ENGL 427.001     Southern Literature     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Powell

Southern literature of the past and present contributes in interesting ways to regional and national dialogue. Studying it not just as American literature, but as the output of a particular regional tradition and set of circumstances, is useful to readers from different backgrounds who want to know more about how literature is created and its relationship to the society in which it is written, published, and read. With these assumptions, this course introduces key characteristics, phases, and issues in southern literature through a systematic survey of selected major authors that emphasizes slave narratives, the Southern and Harlem Renaissances, and contemporary literature of the New South. In addition to completing course readings in poetry and prose, and attending and participating in class activities, participants will complete 3-4 written assignments and demonstrate mastery of course materials on quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

ENGL 430.001    TOPICS: Slavery, Literature & Culture     TTH  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Whitted

(Crosslisted with AFAM420)

This course explores how contemporary literature and other cultural representations grapple with the historical realities of slavery and the lives of enslaved people in the United States. Through fiction, comics, film, art, and media, we will study the ways that form and audience expectation influence how we remember the past and relate to one another in the present. Our goal is to raise questions not just about historical accuracy, but also about ethics and aesthetic choices, creative freedom, taste, and cultural appropriation.

ENGL 433.001    TOPICS: Censorship & Controversy in Children’s and Young Adult Literature     TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Johnson-Feelings

The course will focus on recent controversies related to literature for audiences of children and young adults. Texts will include books such as Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three; Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak; Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Dr. Seuss picture books with the film “The Political Dr. Seuss”, and more. Though the focus is contemporary literature, the books and controversies under consideration will be placed into historical context through reading secondary materials such as Nancy Larrick’s 1965 article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books” and a session at the Hollings Special Collections Library.

ENGL 438E.001    Caribbean Literature    TTH  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  | Jimenez

(Crosslisted with AFAM 438E)

In this course, we will be reading several authors from the Caribbean and the diaspora to examine how they explore the repercussions of the Caribbean’s various histories of colonialism, imperialism, and empire. We will be reading authors such as Elizabeth Nunez, Kwame Dawes, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Mayra Santos Febres, Sylvia Wynter, Xavier Navarro Aquino, and Sharma Taylor. Students will also have the opportunity to produce their own creative work. 

ENGL 439.001    TOPICS: Literature and AIDS     TTH  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Madden

(Crosslisted with WGST430)

When Philadelphia appeared in movie theaters and Angels in America appeared on the Broadway stage in 1993, they signaled a shift in cultural representations and in popular understandings of HIV/AIDS. While stigma and trauma lingered, these representations indicated a shift in the cultural imagination. Two years later, the death toll in the US would peak as new drug therapies became available and HIV became a manageable condition rather than a death sentence. This class will examine that pivotal moment in American culture, as well as what happened before, what happened after—and what has happened since. We will examine literature, film, and other cultural representations, paying attention to social and political contexts. Though we will focus primarily on American cultural responses, we will also consider some international representations. How did HIV/AIDS influence American culture in the first two decades, 1981-2001? How are those early decades still represented in popular culture? How was HIV/AIDS represented in literature and film? in children’s literature? in popular music? What can those texts teach us about the history of LGBTQ activism and protest, death and dying, rage and remembrance, the nature of community and our responsibility for one another?

ENGL 439.002    TOPICS: Literature and AI    TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Gavin

This course will invite students to consider literature and artificial intelligence (AI) from three perspectives: 1) we will examine the representation of AI in contemporary fiction; 2) we will study the history of automatically-generated literature, from analog experiments of the early twentieth century to the interactive fiction of today; and 3) we will gain hands-on experience making our own AI-generated literature to better understand its current limitations and future possibilities. The reading list will likely include Ray Nayler’s The Mountain and the Sea (2022), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), and Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control (2021). Course requirements will include active class participation, weekly short writing assignments, and two longer pieces, one analytical and another creative.

ENGL 439.003   TOPICS: Speechwriting    TTH  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Ercolini

(Crosslisted with SPCH 464)

This course is designed as part theoretical examination and part practical workshop on the arts of advanced advocacy, with emphases on stases of value and policy. We will investigate old and new theories, methods, and complexities of the speech writing process; examine the questions of voice and advocacy in our contemporary moment; experiment with different modalities of speech preparation, composition, and delivery; critically analyze advocacy campaigns from multiple angles and perspectives; and work through the processes of research, analysis, and development of policy argumentation towards advocacy on selected term-length topics of interest. While this course is designed for SPCH minors and ENGL majors and minors, this course is open to anyone interested in practices of advanced public speaking, value and policy advocacy, and theoretical questions about power and language, the relationship between speech and writing, and the modes of influence we have within institutions and amongst one another.

ENGL 487.001     Black Women Writers     TTH  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Finney

(Crosslisted with AFAM 487)

An examination of literature by and about black women, including fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography. This study will focus on issues that emerge from the creative representations of black women and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class that interrogate what is both particular and universal experiences.

ENGL 200.001     Creative Writing & Community     TTH  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Amadon

(AIU & VSR)                                                       

Creative Writing, Voice, and Community is an introduction to writing as a form of social engagement. By examining creative work by established writers, we will discover formal strategies we can put to use in creative assignments. Both the outside texts and writing assignments are geared toward helping us to explore and assert our own identities and aesthetic values. In addition to reading and analyzing outside texts and creating poems and stories of our own, we will become accustomed to describing and helping further the development of our classmates’ writing, the ultimate goal being the creation of a workshop community in which everyone feels able to take risks in their writing.

