Course Descriptions Spring 2016
Department of English
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 2120
Gabriel Hankins
World Literature (MAJORS)
Description: The focus of this course will be on the way that poetry and fiction represent an
encounter between ourselves and the world. Our readings will range from John Donne to James
Joyce to dystopian science fiction, and will center on experimental works of the twentieth
century. Our goals will be precise attention to the details of language, the development of critical
thinking and argumentation skills in a literary studies context, and a broad view of the reach of
comparative world literature. The central class requirements are brief daily writing as
preparation for class discussion, one short and two longer papers, and careful attention to the
process of final revision.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3100
Walt Hunter
Critical Writing about Literature: “You Must Change Your Life”: The Literature of
Transformation
Description: At the end of his sonnet, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the German poet Rainer
Maria Rilke writes, “You must change your life.” We often describe a book as “life-changing,” but
what is it about literature that calls us to change our lives? How is literature about living life at
all, much less changing it? What makes us vulnerable to the power literature has over us—and
how can we talk about that power? This course will introduce you to ways of reading literature,
and prepare you for the critical work you’ll do as an English major, by exploring various scenes
of transformation (social, political, personal, ethical, ecological, temporal, historical) in multiple
genres of literature (poetry, the short story, the novel). By focusing on transformation, this
course will draw our collective attention to what literary works “do,” not only what they “mean.”
To that end, we’ll develop an ever-expanding toolkit of literary devices, terms, genres, and
genealogies. Six weeks of poems—one a day, each in a different poetic design—will make a
good starting point. The sonnet, the haiku, the ballad, the ode, and several open forms provide
us the opportunity to slow down. It will not be unusual for us to spend an entire class period on a
single line of poetry, an image, a metaphor, or a question of meter and rhythm. We’ll build to
longer prose works, including short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Lu Xun, and Naguib
Mahfouz, and two novels: Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mulk Raj Anand’s
Untouchable.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3100
Dominic Mastroianni
Critical Writing about Literature
Description: This course will help you acquire and develop the skills needed to closely read
and interpret literary texts, and to craft and defend arguments about them. The course is
oriented less by a particular set of texts, than by a desire (mine, and hopefully yours) to respond
to texts with sensitivity, intensity, and discipline. We will read, discuss, and write about poetry,
short fiction, a novel, and a range of important works of literary criticism and theory. Our class
meetings will be a series of experiments in close reading, the sort of patient, meticulous
attention to textual detail called for by literary texts and practiced by literary scholars. Authors to
include Stanley Cavell, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Shoshana Felman, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Plato, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, and
Henry David Thoreau.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3100
Erin Goss
Critical Writing about Literature
Description: This course develops the critical acumen and analytical proficiency requisite to
articulate and compelling critical writing. Our focus together will be on coming to ask the kinds of
questions about literary texts that will yield writing about which you care, since our core
assumption will be that good writing depends upon finding ways to care about what your writing
can convey and do. Along the way, the course will provide vocabulary expected of the advanced
student of literature and will consider some key elements of writing style. Our work together in
class will primarily be the work of reading, and we will proceed from the assumption that careful
writing begins with careful reading, for it is unlikely that one can write well about that to which
one has paid little attention.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3140
Sharon Nalley
Technical Writing
Description: In this class, you will learn to evaluate audience, purpose, context, and
constraints of various technical communication practices and write and design technical
communication projects. This particular class will be 1) focused on strengthening critical
thinking skills in every aspect of our course, and 2) using Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger
Games as the conceptual framework of our tech comm genre projects. Emphasis is placed on
teamwork, evaluation, reflection, and communication problem-solving strategies. Planning,
working in groups, and evaluating rhetorical situations will feature prominently, and students will
be able to take advantage of in-class workshops and peer reviews to get feedback on their
projects. Students will spend considerable time presenting their work to the class. Additionally,
this class is participating in Clemson’s “CT2” campus-wide Quality Enhancement Plan to target
undergraduate critical thinking, an invaluable skill for you to develop during your college career
(employers highly value this skill!). We will focus on consciously practicing critical thinking skills
throughout the semester: in our discussions, assignments, reviews, and reflections. You will
complete two versions of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) and submit an
artifact (one of our genre projects) of your progress in critical thinking at the end of the
semester.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3140
Melissa Dugan
Technical Communication
Description: This course focuses on the fundamentals of technical communication. The
course is broken into three major units: the history and practice of technical communication as
an art form, essential contemporary workplace communication skills, and the application of this
knowledge in the form of a client-based multimodal group project proposal. In addition to the
proposal, students will create memos, emails, reports, standard operating procedures, resumes,
cover letters, and infographics. Students will read selections from well-known historical texts
created with the purpose of explaining technical processes and have the opportunity to
develop their technological expertise by working with the software made available through
Adobe Creative Suite. Ultimately, the goal of the technical communication course is to equip
students with a broad range of communication skills in order to make them versatile and
effective communicators in whatever profession they choose.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3140
Brian Smith
Technical Writing
Description: This course is geared toward student professional development and effective
communication skills in various online/digital contexts. Utilizing the Adobe Digital Studio and the
Adobe Creative Cloud, a heavy emphasis will focus on the production of professional
instructional video relevant to the student’s major/career, as well as pertinent topics and
practices like crowdsourcing, promotional materials, professionalism in social media, and the
21st Century video boom. Therefore, students will also utilize The Social Media Listening Center
and The Pearce Center for Professional Communication. LinkedIn profiles, Behance Accounts,
and professional YouTube channels, among other things, will be generated. Students will often
collaborate in teams in the audio-visual production of professional products based both upon
industry standards as well as a few unexpected and creative outlets.
