Kushner (9781559363846); The Crucible, Arthur Miller (9780142437339); Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559365000); Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire (9781559363938); John, Annie Baker (9781559365291); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson (9780452261136); A Raisin in the Sun & The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry (9780679755319); The Red Letter Plays, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559361958); Waiting for Lefty, Clifford Odets (9780802132208); What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck (9781559369640); Yellow Face, David Henry Hwang (9781559363402) Texts will be available at: All can be ordered at local Evanston bookshops, such as Bookends & Beginnings (on Orrington) or Booked (on Main); at The Understudy, a theater-specific bookstore and coffee shop in Andersonville; or online at Bookshop.org, which exclusively works with independent booksellers. Please support these small businesses if you can.
English 313	Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Law	TTh 2-3:20
English 313 Studies in Fiction: Desire and Danger in the 19th Century British Novel (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as perversity, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and drug addiction! Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method(s): early 4-pp. paper (15%); rewrite of first paper (15%); final 6-7 pp. paper (35%); two seminar presentations (10% each), and quality of contribution to seminar discussion (15%). Texts include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 9780141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford, 9780199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Broadview, 9781551117515), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Broadview, 9781551116556). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though you are encouraged to acquire the texts independently and beforehand. Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed OR to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page." Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a special case. It was published in several conflicting editions during Hardy's lifetime. If you don't acquire the edition ordered for the class, there will be some important passages and episodes missing from your edition. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 323-1	Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830)	Phillips	TTh 11-12:20
English 323-1 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Pre 1830) Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as perversity, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and drug addiction! Teaching Method: Seminar discussion. Evaluation Method(s): early 4-pp. paper (15%); rewrite of first paper (15%); final 6-7 pp. paper (35%); two seminar presentations (10% each), and quality of contribution to seminar discussion (15%). Texts include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 9780141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford, 9780199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Broadview, 9781551117515), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Broadview, 9781551116556). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though you are encouraged to acquire the texts independently and beforehand. Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed OR to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page." Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a special case. It was published in several conflicting editions during Hardy's lifetime. If you don't acquire the edition ordered for the class, there will be some important passages and episodes missing from your edition. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 324	Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Newman	MWF 11-11:50
English 324 Studies in Medieval Literature: Queering Medieval Romance (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Medieval romance famously celebrated “courtly love”—the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite—or perhaps because of—the Church’s misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender identities. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women identify as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by male affection. In Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, two girls (one passing as male) fall in love and marry, while in the life of the transgender saint Marina, a woman who becomes a monk is accused of fathering a child. In Silence, a 13^th-century French romance, the “silenced” hero/ine is born female but raised male; as a knight, he is charged with homosexuality after rejecting the queen’s advances. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we’ll turn to ambiguous desires, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amis and Amiloun, and selections from The Romance of the Rose. We’ll end with Chaucer’s “other masterpiece,” the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the ambiguous, bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation. Texts May Include: Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Love (excerpts) – on Canvas Ovid, Tale of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses IX) - on Canvas Transgender Saints' Lives (SS. Marina, Pelagia, Margaret, and Theodora) - on Canvas "The Debate between Ganymede and Helen" (trans. John Boswell) - on Canvas Heldris of Cornwall, Silence (ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi) - ISBN 0-937191-32-9 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. Marie Borroff) - ISBN 978-0-393-53246-3 Amis and Amiloun (ed. Edward Foster) - ISBN 1-879288-88-5 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (trans. Frances Horgan) - ISBN - 9780199540679 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (ed. Barry Windeatt) - ISBN 978-0-140424-21-8
English 339	Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Shannon	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 339 Studies in Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Environmental Questions (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: This seminar will work across Shakespeare’s genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), focusing on representative plays that also show a preoccupation with humanity’s cosmic place and environmental situation. The course will explore Shakespeare’s persistently troubled sense that humankind, alone, does not quite “belong” to nature. We’ll assess how his understanding of “Nature” and our relation to it changes over his career and also how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe those retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. There, a removal to the “green world” serves to counteract one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up against a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human order of civil life defined and established, and from what threatening “laws of nature” is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure -- to hard weather and our own worst instincts, too? This inquiry into Shakespeare’s environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the history of what it has meant to be human. Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion. Evaluation Method: Sustained and substantive class participation and two papers. Texts include: Readings will be chosen from among Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale; brief contextual readings in early modern natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor.