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ENGL 200.002     Creative Writing & Community     TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  TBA

(AIU & VSR)                                                       

Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.

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ENGL 200.003     Creative Writing & Community     TTH  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  TBA      

(AIU & VSR)                                                       

Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.

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ENGL 200.004     Creative Writing & Community     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  TBA       

(AIU & VSR)                                                       

Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.

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ENGL 200.005     Creative Writing & Community     MWF  |  10:50AM-11:40AM  |  TBA       

(AIU & VSR)                                                       

Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.       

ENGL 270.001     World Literature     MWF  |  9:40AM-10:30AM  |  Alexander

(CPLT 270) (AIU)

This course is a survey of world literature from the ancient world to the contemporary period. We will examine how authors from diverse cultures and historical contexts communicate the five senses in their works. We will also examine how these senses are possibly more intense (or less) when the body is isolated, under stress, or facing political persecution or imprisonment. Focusing on the sensorial in a text will help us draw out meaning and apply it to contemporary culture as we have experienced isolation, conflict, and war.

ENGL 280.J10     Literature and Society     ASYNCHRONOUS  |  Muckelbauer

(AIU & VSR)

Topic:  Science Fiction

Mathematician and novelist, Vernor Vinge summarizes a paper he delivered at a NASA conference in 1993 as follows: “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” This event has become a popular topic of debate among scientists and artists alike: are we actually on the verge of a major transformation to our species?  Is this superhuman intelligence even possible? And if so, is it desirable? Or controllable? As we will see, Vinge and others focus primarily on the implications of artificial intelligence as the key element of this transformation.  However, other contemporary thinkers point to significant changes in bio-technology (for instance, our increasing ability to alter nuclear DNA) as indicating that our near future might look significantly “post-human.”  In fact, some have even argued that our society’s increasing dependence on mood-enhancing medications indicates that we are already well on our way to becoming something other than human.  But what exactly do we mean by this? What, precisely, does it mean to be human? These are big questions with profound moral, ethical, and legal implications. In this class we will engage a series of different works each week that not only pose the questions but wrestle with some possible responses (most weeks, this will involve a movie, a short story, and assorted videos and articles that explain the current state of a particular technology)  Our goal is not to definitively answer these questions, but to begin thinking seriously about them as we move toward our post-human future.

ENGL 282.001    TOPICS: Jewish American Literature and Film      MW  |  3:55PM-5:10PM  |  Schoeman

(AIU)

“America” is a composite mosaic born out of the successful encounter and blend of numerous ethnic identities. It’s “the melting pot.” Do you know who invented this phrase? A Jewish immigrant. Have you ever reflected on what this expression actually means and implies? You will now. Through the examination of how the “ethnic story” and “ethnic identity” are progressively constructed and, by entering mainstream culture, in turn end up (re)shaping national/majority identity, students will gain a new understanding of “ethnicity” as a very dynamic notion. One that also entails struggle, conflict and resistance to the dominant culture’s oppressive forces as well as to the pull and oppression of one’s own original culture. We will seek answers to pressing questions such as: What does it mean to be/become American? How do immigrants experience immigration, assimilation, cultural transformation, and what role do gender, race and class play? How is the “identity of the fathers” experienced by the first-generation all-American children? Why, as it is often remarked, were Jews disproportionately numerous among the Civil Rights Movement supporters in the 1960s and are disproportionately numerous today among green activists? What is “American” about American-Jewish culture and what is “Jewish”? When did American humor become so Jewish? Assimilation, Holocaust trauma, “self-hatred,” misogyny (within America and Judaism), homophobia (within America and Judaism), but also environmentalism, internationalism, social activism, are some of the topics addressed by our study and examined through novels, film, television, music, comics and other genres and media.

This class will require you to read books from cover to cover. I will get in touch as soon as the spring semester ends to share information about the syllabus, lesson plans and the reading list, so you’ll know what to expect and will have a chance to read the books during your summer break. This will make your fall semester with me stress-free, easier and enjoyable.

ENGL 282.002    TOPICS: Fluid Fiction: Black Women Write Genre     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Collins

(AIU)

Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Romance: In this course we will read fiction by black women written in the styles that are conventionally identified under the umbrella of popular literature called “genre” fiction. In reading several genres at once, the course follows Kinitra Brook’s argument that black women writers use genre conventions and aesthetics in fluid ways to imagine identity and the larger world in their works. In this class we will ask, how are these writers engaging genre and non-realist techniques to comment on and imagine new configurations and conversations about race, gender, sexuality, class, history, and even literary genre identity.  During the course we will read authors like, Octavia E. Butler, Pauline Hopkinson, Rivers Solomon, NK Jemisin, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Alyssa Cole, and others. 

ENGL 283.002    TOPICS: The Tolkien Legendarium     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Gwara

(AIU)

Thematic, conceptual and lexical study of J. R. R. Tolkien’s major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Evolution of his thinking on power, war, technology, race and environmentalism and sin. Particular focus on heroic identity, individualism, Christianity, and fatalism. 