Course:
ENGL 3370
Instructor:
Rhondda Thomas
Title:
Creative Inquiry: The Clemson University Story Project
Description: For the Clemson University Story Project, students will conduct research for a
mobile app, website, Clemson University history trail, historical maps of Clemson land, a
scholarly book, and journal articles. Research will include recovering the stories of Cherokees
who originally inhabited the land, early European settlers in the Upstate, American
Revolutionary War battles on the land upon which Clemson is built, enslaved and free African
Americans who lived and labored at Fort Hill Plantation, sharecroppers who worked at Fort Hill
during Reconstruction, the predominately African American labor crew that helped build
Clemson, wage workers employed at Fort Hill and Clemson prior to 1963, Clemson
cadets' military service, musicians like Duke Ellington who performed for cadet dances,
women's enrollment at Clemson, Harvey Gantt's integration of Clemson, and other significant
milestones and individuals in Clemson University history. Students will work with their
instructors to develop individualized and team research projects. Research will include travel to
archives and historical sites in South Carolina. Enrollment by permission only. Email
rhonddt@clemson.edu for more information.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3370
Susanna Ashton
Creative Inquiry: “ Sam Aleckson and His World"
Description: Are you interested in American History, American Literature, African American
Studies, or Digital Storytelling?
If so, come get involved in this one-semester team project to research, write & curate a
professional online exhibit about the life and world of Sam Aleckson, a man who was born
enslaved in Charleston SC in the 1840s. He survived slavery and the chaos of the Civil War and
went on to write his little-known life story when he was some 70 years of age. Come help me remap his vexed and complex life onto the romanticized tourist narratives of the Charleston
Battery in partnership with the Avery Center for African American History & Culture at the
College of Charleston.
You'll read and write a great deal concerning history and literature about the cultures of
enslaved people in South Carolina. You'll also help imagine new ways to tell a story of our state
and explore how public stories can use the momentum of a clearer understanding of the past to
move us all forward. BONUS: We will need to take a funded trip or two overnight to Charleston
to do site research.
Get in touch ASAP (Dr. Ashton, sashton@clemson.edu) and let's chat about how this course
might work for you and what you might contribute. The course fulfills the elective requirement for
the English major. In special cases, it may be possible to substitute the course for the Diversity
requirement or for the WPS requirement (for students in the WPS emphasis area).
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3450
Nic Brown
Structure of Fiction
Description: The Structure of Fiction is an introduction to the creative writing and critical study
of prose fiction in which students will write short creative exercises, read a variety of examples
of contemporary short fiction, and write longer pieces of fiction that will be workshopped by the
class.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3460
Jillian Weise
The Structure of Poetry
Description: From the dirty-talking Roman poets through the swash-buckling post-classical
poets and onward to our contemporaries, this class will ask: How are poems made? What is a
line and where to break it? Where did all the formalists go? What is a chance operation? Come
prepared to write many poems in different structures.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3490
Brian Smith
Technology and the Popular Imagination
Description: This course examines the relationship between technology, global art, and
various narrative forms as they have developed in the 21st century. With a heavy emphasis on
audio-visual aesthetic forms, this course will trace the history and resurgence of the music video
and its predecessors, the relationship between language, narrative, and contemporary global
cinema, changes in the music industry, and the rising phenomenon of collaborative online
artistic production. Adobe Anywhere and the future of film, literature and popular culture, The
Grammy Awards and blogging, the 21st Century video boom and social media, will be just a
handful of specific topics covered. Students will work on collaborative projects involving
creative audio-visual production related to the course material utilizing the Adobe Creative
Cloud, the Adobe Digital Studio, and the Social Media Listening Center.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3530
Angela Naimou
American Literatures of Race, Ethnicity and Migration
Description: Examination of U.S. literary texts that respond to the histories and competing
theories of race, ethnicity, migration, empire or diaspora. May include attention to Native
American, African American, Latina/o, Chicana/o, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab
American literature.
