ENGL 3040: Introduction to Literary Studies

ENGL 3220: History of the English Language 

Study English langue from its earliest Indo-European, through India, Africa, and the Caribbean, to its modern World English contexts, with a special emphasis on culture, dialect, and the sociopolitical history of language change over time. Radically expand your vocabulary, your understanding of our shared language, and your grasp of the linguistic forces that have shaped cultures from India to Iceland to Africa to the Americas.

ENGL 3300: Medieval Literature

English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period through the fifteenth century with focus on selected genres and authors such as the Gawain Poet, the Wakefield Master, Julian of Norwich, and William Langland.

ENGL 3520: Life Writing

The emergence of biography and autobiography as literary genres shaped modern culture. This course explores the ways life writing links the individual sense of self to shared cultural memory. Readings are transnational, focusing on work from the late seventeenth century onward, including diary writers such as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell as well as confessional American memoirists such as Kathryn Harrison.

ENGL 3550: Early Indigenous Literature

Survey of early Indigenous literatures of the Americas through the Removal period of the 1820s, paying special attention to alternate literacies including but not limited to creation stories, glyph texts, oral literatures, earthworks, and tribal rhetorical traditions. We also address historical debates about colonialism, cultural appropriation, and tribal sovereignty. Selected texts and authors could include The Popol Vuh, The Codex Borgia, Codex Bodley, Totkv Mocvse/New Fire: Creek Folktales, Blacksnake, Samson Occom, William Apess, and Elias Boudinot.

ENGL 3700: Early Twentieth-Century British Lit

Study writing by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, and more. This class will consider modernism in the social and cultural context of The Great War (called “the war to end all wars, erroneously) and WWII, the 1918 influenza pandemic, the sinking of the Titanic, and the women’s suffrage movement.

ENGL 3710: Late Twentieth-Century British Lit

In Fall 2022, ENGL 3700 will focus on writing by Black writers from the U.K.

ENGL 3830: American Modernisms

Explore modernist literature of the U.S. in national and transnational contexts, with a focus on how writers responded to modernization, displacement, urbanization, and popular culture. Selected authors may include Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, McKay, Faulkner, Hurston, Bishop, Cather, Dos Passos, Bulosan, Paredes, and Chandler.

ENGL 3950: African-American Literature

Major writers from the eighteenth century to the present. Includes such authors as Equiano, DuBois, Hughes, Petry, Baldwin, Hansberry, Ellison, Walker, and Morrison.

ENGL 3995: Feminist Literary Criticism

Critical approaches to the varieties of feminist thinking that influence studies of language, literature, and culture. Intersectional perspectives on issues of gender, race, and class emphasized. (Crosslisted with WGSS 3995)

ENGL 4101: Oscar Wilde

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” -The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

ENGL 4140: Shakespeare, Later Works

Selected works from the second half of Shakespeare’s career, such as Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and later poems. (Students may enroll in ENGL 4140 without having taken ENGL 4130.)

ENGL 4202: Trauma Theory

A Special Topics course being offered for the first time in Fall ’22. ENGL 4202 will feature an introduction to Trauma Theory taught by a leading scholar in the field. 

ENGL 4300: Senior Seminar in Literary Studies

For English majors only. Opportunity for advanced research and completion of a project. Each seminar focuses on a problem, question, issue, or specialized subject. Topics vary. Limited to 15 students. Serves as the required Critical Thinking Through Writing (CTW) course for English majors concentrating in Literary Studies. This course may include a Signature Experience component.