Classes You Won’t See Every Semester
ENGL 340.001 Literature & Law TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Gulick
What can literature teach us about law? This question will guide our journey in this course, which will include a historically and geographically diverse reading list. A famous children’s picture book, an ancient Athenian drama, and the first constitution of Haiti will help us interrogate where law comes from and what to do with the violence of its origins. Through a journalistic account of the trial of one of the Holocaust’s chief architects, and a Chilean play set in the wake of a dictatorship, we’ll explore the connections between trials, theater, and narrative. We’ll turn to a series of texts from post-apartheid South Africa to further examine how law can—or maybe can’t—help a society come to terms with past injustices. We’ll close out the semester with two novels by U.S. authors whose young protagonists—the children of lawyers—come of age by grappling with the question of what it means to live ethically amidst structural racism. We’ll punctuate our intellectual journey with days devoted to poetry written by living, practicing lawyers whose experiments with language are a way of making sense of their profession and its history. Authors will include Maurice Sendak, Euripides, Hannah Arendt, Ariel Dorfman, Antje Krog, Valerie Luiselli, Martin Espada, Harper Lee, and Louise Erdrich.
You do not need to be an English major or “pre-law” in order to take this course. While we will occasionally read court cases and other legal documents in order to glean context, students should be prepared to spend most of their time reading extraordinary—and sometimes extraordinarily complex—works of literature. Successful ENGL 340 students will read voraciously, write carefully, and approach in-class discussions with enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, candor, and generosity. ENGL 340 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and towards the Law and Society minor.
ENGL 341.001 Literature & Medicine MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM Davis
According to Dr. Rita Charon, a pioneer in the field of narrative medicine, the “effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” This course is designed to help students develop that narrative competence regardless of their career plans. The assigned readings will offer a range of literary and medical interpretations of sickness and health, suffering and recovery, and death and loss. Some works will address the treatment and portrayal of patients by medical practitioners while others will give voice to often-neglected patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives on illness and medical care. Together the readings will demonstrate the ways in which disease is lived in narrative terms while also demystifying the practice of medicine, revealing every physician to be, as the poet Anne Sexton observed, “a human / trying to fix up a human.” The course will focus primarily on American literary and medical works, including a selection of essays, poems, short stories, novellas, autobiographical works, a graphic novel, and a one-act play. Although this course should appeal to students interested in pursuing careers in medicine and health-related fields, any student interested in how literature can help us make sense of human suffering in all its variety is encouraged to register; no medical or scientific knowledge is required.
ENGL 373.001 Literature and Film of the Holocaust MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Schoeman
(Crosslisted with CPLT415 001)
This course explores the history of the Holocaust through the way in which it is represented in graphic novels, feature films, documentary movies, pop culture and other art forms.
Dr. Schoeman’s teaching method is European style (Socratic): the professor and the students extensively discuss together the materials, and thus students learn to become analytical interpreters, critical thinkers, intelligent interlocutors and commentators. In Schoeman’s classroom, dialogue is essential. Exchanging thoughts—inspired by the difficult and painful material about genocide students will be exposed to—discussing a variety of viewpoints, challenging long-established taboos, connecting the historical dots (from past to present) are some of the intellectual steps through which participants will learn and grow as scholars and human beings.
ENGL438E.001 Caribbean Literature TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Jimenez
(Crosslisted with AFAM 438)
Authors and literary forms representative of the Caribbean.
Courses That Satisfy Core AIU & VSR
ENGL 200.002 Creative Writing & Community TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Johnson-Feelings
(AIU & VSR)
This section of “Creative Writing, Voice, and Community” is an introduction to writing, giving special attention to the idea of the social responsibility of the artist. Readings and writing assignments will emphasize the exploration of identity and community, values, and ethics. Model texts will include short fiction, biography and memoir, poetry and novel-in-verse, written largely for audiences of children and young adults. Workshop participants will be encouraged to write for these audiences. We will offer thoughtful feedback to each other, together creating a workshop community in which everyone is able to take risks and to grow as writers.
