Upcoming Courses

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Stephanie Troutman

In this course students will explore concepts in Black popular culture of the last fifty years (roughly 1965-2015) with particular emphasis on connections between the Black Power movement, the Black Arts movement and (M4BL) the Movement for Black Lives. Using cultural and critical race theories, students will gain understanding of the historical, popular and political contexts in which Blackness is culturally produced in American society. Materials for the course will include a variety of films, online resources, social media artifacts, scholarly and theoretical texts, and creative works (music, fiction writing, painting, sculpture) as well as the thoughtful incorporation of social media. Hip Hop Culture, Afrofuturism and Black Intersectional feminism will also be focal points of the course.

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Kate Bernheimer

From the Brothers Grimm to Disney and Beyond. Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Little Mermaid – who created these fairy tales, and to whom were they told? What are they about, and why have they survived to the present day? What meanings do they hold for you? To answer these questions, we will read and interpret stories from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and other authors of traditional fairy tales. We will also look at how they are retold today. To deepen our understanding of this evolving art form, we will familiarize ourselves with various interpretive approaches of folklorists, psychologists, fairy-tale scholars, and others.

102 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Lynda Zwinger

So many of us grew up on Disney’s version of fairy tales; they are a part of people's childhoods and in fact are enjoyed by people well beyond their early years. Beautiful, witty, and timeless, for many people Disney means fairy tales. But fairy tales are very old forms of narrative entertainment, with some of them harking back to even older forms. And the older versions do not limit themselves to princesses in blue ball gowns and gruff but ultimately good-hearted bad guys. In this section of “Introduction to Fairy Tales,” we will view some of the iconic Disney versions of fairy tales, read the tales on which they are based, and think about what cultural and personal role these apparently deathless tales play, then and now. Work will consist of informal writing assignments and online discussion.

Readings

The required text for this class is an etext: Maria Tatar (ed.), The Classic Fairy Tales. Norton, 2nd edition. The URL is: https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Second-Norton-Critical-Editions-ebook/dp/B01NBWHWIN/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1545059704

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Violet Chabko

What kinds of models of human life does great literature contain? What is the relationship between literary works and truth? What are the uses of literature? These, and similar questions, are what we will seek answers to in this course as we read canonical Anglo-American texts representative of the major literary traditions. We will attempt to determine, with each text, what makes them worth reading, re-reading, remembering, and recommending to others. Because we will work with a set of canonical works of Anglo-American literature, we will need to attend not only to what these texts do for us—what cognitive and emotional effects they have on us—but also try to articulate what it is about them that has kept them in circulation for years, or, in some instances, for centuries. We will, therefore, engage in close-reading activities, as well as historical study of the assigned readings. You will be asked to submit short response papers on selected passages and/or questions from the assigned readings. These posts will also require you to critically engage with your fellow students’ responses. You will also take multiple reading comprehension quizzes throughout this course. Finally, you will compose a final four-to-six-page thesis driven paper on an interpretive problem in one of the major texts from our reading list.

101 ONLINE

Instructor: Shelley Rodrigo

ENGL 300 emphasizes verbal, visual, musical, and/or spatial forms of expression as designed, developed, and delivered in literature and film. In this condensed version of ENGL 300, we will analyze the text and various cinematic adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Required Texts & Technologies

All required texts (written and film) will either be made freely available through the web or shared on D2L. We will also use a variety of technologies that you either have access through the University (like Adobe Creative Cloud) or have the ability to start a free account on the web.

Course Deadlines

Please realize that the University of Arizona requires 45 hours of work for each unit of student credit. This means we’ll be busy! We will have deadlines with multiple pieces of work due at 11:59pm AZ time on the following days: 12/24, 12/26, 12/28, 12/30, 1/2, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, 1/9, 1/11, 1/13, and 1/14.

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Matthew Abraham

This course will explore the emerging genre of autobiography associated with explorations of populist anger, racial division, political resentment, sexual desire, familial and non-familial connections, and personal growth. We will read the following fictional and non-fictional works: Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir, Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, Rachel Cusk’s Transit, and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Sons. The course will introduce students to how the autobiographical genre creates conceptions of agency and personhood, in various life contexts. Students will write two short course papers during the summer session, in addition to writing D2L discussion posts in response to instructor and classmate prompts.

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Lauren Mason

A survey of British and American literature to 1660, with emphasis on major writers in their literary and historical contexts.

