Spring 2023-24 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.
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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
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 & Drama Literature
Mary Trotter
MW 11:00-11:50am Microbial Sci Bldg
Discussion Section Times Vary
Cross-Listed with Theatre & Drama
English/Theatre and Drama 120 explores the rich world of dramatic writing and theatrical performance. It is offered in two formats: a 3-credit option (sections 301-316) and a 4-credit Comm-B option (sections 317-322). In both formats we read important plays, view recorded stage productions, and write and think analytically about theatre and drama. Styles of theatre we will discuss include classical Greek, Noh drama, realism, expressionism, epic theatre, postcolonial theatre and postmodern theatre.
140: Comm B Topics in English Literature
Topic: The Figure of the Outsider: Writing from the Margins
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
TR 9:55-10:45am Microbial Sci Bldg
Discussion Section Times Vary
Discussion 309 Honors Only (H)
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.”
153.001: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Representing Nature
Heather Swan
MW 1:20-2:10pm Educ Sci 204
Discussion Section Times Vary
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies
During this course, “Literature and the Environment,” you will practice identifying and analyzing the ways in which writers have represented “nature” and the environment in works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. The course will be divided up into three units of inquiry on the following topics: 1) Wilderness and Resource Depletion, 2) Human/Nonhuman Relationships in the Age of Extinction, and 3) Resilience in the Anthropocene. At the outset of the course, we will be introduced to some more traditional concepts of nature, the romantic sublime, the wild, etc. in order to interrogate their evolving meanings in this contemporary moment. We will also examine the ways in which these ideas intersect with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and social and economic mobility. Lecture, discussion, writing assignments, and experiential projects will all be important components of the class.
153.002: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Climate Crisis Literature
Sarah Wood
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 159
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies
What is “nature” and how do the stories we tell about it affect the health of our environment in this historical moment? We will examine fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film and consider: the anthropocene, consumerism, globalization, extinction, apocalyptic narrative, industrial sublime, hyperobjects, slow violence, toxicity, techno-optimism, resilience, and sustainability. And how do these things intersect with gender, race, ethnicity, and social and economic mobility?
153.003: Literature and the Environment
Topic: Introduction to Environmental Humanities
Sarah Ensor
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Hise 394
Cross-Listed with Environmental Studies
In the face of the very real challenges facing our planet, why read literature, make art, watch film, or study history? This course is built on the premise that, far from being a distraction from (or simply a form of pleasure amidst) environmental degradation, such practices can, in fact, enable us to be more attentive, imaginative, ethical, and effective environmental stewards and activists.
Over the course of the semester, we’ll consider the habits of attention that various written, artistic, and conceptual modes demand – and consider how engaging carefully with work in these genres can help us think of environmental crisis anew. Along the way, we will find ourselves asking questions like the following: How might turning to the humanities not only offer us new answers to the questions that various environmental challenges pose, but also alter the terms in which we define such questions and challenges themselves? How can the seeming indirectness of literature (its tendency, say, to speak in symbol or metaphor) help us rethink our belief that successful activism is necessarily “direct”? How might the pace and scale of literary and historical narrative help attune us to environmental problems that unfold slowly, beneath notice, or at a geological rate? How can the “human” focus of the “humanities” give us the language with which to articulate the strange intimacies between human bodies, nonhuman others, and the material environments that surround (and constitute) us all? How can insights from various fields in the humanities help us to understand the relationship between environmental activism and various social justice projects – or, more fundamentally, to understand the way in which the human relationship to the environment is so often already itself gendered and racialized?
156: Literature and Medicine
Topic: The Art of Healing
Colin Gillis
T 6:00-8:30pm Education L185
This course introduces the basic skills of literary analysis, examines literature as a source of knowledge about medicine and a catalyst for critical reflection about its organizing concepts and practices, and considers the value of art and beauty in health care. We will also explore how and why literature might serve as a social and psychological resource for patients and healthcare practitioners.
162.001: Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare Now
Josh Calhoun
TR 9:55-10:45am Humanities 3650
Discussion Section Times Vary
Why Shakespeare? is an entry-level English course designed to introduce students from a variety of social, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds to Shakespearean literature. Toward this end, the course also questions Shakespeare’s prominence in literature and culture. Is he really that good? Does our ongoing fascination with Shakespeare say more about his writing or about us, about our preferences, about our values?
We will begin with selections from Romeo & Juliet as we embrace the feeling of being lost and even overwhelmed, then we’ll learn the skills needed to successfully navigate and enjoy Shakespeare’s language. In the next unit, “Form & Function,” we’ll seek to better understand how Shakespeare’s language works on the page and on the stage. In this unit, we’ll explore a comedy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), a tragedy (Macbeth), and a history play (Henry IV, Part One). In our final unit, “Lives & Afterlives,” we will explore Shakespeare’s Sonnets and two of his most well-known and often-performed plays: Hamlet & Much Ado About Nothing. Reading these plays, we’ll observe—and question—Shakespeare’s unique staying power in the popular imagination.
