Upcoming, New, and Special Topics Courses

Spring 2025

Check the tentative Spring 2025 courses on the university’s list of Spring 2025 Tentative Course Listing.

Fall 2024

English 390K: Shakespeare and Adaptation–Fall 2024

Dr. Maya Mathur

This course will focus on three plays by William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, alongside their literary and cinematic adaptations. Students in the course will analyze the plays in their historical contexts and consider the ways in which contemporary writers and filmmakers have reimagined them.

Summer 2024

More information coming soon!

Spring 2024

Course Descriptions

ENGL 202T1: Writing about the Moon–Spring 2024

Dr. Mara Scanlon

The moon is a satellite, a time capsule, a warning, a wavemaker, a mirror. It is both utterly familiar and strange; cultures across time and place have tried to account for and control the compelling, gendered, cold, beautiful orb in our own sky, through myth, science, fiction, nationalist competition, poetry, physical exploration, photography and painting, song, the naming and charting of its phases, and more. We will do our own exploration of the moon also through reading, discussion, and both formal and informal writing. This Writing Intensive course also fulfills the Humanities general education requirement.

ENGL 251XX: Sherlock and Friends–Spring 2024

Dr. Eric Lorentzen

English 251XX is designed as an in-depth, reading-intensive course in one of the most enduring writers of the British Victorian and Modernist ages, John H. Watson (or, for those who prefer, Arthur Conan Doyle), and his wonderful novels, adventures, and memoirs of his super-detective, Sherlock Holmes. We will start with some influences on Sherlock, found in writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, and follow our Sherlock adventures reading about some Victorian women detectives/writers working in the world of crime fiction.

ENGL 390J: Monsters (to 1800)–Spring 2024

Dr. Ben LaBreche

This course will examine monsters from Beowulf to the early novel to investigate the emergence of modernity.

The course fulfills the pre-1800 distribution requirement in the English major and minor.

ENGL 391F: Topic: Spotlight on Rare Books

Dr. Antonio Barrenechea

This course meets in the old “rare book room” of Trinkle Library (now James Farmer Hall). It explores key concepts around rare books—their survival and custodianship at the University of Mary Washington, their special qualities as historical objects, and their circulation in culture. During select sessions, the class will meet in Special Collections (in Simpson Library) for first-hand contact with UMW’s collection of rare books. Readings and selections include classics and little-known works from the 15th-21st centuries.

Students will produce only book profiles with items from Special Collections, preparing them for digital public outreach.

The course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

LING 470A1: Language and Culture–Spring 2024

Dr. Janie Lee

This seminar course investigates language as central to culture and inquires how language and culture shape our being in the world. Students will do so by developing and beginning to investigate an original research question to pursue in linguistically rich cultural contexts. The course will prepare students to make use of data-collection techniques, including ethnographic fieldnotes, visual documentation, ethnographic interviews, and recording of interaction. Class time will be a combination of discussion of course readings, students’ application of the theoretical concepts in ongoing research projects, and workshops of data collected by students.

ENGL 449N: Partition Literature and Cinema–Spring 2024

Dr. Shumona Dasgupta

The senior seminar will explore South-Asian and diasporic literature and cinema about the Partition of India into India and Pakistan (1947), an event which led to 2 million deaths, displaced between 12-16 million people on both sides of the border and continues to destabilize the region to the present day. We will read poetry, short stories, graphic novels, and other literary texts. The course is especially interested in the question of postmemory and the processes of remembering, and forgetting which accompany violent historical events, while reading literary, cinematic, and other cultural texts through the theoretical frameworks provided by memory, trauma, feminist, and gender studies. We will study the representations of social suffering, mourning, as well as healing and survival in literary and cinematic texts from the 1940s to 2000s, both Anglophone and vernacular (in translation). We will explore the following questions: How is violence represented in literature? Can one theorize upon Partition literature as the literature of trauma? How did race, class, caste, and gender shape one’s experiences? How do displaced peoples and refugees stage their claims while reconstructing their identities in the aftermath of catastrophic events? We will explore some Partition historiography, survivor testimonies, newspaper reports and the scant visual archive of the Partition. This is a speaking intensive (SI) course.

Fall 2023

ENGL 202C: Writing About Literature Through a Cultural Studies Lens–Fall 2023

Dr. Eric Lorentzen

The study of literature demands a number of connections: between literary texts and students’ lives, popular culture and high art, theory and experience, English and a vast variety of texts and experiences from other disciplines, the past and present, academic realms and actual societal realms desperately in need of social justice reform – all of which leads to a critical reading of the world coalescing with a critical reading of the word, through vital multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary work. We will “ONLY CONNECT!” these elements in class, by going out of our way to make everything we read poignant and relative to daily life.

In English 202C, we will learn to write well by reading some wonderful short fiction and connecting these narratives to various realms in popular culture and media, as well as the issues in our own lives in America 2023. The course will have an explicit focus on social justice, and the idea of “skeptical idealism,” the belief that what we read, and what we write, can actually contribute to helping to make the world a better place. This course counts for WI. Join us!

ENGL 313: Flash Forms–Fall 2023

Dr. Laura Bylenok

This course considers all forms of flash prose—short-form creative writing that typically maxes out at about a thousand words. There are different shapes and sizes of small, of course, including the prose poem, flash fiction, and flash essay, and we will consider what defines, distinguishes, and differentiates each of these small prose forms.

Flash implies speed, brevity, movement. Flash—verb: to shine in a bright but brief, sudden, or intermittent way. To express a sudden emotion, again, briefly, as on a face. To hold up or show quickly before putting away. In these forms, we will consider the shimmy of the page of the sentence through time; the capturing of a voice, a moment, or image; the transience of a fragment and the arc, broken; its resistance to the whole, of the centerfold. We will explore forms, figures, shape, resistance, and overlap among the many guises of flash, reading widely and ravishingly through as many pieces and voices as a semester allows, and students will write and workshop their own flash pieces.

ENGL 323: Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity–Fall 2023

Dr. Ben LaBreche

Sexuality—and particularly sexual excess—became increasingly central to literature and identity over the course of the seventeenth century. “Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity” will explore why these changes occurred, how they influenced individualism, obscenity, comedy, the novel, and women’s writing, and how they continue to impact our understanding of modernity.

ENGL 335B: British Romantic Literature: “Romanticism, Revolution, and the Rise of Mass Literacy”–Fall 2023

Dr. Eric Lorentzen

So, you say you want a revolution? This course is designed to provide a survey of British Romantic literature and culture, a somewhat short period in English literary history, but the one in which, perhaps more than any other era, there were incredibly significant revolutions in both literature and life. In English 335B, we’ll be reading all the great poetry that has made the period famous, full of Nature, the supernatural, and illicit transgression of all varieties.

But we’ll also be tucking into a few representative Romantic novels, starting with the Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe, and then progressing on to Jane Austen’s famous Pride and Prejudice. We’ll be finishing up our busy semester with the classic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that brings it all together: the sublime and transcendent Nature of the Alps, the struggle for literacy and culture, and the existential search for a higher being and someone to call “Friend.”

ENGL 336: British Victorian Literature–Fall 2023

Dr. Eric Lorentzen

“The Empire Strikes Back” Education, Imperialism, Reform, and the “Condition of England” Question

So, you say you want to read some great books at university? English 336 is perfect for you. This course is designed to provide a survey of British Victorian literature and culture, a wide and diverse body of texts that, in many ways, marks the transition from the past to the present in British life and letters. From emerging concerns with imperial issues to exponentially increasing levels of literacy, and from the “Woman Question” to revolutionary evolutionary theories, the Victorian period embodied drastic changes in all facets of British life. We’ll be reading Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and other classics, as well as a Gothic Sensation novel that anticipates the detective genre of the latter Victorian period. We’ll also be screening popular and critically acclaimed film adaptations of these great classic stories!

ENGL 353: Asian American Literature–Fall 2023

Dr. Mara Scanlon

This class in Asian American Literature will include some fantastic works of poetry and fiction, most of it from the last 50 years. “Asian” is a broad category that includes but is not limited to persons who trace their roots to at least China, Japan, Korea, Burma (or Myanmar), Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. As such, it represents people whose common racial categorization belies their very diverse histories and traditions–not only in their mother or home nations, but also in the United States, where waves of immigration, labor practices, attempts at assimilation, and shifting prejudices (among other factors) have variously affected the often difficult transition from “Asian” to “Asian American.” Even for writers born and raised in the United States, the unique perspective of one “between worlds,” as one critic has phrased it, makes their writing of great interest.

We will consider questions such as these: how do Asian American writers represent the United States and their contemporary experiences and attitudes? how do they represent their nations of origin or the culture and history of their ancestors? how do they understand the very concept of “race”? where are they positioned in complex intersectional networks? what constructions of identity control or liberate them? if they are bi- or multilingual, how do the writers balance their languages, and what does it mean to make the choice to write in English? in what ways are the texts themselves remarkable in genre, style, form, or language?

This course is an elective for the English major or minor (literature of historically marginalized people or post-1900), an elective for the Asian Studies minor, an elective for the American Studies major, and an elective for the Women’s and Gender Studies major. It is an Honors-designated class and is Digital Intensive.

ENGL 387: South Asian Literature and Cinema–Fall 2023

Dr. Shumona Dasgupta

The Class will explore contemporary South Asian literature and cinema from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and its diasporas. Many of these texts represent and respond to important historical events like India’s Independence movement, the violence of the Partition, the Bangladesh war of Liberation, 9/11, or socio-economic and cultural phenomenon like immigration, globalization and liberalization of South-Asian economies while exploring emerging ideas of nationhood, and the changes in gender dynamics and the structures of class and caste through the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a hands-on approach to literary research, the class will focus on how to critically read culturally different texts, both literary and cinematic.

This course fulfills the English major requirement for Historically Marginalized Literature. It is also Writing Intensive (WI).

ENGL 390H: European Medieval Literature–Fall 2023

Dr. Terry Kennedy

This course will explore how the vernacular, or national languages replaced Latin as the dominant form of literary expression during the 12^th to the 14^th centuries, the so-called “High Middle Ages.” Readings will focus on French, Italian, and English authors, including Marie de France, Provençal love lyrics, Italian lyric and narrative literature such as Dante, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, and Petrarch, as well as the Chaucer and the Pearl-poet.

Summer 2023

ENGL 202L: Writing about the Natural World, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I (May/June) 2023

Dr. Laura Bylenok

MTWR 1-3 p.m. • Combs 322

This course introduces students to different genres of nature and environmental writing with a focus on craft. Students will explore the forms and tendencies of a variety of genres in writing about the natural world, including the pastoral, personal narratives, environmental writing, science and nature narratives, postcolonial narratives, and environmental justice narratives to promote ecological awareness and advocacy. Students will develop critical and creative writing skills through a variety of formal and informal writing assignments, including personal narrative, research, argument, journals, exercises, and reflection.

