The English major provides a solid foundation in the study of the genres of literature, literary theory, literary history, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing, leading to the senior seminar capstone course in which students produce their own extended, original project. Students consult with advisers regularly to ensure that their personal, intellectual, creative and professional goals are being met. Students in the English major program are well prepared for entering graduate study in English, elementary and secondary education, law, business and library science and for careers in government, public service, not-for-profit foundations, public relations and advertising, print and digital publishing and other business fields that need skilled writers and researchers and creative problem solvers. The department also offers two optional concentrations within the 36-credit English major: creative writing and English study for secondary education. Both of these concentrations have more specific requirements than our general major. The English major, whether students choose a concentration or not, is a good preparation for many careers, and graduate study.
The English minor offers the same critical and creative engagements with texts as does the major. Students can choose from a variety of courses to help deepen their critical and writing acumen. The minor is designed to support any major by honing the student's analytical and writing skills.
The Department of English supports five programs: the first-year writing program, the English major, the English minor, the editing certificate and the five-year BA/MAT program in Elementary, Secondary or Special Education. All first-year students entering Quinnipiac University must take EN 101 and EN 102. Students who wish to major, double major or minor in English can apply to the chair of the English department at any time. Students who are interested in the creative writing or secondary education concentrations are encouraged to declare their concentration with their academic adviser as early as possible. Students who are planning to enter the five-year BA/MAT programs in Elementary, Secondary or Special Education will need to apply to the School of Education in their sophomore year. All students in all English programs must maintain an overall 2.50 GPA, be in good academic standing and satisfy all major and minor requirements.
Co-curricular activities are important to the educational goals of many English majors and minors. As a community of readers and writers, the English department supports the English Literary Club, open to all Quinnipiac students, and Montage, the undergraduate literary journal. The department hosts creative writing events, showcasing professional creative writers and artists, and student writers and artists. Students who excel in their studies will be invited to join Sigma Tau Delta, the International Honor Society for English majors.
The mission of the Department of English is to engage students to become:
Serious Readers: English majors take reading (and re-reading) seriously. We analyze and discuss the nuances of poetic form, narrative voice and critical argument. We study historical and cultural contexts in order to grasp and internalize new and unfamiliar perspectives. We read to dissect, and we read to enlarge. English majors read the world around them with open minds and critical precision.
Skillful Writers: Language is the English major’s medium. We combine words and phrases the way painters combine colors and textures. We write to make sense of our reading, to organize our thoughts, and to express ourselves in clear and compelling ways. In writing workshops, we learn the value of collaboration and constructive criticism as we hone our craft. The practice of effective communication through writing makes the English major a sought-after candidate for a wide variety of 21st-century careers.
Global Thinkers: The nature of the English major is to work toward understanding, valuing and respecting the traditions of peoples from a variety of cultures. English majors encounter a wide array of human experience in the literature we study, and we celebrate the ways difference and diversity expand our appreciation for the complex worlds that we navigate.
Creative Problem Solvers: Where some see problems, the English major sees possibilities. The world of the English major is the world of the imagination. We learn to read old and familiar expressions in new and unexpected ways. We value innovation over stagnation and novelty over cliché. The ability to confront an issue with a variety of approaches and perspectives gives the English major an edge when it comes to solving problems.
English (EN)
EN 101. Introduction to Academic Reading and Writing.3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the ways that writing is grounded in reading and that inquiry is essential to learning. Through attentive reading of academic texts, students are given authority as learners to undertake serious intellectual projects that emphasize critical and creative thinking. Instructors guide students through sequenced reading and writing assignments and highlight the revision process of multiple-draft writing that leads to increasingly complex thinking and rhetorical presentation. As a community of learners, students begin to recognize academic writing as a site where knowledge is produced, understood and communicated. Portfolio assessment; grade of C- or better required to pass EN 101. Full-time students are expected to have completed EN 101 and EN 102 by the end of three semesters. Refer to the undergraduate Academic Good Standing Policy for details.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, All
EN 101I. Introduction to Academic Reading and Writing Intensive.3 Credits.
EN 101I is essentially the same course as EN 101; however it meets five hours per week. This class is intended for students who feel that they may need more support in complex reading and/or essay writing. The additional class time allows for more contact with the professor and more feedback and discussion with peers. Portfolio assessment; grade of C- or better required to pass. Full-time students are expected to have completed EN 101 and EN 102 by the end of three semesters. Refer to undergraduate Academic Good Standing Policy for details.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, All
EN 102. Academic Writing and Research.3 Credits.