Major assessments include two writing assignments, memorization of one sonnet, a midterm exam, and a final exam. 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.).
172.001: Literatures of Native America
Susan Dominguez
MWF 8:50-9:40am Ingraham 223
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.
172.002: Literatures of Native America
Susan Dominguez
MW 2:30-3:45pm Sterling 1339
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.
173.002: Ethnic and Multicultural Literature
Topic: Harlem Renaissance
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Hise 394
Explore writers of the Harlem Renaissance, a Black American creative and cultural awakening of the 1920s and 1930s: the freaky, the aesthetic, the political, the trendy, and the risqué. This course draws particular attention to the underexplored contributions of lesbian, bisexual, and queer writers of the 1920s and 1930s.
174.001: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Staging Environmental Justice
Jennifer Plants
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 394
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.
174.002: Literature and Social Justice
Topic: Literatures of Decolonization
Kirk Sides
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 394
This course is a literary and cultural introduction to decolonization, the process by which colonies become independent of the colonizing country. The course ranges chronologically across much of the twentieth century up to the present and geographically from the Caribbean to South Asia. We will look at a variety of texts and movies, including documentaries, and ask questions about media, art, and history in relation to the political and social forces surrounding moments of decolonization. We will also explore expressions of cultural nationalism, ideas of racial and ethnic solidarities, migration, freedom, as well as some of the current debates around institutional decolonization, including within higher education.
175.002: Literature and the Other Disciplines
Joseph Bowling
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Vleck B231
The main seminar in this SPRIG will focus on both historical and contemporary critiques of capitalism. It will consider the question: What is capitalism and what is the relationship between this economic system and the ecological, social, political, and economic crises that define our present? The main seminar will focus on the life, work, and legacy of Karl Marx with the goal of developing a nuanced understanding of his critique of capitalist modernity to apprehend the history that structures the contemporary capitalist world-system. The seminar will be organized around a slow reading and discussion of key chapters from Marx’s most important and influential work, volume 1 of Capital, as well as subsequent responses to and developments of Marx’s method and ideas in the writings of such figures as V. I. Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai, Mao Zedong, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, and others.
176.001: Topics in Literature and Film
Topic: The Office
Joseph Bowling
TR 4:35-5:25pm Humanities 3650
Discussion Section Times Vary
Doppelgangers, doubles, second selves, alter egos, shadow selves the lookalike has long haunted storytelling, from the ancient myth of Narcissus up to the present in such films as Black Swan, Us, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to name only a few examples. In this course we will study the uses, meanings, and functions of these uncanny figures in literary and cinematic narrative, reflecting on why doubling has so pervaded the stories we tell.
177.001: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: Narco-Narratives in the Americas
Oscar Useche
MWF 9:55-10:45am Humanities 2637
In this course, students explore the global genre of narco-narratives—in the context of literature, film, and television—and study the different symbolic representations of social, racial, and cultural constructions of illegality and violence that emerge around the drug trade.
177.002: Literature and Popular Culture
Topic: American Fiction Since 1900
Amina El-Annan
MWF 11:00-11:50am Humanities 2637
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: Social Media Writing
Ainehi Edoro
MW 11:00-11:50am Educ Sci 204
Discussion Section Times Vary
Take a deep dive into the literary universe of digital culture! Why are social media users hooked on emojis? Why is #love the most used hashtag on Instagram? What does cancel culture teach us about emotion, imagination, and writing?
This course focuses on the dynamics of social media platforms as spaces for writing and communication. Social media can seem like pointless babble, but it is not. There is logic to how we write 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. Focusing on Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook, we take a deep dive into the literary universe of digital culture to uncover the order behind the chaos of expressing ourselves on social media.
This course is a hands-on approach to the analysis of social media and creation of content with the objective of getting a better understanding of how social media works on and for us. Our objective is to find the language to talk about what we love but also find unsettling about social media while exploring its creative possibilities.
181.001: First-Year Honors Seminar
Topic: Holding History: Where Literature Comes From
Josh Calhoun
TR 1:00-2:15pm Humanities 2637
Requisite: First Year students only and declared in an Honors program (H)
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 histories of the texts (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, etc.) that we read together in class.
Students need not have any familiarity with archival research to take this class, but should have a desire to spend time with 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 museums. Course assignments will also require students to work independently in some of these locations.
182.001: Introduction to Literature for Honors
Topic: Doing Time-Labor-Incarceration in America
Ingrid Diran
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Vleck B215
Requisite: Declared in Honors program (H)
In the eighteenth century, the phrase “doing time” first came to describe both work and crime as matters of duration. Prison, once understood as the waiting space for public punishment, became the private space of punishment itself, while labor, once understood as a skill or craft, became a timed, waged shift. In this class, we examine how the idea of “doing time” in the U.S. context has shaped and been shaped by ideas of race, gender, nation, ability, and class. Assignments include two essays, periodic response papers, weekly discussion questions, and final presentations.
