Courses

Summer 2023 Course Descriptions

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.

While we work hard to ensure the information here presented is correct and current, course offerings are subject to change at any time. Therefore, students should consult MyCourseGuide for the most up-to-date information regarding specific course offerings, meeting locations, meetings times, and program outcomes.

Please be sure to check the class notes in the Course Search and Enroll application for additional information.

100 level courses

100: Intro to College Composition
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Students required to take the MSN ESLAT cannot enroll until the ESL 118 requirement is satisfied

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 several shorter and longer essays totaling 25-30 pages of revised writing, develop critical reading and thinking skills and information literacy, and practice oral communication.

120: Introduction to Theatre & Dramatic Literature
TBA
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
Online
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama

Course Catalog 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.

153.001: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Micro Nature
Heather Swan
July 17 to August 13 (4 week session)
MTWR 10:20am-12:50pm Grainger 2175
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

When we speak of “Nature” and “Wilderness” we often think of mountains, oceans, deserts, waterfalls, or canyons. Or maybe grizzly bears, alligators, or elephants. But this is a limited view. This course invites you to begin to see the Nature which is all around us, even in our cities and in our backyards––the Nature that is made up of tiny things like bees, spiders, beetles, fungi, water molecules, and air particles. Some of these things are even labeled as dangerous or as pests, and others are simply invisible to us. What happens to our relationship with the world if these remain invisible? This class will look at how writers, filmmakers, poets, and artists have tried to make these invisible parts of our world visible, to help us recognize their value. This class is an invitation to think differently about the natural world around you and your relationship to it in a moment we are calling the Anthropocene.

176: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: TBA
Joseph Bowling
June 19 to July 16 (4 week session)
Online

The office occupies a paradoxical place in the American cultural imagination. On the one hand, landing an office job represents success and upward social mobility. On the other, portrayals of offices in literature and film depict its physical space as drearily uniform and associate office work itself with mindless, repetitive tasks. The office, then, elicits both desire for success and the experience of alienation. In this class, we will study literary and cinematic representations of office jobs to explore the contradictory values and meanings writers and directors attach to so-called “white-collar” work.

200 level courses

207: Introduction to Creative Writing
TA taught courses
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
Online
Requisites: First Year, freshman or 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 fiction and poetry written by each student as well as on a range of published stories, poems, and essays. The instructor will lead a mindful discussion and critique of student work. Students should expect to read and comment on two or three published works per week as well as the work of their peers.

300 level courses

319: Language, Race, and Identity
Topic: Structure of English
Tom Purnell
May 22 to June 18 (4 week session)
Asynchronous Online
Requisites: Sophomore standing

[English Language and Linguistics] (Undergrad and grad) This course examines the role of language in the social construction of racial identity in the US. Combining research and theory from anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, and linguistics, this course emphasizes the essential relations between language, culture, and our genetic endowment specific to humans.

Learning outcomes: At the end of this semester, students are expected to:

Distinguish the measurable language-biology relation from the perceived race-biology relation.
Differentiate nature and nurture arguments when talking about language and race.
Critique historical arguments of the language and race relation.
Understand factors contributing to the language and identity relation, including how language reflects culture.
List shared and unique aspects of racially-affiliated dialects of American English and understand how speech communities reflect regular patterns of varieties.

350.001: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: TBA
TBA
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
Online
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200

Course Catalog Description: Investigation of some specific topic in gender and women’s studies related to gender and literature. Topic differs each semester.

361: Modern and Contemporary US Literature
Topic: Subversive Laughter
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
Online
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Why do we laugh? What do we find funny? Do comedians such as Dave Chappelle and Stephen Colbert or Trevor Noah give us a pertinent and serious commentary of our society? Does comedy – a genre that has (arguably) been considered as inferior to tragedy or drama since Aristotle’s Poetics – actually carry a subversive potential? Is laughter often politically and socially charged?

In this course, we will examine the form and power of humor and comedy. We will examine comedy in different forms – short story, essay, joke, fake news, stand-up, cartoon, memes – to find out what makes them funny and what allows them to convey serious messages about politics, gender, religion, and race.

400 level courses

408: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
Ron Kuka
June 19 to August 13 (8 week session)
TR 6:00pm-8:30pm White 7105
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
Accelerated Honors (!)

This class helps students apply lessons from published fiction (both classic and contemporary) to their own creative 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.

458: Major American Writer(s)
Topic: Stories of Relationships
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
May 22 to June 18 (4 week session)
Online
Requisites: Sophomore standing

If you could enter a machine that would make you feel very happy and fulfilled forever, but you would never be able to spend time with others in the real world, would you enter this matrix-like machine or not? Why – or why not?

The results of the longest scientific study on happiness suggests that health and good jobs make us happy, but that – for most of us – relationships with others are the biggest determinant on how we ultimately feel about our lives.

In this course, we will read well-known American authors and explore relationships in all their forms: familial and romantic relationships; friendships; our relationships to objects, nature, places, history, and experiences – as well as the relationship to our own self. The authors include Ernest Hemingway, Henry David Thoreau, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison.

Fall 2023-24 Course Descriptions

Please be sure to check the class notes in the Course Search and Enroll application for additional information.

100 level courses

100: Intro to College Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: Students required to take the MSN ESLAT cannot enroll until the ESL 118 requirement is satisfied

120: Introduction to Theatre & Dramatic Literature
Mary Trotter
MW 12:05pm-12:55pm Humanities 3650
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama

An introduction to the study of theatre and dramatic literature. In this course, we will

think about plays and performances in terms of the questions they pose about our identities, our relationships and our world
analyze selected dramatic texts as shaped by and shaping specific cultural, dramatic, and theatrical conditions
investigate elements of performance in both theory and practice
articulate informed responses to text and performance in both oral and written forms

Playwrights we will read will likely include Sophocles, Atsumori, Moliere, O’Neill, Beckett, Hansberry, Hwang, Valdez, Soyinka and Parks.

140: Comm B Topics in English Literature
Topic: The Figure of the Outsider: Writing from the Margins
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
TR 12:00pm-12:50pm Soc Sci 5206

Jack Kerouac and his friends go on road trips across America, crossing each other’s paths and making the continent seem small at the time when there are no cell phones to help them stay in touch. Sylvia Plath’s character Esther Greenwood wonders whether she is unwomanly because she is not sure whether she wants to get married and have a baby. Ralph Ellison’s narrator addresses us from a basement, saying: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

In this course, we will look at various kinds of outsiders, nonconformists, and “marginal” characters in the broad sense of the term. When does sanity turn into madness? How can race, gender, or ethnicity make us “invisible” – or too visible? To which extent is conformity a positive force, and to which extent it can stifle our sense of self?