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Tenney Nathanson

This is a course in “close reading.” The reading assignments will be short, to allow us to pay close attention to individual texts and individual passages. We’ll read many poems and some short stories, with an eye toward mastering the close reading techniques crucial to the sort of literary analysis we practice in upper-division literature courses (and beyond). For this online course, daily participation in discussion boards will be a major course requirement. Students will also write approximately six short exercises (roughly 1-2 pages each) and two papers (roughly 3-4 pages each). There are no exams.

There’s no booklist for this course. All course materials will be available online.

Questions? Please email the instructor at nathanso@email.arizona.edu

101 *Fully Online*

Instructor: Lauren Mason

This junior-level proseminar introduces students to methods and materials of literary research.  Content of individual seminars will vary, based upon instructor.

This course examines how marginalized groups have mobilized to claim their rights. This course uses the civil rights movements of the 1960s as a case study in the rhetorical strategies activists have used to frame issues in varied social and media contexts.

This course intended to give students a practical understanding of beginning techniques of creative or literary nonfiction writing (the personal essay, reportage, and memoir) with an emphasis on craft and research, taught through exercises and modeling, the writing and revision of original nonfiction, and readings and discussion of contemporary and classic nonfiction. This course also introduces students to the workshop method used in the intermediate and advanced courses.

Beginning techniques of poetry writing, taught through exercises, the writing of original poetry, and readings in contemporary poetry.

The poet Kenneth Koch says: "Poetry is a separate language within our language… a language in which the sound of words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning." In this class, we’ll tune our ears to the sounds of poetic language. We will learn some of the most important tools of poetic craft (rhyme, rhythm, repetition, line, image, etc.) We will read and analyze contemporary poetry as we find models for our own work. A variety of writing prompts will help to stoke our imagination and inspiration. Then we will develop a process for sharing, critiquing, and revising our own work as well as the work of our peers.

The entry course in the fiction sequence emphasizes the close study of the major craft elements of fiction (i.e., character, point of view, plot), usually with a focus on the short story. Students engage in close reading and discussion of contemporary and classic fiction and, through specific exercises and assignments, begin practicing the techniques, mechanisms, and modes of the short story. ENGL 210 also introduces students to the workshop method used in the intermediate and advanced courses, with guidelines on the importance of active participation and engaged response.

This reading-based course will introduce students of creative writing to the most important terms and concepts utilized across the three genres taught at the University of Arizona: poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. While we will spend the majority of our time reading, analyzing (from the perspective of craft) and discussing published work across a variety of literary styles, students will also have a chance to experiment in their own writing with some of the tools and approaches highlighted throughout our readings and across the three genres.

ENGL 215 is a lecture and reading course designed to introduce new or potential creative writing majors/minors to essential terms and concepts across the three genres offered at UofA (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction) and how to use them effectively within the expectations and tenets of a creative writing workshop. How to we apply these terms and concepts as we learn to observe, describe, and critique drafts with both fairness and sound artistic judgment? It is also designed to supply CW majors/minors with introductions to a range of authors (foundational and influential, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Cisneros; and contemporary and innovative, such as Eula Biss, ZZ Packer, and Ander Monson). Students can expect writing to be both creative (generated by prompts and imitations) and analytical (guided by specific questions about form, content, and meaning).

In this course, you will learn and apply contextual strategies for editing your own writing, as well as the writing of others, for grammar, style, and format. This course counts as an elective for the English major, the Creative Writing major, and the undergraduate Professional and Technical Writing Certificate. 

This course is an introduction to the “New Testament” section of the Christian Bible with some attention to relevant sections of the “Old,” apocryphal and other contemporaneous writings. In addition to originary contexts from the ancient times in which the books of the Bible were written, we will also be considering their historical, religious, literary and intellectual legacies for the following centuries. Taking the approach of contemporary literary scholarship, we will seek to interpret the Biblical texts in relation to when they were written, read, and translated; the principal literary genres out of which they are composed (biography, letters, history, wisdom writing, poetry, prophetic and apocalyptic writing), and their ideological signification (what these texts have been used to explain and justify). There will be substantial weekly reading assignments. Writing assignments will include regular quizzes, a midterm, and final exam.

From the “origins” of Children’s Literature to the current day call for diverse voices in the genre, this course examines the development of concepts of the child, children’s literature, and Western Culture. We will read a broad spectrum of historical and contemporary U.S., British, and world literature, and works representing a variety of genres and cultures. Through a survey of folk tales, picture books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, and graphic novels, we will consider the historical development of children’s literature as well as its dual agenda of instruction and amusement.

