In ENG 358 you will be introduced to many of the critical perspectives and theories that enliven contemporary literary and cultural studies. Included on our lit-crit-hit-parade will be Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, Feminist literary studies, Queer Studies, Ethnic and Race Studies, Postcolonialism, Marxism, Psychoanalytic literary studies, and Culture Studies. Sound intimidating? Don't worry--we will be testing these theories on short stories, novellas, films, pop culture, and each other. As we examine these different ways of reading, and thinking about reading, we will be asking ourselves: What is "literature"? Why do we study it? In what ways, if any, are literary texts different from other types of cultural productions? What is "theory?" Can literary theories be applied to non-literary texts? How do literature and criticism relate to other aspects of culture such as gender, race, class, and nation? What is at stake in choosing one critical/theoretical methodology over another?

Date/Time: Wednesdays, 4-6:45 p.m.

In ENG 322 we will explore that representation in British literature and culture, as the image of the child became increasingly popular and powerful throughout the nineteenth century.

In ENG 328 we will trace the development of the genre of literature for children, from fables and fairy tales and primers to Contemporary Children’s literature that deals with historical themes.

A special "cluster" course on the theme of CHILDHOOD. In each course, the instructors will focus on the theme of "childhood" to draw parallels on ideas about children between and among cultures and literatures across time.

** These courses are co-requisite. You must sign up for both.

Date/Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 a.m. and 11-12:15 p.m.

The period of European Modernism, typically defined from 1890 to 1930, produced literary and artistic forms that were bold and innovative in their desire to express “the new.”

As this literary movement is particularly transnational (German, French, Russian, Czech, Italian, British), this course encompasses literature from various European countries.

This period of international artistic fervor witnessed artists who self-consciously wished to break with the past and to search for new forms of literary expression.

** This course fulfills English Major Late Period requirement.

Date/Time/Location: Mondays and Wednesdays at 4-5:15 p.m. in Science 117

This course focuses on works of Contemporary African American Poetry that use Black commodity slavery as artistic sites of invention and revelation.  The recuperation and retelling of history has always been a central part of African American culture, and that oral tradition has shaped in some profound ways African American poetry. 

The impulse to use slavery as an artistic platform becomes doubly complicated by the tension that occurs between telling the stories of a marginalized people and using traditional Eurocentric forms conceived in tandem with the colonial ideology that labeled Africans as chattel to be used as cheap labor.  Some of the poets we shall read: Thylaiss Moss, Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Hayden and Etheridge Knight.

** This course fulfills the English Major Late Period requirement and the Literature of Race, Culture and Power requirement.

Date/Time/Location: Tuesdays at 4-6:45 p.m. in Goddard 213

Is the graphic novel literature? Is it art? What is a graphic novel anyway? How does it relate to fiction? How does it overlap with popular comics? Is there more to comics than action? Why have graphic novels had such rapid growth in the last decade, and why is there so much controversy over their inclusion in school curricula?

Rhetoric of the Graphic Novel will begin with such questions as we investigate the increasingly popular medium of graphic novels. Our objective will be to explore the graphic novel as a rhetorical form that crosses the boundaries of traditional novels, memoirs, and narrative art to create a hybrid genre. We will consider Scott McCloud’s theories of how we read text and what assumptions we make about writing and pictures when we look at, and assign meaning to, a page. Primary sources will include some of the most celebrated and controversial graphic novels currently available, such as Persepolis, Blankets, American Born Chinese, Fun Home, and Asterios Polyp.

In addition to discussing the content and rhetoric of graphic novels, we will also read critical essays that explore how graphic novels are relevant to teaching in secondary and college classrooms. Students will be challenged to examine graphic novels as cultural and teachable texts in a series of critical papers. As the final project in this class, we will have a creating comics workshop. This course on graphic novels challenges traditional and experimental notions of what constitutes literary and popular texts and calls into question what it means to read and create meaning.

** This course fulfills the English Major Language requirement and will give you credit towards the Writing minor.

Date/Time/Location: Mondays and Wednesdays at 4-5:15 p.m. in Communication Building 203

This course focuses on readings of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century narratives of slavery from Africa, the Americas and England. These texts will be read alongside African American literary theory and historiographies of plantation societies. From Charles Dickens to Toni Morrison, slave narratives and other documents generated by the abolition movement have provided images and rhetorical strategies for fiction and poetry to explore the lives of individuals at the margins.  Most of the popular knowledge about slavery comes from artistic representations of the “peculiar institution,” so it will be the primary task of this course to read and write about texts created by or with the help of the enslaved during the era America and England were slave societies.

In addition, we shall examine the ways figurative language generated by the abolition movement provided an important element - sometimes explicit, sometimes sublimated - for narrative representation of personal liberty and national identity in the British and American literary canons.

This course fulfills the middle period requirement and the race, culture and power requirement for the English major.

Day/Time/Location: Tuesday at 7 - 9:45 p.m. in CECE 167