We will examine the nature of sanity/madness, gender, race, ethnicity, and lifestyle, and try to understand what and why the society at large labels as “normal” or “abnormal.”

144.001: Women’s Writing
Topic: African Feminisms
Ainehi Edoro
MW 11:00am-11:50am Microbial Sciences BL 1520
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies

Though this course is focused on African feminist writing, it is great for anyone interested in global perspectives on current debates about gender, sexuality, and storytelling. Feminism has exploded in African literature within the last 5 years. From the radical vision of Mona Elthanawy’s Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019) to the sex-positive philosophy in Nana Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women (2021), African writers are addressing the complexities of women’s lives. Through a rich collection of texts that includes romance fiction, fantasy, as well as memoirs and poetry, we will explore the key debates and issues driving conversations about feminism in African literature today. More importantly, the course will teach you how to channel your passion for writing into honest, beautiful, and impactful essays inspired by feminist ideas.

144.002: Women’s Writing
Topic: TBA
Jennifer Plants
M 4:00pm-6:30pm Humanities 2637
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies

Course Catalog Description: An introduction to literature in English written by women in various periods and places; specific topics will vary.

150: Literature & Culture of Asian America
Timothy Yu
TR 1:20pm-2:10pm Humanities 3650
Cross-Listed with Asian American Studies

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.

English/Asian American Studies 462: Asian Americans and Science Fiction
(Asian American Studies is primary on this one so I don’t know if you’ll be able to access it.)

Is the future Asian? From Jack London’s visions of the yellow peril to Blade Runner’s 1980s “techno-orientalism,” we’ll see how American science fiction projects its fantasies and fears about the future onto Asia. We’ll also see how Asian American writers like Charles Yu, Cynthia Kadohata, and Ken Liu have responded.

153: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Weather Runaways
M. Ty
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Vleck B215
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

This seminar is dedicated to all those who flee the violence of the weather—or at least try to. How does one run away from an environmental condition? How to make an escape from the ruination inflicted by a weather system? Keeping at the fore Christina Sharpe’s claim that anti-blackness is a total climate, we will examine how histories of colonial violence continue to manifest themselves in the form of contemporary ecological damage. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate how weather runaways—who are often racialized—confront and elude state border regimes. And we will attend to practices of subsistence that are improvised while in flight from unnatural natural disasters. Our collective study of the difficult crossing of climate, race, and migration will work through readings in political theory, law, black studies, environmental thought, critical theory, and literary and visual works from the 20th century to the contemporary moment.

155: Myth & Literature
Topic: Classical Myth and Modern Literature
Ronald Harris
MWF 1:20pm-2:10pm Education L185
Requisites: First Year Interest Group 207 authorization required to enroll

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.

156.002: Literature and Medicine
Topic: The Art of Healing
Colin Gillis
T 6:00pm-8:30pm White 4208

Course Guide Description: Exploration of literature as both a source of knowledge about medicine and as a catalyst for reflection about medical concepts and practices, including health, illness, dying, and disability. Students will consider ways that literature can serve as a resource for patients and healthcare practitioners.

162: Shakespeare
Topic: TBA
Joseph Bowling
TR 4:00pm-5:15pm Humanities 2653

This course will approach Shakespeare through his innovations in tragedy and comedy and trace his influence on both genres up to the present.

172.001: Literatures of Native America
TBA
TR 1:00pm-2:15am Van Hise 599
Cross-Listed with American Indian Studies
Comm B Writing Intensive class

Course Catalog Description: Introduction to the oral and written literatures of the peoples of native North America. An engagement with texts across historical periods, tribal groups, and regions to examine forms such as oratory, sermon, testimony, autobiography, and contemporary poetry and novels.

173.001: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Afrodiasporic Intimacies
Raquel Kennon
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Vleck B231

What do narratives about Black people across the world who have left their homelands reveal about the varieties of global Blackness? How do prose, poetry, and popular film deepen our understanding of linkages across the African diaspora? This course will explore how literary and film depictions of Afrodiasporic dialogues and cultural exchanges help us understand the importance of transnational bonds and frictions of kinship, real and imagined relationships to ancestral homeland, political alliances, global resistance movements, artistic collaborations, and even ruminations on Black hair. We will closely analyze how narrative experimentation and ethnography illuminate notions of race, gender, power, and identity in texts across the diaspora.

173.002: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Race Science and Sci Fi
Amadi Ozier
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Vleck B223
Requisites: First Year Interest Group

This course explores black speculative fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century broadly–from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk. We’ll read science fiction through multiple forms, including novels, short stories, plays, film, and music. Texts include the early speculative fiction of Martin Delaney, William J. Wilson (“Ethiop ), W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and George Schuyler alongside later works by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Tananarive Due, and Nalo Hopkinson.

174.001: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Truth and Crime
Ralph Grunewald
MW 12:00pm-12:55pm Birge 145

Truth and Crime examines the development, scope, and effects of the “True Crime” genre in the United States. By taking a humanities-oriented approach, we will explore various areas of the genre (written, podcasts, documentaries, etc.) and try to explain why we are so compelled by true crime narratives and what true crime’s “truth” is after all. The course will untangle the complex relationship between law and narrative (each will be explained) and the various epistemological systems it combines, including the role of science and technology. At the end of the course, students will have gained a detailed understanding of what our culture’s relationship to “real life” crime narratives tells us about the fundamental and complex role criminality plays in defining us as a society.

174.002: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Staging Environmental Justice
Jennifer Plants
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Vleck B135

From toxic drinking water and floods to rising temperatures and raging wildfires, environmental risks rarely come with a choice to opt out. This course will focus on how theatre and performance are used as tools in the struggle for environmental justice. What can we learn from Shakespeare and Lin-Manuel Miranda when we examine how their work relates to the natural world? Can a play about Hurricane Katrina do anything to protect those vulnerable to flooding in the future? Can you write a play about climate change or is it too big for the scale of the stage? Course texts will include plays, multi-media performances, and environmental criticism, supplemented by guest artists and mini-field trips.