Building on the practices of EN 101, this course introduces students to the kind of critical and creative thinking necessary to understand the relationship between academic research and argumentation. Working with a broad range of academic texts, students undertake projects that focus on a field of inquiry and that lead to increasingly proficient rhetorical presentation. Students develop a practical understanding of the ways in which critical thinking, writing and research all depend upon a shared process of inquiry that can be applied across disciplines and within their chosen majors. Portfolio assessment. Full-time students are expected to have completed EN 101 and EN 102 by the end of three semesters. Refer to the undergraduate Academic Good Standing Policy for details.
Prerequisites: Take EN 101 or EN 101I.
Offered: Every year, All
EN 102H. Honors Academic Writing and Research.3 Credits.
This EN 102 class is reserved for Honors Program students and exceptional students from Fall EN 101 classes. Portfolio assessment.
Prerequisites: Take EN 101.
Offered: Every year, Spring
EN 103H. Advanced Academic Writing and Research.3 Credits.
This course satisfies all first-year writing requirements. Through readings of a broad range of academic texts, students learn to write for academic success. EN 103H integrates the practices of academic reading and writing so that students learn to think critically and creatively as they conduct inquiry in diverse and increasingly rigorous scholarly contexts. With instructor guidance, students undertake self-directed projects and develop rich collaborations among peers, including shared commentary, research and revision, enabling students to identify and transfer best practices to their future performance as readers, writers and thinkers across disciplines, and within their chosen majors. Portfolio assessment. Placement score of 6 required.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 200. Special Topics in Literature.3 Credits.
Students are introduced to readings in literature dealing with a single theme or specific problem, e.g., mystery/detective fiction, masterpieces of Jewish literature, comedy, etc. The course may be repeated for credit when topic changes. Specific titles are announced from time to time.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 201. Creative Writing.3 Credits.
This course blends seminar and workshop approaches to the reading and writing of imaginative literature. Students compose and revise original works in multiple genres, maintain a writer's journal, and assemble a comprehensive final portfolio.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, All
EN 202. Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.3 Credits.
Prerequisites: None
EN 203. Practicing Stylistics.3 Credits.
Students review and practice the fundamental rules governing language, focusing specifically on grammar and syntax. They analyze and practice their own emerging style through imitation and revision exercises across a variety of poetic, fictional and nonfictional models. Required reading includes "The Art of Styling Sentences," "Exercises in Style" and "Stylish Academic Writing." The class culminates with a deeply revised portfolio of original efforts and a final referenced essay on what style means--and how to achieve it.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, All
EN 204. Reading Literature.3 Credits.
What is literature for? Why read it? Is it relevant in the electronic age? Is there is something we can point to and say "that's literature" as a category? The course is about how we read literature as a way of thinking about some answers to those questions. Students read some short stories, poems and perhaps a short novel, argue about what they mean, and what their purpose might be in our lives.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 205. Introduction to Fiction Writing.3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the process of fiction writing. Writing prompts derive mainly from our reading and discussion of published short stories. Participants also read and discuss a handful of pieces "on writing" by established writers to help guide the process. The course is designed to help students hone their craft by writing habitually, composing numerous beginnings, and then working through a selective process to find and complete those pieces with the greatest potential to succeed. Throughout the semester, students draft, revise, edit and polish a total of four short stories. This a foundational course in fiction writing, which means that we focus mainly on the basics of character development and prose style.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 206. Introduction to Writing Poetry.3 Credits.
This course gives students a strong foundation in the formal traditions of poetry in English from blank verse to free verse. Students work closely with Robert Pinsky's "The Sounds of Poetry" to get a grasp of the basic, formal principles of the art, the better to hear poems and understand the ways in which they work. Students explore a variety of poetic forms, reading and discussing poems that exemplify these forms and practicing their own poems based on these models. For the final project of the semester, students assemble a portfolio of all their work, introduced by a reflective essay.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 207. Interactive Storytelling and Narrative.3 Credits.
This course explores the craft and purpose of interactive storytelling. Course content will cover both the creation and analysis of various interactive texts. Students in this class will combine basic coding language with creative writing principles to produce a complex interactive narrative. The interactive narrative will serve as a semester-long project that emphasizes autonomous characters, a responsive setting, and meaningful story branches navigated by a user. Students will also develop a theoretical understanding of interactive media.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 208. Greek Tragedy.3 Credits.
