Courses

1212 Fall 2020-21 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.

Please note Definition of Different Types of Modality, for the purposes of this document:

In-person: has some in-person meeting times
Remote Synchronous: Entirely remote. Students are expected to participate in online lectures, discussions, labs or activities synchronously during scheduled meeting times.
Remote Asynchronous: Entirely remote. Students are engaging regularly every week with the instructor, course content, activities, assignments, etc. but are not required to meet with the class synchronously in a scheduled meeting-time pattern.
Please be sure to check the class notes in the Course Search and Enroll application for additional information.

100: Introduction to College Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: 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 and Dramatic Literature
Mary Trotter
Remote Asynchronous
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama

English/Theatre and Drama 120 is a face-to-face course offered in two formats: a 3-credit option and a 4-credit Comm-B (writing-intensive) option. In both formats we read plays, attend performances, and think, talk, and write about the art of drama and performance. This course’s activities include reading important plays, attending stage productions, writing and thinking critically about theatre and drama. Emphasis is placed on developing analytic skills in dramatic literature and theatre production. The playwrights we are likely to read this fall include Sophocles, Moliere, Zeami, Tristan Tzara, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, David Henry Hwang and Suzan-Lori Parks.

140: Comm B Topics in English Literature
Topic: The Figure of the Outsider: Writing from the Margins
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
Remote Asynchronous

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.”

150: Literature & Culture of Asian America
Timothy Yu
Remote Asynchronous
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.

153.001: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Calling Planet Earth: Our Planetary Environment
Frederic Neyrat
Remote Asynchronous
Cross-listed with Environmental Studies

We live on Earth, but do we know exactly what the Earth is? Is it a mere planet wandering in a cold universe? The quasi-living ecosphere some thinkers call “Gaia”? Or a sort of “spaceship” that geoengineers can enhance and pilot?

The goal of this course is to reveal that planet Earth is both a global ecosystem in which nature and technologies are entangled and a cosmological entity belonging to our solar system. Planetary Humanities will enable students to think together these two aspects of Earth: a/the global feature that is at the core of crucial phenomena like climate change, financial crisis, and transnational migrations, and b/the cosmological aspect that has been at play since the Copernican revolution and its displacement of the Earth from the center of the cosmos.

Drawing on literature (J.G Ballard, J.M. Coetzee, U. Le Guin, M. Shelley, K. Vonnegut), music (Funkadelic, Sun Ra), cinema (Into the Wild, Koyaanisqatsi, Promised Land, 2001: A Space Odyssey), philosophy (H. Jonas, A. Koyré), sociology and history (U. Beck, D. Cosgrove), science (Copernicus, P. Crutzen, J. Lovelock, L. Margulis, J. von Neumann, C. Sagan), anthropology (J. Diamond, T. Ingold, L. Messeri), and theorists who shaped the environmental thought (R. Carson, W. Cronon, B. Latour, A. Leopold, B. McKibben, C. Merchant, R. Nixon, H.D. Thoreau), this class investigates the crucial issues of our terrestrial condition.

If we want to address the environmental problems that humans are confronted with (loss of biodiversity, technological risks, environmental inequity), we need to change our representations of earth, nature, life, humans, and technology.

153.002: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Social Justice in the Anthropocene
Ingrid Diran
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Cross-listed with Environmental Studies

From Birmingham Jail, where Martin Luther King, Jr. voiced his commitment to civil rights through the ecological insight that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” to Kenya, where Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement planted not only trees but “seeds of freedom,” advocacy for social justice and advocacy for environmental justice have mirrored and dovetailed with one another over the last century. Drawing on literary, historical, and sociological texts, this course will explore how this intertwining of political and environmental movements redefines activism in the age of climate change, which geologists have termed the era of Man, or Anthropocene.

153.003: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Gender, Sexuality, and the Environment
Sarah Ensor
TR 9:30-10:45am Online
Cross-listed with Environmental Studies

When contemporary environmentalism urges us to become planetary stewards, it often does so in fairly familiar (and familial) terms, asking us to “love the planet,” to save “Mother Earth,” to embody the chaste restraint implicit in mottos like “leave no trace” or “take only pictures, leave only footprints.” And yet the canon of American environmental literature is also full of more surprising paradigms of relation: queer forms of love burgeoning in natural spaces, human bodies exposed to – and ultimately consubstantial with – environmental toxins, characters whose primary attachments are to grizzly bears or trees or the lingering ghosts of the dead. Through close readings of such texts’ content and form alike, we will see if we might envision a new approach to environmental stewardship, one inspired by queer and gender theory’s openness to non-normative affects, temporalities, relational patterns, and practices of embodiment.