174.003: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Very Contemporary American Literature
Sarah Wood
TR 9:30am-10:45am Van Vleck B231

175.001: Literature and the Other Disciplines
Topic: Literature & Marx
Joseph Bowling
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Van Hise 491
Requisites: First Year Interest Group 233 authorization required to enroll
Honors Optional (%)

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Marx is among the most referenced yet least understood thinkers. This FIG introduces students to Marx and his writings by reading selections of his most important works, by situating those works in their historical context, and by tracing the legacy of those works in the revolutions of the twentieth century. This course will be organized around the key ideas Marx developed across his life: alienation, historical materialism, and capitalist production. We will read and discuss Marx in seminar-style meetings in which students will be expected to actively contribute. Students will also complete regular informal writing assignments, present and lead discussion on an excerpt from Marx’s writings, and write a research paper. The goal of the course is to train students in the careful analytical practices required to apprehend and develop a nuanced understanding of Marx’s philosophy. To aid in our study, we will turn to works of literature and film, putting into practice Marx’s method of critique, in order to elucidate the difficulties of his thought. Throughout, we’ll consider the relevance of Marx to our present moment.

175.002: Literature and the Other Disciplines
Topic: Life Signs
Monique Allewaert
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 587
Requisites: First Year Interest Group 233 authorization required to enroll

Nonhuman animals and plants use songs, chemical bursts, flashes of light, dances, rumbles, and gestures to communicate with each other and sometimes with other species. How do these nonhuman communications intersect with human modes of communication, including those used in literary works? In this seminar, we’ll consider scientific and popular scientific writing about nonhuman communication. We will also explore scientific and literary experimenters who have tried to translate nonhuman signs into human languages, including literary language. We’ll consider Charles Darwin’s plant experiments, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Richard Powers’s Overstory, and Jamaican Anansi stories. What value can be gained from putting nonhuman and human communication into relay? Does putting nonhuman and human communications into relationship with each other have literary value?

176: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: TBA
Joseph Bowling
TR 9:55am-10:45am Humanities 2650

In this course, we will read works of literature and watch their film adaptations in order to study the different techniques of storytelling and meaning making across textual and visual media.

177.001: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: Weird Lit. Humans, Cyborgs, and Animals
Frederic Neyrat
MW 9:55am-10:45am Humanities 2340

This class will focus on the singular forms of being that people literature: humans and also non-humans, a vast category including animals, insects, plants, cyborgs, and robots. We will pay attention to the weird characters that we encounter in novels: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Bartleby (Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”), and a “blind but wise” old woman (Toni Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture”). We will meet a famous monster (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and neurotic superheroes (Alan Moore’s Watchmen). We will also try to understand why robots can become more human than humans (Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot). These readings will lead us to reconsider the representations we have of humans, animals, and technological beings.

177.002: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: TBA
Amina El-Annan
MWF 11:00am-11:50am Humanities 2637

Course Catalog Description: A selected topic studying the intersection of literature and popular culture in various forms and media.

177.003: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: Narco-narratives in the Americas
Oscar Useche
MWF 9:55am-10:45am Humanities 2637

In this course we explore the global genre of narconarratives—in the context of literature, film, and television—and study the different social, racial, and cultural constructions of illegality and violence that emerge around it. We will inquire into the consolidation of a particular aesthetic sensitivity that shapes social behaviors, creative expressions, language, and national stereotypes, among many others. Through critical thinking and writing, we will grapple with the question of how the narcotraffic phenomenon is used at multiple levels to articulate political ideologies and define cultural identities.

177.004: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: Literary Bollywood: Film and Fiction in Modern India
Aparna Dharwadker
R 2:30pm-5:30pm Van Hise 394

Course Catalog Description: A selected topic studying the intersection of literature and popular culture in various forms and media.

178: Digital Media, Literature, and Culture
Topic: Human Memory, Big Data, and the Digital Age
Mark Vareschi
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Soc Sci 4308
Requisites: First Year Interest Group 230 authorization required to enroll
Honors Optional (%)

This course is only open to first-year students. First-year students will enroll via the SOAR program.

181: First-Year Honors Seminar
Topic: Holding History; or, Where Literature Comes From
Joshua Calhoun
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Van Hise 574
Requisites: Declared in an Honors program

Ever felt jealous while watching a movie in which the characters unfurl ancient scrolls or turn the pages of centuries-old books? This course is your chance for hands-on exploration in UW-Madison’s amazing and varied archives. By exploring university archives and conducting hands-on research we’ll discover the hidden history of the texts we read together in class.

For example, while reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we’ll look at handwritten scientific diaries and medical how-to manuals from the sixteenth century. Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus, we’ll explore zines, graphic novels, and banned books in the archives. Reading William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we’ll reconstruct Hamlet’s reading list with volumes from Special Collections.

Students need not have any familiarity with archival research to take this class, but should have a desire to spend time with amazing old books and historical objects in various libraries and museums on campus. Class sessions will meet in alternate locations such as campus libraries, archives, and labs. Course assignments will also require students to work independently in some of these locations.

182.001: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Doing Time: Race-Labor-Incarceration in America
Ingrid Diran
TR 9:30am-10:45am Van Hise 487
Requisites: Declared in an Honors program

In the eighteenth century, the phrase “doing time” came to apply for the first time to both work and crime as both became measurable in terms of time: prison, once understood as a waiting place for public punishment, became the private space of punishment itself, while labor, once understood as a skill or craft, became the working day. In this class, we will read works of literature and social criticism to examine how the idea of “doing time” in the U.S. has been formative for, and shaped by, histories of race, labor, and punishment.

182.002: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Stories, Poems, and Critical Thinking
Vinay Dharwadker
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Van Hise 590
Requisites: Declared in an Honors program

This course will introduce Honors students, from different majors across campus, to critical thinking about literature. We will use poems and short stories from different historical periods and cultures to explore: (1) how imaginative writers represent important real-life issues; and (2) how we, as readers, can use our capacity for critical thinking to respond to them with insight and understanding. Our readings in English and in English translation will include classics such as William Shakespeare and modern Nobel laureates such as Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. We will combine short lectures with open classroom discussion, individual and group assignments, and short and medium-length papers. All our course materials, including digital texts and audiovisual supplements, will be accessible via Canvas.

200 level courses

201: Intermediate Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: Satisfied Communications A requirement and 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.

204: Studies in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy
Eileen Lagman
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Hise 575
Requisites: Satisfied Communications A requirement and sophomore standing; not open to special students

What do texts do? How? For whom? How and why do writers and readers compose texts that have an impact? Approaches these enduring questions of English studies from the perspective of Composition & Rhetoric, one of English’s subfields. Emphasizing critical reading and writing and built around a central theme that varies by semester, the course prepares students to analyze historical and/or contemporary examples of how texts create communities, influence beliefs, and shape knowledge.