This comprehensive survey of Greek tragedy pays special attention to tragic theory and to the evolution of classical drama from its birth in the cult of Dionysus to its culmination in fifth-century B.C. Athens. The extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and selected plays by Euripides are examined with special emphasis on form.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
UC: Humanities
EN 209. Love Stories.3 Credits.
Everyone likes a good love story, right? And everyone hopes, and expects, to have his/her/their own "love story" someday. These stories are everywhere: on TV, in movies and in books we read. This course will explore the idea of love in literature throughout the modern era: how it is part of many of our great narratives, contextualized by its culture and history. In literary history, there are some iconic love stories that we still value, that we still see as universal. If we take love seriously, can we question it? Is it a universal human emotion apart from history or politics? Is love contextualized within an historical moment, by heterosexual normativity, by our notions of family and marriage, by race and class? What are we taught by literature about love?
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 210. The Art of Poetry.3 Credits.
Students undertake close reading and discussion of the genre of poetry not limited by historical period. Attention is paid to technique, formal and stylistic qualities, and repeated themes in an attempt to experience and understand poetry.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 211. Introduction to Editing.3 Credits.
Interested in learning more about editing and publishing? Students are given editing tools to workshop their writing projects from outside the course. Focus is on the formal elements of writing but also their relationship to meaning, purpose, and authority. Seven-week, online.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Fall
UC: Breadth Elective
EN 212. The Personal Essay.3 Credits.
This course features a historical analysis of the genre's origins across 30 centuries of writing--from the earliest records of writing, to contemporary American writers of the form. Theoretical analysis of the genre draws on Greek conceptions of "persona" to modern psychological ideas of "personhood" and "impersonation," to linguistic considerations of the first-person singular and plural pronouns. The five-paragraph format also is drawn into theoretical discussion and practical critique. Students write several "personal" and "academic" essays.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Fall
UC: Humanities
EN 213. Nature Writing.3 Credits.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 214. The History Essay.3 Credits.
This genre-based course in writing the historical essay is not a history course. It is a writing course that concentrates on the technique of the essay and introduces the principles of writing historical literature. Students explore history as a problem-solving tool, wherein the lessons from studying the past can be useful in understanding the present. The course examines newer (and more controversial) areas of cultural and social history.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 215. The Travel Essay.3 Credits.
This genre-based advanced writing course provides a historical overview of nonfiction, travel writing and its emergence as an area of scholarly interest. It explores the ways in which travel writers create narrative personae, construct essays to persuade readers to their perspective, and help to compose the identities of the peoples and cultures about whom they write. Emphasis is on the sustained examination and practice of student writing.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 216. Advanced Editing.3 Credits.
Continuation of Introduction to Editing. Students workshop their writing projects from outside the course, with attention given to revising, copyediting, and proofreading as overlapping and situated practices. Seven-week, online.
Prerequisites: Take EN 211.
Offered: As needed
EN 217. Manuals of Style.3 Credits.
Students translate texts across a sampling of prominent style manuals and house styles, and they experiment with their own writing to invent a manual of style as the culminating project for the course. Students are exposed to practical and theoretical knowledge of how style is connected to the logic of a particular publication, organization, field, discipline, or division of knowledge, enabling students to produce and innovate in varied and changing editorial contexts. Seven-week, online.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 220. The Short Story As a Genre.3 Credits.
This course asks students to explore several remarkable stories across more than two centuries and from a variety of cultures and perspectives. It also helps students to read as literary, writerly critics. The history of how the short story form itself - the genre - has developed is a corner stone of the course's structure. Authors discussed may include the following internationally recognized masters, among others: Poe, Melville, Chopin, Hurston, Kawabata, Hemingway, Baldwin, Bambara, Erdrich, Alexie, Zadie Smith, and Diaz.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 222. Comics and Graphic Novels.3 Credits.
This course explores comics and graphic novels emphasizing contemporary works. Students consider the (often unnoticed) complexity of the comics form, as well as its historical development and representative genres. Readings are drawn from many different genres; and survey a wide variety of national origins, the better to represent the inevitable human diversity embodied in comics creation and reading. Students have the chance to develop an original portfolio that focuses on any creator, genre or theme of their choosing.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 223. Hippies, Punks and Rude Boys.3 Credits.
In the years after World War II, youth culture became a significant part of British life. Year by year, decade by decade, new cultural types emerged: angry young men, mods, hippies, rude boys, punks, skinheads. In this class, students consider how these social types are represented by the literature of the period. Doing so provides us with a vantage point for considering the intersection of social identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) and the relationship between literary culture and wider cultural and historical trends.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
UC: Humanities, Intercultural Understand
EN 230. Carbon Tales.3 Credits.