Core texts will include fiction (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Rick Bass’s The Lives of Rocks), nonfiction (Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough: AIDS and Other Clearcuts, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden), and film (Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Todd Haynes’s [Safe], and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I). We also will read a range of essays drawn from the fields of queer theory, ecocriticism, and cultural studies.

155-Myth & Literature
Topic: Classical Myth and Modern Literature
Ronald Harris
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Pending Room
Reserved for FIG students

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.

156.001: Literature and Medicine
Sunny Stern Yudkoff
Remote Asynchronous

Reading a variety of literary and critical texts, we will investigate how ideas of health and illness are communicated between author and reader, patient and doctor, performer and audience, minoritized communities and the medical establishment. Of particular concern will be exploring how different writers and health professionals represent and communicate pain across genres, including poetry, short fiction, memoir, and the graphic novel. Throughout the course, we will ask and re-ask how words hurt, how words heal, and how reading makes us better health citizens.

156.002: Literature and Medicine
Colin Gillis
T 6:00-8:30pm Online

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
Joshua Calhoun
TR 11:00-11:50am Online

Why Shakespeare? is an entry-level, large-lecture course designed to introduce students from a variety of social, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds to Shakespearean literature. In the course, we’ll also try to better understand Shakespeare’s enduring 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?

In the first unit, we will read selections from Romeo & Juliet, then move through a comedy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), a tragedy (Macbeth), and a history play (Henry IV, Part One). This first unit will focus on “Form & Function” as we seek to better understand the language of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and how that language works on the page and on stage.
Our second unit, “Lives & Afterlives,” considers two of Shakespeare’s most well-known and often-performed plays: Hamlet and The Tempest. Reading these plays, we’ll explore Shakespeare’s unique staying power in the popular imagination.

Assessments include three writing assignments, memorization of one sonnet, and a midterm exam. If we succeed as a class, students will end 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.).

172: Literatures of Native America
Susan Dominguez
MW 5:30-6:45pm Room Pending
Cross-Listed with American Indian Studies

Introduction to the oral and written literatures of the peoples of native North America. Students will engage texts across historical periods, tribal groups and regions, within genres such as oratory, testimony, autobiography, poetry, short story, graphics, and novels.

173.002: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Performing Women and Work
Jennifer Plants
MW 4:00-5:15pm Online

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.

174.001: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Protest Literature
Sarah Wood
MW 2:30-3:45pm Online
Reserved for FIG students

Course Guide Description: An introduction to the multiple ways’ writers have used literary texts to engage with pressing questions about class, race, gender, equality, immigration, and other issues of social justice. Specific topics will vary.

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

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.

175: Literature and the Other Disciplines
Topic: Security, Information, Terror
Russell Castronovo
TR 9:30-10:45am Pending Room
Reserved for FIG students
Honors Optional (%)

This course seeks to excavate the cultures of security, surveillance, and terror that everywhere surround us by turning to the literary and historical past. What do we learn about our present predicament by examining the frontier warfare, extralegal violence, vigilante injustice, paranoia, and other forms of terror that have long been features of the U.S. literary and cultural landscape? While discussions of security often center on legal measures like the USA PATRIOT Act, this course looks to art and literature to pose the following questions: What are the aesthetics of terror? What does it mean to feel in/secure in the world? What set of affects or emotions does security generate? Do more data and more knowledge make us feel safe or unsafe? Does security make us feel insecure? We’ll read a wide array of literature—science fiction, dystopian novels, protest literature, gothic literature, a graphic novel, spiritual autobiography, YA fiction—as we attempt to find some answers to these questions. The tentative list of authors includes Charles Brockden Brown, Nat Turner, Philip K. Dick, Dave Eggers, Emily St. John Mandel, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Michel Foucault, Edgar Allan Poe, and others.

176.001: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: Literature and the Cinematic Imagination
Joseph Bowling
Remote Asynchronous

In this class, we will study the basics of film form and analysis, specifically cinematograph and mis-en-scène. We will then compare the principles of visual analysis to literature, reflecting on the shared principles of film and literary form, in order to become more critical audiences of both media.

176.002: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: Shakespeare Now and Then: The Plays on Stage and Film
Karen Britland
TR 2:30-3:45pm Online
Reserved for FIG students

In this FIG, we will be very interested in two things: how to do justice to the past by looking at Shakespeare’s plays in the context of their own time; and – through watching contemporary movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays – how to think about older texts and the ways they might be relevant to our understandings of our own situations today. We will consider notions of trans-historicism and a-historicism, discussing, for example, whether a concept such as “love” is a universal constant or whether its meanings have shifted across time. We will consider notions of forced marriage; sexuality and gender relations; familial and political hierarchy; and, more broadly (particularly by looking at movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in their historical moment) the relationship between culture and political commentary and political change.

