Writing About Literature:  Self and Other

• Semester-based: Fall
• Instructor: Associate Professor Sam Cohen

The purpose of this online asynchronous course is to offer students the opportunity to learn more about how to read, talk, and write about literature. How we’ll do that:

• We’ll read poems, short stories, and essays loosely collected around the theme of Self & Other—literary works that consider how we know ourselves and others, how we relate to others as individuals and in groups as small as families and neighborhoods and as large as nations and cultures, and how that knowledge and relation leads to the ways in which we treat each other.
• We’ll do some extra reading about different approaches to literary texts—approaches through attention to selfhood, to society, and to literary form.
• We’ll practice different ways of responding to literature—discussion and short written response, arguing and presenting, creating and critiquing—and we’ll work on the nuts and bolts of doing literary research and writing a literary critical essay.

The idea is that, in the end, you will be better equipped to understand and so think about, talk about, and write about literature in classes and in your life outside of and after school. If you are also better able to think and talk about the ways people think about themselves and get along with each other, even better.

Writing About Literature: The Modern City

• Semester-based: Spring
• Instructor: Associate Professor Frances Dickey

English 2100 provides instruction in the fundamentals of writing about literature. Designed with the needs of English majors in mind, the course introduces students to the basics of literary research, interpretation and criticism. A central goal of the course is to familiarize students with a variety of critical and theoretical approaches that are used in the study of literature, as well as with appropriate resources for conducting literary research.

The theme of the course is the modern city, with a specific focus on London from the end of the 18th century to the present, as it grew to the largest city in the world, a powerhouse of the industrial revolution, and the center of a vast empire. We will also look more briefly at literature about Paris, New York, and Dublin. Many of these texts represent similar features, such as the crowded city street, the poverty found there, the confining nature of urban work, the risks and opportunities faced by urban women, and, especially in the twentieth century, the exhilarating diversity of people and ways of living in a modern city. We will examine our texts through a variety of critical methods to practice analysis and see what different results each approach yields. We will also practice the fundamentals of research, and at the end of the course, every student will have the opportunity pursue an independent research project.

• Self-paced: all semesters
• Instructor: Associate Teaching Professor Penny Smith-Parris
• also fulfills pre-1603 and pre-1890 requirement

Historical survey from beginnings of British literature through the age of Johnson, with readings representing significant writers, works, and currents of thought. The purpose of the course is to survey the development of English literature from its beginning in the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of romanticism. Major readings include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Course assignments include four progress checks consisting of brief essays (3-4 pages) and two major essay exams (midterm and final).

• Semester-based: Spring
• Instructor: Associate Professor Elizabeth Chang

This course is designed to introduce you to some of the major British and Anglophone authors and works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, otherwise known as the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary eras. We will look at some of the major literary, cultural, and historical developments of each time period, and try to balance our time between big-picture considerations of large themes and close readings of individual poems and prose passages. Our focus will be on the rise of women's writing, the development of the novel, and the influence of the British Empire. Texts read will include Sense and Sensibility, the poetry of the Wordsworth siblings, Coleridge, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, The Story of an African Farm, The Lonely Londoners, Boyhood, and You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

This course will also be co-taught with an honors course at the University of Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. You will have the opportunity to get to know South African students and to collaborate with them on projects and papers. There will be some required synchronous discussion sessions to help this collaboration. 

• Semester-based: Summer
• Instructor: staff
• also fulfills pre-1890 and English diversity requirements, as well as A&S Writing Intensive requirement

This course will provide a survey of American literature between the colonial period and the Civil War. We will read in a wide variety of genres – poetry, sermons, autobiography, essays, songs, letters, journalism, and political tracts – paying close attention to how writers used the conventions of these genres to meet their particular personal, aesthetic, and political goals. Writers will include but not be limited to: Smith, Bradford, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Edwards, Franklin, Occum, Equiano, Jefferson, Wheatley, Irving, Schoolcraft, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Along the way, we will focus on issues such as colonization, slavery, women’s rights, nature, magic, and individualism. Course assignments will include weekly papers, responses to your peers’ papers, and two revisions. This is a WI course and is conducted entirely online.