We live at an unprecedented juncture in human and natural history: the burning of greenhouse gases for energy has transformed the world, initiating a period of human abundance and environmental destruction. In this class, students read texts that address the environment, seeking to understand the rhetorical and generic gestures through which we engage our carbon-based realities.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 235. Literature by Women.3 Credits.
With the question of what it means to extract a canon of literature defined by gender as its center, this course enables students to consider the ways in which women have contributed a language and form to the literary tradition. In particular, the course explores the process by which this literature, often written from the margins of experience, has shaped how we read today. Varied female authors are discussed, including Woolf, Dickinson, Jewett, Hurston, Morrison, Cisneros, Kincaid, Abouzeid, Kingston, and Dangarembga among others.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
UC: Humanities, Intercultural Understand
EN 240. Survey of English Literature I.3 Credits.
Students gain an understanding and appreciation of literature through the study of the cultural background, the literary work itself, and the life of the author. This course explores the literary history of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times through the 18th century.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
UC: Humanities
EN 241. Medieval Romances.3 Credits.
This course focuses on the most popular medieval literary genre, the romance. This genre encompasses a hero's quest, including knights, battles, magic and damsels in distress or otherwise. Participants read both French Breton lais and Middle English verse romances (in translation) that flourished in 13th- and 14th-century England, with particular attention to the Arthurian legend as well as social, cultural and historical factors that gave rise to this literature. Some attention is given to the attraction of contemporary audiences to elements that had their genesis in medieval romance.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Fall
UC: Humanities
EN 250. Survey of English Literature II.3 Credits.
This course explores the literary history of English literature from Romanticism to Modernism. Students gain an understanding and appreciation of this literature through the study of the cultural milieu, the literary work itself, and the life of the author.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 255. The Supernatural in 19th Century British Literature.3 Credits.
Monsters, Vampires, Ghosts, and Zombies. Need I say more? All these supernatural phenomena have their origins in nineteenth-century British literature, and the stories we tell about them, whether in film or on TV or in contemporary fiction, still use the same motifs as the original texts. They may "update" them, but they are largely indebted to the originals for their reason to exist. In this course, we'll study the originals and find out what's so interesting about them and why this ill-begotten progeny is born in the nineteenth century. Among some poetry and shorter stories we'll read those novels that endure the most: Frankenstein, Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every other year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 256. Fantastic & Magic Latin American Stories.3 Credits.
This course explores iconic Latin American short stories in fantastic and magic realism. We examine how the fantastic and the magic emerge in narratives as internal factors otherwise overlooked. They appear from within conventional realities through a playful irruption of possibilities that the imagination invokes, and through the interaction of different cultural perspectives. The course is taught in English. Original Spanish texts will be available.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed, All
EN 260. Survey of American Literature I.3 Credits.
This course explores the development of American literature as reflected in the works of major authors and works from the Colonial era through the Civil War. Students gain an understanding and appreciation of this literature through study of the cultural background, the literary work itself, and the life of the author. Major authors may include Bradstreet, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville and Davis.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
UC: Humanities
EN 265. Black Writers in and Beyond the US.3 Credits.
This survey course explores African-American literature from Colonial times to the present, concentrating on 20th-century literature. Emphasis is placed upon close reading of selected texts in light of the changing sociocultural conditions faced by African Americans.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities, Intercultural Understand
EN 270. Survey of American Literature II.3 Credits.
This course explores the development of American literature as reflected in the works of major authors from the Civil War to the present. Students gain an understanding and appreciation of literature through study of the cultural background, the literary work itself, and the life of the author. Major authors include Emily Dickinson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Philip Roth and Marilyn Robinson.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 277. Literature of the Americas.3 Credits.
Focusing on the 20th to 21st centuries, this course examines writers from Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, who typically emerge from historically underrepresented groups. These literary works engage the lived experiences of indigeneity, enslavement, imperialism, migration and globalization, to explore the ties that bind the many peoples of the Western hemisphere.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities, Intercultural Understand
EN 280. The European Tradition in Literature I.3 Credits.
This survey course presents selected European masterpieces, both written in English and in translation, including representative selections from Homer to 1700. Emphasis is on literary and philosophic values with attention to methods of literary analysis as applicable to works by Virgil, Dante, Cervantes and others. The course presents historical backgrounds and study in the generic traditions of literature.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Fall
UC: Humanities
EN 281. The European Tradition in Literature II.3 Credits.