176.003: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: Visual Storytelling
Amanda Shubert
TR 2:30-3:45pm Online
Reserved for FIG students

An introduction to visual storytelling, with a focus on the analysis of novels, films, comics, video games. Students will explore how pictures tell stories, how stories make us see pictures in our mind, and how films create narratives through a combination of words and images.

178.001: Digital Media, Literature, and Culture
Topic: Human Memory, Big Data, and the Digital Age
Mark Vareschi
TR 9:30-10:45pm Online
Reserved for FIG students
Honors Optional (%)

The course will begin by considering the relationship between memory and human identity. In many ways, we are who we are because we remember who we are day to day.
However, human memory is fragile. We forget things; we misremember events.
By contrast, any and all online activity leaves a trace that can be collected to form a version of the user. This version is not identical to the human user and yet is often a frighteningly accurate image of the user whose behaviors may be tracked and predicted.
Importantly, this digital version of the user is produced by a form of memory (or more precisely a storage of information) that does not forget. You may not remember “liking” that photo on Facebook at 3 am, but Facebook does.

178.002: Digital Media, Literature, and Culture
Topic: Social Media Texts
Ainehi Edoro
TR 11:00-12:15pm Online
Reserved for FIG students
Honors Optional (%)

Social media can seem like a dump of pointless babble, but it is not. There is logic to how we write both formally and informally on social media. Emojis, typos, misspellings, hashtags, abbreviations, all-caps, and memes are part of a complex language system with quite a few rules and lots of interesting patterns. In this course, we take a deep dive into the literary and linguistic universe of social media to uncover the order behind the chaos of social media writing.

We ask why social media users are hooked on emojis, gifs, and memes. Is instapoetry really poetry? How is Twitter changing the way we tell stories? Why are some twitter threads more epic than others? Why is #love the most used hashtag on Instagram? What do Internet trolls, twitter rants, and call-out culture teach us about the link between emotion and social media writing?

Focusing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the course examines the rules governing language and literary form.

178.003: Digital Media, Literature, and Culture
Topic: Living Digitally: Cultural Responses to Internet
Joseph Bowling
TR 11:00-12:15pm Pending Room
Reserved for FIG students
Honors Optional (%)

The rise and widespread adoption of the internet prompted both utopian and dystopian visions of the future that a digitally connected world would bring. In this class, we’ll study the cultural responses to the internet in the US and the new modes of living its users imagined.

182.001: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Vinay Dharwadker
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Declared in honors program

This course will use the seminar format, combining open discussion with short lectures, student presentations, and other classroom activities. Our main goal will be to familiarize ourselves with representative works of literature in the genres of poetry, fiction (short story and novel), drama, and non-fictional prose. We will sample authors and works from British and American literatures (such as William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison), as well as classics from Anglophone and world literatures (with a few texts in English translation). Our supplementary goal will be to develop our skills in literary criticism, methods of literary analysis, and critical thinking and writing, using works by men as well as women writers.

182.003: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Doing Time: Race, Labor, and Incarceration in America
Ingrid Diran
TR 9:30-10:45pm Online
Prereq: Declared in 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 duration. Prison, once understood as a place to hold prisoners before public flogging, became the private space of punishment itself, while labor, once understood as a skill or craft, became a shift. In this class, we will examine how the idea of “doing time” has shaped and been shaped by, two aspects of American history: race (especially in relation the current regime of mass incarceration and policing) and literature (especially the time represented in the novel). In so doing, we will explore how “doing time has changed and charged the political, social, racial and aesthetic field from the revolutionary era to the present.

201: Intermediate Composition
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereq: 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.

207: Introduction to Creative Writing
TA Taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: Satisfied Communications A requirement and sophomore standing
English 207 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
Thomas Purnell
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing

[English Language and Linguistics] (Undergrad)Whether you have spoken English since you were a baby or you learned 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 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 systematic study of language in all its aspects). We will investigate how the English that 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 together to form discourse from which we derive meaning. Though 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. By the end of the course you will have acquired skills in linguistics and have used them to understand the structure, uses, varieties, styles, and history of the English language.

223: Vladimir Nabokov: Russian & American Writings
S. A. Karpukhin
MWF 11:00-11:50am Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-listed with Literature in Translation

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.