• Self-paced: All semesters
• Instructor: staff

On the MU campus, English 3310 is one of the most popular courses offered to undergraduates by the English department. Chief among the appeals is the literature itself. Students read works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, and others. Though the structure of the course is chronological, beginning with the post-Civil War era and coming up to recent times, the works are grouped to reflect themes and stylistic developments of various periods. This survey course is an opportunity to examine American cultural history and better understand the human condition. Assignments consist of four 1500-word essay responses to questions, a midterm, and final exam.

• Semester-based: 8-week course in Fall semester
• Instructor: Associate Professor April Langley
• also fulfills pre-1890 and English diversity requirements, as well as A&S Writing Intensive and Diversity [DI] requirements

This (8-week) online writing intensive course introduces students to the major developments, themes, and works of African American literature from the arrival of enslaved people from the continent of Africa through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and their post-enslavement as de facto slaves and half-citizens. Specifically, we explore African American literature's continuing response to the call of African, American, and Afro-British American oral and written traditions in the form of folktales, songs, sermons, prose, and poetry, and examines the social, political, and cultural influences of early African-American literature. This summer online course is both fast paced and fun, with short mini-lectures (15 min or less) and diverse reading of literature across many genres, contemporary videos and classic documentaries that add to your interdisciplinary knowledge of literature. Assignments include reading responses, video viewing responses, discussion board peer responses, revisions, and a Final essay with drafts. Students are advised to prepare for this writing intensive course by taking English 1000 in advance. Note: This course meets several requirements for the College of Arts and Science, English and Black Studies Departments: Writing Intensive, Humanities, Diversity Intensive, and other major/minor requirements.

• Semester-based: Spring (even years)
• Instructor: Associate Professor Frances Dickey
• also fulfills English diversity requirement

This course explores the literature of “Modernism,” a period of cultural upheaval from 1900 through World War I (1914-18) and the 1920’s in the United States and Great Britain. During this time artists and writers launched a program of experimentation that challenged long-held conventions of form and content. We begin with the avant-garde movements of the pre-war period, such as Cubism, Futurism, and Imagism, which revolutionized artistic styles and the relationship of writer to audience. Then we examine the social impact and literary representation of World War I, one of the century’s most cataclysmic events, and finally conclude with a unit on the Harlem Renaissance. Authors studied include Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and other greats. In examining how women and writers of color found their voices and made their mark on early twentieth-century culture, this course also fulfills the English diversity requirement for the English major. Written assignments include discussion board posts and responses, short essays, two tests, and a final project.

• Semester based: Spring (odd years)
• Instructor: Professor John Evelev

Struggling first with the Puritans’ distrust of fiction and later to overcome the cultural domination of Britain, the novel quickly became the dominant expression of American literature in the nineteenth century.  This course traces the major shifts of genre and form within the American novel from its beginnings in epistolary novels of manners and seduction in the late eighteenth century to the naturalistic depiction of urban poverty and vice in 1900.  While noting the important formal transformations within the American novel, we will also explore some of its persistent social and political concerns, including women’s “private” experience as privileged topic (contrasted with women’s underprivileged role in American public life), the creation of a distinctly American past (which may be based upon and unsettled by injustices), and the threat of racial and class violence to our notion of American democracy. In addition to weekly novel assignments, required work includes weekly discussion board engagement, four short essays, and a final research project. Required texts: Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797), Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827), Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855), Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893/1896)

• Semester-based: Fall
• Instructor: Associate Professor William Kerwin
• also fulfills the pre-1603 requirement

In this course we will read seven plays by William Shakespeare. Each one will be introduced with a particular literary or historical focus, and then we will proceed act-by-act, asking specific questions about the play’s language and the thematic concerns. We will look at film clips of a range of productions and adaptations of the plays, and we will also look at several poems by other authors that can shed light on the poetic approaches and social issues found in our seven plays. Students will respond to prompts for discussion exchanges, write short essays on each play, and then write a longer essay at the end of the course.