This survey course presents selected European masterpieces, both written in English and in translation, including representative works from 1700 to the present. Emphasis is on literary and philosophic values with attention to methods of literary analysis as applicable to the works of Moliere, Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Pushkin, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mann and Kafka. The course combines historical backgrounds and study in the generic traditions of literature.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
UC: Humanities
EN 299. Independent Study.1-3 Credits.
In-depth focus on a specific author, topic or area. Topic must be specified in advance.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 300. Special Topics in Literature.3 Credits.
This course explores readings in literature dealing with a single author, theme, or specific problem. The course may be repeated for credit when topic changes. Specific titles are announced from time to time.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: As needed
EN 301. Advanced Fiction-Writing Workshop.3 Credits.
This advanced fiction-writing course uses a workshop approach to help students understand and experience the process of drafting, revising and editing short stories, as well as the importance of reading and critiquing the work of their peers. Students read contemporary short fiction and give formal presentations on print and web-based literary journals and magazines. Each student chooses a public venue (e.g., public reading, website, blog, etc.) and presents selections from his/her work. The final portfolio represents the breadth of the students' work, including multiple drafts of stories, workshop comments, reading responses and a writer's journal.
Prerequisites: Take EN 201 ,EN 202 or EN 205.
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 302. Advanced Creative Nonfiction.3 Credits.
This advanced writing course focuses on the reading, analyzing and writing of creative nonfiction. Students read essay and book-length works of creative nonfiction with an emphasis on understanding authorial presence, issues of audience, questions of truth and memory and artistic techniques. Students are asked to employ what they learn from studying masterworks of creative nonfiction to their own longer works of creative nonfiction.
Prerequisites: Take EN 201, EN 202 or EN 205.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 303. The Art of Audio Narrative.3 Credits.
This course is about storytelling. Students learn the basics of multitrack audio recording and mixing. They write and produce fiction and nonfiction audio narratives. Each project is shared in a stimulating and mutually supportive workshop environment. Students read and listen widely to gain a sense of the history and theory of radio art. Participants also spend time identifying target audiences and looking at ways to distribute student work to the larger world of public and independent radio.
Prerequisites: Take EN 201, EN 202 or EN 205.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 304. Junior Seminar in Critical Theory.3 Credits.
Junior Seminar introduces students to principles and textual questions that permeate and animate contemporary literary studies. Students gain knowledge of current theoretical terminology, and some of its implications for the ways we read and analyze texts in the discipline of English. A major focus of the class is on how these principles and terms are put into practice in scholarship on literature. The Junior Seminar is a preparation course for advanced work in the English major, particularly the Senior Seminar. This course must be taken in the junior year.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 306. Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop.3 Credits.
This course assumes a prior foundation in the reading of poetry and the practice of writing in traditional forms and seeks to push students to write original poems in a contemporary idiom. Students write a poem on assignment each week, drawing from readings of contemporary poetry collections as well as additional model poems. Students perform their own work publicly and attend literary events to observe and respond to how other writers perform their work. This practice culminates in a public reading given by the whole class. The final project is to assemble a chapbook of poems.
Prerequisites: Take EN 201 or EN 206.
Offered: Every year, Spring
EN 308. Composing America.3 Credits.
This research-based, advanced composition and period course is a hybrid that crosses the divide between the study of literature and the study of rhetoric. Students investigate the intersection between literature and literacy/composition practices in the U.S. from World War II through the Vietnam War (1939-72). Participants consider how the U.S. has been composed through the acts of reading and writing by studying a variety of texts (poetry, drama, novels, travel, anthropology, folktales, music, theory, film and art).
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 314. Carbon Tales.3 Credits.
We live at an unprecedented juncture in human and natural history. The burning of greenhouse gases for energy has transformed the world, initiating a period of human abundance and environmental peril. We now tell ourselves stories about our energy and climate every day: stories filled with wild events, vast conspiracies, noble heroes, and twisted villains. In this class, we'll think critically about the fiction and film in which we communicate these tales-and we'll think about the next chapters we hope to write.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: Every year, Spring
EN 320. Studies in the Novel.3 Credits.
Students explore the development of the novel from its beginning to the present through discussion of the theories of prose narration. Special attention is given to characteristics of the genre. The course may be repeated for credit when topic changes (e.g., American novel, English novel, Continental novel).
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 321. Twentieth-Century British Literature.3 Credits.