ENGL 200.003 Creative Writing & Community MWF 9:40 AM - 10:30 AM STAFF
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 200.004 Creative Writing & Community TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Powell
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 200.005 Creative Writing & Community MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM STAFF
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 200.006 Creative Writing & Community MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Mueller
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 270.001 World Literature TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Parry
(AIU)
What is world literature? How does it impact our lives? Can literature be enjoyed for pure entertainment yet also improve and enrich us? Memory, and how we remember, is a theme in many novellas, novels, and poems we will read. This course will be full of open dialogue and free-spirited conversation, with the intent to learn something new, from antiquity to our contemporary era. Authors whose text we will enjoy include Plato, Bocaccio, Mary Shelley, Thomas Mann, Gustav Flaubert, Fleur Jaeggy, Wang Chen-Ho, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, and more. Join us as we travel the world through literature, exploring the ambitions, dreams, and journeys of others to better understand ourselves.
ENGL 280.J10 Literature & Society WEB ASYNC Jarrells
(AIU & VSR)
This course is designed for the study of fiction, poetry, drama, and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics, and social responsibility. In this section we will focus on that first of the last three terms: values – or what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the principles or moral standards held by a person or social group.” Values are everywhere and all the time invoked (as in “this or that action, event, or idea does or does not reflect my / our values…”). But rarely are they defined, historicized, or contextualized. The starting point for this course is that literary works provide a particularly productive space – a laboratory, of sorts – for defining, historicizing, contextualizing, and even testing “our” values, whether they are related to the individual, the family, community, society, religion, or politics. Students can expect to read poetry, fiction, and essays on a range of subjects and from different, sometimes distant, periods. Authors to be studied include Jonathan Swift, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Zadie Smith, and Sally Rooney.
This section will be a fully asynchronous online course, although there will be weekly deadlines for individual work and group projects to keep everyone on track.
ENGL 280.J11 Literature & Society WEB ASYNC (2nd Half of Term) Greven
(AIU & VSR)
Community and The Outcast
American life equally prizes community and individualism. Or does it? The individual who fails to conform becomes that dread figure, the outcast. Focusing on several literary and cinematic works (Hawthorne's tales, plays like *The Crucible,* films by Alfred Hitchcock), this course examines works that dramatize community's clash with the outcast. Completely asynchronous, the class consists of weekly e-lectures and required readings. Grading will be based on weekly discussion posts, quizzes, exams, and a term paper.
ENGL 282.001 TOPICS: Reading Multiethnic Children’s Literature TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM 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!
Major Prerequisites
ENGL 287.001 American Literature TTH 2:50 PM -4:05PM 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.
ENGL 287.002 American Literature TTH 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM Vanderborg
(Designed for English Majors)
Homelands in America
This class examines multiple creations and memories of homelands in American literature: Native American communities and histories, colonists challenging their ties to Britain, successive waves of immigrants to the new republic, and the violent loss of homelands in slavery, as well as speculative American homelands, dystopian or hopeful, that authors have imagined for the future. Get ready to explore the vital languages, geographies, cultural translations, and haunting legacies in each of these homeland visions. Our readings include a vivid range of genres--documents, autobiographies/memoirs (Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Maxine Hong Kingston's blend of family fact and fiction in The Woman Warrior), short stories, poems, a YA novel (M.T. Anderson's sci-fi Feed), a superhero graphic novel (Gene Luen Yang's The Shadow Hero), a film (The Brother from Another Planet), and interactive digital literature (Paisley Rekdal's West on the transcontinental railroad, and the adventure game Kentucky Route Zero)—from the American colonial period through the contemporary period, as well as a unit on homelands in recent American children's books.
Assignments include an analytical paper, a creative/critical project, a final exam, reading quizzes, and group presentations.
ENGL 287.003 American Literature MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM 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.
ENGL 287.006 American Literature TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Jackson
(Designed for English Majors)
This class will be a survey of American Literature from its colonial beginnings in the Fifteenth Century to present. We’ll focus on texts that cluster around recurrent thematic questions. These include: What is America? Who are Americans? Is there one fixed definition? Are humans fundamentally flawed, basically neutral, or inherently good? What defines us best: our souls, our heads, or our hearts? How do we come to terms with human suffering and the prospect of death? What is literature, and what is it good for? What is reality, and how can it best be depicted? Others themes will emerge through class discussion. Our class will have three goals: to introduce you to the sweep of American literary history and suggest something of its power and significance, especially by understanding what various works meant in their historical context; to encourage you to read closely and carefully, understanding how those works worked as art; and to help you develop as writers of critical academic prose, through a series of essays and short assignments.
ENGL 288.001 English Literature MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Gieskes
(Designed for English Majors)
An introduction to English 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.