• Semester-based: Spring 
• Instructor: Associate Professor Elizabeth Chang
• also fulfills pre-1890 and English diversity requirements

This class will introduce you to the greatest literary family of the nineteenth century and to some of the greatest novels written in English, not to mention some very complicated and dramatic family history. We will read novels by three of the Brontë sisters as well as some of the siblings’ writings from childhood. We will also learn about the creation and dismantling of the Brontë myth, and about the current critical assessment of each of the sisters. Along the way, we will also discuss Victorian literature, culture, and the history of women’s writing in nineteenth-century Britain more generally.

• Semester based: Spring (even years)
• Instructor: Associate Professor Maureen Konkle
• Also fulfills department diversity requirement

How do you tell the story of your life? What do you include and what do you leave out? How do you present yourself to the world, especially when you belong to a group that is consistently misrepresented? This course looks at the genres of autobiography and memoir in the U.S. from the later nineteenth century through the present, emphasizing how the various writers shaped their lives in print and with special attention to writers who used these forms to tell stories that would not ordinarily make it into print with such force and immediacy. We'll look at the social, political, and cultural forces that gave rise to autobiography and especially memoir in the period, and the connections between these two genres to biography on the one hand and the novel on the other. Our reading will range from classic autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, U.S. Grant, and Zora Neale Hurston to contemporary memoir (and memoir hybrids) by David Treuer (Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life, 2012), Sarah Broom (The Yellow House: A Memoir, 2019), and Patti Smith (Just Kids, 2010). Assignments include two essays, two tests, and a presentation.

• Semester based: Fall (odd years)
• Instructor: Professor Noah Heringman

• Semester-based: Spring (even years)
• Instructor: Associate Professor Frances Dickey
• also fulfills English diversity requirement

This course explores the literature of “Modernism,” a period of cultural upheaval from 1900 through World War I (1914-18) and the 1920’s in the United States and Great Britain. During this time artists and writers launched a program of experimentation that challenged long-held conventions of form and content. We begin with the avant-garde movements of the pre-war period, such as Cubism, Futurism, and Imagism, which revolutionized artistic styles and the relationship of writer to audience. Then we examine the social impact and literary representation of World War I, one of the century’s most cataclysmic events, and finally conclude with a unit on the Harlem Renaissance. Authors studied include Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and other greats. In examining how women and writers of color found their voices and made their mark on early twentieth-century culture, this course also fulfills the English diversity requirement for the English major. Written assignments include discussion board posts and responses, short essays, two tests, and a final project.

• Semester-based: Summer
• Instructor: Associate Professor Sheri-Marie Harrison
• fulfills English diversity requirement and A&S Diversity [DI] requirement

In the Global Novel after 1945 students will study a variety of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces three major theoretical developments of the global novel during this period: world literature, the postcolonial novel, and the global novel. We will read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) along with critical writing on each of the theoretical developments. Our focus will be on the relationship between writers and readers, innovations in the novel form, fiction’s engagement with history and politics, and the changing place of national literature in the world.

• Semester-based: Spring (odd years)
• Instructor: Associate Professor Elizabeth Chang
• also fulfills pre-1890 and English diversity requirements

This class will introduce you to the greatest literary family of the nineteenth century and to some of the greatest novels written in English, not to mention some very complicated and dramatic family history. We will read novels by three of the Brontë sisters as well as some of the siblings’ writings from childhood. We will also learn about the creation and dismantling of the Brontë myth, and about the current critical assessment of each of the sisters. Along the way, we will also discuss Victorian literature, culture, and the history of women’s writing in nineteenth-century Britain more generally.

• Semester-based: Fall
• Instructor: Associate Professor William Kerwin
• also fulfills the pre-1603 requirement

In this course we will read seven plays by William Shakespeare. Each one will be introduced with a particular literary or historical focus, and then we will proceed act-by-act, asking specific questions about the play’s language and the thematic concerns. We will look at film clips of a range of productions and adaptations of the plays, and we will also look at several poems by other authors that can shed light on the poetic approaches and social issues found in our seven plays. Students will respond to prompts for discussion exchanges, write short essays on each play, and then write a longer essay at the end of the course.

