Instruction and practice in the forms, styles, grammar, and analytical skills necessary for success in academic writing at the undergraduate level. Open to first-year students recommended by the English Department. Open to other first-year students and sophomores only by permission of the instructor.

Advanced instruction and practice in the forms, styles, grammar, and analytical skills necessary for successful writing at the undergraduate level. Intended for students not recommended for 110, and students who took English 110 but who want additional focused writing instruction.

Designed to help students practice forms of writing that are at once personal and practical: writing required of applicants for scholarships, graduate and professional schools, other post-Hendrix opportunities, as well as Odyssey and other grants. Students learn to incorporate their experiences, passions, studies, and intellectual and social influences into compelling narrative that prepare them for life after Hendrix. This is writing as self-presentation. Students have the flexibility (in consultation with the instructor) to produce writing that matches their personal needs. Does not offer LS credit. Prerequisite: Junior or Senior standing, or permission of the instructor

Focuses on writing the creative essay and might include other creative nonfiction forms as well (such as feature writing), all with an eye toward publication. Emphasis is placed upon studying professional nonfiction works and conceiving, composing, editing, critiquing, and re-writing student work. Prerequisite: W1 and LS

A poem, Robert Frost said, is “an arrest of disorder”—a verbal machine that helps us mediate the chaos of experience. Through poetry we distill thoughts, clarify emotions, and experience a payoff of pleasure and insight. This course teaches the craft of poetry through discussion of model poems, in-class exercises, peer workshops, and directed practice in writing both free and formal verse. It aims to develop students’ critical as well as creative voices. Prerequisite: W1 and LS

Directed writing of prose fiction. Workshop format, with theory of fiction and outside reading assignments. Prerequisite: W1 and LS

This course explores the writer's role as observer and narrator of social, political and environmental change. Using poems, fiction, and essays as models, students write their own works of real or imagined witness and revise a final piece in their genre of choice. Readings include works by Seamus Heaney, James Agee, Alice Walker, Jhumpa Lahiri, John McPhee, Mohsin Hamid, and Zadie Smith. Prerequiste: W1 and LS.

A topics course in creative writing. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include Creative Writing: Nonfiction, Meaning in Contemporary American Poetry, Writer as Witness, Poetry of Place, Queer Poetry. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisites: W1 and LS

In this course, students learn how to translate personal experience and research into effective pieces of creative nonfiction. We strive to define the term “creative nonfiction” by reading work across a broad spectrum of content and form, and we learn how to read these pieces both as a student and as writer. We also delve into the ethical considerations that come into play when writing from “real” life. Together we strive to develop writing practice, or in other words, the habit of art. This course is open only to Murphy Scholars in Literature and Language.

Directed writing of poetry, with close attention to technique, form, and voice. Students offer constructive criticism of one another’s work. Some outside reading required. Prerequisite: ENGC 303

Directed writing of short stories or novels, with close attention to technique, structure, and voice. Students offer constructive criticism of one another's work. Some outside reading required. Prerequisite: ENGC 304

This is a seminar in the craft of writing focusing on brief forms of prose and prose poetry. Writers study the aesthetic of flash fiction, micro-essays and prose poems, in an attempt to understand and utilize cross-pollination between genres. Students generate a chapbook size portfolio of hybrid genre work. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGC course

An advanced topics course in creative writing. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include Literary Hybrids, Fiction Writing and Publishing, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Non-fiction Essay, Non-fiction and Poetry. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisites: Senior standing or consent of instructor

Limited to senior English majors with a Creative Writing Emphasis, this seminar course focuses on independent writing projects. Departmental faculty and seminar members provide input and critiques as each student works toward a creative manuscript and a critical essay addressing narrative strategies or poetics. The project is defended orally. Students must have a second reader (not necessarily an English Department member); students must receive project idea approval by Fall Break of the senior year. The instructor and the second reader consult to determine the student’s grade.

Students interested in an internship in creative writing should contact the department chair or the film and media studies coordinator.