ENGL 288.002 English Literature TTH 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM Gwara
(Designed for English Majors)
An introduction to English 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.
ENGL 288.004 English Literature TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Stern
(Designed for English Majors)
An introduction to English 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.
Pre-1800 Literature
ENGL 381.001 The Renaissance TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Shifflett
(Crosslisted with CPLT 381)
Study of major authors of the European Renaissance including Castiglione, More, Marguerite de Navarre, Spenser, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. Requirements are likely to include weekly quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
ENGL 382.001 The Enlightenment MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM Gavin
The Enlightenment was an intellectual and political movement in Europe and Great Britain that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emphasizing freedom of thought and experimentation. Many important aspects of our thinking today can be traced back to this time. Science, democracy, nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism all underwent fundamental transformations during this time, which also witnessed the invention of new literary forms like operas and novels. During this course, students will be introduced to the broad outlines of this important moment in cultural history, with an emphasis on writers from Great Britain and with special attention to changes in literary form over the eighteenth century.
ENGL 405.001 Shakespeare’s Tragedies TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Harris
Shakespeare's Tragedies.
Post-1800 Literature
ENGL 340.001 Literature & Law TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Gulick
What can literature teach us about law? This question will guide our journey in this course, which will include a historically and geographically diverse reading list. A famous children’s picture book, an ancient Athenian drama, and the first constitution of Haiti will help us interrogate where law comes from and what to do with the violence of its origins. Through a journalistic account of the trial of one of the Holocaust’s chief architects, and a Chilean play set in the wake of a dictatorship, we’ll explore the connections between trials, theater, and narrative. We’ll turn to a series of texts from post-apartheid South Africa to further examine how law can—or maybe can’t—help a society come to terms with past injustices. We’ll close out the semester with two novels by U.S. authors whose young protagonists—the children of lawyers—come of age by grappling with the question of what it means to live ethically amidst structural racism. We’ll punctuate our intellectual journey with days devoted to poetry written by living, practicing lawyers whose experiments with language are a way of making sense of their profession and its history. Authors will include Maurice Sendak, Euripides, Hannah Arendt, Ariel Dorfman, Antje Krog, Valerie Luiselli, Martin Espada, Harper Lee, and Louise Erdrich.
You do not need to be an English major or “pre-law” in order to take this course. While we will occasionally read court cases and other legal documents in order to glean context, students should be prepared to spend most of their time reading extraordinary—and sometimes extraordinarily complex—works of literature. Successful ENGL 340 students will read voraciously, write carefully, and approach in-class discussions with enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, candor, and generosity. ENGL 340 counts as an upper-level elective (or a post-1800 course) for the English major, and towards the Law and Society minor.
ENGL 341.001 Literature & Medicine MW 3:55PM-5:10PM Davis
According to Dr. Rita Charon, a pioneer in the field of narrative medicine, the “effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others.” This course is designed to help students develop that narrative competence regardless of their career plans. The assigned readings will offer a range of literary and medical interpretations of sickness and health, suffering and recovery, and death and loss. Some works will address the treatment and portrayal of patients by medical practitioners while others will give voice to often-neglected patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives on illness and medical care. Together the readings will demonstrate the ways in which disease is lived in narrative terms while also demystifying the practice of medicine, revealing every physician to be, as the poet Anne Sexton observed, “a human / trying to fix up a human.” The course will focus primarily on American literary and medical works, including a selection of essays, poems, short stories, novellas, autobiographical works, a graphic novel, and a one-act play. Although this course should appeal to students interested in pursuing careers in medicine and health-related fields, any student interested in how literature can help us make sense of human suffering in all its variety is encouraged to register; no medical or scientific knowledge is required.
ENGL 350.001 Intro to Comics Studies TTH 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM Minett
(Crosslisted with FAMS350)
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 373.001 Literature and Film of the Holocaust MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Schoeman
(Crosslisted with CPLT415 001)
This course explores the history of the Holocaust through the way in which it is represented in graphic novels, feature films, documentary movies, pop culture and other art forms.
Dr. Schoeman’s teaching method is European style (Socratic): the professor and the students extensively discuss together the materials, and thus students learn to become analytical interpreters, critical thinkers, intelligent interlocutors and commentators. In Schoeman’s classroom, dialogue is essential. Exchanging thoughts—inspired by the difficult and painful material about genocide students will be exposed to—discussing a variety of viewpoints, challenging long-established taboos, connecting the historical dots (from past to present) are some of the intellectual steps through which participants will learn and grow as scholars and human beings.