224: Introduction to Poetry
Vinay Dharwadker
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing

This course will combine lectures with open discussion and other class activities. We will explore a broad variety of poetry in British and American literatures, from poetry in traditional verse-forms to poetry in free verse. We will sample poets ranging from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Yeats and Eliot, and from Emily Dickinson to Joy Harjo and Naomi Shihab Nye.

One of our key goals will be to develop strong skills in the analysis of poetry on a wide range of subjects, with an understanding of poetic form, literary history, and social and political context.

241: Literature and Culture 1: to the 18th Century
Jordan Zweck
MW 2:25-3:15pm Online
Prereqs: Sophomore Standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 215 prior to Fall 2014

Course Guide Description: 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. Develops skills of critical reading and writing that are essential to majors and non-majors alike.

242: Literature and Culture II: from the 18th Century to the Present
Topic: Literature in Perspective
Mario Ortiz-Robles
Remote Asynchronous
Prereqs: Sophomore Standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 216 prior to Fall 2014

This course is organized around one simple but very important aspect of literature: its ability to make us see the world from different points 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 in this class are self-conscious explorations of how we represent the world to ourselves in order to make sense of our place within it and to imagine how it might be otherwise. We will be reading classic works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, R. L. Stevenson, William Faulkner, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas Pynchon, and Julian Barnes. In reading and writing about literary perspective, we will also be endeavoring to learn something about what it means to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

245.001: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Writing Rivers
Caroline Druschke
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Community Based Learning section
Honors Optional (%)

This small, interactive seminar offers a chance for students to get to know more about the major, about each other, about Wisconsin’s waterways, and hopefully even about themselves. We’ll partner with the Driftless Writing Center’s Stories from the Flood initiative to consider how the stories that are told and not told shape our sense of who and what matters in our state. Students will practice how to engage with community partners to use writing and rhetoric for the public good.

245.002: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Early Modern Women’s Writing and Critical Theory
Karen Britland
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

Woman, for Hegel, is famously “the everlasting irony in the life of the community,” someone who “changes by intrigue the universal end of the government into a private end” and who “perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the family.” Taking as its core a selection of early modern tragedies, this course will investigate women’s relationships to the genre of tragedy. We will discuss critical theories about the tragic genre, focusing particularly on female characters as catalysts for, or agents of, disaster. The reading for this course will alternate between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tragedies (including Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam and John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi) and contemporary theories about women, violence and tragedy.

245.003: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Welcome to the Apocalypse! Cinema and Ecology
Frederic Neyrat
MW 2:30-3:45pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

In this course we will describe the functions of cinema in an age of environmental disasters. Every session will be devoted to an eco-apocalyptic movie that we will question with a text coming from cinema studies (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer), catastrophe theory (Jared Diamond), ecology (Paul Crutzen), ecocriticism (Frederick Buell), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Žižek), philosophy (Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin), and literature (Ursula Le Guin). For each film (Noah, The Day after Tomorrow, Soylent Green, The Walking Dead, etc.) we will investigate if it records, distorts, or projects reality (even if these three operations can obviously be combined). Indeed, we might think that eco-apocalyptic cinema only imagines possible events: would its own goal be to distract us from the necessary coming of these events? Would it try to falsely avert, thanks to the imaginary, the real dangers that threaten us? Is eco-apocalyptic cinema just a smoke screen that covers over real ecological problems? Or is it possible to argue that cinema is able to show us what we might not be able to see without it? Fueling our fears and our paranoia, cinema sometimes enables us to think what we refuse to think: the extinction of human beings, or at least the irreversible deterioration of the living conditions of human and non-human populations. Cinema tries to deliver justice with images when we refuse to see and to act politically to avoid catastrophes.

245.004: Seminar in the Major
Topic: The Queer and Feminist 1970s
Ramzi Fawaz
R 2:30-5:00pm Pending Room
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

This course will explore the literature, popular culture, and politics of radical feminism and gay liberation in the American 1970s. In this period, movements for sexual and gender freedom dramatically transformed (and destabilized) popular ideas about gendered embodiment, sexual intimacy, and family relations while aiming to dismantle the organizing logics of patriarchy, homophobia, and misogyny. Critical of traditional political reform, these social movements enacted a cultural revolution, innovating new modes of literary and filmic storytelling, forming alternative living collectives, altering the form and content of contemporary art, and introducing ribald, sexy, and confrontational performance art to the American public. Consequently, the cultural and political innovations of women’s and gay liberation set the groundwork for modern feminist and queer theory, the formalized study of gender, embodiment, and erotic desire. In this course, we will explore how the cultural politics of women’s and gay liberation produced the foundational concepts, theories, and arguments that would animate critical theories of gender and sexuality for the next four decades. This course will train students in interdisciplinary cultural studies methods by combining a wide-reaching interest in the literature, film, and political writings of these movements along with historical knowledge and theory.