The aspirations and anxieties of American society are dramatized in its places of amusement. Designated spaces of recreation, leisure, and consumption have served as sites of technological fantasy and nightmare, social inclusion and exclusion, class mixing and bifurcation. This course explores places of amusement, each in its own way serving as a barometer of American culture, and anticipating as well as ushering in new historical epochs. Coney Island, Disney World, Las Vegas, and online digital environments constitute the primary sites of analysis for this course.

Not only has the metropolis served as a center for film production and exhibition since the medium's inception, but filmmakers have continually represented the city in fresh and innovative ways. Hollywood blockbusters, documentaries, art films, melodramas, slapstick comedies, crime thrillers, and digital online shorts provide a useful lens to understand how the film industry has evolved from the late nineteenth century to the present, as well as major shifts in NYC's own urban development. At the same time, we analyze how screen representations of NYC comment on the meaning and complexity of American identity.

A basic introduction to the concepts and techniques of film analysis and criticism. For students in their first or second years of study.

While “Film and the Environment” might bring to mind conventional nature documentaries featuring an authoritative voiceover describing intricate phenomenon, this course instead considers how every film relates to the environment, insofar as every film reflects and creates a world through the mechanical reproduction and mass production of space and time. Moreover, cinema—itself an art of ephemera—can slow, reveal, or accelerate changes in the environment. This course explores film’s revelatory capacity and creative production of the environment through a range of film examples. For students in their first or second years of study.

The French New Wave refers to a period of world film history (generally 1959-1964) in which artists feverishly directed their cinephilia toward the creation and criticism of a generically-hybrid, formally experimental, and highly allusive cinema. Impatient with films that merely adapted literary narratives or painterly aesthetics, French New Wave artists and critics self-reflexively called attention to cinematic techniques of making meaning and telling stories. This course explores the important films and writings by/about French New Wave artists such as Varda, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, and Rohmer. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

To what extent can a camera document and become part of our lives? To what extent can a screen and its moving pictures reflect, reveal and become our world? Including and moving beyond conventional biopics, this course combines self-reflexive, observational, interactive documentary films in the spirit of asking and complicating these questions. Showcasing a range of relationships among cinema, self, family, and community, the films of this screening-intensive course feature subjects who looks at or hear themselves cinematically, people who learn more about themselves and their world via the screens and cameras in their environment. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Drawing upon both film theory and history, this course explores the changing appeal, the vibrant spectacle, the demystifiying self-reflexivity, the socio-political resonance, the structured wish-fulfillment, the attractive memorability, and the narrative resonance of the Hollywood film musical. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

In an era of increasing technological convergence, how do we understand the industrial and cultural histories of film, radio, television, video, and web technology as distinct, but also interrelated? "Modern Media Transitions" provides an understanding of major shifts in modern media technology through the close analysis of films, radio broadcasts, television programs, videos, and web-based content. We begin with the emergence of cinema in the 1890's and continue to the present day. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of feature films and documentaries made by African filmmakers, focusing on issues of globalization, education, gender, popular culture and environmental change in contemporary Africa. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

In the last 15 years, new media technologies have transformed the documentary film. Just as innovative modes of production, online distribution, and exhibition have fundamentally changed documentary practice, dynamic forms of documentary have had a profound influence on how people view the world around them. This course explores how prominent filmmakers, public television stations, international activist and human rights groups, and amateur videomakers have made use of and shaped today's rapidly changing documentary formats. We examine works by Errol Morris, Laura Poitras, and Oliver Stone, Witness and HBO, Vice, citizen journalists, and the New York Times. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course features canonical films of world cinema, including national cinemas such as Soviet Montage, German Expressionism, Italian Neo-realism, Hollywood/American Independent, and additional world films of historical significance. In addition to studying significant films, people and movements of film history, this course also considers how and why certain films merit this canonical status. In this class, studying the history of cinema involves studying the history of questions about aesthetics, culture, and politics that inform and are created by film. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of 20th and 21st century theories of how and why film make meaning, how and why spectators create and absorb these meanings, and the changing conception of film within historical, cultural, aesthetic, and social contexts. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of non-fiction film in the context of ethical, ideological, socio-political, cultural, environmental, and aesthetic concerns. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A topics course in Film and Media Studies. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include Our Zombies/Ourselves, Global Mexican Filmmakers, Film & American History, Cinematic Lives. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A seminar course in Film and Media Studies. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include Cinematic Landscape, Landscape & Atmosphere, War, Cinema & Text. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