English 344	18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Soni	MW 3:30-4:50
English 344 18th Century Fiction: Jane Austen and the Culture Wars (Pre 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: The enduring appeal of Jane Austen’s novels is due in part to the fact that the historical and cultural debates in which she intervened are very much the same ones that confront us today: tradition v innovation, parental authority v filial obligation, customary social bonds v contractual relations, emotion v reason, the role of women in society, the value of the arts. This class will consider Jane Austen’s development as a writer, in the context of the “culture wars” in Britain in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. Is Austen a radical or conservative novelist? Does she defend the values of a dying aristocracy, or champion a new middle class sensibility? How does she respond to the jarring changes affecting her society? Does she assert the privileges of the governing classes or urge the rights of silenced groups (especially young women)? Does she offer a traditional or progressive view of marriage? Should children make their own choices in marriage or defer to parental authority? How do her novels cultivate good judgment? Do the arts have a progressive role in transforming society or a conservative one in maintaining traditional values? These are some of the questions we will examine as we read a range of her novels. Our goal will be to understand the experimental and fluid nature of Austen’s thought, as well as the way in which she transformed the history of the novel. Texts include: Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Oxford World Classics) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford World Classics) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Norton Critical Edition) Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Oxford World Classics) Jane Austen, Persuasion (Oxford World Classics)
English 365	Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay)	Johnson	TTh 9:30-10:50
English 365 Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Postcolonial Noir (Post 1830/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Global Overlay) Course Description: Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved. This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, with emphasis on empire and colonialism. We will then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority.  Teaching Method: Seminar. Evaluation Method(s): 1 short and 1 longer interpretive essays; active participation in class discussion; 1 group research presentation. Possible Texts include: Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four; Didier Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam; Sonallah Ibrahim, That Smell; Donia Maher/Ganzeer, The Apartment in Bab al-Louk; Adania Shibli, Minor Detail. Texts will be available at: bookshop.org.
English 366	Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay)	Spigner	TBA
English 366 Studies in African American Literature: Black Mindfulness Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/US Overlay) Course Description: TBA
English 368	Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Empire War Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Froula	MW 2-3:20
English 368 Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature: Empire War Worldliness (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: The twentieth century has been called “the lethal century,” more violent than any previous era. Contested though that claim may be, industrial capitalism, rival imperialisms, and rapid technological development converged to fuel interlocking civil, international, colonial, racial, and global conflicts, pressed by escalating machine warfare beyond the limiting human. Landmark literary works of the period confront such conflicts in many forms and on many fronts, from the racialized economic and cultural violence of European empires in Ireland, Africa, and India to genocide and the two world wars to decolonization and its vicissitudes to contemporary contests and “clashes” between the values of a declining imperial “west” and those of various rising “non-wests”--all under the globalizing domination of technological modernity. In the spirit of what Edward Said calls “worldly,” or multicentric, critical practices, we’ll read selected works by Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Rhys, and postimperial writers against these contexts—and we’ll find that “difficult” modernist texts become stunningly legible in light of historical conditions that are still very much with us.
