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1192 Fall 2018-19 Course Descriptions
We have listed the numbers and titles of many of the English courses for the Spring 2017-18 semester below.
In addition, information about the undergraduate catalogue for English courses can be found in MyCourseGuide (NetID log-in required). Non-UW students can contact the Undergraduate Advisor for information about courses.
100: Introduction to College Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Freshman or Sophomore standing only
English 100 is an introduction to college composition that begins to prepare students for the demands of writing in the university and for a variety of contexts beyond the classroom. Students will compose and revise several shorter and longer essays totaling 25-30 pages of writing, develop skills in critical reading and thinking skills and information literacy, and practice oral communication.
120: Introduction to Theatre and Dramatic Literature
TBA
MW 12:05-12:55pm Humanities 3650
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama
Course Guide Description: Reading important plays, attending stage productions, writing and thinking critically about theatre and drama. Emphasis on developing analytic skills in dramatic literature and theatre production. 4-credit option requires additional writing. Enroll Info: Open to Fr. 4 cr sections meet Com B requirement
140: Comm B Topics in English Literature
Topic: The Wild, Threatened, and Toxic: Environmental Literature in 20th and 21st-Century America
Lynn Keller
MW 9:55-10:45am Ingraham 19
This lecture/discussion course will explore how 20th- and 21st-century North American writers have represented nature or wilderness, humankind’s relation to the rest of the natural world, and human-induced environmental transformation. Course texts will allow us to consider the consequences of some common ways of thinking about the natural environment and, where those consequences seem damaging, invite us to consider possible alternatives. [The description that follows is provisional, as the book selection has not been entirely finalized.]
The readings in the first unit of the course, titled “Ideas of Nature and Land Ethics readings that include works by Aldo Leopold, William Cronon, Wendell Berry, Ed Roberson, and Lucille Clifton– introduce diverse ways of thinking about the land or the natural environment and human relations to it. Along with the poetry of Roberson and Clifton, the novel Ceremony, by Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko, will prompt consideration of ways in which people’s relation to the natural environment is shaped by the history and culture of the racial or ethnic groups with which they identify, as well as by factors like social class, geographical region, and occupation. The environmental impacts of mining, introduced briefly in Ceremony and developed as a central subject of the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been, will lead us into the second unit’s consideration of several forms of environmental degradation caused by industrialized humans and of the often unjustly distributed economic, social, and health consequences of that degradation. In this unit, titled “Threatened and Toxic Creatures and Places, we consider human-animal relations through Ruth Ozeki’s novel about the meat industry and industrial agriculture, My Year of Meats, and through science journalism about mass extinction as well as several works (one a movie) about animal attacks on humans. Other readings will explore such issues as nuclear waste disposal or the harmful consequences of accumulating non-biodegradable plastics. The course will close with Margaret Atwood’s “speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake, that imagines a near-future environmental apocalypse and what might lie beyond it. Reading both fictional and nonfictional works throughout the semester will allow us to evaluate the strengths and limitations of both kinds of writing and to consider the imagination’s role in responding to environmental challenges.
This 4-credit course enables students to satisfy their Communications B requirement while fulfilling one of their literature requirements. Substantial class time in section meetings (twice a week) will be devoted to learning the conventions of writing about literature and, more generally, of writing persuasive prose. Lectures and discussion sections will emphasize the development of close reading skills while also stressing the importance of extra-literary contexts to meaningful literary interpretation.
145: American Dreamers
David Zimmerman
TR 11:00-12:15pm Education L150
We’ll be studying novels, plays, and films that focus on individuals who strive to achieve success and security in America. These individuals sometimes succeed, but in doing so they often compromise their power and freedom. They sometimes fail, exposing both the seductive promise and the fatal limitations of the American Dream. The course texts ask: What are the risks and rewards of the dream of success in America? How does our country’s political and social history shape the meaning and possibility of success for different groups of people? Does success require that individuals fit in socially, and do individuals gain or lose power by assimilating? The course is meant to be engaging and fun. My hope is that you will enjoy studying the texts and movies and also enjoy learning how to think critically and carefully about them and the questions they pose.
150: Literature and Culture of Asian America
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm Ingraham 222
Cross-Listed with Asian American Studies
Course Guide Description: Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. This course traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.
155: Myth and Literature
Topic: Classical Myth and Modern Literature
Ronald Harris
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Humanities 2637
At its core, history is a collection of ancient stories with themes that often appear over and over again. It’s no wonder, then, that ancient myths find their way into modern lives every day. So, a central question explored by this FIG is: How do myths find their ways into our lives—into our poetry, our literature, our popular culture? To answer this question, we will dive into studies of classical literature as well as contemporary artistic and literary adaptations to examine the continuing presence of myth in society today.
We will investigate puzzles: How do the lost fragments of an ancient Greek poem travel from archeologists, to translators, to us, speaking across time of love and desire? And these questions lead to other explorations:
- What do our campus tall-tales tell us about UW-Madison’s history and values?
- When we enter into these stories through creative retelling, how do we become a more integral part of our campus?
- What do the stories of diverse American traditions-the Gullah people of South Carolina, whose language resonates with African rhythms-tell us about how African storytelling traditions connect to the Br’er Rabbit stories of the American South?
- And what is the Mississippi Blues music tradition doing in an American Indian novel from the Pacific Northwest?
The main seminar in this FIG, English 155: “Classical Myth and Modern Literature,” explores ways that modern American culture interprets, adopts, and adapts classical myth in order to address contemporary social, aesthetic, and political concerns. Each course in the FIG deals primarily with the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, but by tracing these adaptations and the transmission of stories from one culture, time, and place to another, you will also study other ancient civilizations from the Middle East, Africa, and Native America. The historical, archaeological, and literary approaches to the legacy of the classical world will take you out of the classroom, to the museum, the library, the laboratory, and the green spaces across campus—each with its own story to tell.