Readings will include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, theory, philosophy, and ecology. Activities and discussion will center on understanding the personal and public significance of writing centered in awareness of the natural world, and we will consider: what does it mean to write about nature? What are the characteristics of nature and environmental writing? What is the history of this kind of writing and what are its forms? What is the role of nature and environmental writing in our culture? To whom are these pieces written? What is the significance of place in our writing and in our lives? What does it mean to advocate through writing? What does it mean to engage in activist writing practices?

This Writing Intensive course also fulfills the Humanities general education requirement.

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I (May/June) 2023

Dr. Levin

MTWR 10:15-12:15 p.m. • Zoom

“Writing about Sports” is a Writing Intensive course that introduces students to different genres of sports writing while focusing on the craft of writing about sports. In addition to Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, students will read short and long-form sports writing from the 2022 edition of The Year’s Best Sports Writing and from various on-line venues.

In addition to short writing exercises, students will complete four formal essay assignments, all of which will all be workshopped in class. In addition to fulfilling the Writing Intensive requirement, ENGL 202L counts as a Humanities Gen Ed course (or as an Arts, Literature, and Performance: Process course on the “old Gen Ed”).

Bring your love of sports (or eagerness to read, write, and learn more about sports) and a desire to hone your craft as a writer. Offered on-line (with live Zoom class sessions) for Summer 2023 (May/June).

ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel–Summer I (May/June) 2023

Dr. Tweedy

MTWR 10:15-12:15 p.m. • Combs 322

This course will focus on graphic novels, a literary form with a voice made from the juxtaposition of visual art and text. We will explore the unique demands this voice places on readers, writers/ artists, and the story as well as how a form first known for pulp science fiction and melodrama now engages in “culture work” by telling stories about race, gender, addiction, sexuality, censorship, and terrorism.

ENGL 202L1: Writing Food/Book/Film Reviews, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II (June/July) 2023

Dr. Kennedy

MTWR 10:15-12:15 p.m. • Zoom

This writing intensive course also fulfills the Humanities general education requirement.

ENGL 392D: Southern Short Stories–Summer II (June/July) 2023

Dr. Gary Richards

MTWR 1-3 p.m. • Combs 322

This special topics course chronologically surveys southern short stories from roughly the Civil War until the end of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the course will read a representative short story from a dozen southern writers to provide breadth; on the other hand, the course will read a cluster of four or so short stories from four canonical southern writers (Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty) to provide depth. To accommodate the summer schedule, the course requirements are: a short biographical oral presentation, three one-page responses, quizzes every other day, and a final examination.

The course will cover these sixteen authors: George Washington Cable, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Ellen Douglas, Ernest J. Gaines, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Walker.

Spring 2023

English 203: Writing with Digital Media–Spring 2023

Dr. Brenta Blevins

According to Statista, “As of 2022, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 147 minutes per day, up from 145 minutes in the previous year.” According to the Pew Research Center, “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices.” And “three-in-ten Americans now read e-books” (Pew Research).

Given the rising importance of all this digital writing, this course looks at how we write through digital media. The course focuses on how to create effective content by understanding research and theory related to composing for digital platforms, whether for an individual’s or organization’s personal, professional, commercial, political, governmental, or other use. Doing so will involve learning about and experimenting with different rhetorical modes, genres, and media, as well as different writing styles. You will get extensive practice in analyzing and composing writing that engages graphical, multimodal, hypertextual, and interactive elements across a variety of public genres.

In this course, students will

Utilize effective writing processes and digital composing tools.
Assess audiences and customize content for specific audiences and delivery methods by applying appropriate styles and genres to specific audiences in digital media.
Apply user experience, content strategy, usability, and information literacy to compose ethical digital writing.
Work with multiple communication modes to construct effective communication.

By the end of the class, you will develop a portfolio of digital writing demonstrating creative expression for online communication to achieve a specified rhetorical aim.

This course fulfills both Writing Intensive (WI) and Digital Intensive (DI) general education requirements.

English 306R: Writing and Literacy in the Digital Age–Spring 2023

Dr. Brenta Blevins

Want to learn about how knowledge is produced for one of the top ten websites in the world? Read on to find out more about your opportunity to write and to publish on one of the world’s most frequently visited websites.

Literacy, at its most basic, is the ability to read and to write. This class will explore how our understanding of literacy has changed in consideration of the new digital technologies and tools that have rapidly developed in recent history. Our central focus will be defining digital literacy and considering the implications of and issues raised by different definitions of digital literacy.

To take up our study of writing and literacy in the digital age, we first need to understand a history of literacy. As a class set at an American university, we’ll focus in this course primarily on literacy as understood, practiced, and taught in the British colonies that eventually became the United States, although we’ll also touch briefly on understandings and expressions of literacy around the globe, particularly in relation to digital literacy.

We’ll explore these topics by writing in traditional media and new digital media forms. By the end of the course, students will create their own digital literacy narratives, among other assignments–including the opportunity to write for one of the most used websites in the world: Wikipedia. You’ll learn about writing style, ethical practices in writing, providing feedback on writing, using visuals in combination with writing, collaborative writing, and more in this class.

This course fulfills both Writing Intensive (WI) and Digital Intensive (DI) general education requirements.

English 391A: The Victorian Pastoral Novel George Eliot & Thomas Hardy–Spring 2023

Dr. Eric Lorentzen

English 391A is designed as an in-depth, reading-intensive course in two of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Thomas Hardy. Writing during the Victorian era, arguably the period in which novels increasingly became the most widely read literary genre, Eliot and Hardy became two of the more eloquent chroniclers of country life in England of the Victorian period, the two eminent specialists in the pastoral novel. However, these novelists also wrote works that astutely transcended merely pastoral concerns, creative narratives that became landmark “Condition of England” novels as well. In fact Eliot’s Middlemarch ranks at the very top of this category, alongside Dickens’ Bleak House perhaps, at the pinnacle of the Victorian novel overall.

In English 391A, we will examine a number of different concerns upon which scholars have focused in studies of the Victorian (pastoral) novel, critical lines of inquiry including education, reading, gender, class, nationality, empire, social reform, industrialization, evolution, revolution, colonialism, public health, social institutions (including, but not limited to schools, courts, the police, churches, the military, the medical professions, government institutions, and philanthropic societies), and, of course, the country vs. the city. And, like most Victorian novels, these novels are largely about novels themselves, books about books, filled with readers and texts of unimaginable variety, interpretation, decoding, signifying, representation, and the many pitfalls inherent in such hermeneutic processes.

Through reading the fascinating novels we will encounter in English 391A, we will try to develop a sense of the “inter-connectedness” of Victorian literary works, and how these works of fiction “speak to each other.” By examining how their literary motifs are developed, revised, challenged, parodied, and turned on their heads throughout different novels and their corresponding historical contexts, we will attempt to expand our notions of what constitutes the “Victorian pastoral novel.” Finally, we will constantly consider what we can learn about our own 21st-century lives from these terrific texts, reaffirming the crucial power that reading narrative fiction can have in our real day to day existence.

Our possible texts include:

Jefferies, Richard. Hodge and His Masters.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch.
Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.

English 392: Washington Through Cinema–Spring 2023

Dr. Antonio Barrenechea

Since its founding in 1790, Washington, DC has held one major place in the public imagination: U.S. national politics. Today, “Washington” is little more than a linguistic substitute for all U.S. government operations. This association extends to the cinema. Beginning with silent films, the motion pictures feature heads of state serving the call of duty, usually in dire times. Yet, the 100+-year history of the movies also tells a different story. As a professor of cinema and a Washingtonian for the last decade, I seek to complicate the notion that the city is a stand-in for politics. In this course, we examine several film genres that place the U.S. capital at the center, but in diverse ways.

English 393: Global Women’s Literature and Woman of Color Feminism–Spring 2023

Dr. Shumona Dasgupta

This course will focus on global women’s writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. We will analyze issues of voice, agency, identity, cultural memory, storytelling and resistance as women confront the forces of patriarchy, colonialism, racism and neoliberalism. We will read woman authored novels, short stories, poetry and some postcolonial and women of color feminism. In addition to literary texts we will read Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Mitsuye Yamada, Rosario Morales, the Combahee River Collective, Yolanda M. Lopez, Hazel Carby, Ania Loomba, Sara Mills, Anne McClintock and many more. The course fulfills the post-1900 and historically marginalized literature requirement of the English major.

Fall 2022

English 202J1: Writing in the Workplace–Fall 2022

Dr. Brenta Blevins

Writing in the Workplace focuses on the development of writing as a human technology that is essential to the modern workplace.

This course is structured as an introduction to a range of written genres, strategies, and conventions used for on-the-job writing. By the end of this course, students will have extensive experience with writing processes and polished resumes, cover letters, job profiles, career plans, and more to support job searches, as well as experience with such workplace genres as reports, performance evaluations, self-assessments, and more. We’ll apply a variety of strategies, including close reading, research, and analysis skills to craft documents tailored to the jobs to meet students’ future career plans. Further, the course will cover interrelationships between core workplace activities and writing practices, including document and media design, project management, and rhetorical strategies for creating effective texts for various audiences.

While this content may be especially helpful for students preparing to transition from college to long-term careers, writing knowledge remains relevant in an environment in which historically Americans have changed jobs over 12 times in their lifetimes and strong written communication skills are a top attribute employers are looking for in employees.

Although this course will be delivered in a fully online, asynchronous format using Canvas, students will need to meet routine due dates to participate in the drafting, feedback, and revision essential to the writing process. The course uses Open Education Resources (i.e., it does not require the purchase of textbooks).

ENGL 251TT: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture–Fall 2022

Dr. Lorentzen

In this General Education course, we will examine the works of Charles Dickens through a Cultural Studies lens, reading them alongside the many works of media and popular culture to which they have contributed throughout the years. Some of the Dickens texts we’ll examine include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol. Some of the works beyond Dickens will include Wordsworth’s poetry, some Dickens fan fiction, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, films like Groundhog Day and Disney’s Christopher Robin, teen soaps like The O.C. (2000-2004), and a few of the celluloid incarnations of Scrooge and his ghostly friends (including the Muppets!). We’ll also scrutinize various Dickens fairs, walking tours, Christmas villages, museums, and other elements of his impact on literary tourism. Please Sirs and Madams, you’ll definitely want some more!

English 307: Writing Studies–Fall 2022

Dr. Brenta Blevins

Q: What do Stephen King, Angie Thomas, V.E. Schwab, Sarah Maas, technical writers, social media influencers, the creators of Red Dead Redemption 2, and website copywriters all have in common?

A: A writing process: Find out more in ENGL 307: Writing Studies. Drawing from the field of Writing Studies, this course answers such questions as: What is a writing process? Who has them? Do only published novelists have them? Playwrights? What about videogame creators? Did writers have them in antiquity? Do today’s business writers have them? Whether you identify as a confident writer or someone who’d rather do literally anything else than write, this course will provide opportunities to learn about and practice writing process research to add more tools to your writing toolbox (to borrow Stephen King’s metaphor). Wherever you are as a writer, you’ll gain tools to hack your writing process and level up with your writing.