207: Introduction to Creative Writing
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Requisites: First Year, freshman or sophomore standing only
Satisfies a Comm B requirement

English 214: The English Language
Tom Purnell
MW 12:05pm-12:55pm, Humanities 2650
Requisites: Sophomore standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Undergrad)

Whether you have spoken English since you were a baby or since learning English as an adult, you probably have asked yourself 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 change the English language? In this class, we ask many questions like these and attempt to answer them using modern linguistic techniques (the systematic study of language in all its aspects). We investigate how the English we use today is organized into sounds, into small meaning-bearing units called morphemes, into words, and by groups of words into sentences — then sentences gather to form discourse from which we derive meaning. Though most people have strong feelings about what is right and wrong about today’s English, there is no such thing as ONE English language. Looking back over the past 50 or 500 years, it is evident that English has changed. What processes have brought about this change? And why do different native speakers today speak different English varieties?

This class is intended for anyone interested in how English works and how today’s English became what it is. By the end of the course, you will have acquired linguistics skills and used them to understand the structure, uses, varieties, styles, and history of the English language.

Learning outcomes: At the end of this semester, students are expected to:
Recall and identify linguistic concepts as they apply to English.
Classify and analyze linguistic units (such as words or sentences) in English, applying linguistic methods and terminology.
Explain the relationship between language variation and language change.
Assess the role of communities and experiences of individuals in using language for self-expression and to create meaning.

223: Vladimir Nabokov: Russian & American Writings
S. A. Karpukhin
MWF 11:00am-11:50am Van Hise 114
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-listed with Literature in Translation
Honors Optional (%)

In this course you will get to know the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). You will discover the “Nabokov effect,” the writer’s love of pattern, and the system of cognitive challenges and rewards in his Russian and American fiction. You will read Nabokov’s major works from the perspective of history and politics, ethics and art: learn about the “nightmare of history” in 20th-century Europe as well as the writer’s experience as a refugee from ideology and racial hatred in post-war America.

224: Introduction to Poetry
Vinay Dharwadker
R 4:00pm-6:30pm Ingraham 115
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will introduce students from different majors across campus, including majors in English and other humanities, to the systematic study of poetry. We will focus on a range of important questions: What makes a poem a poem, and what are some of our general conceptions of poetry? How should we analyze poems, in order to interpret, assess, and explain them satisfactorily? What are some of the common forms, genres, and techniques of poetry? How can we respond critically to a poet’s imagination? What makes poems beautiful and memorable? Our readings from British and American poetry will include classic as well as contemporary texts, and examples across categories such as social class, gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. We will combine short lectures with open classroom discussion, individual and group assignments, and short and medium-length papers. All our course materials, including digital texts and audiovisual supplements, will be accessible via Canvas.

241: Literature and Culture 1: to the 18th Century
Lisa Cooper
MW 11:00am-11:50am Soc Sci 5208
Prereqs: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 215 prior to Fall 2014

What is a person, a home, a nation, a world? What we now call “English literature” begins with these questions, imagining a cosmos filled with gods and heroes, liars and thieves, angels and demons, dragons and dungeons, whores and witches, drunken stupor and religious ecstasy. Authors crafted answers to these questions using technologies of writing from parchment to the printing press, and genres old and new, from epic and romance to drama and the sonnet. Emphasis will be on developing the skills of close reading, critical analysis, and writing that are of use for majors and non-majors alike, and on thinking about what it means to participate in a community (or several communities) of readers.

242: Literature and Culture II: from the 18th Century to the Present
Topic: TBA
TBA
MW 4:35pm-5:25pm Chamberlin 2241
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 216 prior to Fall 2014

Course Catalog Description: Considers a period of unparalleled tumult: a time of vast world empires and startling new technologies, revolutions that radically redefined self and community, two cataclysmic world wars, the emergence of ideas of human rights, and the first truly global feelings of interconnectedness. How has literature captured and contributed to these dramatic upheavals? Some writers worldwide have struggled to invent new forms, new words, and new genres to do justice to a world in crisis, while others have reached back in time, seeking continuity with the past. Explore enduring traditions of poetry and drama and think about experiments in the new, globally popular genre of the novel. Develops skills of critical reading and writing that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.

245.001: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Plot & Plantation: Material of Resistance in Novel
Kristina Huang
W 6:00pm-8:30pm Education 151
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

Course Catalog Description: Offers 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.

245.002: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Writing Feeling
Eileen Lagman
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 583
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

How is emotion part of meaning making and communication? How does writing generate feeling—whether shame, grief, fear, love, or joy? Through engaging with rhetorical theory, emotion studies, and qualitative research, as well as writing across genres and modes, this class will explore different ways to understand the connection between writing and feeling so that we might better understand the way we write, how we might teach writing, and how we might write for the world.

245.003: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Empire of Senses
Yanie Fecu
TR 9:30am-10:45pm Vilas 4020
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This seminar focuses on two key senses—seeing and hearing—to investigate representations of racialized experience in global Black literature and music. From Beyoncé and Jamaica Kincaid to Kanye West and Paule Marshall, students will analyze novels, music videos, poetry, films, and documentaries alongside different musical traditions. The course will highlight key historical moments like the Harlem Renaissance as well as more recent events, like rapper Kendrick Lamar’s historic Pulitzer Prize win. We will consider questions such as:

How can text and music capture the lived experience of marginalized people?
How do authors and musicians explore cultural assimilation, political resistance, and social justice
How can we understand the relationship between fans and musical artists?

Ultimately, this seminar will enable students to critique narratives that present Black culture as a monolith and to understand the complexity of racial formation in and beyond the United States.

245.004: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Afterlives of Slavery
Raquel Kennon
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Hise 379
Requisites: Sophomore standing

How do contemporary writers and artists transfigure the generic conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave narratives through historical realism, the supernatural, melodrama, or satire? How might certain texts compel us to think about the idea of reconstruction as a U.S. historical period and narrative process? This course explores how twentieth and twenty-first century narratives of slavery recount, reimagine, reshape, and remember, or forget, slavery’s past. Although we will focus primarily on U.S. contemporary narratives of enslavement, or neo-slave narratives, we will also consider some examples from the Americas in translation while paying particular attention to how contemporary fictions of enslavement engage concepts of emancipation, freedom, and abolition. In tracing the proliferating literary and cultural afterlives of slavery, we will consider how race, gender, place, and time in particular, representations of Black women come to bear on these textual and artistic transformations. We will draw from a body of work that crosses multiple genres: fiction, poetry, visual and popular culture.