156: Literature and Medicine
Sunny Stern Yudkoff
MW 9:55-10:45am Birge 145
What does it mean to be sick? How have authors, poets, and journalists written about the experience of illness? How do these writers represent pain? This course investigates these questions by turning to a variety of texts, including short stories, memoirs, poems, graphic novels, and essays by patients and doctors, alike. We will further ask how questions of religion, race, and gender impact how these writers define health and illness. Our goal as close-readers will be to become keenly aware of the language and metaphors of medical writing.
162: Shakespeare
Joshua Calhoun
TR 8:50-9:40am Noland 132
Why Shakespeare? is an entry-level English course designed to introduce students from a variety of social, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds to Shakespearean literature. Toward this end, the course also questions Shakespeare’s prominence in literature and culture. Is he really that good? Does our ongoing fascination with Shakespeare say more about his writing or about us, about our preferences, about our values?
We will begin the semester with readings from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, then set off on a journey into the various worlds Shakespeare conjured in his plays. We’ll start in Ancient Greece with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then it’s on to Macbeth’s medieval Scotland, then to fourteenth-century England for Henry IV, Part One. In this first unit, we will focus on “Form & Function as we seek to better understand the language of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and how it works.
Our second unit, “Lives & Afterlives considers two of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays: Hamlet & The Tempest. Reading these plays, we’ll explore Shakespeare’s unique staying power in the popular imagination.
Assessments include weekly quizzes, two writing assignments, memorization of one sonnet, and a midterm and final exam. Attendance is mandatory for lectures and discussion sections. If we succeed as a class, students will finish the semester with a working understanding of Shakespearean language and themes that appear everywhere in literature and media (including graphic novels, film, music, children’s literature, etc.).
167: British and American Writers
Emily Auerbach
W 6:00-9:00pm TBA
Course Guide Description: An introduction to British and American literature through particular writers and themes.
168: Modern Literature
Jeffrey Steele
TR 12:00-12:50pm Humanities 3650
From the beginning of the 20th century, writers have wrestled with the problem of stabilizing identity in an ambiguous and disorienting world. Faced with colonial violence, war, torture, lynching, murder, the threat of nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe, and terrorism, the eight authors in this course attempt to define patterns of existence that can give life direction and meaning. A pervasive threat, confronted by nearly all of them, is that of trauma generating personal and collective amnesia.
The effort to recover the lost and forgotten aspects of the self lead characters from the wilds of Africa (Conrad) to the Canadian wilderness (Atwood), from camping in Michigan (Hemingway) to the ghostly presences of a haunted home (Robinson), from a journey into racial history (Morrison) to the collective memory of cultural genocide (Silko), from the search for order in an ambiguous world (Pynchon) to the numbing effects of modern technology (DeLillo). Journeying into the hearts of darkness, these writers define existence in a time of war. Each, in his or own way, examines the homecomings of characters who are faced with the difficult task of locating personal memories in specific terrains–a process that we might term the politics of memory. Facing catastrophe without and chaos within, many characters in this course begin quest-like journeys to what they hope will be places of remembrance and healing. The elusive goal of these quests is that moment of pattern recognition when the different pieces of life’s puzzle fall into place. Such stability is achieved by a few characters; but many more find themselves on the outside or at the edge, looking into rooms they cannot enter or into the horror of a now-remembered abyss–experiences that permanently change their lives.
173.001: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Race, Place, and Story: American Literature
Roberta Hill
TR 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2251
Course Guide Description: Introduction to literature that reflects the writing and experience of minority and ethnic groups. Texts will focus on a theme or problem.
173.002: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Performing Race in America: Black and White Onstage and in the Present Tense
Jennifer Plants
MW 2:25-3:15pm Birge 145
From A Raisin in the Sun to Hamilton, this class will look at how live theatrical performances challenge and inform our perceptions of whiteness and blackness, and ultimately the social concept of “race.”
We will study playwrights, stand-up comedians, politicians, musicians, filmmakers, and ordinary people who all use the language of theatre to tell a story–focusing on those who write about and/or “perform” African-American life and culture. What happens when a contemporary African-American playwright stages a text about race from the 19th century? What is “color-conscious” casting? How is Beyoncé like Shakespeare? Examples of writers and artists studied in past semesters include: Anna Deavere-Smith, Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Spike Lee, Key and Peele, Suzan-Lori Parks, President Obama, and Public Enemy. Guest speakers, attendance at local performance events and a final performance-based/creative project will be integral parts of this course.
176: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: World Literature and Film
Yanping Zhang
MW 8:50-9:40am Biochem 1125
What is world literature? What contact zones exist between literature and film? This introductory literature course focuses on works that circulate beyond national borders and take the experience of the wider world as their theme. It offers sustained attention to films that demonstrate a continued engagement with the cultural, ethical, and artistic ambitions of such works. From The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Arabian Nights to more recent literary and filmic works by Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Michael Haneke, and the Cohen Brothers, this course explores the global production, circulation, and repercussion of literature, as well as the varied aesthetic modes in which works of literature and films refract the wider world in which they are situated.
177: Literature and Popular Culture
TBA
TR 2:30-3:45pm Helen C. White 6110
Course Guide Description: A selected topic studying the intersection of literature and popular culture in various forms and media.