Summer 2022

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2022

Dr. Levin

ENGL 202L, “Writing About Sports,” introduces students to different genres of sports writing while focusing on the craft of writing about sports. In addition to Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, students will read short and long-form sports writing on on-line venues. Most will be available free, but all students will be asked to purchase a digital subscription to Sports Illustrated for one full month. Instructor will provide more detailed instructions about purchasing the one-month subscription. Writing assignments will include four formal essays, which will all be workshopped in class, along with a variety of short writing exercises. ENGL 202L fulfills a Writing Intensive requirement. Bring your love of sports (or willingness to learn more about them) and desire to hone your craft as a writer.

ENGL 202P: Writing Critical Reviews, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2022

Dr. Kennedy

ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel–Summer I 2022

Dr. Tweedy

Spring 2022

ENGL 202R1: The Science in Science Fiction–Spring 2022

Dr. Kennedy

This class will use a variety of sources to look at how science fiction writers use existing scientific theories in fiction and film. The required assignments will include personal essays, research essays, and literary and film analysis. Texts will include works by Arthur C. Clarke, Philip Dick, Issac Asimov, and Ann Leckie, among others.

ENGL 251RR: 19th Century Women Novelists–Spring 2022

Dr. Lorentzen

This special topics course will survey some of the tremendously important English women novelists of the long 19th century, seeking to frame them amongst the feminist discourses of Mary Wollstonecraft and others. Texts include Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans) Mill on the Floss, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

ENGL 251SS: Lewis and Tolkien–Spring 2022

Dr. Kennedy

This course will explore the legacy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, including their influence on writers such as J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Philip Pullman, and Ursula Le Guin. Assignments will include film screenings, personal response essays, and a mid-term and a final exam.

ENGL 390: Poetry of Desire, Speaking Intensive–Spring 2022

Dr. LaBreche

What are the forms of desire? This class will read early modern poems side by side with lyric poetry of our own day to examine gender, sexuality, and how literary and social meaning relate to poetic form. No previous experience with poetry required. This class fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major and minor and is a WGST elective.

ENGL 451B: Reading Literature with Computers–Spring 2022

Dr. Whalen

This class is an exploration of emerging methodologies in literature studies that take advantage of computational methods to analyze and critique literature. These so-called “distant reading” techniques have found many useful applications, but need to be interrogated for their latent assumptions and priorities. This class is about understanding that controversy while testing and demonstrating methodologies like topic modeling, stylometrics, and other data-driven approaches.

By completing this class, students will gain experience in applying digital tools to the questions and problems of literary studies. Specifically, successful students will be able to

– Choose appropriate computational methods that explore meaningful questions about literature;
– Account for the validity of data-driven analytic approaches;
– Recognize and contribute to the network of scholarship around digital literary studies, especially within the so-called digital humanities;
– Understand how digital literary studies exists within and in response to the history of literary theory.

This class makes no assumptions about students’ prior experience with programming. From total beginners to advanced coders, all are welcome and all will be supported in accomplishing the learning goals set out for this seminar.

ENGL 451B: Reading Literature With Computers fulfills the senior seminar requirement for English Majors and the capstone for Digital Studies Minors.

Summer 2021

ENGL 202L: Writing about the Natural World, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Bylenok

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Levin

ENGL 385.M1: Contemporary American Fiction–Summer I 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Richards

In this course, we will read five novels–Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, and Tommy Orange’s There There–and an extensive range of short stories by James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Allan Gurganus, John Edgar Wideman, Jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Allison, Tim O’Brien, and Amy Tan.

ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel–Summer I 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Tweedy

Session II: June 22-July 21

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Levin

ENGL 202L: Writing about Food/Book/Film Reviews, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II 2021: ONLINE

Dr. Kennedy

ENGL 207: Literature in Performance–Summer II 2021, ONLINE

Dr. Kennedy

ENGL 245: Introduction to Cinema Studies–Summer II 2021, ONLINE

Dr. Barrenechea

ENGL 306B: Technical Writing, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II 2021, ONLINE

Dr. Blevins

This advanced writing course explores different writing genres, media, and technologies used in technical professional settings. The course begins with exploring different definitions of technical writing and an overview of different writing forms used in technical writing. In working with such technical writing genres as instructions, definitions, and reports, students engage in a number of technical writing practices, including learning about the writing process, writing independently and in team environments as writers, testers, and copyeditors. Additionally, students explore professional digital identities and prepare a writing portfolio for employment application as their culminating assignment. This course will be delivered in a fully online, asynchronous format using Canvas. This course uses Open Education Resources (OER) and requires no textbook purchase.

Spring 2021

English 206A: Global Issues in Literature: Contemporary Global Literature by Women

Dr. Shumona Dasgupta

We will read contemporary global fiction written by women from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The literature depicts the multi-layered impact on the lives of women when the forces of indigenous patriarchy, colonialism and globalization intersect, and the processes of conflict, assimilation and/or hybridity which result as cultures come into contact or clash. We will explore the idea of writing as resistance. The course meets online synchronously in MWF sections.

This class fulfills the ALPA, GI, Diverse & Global Perspectives, WMST (elective) and SI (Speaking Intensive) requirements

English 318: Sex, Love, and Power in Renaissance England

Dr. Ben LaBreche

This course focuses on the role of sexuality, sex, and gender in the poems, plays, and prose of the sixteenth century, England’s earliest modern literature. We will explore in particular how Englishmen and women conceived of sex and gender in this period, how these conceptions drew upon continental and classical sources, and how they helped support the larger structures of England’s social, political, religious, and intellectual life. We will also study the social realities of sex and sexuality in Renaissance England, practice textual analysis, and work on research, presentation, and argumentation skills. Ultimately this course will help you understand sources of and alternatives to our own conceptions of sex and sexuality, and give you a strong basis for enjoying the beautiful, witty, sometimes raunchy, and sometimes troubling texts of English literature’s golden age.

ENGL 391C: Whitman and Dickinson
Dr. Mara Scanlon

Whitman and Dickinson are frequently cast in opposition to one another: he, the master of the long line—arrogant, sexual, political, radical, with masculine epic reach; she, the scribbler of diminutive lyrics— reclusive, proper, death-obsessed, religious, with feminine focus on flowers and birds. Such literary-biographical portraits are not without some truth or purpose, but nuanced readings of these canonical American poets suggest that the binary is neither stable nor truly representative. In fact, both poets are stylistically experimental; both were answering Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for an American poet; both engage intellectually and creatively with questions about the 19^th-century nation, the body and soul, religion, history, gender, sexuality, friendship, and nature. Together they profoundly innovated American poetry and shaped the American voice in ways that extend to the present day. The course meets primarily in person.

J-term 2021

English 202J1: Writing in the Workplace

Dr. Brenta Blevins

Writing in the Workplace focuses on the development of writing as a human technology that is essential to the modern workplace.

Fall 2020

English 360: Postcolonial Studies: Literatures of Resistance–Fall 2020

Dr. Dasgupta

We will read contemporary fiction from Africa, the Caribbean and South-Asia which explores how the experience of colonialism, imperialism and decolonization impacted individual and collective identities of the peoples who suffered displacement, economic deprivation, cultural alienation and loss.

How did the colonized forge a politics and literature of resistance?

Some of the texts depict the moment of “first contact” between European powers and the colonies; others focus on the multi-layered impact of patriarchy and colonialism in the lives of women. We will read books representing the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a novel about the Haitian experience, and a Caribbean rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The final section of the course will examine contemporary forces of neoliberal globalization which have made a mockery of any real notion of “freedom” for the vast majority of people in the global South now. The course fulfills the “historically marginalized” literature requirement for the English major.

English 390G: Chaucer and the European Tradition–Fall 2020

Dr. Kennedy

This course will explore classical, French, and Italian sources for Chaucer’s poetry in order to understand how intertextuality reflects and contributes to sharing and revitalizing cultural knowledge across national and temporal boundaries. In other words, this course will explore how literary texts speak to each other through the act of reading.

Summer 2020

Session I: May 18-June 20

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2020: ONLINE

Dr. Levin

ENGL 302A: Introduction to Creative Writing, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2020: ONLINE

Dr. Rochelle

Prerequisite: ENGL 295 or permission of instructor

This class offers an Introduction to writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The class will provide opportunities to do a lot of writing and revising and reading and talking about writing and workshopping. The primary emphasis is on developing students’ abilities to write creatively.

ENGL 385.M1: Contemporary American Fiction–Summer I 2020: ONLINE

Dr. Richards

ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel–Summer I 2019: ONLINE

Dr. Tweedy

Session II: June 22-July 21

ENGL 207: Literature in Performance–Summer II 2020, ONLINE

Dr. Kennedy

ENGL 306B: Technical Writing, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer II 2020, ONLINE

Dr. Blevins

This advanced writing course explores different writing genres, media, and technologies used in technical professional settings. In working with specific technical writing genres, students engage in a number of technical writing practices, including learning about the writing process, writing independently and in team environments as writers, testers, and copyeditors. Additionally, students explore professional digital identities and prepare a writing portfolio for employment application as their culminating assignment. This course will be delivered in a fully online, asynchronous format using Canvas.

Spring 2020

English 202: Writing about Writing–Spring 2020

Dr. Blevins

Different English 202 sections take different topics for exploring writing. In this course, we’re going to explore writing itself as a topic. This means that we will read in a variety of formats both fiction and non-fiction about writers, writing, and the narratives we create using and about writing.

To understand writing, we’ll also think about what it means to read. We will talk about how to read different types of writing, as well as how to produce different forms of writing. To begin this conversation, we’ll consider what it means to be literate, which means at its most basic the ability to read and to write, but we’ll look at how literacy involves much more than simply the initial acquisition of reading and writing.

We’ll look at readings that enable us to look at what writers (and readers) do, and in so doing, we’ll consider who is a writer, what writing is, and the value of writing. We’ll talk about the steps of writing by looking at different writers’ process and apply that to our own writing practices to better our own writing processes.

English 251N: Literature of Death and Purpose–Spring 2020

Dr. McAllister

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

– Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

Course goals:

• Learn why literature is one of the chief means with which humans have grappled with death, meaning, and purpose

• Explore authors from many eras and cultures who have reflected deeply on life and death

• Become more comfortable thinking and talking about death

• Use the wisdom of others (and a LOT of hands-on activities) to consider how best to live your one “wild and precious life”

English 385: Disability and Literature–Spring 2020

Dr. Foss

This course fulfills the literature of the historically marginalized groups requirement and takes for its focus the complex intersections(s) of disability and literature. Throughout the semester we will consider the various ways in which literary representations of disability from the nineteenth century to the present have embodied a range of pejorative, enabling, and/or ambivalent possibilities. We will close out the course with a special unit on autism and literature.

Readings will include novels by William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and John Steinbeck; short fiction by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O’Connor, and Oscar Wilde; poetry from Emily Dickinson, Jim Ferris, Petra Kuppers, Sylvia Plath, and Percy Shelley; and disability studies theory from Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder—plus, much much more!

