Spring 2025
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
ENG105 – Introduction to Creative Writing
(4 crs.) Introduction to basic principles of reading and writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (may also substitute genres to include drama and/or screenwriting). (Lec. 3. Project 3/Online). (A3) (B1)
ENG110 – Introduction to Literature
(4 crs.) Analysis of literature through reading and discussion of a number of genres derived from a variety of literary cultures. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A3) (B1)
ENG120 – Poetry Out Loud
(4 crs.) Study of great poetry through the art of performance. Emphasis on public speaking skills, self-confidence, and study of literature to understand and express fundamental beliefs about life, love, pain, happiness. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A4) (B2)
ENG121 – OUTRAGE! Literature of Protest and Dissent
(4 crs.) Study of proud history of poems, songs, plays, and fiction speaking truth to power. Examination of the ways selected literary texts have engaged with different kinds of oppression. (Lec. 3, Online 1) (A3) (C1)
ENG160 – Literatures of the World
(4 crs.) Cross-listed as (ENG), CLS 160. Introduction to significant works of world literature. (Lec. 3, Rec.1, Online 1) (A3) (C2)
ENG205A – Creative Writing: Poetry (4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. (Lec. 3. Project 3/Online) ENG 205A may be offered online. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG205B – Creative Writing: Fiction(4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) ENG 205B may be offered online. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG205C – Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction(4 crs.) Writing and analysis of works written by class members and professional writers. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) ENG 205C may be offered online. Students may repeat ENG 205 for a total of 16 credits but may not repeat the same letter (A, B, C, D).
ENG 241 – U.S. Literature I (4 crs.) Selections from U.S. literature from beginnings to mid-19th century. (Lec. 3, Project 3)
ENG243 – The Short Story (4 crs.) Critical study of the short story from the early 19th century to the present. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) (A3) (B1)
ENG260 – Women and Literature. (4 crs.) Critical study of selected topics. (Lec. 3, Project 3/Online) (A3) (B1)
ENG 302 – Topics in Film Theory. (4 crs.) Professor Ryan Trimm. MW 2-3:15
ENG 305B – Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction; Staff; TuTh 9:30-10:45
ENG 333 – The Sensuous Sentence: Grammar for Grammarphobes; Professor Williams; MW 2-3:15
We will read widely in the theories and structures of English style and grammar, with special attention to the binary contrast of descriptive and prescriptive grammatical systems; how the binary breaks down under critical attention; the historical, political, and social roles of grammar; and the evolution of the English sentence. Readings are likely to include works by Shaw, Kelley, Jonson, Austen, Woolf, Díaz, and many commentators on grammar and style. The tone of the course will be conversational, exploratory, and adventurous. We will not labor under the turgid rules of punctuation, but you should nevertheless expect to come away with a refined and expanded understanding of the basic rules of English style, punctuation, and mechanics. Frequent in-class participation and contribution to online discussion threads will be required.
ENG 345 – Topics in American Colonial Literatures; Professor David Faflik; TuTh 11-12:15
Networks of Early American Literary Exchange
This course explores the literatures of colonial America before 1800, with the aim of examining how the social circulation of literary texts during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries conditioned their reception for several generations of contemporary readers. Our concerns in this course are not strictly literary, however, for we will also trace how a variety of different literary “economies” helped to shape the cultures (and cultural conflicts) that surrounded the production, distribution, and reception of a wide range of “American” literary artifacts over the course of several centuries. The guiding assumption for our class is this: whatever “meaning” a work of literature can be said to possess has depended historically on how it moved through the world, whether in its original transmission from author to reader or else in the unpredictable paths it traveled through some protracted ritual of exchange. Among the authors we will read this semester are Cabeza de Vaca, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Hannah Webster Foster.
ENG 356 – Literature and the Law; Professor Jennifer Jones; TuTh 9:30-10:45
Vengeance
It is hard to imagine a human being who did not experience the fury of being wronged and the longing to be avenged for it. And so, unsurprisingly, the literary imagination for vengeance is ancient, far-reaching, and tenacious. It was powerful when Moses sang “Vengeance is mine” to God in the 13 th century B.C.E. And it remains powerful more than three thousand years later, today: In the fifty years since the publication of his first novel about an adolescent girl with a thirst for vengeance and the superpowers to wreak it, Stephen King’s Carrie has sold more than 350 million copies, making King one of the most successful novelists of all time.
