Upcoming Courses

101 Fully Online

**7-Week First Session**

Instructor: Melani Martinez

ENGL 160A2 explores food writing and its relationship to culture. Analyzing food as both personal and cultural symbol, students will develop an appreciation for how food traditions reflect and shape cultural societies and diverse worldview. Course materials will focus on diverse perspectives with emphasis on marginalized groups such as migrant, incarcerated, and Indigenous food communities. Students will explore their own food memories in reflective writing and storytelling to find connections between personal food histories and social or environmental justice. Using various rhetorical strategies and drawing from research, field study, oral history, and lived experiences/traditional knowledge, students will practice food writing for a variety of audiences in four key genres: recipe card, profile podcast, food memoir, and manifesto. Workshop and revision will be important aspects of the course.

101/201 Fully Online

**7-Week First Session**

Instructor: Dennis Wise

Monsters are cool—but they’re also interesting, and also sometimes deeply problematic. The category of the “non-human” (or, more broadly, “the Other”) raises key questions about human identity, human values, and the cultural boundaries we construct to cordon off the horrific, the weird, the frightening, the monstrous, or the non-human. As a result, we won’t focus simply particular monster-types like the zombie, the vampire, or the cyborg. Instead, we’ll look at monster-figures in literature and film as key indicators of cultural history: the symbolic carriers of cultural values, problems, and ideological tensions. These cultural issues can include things like political dissension, systems of religious belief, social order and disorder, human nature, or distinctions of race/class/gender. As we’ll see, monsters often become symbols in the cultural, political, and intellectual clashes that mark Western history. In order to better understand our cultural roots, then, we have to come to terms with the historical and ideological tensions behind those clashes. In this course, we’ll discuss these tensions through well-organized analytical arguments that present strong textual evidence and display critical thinking.

In this iteration of “Major American Authors,” we will explore the work of many writers by examining the long relationship between music and literature in U.S. American history. We will study works from the beginning of U.S. American literary and musical culture to the present day. Examples include: The Bay Psalm Book; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and many more; W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; and essays on music by Langston Hughes, John Cage, Greil Marcus, and Anne Powers. Importantly, we will listen to and read the lyrics from a wide variety of popular musics in U.S. America. These will range from anonymous folk ballads, work songs, and spirituals, to authored works by writer-performers such as Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, MF Doom, Kendrick Lamar, and many more. This class will require us, as the composer Charles Ives famously stated, “to stretch our ears,” and our goal will be to listen to and for musical-literary connections that are often neglected or forgotten in contemporary popular culture. This is a writing intensive course, and we will write regularly in order to closely examine these works in relation to form, theme, and context.

Basic concepts in the study of the English language: history, semantics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse. English in its social context: regional and social varieties, language acquisition, and English as an international language.

English 300 is a comparative study of literature and cinema as aesthetic media. Given the breadth and complexity of film and literature, including historical, technical, and narrative elements, our class is broken into three modules: “Film, Literature, and Aesthetics,” “Adaptation and Intertextuality,” and “Cultural and Ideological Connections.” We will survey a curated list of films and texts that serve as examples, emphasizing specific dimensions that support course outcomes. Class activities include asynchronous discussions, individual reflections, short essays, and a final multimodal project that synthesizes the course modules and materials. All of our readings and films are found on D2L, so that they may be easily accessed and revisited as often as needed. 

The origin and evolution of genres in literature, rhetoric, and nonfiction prose, among others.

The Prison Writing Course encourages reflection and response to "narratives" about prison and inmates and examines larger societal issues surrounding this topic. The lectures and main assignments will encourage students to look at received perspectives of prison and prison issues (past), allow for response to issues raised in the readings and within class discussions (present), and then give students the opportunity to propose a community project that addresses some issue raised or encountered throughout the course (future).

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 UX@UA, 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.

This course will focus on a selection of Shakespeare’s late comedies, tragedies, and romances. We will examine the art of these plays, looking at Shakespeare’s language, his dramatic technique, and his development as an artist. To gain a more complete understanding of these works, we will also study them in their historical context. The birth of nationalism, the emergence of capitalism, and the Reformation, for example, will involve us in discussions of economic, religious, racial, and gendered identity. But we will not limit ourselves to just this plurality of forces.  Employing the interdisciplinary theorizations of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, we will also consider how alternative subjectivities reconfigure our understanding of authorship both then and now. By employing actor-network theory, new materialism, and posthumanism, we will explore how these plays and their modern adaptation offer creative potentialities and new networks of understanding.   