English 390E: Shakespeare, Race, and Gender–Spring 2020

Dr. Mathur

What can William Shakespeare, a four-hundred-year old symbol of English literary and cultural imperialism, teach us about contemporary notions of race and gender? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Shakespeare’s plays were written at a time when England was establishing diplomatic ties and trade routes to parts of Africa and Asia as well as its colonies in the Americas. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are informed by this context and feature characters who are marginalized by virtue of their race, religion, and gender. The politics of race and gender are also important to modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, especially those by writers of color. In this course, we will examine the intersections of race and gender in some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays and explore their adaptation by twentieth and twenty-first century playwrights.

Plays

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
William Shakespeare, Othello
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Adaptations

Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief
Djanet Sears, Harlem Duet
Toni Morrison, Desdemona
Aime Cesaire, A Tempest

English 390F: Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity–Spring 2020

Dr. LaBreche

What hath night to do with sleep?

—John Milton, Comus

Sexuality—and particularly sexual excess—became increasingly central to literature and identity over the course of the seventeenth century. “Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity” will explore why these changes occurred, how they influenced individualism, obscenity, comedy, the novel, and women’s writing, and how they continue to impact our understanding of modernity.

English 392: “The Great American Novel”–Spring 2020

Dr. Barrenechea

In this elective in the English major, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick will be our primary text. Through readings in theory and cultural history, we will interrogate each of the key words in the title of the course: 1) “Great” (canon formation–what counts as “great” and who gets to decide?). 2) “America” (the geopolitical and cultural contours of “American,” a term traditionally associated with the United States only, not Central or South America). 3) “Novel” (the emergence of the “novel” as a hybrid and dialogic form of writing inclusive of differences). Our aim will be to test the validity of “The Great American Novel” as a qualitative category of analysis in literary studies.

ENGL 393 Major Black Women Writers–Spring 2020

Dr. Tweedy

This course will be an exploration of major Black women writers. Specifically, over the course of the semester, we will focus on the key works of bell hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor as well as select readings by African American literary critics, examining how African American literary works both tell and yet re-imagine the narrative of black women in America.

ENGL 451B: Reading Literature with Computers–Spring 2020

Dr. Whalen

This class is an investigation into what happens when we enlist the assistance of computers in analyzing, interpreting, and making arguments about literature. Computational approaches to literature have surged in popularity and visibility in the past decade or so — usually under the banner of “digital humanities” — so this class will attempt to historicize and respond to that emergence while practicing and experimenting with some of the key methods like stylometrics, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. Students will read widely in the contemporary scholarship on computational text analysis or “cultural analytics” and develop individual projects that explore specific questions or texts. Many of the methods we will use involve Python, but no prior experience in programming is necessary to be successful in this class.

DGST 301E: Virtual and Augmented Reality–Spring 2020

Dr. Blevins

This Digital Studies elective focuses on theorizing, analyzing, and composing the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). We will learn and apply theories of remediation (one medium incorporating or representing another medium) and multimodality (use of multiple communication modes) to explore digital mediation of reality. We will learn about the histories behind the technologies, as well as current and future uses of these technologies of VR and AR, will analyze VR and AR across a variety of purposes, and students will learn to produce their own VR and AR using free resources and materials available on campus.

Fall 2019

ENGL 390D: Poetry of Desire, Speaking Intensive–Fall 2019

Dr. LaBreche

Summer 2019

Session I: May 20-June 20

ENGL 202L: Writing about Sports, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2019

Dr. Levin

ENGL 302A: Introduction to Creative Writing, Writing Intensive (WI)–Summer I 2019

Dr. Rochelle

Prerequisite: ENGL 295 or permission of instructor

ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel–Summer I 2019

Dr. Tweedy

Session II: June 24-July 25

ENGL 306B: Technical Writing, Writing Intensive (WI)–ONLINE Summer II 2019,

Dr. Blevins

ENGL 393C:Postmodern Women Writers–Summer II 2019

Dr. Haffey

In this course we will explore the writing of late twentieth-century women writers whose work can be described as postmodern. Until recently, much of the scholarship on postmodern fiction focused on male writers and granted only minimal attention to the many excellent women writers whose work also helped define this type of literature. We will be studying several such writers, including Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, and others. These women deploy a great number of postmodern techniques to explore a wide variety of issues.

Spring 2019

ENGL 202G: Writing about Liberty–Spring 2019

Dr. LaBreche

This class will have three primary objectives: read and analyze several theoretical approaches to liberty; present and discuss current topics related to liberty or public policy broadly; and develop writing skills in conjunction with thinking about liberty. In particular, this last point means working in three genres of argumentative writing: the personal essay, the policy paper, and blogging, exercising research skills, engaging one another critically and constructively in writing workshops, and practicing the art of revision. Ultimately, this class is a chance for students to explore and share their interests and their views on important social and political topics.

ENGL 202F: Writing about Appalachian Folklore

Dr. Almond

As a general education writing seminar, this course is designed to further develop the students’ writing skills within the context of Appalachian folklore as it is presented in various literary forms by and about the people of Appalachia. This course requires participation in all class activities—instructor facilitated discussions, small group discovery and discussions, peer reviews and feedback, in-class writing assignments, and formal presentations. In addition to these day-to-day activities, students are required to write an oral history, a critical analysis, a book review, and a research paper. While the work load is impressive, it yields rich results.

English 306R:Topics in Writing: Writing and Literacy in the Digital Age–Spring 2019
Dr. Blevins

To address the question of what digital literacy is, we’ll read about literacy and then explore different definitions of digital literacy and expressions of that literacy in the genre of the digital literacy narrative. We’ll look at historical literacy, current literacy, and predictions about future literacy. We’ll read literacy scholarship and fictional explorations of literacy and digital literacy in novels and short fiction.

We’ll explore these topics by writing in traditional media and new digital media forms. By the end of the course, students will create their own digital literacy narratives and offer their own definitions of digital literacy, among other projects.

English 350: Electronic Literature–Spring 2019
Dr. Whalen

What is “electronic literature”? What does “literature” have to do with “digital studies”? How is literature changing because of digital platforms? Why?

More specifically, if you’re a CDS major, Digital Studies Minor, or English Major, you may be wondering, “Should I sign up for a class on Electronic Literature in Spring 2019”?

If so, please visit www.shouldIsignupforaclassonelectronicliterature.com and many of your questions will be answered.

English 384: Disability and Literature–Spring 2019
Dr. Foss

This course takes for its focus the complex intersections(s) of disability and literature. Throughout the semester we will consider the various ways in which literary representations of disability from the nineteenth century to the present have embodied a range of pejorative, enabling, and/or ambivalent possibilities. We will close out the course with a special unit on autism and literature.

Summer and Fall 2018

ENGL 376A9: Whitman and Dickinson–ONLINE SUMMER MAY/JUNE
Dr. Scanlon

ENGL 447P: Shakespearean Women (seminar)–FALL 2018
Dr. Finkelstein

The era during which Shakespeare wrote, the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James, saw rapid social, political, religious, and economic changes. As is usually the case during times in which people believe that cultural forces are shifting quickly, controversies vividly emerged about the nature of women, about bodies, and about gender. With considerable new money available, theatre was the most visible form of entertainment and addressed these controversies on London stages. Shakespeare engages with issues surrounding women, gender, and sexual object choice within all the genres in which he worked, including comedy, tragedy, history, and poetry. Although we will primarily focus on comedy, we will also look at examples from other genres. We will also look at a couple of first-rate non-Shakespearean plays from this period to see how Shakespeare’s attitudes were both representative of his age and distinct to himself.

ENGL 445F: The Rise of Vernacular Culture (seminar)–FALL 2018
Dr. Kennedy

The purpose of this course is to consider the development of Chaucer’s understanding and appreciation of the notion of authorship and authority by contrasting his work with those of his Italian models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio. Although Boccaccio is recognized as one of the main sources for many of Chaucer’s works, both writers are engaged with understanding the question of authority (particularly in the vernacular) in terms of the Italian tradition. The course will seek to explore how the notion of vernacular authority evolves in the author’s work, to discuss how literary traditions are invented, and to examine how genre, style, and source inform representational strategies.

ENGL 313G: Writing For Multimedia–FALL 2018
Professor Rafferty

While the page (both print and web) remains the primary medium for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, practitioners of those genres are increasingly exploring other means of expressing themselves, including work in audio, video, graphic novels, and interactive online experiences. This multi-genre course will consider several outstanding examples of what’s possible with an eye towards writing and producing work in a variety of media. Technical expertise is not necessary to start this course, but expect to spend time learning how to use the tools that make these things possible. Students will produce a digital portfolio of work as well as the knowledge of how that work might be distributed.

English 390B: Literature and Revolution–FALL 2018
Dr. LaBreche

The seventeenth century was England’s Age of Revolution: dissidents executed one king and forced another to abdicate; royalists brought about a period of unparalleled sexual libertinism; the Scientific Revolution changed the way that people saw their world; and women writers transformed the literary landscape. This course will focus on how authors in a wide variety of positions imagined and criticized literature, gender, sexuality, and power throughout this turbulent period.

DGST 301A: Creative Coding–FALL 2018
Dr. Whalen

“Creative Coding” means doing interesting things with computers by writing instructions that make a computer create something. In this class, that something will be poetry, literature, graphic art, music, and anything else you can think of to make it create. We will look at the history of these genres for the ways artists have experimented with code, but this class will emphasize producing original creative work. No prior experience with programming is required, and to some extent, this class may serve as a general introduction to programming — with the caveat that the things you learn how to make for this class will be rigorously impractical. That said, a basic comfort level with code and a general acceptance of the value of avant-garde poetics may be helpful. Primarily, we’ll be making things with Processing and P5.js. This class is an elective for the Communication and Digital Studies Major or the Minor in Digital Studies.

ENGL 253: Games and Culture–FALL 2018
Dr. Whalen

From Solitaire to Skyrim, from flight simulators to Flappy Bird, videogames are one of the major modes of media consumption today. They create common experiences among users that we can share and learn from, and they are touchstones in popular cultures. As digital texts, videogames allow different kinds of expression and new rhetorics, and as cultural artifacts, videogames join a larger ecology of media which contain and construct cultural values like representation, diversity, social justice, identity, equality, freedom. As videogames are products of a culture with these and other values, videogames in turn, reflections of those values as well as vehicles for motivating change. This class, “Games and Culture”, is an investigation of these cultures and conversations. This class is an elective for the Communication and Digital Studies Major or the Minor in Digital Studies.

Summer and Fall 2017

ENGL 375A6: Modernism, Poetry, and Periodicals–ONLINE SUMMER MAY/JUNE

Dr. Scanlon

This is a five-week course taking as its primary text the issues of Poetry magazine from 1912-1922 as digitized by the Modernist Journals Project. Poetry was arguably the most important “little magazine” of its time, publishing a wide variety of poems, reviews, poetic manifestos, and literary debates that reveal the slow emergence of what we came to call Modernism. Using the artifacts of the digital archive and working collaboratively in primary research and close reading, we will discuss 1) the poetry itself, mastering the vocabularies and methods of poetic analysis, and 2) the development of the schools, ideals, and voices of Modernism, including but not limited to its negotiation of war, national culture, audience, and literary tradition and experiment. This course is asynchronous; work will be completed in half-week blocks.