200 level courses
200: Writing Studio
Keli Tucker
W 5:30-7:00pm Chadbourne 126
Requisite: Consent of instructor required
In this workshop-oriented course, designed for students in all disciplines, students receive support and peer mentoring on writing projects for other classes. We’ll give you the tools you need to become a better drafter, reviewer, and reviser of different types of academic writing. It’s important to note that this workshop does not require you to complete additional formal writing assignments; instead, it’s about enhancing your skills for your other courses. It’s also a chance to meet other student writers and form a close community. (We recommend that you enroll in another course that includes writing assignments while taking this course.). Priority for enrollment is given to Chadbourne Residential College students.
201: Intermediate Composition
TA taught courses
Section Times Vary
Requisite: Consent of instructor; 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
Section Times Vary
Requisite: First Year, freshman, or sophomore standing only
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.
English 207 satisfies a Comm B requirement.
236: Bascom Course
Topic: Writing Rivers
Caroline Gottschalk Druschke
TR 11:00-12:15pm White 7115
Requisite: Satisfied Communications A requirement
This community-based learning seminar invites students to practice professional and creative writing, critical thinking, and collaboration by working alongside a watershed council in southwest Wisconsin. Student research and writing will help to solve problems and address community concerns related to flooding in our state. Expect multiple field trips, fulfilling group work, and learning from off-campus experts.
241: Literature and Culture 1: to the 18th Century
Jordan Zweck
TR 11:00-11:50am Humanities 2340
Discussion Section Times Vary
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 215 prior to Fall 2014
Course Catalog 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
Monique Allewaert
MW 9:55-10:45am Humanities 2650
Discussion Section Times Vary
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Not open to students who took ENGL 216 prior to Fall 2014
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?
245.001: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Authorship and Anonymity in the Long Eighteenth Century
Mark Vareschi
TR 9:30-10:45am Education L159
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
This course will introduce English majors to the theoretical and historical issues surrounding authorial anonymity in the British long eighteenth century. We tend to think of both anonymity and authorship as phenomena that are unchanging of the course of literary history. However, both authorial anonymity and authorship undergo a series of transformations over the course of the eighteenth century as they begin to coalesce into their modern, recognizable forms.
245.002: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Writing Money
Eileen Lagman
W 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 491
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Hybrid Course
Honors Optional (%)
The purpose of this course is to understand the intersections of writing and money—or more specifically how writing systems and economic systems work together in everyday life. We’ll examine both how writing and writers have participated in systems of commercial exchange as well as how money shapes the value, contexts, and exigencies for writing. If we accept the narrative that modern society has moved from an industrial economy to an information economy or even an attention economy, what does that mean for writers? What is writing for? How is it valued? How do economics systems determine what is “good” writing? What writing skills are needed for economic success? And what does it mean to write for money? We’ll read texts from across different disciplines, including economics, sociology, literacy studies, rhetorical theory, and political science, and address issues such as: authorship and ownership, open source writing, writing as labor, and media peer production and information sharing. Student projects will include an analysis essay, a local research project, and a multi-genre project on “writing for money.”
245.003: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Plot & Plantation: Materials of Resistance in Novel
Kristina Huang
MW 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2251
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
In the English-speaking world during the eighteenth century, enslaved people’s access to the tools of reading and writing were surveilled and made punishable by their captors. How does this contextualize the ways contemporary readers and writers study representations and testimonies of the enslaved in early English literature? Who read and interpreted these images and narratives in the eighteenth century? How do contemporary artists counter-write and/or break from representations violently structured by colonialism, imperialism, and racism? We will study literature at the intersection of contemporary art, literature, and history.
245.005: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Gendering Pain: Feminist Literatures of Disability
Danielle Nelson
MW 4:00-5:15pm Education L159
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political.” From sad girl lit and therapy-speak to our post #MeToo moment, “Gendering Pain” explores how narratives of sadness, pain, and embodied feeling have shaped feminist literatures and a commitment to transformative possibilities for care, connection, and collectivity. Course readings explore the work of writers Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Sara Ahmed, and bell hooks alongside disability criticism to examine how tropes around illness, gender, and trauma emerge in literary and cultural texts spanning the portraiture of Frida Kahlo and Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995) to Chanel Miller’s 2019 memoir Know My Name.
245.005: Seminar in the Major
Topic: Genius, Invention, and Artificial Intelligence
Brian Milthorpe
TR 4:00-5:15pm Ingraham 223
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
This course will engage with a variety of literary and visual media about singular geniuses, strange inventions that come to life, and mad scientists from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. We’ll explore how representations of genius and intelligent machines have changed and how they inform current concerns about AI.