English 374	Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Woven Being: Literature and Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)	Wisecup	MW 2-3:20
English 374 Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Woven Being: Literature and Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) Course Description: This course, co-taught by Kelly Wisecup, English, and Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Block Museum, is designed in partnership with the Block Museum’s 2025 exhibit of Indigenous art entitled “Woven Being.” Building on the exhibit’s attention to the “interwovenness of Indigenous art, materials, and time in the Chicago region,” the course will place literatures and visual art from/about the Chicago region and Great Lakes in conversation to ask the following questions: what are the relations between Indigenous literatures and visual arts? How do different literary and visual forms weave materials, stories, and beings together? Anchored by four visual artists collaborating with the Block—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe), Nora Lloyd (Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)—the course places these artists’ work in conversation with literatures by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Susan Power, Simon Pokagon, and more. Students will gain skills in art historical and literary research practices, exhibition design, archival research, the transcription and interpretation of historical materials, and more. Substantial class time will be spent at the Block engaging with the exhibit and with featured artists. Teaching Method: seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in the Block Museum, conversations with artists and guest speakers. Required Texts Susan Power, Roofwalker (2002) (9781571310415) Blaire Morseau/Simon Pokagon, As Sacred to Us (1893/2023) (9781611864625)
English 377	Topics in Latinx Literature: Chicanx and Mexican Feminisms in Art and Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice)	Rodriguez Pliego	TTh 11-12:20
English 377 Topics in Latinx Literature: Chicanx and Mexican Feminisms in Art and Literature (Post 1830/Race & Ethnicity/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice) Course Description: Mexican and Chicanx oral traditions remember the Indigenous interpreter who led Hernán Cortés through Mesoamerica by the name of La Malinche. In the five centuries since her death, she has become a symbol for treachery, a seductress that sided with the enemy of her people for personal gain. This course takes the myth of La Malinche as a starting point to consider the construction of gender that underlies Chicanx and Mexican identities. It considers female and queer writers from the twentieth and twenty first centuries who have sought to reframe women’s roles in Chicanx and Mexican storytelling. We will read stories about traitors, witches, and madwomen; stories that center language as our main instrument to fabricate and rupture gender roles. Our discussions will pay particular attention to the literary traditions that authors take up to narrate the unsettling reality of gender-based violence: surrealism, horror stories, realist fiction, and hybrid forms. We will consider how feminist reformulations of horror, surrealism, and realism might respond to the male-dominated traditions of magical realism, the Chicano nationalist movement, and Mexican philosophy. We will also study the visual mediums through which generations of Chicanx feminists have celebrated their multicultural heritage as well as the protest art forms emerging from the ongoing Mexican feminist movement Ni Una Menos (Not One More). Our course materials will reveal the rich genealogy of female artists behind contemporary feminist uprisings in Mexico and in Mexican American communities. Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based. Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final paper, personal essay, attendance and participation. Texts include: Short stories, visual art, poetry and essays from Cherie Moraga, Amparo Dávila, Leonora Carrington, Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Guadalupe Nettel, and Wendy Trevino. Texts will be available at: Materials will be scanned and uploaded to Canvas.
English 379	Studies in Multiethnic American Literature: Multiracial Identities	Comerford	MW 11-12:20
English 379 Studies in Multiethnic American Literature: Multiracial Identities Course Description:TBA
English 381	Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures)	Evans	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 381 Literature and Medicine: Literature of Plague and Pandemic (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Transnationalism and Textual Circulation/Race & Ethnicity/Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures) Course Description: The World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, 2023—three years and change after it began. Most of us continue to experience the aftermath of the pandemic in various ways.* Primary and secondary school students continue to lag behind grade level by as much as nine months; commercial zones in major urban areas remain empty as remote working arrangements persist; millions of families grieve for lives lost to the novel coronavirus; and millions more contend with the effects of long COVID. In short, even as the epidemiological threat of the SARS-COV-2 virus has waned, the sociocultural impact of this worldwide crisis has just begun to come into focus. Having spent three years in involuntary training as amateur epidemiologists, we can now turn to the humanistic disciplines—which analyze the processes and products of human culture—to take stock of what this experience has meant for our values, our outlook, our relationships, and our culture. In that spirit, this course will investigate plague literature over the longue durée—nearly seven centuries, from 1348 C.E.–2023 C.E.—to explore the diversity of human experience in relation to plague and pestilence as represented in the Western/Anglophone canon.** Guiding questions will include: how have different groups of people searched for answers about the mechanisms and the meanings of plague (in medicine, in religion, in moral philosophy)? how have cultures responded to death rates so high that they defy traditional rituals of mourning and memorialization? what underlying prejudices, suspicions, and other social ills tend to be activated by pandemics, and to what effect? what role does literature play in helping us to formulate, and sometimes to answer, these questions and others? Course readings are divided into three units: medieval and early modern Europe, from Boccaccio to Daniel Dafoe; literature of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, including Tony Kushner and Sapphire; and a final unit on contemporary literature, featuring presentiments of and responses to COVID-19 from Ling Ma, Carmen María Machado, and Michael Cunningham. Assignments will include collective annotations on Canvas, podcast episodes (produced in small groups), Canvas Discussions, and a final essay or creative project. As well as other crises—political, financial, moral, ethical, educational, racial, economic, and so on—but there are only ten weeks in the quarter. The primary sources for this course were almost all composed in English; those originally composed in another language have been translated so widely as to occupy space in the Anglophone canon despite their origins in another linguistic tradition. Texts:* Eula Biss. On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. ISBN 1555977200 Daniel Defoe. ed. Paula R. Backsheider. A Journal of the Plague Year. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0393961885 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Revised and Complete Edition. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. ISBN 9781559363846 Ling Ma, Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN 1250214998 Michael Cunningham, Day. New York: Random House, 2023. ISBN 0399591346 Other readings and media will be available on Canvas.