181: First Year Honors Seminar
Topic: Writing with Nature
Joshua Calhoun
TR 11:00-12:15pm Helen C. White 7117
Prereq: Freshman or sophomore standing only and declared in honors program
In this Environmental Humanities course we will focus on reading and writing in, about, and with nature. We will explore questions about ecology, environmental ethics, and human consumption, and we will work together to articulate our answers in spoken and written form. Throughout the course, we will interrogate our relationship to dirt as a way of making sense of the natural world around us. How do we know if something is “dirty”? Are our attitudes about dirt normal? How have people in other time periods and cultures defined “dirty”?
Writing assignments for this course are designed to challenge students to improve their communication skills, which means that reading, research, writing, and presentation assignments will be atypical and exacting. Students should know in advance that the major assignments for this course require students: 1) to spend at least one uninterrupted hour per week in the Lakeshore Preserve sitting on the ground (or a log or stump) while completing a Nature Journal; 2) to conduct original archival research in the University Archives; and 3) to collaborate with classmates on research and a major presentation.
182.001: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Shakespeare Now and Then: The Plays on Stage and Screen
Karen Britland
TR 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2261
Prereq: Declared in honors program
We will read and discuss at least five of Shakespeare’s most famous plays (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth), and we will watch some of their modern film adaptations. The course will emphasize the importance of developing the skills of close-reading for both written and visual texts, and is designed both for students with a serious interest in Shakespeare and for those without much prior experience of Shakespeare or literature. By looking at movies, we will constantly remind ourselves that Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed as popular entertainments and do not necessarily have to be understood as “high culture,” while also paying attention to the ways in which social and historical contexts are important for meaningful literary interpretation. The class’s final project will encourage you to develop research skills, to investigate the cultural and historical significance of a recent Shakespearean movie, and to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s texts are used to comment on contemporary social and political concerns.
All the plays for this course are to be found in The Norton Shakespeare: The Essential Plays/The Sonnets, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Norton, 2015): ISBN-13 978-0393938630. Other material will be available online.
182.002: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: The University and the Good Life
Kristina Huang
TR 9:30-10:45am Helen C. White 7105
Prereq: Declared in honors program
We will begin this seminar by nuancing the assumption that the university is a meaningful space that produces the conditions for “the good life.” What are those conditions and how do they materialize in the physical spaces, people, texts, and objects we (expect to) encounter in a place of higher learning? We’ll explore what “the good life” means and track how that pursuit is routed through narratives, aspirations, and representations around the university. Through film, novels, and legal literature, we’ll read across genres and study how “the good life” in the university is entangled with questions of race, gender, sex, and accessibility, both in terms of physical ability and economic opportunity.
201: Intermediate Composition
TA Taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Sophomore standing; not open to special students
English 201 is a small, topic-driven writing course that fulfills part B of the University’s Communication requirement. Sections of 201 offer hands-on practice with writing and revision, building on skills developed in earlier writing courses and providing new opportunities for students to grow as writers. Though topics vary by section and semester, this class consistently provides experience writing in multiple genres and for diverse audiences.
207: Introduction to Creative Writing
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Sophomore standing only
Satisfies a Comm B requirement
In this course, students are taught the fundamental elements of craft in both fiction (plot, point of view, dialogue, and setting, etc.) and poetry (the image, the line, sound and meter, etc.). This class is taught as a workshop, which means class discussion will focus on both craft (published stories, poems, and essays) and, perhaps more importantly, the fiction and poetry written by each student. That is, the student writing becomes the text, and the instructor leads a sympathetic, but critical, discussion of the particular work at hand. Students should expect to read and comment on two or three published works per week as well as the work of their peers. To enable a collegial and productive class setting, all sections of 207 are capped at eighteen students.
214: The English Language
Richard F Young
MW 11:00-11:50am Science 180
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Whether you have spoken English since you were a baby or you learned English as an adult, you probably have asked yourself some questions about the English language. Do you feel good or do you feel well? Who wrote the dictionary? Is hip-hop poetry? How do children learn to speak? Will the Internet really change the English language? In this class, we will ask many questions like these and attempt to answer them by using the techniques of modern linguistics (the scientific study of language). We will investigate how the English that we use today is organized into sounds, into small meaning-bearing units called morphemes, into words, and how words group together into sentences. Although most people have strong feelings about what is right and wrong about today’s English, we will see that there is no such thing as ONE English language. No, there is no single English language today, and when we look back over the past 50 years or over the past 500 years it is obvious that English has changed. What processes have brought about this change? And why do different native speakers today speak different Englishes?
This class is intended for anyone who is interested in how English works and how the English of today came to be what it is.
223: Vladimir Nabokov: Russian and American Writings
Sergey Anatolyevich Karpukhin
MWF 11:00-11:50am Social Science 5231
Cross-listed with Literature in Translation
Course Guide Description: The major novels of Vladimir Nabokov studied in the context of Russian and American literatures. Nabokov as a quintessential artist in exile, whose work explores loss of language, country and home.
241: Literature and Culture I
Jordan Zweck
MW 9:55-10:45am Humanities 1121
Prereq: Not open to students who took ENGL 215 prior to Fall 2014
This course provides an introduction to literature in English from the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. Together with English 242, it provides an introduction to British literary history, and its primary goals include familiarizing students with the canon of English literature and preparing students for more specialized study in advanced courses in the major. The course spans roughly 1000 years, from the origins of English literature to the rise of the novel. Along the way, we will examine how literature engaged with topics as disparate as love, religion, and science, and we will read everything from elegant descriptions of angelic beings to six-hundred-year-old fart jokes. To focus our discussions, we will concentrate on questions of form and genre, including the epic, fabliau, romance, sonnet, lyric, and novel. Emphasis will be on close reading and literary analysis, but we will also pay close attention to the social, cultural, and political contexts from which each text emerged. This course also develops skills for writing clearly and critically that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.