246: Literature by American Indian Women
Susan Dominguez
MW 4:00-5:15pm Science 360
Cross-Listed with American Indian Studies
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.
248.001: Women in Ethnic American Literature
Leslie Bow
Online Asynchronous
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Gender and Women Studies. Open to English and GWS majors.
This is a modular section during intersession that meets January 02, 2024 thru January 21, 2024
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)
Course Catalog Description: American literature by and about women, written by authors from ethnic groups.
248.002: Women in Ethnic American Literature
Anja Jovic-Humphrey
Online
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Gender and Women Studies
This is a modular section that meets January 02, 2024 thru January 21, 2024
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)
Course Catalog Description: American literature by and about women, written by authors from ethnic groups.
300 level courses
304: Composition & Rhetoric In and Beyond the University
Lisa Johnson
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B223
Requisites: Satisfied Communications A requirement and sophomore standing
In this class, we will deepen our understanding of composition in and beyond the university. We will identify key concepts in writing theory; interrogate the analytical lenses of race, writing, and the academy; and apply tools from the field of Composition and Rhetoric in order to conduct original research.
307: Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry Workshop
Noreen McAuliffe
T 8:50-10:45am White 6108
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. 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
Anja Wanner
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B215
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Here’s your chance to learn about English grammar from the perspective of a linguist. Grammar is not a corset, but a system of internalized rules that enables us to interpret sequences of words as sentences. We’ll make those rules visible, learning syntactic vocab on the way and comparing the grammar of different text types.
319: Language, Race, and Identity
Tom Purnell
MWF 12:05-12:55pm Van Hise 215
Requisite: Sophomore standing
English 319 explores the relationship between language and racial identity in the US. The course draws on research from multiple fields to highlight the connections between language, culture, and genetics. Essential questions include: how is language related to race through biology and culture? How do language rules limit the expression of racial identity? How do speakers of ethnically-affiliated dialects signal their locality?
320: Linguistic Theory and Child Language
Jacee Cho
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Hise 159
Requisite: Sophomore standing
*Students who have taken English 420 Universal Grammar and Child Language Acquisition prior to Spring 2020 may not enroll in this course.
[English Language and Linguistics] (Mixed Grad/Undergrad) This course provides an introduction to the linguistic study of child language within the generative theory. According to this theory, humans are born with genetically determined linguistic knowledge called Universal Grammar, which guides children in learning language. Students will learn basic concepts of the generative theory and learn to apply them to the study of child language. Topics include universal linguistic principles that govern children’s acquisition of syntax and semantics and cross-linguistic influence in children acquiring more than one language from birth or early childhood. We will discuss empirical research studies testing the Universal Grammar theory of language acquisition.
*There is no required textbook. All reading materials will be available electronically on the course website.
350.001: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Queer Art of Memoir, Art of Queer Memoir
Ainehi Edoro
MW 2:30-3:45pm Chamberlin 2120
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies
Honors Only (H)
Course Catalog Description: Investigation of some specific topic in gender and women’s studies related to gender and literature. Topic differs each semester.
350.003: Special Topics in Gender & Literature
Topic: Wm Writers & Social Fictions in the 20th Century Literature
Tracy Lemaster
TR 2:30-3:45pm Chamberlin 2120
Requisites: GEN&WS 101, 102, 103, or GEN&WS/SOC 200
Cross-Listed with Gender & Women’s Studies
Honors Only (H)
Course Catalog Description: Investigation of some specific topic in gender and women’s studies related to gender and literature. Topic differs each semester.
352: Modernist Poetry
Vinay Dharwadker
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Vleck B215
Requisite: Sophomore standing
Focuses on: (1) conceptions of modernism in British, Anglo-Irish, and American poetry; (2) early modernists T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes; (3) W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and women poets Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Joy Harjo, and Naomi Shihab Nye from later planetary modernism. Lecture and open class discussion format, with detailed analysis of important poems. Class quizzes; essay assignments for midterms and finals.
368: Chicana/o and Latina/o Literatures
Topic: Sensing Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Literatures
Megan Bailon
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Vleck B231
Requisite: Sophomore standing
This course explores how sensory elements in both foundational and contemporary works by Latinx/e and Chicanx/e authors, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, etc. highlight non-Western modes of imagining community and engaging with “America.” This approach will lead to larger insights about issues facing Latinx communities, including immigration, language, race, and cultural identity.
373: Contemporary Poetry
Timothy Yu
TR 11:00-12:15pm Engr Hall 3024
Requisite: Sophomore standing
This course explores the bewildering and exhilarating diversity of contemporary American poetry from 1945 to the present. We survey the many schools of contemporary style from confessional to formalist, from New York to San Francisco, from Black Mountain to Black Arts, from Language to Conceptualism and ask how race, gender, and politics inflect the choices poets make. Poets may include Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Audre Lorde, Myung Mi Kim, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, and others.