General Education: Tier 2 Humanities

101 **Seven Week-First Session: Fully Online**

102 **Seven Week-Second Session: Fully Online**

Instructor: Maritza Carndenas

What can the study of popular cultural forms like Television, Films, Advertisements, Video Games, Facebook as well as cultural practices like shopping, viewing habits, and other modes of consumption reveal about US American Values? How do representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality disseminated within these popular texts shape the way we come to see others and ourselves? These are some of the guiding questions we will be exploring in our study of U.S. popular culture. Through an examination of both critical essays and primary texts, students in this course will learn not only how to critically read and interpret various cultural forms, but also will come to understand the ways in which popular culture structures our day to day lives.

In this class, we will explore the many ways in which major Anglophone American writers and composers imagine and reimagine the relationships between music and literature. We will examine a variety of works, ranging from the beginnings of American literary and musical culture to the present day. We will listen to the ways in which music and literature not only influence each other formally and thematically but also how, at times, these two arts blend to a point where we cannot distinguish them from each other. In our work, we will not only focus on major texts and compositions in American literary culture—from the Bay Psalm Book to the poetry of Amiri Baraka, from Thoreau’s Walden to the experimental writing of Susan Howe—but also examine American popular culture in the form of folk ballads, blackface minstrelsy, African-American slave songs and spirituals, ragtime, the blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, punk rock, rap and hip-hop. This class will require us, as the composer Charles Ives famously stated, “to stretch our ears” and to listen for new relationships between these two “sister arts.” 

GEN ED: TIER 2 HUMANITIES

001

MWF 11:00 –11:50 AM

Instructor: Erika D'Souza

Introduction to Literature: The “Flawed” Story

"I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."    -Augusten Burroughs

In this course, we will be honing in our talent for close-reading, and analyzing literary tropes and terms through the eyes of the “flawed” hero. We will studying the merits and limitations of topics like the "tragic flaw," as well as broader terms like genre, narrative, theme, etc through a variety of poems, prose and film. Our reading list will include works by William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Artemisia Gentileschi and Walt Disney, amongst others. Expect a rigorous reading and writing load.

002

MWF 10:00 –10:50 AM

Instructor: Kay Chronister

003

TR 12:30-1:45 PM

Instructor: Sarah Wilhoit

Confronting the Other: Witches, Aliens, Robots, and Ghosts

In this course, we will consider how fantastical genres, such as magical realism, horror, and science fiction, provide insights into what it means to be human. Along the way, we will find numerous opportunities to explore issues of gender, race, (dis)ability, colonialism, language, culture, and power. Reading selections will range from gothic ghost stories to contemporary science fiction. Students will work to develop close reading skills and engage with intellectually challenging ideas in clear prose.

004

TR 2:00-3:45 PM

Instructor: Ruixue Zhang

A Conversation with the Ghost

A ghost always manifests to the living and reveals a hidden past. A conversation with the ghost is actually an exploration of the untold and untellable past, just as a literary text codifies a language that requires our decoding. This course centers on those nineteenth-century American and British writers’ works that invite the reader to closely read those ghostly traces in their well-woven texts and discover the unspoken and unspeakable secrets. A potential list of selected authors includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

101 **Seven Week-Second Session: Fully Online**

Instructor: Yuni Kim

Close reading of literary texts, critical analysis, and articulation of intellectually challenging ideas in clear prose.

The Art of Reading

Course designed to introduce students to the study of literature. Students will learn the practice and pleasures of slow, careful, and subtle reading in order to understand and interpret literary texts. Students will begin to learn and incorporate the methods and tools of literary analysis into a systematic approach to reading and writing about literature. As we read examples of the key literary genres—poetry, drama, and narrative—students will begin to consider how different literary works demand different kinds of reading. They will also begin to pay critical attention to the expectations and assumptions we bring to the texts we read. This is a writing-intensive course, in which students will produce essays, responses, and reports in order to think about reading in all its complexity.

This course will act as an orientation to the work we’ll be doing in London. This will include practical orientation (vaccinations, visas, travel logistics and safety, etc.), including a health and safety session with a UA Abroad representative, and an overview of the program activities and reading/written work for the program. Graded pass/fail.

This is a course on the history of American film genres from the silent period through the early 2000s.  Students will investigate film genres within the contexts that produced them, focusing on questions of film style, censorship, gender, race, immigration, and social class.  This course is especially concerned with the close analysis of film and readings of specific scenes and images and will make use of the terminology in Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art.  If students believe that they will find this tedious, please drop the class.  A major goal is for students to learn how to translate visual and aural elements into cogent and correctly written critiques. We will study silent comedy, pre-Code films, melodrama, the gangster, film noir, the Western, science fiction, and the horror film.  Films include The Gold Rush, Baby Face, Written on the Wind, The Searchers, The Big Sleep, Rosemary’s Baby, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, among others.  We will discuss problems of adaptation in our readings of the hard-boiled crime novels, Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep.  Requirements include quizzes, screening reports, and essay midterm and final exams.