245.005: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Literary Architectures: Making Space in American Literature
Sarah Ensor
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

In this class, we will consider “literary architectures,” broadly conceived, and analyze the social configurations that these structures make space for. As we move back and forth between discussing the structures depicted in American literature and the structures (forms, genres, traditions) of that literature itself, we will ask questions like the following: How do gender, sexuality, race, and class shape our inhabitation of space, and vice versa? How does our built environment affect our relationships to each other – including, importantly, whom we care for and how? When literary characters inhabit, dismantle, or remake physical structures, what can that teach us about how we might inhabit, dismantle, or remake social structures? And how has authors’ play with literary form – including the space of the page and the dimensions of reading itself – been a way to make new relational possibilities legible, and effect social change?

305: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement
Caroline Druschke
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies
Honors Optional (%)

This course focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of public engagement with science, with an emphasis on science communication. We’ll explore UW-Madison’s land grant mandate to share university research with the public and build from readings in science communication and public participation in scientific research. Students will use what they’ve learned to design, execute, and assess a public engagement activity.

307: Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry Workshop
TA taught courses
Times & Places Vary
Prereqs: 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. To enable a collegial and productive class setting, all sections of 307 are capped at 16 students.
English 307 satisfies a workshop requirement for the emphasis in creative writing.
English 307 satisfies a Comm B requirement

314: Structure of English
Juliet Huynh
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of the syntactic structure of English phrasal grammar. Students will descriptively analyze the structure of words and phrases while also comparing them to actual spoken English sentences. The course grade will be assessed based on participation, homework assignments, quizzes, and a final paper.

315: English Phonology
Eric Raimy
MWF 11:00-11:50am Van Hise 231
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Meets with Linguistics 310

This course offers an introduction to general phonetics and phonology by focusing on the sound system of English. Understanding how English works phonologically allows us to better understand how other languages are similar or dissimilar to English phonology. Topics include acoustic phonetics, articulatory phonetic descriptions of consonants and vowels, classic phonemic theory, the nature of phonological processes 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, account for basic phonological processes, and understand the effects of different phonologies for different languages.

316: English Language Variation in the U.S.
Glenn Starr
TR 9:30-10:45am Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

Course Guide Description: Description and analysis of geographical and social variation in English in the United States

318: Second Language Acquisition
Juliet Huynh
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: 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
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing

This advanced course focuses on Tudor literature in the context of global exchange. The class includes poetry, prose, and the visual arts. Students consider the global literary exchanges that coalesced in the flowering of Renaissance literature. A midterm essay and an 8-10 page final research project are required along with creative and other assignments.

334: Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture
Topic: Surveillance and Eighteenth-Century Literature (and Beyond)
Mark Vareschi
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

Perhaps no topic has received more attention than surveillance in our contemporary culture. Following on the revelations of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that nearly every bit of international and domestic online and voice communication was or could be monitored, saved, and analyzed we have seen an explosion of scholarly and popular writing on surveillance. In this course, we will seek to understand the long history of surveillance, its literary representations, and those formations that precede current practices from the 18th through the 21st centuries. Readings may be drawn from authors like Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, George Orwell, and John Brunner.

350.001: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Social Justice Literature
Samantha Schalk
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Honors Optional (%)
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies

Investigation of some specific topic in gender and women’s studies related to gender and literature. Topic for Fall 2020 is social justice literature. Writing intensive course with creative writing elements

350.002: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Gender and Technology
Sarah Wells
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Honors Optional (%)
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies

“Why do I have to call this app ‘Julie’?” wonders science and technology reporter Joanne McNeil. This literature and film course considers how our present moment fits into a longer history of the relationship between gender and technology. We will analyze the political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of this relationship through films, novels, short stories, and essays from across the globe, and from the 19th century until today. We will reflect on how, why, and to what effect new technologies — as well as their inventors and users — have persistently been understood in gendered terms. We will explore how writers, artists, and intellectuals have responded to the political and economic dimensions of gendered technologies. And we will generate alternatives for thinking the relationship between gender and technology, whether excavated from the past or imagined for the future. Students will hone their skills in critical thinking and analysis through readings, viewings, class discussion, presentations, and writing assignments.