ENGL 285.002    TOPICS: The American Gothic from Poe to Stephen King     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Greven

(AIU)

This course focuses on the American Gothic from its early incarnation in classic American literature to its development in the twentieth-century with writers like Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King. Quizzes, exams, four short papers, and regular attendance required. 

ENGL 287.001    American Literature     MW  |  3:55PM-5:10PM  |  Greven

(Designed for English Majors)

In 1820, one English commentator observed, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” By the end of the century, American literature had won, as one critic puts it, “a grudging respect” in the transatlantic literary marketplace. This course focuses on the development of a national literature in the nineteenth-century United States, paying attention to the transition from romanticism to realism. Grounding our analysis in considerations of form, we will explore the ways that literature registered broader conflicts over race, gender, sexuality, and class in the emergent nation. Participation will be graded, and other requirements will include individual presentations, unannounced quizzes, two essays, a midterm, and a final.

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ENGL 287.002    American Literature     TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Trafton

(Designed for English Majors)

An introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature. Designed for English majors.

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ENGL 287.003    American Literature     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Forter

(Designed for English Majors)

This course traces the history of literature in the U.S., focusing especially on the period from 1850 to the early 2000s. We will explore major literary movements and their characteristic forms (narrative techniques, styles) by placing them in relation to the historical conditions from which they emerged. This means attending to the different ways in which authors have grappled with the central issues of their day. At the same time, the course will emphasize the continuity of certain themes across the movements and periods that we study: the problem of “freedom” and its relationship to the idea of America; the legacy of chattel slavery and place of race in the imagination of Black and white authors; the persistent attempts by women writers to develop literary forms adequate to their experience; and the alienating effects of capitalism on writers from all backgrounds.

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ENGL 287.004    American Literature     TTh  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Powell

(Designed for English Majors)

English 287 provides an introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature. This section presents competing narratives of U.S. literary history by clustering exemplary works by writers who represent a range of American literary traditions as they deal with selected themes across several centuries, beginning with nonfiction by Benjamin Franklin and Olaudah Equiano and concluding with poems by Audre Lorde and Billy Collins. The clusters will draw on exemplary works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, to support our exploration of some of the advantages and limitations to thinking about literary history in terms of traditions.  What may narratives about literary history reveal about literary influence and innovation, and what they may obscure?  In addition to completing course readings in poetry and prose, and attending and participating in class activities, participants will complete 3-4 written assignments and demonstrate mastery of course materials on quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

ENGL 383.001    Romanticism    MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Jarrells

This course provides an introduction to the literature of the Romantic period. Students will study a variety of genres from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and engage the work of a wide range of authors, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, John Keats, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Some close attention will be paid, as well, to the ways that writers of the period articulated a position for or against the Enlightenment values that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century and to questions about how these values complicated notions of what it meant to be British or modern or global.

ENGL 390.001    Great Books of the Western World  I   TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Dal Molin

(Crosslisted with CPLT301)

This course will cover European masterpieces from antiquity to the beginning of the Renaissance. We will cover the genres of the Greek epic, Greek tragedy, sophistry, the rise of Greek philosophy, Roman New Comedy, the medieval Romance, medieval love poetry, and the novella.

ENGL 392.001    Great Books of the Eastern World    MWF  |  1:10PM-2:00PM  |  Patterson

(Crosslisted with CPLT303)

A journey from ancient times to the contemporary period, this course invites students to examine selected literary works from the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean traditions in a variety of genres including epic, poetry, drama, and novel. The course is divided into two parts, i.e., the pre-modern and modern periods. We will pay special attention to the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were created and the mutual influences between these cultures. 

ENGL 405.001    Shakespeare's Tragedies    TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Shifflett

Study of some of Shakespeare's best tragedies, with the goals of figuring out how they please us, what they are teaching us, and why they sometimes disappoint us. Requirements are likely to include weekly quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final exam.

ENGL 350.001    Intro to Comics Studies    TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Minett

(Crosslisted with FAMS 350)

Tackles questions of storytelling, industry, history, culture, legitimation, and audiences. Readings range from Donald Duck to Maus, from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to Fun Home, from Archie to The Avengers, from Persepolis to Lumberjanes, and from Tales from the Crypt to Young Romance.

ENGL 383.001    Romanticism    MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Jarrells

This course provides an introduction to the literature of the Romantic period. Students will study a variety of genres from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and engage the work of a wide range of authors, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, John Keats, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Some close attention will be paid, as well, to the ways that writers of the period articulated a position for or against the Enlightenment values that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century and to questions about how these values complicated notions of what it meant to be British or modern or global.

ENGL 385.001    Modernism     MWF  |  1:10PM-2:00PM  |  Glavey

This course will provide a survey of the twentieth-century literature that scholars have retrospectively labeled modernist. Our primary goal will be to understand the specific features of the literature we will be studying: how the texts are put together as works of art, what they attempt to achieve, how they might challenge twenty-first century readers. We will be especially interested is in what we might learn about modernity’s “structures of feeling”—what it feels like to be modern--and the various ways in which the aesthetic has enabled people to engage creatively with these structures, especially as they relate to the experience of race, gender, and sexuality. In thinking through what literature tells us about such questions, we will consider the artistic, technological, epistemological, psychological, and sociological facets of modernity as mediated by the particular formal and thematic choices of our authors.