COMM 307G: Gender and Communication–ONLINE SUMMER MAY/JUNE

Dr. Johnson-Young

Communication and gender will explore the ways in which communication constructs gender. This course will be a guided study of the different areas in which communication and our understanding and expectations of gender emerge. Starting with theoretical foundations and approaches to understanding gender and communication, the course will move into areas such as family, workplace, media, and politics. Students will have the opportunity to critically engage with scholarship and apply this to real-world examples through their own reflections, creations, and other original works.

ENGLISH 375B4 OL: LATE VICTORIAN DECADENT LITERATURE: READING THE AVANT-GARDE LITERARY MAGAZINE THE YELLOW BOOK WITHIN BRITISH FIN-DE-SIÈCLE CULTURE–ONLINE SUMMER MAY/JUNE

Dr. Foss

This course takes for its primary focus the groundbreaking avant-garde literary magazine The Yellow Book, which was published by The Bodley Head in 13 volumes between April 1894 and April 1897. Arguably the defining periodical of its day, The Yellow Book had a dual emphasis on literature and visual art. This course, as an English department offering, only will require you to read the former, although you are welcome to explore the relationship between the art and the literature in any number of your assignments, if you are so inclined. Its written materials offered its readers an astonishingly wide variety of texts (poetry, short fiction, novellas, drama, and multiple types of nonfiction offerings as well) by approximately 140 different writers, including Max Beerbohm, Olive Custance, Kenneth Grahame, Henry James, Ada Leverson, E. Nesbit, Arthur Symons, Graham R. Tomson/Rosamund Marriott Watson, H.G. Wells, and William Butler Yeats.

For more info., please email Professor Chris Foss (cfoss@umw.edu)

LING 470S “Endangered Languages, Vanishing Voices”–FALL 2017

Dr. Fallon

By the end of this century, linguists estimate that at least half of the world’s languages will become extinct. More radical estimates are that by 2100, 90% of languages now spoken will die. This course will examine the phenomenon of language extinction and endangerment and will grapple with the following questions: What is it like to be the last speaker of a language? What is it like to speak a language that has not been passed on to a younger generation? What social, political, and economic factors contribute to language endangerment? What can be done to reverse language loss through revitalization efforts? Finally, the course will explore what is lost when a language is lost, not only in terms of linguistic diversity, but also the invaluable cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples of their ecosystems and the environment.

ENGL447N: Renaissance Drama–FALL 2017

Dr. Mathur

The English Renaissance (c.1500-1700) is most often associated with the works of William Shakespeare. But Shakespeare wrote only a small fraction of the approximately two thousand plays that were performed between 1576, when James Burbage opened the first public playhouse, and 1642, when the theaters were closed on the eve of the English Civil War. In this senior seminar, we will turn our attention to the work of Shakespeare’s lesser-known but equally talented contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton. We will also examine the work of some early female dramatists, including Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Margaret Cavendish. We will pay close attention to the medieval theatrical traditions that influenced their work, explore the genres in which they wrote, study the historical circumstances of their work, and their critical reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Studies in Exploitation Cinema–FALL 2017

Dr. Barrenechea

This course investigates the historical, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions of low-budget “exploitation” cinemas produced around the world. Although lowbrow cinema culture (“paracinema”) has traditionally been relegated to the margins by the academy, it has recently begun to gain attention from the scholarly community. This includes us! Consideration will be paid to how “trash” cinema traditions reveal particular attitudes about modernity, global integration, and the worldwide influence of Hollywood. The course proceeds through national and international case studies while tracing issues of production, distribution, and exhibition from the silent cinema to the digital age.

English 375B3: Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity–FALL 2017

Dr. LaBreche

Sexuality—and particularly sexual excess—became increasingly central to literature and identity over the course of the seventeenth century. “Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity” will explore why these changes occurred and how they continue to impact our understanding of modernity. We will explore and enjoy a variety of English and French texts from this period; topics of special interest will include the development of individualism, the political stakes of sexuality, sexuality as a response to philosophy and science, urbanization and the development of homosexual community, conceptions of gender, pornography, and obscenity, and the relationship of these concepts to comedy, the novel, and women’s writing.

ENGL 376ZZ: 19th- and 20th-Century British Feminist Novel (Gender in the Novel, and Other Revolutions of the Mind)–FALL 2017

Dr. Lorentzen

This course is designed as an in-depth, reading-intensive course in one of the more interesting (sub?)-genres of the British novel, the Feminist novel or narrative. In English 376ZZ, we will examine a number of different concerns upon which scholars have focused in Feminist or Gender Studies, including issues of education, reading, gender(s), class, nationality, empire, violence, sexuality, desire, transgression, and “revolutions of the mind.” We will explore just how well the critical commonplaces about feminist novels hold up, as we scrutinize or own unique genealogy of the 19th- and 20th-century British feminist novel. While we will recognize that there is great disagreement about what “feminism” is or does, we will not be seeking to re-define the term in any corrective way. Rather, we will be exploring the ways in which what we will be calling “feminisms” function in the British novel, and the ways they can help us excavate the literature and cultures of the last 200+ years, with regard to these particular narratives. Authors include Mary Wollstonecraft (of course!), Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Jeanette Winterson.

Spring 2017

ENGL 202A1: Writing through Myth

Dr. Bylenok

This general education, writing intensive course focuses on how contemporary writing uses, adapts, steals from, or re-envisions the ‘old stories’ of mythology (Greek, Roman, Norse, among others) and brings them into a contemporary context. Myths tell stories of encounters between the human and the supernatural or divine—stories of creation, destruction, power, mortality, and identity, that seek to explain the natural and cultural world we find ourselves in. We will explore the implications and consequences of these stories in the 21st century, and we will ask: what is myth in the age of the Anthropocene? Readings will include texts in a variety of genres, including essay, fiction, poetry, and film. Students will develop critical and creative writing skills through historical research, literary analysis, and creative adaptation and response.

ENGL 202F: Writing about Appalachian Folklore

Dr. Almond

English 342 – Contemporary British Fiction

Dr. Haffey

Great Britain in the post-WWII years was a society in transition. Not only were dozens of former colonies to the British Empire gaining their independence, but also England itself was experiencing a great demographic change. As Louise Bennett writes in a 1957 poem, England was experiencing “colonization in reverse,” as people from the former British colonies were immigrating to English cities by the thousands. The literature of the period thus reflects these shifting demographics as writers rethought national and political identities in new ways. Through the consideration of a diverse set of fictional texts from the latter half of the twentieth century, this course offers an introduction to contemporary British literature in an era defined by postcoloniality, changing class relations, shifts in conceptions of gender and sexuality, technological innovation, and globalization. In this course, we will focus specifically on the years between 1960 and 2000, employing feminist and postcolonial theory as a way to examine the racial, ethnic, and gender relations of the time. During the second half of the semester, we will turn our attention to the conventions of postmodern literature and theory.

Engl 376A1: South-Asian Literature and Film

Dr. Dasgupta

This class will explore contemporary South-Asian literature and film from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and its Diasporas. Many of these texts represent and respond to important historical events like India’s Independence movement, the violence of the Partition, the “Emergency” of 1975, or socio-economic and cultural phenomenon like immigration, globalization and liberalization of South-Asian economies while exploring emerging ideas of nationhood, and the changes in gender dynamics and the structures of class and caste through the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With a hands-on approach to literary research, the class will focus on how to critically read culturally different texts. Class requirements are weekly quizzes, two term papers and a group presentation.

Engl 375 B5 Medievalism and the Modernist Temper

Dr. Kennedy

This course explores the relationship between late Victorian and Modern authors to medievalism—a focus of study one could argue was in fact invented by the birth of philology during the late Victorian period. The works of such writers as Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Auden all reflect what could be described as a frustrated medievalist temperament; how they read and understood medieval writers such as Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, and some Arthurian material will help students actively engage in comprehending a key moment in British literary history.

ENGL 460E: Seminar in Ethics and Literature

Dr. Scanlon

In this advanced seminar we will read works by many of the leading theorists in the field Ethics and Literature and will also read a number of literary works, applying and developing the theoretical models we study. We will keep before us questions such as these: what is literature for? Can it help us to live well in a suffering, complicated world? When an author writes, what is his or her obligation to the subject matter, the language, or the readers who will eventually receive that text? Who has the authority to represent certain viewpoints, experiences, or historical events? How can literature act as witness, as resistance, or as a site at which we may encounter the (human and nonhuman) Other? When we read, what is our obligation to the text, the author’s utterance, and/or the world we re-encounter after our reading? In the midst of all this, it is vital as well to ask. . . but what about beauty?

English 449R – The Bloomsbury Group

Dr. Haffey

Named after the area of London in which they lived and worked, the Bloomsbury Group was an assemblage of English artists, writers, philosophers, and critics who made enduring contributions to their respective fields during the first half of the twentieth century. Among its most famous members are novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, biographer Lytton Strachey, and economist John Maynard Keynes. These individuals were connected less through a shared aesthetic and more through the enduring ties of their personal relationships with one another. As Dorothy Parker has famously said of the group, they “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” The members of the Bloomsbury Group are famous (or perhaps infamous) not only for their individual accomplishments, but also for the new kinds of domestic, romantic, and sexual arrangements they forged. As critic Victoria Rosner has claimed, Bloomsbury’s legacy lies in its creation of “a new kind of domestic life, one far more flexible, radical, and experimental than that of its Victorian predecessors.” In this course, we will explore the literature, art, and criticism of the Bloomsbury group, paying special attention to their approach to personal relationships and domestic arrangements. Though we will read a variety of texts from the group’s various members, we will devote the bulk of the semester to its novelists: Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

LING 375J: Language and Race

Dr. Lee

This course examines the ways in which race and ethnicity manifest in language use and in ideas about language in the United States. Students will produce an educational video as well as critically reading and evaluating current sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological scholarship in race and ethnicity. This course fulfills elective requirements in the English major and the linguistics minor.

LING 470R: Discourse Analysis

Dr. Lee

What is discourse? How do we study it? What is the significance of discourse analysis in the field of linguistics and other related fields? What are different types of discourse analysis?

While studying the history of the field and reading seminal pieces in the field, we will participate in bi-weekly discourse analyses. About half of class time will be spent on us jointly coming up with a transcription system, listening to recordings that class members collected and analyzing them collectively, learning and practicing discourse analytic techniques, and working towards the final project.

