| ENGL 101-01 |
American Television
Instructor: Greg Steirer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 220-02. For most of the twentieth century-and arguably still today-American television has functioned as a form of "public sphere," in which contemporary debates about race, class, gender, and sexuality were represented through visual and narrative forms. In this course we will examine television from institutional, aesthetic, social, and historical perspectives so as to understand its role in the negotiation of cultural change and identity. Attention will be given to traditional broadcast television and cable as well as more recent streaming television platforms, such as Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 101-02 |
The Legend of King Arthur: From Medieval to Monty Python
Instructor: Chelsea Skalak
Course Description:
The legend of King Arthur has captured imaginations for hundreds of years, inspiring adaptations even into the present day. Yet when the legend originated a millennium ago, it was already considered a tale of a bygone age, the dream of a romantic past. This class will study the medieval origins of the King Arthur story and then trace that legend through time to the present day, including the films King Arthur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As we read, we will consider how each text responds to both its historical context and its own imagined past.
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10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
ALTHSE 110 |
| ENGL 101-03 |
The History of Love
Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost
Course Description:
We will trace the long history of love narratives in the Western tradition, from the classical world to today. We will follow the evolution of key concepts such as sexuality, parental authority, mutuality, companionship, possession, jealousy, and subjectivity. Authors read will likely include Sappho, the Song of Solomon, Plato, Shakespeare, Austen, and Morrison.
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09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
EASTC 411 |
| ENGL 220-01 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Sheela Jane Menon
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
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11:30 AM-12:20 PM, MWF
DENNY 204 |
| ENGL 220-02 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Siobhan Phillips
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
EASTC 410 |
| ENGL 220-03 |
Introduction to Literary Studies
Instructor: Russell McDermott
Course Description:
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
EASTC 108 |
| ENGL 221-01 |
Narratology
Instructor: Greg Steirer
Course Description:
As human beings, we encounter narrative everywhere: not only in literature, comic books, and film; but also in our myths and religions, our personal and national histories, our career plans, and our politics-even our everyday conversations. Almost all aspects of social life, in fact, depend upon narrative, a fact that has led some theorists to suggest that the ability to create and understand narrative is one of the defining features of human beings as a species. But how does narration work? What are its underlying rules and structures? This course will introduce students to the study of narration-called narratology-through the examination of stories in multiple media, including literature, film, and television.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
EASTC 112 |
| ENGL 222-01 |
Cookbooks: Craft and Culture
Instructor: Siobhan Phillips
Course Description:
This course will consider the cookbook as a literary form and a cultural artifact. We will focus on US texts from the last three centuries, considering how these works inflect questions of temporality, labor, ecology, and identity, among other topics. Readings will include primary texts from Bracken, Child, Chao, Lewis, Smart-Grosvenor, and Toklas along with a range of historical and theoretical secondary texts.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
EASTC 314 |
| ENGL 222-02 |
Theories and Methods in Media Studies
Instructor: Russell McDermott
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 220-04. This course introduces students to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of media. It will build on the frameworks and analytical skills introduced in general media studies courses. This course will put a variety of analogue and digital media forms and practices in conversation with multiple theoretical lenses and methodologies, including medium specificity, media effects, cultural studies, media archaeology, ecocritical, and infrastructural. Students will be asked to apply these models and methods to specific objects, practices, and systems and to begin research in media studies. Students will also be asked to consider the costs of media practices: to the environment, to society, and to individuals.