Texts may include Beowulf; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Paradise Lost; Oroonoko; and poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne.
242: Literature and Culture II
Topic: Literature in Perspective
Mario Ortiz-Robles
TR 1:20-2:10pm Microbial Sciences Building 1520
Prereq: Not open to students who took ENGL 216 prior to Fall 2014
ENG 242 is the second part of our historical survey and covers literature written in English from 1800 to the present. It is impossible to cover the whole period so the course is organized around one very important aspect of literature: its ability to make us think about perspective, both in terms of how it helps us take stock of our own lives and in how it allows us to see the world from another person’s point of view. In some sense, all literature is an exercise in perspective since it is written by different people living in different places in different time periods, but the texts we will be reading and discussing in this class are self-conscious explorations about what it means to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. We will be reading classic works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and J.M. Coetzee. Each of the texts we will read in this class asks us to be attentive to different points of view and to difference itself. I hope you enroll in this class; I very much look forward to learning about what it is like for you to read an exceptionally interesting set of literary texts!
245.001: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Authorship and Anonymity in the Literature of the Long 18th Century
Mark Vareschi
TR 9:30-10:45am Education 345
This course will introduce English majors to the theoretical and historical issues surrounding authorial anonymity in the British long eighteenth century. We tend to think of both anonymity and authorship as phenomena that are unchanging of the course of literary history. However, both authorial anonymity and authorship undergo a series of transformations over the course of the eighteenth century as they begin to coalesce into their modern, recognizable forms. Our task is to tease out moments of transformation in order to understand why it is we think of anonymity and authorship in the manner we do. Readings will include Daniel Defoe’s Roxana and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Students will write one shorter paper, a research prospectus, and a longer research paper.
245.002: Seminar in the Major
Topic: American Identity: 20th Century Poetry
Sarah Wood
MWF 11:00-11:50am Humanities 1221
In this course, we will read poetry produced by American writers to consider how these writings articulate concerns with identity, home, nation, truth, power and spaces. We will examine how works from different cultures within the United States, from different time-spaces, with different goals are informed by the specificities of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. We will consider the form of poetry itself, and how that form is constantly being reimagined. How does the aesthetic work of the poem engage the politics of these varied and haunting stories? While no attempt to understand national identity can be complete, these poems will provide excellent grounding for wider contemplations about the nation and its art.
Authors (subject to change): Anthology-style readings from: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Trethewey, Amiri Baraka, and more.
Class meeting style: The course will consist primarily of seminar discussion with some lectures, so heavy class participation is expected. We will discuss in small and large groups, and I will assist you in improving your verbal communication skills.
Assignments: You will keep a reading journal and complete several written assignments (3, 5 and 10 pages papers) that will include scaffolds: pre-writing, drafts, conferences, final version. Creative Final Project option available.
245.003: Seminar in the Major
Topic:
Robin Valenza
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 201
Course Guide Description: This small seminar, taught by a faculty member, will offer students close instruction in the principles and practices of informed, engaged, critical reading and writing. While the texts and topics vary, each seminar will reinforce fundamental skills taught across the English major, strengthening students’ capacities to write and speak powerfully and to build convincing, original, well-organized arguments that persuade audiences of their significance. Students will meet with the professor in individual writing conferences and will write at least 30 pages, including drafts and informal assignments spread throughout the semester.
245.004: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Noise and American Culture
TBA
TR 11:00-12:15pm Noland 119
One person’s music has always been another person’s noise. It is no surprise, then, that the hip hop group Public Enemy used “Turn it up! Bring the noise!” as the infamous hook for their first 1988 single. In their lyrics they argue for rap as a legitimate musical genre and incorporate a cacophony of record scratches, siren sounds, and funk samples to make this claim. The line between music and noise is a blurred one, and making the distinction largely depends on what culture and time period you choose. This seminar investigates the nuances of noise through a broad range of materials and cultural moments. Throughout the semester we will closely read American prose and poetry that take up the significance of disruptive sound. We will seek to answer several guiding questions such as: how are we conditioned to distinguish between desirable and undesirable sounds? How has the development of audio recording technologies shaped the way we communicate? And how do marginalized communities use sound to articulate new political demands?
We begin by reading brief philosophical meditations on how different environments generate different modes of listening. Next, we work through major innovations in sound technology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, from the phonograph and radio to the cassette tape and iPod, and consider the individual’s increasing control over the production and transmission of sound. Finally, we examine how and why audiences have reacted to experimental techniques in indie rock (Animal Collective), classical music (Igor Stravinsky, John Cage), hip hop (Kanye West), and jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Abbey Lincoln).
245.005: Seminar in the Major
Topic: The Interracial Romance
TBA
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 367
Why was the interracial romance a popular theme in American literature and cinema even during the period in which no African American and white individuals could legally wed in most states? Why does the black and white romance remain a fascination? The course will look for answers by examining multiple facets of the interracial romance from the 1920s to the new millennium. We’ll read stories by Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and Danzy Senna, and discuss classic films such as Pinky, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Jungle Fever. We’ll re-enter the court rooms of the Rhinelander and Loving cases and revisit historical landmarks. Equipped with the legal and historical perspectives, we will consider how authors deploy the interracial theme to address larger concerns about citizenship, race, and power. One key goal of the course is to develop your analytical and interpretation skills of cultural productions in daily discussions and written essays.