ENGL 392.001    Great Books of the Eastern World    MWF  |  1:10PM-2:00PM  |  Patterson

(Crosslisted with CPLT303)

A journey from ancient times to the contemporary period, this course invites students to examine selected literary works from the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean traditions in a variety of genres including epic, poetry, drama, and novel. The course is divided into two parts, i.e., the pre-modern and modern periods. We will pay special attention to the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were created and the mutual influences between these cultures. 

ENGL 425B.001    The American Novel Since 1914    MW  |  3:55PM-5:10PM  |  Forter

This course traces several arcs in the history of the U.S. novel from around WWI to the early twenty-first century. We will explore the relations between history and literary invention. How does the form of the novel transform in the century under discussion, and how are these changes related to transformations in U.S. society at large? We will also consider the link between authors’ “social locations”—their gender, sexuality, race, class position, and so forth—and their responses to historical circumstances. How do these questions of identity shape how an author depicts U.S. capitalism, racial inequality, gender dominion, and/or (more recently) the climate crisis? We’ll ask about the different constructions of “American” and “literature” that follow from these questions, especially when the novel is practiced by recent immigrants and others whose relationship to Americanness is unconventional in its angle of approach. Finally, the course explores the role of the novel in memorializing the historical past. We’ll examine the kinds of “pasts” that these books depict, and ask whether their treatments encourage us to view the past as irretrievably lost or as a resource for imagining a freer future.

ENGL 426.001    American Poetry    TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Vanderborg

What do we mean by “new media,” and how has it shaped American poetry in the late 20th- and 21st centuries?

• Print itself was once a revolutionary new medium, and its innovations still surprise and delight. This class charts print concrete poetry, erasure poetry, and palimpsest poetry that transforms historical sources—Janet Holmes rewriting Emily Dickinson’s poems, Joy Harjo collaging Native American stories and paintings, M. NourbeSe Philip retracing the Middle Passage from a single legal document.
• Come read award-winning multimedia children’s poetry books that bridge generations, languages, and art forms, like Minh Lê’s Drawn Together, Sili Recio’s If Dominican Were a Color, Yuyi Morales’s Dreamers, and Patti Kim’s Here I Am.
• Encounter the new genre of comics poetry.
• Enjoy a field trip to Thomas Cooper’s Special Collections for interactive poetic book art that anticipated digital new media.
• Then take a deep dive into multiple genres of digital poetry—hypertext poems, digital documentary poems, infinite scroll poems, poem games, poetry apps, and poems set against a sky-screen of night stars.
• Look at 3-D sculpture poems and installation poems (like Margaret Rhee’s The Kimchi Poetry Machine), and watch poem films (Big Data by Diego Bonilla and Rodolfo Mata).
• Explore ecopoems and biopoems—poems encoded as DNA bases and implanted in bacteria and poems written for nonhuman species (Christian Bök’s Xenotext experiment and Eduardo Kac’s bio art).
• For every medium, we’ll chart its possible messages, styles, audiences, and politics, with selections that represent the geographical diversity within the term “American,” featuring authors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
  
  Class requirements include a shorter analytical paper (4-5 pages), a longer analytical paper (7-9 pages), and a combined creative/critical final project. Take-home quizzes will involve writing your own poems in different formats and drafting proposals for digital and bio art!

ENGL 427.001     Southern Literature     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Powell

Southern literature of the past and present contributes in interesting ways to regional and national dialogue. Studying it not just as American literature, but as the output of a particular regional tradition and set of circumstances, is useful to readers from different backgrounds who want to know more about how literature is created and its relationship to the society in which it is written, published, and read. With these assumptions, this course introduces key characteristics, phases, and issues in southern literature through a systematic survey of selected major authors that emphasizes slave narratives, the Southern and Harlem Renaissances, and contemporary literature of the New South. In addition to completing course readings in poetry and prose, and attending and participating in class activities, participants will complete 3-4 written assignments and demonstrate mastery of course materials on quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

ENGL 428A.001     African American Lit I: to 1903     MW  |  8:05AM-9:20AM  |  Langley

(Crosslisted with AFAM428A)

This course introduces students to the major developments, themes, and works of African American literature-from its eighteenth-century beginnings to 1900, the post-Civil War and Reconstruction Era.  Course objectives include exploring African American literature's continuing response to the call of African, American, and Afro-British American oral and written traditions-in the form of folktales, songs, sermons, prose, and poetry; examining the social, political, and cultural influences of early African-American literature; and, analyzing the implications of this literature through meaningful written responses to the readings and the questions they raise about historical and prevailing issues, genres, and meaning in early African American literature and cultures.

ENGL 430.001    TOPICS: Slavery, Literature & Culture     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Whitted

(Crosslisted with AFAM420)

This course explores how contemporary literature and other cultural representations grapple with the historical realities of slavery and the lives of enslaved people in the United States. Through fiction, comics, film, art, and media, we will study the ways that form and audience expectation influence how we remember the past and relate to one another in the present. Our goal is to raise questions not just about historical accuracy, but also about ethics and aesthetic choices, creative freedom, taste, and cultural appropriation.

ENGL 432.001    Young Adult Literature     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Viswanath

This is a survey course in which we will read contemporary literature for young adults that will help us challenge and reimagine the literary canon. We will explore a variety of genres including fiction, poetry, television, and graphic novels. Most important, we will work together to better understand the concept of adolescence, discuss the characteristics of young adult texts and literary criticism, and use that criticism to analyze the texts we read. 