375: Literatures of Migration and Diaspora
Topic: Leaving Home
Laila Amine
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Vleck B215
Requisite: Sophomore standing
This class explores what it means to leave home and the kind of perspectives such leaving engenders in African American Literature. Through the study of essays, short stories, memoirs, and novels by acclaimed Black American writers, we will pay close attention to the motivations to exit America, the double perspectives of exiles, and how home is imagined at a distance.
400 level courses
401: Race, Sex, and Texts (How to Do Things with Writing)
Sara Kelm
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 7111
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This course explores how we create and curate ideas of place, identity, and belonging through texts like memoirs, museums, and archives. We will use rhetorical frameworks to examine the stories we tell about our campus, region, nation – and ourselves. Students will collaborate on an oral history project for the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective.
407: Creative Writing: Nonfiction Workshop
Beth Nguyen
T 11:00-12:55pm White 7109
Requisites: Completion of one of the following with a 3.0 or higher: English 207 or 307 taken Fall 2014 or later; or English 203 taken prior to Fall 2014
Students who do not meet the prerequisite may submit a writing sample to the program director on Monday of the last week of classes.
This workshop class will focus on introducing students to creative nonfiction, with an emphasis on memoir and personal essays (not journalism). We will read and discuss examples of creative nonfiction that include perspectives on craft, context, audience, narrative, and more. Students will be expected to write original works of creative nonfiction and share and discuss them with the rest of the class in an open workshop format. Requisites: 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.
408.001: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
TBA
T 3:30-5:25pm White 6108
Requisites: 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 (!)
Course Catalog Description: Writing literary fiction.
408.002: Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop
TBA
M 3:30-5:25pm White 7109
Requisites: 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 (!)
Course catalog description: Writing literary fiction.
409.001: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
Sean Bishop
T 11:00-12:55pm White 6108
Requisites: ENGL 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
This section of ENGL 409 (“Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop”) will explore what poetry is “for:” what it does and has done (or what people have believed it to do) since its independent origins in different cultures throughout the world. We will read and write poems that seek to connect us to the spiritual world, poems that seek to bring about social and political change, poems that seek to change the way language itself functions, poems that seek to document historical events, poems that explore our deepest psychologies, etc, etc. At all times, we will keep in mind the notion of “intent.” We will ask, “What do we think this poem is trying to do, and how might it do that better?” Students will draft weekly poems in a number of styles and traditions, will submit three poems of their own choosing to be workshopped by their peers, and will provide feedback on four of their peers’ poems each week.
409.002: Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop
TBA
M 3:30-5:25pm White 6108
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 410, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)
Course Catalog Description: ENGL 409, formally known as “Creative Writing: Poetry Workshop,” focuses on the art and craft of poetry writing. It is typically run as a workshop in which discussion focuses on craft issues, assigned published work, and original student poetry.
410: Creative Writing: Playwriting Workshop
Jennifer Plants
M 3:30-5:30pm White 7105
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing. Students may not be concurrently enrolled with ENGL 307, 407, 408, 409, 411, 469, 508, 509, or 695
Accelerated Honors (!)
Course Catalog Description: Explores the art and craft of writing for the stage. Examines strategies that writers can use to tell stories and communicate ideas both theatrically and dramatically. 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.
411.001: Creative Writing: Special Topics Workshop
Topic: Climate Fiction Writing
Porter Shreve
R 1:20-3:15pm White 6108
Requisites: ENGL 207, 307, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, or graduate/professional standing
Accelerated Honors (!)
This course is a workshop in which intermediate writers are given the opportunity to write original fiction, read and give detailed feedback on the work of their peers, and study published fiction alongside their film and TV adaptations with the intent of developing a greater sense of imagery in their own work.
414: Global Spread of English
Tom Purnell
Online
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This is a modular section that meets January 2, 2024 thru January 21, 2024
(Session Code XCC, 3 weeks of instruction)
In English 414, we delve into the worldwide influence of the English language through the lenses of linguistics, social dynamics, and politics. Through critical analysis, we address probing questions such as the means and motives behind the proliferation of English, language ownership, and the repercussions for indigenous languages. Moreover, we explore the significance of English in disseminating American culture and the Internet.
415: Introduction to TESOL Methods
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 4208
Requisites: Sophomore standing
English 415 is an introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. In this course, we will explore the contexts in which English is taught, and the methods and materials used to teach it. Students will read about, respond to and discuss the methods for teaching English as a second or foreign language, with a focus on theory and rationale, and techniques and materials. Students will also observe ESL classes and document their observations as well as tutor a language learner throughout the semester.