English 384	Studies in Literature and the Environment: Voices of Environmental Justice (Post 1830)	Dimick	MW 12:30-1:50
English 384 Studies in Literature and the Environment: Voices of Environmental Justice (Post 1830) Course Description: This course considers the relationships between systems of human injustice and environmental issues—including industrial disasters, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. We examine environmental justice writing and artwork with a transnational, interconnected approach. For example, we ask how the Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue’s depiction of pipeline spills in the fictional town of Kosawa connects to Native American resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. We link a poem documenting silicosis in the lungs of West Virginian coal miners to a novel portraying the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. We compare a nonfiction account of Kenyan women resisting deforestation and an iPhone app reclaiming public access along the Malibu coast. We explore questions of voice, genre, and narrative, cataloguing the strategies writers and artists use to reach a global audience.
English 385	Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Godfrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Material Girls: Excess, Gender, and Commercialism in Pop Culture (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: As cultural critic Ariana Grande once said, “I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it!” Some hundred years before, Karl Marx warned about consumerism and alienation: “Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” Taking the iconic makeover scene as its guiding trope, this course considers the preoccupation with gender, sex, and the performance of femininity that lies at the heart of modern consumer culture. How are racial and gender boundaries constructed and enforced through consumerism? Can one truly purchase empowerment? Are there, in fact, some ways in which consumerism offers key avenues for self-fashioning, and the subversion of heteronormative gender performance? While this course begins in 1725 with Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and a brief survey of antecedents, the majority of texts are literature, film, and pop culture ephemera from the 1990s through today. Texts include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Bong Joon-ho’s best picture winning Parasite, and Greta Gerwig’s latest satire Barbie. Students will engage with Marxism, feminism, gender theory, and sociological thought to construct a modern pop canon of consumption. According to interest, students will also be expected to track a vlogger/influencer of their choice in a pop culture journal. Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises. Evaluation Methods: Participation, pop culture journals, final project. Texts Include: Agnes Varda, Cleo from 5-7 (1961), Amy Heckerling, Clueless (1995), Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005), Sakaya Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016), Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019), Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers (2019), Channing Godfrey People, Miss Juneteenth (2020), and Greta Gerwig, Barbie (2023). Texts will be available at: Prep (ISBN 9780812972351) and Convenience Store Woman (ISBN 9780802129628) at Norris, all others on Canvas.
English 385	Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Comedies Old and New (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Wolff	MW 3:30-4:50
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Romantic Comedies Old and New (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Does the popular genre of the romantic comedy continually renegotiate the social contract? Or do its “happy endings” continually impose the safety of closure on love’s wayward digressions? This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary “rom com,” from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of “romance,” or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of the “comedy” genre is often understood to house a subversive potential, using absurdism or satire to scramble power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One standout question for us will be: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame the comedy genre’s subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Why do some literary forms and characters seem endlessly adaptable for different social subjects; and how does a screen actor’s “star text” or public image help direct the genre’s history? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Evaluations are based on participation and preparation; writing several short papers, film analyses, & response posts; presentation on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history; and a final exam. Required Texts (available for purchase & buyback at Bookends & Beginnings): William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Pelican Edition) (ISBN 978-0143130185) Jane Austen, Emma (Penguin Edition) (ISBN 978-0141439587) Note: All films and other readings will be available in “Reserves” on our Canvas site. Course Objectives: To study what constitutes a “genre,” how it comes into being, and how it changes over time To analyze personal attachments to cultural objects in a critical light To practice and improve critical reading and writing about literature and film To practice and improve conversational analysis, public presentation, and critical dialogue
English 385	Studies in Literature and Culture: Swindlers, Charlatans and Cheats: Literature of the Scam (Post 1830)	Syvertsen	TTh 3:30-4:50
English 385 Studies in Literature and Culture: Swindlers, Charlatans and Cheats: Literature of the Scam (Post 1830) Course Description: Scams have taken a central place in recent culture, providing Netflix and Hulu with seemingly endless material for documentaries and docuseries, from Fyre Island to Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, and the so-called Tinder Swindler, to name just a few. Some have even suggested that scams—and our obsession with them—are a particularly Millennial phenomenon. But scamming, and literature about scammers, has a long and rich history, from Herman Melville’s Confidence Man, to the Wizard in L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or the protagonist of the recent Oscar-nominated remake of Nightmare Alley. This course surveys a selection of literature, film, TV, and podcasts about scams and scammers, explores historic and contemporary discourse about scams, and interrogates and critiques the current cultural obsession with them. Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar. Evaluation Method: Mid-term presentation and final essay. Texts include: Herman Melville, The Confidence Man. Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.