246: Literature by American Indian Women
Susan Dominguez
TR 4:00pm-5:15pm TBA
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Presents a broad range of literatures from diverse Native traditions and eras, to provide students with a basic knowledge of major issues affecting and best-known texts by American Indian women authors.

300 level courses

305: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement
Topic: “Dammed: Critical Approaches to Human and More-Than-Human River Engineering”
Caroline Druschke
T 11:00am-1:30pm Science Hall 110
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Satisfied Comm A requirement

Dams may stand at what McPhee called the environmentalist’s innermost circle of hell, but they have surprisingly different social and environmental impacts depending on who builds them (federal agencies? farmers? beavers?) and at what scale. This seminar will engage critical perspectives from the environmental humanities, geography, geomorphology, history, and popular writing on dams and their impacts on freshwater systems, humans, anadromous fish, flooding, wildfires, foreign policy, settler colonialism, and climate change. The class will feature classics like Morgan’s The American Beaver and His Works and White’s The Organic Machine, related films, and recent work like Simpson’s A Short History of the Blockade and Ogden’s Loss and Wonder at World’s End. The course will emphasize attentive reading, discussions and presentations, frequent writing, and place-based case studies.

307: Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry Workshop
TA taught courses
Days & Times Vary Online
Requisites: Junior standing or ENGL 207. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 407, 408, 409, 410, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Satisfies a Comm B requirement
Satisfies a workshop requirement for the emphasis in creative writing
Accelerated Honors (!)

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.

314: Structure of English
Tom Purnell
MWF 9:55am-10:45am Ingraham 222
Requisites: Sophomore standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Undergrad and grad)

This course provides a general introduction to the study of English grammar from a linguistic perspective. In this course, we discuss that grammar is not something external that is written down in a book to be memorized by speakers of a specific language; instead, it is part of every speaker’s implicit knowledge about their language. In this course, students learn to apply linguistic terminology and methods to describe the structure of English words and sentences, both verbally and visually.

In this course, we also learn to identify linguistic constructions (such as relative clauses, passive constructions, and nominalizations) and analyze their use in different text types or genres. To this end, your final project paper will use the terminology you will learn in class to compare various texts and discourses regarding their structure.
Learning outcomes: At the end of this semester, students are expected to:

Identify and summarize the form and function of words in a sentence using linguistic terminology and methodology.
Represent the structure of simple and complex sentences verbally and visually (tree diagrams).
Carry out a comparative data-based analysis of two texts that deal with similar topics but are situationally different.
Create a visually compelling oral presentation of your analysis in number 3 above.

315: English Phonology
Eric Raimy
MWF 11:00am-11:50am Comp Sci 1325
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Meets with Linguistics 310

English Phonology introduces students to the sound system of English, including phonetics and elementary phonology. Phonetics is the study of sounds (phones), while phonology examines how minimally critical sounds work together with other minimally critical sounds. Course topics include acoustic phonetics, articulatory phonetic descriptions of consonants and vowels, classic phonemic theory, the nature of phonological processes, linguistic change, and the acquisition of phonological systems. By the end of the course, students will be able to describe and transcribe the speech sounds of English, recognize and describe phonemic and phonotactic patterns, and account for basic phonological processes.

316: English Language Variation in the U.S.
Juliet Huynh
TR 9:30am-10:45am Nolan 119
Requisites: Sophomore standing

The course examines the relationships of the different geographical varieties of English in the United States in relation to the social identities that are associated with these varieties. While no variety is more important than another, this course will explore how these various dialects of English stand in relation to standard language ideology.

318: Second Language Acquisition
Juliet Huynh
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 375
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will introduce the field of second language acquisition. The course will cover research topics including the differences between first and second language acquisition, language perception and production and how the first and second language are affected, and what the second language teaching implications are.

328: The Sixteenth Century
Elizabeth Bearden
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm White 4208
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This is a rigorous, advanced course focusing on Tudor literature in the context of formal and cultural exchange. The class will include poetry and prose narratives, and it will also reach out to other media such as music and the visual arts. The approach will be comparative; the reading list will not be limited to English authors only, and students will be asked to consider the global literary exchanges that coalesced in the creation of early modern English literature. Primary texts will be paired with scholarly assessments representing current critical approaches to early modern literature. The course will be grounded in readings from the early Renaissance that highlight formal aspects of humanist, courtly, poetic, and political texts. These readings will, in turn, inform the way we consider how English writers were influenced by global and cross-cultural exchange across a number of cultural contact zones.

350.001: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Waiting Rooms: Gender, Disability, & the Politic
Jess Waggoner
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Sterling 2425
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200

Course Catalog Description: Investigation of some specific topic in gender and women’s studies related to gender and literature. Topic differs each semester.

353: British Literature since 1900
Topic: Modern British and Irish Literature
Richard Begam
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 387
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional %

This course surveys a number of the principal works of twentieth-century British, Irish and Commonwealth literature. Issues to be considered include the “inward turn” of modernism, its fascination with myth and archetype, England’s changing social and economic conditions, and the encounter between Western and non-Western cultures resulting from British colonialism.

359: Visionary and Speculative Fiction: Social Justice Approaches
Sami Schalk
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Sterling 2301
Requisites: Sophomore standing, previous GWS course, or permission of instructor
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies
Honors Optional %

“All organizing is science fiction” –Walidah Imarisha Explores the genre of visionary fiction—speculative fiction written for social justice purposes—as a means to create, build and maintain new worlds. Examines the political potential of literature and multiple examples of visionary fiction. Requires independent research on a chosen social justice issue and the creation of a visionary fiction short story at the end of the semester.

360: The Anglo-Saxons
Jordan Zweck
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with History & Religious Studies

Who were the people who lived in what is now England over 1000 years ago? This class explores the history, literature, religion, art, and culture of the early medieval English. We explore a wide range of texts originally written in Latin and Old English that include fights with monsters, heartbreaking elegies, dirty riddles, bombastic sermons, and medical treatises. Over the semester, we will learn about how Early Medieval England came into existence, how it became Christianized, how it fought, assimilated, and fought again with Vikings, and how it all ended (or didn’t!) with the Norman Conquest. We’ll also be thinking about how to rename this course, given recent debates in the field regarding the name once given to the people of early medieval England: “The Anglo-Saxons.” No previous experience with medieval literature and culture required!