ENGL 376A6: Sherlock Holmes

Dr. Lorentzen

English 376A6 is designed as an in-depth, reading-intensive course in one of the most enduring writers of the British Victorian and Modernist ages, John H. Watson (or, for those who prefer, Arthur Conan Doyle), and his wonderful novels, adventures, and memoirs of his super-detective, Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock captured the interest and attention of a reading public like no other detective, in a century with a long history of detective and sensation fiction, had ever done to that point, and he still remains the most famous (fictional?) detective the world has ever seen. As part of the time period in which novels became the ascendant literary genre, we would normally approach the fiction of this age by examining a number of different concerns upon which scholars have focused in studies of the rise of the novel specifically, and fiction generally. From serial publication and other questions of form to the debate over the effect of novel-reading on various populations of readers (women readers, working class readers, colonial readers), and from the reception history of British fiction to the rise of the public lending libraries, railway novel stands, and other popular outlets, we would engage the crucial questions about the genre that readers of the era often faced. From concerns with imperial issues to exponentially increasing levels of literacy, and from the “Woman Question” to revolutionary evolutionary theories, these periods embodied drastic changes in all facets of British life. In the midst of a simultaneous “Industrial Revolution” and “Age of Reform,” Victorian (and Edwardian) fiction often addressed the comprehensive “Condition of England” question by examining some of these changes in a variety of cultural spheres. Indeed, the criticism of the literature of this age is often overwhelming in its sheer volume, breadth, and intensity. There are many critical areas which we might expect to explore in our intellectual community, including issues of education, reading, gender, class, nationality, empire, social reform, industrialization, evolution, revolution, colonialism, public health, and the numerous and ubiquitous social institutions — including, but not limited to schools, courts, the police, churches, the military, the medical professions, government institutions, and philanthropic societies. If Watson’s chronicles of Sherlock are like most Victorian novels, we might suppose that they are novels which are largely about novels themselves, books about books, filled with readers and texts of unimaginable variety, interpretation, decoding, signifying, representation, and the many pitfalls inherent in such hermeneutic processes. Indeed, the academic and intellectual joy inherent in studying this literary time period primarily often involves the great wealth of didactic messages about both this world and our own 21st-century lives that we can learn from these terrific texts, reaffirming the crucial power that reading fiction can have in our real day to day existence.

However, in English 376A6, our primary critical question could very well be whether these critical methodologies, although they are most appropriate for the other fiction from the age of Sherlock, are equally efficacious in the study of his works. We might find, as much as we love to read about our favourite detective’s adventures, that we will have to ask serious questions about the “literariness” of the Holmesian canon. The first, and most uncomfortable question, may well be: “Is an undergraduate course devoted exclusively to the study of Sherlock Holmes worthwhile?” Is there enough intellectual content to supplement the entertainment that the tales undoubtedly deliver? One brief look at the canon of Sherlock criticism reveals that the lines of inquiry that scholars employ in essays, articles, and books about Holmes prove very different from the concerns upon which other period intellectuals focus. Does Sherlock necessitate different scholarly approaches, thereby creating a vibrantly unique field of critical endeavor, or do these disparate critical conversations indicate some sort of lack in academic substance? There are very few undergraduate courses in America solely devoted to Sherlock Holmes; why is this the case, in view of the immense popularity that the books enjoy in terms of film and television adaptations? Is a course on Sherlock Holmes invariably a Cultural Studies offering instead of an English class? If so, is that OK???

Texts may include some of the writers who come before, and give birth to, Sherlock Holmes . . . such as Vidocq, Poe’s detective stories, a Wilkie Collins mystery novel, and Victorian detective fiction written by, or about, some women who take a proud place as detectives in Victorian literary narratives. Of course, the class will also read three Holmes novels (Study in Scarlet, Sign of Four, and Hound of the Baskervilles) and quite a few of the short stories. Finally, in line with the above question about cultural studies methodologies, we will examine a number of Sherlock interpretations from the worlds of film, television, and other popular culture. The game is afoot!

Summer and Fall 2016

ENGLISH 375B4 OL: LATE VICTORIAN DECADENT LITERATURE: READING THE AVANT-GARDE LITERARY MAGAZINE THE YELLOW BOOK WITHIN BRITISH FIN-DE-SIÈCLE CULTURE–Dr. Foss

SUMMER 2016, 5-WEEK MAY/JUNE TERM

For more info., please email Professor Chris Foss (cfoss@umw.edu)

ENGL 376F: Globalization and Literature–Dr. Dasgupta Fall 2016

This course will use theory, literature and film to first understand globalization as a phenomenon by studying how globalization has impacted both the global north and the global south (first and third world settings). Then we will analyze how globalization is represented in literature and the ways in which globalization has influenced literature, especially categories like “global literature” or “world literature”. We will engage both with the critiques of globalization, especially from within a postcolonial praxis which has positioned globalization as a form of neocolonialism and oppression, as well as with critical frames which have focused on how globalization has enabled a new kind of mobility and new modalities of identity and belonging.

ENGL 301: Magazine Writing–Professor Subramanian. Fall 2016

This course is an immersion into longform journalism, reporting that uses literary tools such as plot, point of view, characterization and scene setting that are typically associated with fiction. The class will function as an online magazine covering the city of Fredericksburg, in which students will publish reported personal essays, personality profiles and multimedia story packages. These writings will be informed by the examination of texts ranging from Walt Whitman’s dispatches during the Civil War to Cosmo and Rolling Stone to web publications such as Slate and BuzzFeed. Through these readings, students will also learn about the relatively recent, and uniquely American, development of the longform genre. In addition to the writing, students are expected to contribute to class discussions and workshops as well as prepare a formal presentation on a print glossy of their choosing.

ENGL 375JJ: Literature of the Great War–Dr. Scanlon Fall 2016

World War I (1914-1918) was also known as the Great War and, shortsightedly, the War to End All Wars. This class, prompted by the centenary of that conflict, focuses on literary representations of the war and its far-reaching effects not only on individuals and governments but on social hierarchies, beliefs, practices, and institutions. War literature has been emphatically and narrowly defined as a masculine genre shaped by direct experience of combat and the camaraderie of fighting men. Our readings will broaden that convention by including both traditional war texts and literature from the Home Front and of women’s experiences of service. We will gain basic understanding of the war’s conflicts, technologies, and maladies. Topics include but are not limited to production of/challenges to values such as heroism, honor, and patriotism; representation of trauma, disability, and mental illness; constructions and representations of gender, sexuality, identity.

ENGL 313F: Ecoliterature–Professor Pineda Fall 2016

In this WI course, we will both study and produce narratives with a focus on nature and the environment, as well as seek to define (and, perhaps, redefine) the landscapes comprising our sense of place. The course will feature numerous multi-genre texts, ranging from nature-based memoir to eco poetics, and we will utilize the writing workshop model for critiques of the creative work.

English 455J: Seminar: Moby-Dick– Professor Mary Rigsby Fall 2016

Spend the semester immersed in a study of Herman Melville’s highly acclaimed 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Students in this seminar will become the crew of the Pequod, each student being assigned to a particular whale boat or a job on board the ship. Study will involve three levels of research. First, as members of the crew, students will enhance their close reading of the text by enacting scenes related to tasks associated with whaling, as well as other key events that happen on board the Pequod. Students will maintain a log of their experiences, write letters to their friends and families back on land, engage in discussions of published texts that were available to readers in 1850, and develop their own interpretations of Captain Ahab’s choices in the pursuit of the white whale. Second, as time travelers outside the fictional world, students will also have the task of creating a profile of Herman Melville to better understand the experiences, values, and interests that likely motivated his creation of the novel. Third, as active twenty-first century literary critics, students will generate their own assessment of the novel and join the meta-level of academic critics who have not wanted to give up the ship, so to speak. Perhaps some students know what happens to the Pequod. Those students are urged to be silent about the outcome, so as not to discourage other students from registering for this seminar! This seminar will emphasize the careful reading of the novel and is appropriate for senior English majors whether they have previous experience studying the novel or are having their first encounter. Class is capped at 15. No stowaways allowed!

Engl 375 B5 Medievalism and the Modernist Temper– Dr. Kennedy Fall 2016

Engl 251HH Folktale, Myth and Archetype–Dr. Kennedy Fall 2016

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the notion of archetype as a flexible way to understand how patterns in literary texts repeat across time in order to create a coherent sense of meaningfulness in everyday life. Developed most famously by Joseph Campbell’s applications of the work of Carl Jung, archetypal criticism combines an appreciation for psychological approaches to literature with anthropological and broader cultural questions of the human habit of narrating experience.

LING 470P: Language, Gender, and Sexual Assault–Dr. Parker Fall 2016

Prerequisites for LING 470P: Students must have successfully completed Linguistics 101 and a 300-level linguistics course, or contact the professor by email to describe relevant academic preparation (e.g. coursework, major in women’s and gender studies) regarding possible Permission of Instructor.

This seminar will introduce students to research and thinking on the language and linguistic strategies found in discourse about sexual assault. In our interdisciplinary approach, we’ll draw from knowledge, research methods, and applications developed primarily in linguistics, as well as psychology and women’s and gender studies across the curriculum. We’ll discuss and apply linguistic methods for analyzing women’s language about sexual assault in a variety of contexts. We will examine how constraints, conventions, and social forces present in immediate situations of sexual assault and broader levels of society influence the language people use in discourse about sexual assault.

We will examine sources from different genres represented in qualitative and quantitative research studies, scholarship, and activist contexts, including interviews, narratives, reports, and testimony in courtroom and community social justice contexts and projects. We’ll make use of several theoretical frameworks (e.g. feminist theory, intersectionality, black feminist thought, and queer theory) to analyze how our use of language is influenced by the intersection of diverse factors (e.g. gender, ability, age, education, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, sexual identity and orientation) as they play out in dynamics of personal, cultural, and social contexts within hierarchies of power.

Through the semester, students will develop their abilities to present and lead discussions of existing research and scholarship, as well as conduct and present empirical and action-research projects. Research papers/projects, exams, reflective and other speaking and writing exercises, in-class activities, and occasional quizzes will contribute to evaluation of student work.

Spring 2016

English 375B3: Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity–Dr. LaBreche

Sexuality—and particularly sexual excess—became increasingly central to literature and identity over the course of the seventeenth century. “Sexuality and the Origins of Modernity” will explore why these changes occurred and how they continue to impact our understanding of modernity. We will explore and enjoy a variety of English and French texts from this period; topics of special interest will include the development of individualism, the political stakes of sexuality, sexuality as a response to philosophy and science, urbanization and the development of homosexual community, conceptions of gender, pornography, and obscenity, and the relationship of these concepts to comedy, the novel, and women’s writing.

ENGL 375B2: Introduction to Cultural Studies: Literature, Theory, and Pedagogy (or, “Only Connect!”)—Dr. Lorentzen

In this course, we will begin by becoming familiar with the major genealogies of cultural studies theory, from its origins in the 1960s at the Birmingham Centre in England through the ways in which they have evolved throughout the subsequent decades of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. After this introduction, we will begin an examination of cultural studies pedagogy in the literature classroom, paying special attention to the plight of the liberal arts university today, in the midst of marginalizing STEM initiatives. Perhaps in more than any other area of academic endeavor, the necessity for embracing an “only connect” pedagogical philosophy in the literature classroom is of utmost importance. Indeed, the study of literature in the university demands a number of connections: between literary texts and students’ lives, between popular culture and putatively canonical texts, between theory and experience, between English and a vast variety of texts and experiences from other disciplines, between the past and present, and between academic realms and actual societal realms desperately in need of social justice. We will be striving to make all of these connections in English 375B2. As Paulo Freire has suggested, we must read the world critically as well as reading the word critically!