This course examines cinema as a major narrative form of the 20th century. We will begin with the earliest French and American experiments in visual storytelling in short films and animation. Then we will trace the development of film narrative and its derivation from literary forms through the silent comedy and horror to Hollywood narrative genres, such as the Western, the screwball comedy, the musical, the suspense film. Students should expect to commit to substantive reading, writing, and viewing. Assignments will require close narrative analysis of film on the shot, sequence, and plot levels and mastery of the vocabulary and precepts of narrative and film studies.

A consideration of important authors, works, and themes in American literature.

American poets were instrumental in shaping the movement known as modernism. Stressing experiment and innovation, their work challenged conventional conceptions of poetry, creating a hyper-textual space in which competing idioms, discourses, and models of social and political action could jostle freely. (Contemporary poetry, especially so-called “composition by field,” is very much an outgrowth of modernist practice.) We will focus on the work of such major American modernist poets as Eliot, Pound, Williams, H.D., Stevens, Moore, and Crane. We will stress close reading of individual poems but will also explore modernism as a program of literary and cultural innovation. Requirements: three short papers (3-5 pp. each), or two short papers plus a journal of imitations; a final exam.

In this upper-division course, we will read, examine, and discuss pairs of literary works by contemporary American authors that overlap and engage thematically with each other in meaningful ways.  The reading list is still taking shape, but will probably include works by Cormac McCarthy, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Ana Castillo, Jacques Poulin, and Cecile Pineda.  Students will be expected to participate regularly in class discussion, and to write two or three short papers over the course of the semester.

A 1-credit workshop in translating, adapting, and applying Creative Writing major skills to multiple career paths. Students will research career fields and graduate and preprofessional programs and be in conversation with professionals from these fields. Students will finish with an informed and workshopped set of application materials for an entry-level career position or a graduate program.

While the art of rhetoric is often thought about in relation to persuasion and to a host of classical figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero, and the Sophists, it provides a much larger framework that helps us to explain and understand modern social phenomena such as the concepts of “post-truth” and “fake news” in modern culture, as well as the rise of demagogic and authoritarian figures in the context of populist political movements. For example, we see how prevalent references to “fake news” and “post-truth” have become in media discourse, where even science and objectivity have been called into question because of their connections to power and corruption. In this context, one gets to choose literally what she or he would like to believe about the external world because there is probably a community out there that will support it. What problems are posed for public discourse and deliberation when questions about representation become so prevalent? This is a major question we will consider in this class.

By examining rhetorical traditions, we will lay the ground to understand how language and rhetoric have been used and abused by those in power.  By understanding how rhetoric has developed throughout history as a tool of persuasion and manipulation, we will develop a greater appreciation of how the use of language in various contexts shapes our framing of reality. This is especially important as we enter what has been labeled as a “post-truth” era, where the very ability to represent “facts” and “reality” have been called into question.

Whether you are interested in the representation and treatment of minorities and women under the Trump administration, have an abiding interest in the rapid growth and influence of  social movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, or have wondered why our current political moment is so unbelievable, you will be able to see the applicability of rhetoric to the emergence of social concerns and the growth of social movements in the public sphere.

A general overview of the profession covering prominent theories, methodologies, and procedures influencing the field.

Study of selected Romantic poets and their contemporaries.

American poets were instrumental in shaping the movement known as modernism.  Stressing experiment and innovation, their work challenged conventional conceptions of poetry, creating a hyper-textual space in which competing idioms, discourses, and models of social and political action could jostle freely.  (Contemporary poetry, especially so-called “composition by field,” is very much an outgrowth of modernist practice.)  We will focus on the work of such major American modernist poets as Eliot, Pound, Williams, H.D., Stevens, Moore, and Crane.  We will stress close reading of individual poems but will also explore modernism as a program of literary and cultural innovation.  Requirements: three short papers (3-5 pp. each), or two short papers plus a journal of imitations; a final exam. 

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.