In this course, we will be reading British fiction, but doing so in a somewhat different manner. Scholars have long emphasized the experiments of modernism in the early Twentieth Century and, indeed, we will begin there in the works of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. But we're going to take a broader view: we will cover the whole century, not just its early years, and we'll read genre literature often excluded from serious consideration. So our itinerary includes not only the modernists, but also writers as diverse as Agatha Christie, Graham Greene and the world's latest Nobel Laureate in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro. In doing so, we will examine how the provincial English at last began to acknowledge the world-how they began to see their own empire and its aftermath-and how this more globally minded writing ties together a century of literary and popular narratives.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
EN 322. Modern British Literature (1900-1945).3 Credits.
This course focuses on readings in British literature of the early 20th century. Students study writers such as Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats and Eliot against a background of social and political crises from 1900 to 1950.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 323. Contemporary British Literature (1945-Present).3 Credits.
Devastated by Hitler's Blitz, Britain watched its empire crumble and its global power recede. In a nation of social troubles, British writers began again to write for the public. From the Beatles to the Rushdie affair, British culture has thrived in the face of rapid change by producing a literature of social engagement and aesthetic vibrancy. This course includes texts that speak to these wider historical currents and the aesthetic and intellectual life of Britain since 1945.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 324. The Gothic Novel.3 Credits.
This course offers a historical survey of the Gothic genre, from Horace Walpole's 1764 "The Castle of Otranto" leading to its many variations in subsequent centuries: terror narratives, the political gothic, the female gothic, science and crime and the postmodern gothic. The course considers the Gothic genre's deployment in historical, social and cultural contexts, as well as the structural and epistemological changes that have emerged since the late 18th century.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
EN 325. History of the English Language.3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the origins and development of the English language and to its social, cultural and historical contexts. It is required of all English majors in the MAT program.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every year, Spring
EN 326. Modern Irish Drama.3 Credits.
This course surveys the development of modern Irish dramas, from W.B. Yeats and the writers of the Gaelic Revival (1884-1916) to more current dramatists such as Tom Murphy and Brian Friel. The material not only covers the powerful body of work produced by Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory (along with its influence on European and American drama) but also ranges over the work of G.B. Shaw, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey and Martin McDonagh. Students also consider modern works of the Irish stage, especially by women (e.g., Elizabeth Kuti) and other voices.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: As needed
EN 330. World Literature.3 Credits.
This course addresses literary topics by reading texts drawn from various national, regional or transnational literatures.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 331. Classic & Contemporary Literature Adolescent Lit.3 Credits.
For centuries, an educated person was expected to read the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Now, we expect an educated person to have read in a variety of social identities and experiences. This class brings these two literatures and attitudes together. We will read Classical Greek and Roman literature in translation and consider the intriguing trend of Twenty-First Century writers, mostly women, who are retelling these myths today. Why does a Muslim woman want to re-write Sophocles? Or a working-class writer want to think about the Greek elites? How can we learn to read both these literatures differently by putting them together?
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 332. Myth in Children's & Adolescent Lit..1 Credit.
Students enrolled in EN 331 have the option to take this add-on course. The class will be offered online, asynchronously. We will begin by reading some secondary texts to orient ourselves to children's and adolescent literature as traditions. From there, we will proceed to a study of a variety of recent works that deal with classical mythology.
Corequisites: Take EN 331.
Offered: As needed, All
EN 338. American Literature by Women of Color.3 Credits.
This course explores the diverse literary traditions, themes and narrative strategies employed by American women of color, including black, Latina, Asian and Native American female writers. Students examine how race, ethnicity and gender affect form, content, language and style in literature. Writers include: Silko, Erdrich, Morrison, Walker, Angelou, Giovanni, Tan, Kingston, Yamamoto, Cisneros and Viramontes.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 340. Immigrant Fictions.3 Credits.
This course explores fiction by/about immigrants, examining U.S. history and culture through their stories. Participants focus primarily on 20th- and 21st-century texts by Jewish, Latin American, Caribbean, Asian and African migrants to understand how they represent the race, class and gender barriers (and opportunities) that underlie the American Dream. We also use critical scholarship on racial formation, immigration, citizenship, human rights and diaspora to produce presentations and essays. Students use these concepts to help theorize how the most marginalized "aliens" have made America the complex and contradictory nation it is today.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 341. Chaucer and the Medieval Period.3 Credits.
This course presents a critical interpretation, in its historical setting, of the chief imaginative work in England of the period, "The Canterbury Tales." Additional works of Chaucer and other representative dramatic and lyric poetry also are included. Attention is given to the cultural and artistic setting.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 343. Shakespeare: History & Comedies Comedies.3 Credits.