ENGL 433.001    TOPICS: Censorship & Controversy in Children’s and Young Adult Literature    TTh  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Johnson-Feelings

The course will focus on recent controversies related to literature for audiences of children and young adults. Texts will include books such as Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three; Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak; Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; Dr. Seuss picture books with the film “The Political Dr. Seuss”, and more. Though the focus is contemporary literature, the books and controversies under consideration will be placed into historical context through reading secondary materials such as Nancy Larrick’s 1965 article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books” and a session at the Hollings Special Collections Library.

ENGL 436.J10     Science Fiction Literature     ASYNCHRONOUS  |  Muckelbauer

Mathematician and novelist, Vernor Vinge summarizes a paper he delivered at a NASA conference in 1993 as follows: “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” This event has become a popular topic of debate among scientists and artists alike: are we actually on the verge of a major transformation to our species?  Is this superhuman intelligence even possible? And if so, is it desirable? Or controllable? As we will see, Vinge and others focus primarily on the implications of artificial intelligence as the key element of this transformation.  However, other contemporary thinkers point to significant changes in bio-technology (for instance, our increasing ability to alter nuclear DNA) as indicating that our near future might look significantly “post-human.”  In fact, some have even argued that our society’s increasing dependence on mood-enhancing medications indicates that we are already well on our way to becoming something other than human.  But what exactly do we mean by this? What, precisely, does it mean to be human? Or post-human? These are big questions with profound moral, ethical, and legal implications. In this class we will engage a series of different works that not only pose the questions but wrestle with some possible responses (most weeks, this will involve a movie, a short story, and assorted videos and articles that explain the current state of a particular technology)  Our goal is not to definitively answer these questions, but to begin thinking seriously about them as we move toward our post-human future.

ENGL 437.001    Women Writers     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Keyser

(Crosslisted with WGST 437)

This course will provide a survey of literature by twentieth and twenty-first century US women writers in three genres (novels, plays, and poetry collections). In this class, we will explore the connections between gender and genre, patriarchy and white supremacy, queerness and character, literary form and social rebellion. Assignments include reading quizzes and comparative essays.

ENGL 438E.001    Caribbean Literature     TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Jimenez

In this course, we will be reading several authors from the Caribbean and the diaspora to examine how they explore the repercussions of the Caribbean’s various histories of colonialism, imperialism, and empire. We will be reading authors such as Elizabeth Nunez, Kwame Dawes, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Mayra Santos Febres, Sylvia Wynter, Xavier Navarro Aquino, and Sharma Taylor. Students will also have the opportunity to produce their own creative work. 

ENGL 439.001    TOPICS: Literature and AIDS     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Madden

(Crosslisted with WGST430)

When Philadelphia appeared in movie theaters and Angels in America appeared on the Broadway stage in 1993, they signaled a shift in cultural representations and in popular understandings of HIV/AIDS. While stigma and trauma lingered, these representations indicated a shift in the cultural imagination. Two years later, the death toll in the US would peak as new drug therapies became available and HIV became a manageable condition rather than a death sentence. This class will examine that pivotal moment in American culture, as well as what happened before, what happened after—and what has happened since. We will examine literature, film, and other cultural representations, paying attention to social and political contexts. Though we will focus primarily on American cultural responses, we will also consider some international representations. How did HIV/AIDS influence American culture in the first two decades, 1981-2001? How are those early decades still represented in popular culture? How was HIV/AIDS represented in literature and film? in children’s literature? in popular music? What can those texts teach us about the history of LGBTQ activism and protest, death and dying, rage and remembrance, the nature of community and our responsibility for one another?

ENGL 439.002    TOPICS: Literature and AI    TTh  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Gavin

This course will invite students to consider literature and artificial intelligence (AI) from three perspectives: 1) we will examine the representation of AI in contemporary fiction; 2) we will study the history of automatically-generated literature, from analog experiments of the early twentieth century to the interactive fiction of today; and 3) we will gain hands-on experience making our own AI-generated literature to better understand its current limitations and future possibilities. The reading list will likely include Ray Nayler’s The Mountain and the Sea (2022), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), and Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control (2021). Course requirements will include active class participation, weekly short writing assignments, and two longer pieces, one analytical and another creative.

ENGL 487.001     Black Women Writers     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Finney

(Crosslisted with AFAM 487)

An examination of literature by and about black women, including fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography. This study will focus on issues that emerge from the creative representations of black women and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class that interrogate what is both particular and universal experiences.

ENGL 360.001     Creative Writing     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Dings

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

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ENGL 360.002     Creative Writing     TTh  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Waldron

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

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ENGL 360.003     Creative Writing     MW  |  3:55PM-5:10PM  |  TBA

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

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ENGL 360.004     Creative Writing     MWF  |  1:10PM-2:00PM  |  TBA

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.

ENGL 464.001     Poetry Workshop     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Countryman

The focus of this course will be writing and revising new poems. Students will refine their ability to articulate their own poetic aims and style, while also expanding their view of what a poem can be and do through readings of contemporary poetry and writing exercises tied to those readings. Peer response will factor heavily into the final grade. The final goal of this course is a portfolio of original creative work. Students should have taken ENGL 360 previously, but those with experience writing poetry or taking creative writing workshops are welcome.  