English/Medieval Studies 426: Chaucer’s Courtly Poetry
TR 2:30-3:45pm

In this course, we will read poetry by the medieval author Geoffrey Chaucer, including his dream visions (including one with a whirling twiggy house, another with a mysterious knight and a game of chess, and a third featuring a debate among talking birds!), longer courtly love poetry, and shorter lyrics. If you’ve ever wanted to know what Chaucer wrote when he wasn’t writing the Canterbury Tales, this is the course for you!

Texts will be read in Middle English, but no prior experience with Middle English or medieval literature is required.

368: Chicana/o & Latina/o Literature
Topic: Chicanx and Latinx Literature and Visual Culture
Theresa Delgadillo
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Chican@ & Latin@ Studies

Considers the interplay between the visual and the literary in novels, short stories, poems, and memoirs or autoethnographies that center visual objects such as photographs, movies, installations, architecture, graffiti, and/or tattoos to question the act of “seeing” especially with respect to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Focused on literature from 1970s to the present. Assignments include short essays, regular discussion and dialogue, short quizzes, and group presentations.

374: African and African Dispora Literature and Culture
Laila Amine
R 4:00pm-6:30pm White 4281
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course examines contemporary return travel by African Diaspora authors, with an emphasis on African American classics. We will explore the genre of return travel writing and how it rethinks widespread forms of black mobility (migration, exile, dislocation).

375: Literatures of Migration and Dispora
Amadi Ozier
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Humanities 2653
Requisites: Sophomore standing

How do you find your place in this world? Black women’s writing on home, family, and nation from the 19th and 20th century. Homemaking and future-making at various sites, including: the ocean, the plantation, the river, the tenement building, the market, the jook, the garden, the homeless shelter, the cabaret, the jail, and the squat.

We will primarily read fiction, poetry, and drama from decolonial environmentalist and feminist thinkers such as Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Gayl Jones.

We will also explore critical perspectives on spatial theory, housing justice, and racial capitalism from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rinaldo Walcott, bell hooks, Huey P. Newton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cheryl L. Harris, Robin D. G. Kelley, Katherine McKittrick , Christina Sharpe, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Booker T. Washington.

400 level courses

403.001: Seminar on Tutoring Writing Across the Curriculum
Emily Hall
TR 9:30am-10:45am White 6176
Requisites: 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
Accelerated Honors (!)

Explores current theory and research on the writing process and analyzes disciplinary genres and conventions. Teaches strategies for helping writers revise their work. Explores the teaching of writing from multiple perspectives including that of race, disability, and social justice. 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 1:00pm-2:15pm White 6176
Requisites: 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
Accelerated Honors (!)

407: Creative Writing: Nonfiction Workshop
TBA
T 3:30pm-5:25pm White 6108
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 408, 409, 410, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course Catalog Description: Explores a variety of non-fictional prose writing forms including (at the instructor’s discretion) personal essay, memoir, travel writing, opinion pieces, investigative journalism, public science writing, and natural history writing. Covers theory and technique, reading the work of established writers and some short writing exercises. Focuses on student writing, both in the classroom and in individual conferences.

408.001: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
TBA
R 1:20pm-3:15pm White 6110
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
Accelerated Honors (!)

This class will attempt to provide you with a vocabulary for discussing creative work (that of established writers as well as your peers) and help you apply learned techniques to your own writing, so that you may begin to determine your own aesthetic. Some topics you can expect to explore include: point of view, the construction of good dialogue, navigating scene and exposition, and the sound and rhythm of constructing a sentence.

Whether or not you go on to write professionally, reading and writing are fundamental tools you’ll use for the rest of your life, and you can only benefit from refining these skills. In return, I’ll expect the cooperative fostering of a safe and conducive environment for yourself and your peers to learn in. Though writing is often a solitary practice, it is necessary to create a writing community that allows its members to share and discuss work and ideas in a way that benefits the development of both the writer and the reader. At times, this class will seem to move quickly, and require you to really engage with your writing, the writing of your peers, and all of the assigned readings.

408.002: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
Ron Kuka
R 5:40pm-7:40pm White 7105
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
Accelerated Honors (!)

409.001: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Amy Barry
T 11:00am-12:55pm White 7109
Requisites: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 410, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)

In this weekly workshop we’ll read, write, and learn strategies for revising poetry in a variety of 21st-century styles. Each student will be workshopped 3 or 4 times, submitting poems in any style they want. Additionally, students will write brief weekly exercises to develop their skills in each of the poetic styles we’ll explore. Students will submit a final portfolio of revisions at the end of the course.

409.002: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Paul Tran
M 3:30pm-5:25pm White 6108
Requisites: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later
Accelerated Honors (!)

Beauty is not something to behold, Toni Morrison writes. It is something one can do. This intermediate poetry workshop will help poets analyze and experiment with language not only to do beauty but also to arrive at new ideas about our human experience. We will close read poems diverse in authorship, context, and point of view, and we will write an original poem each week demonstrating our proficiency of how prosodic devices, received forms, rhetorical modes, and spoken word combine to help us answer, or attempt to answer, questions about our lives together and apart in a particular place and time. Authors we will study include Franny Choi, Robert Hayden, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Danez Smith, and Crystal Valentine.

411.001: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: Literary Publishing
Sean Bishop
T 1:20pm-3:15pm White 7109
Requisites: 207, 307,407,408,409,410, 411, or graduate/professional standing
Accelerated Honors (!)

This is a course for creative writing students who would like to be published, and/or students who are interested in the editorial side of the publishing world. Half of this course will teach students how to prepare and submit their own poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction for publication in literary journals. And the other half of this course will teach the ins and outs of literary editing: students will solicit and put together an anthology by UW alumni, which will be published next year. Students will also help pick the finalists for this year’s Wisconsin Poetry Series, which publishes seven single-author books of poetry each year. By the end of this course, students will have all the tools they need to begin publishing their work in top-tier literary journals and will gain real-world experience as a literary editor.

411.002: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: TBA
TBA
M 11:00am-12:55pm White 7109
Requisites: 207, 307,407,408,409,410, 411, or graduate/professional standing
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course Catalog 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 full-length pieces.