Shakespeare spent the first decade of his writing career honing both his comic craft and his political observation. In reading his comedies, this class explores how Shakespeare invented and revised his culture's ideas about marriage, love, and gender. In reading his histories, we ask, along with Shakespeare, what characteristics we want in our rulers; when armed resistance is justified; and how war impacts a nation's sense of self.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 344. Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances.3 Credits.
Extensive structural and thematic analysis of Shakespeare's tragedies and romances is the basis of this course, which concentrates on selected problems of scholarship, criticism and performance.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 345. English Literature of the Renaissance.3 Credits.
This intensive study of the principal genres of 16th-century English literature, including lyric poetry (Sidney) and Romance such as "The Faerie Queen" (Spenser), places special emphasis on the major works of the Elizabethan period. Some attention is given to the medieval background, Renaissance art and music, and Continental literature.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 348. Milton and the 17th Century.3 Credits.
This intensive study of literature within this revolutionary period emphasizes the cultural context for poetry, prose and drama in England from 1603 to about 1665. The course focuses on Milton's "Paradise Lost" and on works of other major writers, such as the metaphysical poets (Donne, Marvell, Herbert), and Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and Thomas Middleton (drama).
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 350. 18th-Century British Literature (1660-1800).3 Credits.
The idea that literature is changing in form and content as well as in its social function is central to the study of literature in the long 18th century: what's at stake in the change? This course explores this question by reading a variety of texts including Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," Pope's "Essay on Man," and Eliza Haywood's "Fantomina," among others, works that seem to be rather strange literature by modern standards. Participants also read about the "rise" of print culture, the many historical changes of the period, such as the rise of the colonial empire, and the change from a poetics of the elite to the aesthetics of feeling.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 351. Studies in Rhetoric and Writing.3 Credits.
This is an advanced course in the theory and practice of argumentation. Students learn the foundations of Aristotelian rhetoric and then apply an understanding of Logos, Pathos, Ethos and Telos to various topics of historical and contemporary concern-most prominently on the cognitive, social and political changes effected by the 500-year-old Gutenberg Revolution (The Age of the Book) and their rapid disruption and undoing via the Digital Revolution (The Age of the Screen). Weekly papers and some heavy reading requirements.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 352. British Romanticism (1785-1832).3 Credits.
This period of time is revolutionary: the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural revolution, the political revolutions in France and America, a literary revolution that constructs a broader reading public, and a print revolution that expands the publishing industry. In this course, students question what these revolutions have to do with novels, poetry and essays of the period, and explore how literature of this period help "revolutionize" the individual, nature and society at the same time that it seems to "romanticize" them.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 355. Victorian Literature (1832-1901).3 Credits.
During the Victorian period, the industrial age in England reached its height as the nation expanded its cultural and economic boarders to become the world power that was the British Empire. It was a time when immense wealth was coupled with immense poverty, and "propriety, duty and family" was the slogan of Victorian morality but hidden in the open was the growth of brothels and the drug trade. It was the first age where literacy was widespread, and reading was the primary entertainment for the elite and the masses. Students explore the variety of literature in which the Victorians imagined themselves and the world they lived in.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 358. English Elective.3 Credits.
Prerequisites: None
EN 361. Origins of U.S. Literature (1492-1865).3 Credits.
At the heart of our national literature lies a complex early narrative. It contains darker issues with an unresolved past, conflicting histories, encounters with the "other," our Calvinist relationship with nature and nurture, a mixed psychology as colonials and revolutionaries, and the tension between our aspiration to be the city on the hill and the realities of life on the edge of wilderness. It also contains the exuberance of the "new Adam" (and Eve), where we can start the story over again and again. This course invites students to test and interrogate these ideas by reading authors in the founding traditions of U.S. literature, such as Bradstreet, Edwards, Rowlandson, Equiano, Wheatley, Brockden Brown, Emerson, and Hawthorne.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 365. The American Renaissance (1830-1865).3 Credits.
This course presents a study of the dichotomy in the literature of the American Renaissance as reflected in such works as "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar," "Civil Disobedience," "Walden," "Song of Myself," "The Scarlet Letter" and "Moby Dick."
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every year, Fall
EN 366. Modern U.S. Literature (1900-1945).3 Credits.
The early 20th-century movement known as Modernism was an exhilarating time when the Western world's artists and thinkers were exploring how to represent human experience authentically. In the context of U.S. contributions to this era, students investigate questions of aesthetic innovation (especially in poetry), literary subgenres, popular vs. high culture, and national and ethnic identity (including the Harlem Renaissance). Representative authors might include Cather, Frost, Hammett, Hemingway, Hurston, Larsen, Stein, Stevens, Toomer and Yezierska.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 367. Contemporary U.S. Literature (1945-Present).3 Credits.