Students interested in an internship in film studies should contact the department chair or the film and media studies coordinator.

Close readings of short narrative fiction from several cultural and linguistic traditions, through which students develop a vocabulary of technical and formal terms for the study of narrative.

Close readings of poems from the Renaissance to the present day.

An introduction to the various periods and genres of world drama.

Study of short novels and the films made from them that introduces students, via the practice of close reading, to the specifically literary and cinematic properties of each form. The course interrogates the idea that cinematic adaptations of literary works must necessarily be thought of in terms of success and failure, that is, in terms of fidelity.

This course invites you into an intensive study of creative nonfiction. We focus on the essay as a literary object, a communicative device, and a source of intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment. Together, we work to develop your understanding of how good essays work, from their conception in an author's experience of the world through the hard work of their development and the pleasure of their transmission to others. In the process, we devote sustained attention to your writing, working to cultivate your distinct perspective and to strengthen your ability to engage, interest, and persuade your audiences.

A study of the diverse genres within Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, read in Middle English.

This course explores the Gothic from its first appearance in the middle of the 1700’s to its current deployment in film and popular culture. Reading works by Walpole, Lewis, Shelley, Stoker, Stevenson, and others, students study the conditions that made the Gothic possible, the coherence of the conventions that organize it, and the rich variety of the authors ranged under its standard. In this course students examine the different ways that it manages (or fails to manage) historically specific problems of sexual, political, and racial difference.

Novels from the 1950s to the present that reflect Africa’s diverse cultures and history.

This course explores representations of the Holocaust. Students consider what it means to represent an extreme or limit experience—one felt by perpetrators and victims alike to be unrepresentable. Course texts include novels, memoirs, graphic novels, films, and excerpts from theoretical works.

Works by women writers from a variety of African regions and cultures.

An examination of narrative, poetic, and cinematic responses to war from the Civil War to the present. The focus of the course varies, with three chief versions: a chronological survey of the entire span; an examination of a more limited period (even to one armed conflict); and an inquiry on the human body as an instrument and artifact of war. Not all authors are combatants/veterans/men/U.S. citizens.

An introduction to the novel form as it developed in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. Discussions connect the novel's evolution to the shifting social and political circumstances it addressed.

An examination of crime fiction and non-fiction from the 1840’s to the present, including focuses on Poe’s early detective stories, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon, the Golden Age of British detective fiction, the American “hard-boiled” detective genre, and police procedurals. Crime film offerings include film noir, Hitchcock’s canonical works, and neo-noir.

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved expresses memory’s frightening grip on former slaves through a ghost story. It’s a novel all about possession. Marginalized communities have often turned to speculative fiction—the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, the surreal—to say what mainstream realism can’t, to challenge dominant narratives, and to tell a good story. Black writers have also used it to appreciate the African roots from which they were violently sundered. This course serves as an introduction to African American literature by studying its tradition of speculative fiction from the late 19th century to the 21st century in prose, poetry, and film.

A topics course in pre-1900 literary studies. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include The Essay, Literature and the Body, Reason vs. Desire in Literature, Digital Humanities. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught.

An examination of how literary and other representations have depicted their culture's relationship to the environment. The exact content varies from term to term, though the course studies various literary and representational forms, including some theoretical writing. While the course examines how writers have experienced, understood, and envisioned their environment and their place in it, related issues in the texts—such as character, gender, race, and economics—are also studied.