• Semester based: Spring (odd years)
• Instructor: Professor John Evelev

Struggling first with the Puritans’ distrust of fiction and later to overcome the cultural domination of Britain, the novel quickly became the dominant expression of American literature in the nineteenth century.  This course traces the major shifts of genre and form within the American novel from its beginnings in epistolary novels of manners and seduction in the late eighteenth century to the naturalistic depiction of urban poverty and vice in 1900.  While noting the important formal transformations within the American novel, we will also explore some of its persistent social and political concerns, including women’s “private” experience as privileged topic (contrasted with women’s underprivileged role in American public life), the creation of a distinctly American past (which may be based upon and unsettled by injustices), and the threat of racial and class violence to our notion of American democracy. In addition to weekly novel assignments, required work includes weekly discussion board engagement, four short essays, and a final research project. Required texts: Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797), Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827), Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855), Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893/1896)

• Semester-based: Summer (some synchronous meetings)
• Instructor: Professor Phong Nguyen
• Prerequisite: English 1510  Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction or another Creative Writing course

In this course, students will learn advanced fiction-writing techniques and approaches, such as drawing connections between disparate elements within a story. To that end, this course will introduce students to single-author short story collections and, in some cases, novels. In addition to undertaking close reading and generative writing exercises, students are encouraged to enter into a wider literary context, positioning their work in dialogue with published fiction of the past, present, and future.

• Semester-based: Fall (second 8-week session)
• Instructor: Assistant Professor Gabriel Fried
• Prerequisite: English 1510  Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction or another Creative Writing course

In this course, students will develop their skills of poetic craft and voice, taking up approaches and modes that expand on what poems can do or be. This will likely include more daring engagement with prosody/poetic form, as well as the creation of interconnected poetic sequences. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the relationship between the textual (written) poem and its vocalization (performance). Over the semester, we will consider and learn from published examples of ambitious, surprising poems. We will also read and respond to several chapbooks or full-length books in order to deepen our sense of how poems by the same poet may interact with one another within a published volume.  

• Semester-based: Fall (odd years)
• Instructor: Professor Carsten Strathausen

This course studies the relation between literature and film via a detailed analysis of popular movies and the literary texts—and narratives in particular—that inspired them. Although we shall discuss some historical and theoretical texts, particularly at the beginning the course, the emphasis overall lies on close readings of the chosen texts (e.g. Solaris, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?) and the corresponding films. A central goal of this course is to question the “fidelity” model on which most comparative analyses of film and literature are (still) based. A second goal is to explore the central theme commonly shared by all texts and movies we will discuss, namely post-humanism. What does the term mean? How has the non-human “other” of humanity been depicted differently in literature and film over the last 200 years?  

Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1831), Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Franz Kafka, The Trial, Stanislav Lem, Solaris (1961), Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? (1968), Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Films: Murnau, Nosferatu (1922), Whale, Frankenstein (1931), Browning, Dracula (1931), Fisher, Horrors of Dracula (1958), Crain, Blacula (1972), Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972), Scott, Blade Runner (1982), Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Coppola, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Soderbergh, Solaris (2002), Hillcoat, The Road (2009)

• Self-paced: every semester
• Instructor: Professor Matthew Gordon

This course examines the history of English from the prehistoric roots that bind it to other languages of Europe and Asia, through the period of its earliest attestation, and into the modern era. We can see that English has undergone dramatic alterations throughout its life, and the class considers changes in sounds, grammar, meaning, and vocabulary. To understand these changes and why they occur, we look for explanations in both the structure of the language and in the social history of its speakers. The course approaches the subject from the perspective of modern linguistics, a field whose theories and analytical methods differ somewhat from other areas of English. There is one main textbook for this course with additional readings available online. Grading for this self-paced course is based on 16 progress evaluations and 4 exams.

• Semester based: Fall
• Instructor: Associate Professor Sam Cohen

In this asynchronous online capstone course we’ll read American novels published since 1900 that are concerned with politics; we’ll examine the stories writers have told about politics and the stories Americans have told themselves about their country. Primary works will include Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901); Jack Conroy, The Disinherited (1933); Joan Didion, Democracy (1984); Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2016); Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016).

Assignments will include daily discussion board posts and comments and a final paper with abstract, annotated bibliography, peer-reviewed rough draft, and final draft. We will also have a career unit dedicated to thinking about entering the working world as English majors.