After World II, the U.S. experienced profound change, including the Atomic Age and the Cold War (and later wars on drugs and terrorism), unprecedented global travel and migration, Civil and Human Rights movements, and astonishing technological revolution. Engaging these seismic shifts, cultural expressions have changed as well. This course focuses on the late 20th- to 21st-century writers who reimagined our world, among them Postmodernists such as Nabokov, political writers such as Kerouac, writers of color such as Morrison, and poets and innovators of form such as Plath or Anzaldua.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Spring
EN 373. Modernist American Poetry.3 Credits.
Introduces "Modernism" and "Modernist" poetry to enable close readings of modernist forerunners Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and onward through the 1960s. Major poets include Pound, Eliot, Crane, Williams, Hughes, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Ginsberg, Knight, Sexton and Kinnell. Emphasis is on applying a deepened historical sense of what Modernism was and what it now means through individual poems and across poets and poetic schools. Students write final long essays analyzing American modernist themes, poetic forms and cultural frames.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 380. Realism and Naturalism in U.S. Literature (1865-1930).3 Credits.
U.S. Realism and Naturalism were late 19th-/early 20th-century aesthetic movements that emerged after Romanticism. The nation's post-Civil War mood produced a literature that reflected forces from industrialism and social migration to Darwinism and the "New Woman." In this course, students examine literature written in relation to those forces and specifically study how the novel matures in the U.S. tradition. Authors may include Twain, James, Chopin, Chesnutt, Howells, Wharton, and Crane.
Prerequisites: Take one 200-level English course.
Offered: Every other year, Fall
EN 390. Environmental Writing.3 Credits.
This course considers the rhetoric of environmental communication. How can we write to reach audiences both professional and public? Explaining scientific knowledge is tricky at the best of times, but environmental communication is now burdened by extraordinary political, social, and cultural complexities. You will develop your rhetorical sensitivity and linguistic facility by analyzing historical examples and practicing genres (both technical genres like the proposal and public facing ones like articles and essays).
Prerequisites: Take EN 101 and EN 102; or EN 103H.
Offered: As needed
EN 399. Independent Study.1-6 Credits.
In-depth focus on a specific author, topic, or area. Topic must be specified in advance.
Prerequisites: Take EN 101.
Offered: As needed
EN 414. Editorial Internship.3 Credits.
Students collaborate as an editorial team on a volume of Double Helix: A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing. Under the guidance of the Associate Editor, with oversight from the Editor, students work with professional manuscripts, from submission through publication, acquiring experience with all phases of the editorial process. Students who complete the internship receive three course credits, are permanently listed on the journal site as Assistant Editors for that volume, and gain hands-on experience applicable to editorial positions in all fields. Seven-week, online.
Corequisites: Take EN 216 or EN 217.
Offered: As needed, Fall
EN 460. Senior Seminar Capstone.3 Credits.
Senior Seminar focuses on sustained intellectual inquiry about literature, highlighting your own literary interests. It offers students the opportunity to develop expertise on a text/field/question of their choice, while providing them with a process and a community to rely on for support and feedback. In this course, students conduct independent research on a literary text. Building and contributing to an intellectual community, students write, revise and present a major argumentative essay. Open to senior English majors only.
Prerequisites: Take EN 304.
Offered: Every year, All
EN 470. Senior Thesis.3 Credits.
Senior thesis is open to English majors who are candidates for honors in English. Candidates must be recommended by a member of the English faculty, who consents to serve as adviser for the thesis. This adviser and the student select two additional faculty to serve as a reading committee for the student's final thesis presentation.
Prerequisites: Take EN 204 or EN 304 and one 300-level English course.
Offered: Every year, All
EN 499. Independent Study.3 Credits.
Prerequisites: None
EN 500. Special Topics in Literature.4 Credits.
Extensive reading and intensive analysis of literature dealing with a single theme or specific problem.
Prerequisites: None
Offered: As needed
EN 554. Young Adult Literature.4 Credits.
This is a multi-genre course that asks students to consider the evolving category of young adult literature with an emphasis on literary and cultural analysis. By pairing primary texts with both seminal and recent criticism, students consider historical and contemporary examples of young adult literature, focusing on questions of coming-of-age, ethnicity, sexuality, canonicity, trauma and identity.
Prerequisites: Take EN 460.
Offered: Every year, Spring