245.006: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Plot and Plantation – The Material of Resistance in the Novel
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm Helen C. White 7105
What are the connections between plot (in a novel) and plantation? While considering the eighteenth-century contexts for the Caribbean plantation system, this course explores the relationships between plotting, representations of authority, and narrative form. We will begin with the notion that the plantation was not only a system of violence, but also a modern site connected to the development of literary cultures (particularly the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century). Plots and plantations structure actions in space and time, and we’ll ask ourselves how representations of slavery, resistance, and marronage – acts of truancy or flight from slavery – played into narrative themes about power, pleasure, and property. In the first portion of this course, we will study imperial anxieties around slave revolts and analyze how these revolts were represented in works that overlapped with the rise of the novel. The second portion examines contemporary Caribbean writings that interrogate themes of power, pleasure, and property as they adapt narrative plots associated with earlier English literature. As we shift into the third portion of the course, we’ll track the ways Caribbean works of literature remember and aestheticize histories of opposition and resistance carried out by the enslaved.
305: Rhet, Science and Public Engagement
Caroline Gottschalk Druschke
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B215
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies
Welcome to Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement! This course focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of public engagement with scientific research, policy, and management, with an emphasis on science communication. During the semester, we’ll explore University of Wisconsin’s land grant mandate to share university research with the public and use university resources to explore public needs. We’ll build from readings in science communication and public participation in scientific research, and reach out to experts in Wisconsin working on a variety of projects with public stakeholders. At the end of the class, you’ll use what you’ve learned this semester about the theory and practice of science communication and public engagement to design, execute, and assess an activity that engages a segment of the public in scientific research (maybe even your own!). In short, this class is about learning and doing.
307: Creative Writing: Fiction and Poetry Workshop
TA Taught Courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: Junior standing or completion of one of the following: English 207 taken Fall 2014 or later; or English 203 taken prior to Fall 2014
Satisfies a Comm B requirement
Satisfies a workshop requirement for the emphasis in creative writing
This class is similar to English 207 (see above) but with greater emphasis on craft (narrative control, poetic form) and the writing process. Like 207, this class is taught as a workshop, which means class discussion will focus on both craft (published stories, poems, and essays) and, perhaps more importantly, the fiction and poetry written by each student. That is, the student writing becomes the text, and the instructor leads a sympathetic, but critical, discussion of the particular work at hand. Students should expect to read and comment on two or three published works per week as well as the work of their peers. To enable a collegial and productive class setting, all sections of 307 are capped at 16 students.
314: Structure of English
Anja Wanner
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B215
Should it be “taller than I” or “taller than me?” In this course, we will not focus on what is considered “proper” English, rather, we will study English grammar from a descriptive perspective. To a linguist, grammar — the ability to put words together to form natural-sounding sentences — is not something that is written down in a book, it is a tacit form of knowledge that exists in a speaker’s mind. (See also the course trailer: https://youtu.be/VLnQBQHCMQQ)
We will try to make that knowledge visible. You will learn to classify parts of speech (everybody knows what a noun is, but what about prepositions, conjunctions, and particles?), identify syntactic constructions (e.g., infinitives, passives), and, most importantly, analyze the structure of a sentence, both verbally and visually (in tree diagrams). Knowing how to do this will make you a more confident speaker and writer.
Class meetings will generally be a mix of lecture, discussion, and problem solving. Attendance is mandatory and will be recorded. Expect to be called on in class and to participate in group work. There is a required textbook for this class; additional materials will be made available on Learn@UW. The reading load for this class is not very high, but there will be weekly homework assignments. Assessments include two graded homework assignments (exam length for both), two in-class exams (midterm and final), and an individual project, in which you will contrast the linguistic profiles of two genres based on two pages of text (e.g., news article/editorial; lab report/grant proposal).
(For the record, both “taller than I” and “taller than me” are perfectly fine. In the first case, “than” is a conjunction followed by an elliptic clause with “I” as the subject, “taller than I am,” in the second, “than” is used as a preposition, followed by an object pronoun, “me.” If this sounds like gibberish to you, it is because you haven’t taken “The Structure of English” yet.)
315: English Phonology
Eric Raimy
MWF 11:00-11:50am Social Science 6240
Prereq: Sophomore standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)
This course offers an introduction to the sound system of English, including phonetics and elementary phonology. Topics include articulatory phonetic descriptions of consonants and vowels, classical phonemic theory, the nature of phonological processes, linguistic change and the acquisition of phonological systems. By the end of the course, students should be able to describe and transcribe speech sounds of English, recognize and describe phonemic and phono tactic patterns and account for basic phonological processes.
Note: English 315 (or consent of the instructor) is a prerequisite for English 709 (Advanced English Phonology)
316: English Language Variation in the U.S.
TBA
MWF 11:00-11:50am Social Science 6102
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Course Guide Description: Description and analysis of geographical and social variation in English in the United States.
318: Second Language Acquisition
Jacee Cho
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B231
Prereq: Sophomore Standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)
A central characteristic of human beings is LANGUAGE as man is the only animal capable of language (homo loquens). The ability to acquire and use language is uniquely human. Another distinctively human capacity is the ability to learn languages other than the mother tongue throughout the lifespan. Indeed, data show that there are more bi/multilinguals than monolinguals in the world (~60% in Europe, ~25% in the US, 99% in Luxembourg!). In this course, we will discuss some of the current theories on how people acquire/learn a non-native, or second language (L2). We will survey both quantitative and qualitative research on how a second language is acquired, represented and processed in the mind/brain and discuss theoretical and practical implications of the current L2 research. Topics to be discussed in this course include formal (linguistic) characteristics of interlanguage (learner’s L2), the role of Universal Grammar and native language in L2 acquisition, crosslinguistic influence (how L1 and L2 influence each other), and nonlanguage factors such as age of acquisition (whether and how much age of acquisition matters), verbal aptitude, and motivation.