ENGL 386.001 Postmodernism TTH 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM Vanderborg
Impossible Cities: Architectures of Postmodernism
We will cover an international selection of post-World War II literature, focusing
on the metaphor of the city. How are communal spaces and histories described in the
texts? Who inhabits these postmodern cities? Readings will include experimental novels
(Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and chapters from Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here), an artist's book (Tom Phillips's A Humument), prose-poetic vignettes (Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities), Borges's short stories masquerading as essays, a surrealist graphic novel (Shaun
Tan's The Arrival), a memoir spliced with fantasy (Kingston's The Woman Warrior), an interactive game, digital poetry, and metafictional children's books. Assignments
include a midterm, a paper, a final exam, and discussion posts as well as brief class
preparation assignments.
ENGL 391.001 Great Books of the Western World II TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Dal Molin
(Crosslisted with CPLT 302)
This course will cover European masterpieces from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Students will get to “taste” a cornucopia of genres such as Renaissance comedy, the essay, satire, romantic poetry, the short story, bohemian exoticism, opera, and science fiction. In our investigations of these texts, we will consider important themes relating to their historical periods such as the link between politics and literature, philosophy and literature, science and literature, and the role that writers and poets play in the making of (modern) Western society.
ENGL 425A.001 The American Novel to 1914 TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Woertendyke
This course will trace the development of fiction from the eighteenth century through World War I. The messy “novels” of early nationalism are shaped by revolutionary and reactionary responses to both independence and democracy. But it’s the transformations of the long nineteenth century that we continue to debate in contemporary U.S. literature, culture, and popular media. Fiction of pre-WWI actively participates in, and contributes to, every flashpoint on the national stage: religion, art, economics, politics, philosophy, and social relations. Questions about publicity, secrecy, and domesticity; economic mobility and education; citizenship and disenfranchisement, all work to define what it means to be an American. While the implications of these engagements are serious, the literary and print cultural experimentation is often playful, hilarious, and strange. Authors may include Hannah Foster, Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larson, and popular fiction and fragments published in newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets. We will also spend at least two class sessions looking at the rich archives of American literature in the Irvin Department of Rare books and Special Collections.
ENGL 428A.001 African American Lit I: to 1903 TTH 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM Trafton
(Crosslisted with AFAM 428A)
Representative works of African-American writers to 1903.
ENGL 432.001 Young Adult Literature TTH 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM Johnson-Feelings
The subject matter of this course is contemporary American young adult (YA) literature.
Note that this course is reading intensive.
Students will examine texts that are in some way related to central ideas about America
and Americans of various backgrounds and experiences. Discussion topics will include
the meanings of literary excellence in the young adult literature world, the politics
of the children’s book publishing industry, and current issues and controversies in
the field, including awards, censorship, gender, authorship, race, and more. Most
importantly, students will give attention to the relationship between literature and social justice.
ENGL 437.001 Women Writers TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM 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.
ENGL438E.001 Caribbean Literature TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Jimenez
(Crosslisted with AFAM 438)
Authors and literary forms representative of the Caribbean.
Creative Writing
ENGL 360.001 Creative Writing TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Amadon
This course is an introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction. We will learn, as a class, ways of responding to creative work and use our discussions as a means of defining our own aims and values as writers and poets. The final goal of this course is a portfolio of original creative work, but peer response is fundamental; both will factor heavily in the final grade. The class will read works by contemporary and canonical writers as a way of expanding our view of what our writing can do. However, this course is designed as a creative writing workshop, and the majority of class time will be devoted to discussing new writing from students.
ENGL 360.002 Creative Writing TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Dings
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 360.003 Creative Writing TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM STAFF
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 360.006 Creative Writing MW 2:20 PM -3:35 PM STAFF
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 465.001 Fiction Workshop TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Bajo
Workshop in writing fiction.
ENGL 491.001 Advanced Poetry Workshop TTH 2:50PM-4:05PM Finney
Students will study poetry writing at an advanced undergraduate level through close readings of professional poetry, composition of original work, and regular practice in the evaluation of peer work.
ENGL 492.001 Advanced Fiction Workshop TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM 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.
Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing
ENGL 387.001 Introduction to Rhetoric TR 11:40AM-12:55PM STAFF
(Crosslisted with SPCH 387)
Theories of human communication useful for understanding and informing the everyday work of writers. Emphasis on intensive analysis and writing.
ENGL 388.001 History of Literary Criticism & Theory MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Muckelbauer
Representative theories of literature from Plato through the 20th century.
ENGL 460.001 Advanced Writing TTh 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Rule
How do writers stand out? What about a writer's choices—about their sentences or structure or tiny word choices—make us feel like we're experiencing their "voice"? How do writers shape language to convey their unique perspective, their presence, or distinct personality? This course focuses on these questions, as we puzzle over what it means to say that writing has "voice" and experiment with how to bring out such force in our own writing (and other media). Through study of rhetorical style, sentence-craft, identification and other concepts, students can expect in this class to analyze a range of personal essays and other first-person genres, collect in a commonplace book samples of powerful sentences and excerpts, and develop your own composing projects in a semester-long writer's workshop and portfolio, including a multimodal project in which you literally give voice to your writing. Focusing neither on academic nor creative genres alone, this course will speak to any student interested in improving their facility with and impact in writing across domains.
ENGL 462.001 Technical Writing TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Bland
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 6 available sections on various days and times + 2 asynchronous sections
Please see Self-Service Carolina for more details
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal articles and reports
Language and Linguistics (all fulfill the Linguistics overlay requirement)
ENGL 389.001 The English Language MWF 9:40 AM - 10:30 AM STAFF
(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 389.002 The English Language MW 2:20 PM - 3:35 PM Manetta
(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 439.002 TOPICS: Language and Gender TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Esposito
(Crosslisted with LING541)
There are many popular ideas about how gender relates to language use, but rarely are these ideas rooted in a total empirical reality. This course will provide you with the theoretical tools – both social and linguistic – to not only critically evaluate such claims, but to formulate your own ideas about how language and gender/sexuality work together. This course is intended to be highly interdisciplinary – we will not only discuss theoretical accounts of how gender, sexuality, identity, and ideology operate, but we will explore how these accounts can provide a lens through which we can analyze linguistic behavior.
ENGL 439.003 TOPICS: Teaching English Abroad TTH 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM Liu
(Crosslisted with LING 395)
This course provides an introduction to the theories of second language acquisition and the foundational principles and techniques of English Language Teaching (ELT). Designed for undergraduate students aspiring to teach English to non-native speakers, whether abroad or in proprietary language schools within the United States, the course combines theoretical knowledge with practical application. Students will engage in hands-on ELT activities and gain direct experience working with English Language Learners (ELLs). By the end of the course, participants will be equipped with the skills and confidence needed to excel in their English teaching endeavors.
ENGL 439.004 TOPICS: Language, Race, and Culture TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Chun
(Crosslisted with LING 305 002)
This course introduces students to concepts and methods from linguistics and anthropology and applies these analytical tools to pressing contemporary debates about language and race in the United States. It will address the following topics that are relevant primarily to English-using communities: cognitive aspects of racial discrimination; microaggressions; colorblindness; code words; derogatory and reappropriated slurs; linguistic appropriation; linguistic profiling; accent representation in media; language policies in education; and strategies addressing race-based inequity. In other words, we will investigate race-related linguistic issues by describing language practices and ideologies associated with racial differentiation, analyzing the societal implications of these practices and ideologies, and considering ways in which matters of language and race can be effectively addressed.
ENGL 450.001 English Grammar TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM 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.
HONORS COLLEGE COURSES (restricted to SC Honors College Students)
ENGL 200.H01 HNRS Creative Writing & Community TTH 10:05AM-11:20AM Waldron
(AIU & VSR)
Workshop course on creative writing with a focus on values, ethics, and social responsibility.
ENGL 270.H01 HNRS World Literature MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM Beecroft
(AIU, Crosslisted with CPLT 270)
Writing songs and telling stories is a universal and vital part of the human experience, both everyday and extraordinary. This course will explore some of the most distinctive and valuable works of literature composed anywhere in the world. There’s no way to justice to all this richness, no way to give a one-semester survey that offers more than a tiny fraction of the texts you should read. So we’re not going to try to be comprehensive, though the works we will read come from five millennia and five continents. Our priority will be figuring out how literature works. Songs and stories are like any other human invention: they’re made of a collection of parts put together in a very specific way, and this course will help you to understand the techniques that make literature possible.
