English Courses

While refining students' general analytical and interpretive skills, this course offers intensive examination of specific issues in literature and culture, often those at the center of current critical interest. Recent sections have focused on The Gangster Film, Memoir and Sexuality, Quest for the Grail, and Native American Literature. Students may only count one ENG 255 that is a cross-listed Modern Language course toward the major or minor.

Fall Semester information

255A: Tps:Literature and Pandemic

255B: Tps:Medieval Tabloid

255C: Tps:African American Cinema

Reading African American cinema as a pivotal archive in African American cultural production, this course explores the diverse black aesthetic traditions that African American film has and continues to develop, explore, and shape. Specifically, the course will track how films produced, written, and/or directed by African Americans are situated in larger debates about the politics of race and representation.

Spring Semester information

255A: Tps:African American Women Playwrights

Many readers may be familiar with groundbreakers like Lorraine Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun has become part of the canon of Civil Rights era reading. But in the 1960s and 1970s, African American women playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange were doing experiments with language and theatricality that had never been seen before. And from the 1980s into the present, we continue to witness important works by writers like Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks (the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama), Lynn Nottage, and many others.
This course focuses primarily on works by these more recent playwrights, with specific attention to ways that race/racism and gender/sexuality-- as well as social class and professional marginalization--have affected their work and become integral to their plays. This is a course that will require active participation; since it is also a "W" class, students will do a variety of writing exercises and more formal papers.

255B: Tps:Poet, Seeker, Lover, Friend

Drawing inspiration from Eudora Welty's aphorism "all serious daring starts from within," this course will analyze poetry, fiction, and drama while asking questions about the directions that even a "sheltered life" can take.  Core poems will include the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, seventeenth-century poems of love and friendship by John Donne and Katherine Philips respectively, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Mary Jo Salter's "Elegies for Etsuko." We will also read Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter's Tale, Jane Austen's Persuasion, Toni Morrison's Sula, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Four of your five papers will be analytical in focus; your penultimate paper will consist of a creative letter or monologue that incorporates research on secondary sources into your explication of poems by Donne, Philips, or Eliot.

255C: Tps:Viking Myths and Modern Myth-making

This course introduces students to a wide range of texts from the Viking-Age North Sea region (ca. 793¿1300 CE), beginning with the first Norse territorial expansions into Anglo-Saxon England and ending with the widespread Christianization of Iceland and Norway. The course will include selections from Old English poetry, the Eddas (prose and poetic), Norse þattr, Icelandic sagas, Icelandic law, Arabic travel narratives, and various other documents that tell the story of cultural contact between the Viking peoples and their neighbors near and far. We will consider the act of encountering literature in translation, investigate the historical and etymological origins of the term Viking, and probe the assumptions behind pop culture representations of medieval Scandinavians. The course will also address the appropriation of Viking culture by modern special interest groups. What are the past and present myths surrounding Viking culture, and how can we begin to uncover the truth about this complex group of peoples?