412: Bad Grammar and Metalinguistic Awareness
Wanner, Anja
TR 09:30am-10:45am Van Vleck B223
Requisites: Sophomore standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)

In this mixed undergrad/grad class we will explore the vexed relationship between descriptive and prescriptive grammar. While the field of linguistics has long rejected prescriptive accounts of language use as irrelevant and damaging, the broader culture is fascinated with such accounts, even if they are brought forward by individuals who openly profess that they have no interest in the structure of language per se. In the spirit of Anne Curzan’s suggestion to “engage rather than dismiss” prescriptive voices in public discourses about language, we will discuss different forms of prescriptivism, the history of prescriptive grammar and standardization in English, and the harm such approaches can cause. Central to the discussion will be case studies of constructions often criticized by prescriptivists, including so-called split infinitives, flat adverbs, or the use of ‘who’ as object pronoun.

415: Introduction to TESOL Methods
Joseph Nosek
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Thinking about teaching ESL or English abroad in the future? English 415 is an introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. The course explores the contexts in which English is taught, and the methods and materials used to teach it. We explore how people learn languages and the most effective research-based ways to teach them. You will observe ESL classes and tutor a language learner throughout the semester. Eng 415 will provide you with a foundational knowledge of language teaching and some of the necessary skills and practical knowledge to succeed as English language instructors in a wide variety of teaching contexts. This course also serves as the introductory course for our 15-credit TESOL Certificate.

426: Chaucers Courtly Poetry
Jordan Zweck
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies

Texts will be read in Middle English, but no prior experience with Middle English or medieval literature is required.

431: Early Works of Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare
Elizabeth Bearden
R 4:00pm-6:30pm White 4208
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will investigate a selection of Shakespeare’s early works before 1601 with an emphasis on how these texts represent error. A selection of comedies, histories, sonnets and excerpts from Shakespeare’s sources and contemporaries along with critical essays will constitute the bulk of the required reading. Students will be asked to consider how error—in the metaphorical as well as the pagan and Judeo-Christian molds—is crucial to Shakespeare’s formal and cultural contributions to the Western literary tradition. Along with requiring the student to write two essays, the course will give students the choice to submit a dramatic recitation of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory or to write their own sonnet in Shakespeare’s form.

English 438: Topic in Eighteenth Century Literature & Culture
Topic: Gender and Sexuality in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Libertines, Eunuchs, Mollies, and More!
Mark Vareschi
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Do the ways we think, feel, and write about gender and sexuality have a history? What is the relationship between the desiring body and the desiring mind? Are they the same thing? These are a few of the central questions we will pursue in this course. Focusing on the period between 1660 and 1750, we will attend to the, sometimes radical, transformations in literature and culture. We will seek to tease out the ways in which these transformations have shaped our modern conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Our goals in this course are to develop an ability to speak and write about major developments in British literature from 1660-1750, to familiarize ourselves with the poetry, drama, and prose of the period under consideration, and to develop a critical perspective regarding the period’s literary and intellectual movements.

444: Topic Romantic or Victorian Literature and Culture
Topic: India & Victorian Imagination
Amanda Shubert
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Vleck B231
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Study of a topic in 19th-Century British literature.

453: Topic in British Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: Backgrounds to Modernism
Richard Begam
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Hise 495
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

This course charts the intersection between the cultural phenomenon we call modernity and the literary and aesthetic phenomenon we call modernism. Drawing on works in philosophy, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics, we examine how the central texts of modernist literature grappled with a number of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought.

456: Topic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
Topic: 19th Century American Theatre and Drama
Mary Trotter
TR 9:30am-10:45am Van Vleck B215
Requisites: Sophomore standing

From “legit drama to fairground performances, American theatre in the nineteenth century was a primary vehicle through which diverse Americans imagined themselves, their histories, and the possibilities for their rapidly changing nation’s future. The legacy of American theatre found in the texts and archival remnants of its melodramas, minstrel shows, musicals, “wild west shows, and vaudevilles offer important insights into the legacy of theatricality and representation in American culture that continues to inform how “America performs/is performed locally and globally on TV and film, on stage, and in everyday life. We will read about two plays per week along with supporting critical and historical texts about American theatre and performance. We will learn about playwrights, theatre companies and spaces, actors, stage technology innovations, theatre economics, and audience spectatorship. This is a great class for students interested in nineteenth-century American literature and history, dramatic literature, popular culture, radio/television/film studies, and theatre and performance studies.

Please note that this course will address sensitive and difficult issues such as racial and ethnic prejudice, stereotyping and violence, and their representation on the American stage, including the history of blackface minstrelsy and its influence on contemporary art and politics.

457.001: Topic in American Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: Cultures of AIDS activism
Ramzi Fawaz
T 6:00pm-8:30pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This course will explore the art, literature, video and film of radical AIDS activism in the US-American 1980s and 1990s. Much like the contemporary Covid crisis, four decades ago an unfamiliar new disease, the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV/AIDS, exploded into the public imagination. As a sexually transmitted disease that initially affected the gay male community most profoundly, but rapidly evolved into a global pandemic that knows no borders, AIDS instantly became a lightning rod for national anxieties about women and queer people’s long-standing demands for greater sexual freedom. It exposed the rampant inequalities of US-American science and medicine, including the unconscionable mistreatment of racial, gender, and sexual minorities by medical practitioners. And it inspired a broad-based, intergenerational coalition of politicized sexual outlaws and their allies to engage in direct-action activism to fight for the lives of their friends, chosen families, and lovers. In this process, AIDS activists produced confrontational protest art and filmed documentary evidence of their mass demonstrations. They wrote poetry, theatre, and literature about those living with HIV and crafted rebellious political speeches railing against the onslaught of homophobic, racist, and classist violence toward people with AIDS (or PWA’s). By studying the extraordinary artistic, political and intellectual output of AIDS activists in the moment of their greatest crisis, we will identify the imaginative tools previous generations have left us to fight against our collective dehumanization in the age of Covid.

461.001: Topics in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Black and Latinx in Literature and Visual Culture
Theresa Delgadillo
TR 2:30am-3:45pm Van Hise 215
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Meets with Chican@ & Latin@ Studies 328

An interdisciplinary course that explores the intersection of Black and Latinx and the experiences of Black Latinx peoples through readings in literature, theory/philosophy, history, cultural studies, autoethnography/testimonio, and visual studies as well as assigned films and videos. Assignments will include short essays, regular discussion and dialogue, short quizzes, and group presentations.