353: British Literature since 1900
Topic: Modern British and Irish Literature
Richard Begam
TR 2:30-3:45pm Pending Room
Prereq: Sophomore standing

From Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness” and T. S. Eliot’s “waste land” to Virginia Woolf’s “lighthouse” and Samuel Beckett’s “Godot,” modernism is a collection of radically new metaphors about how we understand reality when everything is in a state of change. Among other things, this course will consider how George Bernard Shaw rejects traditional morality in favor of a socialist Nietzscheanism; how William Butler Yeats struggles between life and art; how E. M. Forster seeks new ways to “only connect”; how James Joyce ironizes himself into an aesthetic object; and how Chinua Achebe chooses between tradition and modernity. All of these writers find innovative forms to express innovative ideas as they re-imagine a fading past in terms of an uncertain future.

Texts:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Grove Press)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin, Hampson, edition)
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (Penguin)
E. M. Forster, Howards End (Vintage)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, Deane edition)
G. B. Shaw, Major Barbara (Penguin)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories (Penguin)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (HBJ)
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems (Scribner)

375: Literatures of Migration and Diaspora
Theresa Delgadillo
MW 2:30-3:45pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Meets with Chicana/o & Latina/o Studies 330

In this course centered on literature by or about people who leave homes and homelands by choice or compulsion, we will read and study texts that explore big questions behind migration and diaspora (war, violence, economy, race, class, environment, gender) as they also reflect on individual and social negotiations of these movements in the portrayal of characters in flight or transit, unsettled, dispossessed, or struggling to create home. We will read 20th and 21st century short stories, novels, memoirs and autobiographies (or selections from these) with attention to modes of narration to heighten our understanding of the conditions of migration and diaspora and the multiple questions these movements raise for global society. Course assignments will include quizzes, short papers, and group project and class presentation.

400: Advanced Composition
Mary Fiorenza
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Satisfied Communications A requirement and junior standing
Honors Optional (%)
Fulfills the ELL/CR requirement for English Majors

How does writing work for you? What motivates you as a writer? How do we take into account the practical, creative, stylistic, and ethical dimensions of our own writing to produce strong essays, arguments, and articles? What resources do experienced writers use when developing their work?

This course digs into these questions and gives you a workspace where you can practice a range of strategies to help you develop as a writer among other writers. Students in the course generate work in the broad category of nonfiction, including creative nonfiction, and serve as readers for each other’s work in progress. This course is designed for any student with a strong interest in writing. We’ll examine conventions and critical standards in relation to process, access, effective communication, and inclusivity. Readings from Best American Essays and other recent collections emphasize diverse voices and current issues.

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

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 Online
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
Accelerated Honors (!)

407: Creative Writing: Non-Fiction Workshop
Sean Bishop
R 11:00-12:55pm Online
Prereq: 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 (!)

In this course we’ll explore today’s fastest-growing and most versatile genre of creative writing: the essay. By reading and writing micro-essays, personal essays, lyric essays, braided essays, reviews, and works of literary journalism, we’ll navigate the tricky, contested borderlands and demilitarized zones where “nonfiction” overlaps with poetry, fiction, “academic” writing (whatever that means), and traditional journalism or reporting. How do we render our complicated personal lives into clear, meaningful, and honest narratives? How do we turn dry and difficult research subjects into artful and emotional prose? At what point does the artistic license implied by the word “creative” threaten the very notion of “nonfiction” itself? And how can we, as writers, protect and ensure the truth of our words, in a “post-fact” media environment? Through questions such as these, we’ll be guided by the likes of Hanif Abdurraqib, James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Jenny Boully, Alexander Chee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joan Didion, Roxane Gay, Malcolm Gladwell, Leslie Jamison, Elena Passarello, Marilynne Robinson, Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, and others.

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.
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.

409.001: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Amy Quan Barry
M 11:00-12:55pm Online
Prereq: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later; or ENGL 203, 300-307 before Fall 2014
Accelerated Honors (!)

This class helps students apply lessons from published poetry (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 the lyric image, the stanza and line, and the sonic qualities of language. Classes are small (15), and students are expected to read the work of their peers carefully and participate during class discussions.

409.002: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Amy Quan Barry
M 1:20-3:15pm Online
Prereq: English 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, or 410 in Fall 2014 or later; or ENGL 203, 300-307 before Fall 2014
Accelerated Honors (!)

411: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: African American Poetics
Amaud Johnson
T 5:00-7:00pm Online
Prereq: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing
Accelerated Honors (!)