Hence, during the remainder of the course, we will turn our critical gazes toward a few literary works, such as a couple of Shakespeare plays about the problems of aging and a shorter Dickens novel on the dangers of Utilitarian education and “fact”-based schooling, but also toward some historical texts, some texts about media, some films, television, music, and other areas of popular culture. Finally, we will practice what we preach by having the students in class contribute some of the texts they wish to study to our final weeks of the syllabus. Requirements may include some reading quizzes, a group project, a short final paper, and a final exam.

LING 470Q: The Quest for Phonological Features—Dr. Fallon

In the world’s languages, there are about 200 different vowels, and over 600 consonants. Yet these speech sounds can be described in a much smaller, universal inventory of only one or two dozen distinctive features–the atoms of sounds. This course will take students on an exciting intellectual quest for the ultimate constituents of language, the fundamental elements of Universal Grammar. We will review important proposals from various intellectual currents, from the Prague School (Trubetzkoy, Jakobson) to various strands of generative phonology (Jakobson, Chomsky, Halle, and others). We will grapple with the nature of features (whether they are binary, privative, or multivalent) and their organization (whether they occur in bundled matrices or are enriched by a featural hierarchy). We will also examine the issue of underspecification, a state when features are not activated in the mind. We will see how different assumptions and models change the answers to our questions. The focus will be on feature theory and theory building and refinement, not on the detailed analysis of the phonology of any particular language. The course will include a phonetics overview. Other phonological concepts will be reviewed as they arise.

COMM 370P: Political Speech Writing—Dr. Ohl

*Special for Spring 2015*: In anticipation of the 2016 elections, this special topics course in political speech writing will focus on the critique, reception, and invention of persuasive political messages. Digital media creates new demands and obstacles for speechwriters attempting to gain public attention and shape the citizenry. The ephemeral and participatory nature of digital media greatly favors the production of immediate and inventive messages—oftentimes in 140 characters of less! Students will learn and practice rhetorical strategies tailor-made for twenty-first century political discourse. This class is designed for majors in Communication and Digital Studies, as well as those interested in working for governmental and non-profit agencies.

ENGL 451A: After Books—Dr. Whalen

When books end, what happens to literature? What forms will replace or remediate the paper codex? Is that succession an inevitable event, and if not, why does the notion of books disappearing produce so much anxiety as expressed in fiction and film? This seminar will be an exploration of the material histories and digital futures of the book. Through a series of “mediations” and a final, large-scale seminar paper, students will explore and propose some answers to these provocations.

Summer and Fall 2015

ENGL 375A6: Modernism, Poetry, and Periodicals–ONLINE SUMMER MAY/JUNE

Dr. Scanlon

ENGL 206A: Global Issues in Literature–SUMMER (MAY/JUNE term)

Chris Foss

This course fulfills your Global Inquiry (GI) or the Arts, Literature, and Performance—Appreciation (ALPA) general education requirement. It will ask you to engage with multiple perspectives on a cluster of interrelated themes/issues as expressed in literature in order to explore the contact zone between Anglo-European perspectives and disparate world cultures outside Western Europe and North America. You will read one textual representative from each of the continents (with the exception of routinely-overlooked Antarctica): NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It, Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project. As you move from continent to continent, your goal will be to consider both the universal and the particular aspects of love, sorrow, joy, pain as inflected by the different contexts of self, family, community, culture and by the various possibilities for arrival, displacement, assimilation, resistance.

ENGL 202W: Writing the Open Road–FALL

Professor Johnson

This is a writing intensive course that will explore the various iterations of the road trip. Students will read and respond to contemporary poems, essays, stories, and novels. Readings will be focused on the road trip as it is rendered in American literature and will include books by Cormac McCarthy, Rebecca Solnit, Denis Johnson, and others. Students will write both critical and creative responses to the assigned readings.

ENGL 202F: Writing about Appalachian Folklore–FALL

Professor Almond

As a writing seminar, this course is designed to further develop the students’ writing skills within the context of Appalachian folklore as it is presented in various literary forms by and about the people of Appalachia. This course requires participation in all class activities—instructor facilitated discussions, small group discovery and discussions, peer reviews and feedback, in-class writing assignments, and formal presentations. In addition to these day-to-day activities, students are required to write an oral history, a critical analysis, a book review, and a research paper.

While the work load is impressive, it yields rich results.

ENGL 375KK: British Romantic Women Poets, 1770-1840–FALL

Chris Foss

Until only about fifteen years ago, most classes in British Romantic Literature focused almost exclusively on an all-male set of poets often referred to as the Big Six: William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. This course proposes an alternative Big Eleven of women writers for your consideration. This alternative female canon breaks nicely into two distinct generations, as does the male pantheon. We will begin with a first generation I have dubbed (appropriating the name of another famous all-male club) The Magnificent Seven, all born before American Independence: Anna Seward, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Tighe. Then, we will turn to a second generation I have dubbed The Fab Four, all born after the French Revolution: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.), Caroline Norton, and Mary Howitt. The course finishes up with a two-part Canonball unit, for which you will get to join in constructing a part of our calendar of readings that I have reserved for student-selected works. We will begin by reading texts by some of the other 51 women poets in our anthology that have been selected as canon-worthy by the students who took this class the last time it was offered. Then, we will read a poem (or a small set of poems) nominated by each and every one of you as equally worthy of canonization; these poems not only will be the focus of your major project, but they will become part of the official assigned readings the next time I teach this course.

ENG 340: Modern British Fiction– FALL

Dr. Haffey

This course is an in-depth study of the fiction produced in Great Britain from approximately 1890 to 1939. Throughout the semester, we will consider some of the forces acting on the literature of this period and focus on the various ways, means, and dilemmas of written expression in a modern society. We will examine the defining characteristics of modernism and its particular responses to the literary conventions that came before. Modernist fiction is known for its experimental styles, and we will explore how these texts play with narrative techniques in innovative ways. The course will pay special attention to issues of identity related to race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality as they appear in the literature of the period. Authors on the syllabus include Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood and others.

ENGL 376C: Early Modern Libertinism–FALL

Dr. LaBreche

Sexual excess plays a key role in seventeenth-century British and French literature. This course will offer the chance to explore and enjoy some of these texts and will ask why libertinism meant so much to early modern writers and readers. Assignments and discussion will include topics such as changes in comedy, the emergence of pornography (and the novel!), the development of homosexual subcultures, and the growth of literature by women. We will also explore how libertine sexuality connects to modernization in religion, science, philosophy, and politics. English authors will include Marvell, Rochester, and Behn as well as earlier and later libertine writers. French authors will include figures such as Montaigne, Molière, La Fayette, and Bayle.

English 441Q: Virginia Woolf–FALL

Dr. Haffey

This course will be an in-depth study of both the fiction and nonfiction of Virginia Woolf. As a class we will trace Woolf’s career and the development of her narrative style in the years between the two World Wars. Though the majority of the class will focus on Woolf’s novels, we will spend time examining Woolf as an essayist and as a literary and cultural critic in works including A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

Spring 2015

FSEM100L3: Jane Austen: Text/Film/Web

Dr. McAllister

No other classic writer dominates popular culture quite like Jane Austen. This course asks “Why Austen?” by looking at selected novels; scholarly research on Austen’s popularity; and a wide variety of Austeniana, including films, videos, blogs, games, fan sites, and more.

ENGL 202F: Writing about Appalachian Folklore

Professor Almond

While the work load is impressive, it yields rich results.

ENGL202T: Writing Through Memoir

Professor Pineda

This course will provide you with an introduction to the contemporary memoir. We will study and discuss various elements of craft in creative writing (Point of View, Characterization, Imagery, Framing, etc.) within critically acclaimed works by memoirists Bechdel, Bottoms, Flynn, Grealy, Land, Satrapi, and Strauss.

ENGL 202X: Writing about Music

Dr. Hale

Music, especially Rock music, transcends boundaries and disciplines. Writing has and continues to be a core aspect of Rock music, from the artists writing the songs and giving interviews to the scholars and journalists who write on the music and movements brought about by the songs themselves. Often dismissed as being a passing fad or having no social or academic value, Rock music tells a story. The genres can include Motown, blues, progressive, punk, disco, grunge, rap, and indie rock. Each captures moments in history and social movements. Further, rock music gives rise to iconic figures who, for better or worse, become the voice of a generation or group. There are so many ways to examine rock music as it lends itself to discussions on race relations, copyright, censorship, feminism, youth subcultures, and the notion of value and art. This class intends to engage students, through writing and readings, in the music as well as the discussions surrounding the music.

ENGL 251AA: Games and Culture

Dr. Whalen

A critical exploration of cultural value within video games — including issues of gender, race, sexuality, class, labors — and the ways by which contemporary and historical games represent or respond to those topics.

English 251EE: Dickens at 200

Dr. Lorentzen

This course is designed as an in-depth, reading-intensive course in one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, Charles Dickens. Writing during the Victorian era, arguably the period in which novels increasingly became the most widely read literary genre, Dickens captured the interest and attention of a reading public like no other English writer ever has (ironically, the closest example we may have is the recent popularity of J. K. Rowling, who both knows her Dickens very well and has may things in common with him). In English 251EE, we will examine a number of different concerns upon which scholars have focused in Dickens studies, an area of criticism that is second only to Shakespeare studies in its sheer volume, breadth, and intensity. As the desultory subtitle for the course indicates, there are many critical areas which we can explore in our intellectual community, including issues of education, reading, gender, class, nationality, empire, social reform, industrialization, evolution, revolution, colonialism, public health, and Dickens’ many institutions — including, but not limited to schools, courts, the police, churches, the military, the medical professions, government institutions, and philanthropic societies. And, like most Victorian novels, Dickens’ novels are largely about novels themselves, books about books, filled with readers and texts of unimaginable variety, interpretation, decoding, signifying, representation, and the many pitfalls inherent in such hermeneutic processes. Through reading the fascinating novels we will encounter in English 251EE, we will try to develop a sense of the “inter-connectedness” of Dickens’ literary works, and how his works of fiction “speak to each other.” By examining how his literary motifs (such as “literacy” or “education” — major motifs in this class) are developed, revised, challenged, parodied, and turned on their heads throughout different novels and their corresponding historical contexts, we will attempt to expand our notions of what constitutes the “Dickens canon.” Finally, we will constantly consider what we can learn about our own 21st-century lives from these terrific texts, reaffirming the crucial power that reading Dickens’ fiction can have in our real day to day existence.