ENGL 280.H01 HNRS Literature & Society MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM Jarrells
(AIU & VSR)
This course is designed for the study of fiction, poetry, drama, and other cultural texts engaged with questions of values, ethics, and social responsibility. In this section we will focus on that first of the last three terms: values – or what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the principles or moral standards held by a person or social group.” Values are everywhere and all the time invoked (as in “this or that action, event, or idea does or does not reflect my / our values…”). But rarely are they defined, historicized, or contextualized. The starting point for this course is that literary works provide a particularly productive space – a laboratory, of sorts – for defining, historicizing, contextualizing, and even testing “our” values, whether they are related to the individual, the family, community, society, religion, or politics. Students can expect to read poetry, fiction, and essays on a range of subjects and from different, sometimes distant, periods. Authors to be studied include Jonathan Swift, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Zadie Smith, and Sally Rooney.
ENGL 282.H02 SPECIAL TOPICS: Fiction and Mental Health TTH 1:15 PM - 2:30 PM 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.H02 SPECIAL TOPICS: The Ecological Imagination TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM 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 288.H01 HNRS English Literature MW 2:20PM-3:35PM Gavin
(Designed for English Majors)
A seminar in English literature tracing change from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will survey works by major authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Richard Sheridan, Eliza Haywood, and Jane Austen. Our selections will include poetry, drama, and fiction. Requirements include careful reading and participation in class discussion, as well as four short papers and two in-class presentations.
ENGL 360.H01 HNRS Creative Writing MW 2:20PM-3:35PM Barilla
Workshop course on writing original fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction.
ENGL 463.H01 HNRS Business Writing TTH 2:50 PM - 4:05 PM STAFF
Extensive practice in different types of business writing, from brief letters to formal articles and reports
SCHC 353.H01 HNRS Comics and Censorship in America TTH 11:40 AM - 12:55 PM Whitted
Comics and graphic novels have a long history of controversy that goes back to the nineteenth century. During the Progressive Era, critics worried that the vivid colors of newspaper comic strips would lead to eye strain. Authorities during the 1950s insisted that rampant juvenile delinquency among young people could be traced back to comic book depictions of crime, while others questioned whether jungle comics and superheroes incited racial prejudice. Our class will trace this history and consider how debates over comics reflect changing attitudes in the United States about cultural norms, the politics of representation, and adolescent consumers. What is it specifically about comics, with its interplay of images and words, that makes the form vulnerable to such scrutiny? How has controversy impacted the medium and its creators over time? We will hear from the voices of critics and learn about the efforts of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the American Library Association to educate the public. Readings will also include case studies of key titles that have been challenged in recent years for concerns over violence and obscenity in depictions of the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ representation, and racial discrimination. Along with weekly in-class writing assignments and small group activities, this course will require a final research paper and presentation.
SCHC 388.H02 HNRS The Holocaust MW 3:55 PM - 5:10 PM Schoeman
This course explores the history of the Holocaust through the way in which it is represented in graphic novels, feature films, documentary movies, pop culture and other art forms.
Dr. Schoeman’s teaching method is European style (Socratic): the professor and the students extensively discuss together the materials, and thus students learn to become analytical interpreters, critical thinkers, intelligent interlocutors and commentators. In Schoeman’s classroom, dialogue is essential. Exchanging thoughts—inspired by the difficult and painful material about genocide students will be exposed to—discussing a variety of viewpoints, challenging long-established taboos, connecting the historical dots (from past to present) are some of the intellectual steps through which participants will learn and grow as scholars and human beings.
SCHC 457.H01 HNRS Ideas of the Poet, Ancient to Modern TTH 1:15PM-2:30PM
Shifflett
Where do poets come from? Are they made or are they born? What--really--do they do,
and what are they for? What is/are their special role/s in society? People have been
asking such questions for thousands of years--indeed, until the twentieth century,
this is what "literary theory" was mostly about. And yet there is little consensus
even today about the answers. In this course we study high points of this long debate,
while also relating it to contemporary issues in literature, the arts, and politics.
Class meetings feature group discussions about the reading assignments as well as
one-on-one tutorials dealing with the course's writing assignments. There are two
in-class exams requiring detailed responses to prompts about the reading assignments.
And there is one essay on a topic approved in advance by the instructor.