An intensive introduction to literary study, the course is designed to help prospective English majors understand the distinctive features of various genres of literature. Through an examination of selected poetry, prose, drama, students read critically, understand critical terminology, an develop a basic vocabulary for discussing and writing about literature. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Students pursue in-depth exploration of a topic in literature written in English. The course, taught in one-hour weekly sessions, has a low faculty-to-student ratio (1:2 or 1:3) and stresses, writing, reading, peer critiquing, and oral presentation skills. It culminates in a group activity such as a field trip, student symposium, engaged-learning project, or gathering with other tutorial pairs. This course is open only to Murphy Scholars in Literature and Language.

A reading of Chaucer's masterpiece as a work of comedy, tragedy, and romance. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Introduction to outstanding works of British literature from the medieval period to the close of the eighteenth century, studied in chronological sequence and with some attention to historical context. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

An examination of Shakespeare’s works. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A topics course in British literature from 1500-1660. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries excluding the plays of Shakespeare. Plays are selected from the major works of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Ford, Tourneur, and Marston. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A survey of English literature from 1660 to 1707, with an emphasis on the poetry, drama, and criticism of the era. Special attention is paid to works by Dryden, Pepys, Wycherly, and Congreve. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course explores the emergence and early development of the British novel. Working with several representative novels, students discuss and write about the narrative conventions eighteenth-century writers absorbed, resisted, or created; competing ideas about readers and readership in the period; and the place of the upstart novel among more well-established literary objects. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of eighteenth-century prose and poetry (excluding the novel) and drama. Special attention is focused on the works of Pope, Swift, Gray, Johnson, Sheridan, and Blake. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Fiction, drama, and poetry from the former British Empire, addressing the diversity of colonial legacies in the Caribbean, India, Africa, and Asia. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

The impact of social institutions on domestic happiness in novels from Defoe to Hardy. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of Romantic poetry, fiction, and criticism. The course is centered on careful reading of the literature, but also considers the connection of Romanticism to contemporary politics and culture. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A focused study of nineteenth-century British poetry, with attention to issues of length, completeness, and closure. Poems studied range in length from several lines to several hundred pages. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A survey of the 19th century U.S. novel, with particular attention to its attempts to provoke and shape its readers’ sense perceptions and ethical sensibilities. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Close analyses of works by Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Brooks, Hughes, Bishop, Cummings, and other representative poets. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course asks, What is modernism? We address that question by exploring texts from the era as artistic objects as well as framing that exploration in terms of the cultural moment they both responded to and helped create. We primarily study fiction and poetry, though other genres (film, drams, nonfiction) may receive consideration. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

In what ways does postmodern literature react against or further the modernist project, and how does the post-war period contribute to this process? Where has contemporary American literature taken us? We begin to answer these questions through the study of fiction and poetry, though other genres, including drama and literary theory, may receive consideration. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

The evolution of the Arthurian canon in English, from the 14th century to the present. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

An intensive survey of the literatures of the early Americas, with particular attention to the questions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Primary sources are drawn from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries; secondary sources include theoretical and historical writing on gender, sexuality, and the body. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Uses the idea of “postmemory” to explore the afterlife of the Holocaust. What relationship does the generation that came after have to the trauma of those who came before? Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Emphasizes close study of the stylistic and formal strategies used by writers in Britain and its colonies in the first half of the 20th century. Also considers representations of colonialism, cosmopolitanism, industrialization, suffragism, and the institution of mass media in the period. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course investigates the category of “the experimental” to consider 20th century British fiction and asks students to consider the puzzling fact that in Britain the most experimental—that is, the strangest—narratives often seem to take the most conventional form. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