This is a course in the writing of personal essays. We will privilege shorter, more frequent pieces in order to sample different types: memoir, character sketch, place profile and more, culminating in a longer piece at the end of the term. We will mix readings, discussions and workshops as we explore the fundamentals of the craft of writing the real. Expect a challenging but dynamic course in which we revel in writing awesome sentences and in confronting the aesthetic and ethical challenges of non-fiction. One required text will be Philip Gerard's Creative Nonfiction.

As an intermediate fiction-writing workshop, this course extends and complicates craft technique introduced at the beginning level. The emphasis of this course is to help you to begin developing a collection of short stories or a novel-in-stories. Same method of instruction and enrollment priority as 210 and class size is limited to 20. Creative Writing majors and minors will be given priority.

“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our challenge as writers can perhaps be no more succinctly expressed than with these words. This cross-genre workshop will ask you to do “the most difficult thing in the world” with the aim of expanding your thinking, your writing, and your thinking about writing. Using interdisciplinary, embodied and interactive exercises, you will be given the opportunity to explore a range of different approaches to working with theme, style, plot, character, voice, idea, and emotion. You will be asked to leave preconceived projects and expectations at the door, to take risks, generate new writing, to read and respond to a diverse and rigorous reading list, and to engage generously with your peers. A recommended, but optional field study will be offered in mid-February. You will have the opportunity to join your class, other UA students, faculty, and community members in a one-day intensive writing workshop with educational and performance components.

Our class time in this intermediate poetry workshop will be divided between close reading seminars and studio time in which we draft out of a range of prompts and exercises, transitioning to whole-group critiques when appropriate. We will read contemporary poets across cultures and write brief craft analyses of their work. While this course is about writing better poems, it is ultimately about learning new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being; it’s about expanding your took kit for self-invention and for world-invention.

It is no secret that mass incarceration has become one of the most important issues defining contemporary U.S. culture, at home and abroad. This class will frame this national problem through a local lens, balancing readings that discuss the historical causes of mass incarceration, including the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, the evolution of harsh sentencing laws, the role of bond and bail legislation, and gender dynamics, with a focus on local prison populations and those who are involved in trying to mitigate the challenges facing them. We will invite a variety of guest speakers to visit our class, including a local public defender, an activist who works in the women’s prison in Perryville, social workers who talk about the challenges facing recently released individuals, and formerly incarcerated activists. This course will also include an opportunity for students to participate in developing courses for the Prison Educational Program, to be taught in the local Arizona State Prison Complex here in Tucson. We will discuss how to work collaboratively with incarcerated students in order to develop meaningful pedagogy and the specific challenges involved in developing curriculum among a diverse group of students with different educational backgrounds, scattered across a number of different yards.

How have literary expression and our understandings of the self-changed alongside the media technologies of the twenty-first century? This course examines the place of fiction among social media, big data, fan fiction, video games, and the many other forms of entertainment that compete with it today. To do so, we’ll learn about the history of media forms, and some of the methods of media studies, which consider how media forms shape the stories they convey. We will read novels, a play, poetry, and experimental forms that ask what technology might be changing about the human condition, including concerns about privacy, identity, politics, memory, and more. Along the way, we will encounter some of the history of experimental literature and we’ll consider what forms the future of literary expression will take.

This class explores voice and accent in English literature and cultural production, including podcasts, audiobooks, film, and television. Topics include race and voice (e.g. brown voice); the cybernetic voices of virtual assistants like Siri; the call center; and forensic listening. Everyone has an accent, but some are heard as “neutral” and others as markers of difference. This has serious implications: accent discrimination costs jobs, housing applications, and asylum claims. Do literary texts have accents, like people do? Students will gain understanding of the politics of accent and voice, while learning to use their accented voices to produce close, critical readings.

This course offers an introduction to queer theory and culture, looking at what happens to literature and film when one looks at it through the prism of sexuality and gender. We will be interrogating the meaning of sex, sexuality, gender, and sexual / gender identity in a variety of contexts: in terms of the experience of authors, the constitution of characters, the meaning of settings, the relationship of literature or film to larger political issues, the practice of reading, shifting historical meanings, temporality, religion, and in relation to race, class, and able-bodiedness. We will be examining not only how sexual discourses constitute the shifting meaning of “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer” identity and experience, but “straight” or “normative” identities and life narratives, as well.