English 386	Studies in Literature and Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment)	Stern	MW 11-12:20
English 386 Studies in Literature and Film: Women on the Verge: Obsession and Melodrama, 1900-1965 (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment) Course Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death. Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19^th-century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings. We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues. Mode of evaluation will be two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus. Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
English 392	Situation of Writing	Bouldrey	MW 12:30-1:50
English 392 Situation of Writing Course Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States starting with Melville, and moving quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by shaping it or walking away from it—Roxane Gay, Adrienne Rich, Richard Baldwin, and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with a service learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Our class will be enhanced by the annual Return Engagement series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern’s Writing Program. My intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, and will evolve into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. This course is part of the Hewlett Diversity Initiative, and as part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities.
English 393-2	Theory and Practice of Poetry	Webster	MW 3:30-4:50
English 393-2 Theory and Practice of Poetry Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 394-2	Theory and Practice of Fiction	Seliy	MW 3:30-4:50
English 394-2 Theory and Practice of Fiction Course Description: This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get. Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops. Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback. Texts Include: TBA Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 395-2	Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction	Hernández	MW 3:30-4:50
English 395-2 Theory and Practice of Creative Nonfiction Course Description: An advanced year-long course in reading for writers, critical analysis of techniques of creative nonfiction, and intensive creative writing. Reading of primary works will concentrate on longer creative nonfiction works, and the creative project for the latter part of the sequence is a work of creative nonfiction of approximately 15,000 words. A guest non-fiction writer will visit in May as writer-in-residence. Teaching Method: Discussion. Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation. Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies. Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.
English 397	Research Seminar: Cultures of Play	Soni	MW 12:30-1:50
English 397 Research Seminar: Cultures of Play Course Description: From video games and board games to game shows and sports, games saturate our culture and shape who we are. Some scholars have even argued that games are replacing novels and film as the dominant form of cultural expression. Others view games as a frivolous and unproductive activity, not worthy of serious study. In this seminar, we will explore some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between games and human culture. Why do people play games? What kinds of meanings, cultural values and political agendas do games encode? Do games function differently than other cultural objects, such as films, novels or works of art? What might it mean to think of all culture and works of art as arising from a “play impulse”? And if this is the case, why do we trivialize game-playing? Is the ubiquity of games in our lives a specifically modern phenomenon? Is the advent of the digital age producing a gamification of everyday life? To investigate these questions, we will read a wide range of critical writing about the importance of play and games in human culture, by philosophers, novelists, literary critics, social scientists, historians and game designers. The class will give you an opportunity to develop a 12-15 page research paper that studies one particular game or aspect of game culture in-depth. In the process, you will learn how to frame a significant research question; articulate a research proposal; navigate scholarly databases and archives; evaluate sources; and, produce an annotated bibliography. Teaching Method(s): Seminar, discussion, workshop. Evaluation Method(s): Topic Statement: 5% One paragraph proposal: 5% List of 15 sources developed in consultation with Charlotte Cubbage: 5% First five annotations: 5% Second five annotations: 5% State of the field analysis: 10% Paper abstract and outline: 10% 6 page draft and presentation: 15% Final research paper 12-15pp.: 30% Participation, peer review etc.: 10% Texts include: Booth et al., Craft of Research (ISBN-10: 022623973X; ISBN-13: 978-0226239736) Texts will be available at: Norris University Bookstore
English 398-2	Honors Seminar	Grossman	Th 3:30-4:50
English 398-2 Honors Seminar Course Description: Part of a two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter. Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.