In this course, we read and discuss key works in contemporary black feminist theory, especially those focused on the afterlives of slavery and its legacies in the American world. We read these texts in conjunction with a range of primary sources, from the antebellum slave narrative to contemporary poetry and visual arts. Throughout, we attend to the creativity and resilience that have characterized Black life, Black art, and Black thought in the Atlantic world. Readings may include selections from Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, and other leading Black feminist scholars, writers, and artists. May be used to fulfill either the department’s requirement in literary theory or one of the pre-1900 course requirements, but may not be counted for both. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Considers “theory” as an interdisciplinary enterprise that explores the meaning of signifying systems, in part by rejecting so-called common sense. Examines structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, feminism, and queer theory, among others. Intended for students of all disciplines. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

The spread of the English language and Anglophone literature beyond England, from medieval Scotland to 20th-century Singapore. Also examines the impact of global English on indigenous languages and cultures. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

An intensive study of the stylistic and topical cross-pollination between texts commonly described as “literature” and those generally classified as “criticism,” this historically wide-ranging course will encourage students to experiment with both the form and the content of their own analytical writing. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

An introduction to a school of theoretical inquiry. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Recommended: ENGL 297. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

A topics course in pre-1900 literature. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Recent section topics include Slavery in American Literature, American Renaissance and its Others, Sense and Sensation in 19th Century America, Literary Landscapes: Arkansas, Books: Reading in the Digital Age. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course aims to develop an appreciation and understanding of how Vietnam has been imagined in literature and film by Vietnamese, American, and European artists, within the context of Vietnamese history from the early 19th century to the present. Course material covers the spectrum of narrative expression by including prose fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. Prerequisite: Any 200-level ENGL/ENGF course

Students pursue in-depth exploration of a topic in literature written in English. The course, taught in one-hour weekly sessions, has a low faculty-to-student ratio (1:2 or 1:3) and stresses, writing, reading, peer critiquing, and oral presentation skills. It culminates in a group activity such as a field trip, student symposium, engaged-learning project, or gathering with other tutorial pairs. This course is open only to Murphy Scholars in Literature and Language.

An intensive topics course in British Literature from 1500-1660. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

A survey of Blake’s view of society and religion as these are reflected in his lyrics, his prophetic books, and his paintings. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of Austen's "Northanger Abbey," "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," "Emma," and "Persuasion."

An examination of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of fictional and non-fictional prose by the modernist British writers D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. We suggest that, despite differences in style, the two writers are similarly preoccupied by the concept of the irrational, especially as it is figured as antagonism, aggression, and war. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

A study of Achebe’s classic novels and short stories and of Soyinka’s masterworks of drama, autobiography, and fiction. Works include No Longer At Ease, A Man of the People, Death and the King’s Horseman, and Ake’. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

An intensive topics course in American literature. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

William Faulkner and John Edgar Wideman provide a study in contrast and a study of deep similarities: a white rural Mississippian writing in the early part of the century and a black urban Pennsylvanian writing in the current era, both of whose works not only show stylistic similarities but also share persistent concerns of the past’s presence in the present; of place; of race and gender; and of the use of fiction to investigate the authors’ personal sense of history, home, and self. We explore three of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and then Wideman’s Homewood trilogy. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

An in-depth study of Hemingway’s career, from In Our Time to his posthumously published The Garden of Eden. Literary criticism of Hemingway is also be a major subject of study. In addition to paper(s), students are expected to research the criticism and to lead class discussions based upon their research. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

An intensive topics course in pre-1900 literature. This course can be repeated for additional credits as long as the section topics are different. Consult the online course schedule for information about the topics currently scheduled to be taught. Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

This course taken during spring of the senior year focuses on independent research projects. Departmental faculty and other seminar members provide input and critiques as the student works toward a significant piece of original literary criticism. The project is presented/defended orally. Each student must have a second reader (advisor); the student must solicit the second reader and receive approval of the project early in the fall semester. The second reader does not necessarily need to be an English Department faculty member. The ENGL 497 instructor and the second reader consult to determine the student’s grade. This course is limited to senior English majors. Prerequisite: Any 300-level ENGL/ENGF course

Students interested in an internship in English should contact the department chair.