Yet the very notion of a "sexual identity," no matter how broadly defined, begs a number of questions. What is gender, anyway?  How is it experienced socially, erotically, in the body? How do we think of sexuality?  Is it a kind of appetite one is born with, akin to hunger or thirst?  A drive that aims toward a very specific kind of object?  Or is it something that is excited from without, responding to cultural stimuli that tell us what we want? Does one "choose" a sexual identity, is one born with it, or is it something that develops and changes over time?  And how is it similar to (or different from) racial or class identity as a political category of exclusion and oppression?  How does sexual desire relate to the production of gender—both for the desiring self and for the desired object?

English 373A introduces students to major works from the Anglo-Saxon or Old English period to the late seventeenth century. We will begin with one epic poem, Beowulf, and end with another, Paradise Lost. In between in chronological order we will read lyrics (short non-narrative poems), sonnets (a type of lyric), drama (plays), and more. We will set the readings in their historical context and at the same time consider how they speak to us today. The class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays. There will be three short papers, in-class writing assignments (including at least ten short-answer quizzes), and a final examination.

Touchstones of the Imagination is a survey of British (and American) literature from the Restoration through the Victorian period emphasizing important works of the marvelous and improbable in their literary and historical contexts. We will follow an approximate chronological approach for each national literature. British: Pope, Rape of the Lock; Swift, “A Modest Proposal”; Sheridan, School for Scandal; Brontë, Jane Eyre; Lamb, “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig”; Keats, Odes; Browning, selected poems; Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; Mitford, Sign of the Spider; Wilde Importance of Being Earnest and Salome. American short stories: Irving/ Hawthorne/ Poe. Primarily your participation (either oral presentations and/or impromptu discussion contributions), a paper, three tests (essay/identification) or two tests and a final exam will determine grades.

Encounter

This course will introduce students to literary analysis through a range of genres and texts. In the first part of the class we will focus particularly on short fiction, or “flash” fiction, as a way of honing our analytical skills. We will also be looking at a variety of contemporary poetry, theater, a novel and a film adaptation. Participation in class discussion and activities and attendance at literary and theater events in the community will be required.

Introduction to the various modes, techniques, and terminology of practical criticism.

The course invites students to engage with important works from a number of literary genres. We will read and write analytically about prose, poetry, and drama from different times and places. Students should aim to come away with sharpened analytic and writing skills. There will be short papers (written out of class) and at least ten in-class writing assignments, including short-answer quizzes.

Villains

As a spur to literary investigation, our course will focus on ethically distasteful main characters. Why do anti-heroes have leading roles -- what is the value of the downright despicable protagonist? Reading drama, poetry, short stories, and novels, we will contrast characters who repulse us with characters we trust and admire. That literature expands our empathetic repertoires, as we come to care for fictional others, has been named one of its virtues -- but what are the benefits of recoiling from certain figures? From Euripides' Medea to Milton's Satan, we will also address the attraction of the villain. In Poe's short stories and Browning's poetry, we will investigate "mad" or "monstrous" psychologies. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction we'll explore characters' moral apathy, moral complicity, and moral depravity. This course will provide you with the skills to analyze literary works across genres and periods. We will concentrate on the art of "close reading" -- digging into lines and passages for their rich implications. Each student will give an in-class presentation; there will be short weekly writing assignments and three short essays.

This course will deal with several major colonial and postcolonial novels, focusing on issues at stake in contemporary discussions of these works. Among the novelists to be explored are Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Forster (A Passage to India), Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Kincaid (Lucy), Naipaul (A Bend in the River), Coetzee (Disgrace), and Bharati Mukherjee (Jasmine). Nearly all the novels are quite short and are chosen to focus on larger cultural and political contexts and problems they explore. We will also read some portions of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Edward Said’s Orientalism and a selection of some short but important theoretical essays. The goal will be to examine these novels from the perspective of various major postcolonial concepts about identity, representation, nationalism, and globalization among a host of others. Each student will write a 1- or 2-page, single space commentary on an important aspect of each novel, a mid-term exam, and a final exam.