• Semester-based: Fall
• Instructor: Associate Professor William Kerwin
• fulfills pre-1603 and pre-1890 requirements

In this course we will read seven plays by William Shakespeare. Each one will be introduced with a particular literary or historical focus, and then we will proceed act-by-act, asking specific questions about the play’s language and the thematic concerns. We will look at film clips of a range of productions and adaptations of the plays, and we will also look at several poems by other authors that can shed light on the poetic approaches and social issues found in our seven plays. Students will respond to prompts for discussion exchanges, write short essays on each play, and then write a longer essay at the end of the course.

• Self-paced: all semesters
• Instructor: Associate Teaching Professor Penny Smith-Parris
• fulfills pre-1603 and pre-1890 requirements

Historical survey from beginnings of British literature through the age of Johnson, with readings representing significant writers, works, and currents of thought. The purpose of the course is to survey the development of English literature from its beginning in the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of romanticism. Major readings include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Course assignments include four progress checks consisting of brief essays (3-4 pages) and two major essay exams (midterm and final).

• Self-paced: all semesters
• Instructor: Associate Teaching Professor Penny Smith-Parris

Historical survey from beginnings of British literature through the age of Johnson, with readings representing significant writers, works, and currents of thought. The purpose of the course is to survey the development of English literature from its beginning in the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of romanticism. Major readings include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Course assignments include four progress checks consisting of brief essays (3-4 pages) and two major essay exams (midterm and final).

• Semester-based: Summer
• Instructor: varies

This course will provide a survey of American literature between the colonial period and the Civil War. We will read in a wide variety of genres – poetry, sermons, autobiography, essays, songs, letters, journalism, and political tracts – paying close attention to how writers used the conventions of these genres to meet their particular personal, aesthetic, and political goals. Writers will include but not be limited to: Smith, Bradford, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Edwards, Franklin, Occum, Equiano, Jefferson, Wheatley, Irving, Schoolcraft, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Along the way, we will focus on issues such as colonization, slavery, women’s rights, nature, magic, and individualism. Course assignments will include weekly papers, responses to your peers’ papers, and two revisions. This is a WI course and is conducted entirely online.

• Semester-based: 8-week course in Fall semester
• Instructor: Associate Professor April Langley

This (8-week) online writing intensive course introduces students to the major developments, themes, and works of African American literature from the arrival of enslaved people from the continent of Africa through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and their post-enslavement as de facto slaves and half-citizens. Specifically, we explore African American literature's continuing response to the call of African, American, and Afro-British American oral and written traditions in the form of folktales, songs, sermons, prose, and poetry, and examines the social, political, and cultural influences of early African-American literature. This summer online course is both fast paced and fun, with short mini-lectures (15 min or less) and diverse reading of literature across many genres, contemporary videos and classic documentaries that add to your interdisciplinary knowledge of literature. Assignments include reading responses, video viewing responses, discussion board peer responses, revisions, and a Final essay with drafts. Students are advised to prepare for this writing intensive course by taking English 1000 in advance. Note: This course meets several requirements for the College of Arts and Science, English and Black Studies Departments: Writing Intensive, Humanities, Diversity Intensive, and other major/minor requirements.

• Semester-based: Spring (odd years)
• Instructor: Associate Professor Elizabeth Chang

This class will introduce you to the greatest literary family of the nineteenth century and to some of the greatest novels written in English, not to mention some very complicated and dramatic family history. We will read novels by three of the Brontë sisters as well as some of the siblings’ writings from childhood. We will also learn about the creation and dismantling of the Brontë myth, and about the current critical assessment of each of the sisters. Along the way, we will also discuss Victorian literature, culture, and the history of women’s writing in nineteenth-century Britain more generally.