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10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
EASTC 314 |
| ENGL 311-01 |
Chaucer's Women
Instructor: Chelsea Skalak
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-02. Patient Griselda, sensual Alisoun, long-suffering Constance, the irrepressible Wife of Bath - in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer provides a wide range of women who alternately uphold and challenge the medieval boundaries of femininity. In this class we will explore medieval conceptions of gender, sexuality, and authority by way of Chaucer's most memorable women, read alongside confessional manuals, scientific treatises, and religious tracts that provide insight into how medieval scholars conceptualized the differences between men and women.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
ALTHSE 207 |
| ENGL 311-02 |
The American Auteur
Instructor: Greg Steirer
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 310-03. Auteurs are usually defined as filmmakers whose individual styles and extraordinary control over the elements of production allow them to create unique films that reflect their own personalities and artistic preoccupations. In this class we will examine the work of four contemporary American directors who are usually identified as auteurs: David Lynch, Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, and Gregg Araki. Through examinations of their films and through discussions of film authorship and culture in the United States, we will interrogate the concept of auteurism as it functions in America today.
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03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 321-01 |
Literature of Migration & Displacement
Instructor: Sheela Jane Menon
Course Description:
This course examines the literature that has emerged from complex histories of displacement, migration, war, exile, and genocide. Focusing on 21st century literature that spans Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central America, we will consider how these histories continue to shape texts and communities around the world. Our primary literary texts might include Crystal Hana Kims debut novel, If You Leave Me (2018), Valeria Luisellis essay collection, Tell Me How It Ends(2017) and Mosab Abu Tohas poetry collection, Forest of Noise (2024). Guided by postcolonial and cultural studies methodologies, our readings and discussions will analyze the variety of forms employed by these transnational texts in order to understand how (and under what conditions) they articulate diverse conceptions of nation, culture, and identity,
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10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 112 |
| ENGL 331-01 |
Media and Empathy
Instructor: Russell McDermott
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 320-01. This class asks us to interrogate the role of emotion and empathy in our engagements with media objects. Together we will construct working definitions of empathy, sympathy, and pity and apply these definitions to a variety of media. We will touch on the moral qualities of empathy, and the role of art in doing good or citizen making. Theoretically, the class will draw from a diverse set of readings from philosophy to literary studies to neuroscience and will task students with thinking across disciplines. Concepts drawn from these readings will be applied to a variety of objects: from autofiction and memoir, to video games and virtual reality. The course will culminate in a final critical or creative project which will extend or address key concepts from the class.
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01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 341-01 |
The Politics of Love
Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston
Course Description:
Love in sixteenth and seventeenth century in England goes hand in hand with politics. Queen Elizabeth declared to parliament, showing them a wedding ring, that she was married to England-primarily so the men in power around her would stop trying to marry her off to various European princes. Thomas Wyatt sat around a dinner table with his friends at court reading a poem about Anne Boleyn's seduction. Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn's husband, miraculously did not have Wyatt beheaded. Mary Wroth was forced to marry an indebted gambler whom she didn't love because she was her father's, and then her husband's, property. Wroth's sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, explores the intimacies she shared after her husband's death with her married cousin, William Herbert, whom she did love. Poems of this period generally are recognized as the Golden Age of the lyric-the short-poem. We will begin our reading of the sixteenth-century poem with adaptations of Petrarchan sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey, and move to the mastery of the form by Sidney and Spencer. The seventeenth century begins with the revival of the sonnet by Shakespeare, and includes brilliant passionate poems declaiming the love of God and the love of women and men by Herbert, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and others. In addition to discussing the cultural context of politics in which our poets lived and declared their love, we will also learn the techniques of describing and analyzing these poems aesthetically, to learn what techniques engender them as memorable and beautiful objects.
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10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
EASTC 301 |
| ENGL 404-01 |
Senior Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Carol Ann Johnston
Course Description:
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.
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01:30 PM-04:30 PM, W
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 404-02 |
Senior Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Jacob Sider Jost
Course Description:
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.
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01:30 PM-04:30 PM, T
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 404-03 |
Senior Thesis Workshop
Instructor: Chelsea Skalak
Course Description:
A workshop requiring students to share discoveries and problems as they produce a lengthy manuscript based on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the approval of the instructor.Prerequisites: 403.
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01:30 PM-04:30 PM, R
EASTC 303 |
| ENGL 500-01 |
Making Media Criticism
Instructor: Russell McDermott
Course Description:
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