This course will focus on a variety of 19th- and 20th-century short stories drawn from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, and Sherman Alexie. Some of the main threads tying together these stories are elements of the grotesque, the labyrinthine, paradox, and the uncanny, often as challenges to hegemonic culture. Thus, the texts have thematic and structural echoes. We will, unfortunately, be reading some of these works in translation. I have tried to locate the best translations available. If you read German or Spanish fluently, the class will be grateful for any comments on the accuracy of the translations. We will discuss the stories in the context of various literary theories and methodologies, including biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, Marxism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and cultural studies. Stories will be read as closely as time permits. The syllabus may, for this reason, be flexible. Students will write comments and observations on readings in preparation for class and will have occasional in-class writing periods. The course also requires a midterm essay and a final essay, and complete an annotated bibliography in preparation for the final essay. Instructions for these assignments will be posted on D2L. Students will share their work in class as part of the participation grade. 

This is the advanced workshop in nonfiction, which, we should start by admitting, isn’t a genre. Nonfiction is just a descriptor, and not a very good one, since intelligent people don’t entirely agree about what it describes and what rules of engagement practitioners and readers expect. Instead we often use the term creative nonfiction (a little better) or (even better) literary nonfiction, which at least properly owns its snobbery. More specifically, what we’re interested in is nonfiction writing that aspires to art and complexity and is serious about its craft. More often than not we’ll be talking about the essay, which is both a sort of writing as well as a way of thinking and of being, even. Essaying is a way of engaging with the world. Essay, as you probably know, comes from the French, meaning to try, to attempt. That is, what we’re doing is inherently experimental. Well, why should that surprise us? The history of literature is the history of experimental literature. So we’ll be experimenting.

This workshop will be partly generative, but much of our time will focus on your own works in progress. We’ll discuss your work—its best qualities, its shapes and possible shapes, its subjects, its moves, its material, its methodology, and directions for improvement and expansion—as a group. We do this not just to improve the work on the table in front of us, but as a way of talking about what we’re working on ourselves. So when we’re workshopping an essay on sea turtles or lobotomies or doll parts or goth songs or Final Fantasy XII by student Y, we are always talking about your work. It is often easier to clearly see and talk about others’ work than your own.

Research is super important to the nonfiction writer. A case could be made that research is the central skill of what we do. Though we can write about ourselves, we’re not always that interesting (we become a lot more interesting by having something besides ourselves to explore). And we only find out what we think by researching and writing about the world and its details.

This is a Writing Emphasis Course for the Creative Writing Major. Discussion of student stories in a workshop setting.

The Advanced Fiction Workshop (ENG 404) offers an opportunity to write and think creatively, learn about the craft of fiction writing, incorporate rewriting into the writing process, and develop as an articulate and generous critic of fiction. Your time will be divided between writing and rewriting your own work, reading and commenting on peer manuscripts, and reading and discussing (mostly) contemporary fiction. Emphasis throughout the semester will be on participation and building a community of literary peers.

This is a course that will focus on cultivating your own aesthetic, voice and craft challenges in poetry. We will read a mix of work by diverse writers from multiple cultures and time periods as we also workshop your work in a dynamic, challenging but respectful environment. You will produce several poems over the term and compile their revisions into a final portfolio. We will mix reading, mini-lectures, class discussion, free writing, small groups and whole-class workshops to create a varied environment. Likely we will have some focus on technical aspects of lineation, sound and rhythm. Students and instructor will collaborate to find sample poems to read and on which we can model work.

Explore the basics of composition alongside the history and definition of feminism of the last three decades, and how it can function as a liberating approach in the writing classroom. Explore the ways composition and its process can be feminist in nature. Learn about, develop and put into practice feminist composing strategies, such as shifting power dynamics in the classroom, improving gendered inequities, fostering inclusivity, enhancing the integrity of each person, helping learners develop independence, teaching and research.

This course offers students an opportunity to learn and practice methods and skills in engaging user communities at every step of their writing and design processes and reporting effectively on their research. By partnering with the campus-wide, interdisciplinary User Experience Initiative (UXI), located in the LifeLab in the Student Union, the course provides a user-centered, collaborative space for students to gain research skills, work on projects connected to their interests, and develop communicative, cultural, and technological resources in and beyond the classroom.

During the first half of his career, Shakespeare wrote most of his romantic comedies, most of his history plays, and several of his best tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. We shall read a selection of these plays, paying close attention to language, character, and dramatic action. We shall also endeavor to keep in mind that Shakespeare was himself an actor and that his plays came to life on a stage. We will demystify the plays and make them accessible to modern readers. Two exams during the course, a final, and a term paper.

The goal of this course is to deepen our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays and of why they continue to be popular more than 400 years after they were written. We will examine one aspect of their popularity by studying some of their film adaptations. The course includes plays from three different genres—comedy, tragedy, and history; all but one of the works will be paired with film adaptations. We will focus on ways in which the written and cinematic texts are not only embedded in their particular culture but also expressive of cross-cultural concerns.