In this course, we will study the obsession of imaginative literature with vengeance in the Western tradition across long time, concentrating on preoccupations definitive of shared human experience where suffering at the hands of another and then retaliating against them is concerned: rage, arrogance, power, loss, grief, guilt, remorse, punishment, justice, recompense, forgiveness, redemption, and the ideal of human rights. We will begin with stories of vengeance that predate the conception of justice; then trace the birth of the democratic ideal of justice; and finally, think about the longstanding entanglements of the two. We will read such texts as the Psalms and the apocryphal Book of Judith from the Old Testament; Seneca’s Thyestes and Aeschylus’ Oresteia from ancient Greece; Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath,” “The Man of Law,” and “The Prioress’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales in the Middle Ages; Elizabethan revenge plays such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy; excerpts from John Milton’s 17 th -century republican epic, Paradise Lost; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s seminal poem of the period of Romanticism, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Emily Brontë’s historical novel looking back on the era, Wuthering Heights; and a powerful assemblage of 20 th and 21 st century works, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” Lars von Trier’s digital film and musical, Dancer in the Dark, and horror fiction by Stephen King and Stephen Graham Jones. To deepen our sense of history, context, and understanding, we will also read critical prose works as various as those of St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacques Derrida, and U.S. constitutional issues, commentaries, and case briefs.
ENG 368 – The Bible as Literature; Professor Derek Nikitas; TuTh 11-12:15
ENG 383 – Modernist Literature, 1900-1945; Professor Stephen Barber; TuTh 12:30-1:45
ENG 385 – Women Writers; Professor Heather Johnson; MW 2-3:15
This course will focus on British women’s writing of the 20th century, with an emphasis on colonialism and postcolonialism. We will read novels and short stories to explore how women’s voices speak to issues in culture, politics, and literary innovation. Writers will include Woolf, Rhys, Winterson, Carter, Smith, Levy, Ali.
ENG 388 – Queer Literatures, Queer Cultures; staff; TuTh 2-3:15
ENG 405 – Capstone in Creative Writing; Professor Peter Covino; W 4-6:45
ENG 410 – Capstone in English Literature; Professor Jennifer Jones TuTh 12:30-1:45
In this course, we will study the powers and pleasures of imaginative literature through close attention to emotion – as a concept, theme, and effect. We will also study the art of formally responding to the aesthetic, political, and ethical complexities of literature in critical writing, giving textual voice to our ideas through the genre of the scholarly essay. In the process, we will read influential imaginative texts in English. We will also read influential critical essays of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, focusing on how they are written and how to read them to think with and respond well to the minds of others. Finally, we will practice the art of research, the culmination of which will be the creation of your own scholarly research paper.
ENG 472 – Shakespeare; staff; MW 3:30-4:45
Graduate Courses
ENG 511 Introduction to Professional Study II
Required for 1st-year students — 1.5 credits
Professor Martha Elena Rojas
Tuesdays, 4:00-6:45 PM
ENG 555 Studies in 19-Century British Texts: Victorian Bodies and Minds
Professor Carolyn Betensky
Wednesdays, 4:00-6:45 PM
This course will consider Victorian representations and explorations of bodies and minds—and the relationship between bodies and minds—in an era in which their norming and typologizing was an urgent but fluid preoccupation. We will read texts by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, John Swanson Jacobs, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Mary Seacole, among others.
ENG 601 Seminar in Creative Writing: Narrative Technique
Professor Derek Nikitas
Mondays, 4:00-6:45 PM
In this course we’ll explore the dialogic relationship between narrative technique and reader reception, from a theoretical perspective and as practitioners of narrative craft (primarily fiction. but the course is designed to be useful to all those who write, or write about, narrative). The course title may emphasize the practical aspects of written storytelling, but we’ll proceed with the understanding that technique is a fluid and context-driven concept, and with the goal of expanding creative horizons in our own creative and critical work.
ENG 601 Seminar in Creative Writing: Poetry
Professor Talvi Ansel
Wednesdays, 4:00-6:45 PM
ENG 620 Seminar in Critical Theory: American Islands: Poetics of Imperialism and Paradise
Professor Janet Kong-Chow
Thursdays, 4:00-6:45 PM
United States American culture often imagines its history as separate/distinct from postcolonialism, despite pre-Independence status as British, French, and Spanish colonial territories. Another pervasive narrative in the U.S. is the belief that it never participated in colonialism or owned colonial possessions, contributing to the continued erasure and invisibility of residents of unincorporated territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guåhan (Guam), Samoa, and the Virgin Islands.
This course examines the influence of three postcolonial geographic discourses—the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific—upon postwar North American cultural and artistic production. We will focus on past and present overseas territories of the United States, with emphasis on Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Hawai’i, and the Philippines. We will engage interdisciplinarily on theories of diaspora, imperialism, global Blackness, and Orientalism; selected texts may include works by Dionne Brand, Édouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Rodney, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, M. Jacqui Alexander, Amilcar Cabral, Lisa Lowe, Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Of particular interest will be geopolitical contexts such as the Cold War, militarization and globalization, “free” trade, modern tourism, environmental justice, and the global war on terror.