In this poetry workshop students will plot, puzzle through and question the aesthetic transformations within African American Poetry from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We will write poetry, considering poetic forms inspired artistic movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, Spoken Word, Hip Hop, and Afrofuturism.

414: Global Spread of English
Thomas Purnell
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad) English 414 will examine the linguistic, social, and political impact of the spread of English around the world. Through readings, lectures and discussions, we will critically consider questions such as: why and how is English spreading? Does English spread tend to perpetuate elites, or does it increase opportunity for the non-elites? What are some characteristics of new varieties of English? What are the issues surrounding standardization? Who “owns” English? What happens to local languages in circumstances of English spread? What is happening regarding English and other languages in such geographical contexts as Singapore? Japan? Tanzania? Peru? And transcending geography, we’ll also consider how English is an agent in the spread of American popular culture, the Internet, etc.

English 414 is an Intermediate level course and counts towards Breadth requirements for Humanities, as Liberal Arts & Science credit in L&S. For graduate students, English 414 counts toward 50% graduate coursework requirement. The instructional mode is classroom instruction, where one credit hour designation assumes approximately fifty minutes of classroom interaction with instructor and a minimum of two hours out of class student work, three times per week for approximately 15 classes. Some engagement for the one credit will include student-to-student interaction and project-based activities in and out of class in lieu of direct instruction.

415: Introduction to TESOL Methods
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

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.

420: Topics in English Language & Linguistics
Topic: Experimental Syntax
Jacee Cho
TR 2:30-3:45pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

[English Language & 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.

423: Topic in Medieval Literature and Culture
Topic: Medieval Monsters and Wonders
Martin Foys
TR 9:30-10:45am Pending Room
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies

In part, this is a fun course about monsters. But monsters are the easy part. Using Medieval England as its focus, this course looks at the reason we have monsters, by exploding the discussion out to the way societies perceive natural and supernatural wonder, to the constructions of race and racialized difference, and to how we use all of these notions to go about making our own local version of the world around us. In the haunting words of heroic poetry, in the fantastic illuminations depicting wondrous races from the East, in medieval maps of the world, the gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral, the werewolves of a chivalric romance, anti-Semitic portrayals of medieval poetry– here and elsewhere ends, freaks, demons, beasts and those thought not quite human abound – defining the medieval world of western Europe by graphically embodying what attracted, repulsed, awestruck and horrified those who represented it, and most importantly by revealing what made it human.

427: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Martin Foys
TR 1:00-2:15pm Pending Room
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies

Study of the most famous and influential medieval English poet through his best-known work and its playful and profound responses to some of the most pressing literary, social, political, and spiritual issues of his time. Chaucer’s writings are some of the funniest, raunchiest, most socially scathing and radically experimental literature ever written in English. You would be surprised. You will be surprised. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is also one of the best literary bridges we have to understand how and why our modern world remains vitally connected to its own medieval past. Through a slow and careful reading and discussion that allows us to take our time with each work we study, the literary, cultural and political issues important to Chaucer will be revealed, as will his medieval wit, humor, and literary avant-gardism– along with a few seriously NSFW passages. We’ll also explore how Chaucer became a literary superstar (complete with his own fan fiction) after he died, and screen the modern film A Knight’s Tale (2001), to figure out why Chaucer, surprisingly and alarmingly, shows up as a wandering and naked gambling addict. Readings will be in the original Middle English; no prior experience with the language is required.

431: Early Works of Shakespeare
Elizabeth Bearden
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: Sophomore standing

This advanced seminar on Shakespeare’s early works emphasis’s the representation of error. Readings include comedies, tragedies, histories, poetry, and Shakespeare’s sources. Students consider how error is crucial to Shakespeare’s formal and cultural contributions. One midterm essay and one 8-10 page final research paper are required along with creative and theatrical assignments.

453: Topic in British Literature since 1900
Topic: Intellectual Backgrounds to Modernism
Richard Begam
TR 11:00-12:15pm Pending Room
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)

How did the moderns rethink morality, society and truth? Pushing off from philosophers like René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, this course examines the revolution in thought and literature introduced by some of the greatest writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine Fyodor Dostoevsky burrowing into the psychic underground; Franz Kafka re-imagining himself as a dung beetle; Thomas Mann loving Venice to death; D. H. Lawrence loving sex to death; and Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett inventing detective novels about the undetectable self. The intellectual backgrounds to modernism are, in other words, inseparable from modernism itself—which is to say from who and what we are today.