In addition to thinking critically about Shakespeare’s gorgeous, funny, complicated, disturbing, and infinitely interesting drama, students will learn the language and methods of film analysis, refine their visual literacy, and develop more effective communication strategies. One of our objectives will be to examine how the author, directors, and actors engage their audiences and construct meaning. Another objective will be to consider how reading Shakespeare and his cinematic interpreters enables us to understand more fully our own culture and our own selves.

We will investigate how Mexican American writers challenge basic assumptions ingrained in the Western understanding of written communication and its ties to alphabetic literacy, settler colonialism, civilizing missions, and unregulated global capitalist expansion. Common assumptions about writing depend upon the alphabet as a precondition for literacy, thereby obscuring pictographic and non-logosyllabic inscription practices that still circulate among Mexican-origin communities. Our analysis of media-rich texts will account for a plurality of transmission practices that are unmistakably tied to the Valley of Mexico, greater Mexico, and México Ocupado. Finally, we will examine how Mexican American aesthetic expressions rooted in lived and livable experiences foster decolonizing relationships to body politics and to each other as well as to the natural world.

This course will trace multiple artistic and historical revolutions in Ireland since 1900. In artistic terms, we’ll consider how the revolutionary work of WB Yeats and James Joyce in the early 20thgenerated a pair of aesthetic trajectories for Irish literature of the past 100 years. In historical terms, we’ll think through how the violent upheaval of Ireland’s 20th21st century political revolutions is reflected in and changed by representations of history by Irish authors. We’ll map the (many!) intersections between these two types of revolution in order to understand the entanglement of history and art in Ireland’s fiction, poetry, and drama. We may even try to figure out what on earth is going on with Brexit, and what that means for a post-Brexit Ireland. Additional possible authors include Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Maedhbh McGuckian, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Roddy Doyle, E.A. Markham, Ursula Raini Sarma, Frank O'Connor, Anna Burns.

The course will provide a general overview of teaching English as a second language, covering prominent teaching contexts, theories, methodologies, and issues influencing the teachers and learners. You will engage in numerous classroom tasks and activities and complete various course assignments as you critically reflect on the role of English and English language teaching in today’s globalized and mobile world. English 455 is one of the four courses comprising the Teaching English as a Global Language Certificate.

The study of novels, drama and poetry by leading Black writers.

Contemporary American poetry both extends and morphs the restless experimental energies and grand ambitions of the great American modernists. We’ll read contemporary (post WW2-present) poetry both as a dialogic response to the modern tradition and as an engagement with contemporary political, economic, and cultural developments. Poets to be studied will likely include several of the following: Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, Heriberto Yépez, Julie Ezelle Patton, Magdalena Zurawski.  (We won’t read all these poets: a reading list of seven to eight writers is most likely.)  Principal requirements: three short papers (3-5 pp. each), or two short papers plus a journal of imitations; a final exam.

Ever had the experience of telling someone that you’re an English Major and getting “So, what are you going to DO with that?” in response? This class aims to move toward an answer. We’ll consider how to translate, adapt and apply English major skills to multiple career paths—both those that leads through graduate and professional degrees, and those that don’t. Students will research graduate/pre-professional programs and/or entry-level positions in fields they choose. Over the course of the semester, we’ll get a sense of the range of resources available at the U of A to help students prepare for life after graduation, and hear from many former English majors now working in a range of different fields. Students will finish with an informed and workshopped set of application materials for an entry-level career position or a graduate program. Note: the U Access description suggests that this class is for seniors, but it is not required that you be a senior in order to enroll. Sophomores and juniors who have completed ENGL380 welcome!

A Space Odyssey

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

We shall take as our starting point the words spoken by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek. His word “space” has an aura of the unknown and uncharted. The word signals adventure and wonder. Space can prove harrowing as well. Just think how the movie Gravity imagines space: empty, cold, forbidding.

Closer to home, Shakespeare’s contemporaries grappled with space too. When they embarked on a long ocean voyage or a journey through a dense forest, they imagined space as dismaying, confusing, and potentially threatening. That is why they worked so hard to map the world. When Galileo turned his telescope on the sky, people learned that the earth was not the center of the universe but simply a body cruising through space around the sun. The discovery was stunning. John Donne registers the shock when he says, “New philosophy [science] calls all in doubt, / the element of fire is quite put out; / the sun is lost, and the earth . . . / ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” John Milton in Paradise Lost captures the disorientation of vast distance when Satan looks from hell to earth and finds a “wild abyss.”