422: Outstanding Figure(s) in Literature before 1800
Topic: Christopher Marlowe
Ron Harris
MWF 1:20-2:10pm Education L185
Requisites: Sophomore standing, Undergraduate students only
Honors Optional (%)
Christopher Marlowe burst onto the Elizabethan theater scene while still a college student, dazzling audiences with heroes who dreamed of world conquest and defied the limits that confine mere mortals. His poems and plays inspired a generation of English writers, including William Shakespeare, his sometime friend and rival.
423: Topic in Medieval Literature and Culture
Topic: Medieval Times & Temporalities
Jordan Zweck
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Vleck B223
Requisites: Sophomore standing
When people in the past imagined the future, what did it look like? How did people in the Middle Ages remember the past? In this class, we’ll read about ways the Middle Ages measured time (calendars, seasons, candles, etc.), and how they thought about their place in time.
431: Early Works of Shakespeare
Joseph Bowling
TR 9:30-10:45am Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing
What is Shakespearean comedy? This seminar seeks to answer this question by studying Shakespeare’s early comedies in relation to the traditions of comedy from which Shakespeare borrowed and innovated. We will aim toward a provisional, working theory of what distinguishes Shakespeare as a comic dramatist. As we progress through Shakespeare’s plays as well as his sources and analogues, we will reflect on disciplinary questions of genre and convention; the relationship between text, form, and context; and the legacy of Shakespearean comedy in contemporary culture.
438: Topic in 18th-Century Literature
Topic: The Gothic Novel
Mark Vareschi
TR 11:00-12:15pm Van Vleck B231
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This course will explore the development of the Gothic novel in England and how the Gothic became a cultural phenomenon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A precursor to our modern Horror genre, the Gothic radically reimagined the nature and purpose of literary fiction and tantalized readers with tales of ghosts, curses, and eerie settings.
443: Outstanding Figure(s) in Literature since 1800
Topic: Modern Short Story
Vinay Dharwadker
R 4:00-6:30pm Van Hise 394
Requisites: Sophomore standing
The modern short story since 19th century in British, American, and global contexts, in English and English translation, with focus on major innovators: Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Haruki Murakami, and others. Review of basic methods of narrative analysis and of main features of short story genre and forms. Lecture and open class discussion format, with detailed analysis of important stories. Class quizzes; essay assignments for midterms and finals.
454: James Joyce
Richard Begam
TR 11:00-12:15pm Humanities 2653
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
This course focuses on the major writings of James Joyce, excluding Finnegans Wake. Most of our attention will be devoted to an in-depth examination of Ulysses conducted over the course of nine weeks. By way of preparation, we shall read two earlier works by Joyce, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, as well as Joyce’s principal source text, Homer’s Odyssey. Among the larger questions we shall address: Where does Joyce position himself in relation to the conflicting demands of nationalism, individualism and aesthetics? What is the significance of the “odyssey of styles” in Ulysses, and how does it affect the novel’s mimetic aspirations? Finally, how does Ulysses reconceive such fundamental ideas as time and place, love and marriage, truth and language, art and morality?
455.001: A Study of an Outstanding Figure(s) in American Literature
Topic: Thomas Pynchon
David Zimmerman
TR 8:00-9:15pm Van Hise 394
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This course studies works by the American postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, including his challenging and notorious 800-page masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Content alert: Gravity’s Rainbow includes graphic sexual scenes and offensive language.
455.001: A Study of an Outstanding Figure(s) in American Literature
Topic: Herman Melville
Monique Allewaert
MW 2:30-3:45pm Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing
In this seminar, we will read key works in Herman Melville’s oeuvre including Moby Dick. A big part of the seminar’s goal is enjoying Melville’s novels, novellas, and poetry. To this end, we will read closely, stopping to work through strange and complex sentences and ideas, considering the effects of Melville’s style, and exploring the claims about the world, writing, and the intersection of world and writing that emerge across Melville’s writing. We will also read several critical studies that help us investigate some of the social and political problems Melville engages, including slavery, racism, class chauvinism, homosociality, resource extraction, and human beings’ relations to other-than-human phenomena.
457: Topic in American Literature and Culture since 1900
Topic: Law & Literature
Ralph Grunewald
TR 1:00-2:15pm Mech Engr 1152
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This course explores the two major branches of the law and literature movement: Part 1 (Law in Literature) examines how legal themes are depicted in fiction and what can be gained from applying a legal lens to literature. For instance, what does To Kill a Mockingbird tell us about the law that a law journal article cannot? In Part 2 (Law as Literature), we look at the similarities between law and literature as text-based disciplines. We will focus on legal storytelling and learn how narrative theory provides insights into the power dynamics of a trial or law in general.
459.001: Three American Novelists
Topic: Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather
Sarah Wood
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Hise 159
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Course Catalog Description: Concentrated study of US novelists.
459.002: Three American Novelists
Topic: Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather
Sarah Wood
TR 1:00-2:15pm Van Hise 394
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Course Catalog Description: Concentrated study of US novelists.