There is no required textbook. All reading materials will be available on the course website.
350.001: Topics in Gender and Literature
Topic: “Adaptations of Black Women’s Literature”
Sami Schalk
TR 11:00-12:15pm Sterling 1339
Prereq: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender and Womens Studies
What is gained and what is lost when a novel is adapted? How does a change in medium or genre change the way we understand narrative, characters and themes? What liberties are taken take in adapting a text? In this class, students will read literature by black women and watch or read adaptations of these texts. Students will be asked to consider what elements of the texts are enhanced, altered, obscured or erased when adapted to a new medium or genre, especially regarding the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality. Assignments include short papers and a final project.
350.002: Topics in Gender and Literature
Topic: Gender, Migration, and Muslim Women Writers
Susan Friedman
W 1:20-3:50pm BIOCHEM 1116
Prereq: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender and Womens Studies
Gender, Migration, and Muslim Women Writers–is an honors seminar on the novels, memoirs, poems, graphic narratives, and films about the experience of Muslim women in migration from predominantly Muslim countries to North America and Europe. Major issues include living “on-the-hyphen,” the significance of religion in the context of rising Islamophobia, the impact of multiple and circular migrations, and the gendered formations of the family and sexuality in diasporic Muslim cultures.
353: British Literature since 1900
Richard Begam
TR 2:30-3:45pm TBA
Prereq: Undergraduate career students only (excludes Grad,Pharm,Law,Med,Vet Med, Guest, Special careers)
Course Guide Description: Survey of twentieth-century British literature including fiction, poetry, and drama.
403.001: Seminar on Tutoring Writing Across the Curriculum
Emily Hall
TR 9:30-10:45am Helen C. White 6176
Prereq: Consent of instructor and acceptance into the Writing Fellows Program. Students who completed English 316 prior to fall semester 2014 may not receive credit for English 403
Course Guide Description: Explores current theory and research on the writing process and analyzes disciplinary genres and conventions. Teaches strategies for helping writers revise their work. As Undergraduate Writing Fellows, students will help their peers improve their writing in courses across the curriculum.
403.002: Seminar on Tutoring Writing Across the Curriculum
Emily Hall
TR 1:00-2:15pm Helen C. White 6176
Prereq: Consent of instructor and acceptance into the Writing Fellows Program. Students who completed English 316 prior to fall semester 2014 may not receive credit for English 403
Course Guide Description: Explores current theory and research on the writing process and analyzes disciplinary genres and conventions. Teaches strategies for helping writers revise their work. As Undergraduate Writing Fellows, students will help their peers improve their writing in courses across the curriculum.
407: Creative Writing: Non-fiction Workshop
TBA
W 10:00-12:00pm Helen C. White 7105
Prereq: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later; or ENGL 203, 300-307 before Fall 2014
Course Guide Description: Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
408: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
Instructors, Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later; or English 203 taken prior to Fall 2014
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
This class helps students apply lessons from published fiction (both classic and contemporary) to their own work. Class typically begins with a lecture concerning some aspect of craft, and is followed by “workshop.” This entails a discussion of story shape, word choice, character development etc. using the creative work of the student as the text. Classes are small (15), and students are expected to read the work of their peers carefully and participate during class discussions.
409: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
TBA
T 2:30-4:25pm Helen C. White 7105
Prereqs: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later; or ENGL 203, 300-307 before Fall 2014
Course Guide Description: Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
411: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: African American Poetics
Amy Quan Barry
M 1:20-3:15pm Helen C. White 6108
Prereq: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later; or ENGL 203, 300-307 before Fall 2014
Course Guide Description: Variable topics including: the informal essay, the long poem, the novel, the novella, genre fiction (detective, juvenile, humor, science fiction, etc.), experimental prose and poetry, etc. Students will read models and write their own exercise and fulllength pieces. No student may enrolled in more than one Creative Writing course in a given semester without approval of the program coordinator. Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
414: Global Spread of English
Thomas Purnell
MWF 12:05-12:55pm Social Science 4308
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Course Guide Description: Examination of the linguistic, social, and political impact of the spread of English around the world. Analysis of geographical, social, and stylistic variation in English in diverse world contexts.
415: Introduction to TESOL Methods
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm Helen C. White 4208
Course Guide Description: An introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Exploration of the contexts in which English is taught, and methods and materials used to teach it.
416: English in Society
Thomas Purnell
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Helen C. White 4281
Course Guide Description: Social and public uses of English; relationships of English structure, lexicon, and discourse to race, gender, class, education, ethnicity, age, and identity; the role of English in public policy.
420: Topics in English Language and Linguistics
Topic: Experimental Syntax
Jacee Cho
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Vleck B223
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)
This course provides an introduction to conducting linguistic experiments to address theoretical questions in the study of syntax. We will discuss how to design linguistic experiments, collect and analyze data, and make generalizations beyond the data you have collected. This is a hands-on course which requires your active participation. Although the focus of this course is syntactic research, the fundamentals of research design and data analysis methods should carry over to research in other areas of language study such as semantics, pragmatics, or language acquisition. By the end of this course, you will have the knowledge and skills necessary to do your own linguistic experiments to explore theoretical issues in linguistics.
There is no required textbook. All course readings will be available on the course website.
423: Topic in Medieval Literature and Culture
Topic: Medieval Monsters and Wonders
Martin Foys
TR 9:30-10:45pm Humanities 2637
Prereq: Undergraduate career students only (excludes Grad, Pharm, Law, Med, Vet Med, Guest, Special careers)
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Course Guide Description: Subject differs each year.