English 375C: Sex, Love, and Power in Renaissance England

Dr. LaBreche

English 375C will focus on the role of sexuality, sex, and gender in England’s earliest modern literature: the poems, plays, and prose of the sixteenth century. We will explore in particular how Englishmen and women conceived of sex and gender in this period, how these conceptions drew upon continental and classical sources, and how they helped support the larger structures of England’s social, political, religious, and intellectual life. Over the course of the semester, we will study the social realities of sex and sexuality in Renaissance England, practice textual analysis, and work on oral and written presentation and argumentation skills. Ultimately this course will help you understand sources of and alternatives to our own conceptions of sex and sexuality, and give you a strong basis for enjoying the beautiful, funny, sometimes raunchy, and sometimes troubling texts of England’s golden age.

ENGL 376VV: Electronic Literature

Dr. Whalen

A survey of born-digital literary work: poetry, fiction, and other genres of literary work produced and experienced through computers.

Engl 376A1: South-Asian Literature and Film

Dr. Dasgupta

ENGL 457P: Seminar on Emily Dickinson and H.D.

Dr. Scanlon

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and H.D. (1886-1961) are two of the most important poets that America has produced, and this seminar will undertake a deep study of their work, both individually and in a provocative co-reading. H. D. knew the poetry of Dickinson (who died just months before her birth) and admired it, but the class is less about direct influence than poetics and receptions, which correspond in striking ways: their tight lyric forms, their experimental use of punctuation, their response to war(s), their use of natural imagery, their critical containment as poetesses of “feminine lyric,” and their personal/critical diminutions as “darling lunatics,” to name just a few. Our interest, of course, will be in (literary, gendered, and other) discontinuities across the century of their writing as well as these and other similarities.

Though the class will focus primarily and deeply on poetic works, our primary readings will be broader. We will also read Dickinson’s letters (themselves beautifully wrought works on nature, humanity, religion, and poetry). For H.D., our reading will include one of her thinly-veiled autobiographical novels and one of her reflective memoirs (Tribute to Freud, an account of her long relationship to Sigmund Freud, of whom she was twice an analysand).

ENGL 457X: Radical Black Fiction Writers

Dr. Tweedy

The course will be exploration of African American texts and authors that attempt to mediate American racism through fictive constructions of Afro-topia predicated upon violent revolt against oppression.

LING 470P: Language, Gender, and Sexual Assault

Dr. Parker

Fall 2014

ENGL 376ZZ: 19th- and 20th-Century British Feminist Novel (Gender in the Novel, and Other Revolutions of the Mind)

Dr. Lorentzen

ENGL 449N: Partition of India

Dr. Dasgupta

The senior seminar will explore South-Asian literature and film from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and its Diasporas which depict the Partition of India into India and Pakistan (1947), an event which led to 2 million deaths, displaced between 12-16 million people on both sides of the border and continues to destabilize the region to the present day. We will study the representations of social suffering, mourning as well as healing and survival in literary and cinematic texts from the 1940s to 2000s, both vernacular (in translation) and Anglophone. We will explore the following questions: How is violence represented in literature? Can one theorize upon Partition literature as the literature of trauma? How does literature and film intersect with historical narratives about the Partition? Who is the Other in these narratives? How did race, class, caste and gender shape one’s experiences? Literature and film will be contextualized with historical narratives, survivor testimonies, newspaper reports and the scant visual archive of the Partition. We will read some postcolonial, feminist and trauma theory.

ENGL 313E: Fantasy Writing

Dr. Rochelle

You want to write fantasy? Elves, dragons, and wizards, right? Werewolves and vampires? Contemporary fantasy is far more than that. Students will develop and write stories set in their own secondary worlds both mundane and magical, and read selected works of in the genre.

ENGL 375JJ: Literature of the Great War

Dr. Scanlon

ENGL 364: CONTEMPORARY ASIAN NOVEL: JAPAN

Dr. Rabson

This course introduces students to contemporary works of Japanese fiction in social and historical context. It is divided topically into five segments: World War II and Its Legacies; The Continuing Military Presence; The Changing Status of Women; Japan’s Minorities; and Living in a High-Growth Economy. Background essays provide contexts for works of literature in each segment. The course seeks a balance in reading literary texts as social commentary and as works of art. Students are encouraged not to explicate a work simply as an anecdotal presentation of an issue, but to evaluate critically how—and whether—its impact is achieved successfully.

ENGL 251DD: 19th-Century British Gothic Novel (“Zoinks!”: Monstrosity, Scary Castles, and Scooby-Doo Villains)

Dr. Lorentzen

“Here there be monsters!” This course is designed to function as a lower-level introduction to the British Gothic novel of the 19th-century, and to Gothic Studies as a genre. We will examine multiple versions of Gothic sensibility, monstrosity, alternative literacies, and the sublime experience of terror/horror that these novelists, in disparate ways, sought to evoke. Since this course is both reading-intensive and lower-level, your assignments will be limited to five reading quizzes, two essay “blue book” exams, and energetic and engaged participation. We’ll start with “classic” British Gothic, and then move to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the Romantic period. Next, we will turn to the long Victorian age, and read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then finish up with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

ENGL 202W: Writing the Open Road

Professor Johnson

This is a writing intensive course that will explore the various iterations of the road trip. Students will write personal essays, research essays, and critical responses to assigned readings. The readings will be focused on exploring the road trip as rendered in American literature, from Kerouac and Nabokov to more contemporary writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Rebecca Solnit.

ENGL 202T: Writing through Memoir

Professor Pineda

This course will provide an introduction to the contemporary memoir. We will study and discuss various elements of craft in creative writing (POV, Characterization, Framing, etc.) within four critically-acclaimed works by memoirists Bechdel, Land, Manguso, and Small.

ENGL 202F: Writing About Appalachian Folklore

Dr. Almond

Students will read works of fiction and non-fiction that reflect the folk traditions and values of the people of Appalachia. Students will also write four papers: documentation of an oral history, a critical analysis of a piece of fiction by an Appalachian writer, a research paper, and a book review.

LING470Q: Quest for Phonological Features

Dr. Fallon

FSEM 100M: The Good Society: Exploring Utopia
Prof. Rochelle

What, then, is a good society? How can we best live well? Can we ever come close to the utopian myth of the Golden Age, when humans supposedly inhabited a perfect world as a gift from the gods? This course will consider these questions and others as we examine utopian and dystopian fiction and film and their rhetoric—for what the author is arguing for or against. Our primary focus will be on contemporary works, but we will ground our discussion in such classical utopian narratives as Genesis, Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia. Students will visit a nearby intentional community and design their own better society.

FSEM 100K5: Documentary Filmmaking: Its Rhetoric and Production

Dr. Rao

This FSEM will be part of a Living and Learning Community called “Documenting Life at UMW”. Students in this FSEM will work with Rao’s COMM 353: Visual Rhetoric class to produce a multimedia documentary about life at UMW. The class will also discuss the use of documentaries to reflect, shape, and alter public argument and discussion. Interested students should contact Anand via email (arao@umw.edu) for entry into the class.

COMM 353: Visual Rhetoric

Dr. Rao

*Special for Fall 2014: COMM 353 will work with Rao’s FSEM on the multimedia project “Documenting Life at UMW.” Both courses will make use of the new Technology Convergence Center, and COMM 353 will meet in the Active Learning Classroom.

This course is centrally concerned with the study and production of visual artifacts as they are used for persuasive effect. The visual component of any argument has long been recognized for its importance, from the color of the suit worn by the speaker, to the backdrop for the press conference. With the use and development of new communication media, the study of rhetoric and argumentation has grown to include more sophisticated understandings of what visual rhetoric entails and how it is produced.

Spring 2014

ENGLISH 376A4: Post-Civil War American Novels

Dr. Kolakoski

In this course, we will trace the development of the American novel from the post-Civil War era through the twentieth century, paying particular attention to form and content. Some of the texts under consideration include Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Cather’s My Antonia, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Plath’s The Bell Jar, Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, and/or Morrison’s Beloved. In addition to reader-response theory, we will employ a variety of theoretical approaches to the novel, including but not limited to American Pragmatism, New Criticism, New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, Modernism, Structuralism and Deconstruction.

ENGL 451A: After Books (Seminar in New Media)

Dr. Whalen

Taking its course number as a cue (as in Fahrenheit 451), this Seminar in New Media examines creative and critical works that address anxieties toward the obsolescence of the book in this late age of print. This course fulfills the seminar requirement for English Majors and satisfies the capstone requirement for Minors in Digital Studies.

ENGL 376VV: Electronic Literature

Dr. Whalen

This is a survey of historical and contemporary work produced in the genre of Electronic Literature, broadly defined as “born digital” texts meant to be accessed via digital technology. Sub-genres and modalities include: hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, playable media, net.art, and others. Students will study electronic literature and produce their own.

American Poetry Since 1975

Dr. Wade

Taking as its point of departure the year 1975–the year in which Saigon fell; Rocky Horror Picture Show and women’s basketball debuted in the U.S, on film and television, respectively; and Space Mountain opened in a Tomorrowland that no longer represents a possible future but rather a nostalgic vision of what could have been–this course investigates contemporary American poetry, tracing its many forms and iterations through approximately the last four decades and focusing particularly on living writers. Students will compose formal papers and informal reflections on the readings in addition to actively participating in class discussion. Texts will include a combination of anthologies and single-author books.

Engl 376A1: South-Asian Literature and Film

Dr. Dasgupta

Dr. Rao

This is an intensive special topics class in which we will explore the theory and practice of social media with a focus on the use of social media by both individuals and groups. Students will explore the theories and concepts of online social networking, and develop an understanding of how social media strategies can be applied in a variety of settings.

LING 470N: Sociolinguistic Field Methods

Dr. Lee

This seminar offers a hands-on introduction to the theoretical underpinnings and practical tasks of conducting sociolinguistic research based on ethnographic fieldwork. In the process of carrying out a semester-long research project, students will learn various data collection methods (e.g, ethnographic fieldnotes, sociolinguistic interviews, and recording of interaction and interviews) and ethnographically-informed discourse analytic techniques.

LING 375J: Language and Race

Dr. Lee

This course examines linguistic practices of and language ideologies about various ethnoracial groups in the U.S. as well as exploring the influence of historical events and sociocultural forces such as immigration and slavery on sociolinguistic phenomena.

ENGL 376A2: American Drama since 1945

Dr. Richards

ENGL 376A2: American Drama since 1945 surveys mainstream drama of the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present with emphasis on the form and content of literary texts rather than on the plays’ production histories. Requirements of the class include bi-weekly quizzes, three short response papers, a midterm examination, and a final examination. The texts under consideration are: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Loraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother, August Wilson’s Fences, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park.

English 376A9: British Victorian Pastoral Novel — George Eliot & Thomas Hardy

Dr. Lorentzen

In English 376A9, we will examine the Pastoral Novel tradition in the mid- and late Victorian periods through an in-depth, reading-intensive exploration of the texts of its two major novelists: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Thomas Hardy. We may also read one of Richard Jefferies’ novels for context, as well as a few of Hardy’s poems. Works may include Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Far From the Madding Crowd, Return of the Native, Tess of the D’urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.