Clearly, the expanses of space unnerved Shakespeare’s culture. Perhaps that is why people were so anxious to contain and shape the world around them, whether indoors or outdoors. To accomplish this goal, they employed the arts of architecture, painting, garden design, and poetry.

This interdisciplinary seminar will look at the literal, literary, and artistic handling of space. How have people organized and divided space? What cultural significance does the treatment of space have? What are the implications for an understanding of the world around us? The course is not chiefly about space as understood by scientists or mathematicians. Instead, we will focus on the artistic expression of Shakespeare’s culture, especially as it manifests itself in buildings, paintings, the landscape around stately homes, and the arrangement of lyrics in a collection of poems.

The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.

The Hurricane Does Not Roar in Pentameter: Memory, History, and Migration in Contemporary Caribbean Literature

Over the past 70 years, writers from the Caribbean have made an indelible imprint on the entirety of literature written in English. This class will focus primarily on writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries who use their work to confront the entanglement of memory, history, and migration. We’ll supplement our reading in literature with theory and criticism that explores the implications of this work for literary cultures in the Caribbean and the wider Anglophone world today. Possible authors include George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kinkaid, M Nourbese Philip, Paule Marshall, Kei Miller, David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Marcia Douglas, Winsome Pinnock, Grace Nichols.

Tragedy

Tragedy is violent, visceral, and ethically fraught. It is an ancient Greek innovation that continues to impassion audiences, dramatists, novelists, philosophers, social theorists, and literary critics (for instance, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Schmitt, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Freud, Žižek, Nussbaum, Carson, and Butler). Tragedy raises the question of how individuals, cultures, and works of art understand loss and catastrophe. It brings power inequities to the fore. In this course, we will traverse ancient history, politics, and ethics, as well as contemporary feminist, queer, and performance theories. We will grapple with the fundamental issues of personhood at stake in tragedy: how is character formed? How do characters behave under duress? Do tragic heroes and heroines "get what they deserve" or far from it? Why do audiences take pleasure in watching fictional people suffer?

We will spend half of our course in the ancient world (in Greece and Rome); here we will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, alongside modern writers' notes on them. We'll take stock of the “ancient quarrel” between tragedy and philosophy, in which Plato calls literature morally dangerous. We'll see how ancient and modern tragedies represent heroism, self-knowledge, autonomy, love, disability, war, and family. In the second half of our seminar, we will see how modern thinkers have viewed, inherited, and reimagined tragedy. Reading drama, philosophy, anthropology, and novels, we will focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who conceive of tragedy as *the* genre of modernity. Each student will give an in-class presentation; there will be short, regular writing assignments and a final creative or critical project. Students will choose some of the readings (and films) in the latter half of the course.

English 307 offers junior- and senior-level students the opportunity to develop their use of rhetorical strategies and communications technologies appropriate to workplaces. With an emphasis on written communication, students will engage in projects that require them to analyze and respond to a variety of professional situations. Students will plan and create a range of individual and collaborative projects including, but not limited to, employment documents, proposals, reports, brochures, newsletters, memos, letters, and other business genres. Workplace practices, business communication assessment, promotional resources, and writing on behalf of an organization are just some of the topics studied in English 307. Through client-based projects, simulations, and/or case studies, students will analyze and reflect upon the role of communication practices in a range of business settings. Students can expect to engage in reading discussions, daily assignments, on- and off-campus research, technology use, and oral reports.

English 308 offers junior- and senior-level students the opportunity to develop their use of the rhetorical strategies and communications technologies appropriate to technical writing situations. Students will plan, create, and user-test a range of individual and collaborative projects including, but not limited to, technical documentation, proposals, reports, job materials, and other technical genres. Project management, documentation plans, style guides, and usability testing are just some of the topics studied in English 308.

Building on the close reading, focused research, and reflective writing done in your general education writing courses (ENGL101 and ENGL102 and their equivalents), this course emphasizes the skills of rhetorical analysis, research, persuasion, reflection, and revision in specific professional and technical contexts.It is designed to help students learn to write for varied audiences and situations, find and evaluate sources, and make critically aware decisions about how best to achieve their purposes. The immediate goal of this course is to prepare students for further research and writing in future professional settings.

This course emphasizes communicating scientific knowledge. You will learn strategies for and get practice in developing, testing, and delivering scientific and technical reports for specific audiences. Whether you bring a project to the class or develop a project for the purpose of the class, you will have opportunities to get feedback on your project in various stages of preparation. ENGL 414 counts as an elective for the undergraduate Professional and Technical Writing Certificate. ENGL514 counts toward the Graduate Certificate in Science Communication.