430: Topic in Modern Literature and Culture
Topic: Women and War, 1642-1660
Karen Britland
TR 11:00-12:15pm Grainger 2195
In this class, we will explore women’s experiences during the English civil wars, which broke out when King Charles I raised his standard against his parliament in August 1642. The class is divided into three sections: mourning, violence and domesticity. We will first consider writing by women that laments the deaths of family members. Then we will consider how women reacted to and wrote about violence towards others and themselves (including sexual violence). Finally, we will consider how women mobilized traditional female roles of domesticity and spirituality to intervene in and come to terms with the conflict. Writers studied in this class will include Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Lucy Hutchinson.
Women Poets of the English Civil War, ed. Sarah C. E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Manchester University Press, 2018). ISBN-13: 978-1526128706
431: Early Works of Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare’s Cities and Their Citizens
TBA
MWF 12:05-12:55pm Science 360
Prereq: Undergraduate career students only (excludes Grad, Pharm, Law, Med, Vet Med, Guest, Special careers) Students who have taken English 417 prior to fall 2014 may not enroll in this course.
What counts as a city and what kinds of communities do cities create? Who gets to be legitimate residents of those cities—i.e., their citizens—and who is excluded from that privilege? What duties do citizens owe their urban communities, and what powers and rights do cities grant their inhabitants? How do race, gender, ability, and class structure citizenship? This course will study how Shakespeare thought through these timely questions in his staging of the cities of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, Rome in Titus Andronicus, Venice in The Merchant of Venice, and Illyria in Twelfth Night. Supplementing these plays will be selections from Shakespeare’s early poetry. We will also read theories of the polis and civis in the classical writers that Shakespeare studied and that continue to inform conversations about citizenship today. To draw out the resonances, continuities, and differences between real and staged citizens in Shakespearean England and in our own time, we’ll also consider some contemporary political and philosophical perspectives and look at recent performances and film adaptations of these plays.
453: Topic in British Literature since 1900
Topic:
Richard Begam
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B223
Course Guide Description: Subject differs each year.
456: Topic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Topic: Writing the City: 19th Century New York
Jeffrey Steele
MWF 12:05-12:55pm Helen C. White 4208
In the 19th century, New York became the cultural and commercial capital of the nation. The goal of this course is to analyze the forms of literary perception that emerged in the country’s first great metropolis. As writers adapted themselves to a context that transcended any individual act of perception, they were forced to address the question: How does one ‘write’ the city? The course is organized around five topics and a series of questions: 1) THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE CITY (Dickens, Willis, Child, Fuller, Fern): How do antebellum reform writers uncover hidden and invisible structures of power in urban environments? 2) THE URBAN GOTHIC AND SENSATIONALISM (Poe, Foster, Lippard): Hod does the exploration of the city’s recesses and criminal underclass change the perception of urban space? 3) MODES OF RELATIONSHIP (Melville, Whitman): How do economic position, social class, and sexual orientation affect patterns of relationship? 4) GENDER ROLES: MEN AND WOMEN IN THE CITY (Blake, Howells): What are the different roles and social networks available to men and women in the decades after the Civil War? 5) TENEMENT LIFE (Riis, Crane, Cahan): How do members of different ethnic groups survive life on the Lower East Side?
461.001: Topic in Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: 20th Century African-American Literature
Sarah Wood
MW 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2637
Seeking powerful authors with valuable points of view? Interested in the trajectory of African-American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries?
The aims of this course are to read a wide selection of books by black writers in order to improve our analytical skills in writing and conversation while exploring the relationship between literature and American identity.
Topics covered will include: representations of human bodies, the role of literature in social justice, role of intended audience, narrative strategies, marginalization, role of citizenship as fundamental to American identity, and the role of racism in culture and literature. Because of the sensitive nature of our topics, we will also be discussing how to approach difficult conversations, methods for disagreement, and strategies for building community.
Texts may include (but are subject to change): Kindred by Octavia Butler, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Cane by Jean Toomer, Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, Native Son by Richard Wright, with and poetry selections by Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Assignments will include: participation, reading journal, traditional written assignments, digital projects, and creative final project of your design.
461.002: Topic in Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Black Women Dramatists
Tejumola Olaniyan
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B223
Course Guide Description: Subject differs each year.
477: Diaspora and Theatre
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 2:30-3:45pm Helen C. White 4208
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama
This course deals with the drama and theatre of African, Caribbean, and Asian immigrant communities in three Western locations: Britain, the United States, and Canada. We explore the relationships between migrancy, race, and forms of cultural expression, keeping in mind the special challenges faced by immigrant playwrights as they seek to realize their work fully on the stage. Authors include Mustapha Matura, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Hanif Kureishi, David Henry Hwang, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, Ayad Akhtar, George Seremba, Rahul Varma, and Lorena Gale.
478: Indian Writers Abroad: Literature, Diaspora and Globalization
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 11:00-12:15pm Helen C. White 4208
Cross-Listed with Languages and Cultures of Asia
This course focuses on some major fiction and cinema produced by authors/auteurs who belong originally to a country in the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), but have emigrated to or grown up in the West (Britain, Canada, and the US). The work of novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai, and Monica Ali, and filmmakers such as Hanif Kureishi, Gurinder Chadha, and Mira Nair, has focused an entirely new kind of attention on their respective cultures of origin, while also addressing the experiences of displacement, acculturation, and marginalization that are traditionally associated with migration and exile. This course is concerned, therefore, with the emerging thematics of diaspora literature and film, the relation of geography to language and form, the interrelations between diasporic literary and visual genres, and the instrumental conditions of writing and reception.