461.001: Topic in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Black Life & Thought in the Long 18th Century
Kristina Huang
MW 6:00-7:15pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing
The presence of Black subjects traversing and inhabiting the Atlantic world ignited the social and political imagination of eighteenth-century writers. How did this presence materialize and contribute to the period’s literary production? This course is a survey of Black Anglophone works in the eighteenth century and their afterlives. We’ll work through a heterogeneous archive of texts (portraits, illustrations, letters, novels, and plays) and examine how Black Anglophone subjects, across the spectrum of enslavement and freedom, engaged with the social, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses of their time.
461.002: Topic in Ethnic & Multicultural Literature
Topic: Zora Neale Hurston
Rachel Kennon
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Hise 155
Requisites: Sophomore standing
This course explores multidisciplinary works by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Reading across genre and time, we will consider how Hurston chronicles Black life and takes up questions of imagination, invention, humor, self-fashioning, and language. We will also examine how biographies, documentaries, and critical reassessments contribute to our understanding of “cosmic Zora.”
462: Topic in Asian American Literature
Topic: Asian Americans and Science Fiction
Timothy Yu
TR 1:00-2:15pm Comp Sci 1257
Requisites: Sophomore standing
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 draw on this background to approach the growing body of work by Asian American authors in science fiction, including authors such as Charles Yu, Ryka Aoki, Ken Liu, Cynthia Kadohata, and Chang-rae Lee.
463: Race and Sexuality in American Literature
Paul Tran
M 1:20-3:15pm White 4281
Requisites: Sophomore Standing
Course Catalog Description: Explores the intersection between race and sexuality in American literature with an emphasis on sex/gender difference, feminism, transgenderism, and nationalism. Focuses on the nature of literature as advocacy, with an emphasis on Asian-American issues.
464: Asian American women Writers
Leslie Bow
M 4:00-5:55pm White 4208
Requisites: Sophomore Standing
Course Catalog Description: Major texts by Asian American women writers.
475: Comedy as Genre
Topic: The Comic Imagination
Richard Begam
TR 2:30-3:45pm Vilas 4008
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Honors Optional (%)
The word “comedy” derives from the Greek komodia, meaning a “song of revelry, carousal or merry-making.” Although comedy tends to be realistic in form, portraying characters who are flawed and imperfect, it usually ends happily with conflicts resolved and love-matches concluded. The approach in this course will be historical and exegetical, tracing the evolution of comedy as a form while interpreting individual texts for their distinctive qualities. Our survey begins in antiquity with the Greek and Roman comedy of Aristophanes and Plautus, proceeds to the Renaissance and Enlightenment with Shakespeare, Jonson and Molière, and extends into the nineteenth centuries with Austen and Wilde. We conclude with two twentieth-century works by Gibbons and Stoppard that temporalize the genre of comedy by looking back at earlier traditions.
478: Indian Writers Abroad: Literature, Diaspora and Globalization
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 11:00-12:15pm White 4208
Requisite: Junior Standing
This course focuses on major Anglophone fiction and cinema produced by authors/auteurs who belong originally to a country in the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka), but have emigrated to or grown up in the West (Britain, Canada, and the US). The work of novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Shyam Selvadurai, Monica Ali, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and filmmakers such as Hanif Kureishi, Gurinder Chadha, and Mira Nair has focused an entirely new kind of attention on their respective cultures of origin, while also addressing the experiences of displacement, acculturation, and marginalization that are traditionally associated with migration and exile. This course is concerned, therefore, with the emerging thematics of diaspora literature and film, the relation of geography to language and form, the interrelations between diasporic literary and visual genres, and the instrumental conditions of writing and reception.
500 level courses
514: English Syntax
Anja Wanner
TR 2:30-3:45pm Van Vleck B223
Requisites: ENGL 314 or graduate/professional standing
In this class, we combine the analysis of English sentences with an in-depth exploration of a theory of grammar that tries to explain why grammar looks the way it does. If you secretly (or openly!) love the nerdiness of X-bar tree diagrams, this class is for you (alas, Engl 314 is a prerequisite).
515: Techniques & Materials for TESOL
TBA
TR 9:30-10:45am White 6144
Requisites: English 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 with videotaped sessions.
520: Old English
Topic: Really Old English
Martin Foys
TR 9:30-10:45am Van Vleck B215
Requisites: Sophomore standing
Cross-Listed with Medieval Studies
Accelerated Honors (!)
Old English is 1,000 years old and uncannily strange, and yet the backbone of modern English. The first half of this class is an intro-level language course covering basic pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary; the second half you learn to translate Old English texts and poems in the original — a rare opportunity.