• Semester based: Spring (odd years)
• Instructor: Professor John Evelev

Struggling first with the Puritans’ distrust of fiction and later to overcome the cultural domination of Britain, the novel quickly became the dominant expression of American literature in the nineteenth century.  This course traces the major shifts of genre and form within the American novel from its beginnings in epistolary novels of manners and seduction in the late eighteenth century to the naturalistic depiction of urban poverty and vice in 1900.  While noting the important formal transformations within the American novel, we will also explore some of its persistent social and political concerns, including women’s “private” experience as privileged topic (contrasted with women’s underprivileged role in American public life), the creation of a distinctly American past (which may be based upon and unsettled by injustices), and the threat of racial and class violence to our notion of American democracy. In addition to weekly novel assignments, required work includes weekly discussion board engagement, four short essays, and a final research project. Required texts: Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797), Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827), Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855), Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893/1896)

Choose 3:

• English 3200: British Literature Beginnings to 1784
• English 3210: British Literature, Romanticism to the Present
• English 3300W: American Literature, Beginnings to 1865
• English 3400W: African American Literature to 1900
• English 4188: Major Authors, 1789-1890: The Brontë Sisters
• English 4310: 19th Century American Literature: The American Novel to 1900

Choose 3:

• English 2009: Pop Culture Film
• English 2150: Literature of Baseball
• English 2150: Tolkien
• English 3210: British Literature, Romanticism to the Present
• English 3310: American Literature, 1865 to the Present
• English 4100: Genres: Life Stories
• English 4140: Transatlantic Modernism
• English 4179: The Global Novel

Select the following 3 courses:

• English 3300W: American Literature, Beginnings to 1865
• English 4140: Transatlantic Modernism
• English 4188: Major Authors, 1789-1890: The Brontë Sisters

• Self-paced: every semester
• Instructor: Teaching Professor Dana Kinnison

A basic introduction to the concepts, terms, and practices commonly encountered in literary study, presented by way of texts from the history of American literature that appropriately demonstrate such concepts, terms, and practices. This course is recommended for prospective English majors. Graded on A/F basis only.

• Self-paced: every semester
• Instructor: Dr. Darren Pine

This self-paced course introduces the fundamentals of writing fiction. We will explore the building blocks that make up a story: significant detail, characterization, fictional time, plot, perspective, dialogue, setting, and revision. This course comprises eight lessons during which we will read two short novels- Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - along with our textbook, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, and several short stories in The Seagull Book of Stories. Each lesson will include responses to the reading as well as creative writing exercises, culminating in the creation of your own short story.

• Self-paced: every semester
• Instructor: Sam Stowers

This course examines the role of men and masculine identity at the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. It traces a history of filmic connections between Asian and American models of masculinity by examining recent Hollywood action films alongside more subtle contemplations of Asian-American identities, as well as comparing American Westerns with Japanese Samurai films that define masculinity as a warrior's life.

• Semester-based: summer
• Instructor: Dr. Marc McKee

Baseball is commonly hailed as the most literary of sports. Over the past century, it has been represented in countless novels, stories, poems, and plays, and has spawned its own brand of essay and memoir. This course is a survey of literature about baseball. Through reading assorted literary works (as opposed to sports writing) in a variety of genres, we will consider why baseball has been such a prevalent muse for such a variety of American writers and how it has been represented, while honing our skills as writers about literature. As we do so, we will discuss the ways in which these writers use baseball as a context to portray other aspects of American life and culture. Weekly assignments include one or two on-line posts and responses to the posts of others. (All coursework will be conducted on-line).

• Self-paced: every semester
• Instructor: Dr. Darren Pine

This self-paced course studies the literary genre of fantasy, with specific emphasis on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his major accounts of the mythical land of Middle-earth. We will read each of these works over the course of seven lessons and look at little closer at the man who wrote them, focusing upon how he explored universal themes of morality, greed, the corrupting influence of power, the value of good stewardship, the importance of free will and the redeeming power of an open heart. For each lesson, the student will submit a short (2-3 page) essay and will keep a reading journal. There will also be midterm and final exams.

• Semester-based: Spring, first 8-week session
• Instructor: Professor Karen Piper
• Satisfies department diversity requirement

In this course, we will read some of the best contemporary writers from around the world--including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We will also learn about the history and culture of many different parts of the world, including their conflicts, politics, and world-changing events. By the end of the class, you will have improved your skills in cross-cultural communication, which is a helpful addition to any resume. You will also gain a better understanding of how the U.S. fits into conversations occurring around the world, getting a glimpse of how we are viewed from outside our borders. We will be reading selections from The Norton Anthology of World Literature for the course.