515: Techniques and Materials for TESOL
TBA
TR 9:30-10:45am Education L150
Course Guide Description: Supervised practice in the use of current techniques and materials in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages, including peer and community teaching with videotaped sessions
516: English Grammar in Use
Anja Wanner
TR 1:00-2:15pm Humanities 1221
Prereq: Must have taken English 314 in Fall 2014 or later; or English 324 prior to Fall 2014.
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)
In this class we examine the role of grammar in constituting genres, mostly in written language. You will learn to analyze texts by situational parameters (such as the function of the text, medium, and intended audience) and to give a functional analysis of patterns of language variation. For example, modern academic writing makes use of long noun phrases, while conversations show the use of pronouns. Emphasis will be put on the notion of “complexity”. What is complexity in language, how do we measure it, how does it change over time? You will be introduced to working with linguistic corpora (electronic collections of texts and conversations). The end-of-semester project will be a poster presentation — you will learn to create an effective research poster and to present your project to an audience. Graduate students will also submit a paper version of the poster. Other assessments include a series of homework assignments and two exams.
520: Old English
Martin Foys
TR 1:00-2:15pm Education L150
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Notes: small class size, intimate seminar-style instruction pre-reqs can be waived with appropriate background study/interest fulfills pre-1800 requirement for English major
Old English is the earliest form of English; it is also fascinating — exotic, yet at the same time the backbone of the language we use today. From over 1,000 years ago, it is the language of heroes, monsters, kings, scholars, saints, and some very special sinners. Studying Old English gives you a foundational understanding of how modern English still works today, valuable knowledge for any student.
No background in languages or linguistics is required to take this class, though if you’ve studied another language, that can be helpful. In the first half of the class, we will cover basic pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, while doing short translation exercises. In the second half of the semester, we will put the skills you’ve learned to work, working on reading Old English texts and poems in the original — a rare opportunity. Because this is a language class, no papers will be required. Instead, there will be regular translation exercises, quizzes, exams, and a final translation project.
525: Health and the Humanities
Jenell Johnson
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 578
Prereq: Declared in the Health and the Humanities certificate.
Cross-Listed with Medical History and Bioethics & History of Science
This course focuses on humanistic perspectives on health and healing and is part of the curriculum for the Health and the Humanities certificate. Students will explore people’s lived experiences with illness, the representation of illness in medicine and popular culture, and how culture shapes the experiences of patients and health care providers.
539: Jewish Literatures in Diaspora
Sunny Stern Yudkoff
M 1:20-3:15pm Ingraham 222
Cross-Listed with Jewish Studies
Meets with German, Nordic, and Slavic Studies
In “Our Homeland, the Text,” the literary critic George Steiner famously declared that, for Jewish culture, “the text is home; each commentary a return.” This course uses Steiner’s words as a starting point to ask what it means for Jewish writers across the globe to examine the concepts of home and homeland through literature. We will explore how writers have defined the identities of “native” and “foreigner” in different geographies and different languages. We will also pay close attention to how notions of “exile” and “diaspora” have shifted in Jewish culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing our attention on such themes as: the role of Israel/Palestine, the legacy of Yiddish, the articulation of Jewish-Christian difference, and the development of feminist and queer literary perspectives. Readings will include poetry, prose, and essays by Cynthia Ozick, Edward Said, Maxim Biller, Yankev Glatshteyn, Irena Klepfisz, and others.
546: Topic in Travel Writing before 1800
Elizabeth Bearden
MW 2:30-3:45pm Helen C. White 4275
This rigorous, upper-level course will investigate a selection of travel writing from Antiquity through the Eighteenth Century with an emphasis on the period between 1500 and 1750 C.E. The course will take a comparative approach, treating travel texts from a variety of national traditions, while focusing on the literary and social repercussions of these texts in early modern Europe. We will also read theoretical works that will enrich and expand our understanding of the travel genre. Lively class discussions and oral reports will encourage critical thinking and debate. Students will hone their analytical and writing skills through three essay assignments. Creative writing assignments will stimulate the students’ ability to relate these texts to their own ways of imagining the world.
The course has four thematic areas of focus:
- The figure of the traveler,
- Reasons for and forms of travel,
- What travel does to European concepts of identity in the early modern period, and
- How travel affects European literature.
The student should have a firm understanding of these overarching concepts by the end of the class. These topics will help to define our discussion of the texts at hand. The goal of the course is not only to provide an understanding of the narrative form and function of early modern travel writing, but also to stimulate students’ awareness of travel writing’s role in defining and complicating European estimations of cultural ‘Others’ and of themselves.
575: British Drama, 1914 to Present
Mike Vanden Heuvel
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 487
Prereq: Junior standing
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama
The course is undergoing revision, so the “official” course description above is not completely accurate. Rather than a standard survey, the course will address certain traditions in British drama that grew up between World War 1 and 1960, and then use these to study intensively more contemporary plays and theatre practices that question and subvert traditional forms of dramatic writing. Among these are examples of new writing by playwrights like Caryl Churchill, so-called “in-yer-face” theatre (Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, etc.); the advent and development of devised theatre by companies like Joint Stock and Complicite, and Frantic Assembly; new multi-media and digital-based forms of performance by Blast Theory and others; and the use of immersive theatre techniques by Punchdrunk (“Sleep No More”), Dreamthinkspeak, and Secret Cinema.
672: Selected Topics in African-American Literature
Topic: Jazz Aesthetics
Craig Werner
TR 11:00-12:15pm Science 360
Cross-Listed with Afro-American Studies
Course Guide Description: An intensive analysis of specific themes in the Afro-American experience. Subjects vary with instructor.