525: Health and the Humanities
Caroline Hensley
TR 11:00-12:15pm Comp Sci 1257
Requisites: Declared in the Health and the Humanities certificate
Cross-Listed with Medical History and Bioethics & History of Science
Explores how a humanistic perspective can broaden our understanding of health and medicine. Specifically, we will examine the role of language and culture in the creation and circulation of biomedical knowledge; our lived experiences with illness (physical and mental); the intricate intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability and medicine; the political dimensions of diagnosis, disease, and epidemics, and the role that fiction, creative non-fiction, comics, and film play in shaping our experiences with health and medicine as health care providers and as patients. The course does not assume any background in science or medicine. One of our recurrent topics, in fact, will be to consider how non-experts interact with medicine and its technical vocabularies. Although the primary objective of the course is to understand the cultural, social, and political dimensions of health and medicine, a secondary objective is for students to become more savvy patients and, for the few students who might emerge on the other side of the stethoscope one day, more well-rounded health care professionals.
559: Topic in Literary or Cultural Theory
Topic: Reimagining Communication in the Age of AI
Frédéric Neyrat
MW 2:30-3:45pm Humanities 2637
Requisites: Sophomore standing
The aim of the course is to address three groups of questions, which will structure the three main periods of the semester: A) General theory of communication. Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to communicate? B) Wandering avatars of the digital world. Do social media and AI facilitate or hinder communication? C) Non-communication. How can communication be radically interrupted and reoriented?
576: Survey: Theories of Drama
Aparna Dharwadker
TR 2:30-3:45pm White 4208
Requisites: Junior Standing
This course will take a comparative approach to some major “theories of the theatre” that have emerged during periods of intense dramatic activity in cultures ranging widely in time and space: ancient Greece and India, classical Japan, early modern and modern Europe, the modern Americas, and the postcolonial societies of contemporary Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Drama, theatre, and performance are among the earliest forms of representation theorized in both Western and non-Western cultural traditions, and the parameters of theory are defined with remarkable consistency by the distinctive qualities of theatre as a mimetic, performative, and public art. The principles of mimesis and verisimilitude engage metaphysical, aesthetic, and formal issues, while the aspect of live performance engages the practical details of presentation and reception. Our discussion will take this duality into account, connecting theatre theory with general principles of poetics as well as the material, sociopolitical, and institutional contexts of performance in a given time and place. The readings will be organized into sequential units, including “Foundational Poetics,” “Classicism and Neoclassicism,” “Realism and its Redactions,” “Political Theatre,” “The Avant-Garde,” and “Postcolonial Revisions.”
600 level courses
613: TESOL: Pedagogical Grammar l
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets January 23, 2024 thru February 18, 2024
(Session Code ADD, 4 weeks of instruction)
A focus on understanding English grammar from a pedagogical perspective for the purpose of teaching English as a second or foreign language. The emphasis is on theory and techniques applicable to teaching English grammar.
614: TESOL: Pedagogical Grammar ll
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets February 19, 2024 thru March 24, 2024
(Session Code EFE, 5 weeks of instruction)
A focus on understanding English grammar from a pedagogical perspective for the purpose of teaching English as a second or foreign language. The emphasis is on theory and techniques applicable to teaching English grammar.
615: TESOL: Teaching Listening and Speaking
TBA
TR 1:00-2:15pm White 6144
Requisites: English 415
This is a modular section that meets April 1, 2024 thru May 3, 2024
(Session Code KEE, 5 weeks of instruction)
Course Catalog Description: An overview of listening and speaking skills and how to teach them.
651: Special Topics in Theatre and Performance Studies Research
TBA
TR 9:30-10:45am Humanities 6321
Requisites: Junior standing
An overview of listening and speaking skills and how to teach them.
672: Selected Topics: Afro-American Literature
Topic: Traditions in African American Humor
Brittney Edmonds
MW 2:30-3:45pm White 4208
Requisites: Junior standing
Cross-listed with Afro-American Studies
This seminar examines the politics of black satire as a performative medium, and it traces a genealogy of black comedic performance practices in the tradition of African-American satire and politically insurgent humor. Course participants will explore multiple modes of satirical performance in relation to critical aesthetic movements and historical periods from the 19th century to the present day. Special emphasis will be placed on interrogating the politics of African-American blackface minstrelsy as satire. The seminar will also emphasize an examination of post-Civil Rights black satire in theatre, films, sketch comedy programs, visual art, political cartoons, novels, and popular music culture. Course participants will place theories of humor and signifying (by Ellison, Gates, Watkins, Freud, and others) in conversation with the performances of Williams and Walker, Nina Simone, Richard Pryor, Kara Walker, Paul Beatty, Suzan-Lori Parks, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others.
Fall 2023-24 Course Descriptions
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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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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-10:45am 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
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 (!)
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.
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 (!)
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 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
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.
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: Psychedelic Imaginaries
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.
Summer 2023 Course Descriptions
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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.