462.001: Topic in Asian American Literature
Topic: Asian American Graphic Novels and Comics
Timothy Yu
TR 11:00am-12:15pm Van Hise 215
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Asian American Studies

Comics have often been dismissed as a simplistic medium meant for children, but in the past few decades they have gained increasing respect as serious literature, often under the label “graphic novels.” And the past two decades have seen an explosion of comics, graphic novels, and graphic memoirs from Asian American creators. We’ll survey this growing body of work, beginning with the question of what comics and graphic novels are and how they differ from other forms of art and literature. We’ll then examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to the form, considering how Asian Americans use the medium of comics to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories.

465: Asian American Poetry
TBA
T 1:20pm-3:15pm Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Asian American Studies

Course Catalog Description: Throughout the history of Asian America, poetry has been a vehicle for the creation and exploration of an Asian American voice; in poetry we can see the continuing struggle over what form Asian American expression will take. Will it follow Asian or European models? Will it employ traditional forms, or experiment in search of new styles? Will it be individual or collective, introspective or political? We will explore these questions through a study of a wide range of Asian American poets from a variety of historical periods and ethnicities, including Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada, Li-Young Lee, John Yau, Myung Mi Kim, and Linh Dinh.

474.001: Topic in Contemporary Literature
Topic: Very Contemporary American Literature
Sarah Wood
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 474
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Study of recent literature written in English. Specific topic will vary.

474.002: Topic in Contemporary Literature
Topic: Very Contemporary American Literature
Sarah Wood
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm Room Pending
Requisites: Sophomore standing

Course Catalog Description: Study of recent literature written in English. Specific topic will vary.

500 level courses

508: Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction Workshop
TBA
T 1:20pm-3:15pm White 7109
Requisites: ENGL 408 or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 469, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course Catalog Description: Fiction writing.

515: Techniques & Materials for TESOL
Andrea Poulos
TR 9:30am-10:45am White 6144
Requisites: ENGL 415

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.

516: English Grammar in Use
Anja Wanner
TR 1:00pm-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: ENGL 314 or graduate/professional standing
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad)

The study of syntax often stops at the sentence boundary, but clearly our linguistic choices, including choices of word order, are informed by situational factors. This mixed grad/undergrad class is for students who want to learn more about grammar phenomena that arise from the discourse situation and genre conventions. When do we use passive voice instead of active voice, and why? When do we say “picked up the phone” and when “picked the phone up,” and why? The class also discusses how sentences merge to become “text” — through the use of connectives and pronouns for example. We will look at important case studies, all based on corpus linguistic or experimental data, on topics like word order variation, language change (including change stemming from digital discourse), and variation by register.

533.001: Topic in Literature and the Environment
Topic: ECOPOETRY in the Anthropocene
Heather Swan
W 2:30pm-5:00pm Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

Students in this class will explore how poets interrogate the concept of “nature” in the Anthropocene and explore representations of nonhumans and interconnection as well as of environmental destruction (climate change, resource depletion, extinction, and toxicity). Attention will be paid to the ways in which different identities affect our relationships with the natural world due to cultural, geographical, and historical situatedness.

533.002: Topic in Literature and Environment
Topic: Queer & Anticolonial Gardening
M. Ty
TR 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Vleck B233
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies

This seminar pursues a critical investigation of how instituting gardens has historically supported imperial projects of cultivating and organizing life—often with the intent of maximizing yield (of crop, of scientific knowledge, of “beauty”). A collective study of various forms of resistance to colonial models of planting, including the monocropping at the heart of the plantation economy. The seminar asks: in what ways might non-normative practices of gardening challenge logics of sexual and racial difference that colonial horticulture maintains as a hard and profitable norm? In what ways have informal practices of subsistence enacted ways of relating to the local ecologies that diverge from the law of the plantation? How have gardens sustained by minoritzed groups offered resources for collective memory, as well as therapeutic and medicinal relief? And how have the oppressed understood gardening as a practice of freedom?

559.001: Topic in Literary or Cultural Theory
Topic: Divergent Feminisms
Ramzi Fawaz
M 4:00pm-6:30pm Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing

This advanced theory seminar will explore recent US-American popular culture that grapples with psychedelic experience. Psychedelics, like LSD (or “acid”) and psilocybin (or “magic mushrooms”), are a class of drugs, which create mind-altering and consciousness-expanding effects. The signal feature of psychedelics is their ability to stimulate a radical tuning up of the senses, which is experienced as a hallucinogenic state but lived differently by each person. In the 1960s, US-American countercultural youth turned on to psychedelics as a way to access a broader range of human perceptual capabilities. Many also claimed that psychedelic experience expanded their understanding of categories like race, gender, sexuality and other forms of human difference by giving them a cosmic sense of connection with the human species. Today, medical researchers are studying psychedelics as an effective treatment for a numerous mental health crises like depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma, thereby inaugurating what many consider a new psychedelic renaissance. In this class, we will ask what role art and culture can play in harnessing the best aspects of psychedelic experience in aesthetic or creative form. This includes studying how hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic, and viscerally intense literature, film, television and visual culture can shake us out of habituated ways of thinking, broaden how we grasp human diversity, and provide ways of better responding to the large-scale catastrophes of our time.

559.002: Topic in Literary or Cultural Theory
Topic: Planetary Ecology: Terrestrials and Celestials
Frederic Neyrat
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing

The goal of this theory- and politics-oriented class is to rewrite ecological thought from a planetarity perspective. 1) Planet Earth, the first part of the course, will study the concepts of “terrestrial,” “terrestrial community,” and planetarity. 2) Radical Politics of Territories, the second part, will focus on territorial political struggles, the radical politics of abolition geography and abolition ecology. 3) Terrestrials and Celestials, the most speculative part of the class, will seek to go beyond the limits of hyper-territorialization and terrestrial fetishism. Students will be asked to make brief presentations, to write essays or create videos. Amongst others, we’ll study B. Latour, A. Mbembe, G. Spivak, D. Chakrabarty, R. W. Gilmore, G. Agamben, Augustine, M. Heidegger, and several texts published by the platform Ill Will.

600 level courses

651: Special Topic in Theatre and Performance Studies Research
Topic: 19th C. American Theatre & Drama
Mary Trotter
TR 9:30am-10:45am Van Vleck B215
Requisites: Sophomore standing or consent of instructor

Course Catalog Description: Specialized subjects relevant to the study of the theory, history and criticism of theatre and performance studies.