English 403	Writers Studies in Literature	Hernández	Th 2-4:50
English 403 Writers Studies in Literature Course Description: TBA
English 422	Studies in Medieval Literature: Global Middle Ages	Newman	T 2-4:50
English 422 Studies in Medieval Literature: Global Middle Ages Course Description: The term “Middle Ages”—the period “in the middle” between classical antiquity and the Renaissance—derives from European history, and it’s problematic even there. But the global turn in medieval studies enables us to go beyond the field’s traditional focus on Europe alone to explore its ties with the rest of the known world. In this course we’ll do that in two ways. Our first unit will deal with romance, gender, and the aesthetics of eroticism. Court ladies feature as foundational romance authors in two island nations, England and Japan, at opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass. After reading the Lais of Marie de France (12^th century) and selections from the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11^th century), we’ll complicate our study with two transgender romances: Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence and a Japanese tale translated by Rosette Willig as The Changelings. In our second unit, dealing with travel and ethnography, we’ll consider two Islamic and two European works: The Book of Ibn Fadlan (921-22), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (1253-55), The Travels of Ibn Battutah (1325-54), and The Book of John Mandeville (ca. 1356). Critical readings will include literary essays on the French and Japanese texts, as well as excerpts from Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages; Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel; and Shirin Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Texts: The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Claire Waters (Broadview) - 978-1-55481-082-6 Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (abridged), ed. and trans. Royall Tyler (Penguin) – 978-0-14-303949-0 Heldris of Cornwall, Silence, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (Michigan State UP) – 0-937191-32-9 Torikaebaya monogatari (The Changelings), trans. Rosette Willig – on Canvas Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (Penguin) – 978-0-140-45507-6 The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, trans. Peter Jackson (Hackett) – 978-0-87220-981-7 The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed. and trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Picador) – 978-0-330-41879-9 The Book of John Mandeville, ed. and trans. Iain MacLeod Higgins (Hackett) – 978-0-87220-935-0
English 431	Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Early Modern Horror	Evans	M 2-4:50
English 431 Studies in 16th-Century Literature: Early Modern Horror Course Description: TBA
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Women on the Verge	Stern	W 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Women on the Verge Course Description: TBA
English 471	Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties across the Americas	Rodriguez Pliego	Th 2-4:50
English 471 Studies in American Literature: Sovereignties across the Americas Course Description: The terms “sovereignties” and “Americas” in the title of this course stand at the crossroads of old and new dialogues about their meanings. This course considers Indigenous and Native American notions of sovereignty that imagine nationhood outside of the nation-state framework. It reads these theorizations of sovereignty and nationhood alongside Latin American and Latinx anti-imperial writing. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the rise of the Guna word “Abiayala” and its use by Indigenous activists from Latin America, and “Turtle Island” as the name that Native American creation stories give to our continent. Our discussions will trace connections between the storytelling traditions of Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors across the hemisphere. We will study the narrative forms that authors take up as they construct or critique nationhood: essays, short stories, novels and poetry. We will also examine how authors break down these forms by taking up communal authorship, orality, visual media, and multilingualism as narrative strategies that provide aesthetic and ideological challenges to canonical articulation of nation-state sovereignties. Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based seminar. Evaluation Method(s): Conference abstract, paper, presentations, and participation in discussions. Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include essays by Emil’ Keme, José Martí, Gerald Vizenor, Shari M. Huhndorf, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Walter Mignolo. Primary materials will include works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Luz Jiménez, Tommy Orange, Yuri Herrera, and Natalie Díaz, as well as excerpts from Popol Vuh and Florentine Codex Texts will be available at: All materials will be uploaded to Canvas.
English 497	MFA Fiction Workshop	Abani	T 2-4:50
English 497 MFA Fiction Workshop Course Description: TBA
English 571	Teaching Creative Writing	Seliy	M 10a-12:50p
English 571 Teaching Creative Writing Course Description: TBA