ENGL 465.001     Fiction Workshop     TTh  |  4:25PM-5:40PM  |  Bajo

Workshop in writing fiction.

ENGL 492.001     Advanced Fiction Workshop     TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Bajo

Students will study the art and craft of writing literary fiction at an advanced level through close readings and the composition of original short stories.

ENGL 363.001     Intro to Professional Writing     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Garriott

Overview of concepts, contexts, and genres used in professional communication. Intensive practice in analyzing, emulating, and creating textual and multimedia documents for a variety of professional, non-academic purposes (including commercial, informative, persuasive, and technical).

ENGL 387.001     Introduction to Rhetoric     TTh  |  3:55PM-5:10PM  |  Holcomb

(Crosslisted with SPCH 387)

Rhetoric is a term we frequently hear in the media where it’s often used as a synonym for deceptive, empty, bombastic, or even threatening language. But there is so much more to rhetoric than these synonyms suggests. Accordingly, this course introduces you to a more comprehensive and capacious view of rhetoric, including the origins of its study in ancient Greece and Rome and its uses and operation in a variety of modern contexts and media. This course falls into three units that correspond to the three major pillars of rhetorical studies: history, theory and criticism. We’ll begin by surveying treatises on rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome, treatises that have had a profound influence on the history of rhetoric in the West. We’ll then read selections from several key rhetorical theorists from the previous century, and we’ll end with a unit on rhetorical criticism—that is, the application of rhetoric concepts and theories to various texts to analyze how they function in their immediate and broader contexts. Here we’ll focus primarily on the rhetorical analysis of prose style. Our goal in surveying these three areas is to give you a solid foundation in the scholarly study of rhetoric.

ENGL 388.001    History of Literary Criticism & Theory     MWF  |  10:50AM-11:40AM  |  Glavey

This course will survey the developments that have shaped the way scholars and critics have studied literature and culture across the twentieth century and into the twenty–first. Each school of thought we cover could easily be the topic of a course all of its own. We will be moving quickly and, of necessity, leaving out a great deal. The goal of the course is thus not to achieve mastery of any particular approach. Rather, the class is to serve as a brief introduction to many different ideas in the hopes of multiplying our sense of what it might mean to read and interpret a text. 

ENGL 439.003   TOPICS: Speechwriting    TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Ercolini

(Crosslisted with SPCH 464)

This course is designed as part theoretical examination and part practical workshop on the arts of advanced advocacy, with emphases on stases of value and policy. We will investigate old and new theories, methods, and complexities of the speech writing process; examine the questions of voice and advocacy in our contemporary moment; experiment with different modalities of speech preparation, composition, and delivery; critically analyze advocacy campaigns from multiple angles and perspectives; and work through the processes of research, analysis, and development of policy argumentation towards advocacy on selected term-length topics of interest. While this course is designed for SPCH minors and ENGL majors and minors, this course is open to anyone interested in practices of advanced public speaking, value and policy advocacy, and theoretical questions about power and language, the relationship between speech and writing, and the modes of influence we have within institutions and amongst one another.

ENGL 460.001     Advanced Writing     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Holcomb

This course approaches advanced writing through genre and style. Genre is traditionally defined in terms of the subject matter and, more usually, form or structure, but we’ll adopt a more recent (and useful) approach and think of genres as modes of social action that writers perform in response to typified or recurrent situations. Defined as such—that is, as social action—genre invites us to think of writing, not as simply the transcription of thought (for instance) or the representation of some “reality,” but as behavior. Within this new framework, generic labels (such as novel, research report, course syllabus, shopping list) serve as a shorthand for different ensembles or repertoires of behavior that writers orchestrate to answer (or alter) the situations in which they write.

We’ll approach style along similar lines—that is, as a vehicle for social interaction. Style is not some decorative overlay that we apply after generating the content of our writing, nor is it simply a matter of grammar and mechanics. Rather, it is a medium through which writers present themselves and orchestrate relationships with their readers, their subject matter, and the broader contexts in which their texts appear.

ENGL 462.001     Technical Writing     TTh  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Anderson

Preparation for and practice in types of writing important to scientists, engineers, and computer scientists, from brief technical letters to formal articles and reports.

ENGL 463     Business Writing

7 available sections on various days and times

Please see Self-Service Carolina for more details

Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal articles and reports

ENGL 389.001     The English Language     MW  |  3:55PM-5:10PM          TBA

(Crosslisted with LING 301)

Introduction to the field of linguistics with an emphasis on English. Covers the English sound system, word structure, and grammar. Explores history of English, American dialects, social registers, and style.

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ENGL 389.002     The English Language     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  TBA

(Crosslisted with LING 301)

Introduction to the field of linguistics with an emphasis on English. Covers the English sound system, word structure, and grammar. Explores history of English, American dialects, social registers, and style.

ENGL 450.001     English Grammar     TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Liu

(Crosslisted with LING 421)

Major structures of English morphology and syntax; role of language history and social and regional variation in understanding contemporary English.