Texts:
Beckett, Molloy (Grove Press)
Conrad, The Secret Agent (Penguin)
Descartes, Discourse on Method (Penguin)
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground/The Double (Penguin)
Lawrence, Women in Love (Penguin, Farmer-Vasey-Worthen edition)
Mann, Death in Venice (Norton)
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Vintage)
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage)
xeroxed material (available in L&S Copy Center, 6120 Social Science)

457.002: Topic in American Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: America in the 1990s
Ramzi Fawaz
M 2:30-5:00pm Pending Room
Honors Optional (%)
Prereq: Sophomore standing

This course will offer a cultural history of America in the 1990s, using media and popular culture, social movements, and key intellectual debates to reconstruct the cultural and political conflicts that came to define the last years of the 20th century. Not only did the decade signal the end of the Cold War, it also saw the ascendancy of the Clinton administration, the first Gulf War, the most severe racial conflicts since the Civil Rights era, the acceleration of globalization and mass consumerism, and extraordinary advances in medicine and technology that continue to shape our everyday lives. In many ways, the 1990s is a window into the politically polarized world we live in now. By investigating these and other events that shaped national public culture in the 1990s, we can begin to develop arguments about our current political and social environment, simultaneously unpacking the ways we interpret, appropriate, and fantasize the American past. We will discuss a range of topics including the “Culture Wars,” the politics of race and multiculturalism, the AIDS epidemic, third-wave feminism and gay liberation, the internet, the Human Genome Project, mass consumerism and globalization, and national debates over violence and ethics in the global “war on terror.”

457.003: Topic in American Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: Jewish Humor
Sunny Yudkoff
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Meets with Jewish Studies 430.002

What is humor? Why and when do people tell jokes? And what do we make of the fact that a certain form of humor has come to be labeled “Jewish”? In this course, we will examine the notion of “Jewish humor” by reading a variety of texts (jokes, short stories, films, websites, conceptual art, and cultural kitsch). The course will begin by covering a variety of theoretical explorations of humor. While our focus will be on American texts from the 1880s until the present, we will also reach back in time to examine humor in classical Jewish texts, from the Hebrew Bible to the Middle Ages. Themes to be examined include: in-group vs. out-group humor; Jewish-Christian difference; humor and the Holocaust; humor and ethnicity; the notion of self-hatred. The general goal of the course will be to answer the question: Is there such a thing called “Jewish humor”? (Hint: The answer may be “no.”)

458.001: Major American Writer or Writers
Topic: Ernest Hemingway
Sarah Wood
TR 9:30-10:45am Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

Course Guide Description: Study of major American writer(s).

458.002: Major American Writer or Writers
Topic: TBA
Sarah Wood
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing

Course Guide Description: Study of major American writer(s).

477: Diaspora and Theatre
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 1:00-2:15pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Theatre & 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.

508 Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Porter Shreve
R 1:20-3:15pm Online
Prereq: 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 (!)

Though similar to English 408, this class goes into greater detail to help students with experience in fiction writing refine their skills with readings and lectures that address in detail narrative arch, scene development, realistic dialogue, experimental form, etc. Reading and discussions will vary somewhat depending upon the instructor. This is a “workshop,” so students will be expected to complete weekly writing assignments as well as (at a minimum) two complete short stories. They will also be expected to comment on the work of their classmates and participate in class discussions. Classes are small, typically under 15 students.

515: Techniques & Materials for TESOL
TBA
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: ENGL 415

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
Topic: American Protest Literature: 20th-21st Century
Anja Wanner
Remote Asynchronous
Prereq: ENGL 314 or graduate/professional standing

In this class, we will look at grammar patterns in different registers and genres, including the language of social media. You will be introduced to working with large linguistic corpora. Assignments include an outreach project (check out the website Grammar Badgers for a flavor) and an end-of-semester research poster.

520: Old English
Jordan Zweck
MWF 9:55-10:45pm Online
Prereq: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Accelerated Honors (!)

Course Guide Description: The elements of Old English grammar with selected readings.

577: Postcolonial Theatre: Drama, Theory and Performance in the Global South
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 11:00-12:15pm Online
Prereq: Junior standing
Honors Optional (%)
Cross-Listed with Theatre and Drama

The formal end of European colonialism in various parts of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean has initiated a new, “postcolonial” phase in literature and culture. The main objective of this course is to focus on post-independence urban drama and theatre in such locations as India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the Caribbean as specifically postcolonial forms that “perform” (rather than merely textualize) the tensions definitive of postcolonialism. The primary materials for the course will include plays by leading postcolonial authors such as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Femi Osofisan, the Sistren Theatre collective, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mustapha Matura, Utpal Dutt, and Girish Karnad.