ENGL 270.H01     HNRS: World Literature     TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Van Fleit

(AIU)

What are our first associations when we think about world literature? How does our background condition us to understand what might qualify as world literature?  In this course we will start to explore world literature by asking both “whose world?” and “what is literature?”  Recent literary collaborations between AI and human authors bring up similar questions: what is authorship?  Who (what?) can engage in creative labor?  Who decides what AI looks like? In this course we will explore these questions as we analyze texts about robots, AI, and automata from different historical periods and geographical locations.  Humans have been imagining robots as laborers and humans as creators of artificial life almost as long as we’ve been writing literature, so the course will start with texts from ancient Greece and ancient China and then move to texts such as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and R.U.R., the Czech play that gave us the term “robot.”  As we near the end of the course we will explore how authors have imagined the effects of an increasingly mechanized society on human labor and creativity as we read stories about labor, AI, and robots from 21st century Zimbabwe, Japan, Cuba, and China. Finally, we will end the course with readings that consider how AI might change the future of world literature.

ENGL 282.H01     HNRS: TOPICS: Reading Multiethnic Children’s Literature     TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Viswanath

(AIU)

This course will examine representations of multicultural, multi-ethnic characters in children’s and young adult texts including picture books, novels, and graphic novels. Primarily, it will deal with concerns about the child/ adolescent body and its representation in literature. Key themes include (but are not restricted to) race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and the influence of the media. We'll be covering a lot of material in this course - come prepared to read!

ENGL 282.H02     HNRS: TOPICS: Fiction and Mental Health    TTH  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Jackson

(AIU)

Attending school can be stressful for all of us, but according to a 2019 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, America's colleges are currently witnessing a "student mental health-crisis."  In the last decade, the number of students visiting campus counseling services for depression and anxiety has grown by forty percent.  Our lives have only become more stressful with the advent of Covid.  What can fiction possibly teach us about mental health, and how might fiction, and stories more generally, help us achieve and maintain it?  In this course, we'll find out.  We'll read a variety of contemporary novels and short stories, and a few historical ones, about anxiety, depression, dissociation, and isolation but also consider fictions about healing, happiness, and wellness.  We'll probe the boundaries of what counts as fiction by reading clinical case histories and memoirs, and we'll investigate how fiction has operated in therapeutic practices such as Bibliotherapy, Existential, Narrative, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapies.  We'll also investigate the value of traditional wellness practices including mindfulness and yoga.  We'll cover a wide range of approaches to interpreting and analyzing fiction and along the way learn about some basic concepts in mental health and wellness. Assessment will be by a variety of take home assignments.  This class is not a substitute for attending counseling, but our emphasis will be on reading fiction in ways that are not only perceptive but also helpful and hopeful.

ENGL 285.H01     HNRS: TOPICS: The Ecological Imagination     TTH  |  10:05AM-11:20AM  |  Keyser

(AIU)

From Rip Van Winkle sleeping in the forest to the Lorax speaking for the trees, US literature has been preoccupied with wild spaces and their imperilment. This course will trace arboreal, botanical, and ecological themes in nineteenth and twentieth-century US literature (poetry, short stories, nonfiction, memoir, and novels).

ENGL 287.H01     HNRS: American Literature     TTH  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Jackson

(Designed for English Majors)

An introduction to American literary history, emphasizing the analysis of literary texts, the development of literary traditions over time, the emergence of new genres and forms, and the writing of successful essays about literature.

ENGL 360.H01     HNRS: Creative Writing     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM   |  Barilla

Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction

ENGL 462.H01     HNRS: Technical Writing     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Rees-White

Preparation for and practice in types of writing important to scientists, engineers, and computer scientists, from brief technical letters to formal articles and reports.

ENGL 463.H01     HNRS: Business Writing     TTH  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Rees-White

Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal articles and reports.

SCHC 350.H01     HNRS: Cultures of Extraction     MW  |  2:20PM-3:35PM  |  Jelly-Schapiro

Capitalist modernity was born in the space of the colony, and in the moment of extraction. The mining of gold and silver in the New World signaled what Henri Lefebvre would later describe as the “absolute predominance of exchange over use,” the essence of commodity culture. And the surplus value derived from the combination of enslaved or wage labor and subterranean metals catalyzed the growth of industrial civilization within Europe. The extraction of precious metals, moreover, dovetailed—in a historical and structural sense—with the extraction of fossil fuels. The intensification of mineral mining in North America and Southern Africa, for example—most especially the gold rushes in California and on the Witwatersrand—coincided, in the middle and latter decades of the 1800s, with the advent or acceleration of commercial fossil fuel production. The first commercial oil wells were drilled in Ontario and Pennsylvania in 1858 and 1859; the exploitation of large petroleum reserves in Texas began around the turn of the century. At that same time, the expansion of coal mining—across the surface of the earth and into its depths, in Appalachia as in Yorkshire—made possible the explosion of steam power, which drove the infrastructure of capitalist accumulation: the mining and smelting of gold, silver, iron, and copper; the transportation, via rail, of those minerals and the migrant workers enlisted to extract them; the refinement of cotton in the mills of Lancashire and New England. And today, various sites and technologies of extraction—from the tar sands of Alberta to the coltan mines of Central Africa—continue to shape social and political life around the planet. Reading historical and contemporary works of fiction—as well as film, music, visual art, and theory—from around the world, this course will consider the literary and cultural representation of extractive modernity at large

SCHC 351.H01     HNRS: Artificial Intelligence and Shakespeare      TTh  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Gavin

This course provides an in-depth exploration of the linguistic foundations behind artificial intelligence (AI). Contemporary AI systems, such as ChatGPT, are constructed upon large-language models that rely on statistical analyses of extensive textual data. With the public release of large-scale datasets like Early English Books Online, we can now use the same methods to model cultural history, including the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will begin by reading Hamlet, then we will analyze the play using techniques of progressively increasing complexity: from basic descriptive statistics and classification algorithms to vector-space decompositions, culminating in machine-learning applications that include topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and neural networks. Requirements will include three short analytical papers and a final project, which will likely involve creating customized chatbots to represent Shakespearean characters, Shakespeare himself, his contemporaries, and other historical figures. Through mathematics, we will learn to speak with the dead.

SCHC 354.H01     HNRS: American Autobiography      TTh  |  8:30AM-9:45AM  |  Johnson-Feelings

The focus of this course is American life stories, whether told through traditional autobiography/memoir or through song lyrics, children’s literature, visual art, or some other genre or medium. In particular, seminar participants will look at the intersection between conceptions of childhood and the idea of the “American Dream” as Americans craft and live their lives. Readings will be representative of a cross-section of American experiences in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, region, religion, language of origin, and more. Readings will include texts created for audiences of adults, young adults, and children.

SCHC 398.H01     HNRS: Asian American Culture in the 21^st Century     TTh  |  2:50PM-4:05PM  |  Lee

The pandemic era of 2020–2024 has brought into relief the paradoxical visibility of Asian Americans as victims of racist violence during a concurrent zeitgeist of unprecedented cultural representation. The latter boom indexes not only the slightly longer twenty-first century phenomenon of mainstream visibility, shaping the legibility of a distinctive Asian American culture, but also the intramural space for resource and resilience amidst the current era of anti-Asian hatred. This course will examine this century’s variety of representations made by Asian Americans, with a particular focus on the tensions between contemporary cultural production and anti-Asian racism. We will pose large, intractable questions in cultural theory regarding transnationalism, model-minoritization, cultural appropriation, people-of-color solidarity, and psychic and physical violence, in addition to our querying the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and geography in Asian American consciousness and cultural formation. Ultimately, we will emphasize the triumph of Asian American social life in the contemporary era by asking ourselves how a coherent, prevailing “we” has come into view despite anti-Asian cultural and political conditions. Items covered may include Asian American presence on YouTube and TikTok, as well as in antiracist activism, hip-hop, fashion, food, film, and electoral politics. TV and film we may sample include Fresh Off the Boat (2015–2020), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens (2020-), Minari (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Beef (2023), Joy Ride (2023), Shortcomings (2023), and The Brothers Sun (2024); cultural phenomena we may discuss include 88 Rising, #StopAsianHate, #VeryAsian, Linsanity, Yang 2020, and Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now (2022). We may also periodically host Asian American speakers from music, film, food culture, advocacy, and politics.

ENGL 404.H01     HNRS: The Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries     TTH  |  1:15PM-2:30PM  |  Gieskes

This class will provide an introduction to the rich field of non-Shakespearean early modern drama. Shakespeare was far from the only playwright working in the period and we will read a selection of plays that held the stage alongside and in competition with his works. We will be reading plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Marston, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and Francis Beaumont, and John Webster as well as one anonymous play. All of these plays were written by playwrights whose careers coincide with or come after Shakespeare's and who found themselves in various kinds of competition with him and with each other. These writers cite each other, parody each other, and criticize each other in overt and covert ways. The back and forth commentary between writers is an important aspect of the period's drama and our reading of these plays will attend to this intertextual play which will in turn enrich your reading of Shakespeare's plays. I have chosen plays from a variety of genres and hybrid forms, but will continually stress that this is but the tip of a very large iceberg and we cannot make anything more than a gesture at being comprehensive this semester. For example, I have only included one play by Marlowe and one by Jonson simply because of time. All the plays are associated with the public and private theaters of London, but there were many other sites and kinds of drama in the period and I will attempt to indicate some of these as they relate to the plays on the syllabus. We will also make some effort to situate these plays in the literary, social, and theatrical contexts in which they appeared.

SCHC 450.H01     HNRS: Seeing in Black and White: Race and Vision in African American Literature     TTH  |  11:40AM-12:55PM  |  Trafton

This is a course that takes selections from contemporary African American writers that highlight issues of race and appearance, and especially as they involve issues of vision and visibility. Our authors ask this: since race is at least in part a function of sight; of some people seeing other people who look different than themselves, then what can be learned about race and race relations by artistically challenging our preconceptions about both what and how we see? Using such texts as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Toi Derricotte's The Black Notebooks, and August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, we, along with our authors, will investigate these issues.

SCHC 454.H01     HNRS: Poetry and Religion: Eastern Traditions     TTH  |  10:05AM-1120AM      Dings

This course will explore Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and some of the best poetry in the world canon that grows out of these world views (a planned sequel will explore Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Global citizenship requires that we understand ourselves in relation to our global neighbors. The fact is that most people around the world think and act in some relationship to core beliefs that they hold; it is also true that for many societies around the world these beliefs are religious or grow out of religious traditions. Knowledge of these traditions can lead to greater understanding and discovery of shared values. Students should expect intensive reading about each religion and careful reading of selected poetic texts. Grading will be determined by four tests, homework assignments, quality and regularity of class performance, and one final 10-page paper.