Course:
Instructor:
ENGL 3800
Megan Woosley-Goodman
Title:
British and American Women Writers
Description: This section of English 3800, British and American Women Writers, is a course
that covers poetry, drama, fiction, and prose by established and little-known women writers in
Britain and America. Particular attention is given to works treating themes and issues
concerning women’s lives. The readings are on such topics as women and work, education,
religion, and creativity.
In this course we will read women’s writing starting with the Anglo-Saxon period and ending with
a postcolonial novel of the 20thcentury. We will view women’s writing through the scope of the
body by exploring attitudes to gender, sexuality, and the regulation of desire; we will explore the
role the female body plays in defining identity while simultaneously looking at the attempts of
others to define female experience through the bound, the pregnant, the un/married, classed,
and the hysterical body. The female body has long been a site of a power struggle and women
throughout many historical periods have attempted to define/redefine identity by laying claim
and/or rejecting others claims to their own bodies. We will examine several ways the body has
been used to define female identity: spiritual, religious, intellectual, romantic, physical,
philosophical, and the socio-political.
The primary objective is to provide students with the skills necessary to perform close reading of
texts in a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, and plays. As a result of practicing close
reading, students should become more confident in their abilities to analyze literature, both
formally in written essays, and informally in class discussion and reading responses.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3960
Brian McGrath
British Literature I
Description: ENGL 3960 aims to introduce students to the English literary tradition up to
roughly 1800. We will consider how writers engaged with vital historical events and
developments such as the rise of absolute monarchy, revolution, the expansion of the reading
public, the emergence of a middle class, and changing relations between the sexes. By putting
authors and texts in dialogue with each other as the semester progresses, we will become
aware of how literary traditions and canons are dynamically created as well as re-created. The
course will also familiarize students with some important techniques of literary analysis used to
account for the power of literary writing.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3980
Dominic Mastroianni
American Literature Survey I
Description: This course will introduce you to American literature from the colonial period
through the Civil War. Over the course of the semester we will read and think with some of the
most provocative works of early American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose. We will
encounter our wide variety of writings by focusing on early American accounts of passions and
moods such as love, wonder, sympathy, friendliness, terror, joy, sadness, desire, hope, despair,
hatred, attraction, repulsion, loneliness, boredom, jealousy, generosity, uneasiness, satisfaction,
and shame. As we move through this course together, you can expect to become a more
attentive reader and a more forceful writer. Authors to include Anne Bradstreet, Charles
Brockden Brown, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Lydia Maria Child, Emily Dickinson,
Frederick Douglass, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Olaudah Equiano, Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Jefferson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan
Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Phillis Wheatley, and Walt Whitman.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 3980
Susanna Ashton
American Literature Survey, Part 1
Description: This junior-level class for English Majors, Education Majors and other enthusiasts
of all stripes will wander through a couple of centuries and across all sorts of hazy
borders…where does the United States begin and where does Mexico end? Do a couple of
letters written on boat that was sailing back from the Caribbean really document the “discovery”
of America? If someone wasn’t allowed to be a full citizen, are we actually insulting her by
calling her work “American”? Is a Narragansett dictionary written by a missionary in New
England really literature? And if a story or poem isn’t “set” in the US but seems to happen in
Europe or some vague fairy kingdom (Hello, Poe), does that help us actually understand
anything about the culture of the USA? Slave narratives were written to manipulate readers, is
that different from any other sort of stealthy text? And what about that great novel of supposed
anti-slavery thought,Twain's "Huck Finn"-- the book that was actually written two decades after
slavery had been abolished? As you can tell, I have some questions. I will keep teaching this
American Literature survey until I sort them out, dang it. Please help me.
In this class, you’ll participate with verve or why bother to come? You’ll write messy inchoate
thoughts and then you’ll rewrite them into sharper analyses for at least two meaty papers.
Regular quizzes may terrorize or delight, a final exam will give you an opportunity to show off
the kind of teacher or student you want to be and every step of the way I expect you to add to
my question list.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4110
Andrew Lemons
Shakespeare and Co.
Description: Shakespeare has been transformed, for better or worse, into perhaps the most
enduring icon of the singular literary genius. But even genius cannot exist in a vacuum. This
course sets Shakespeare’s drama and poetry against the other exceptional authors that
preceded and surrounded him in late 16th and early 17th century London. Students will read a
selection of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry coupled with similar or directly related works by
contemporary and near-contemporary authors such as, for instance, Philip Sidney, Christopher
Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth I, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Secondary readings on
the social and cultural context in which these authors lived and worked will enable students to
understand Shakespeare among these other poets and playwrights, not as isolated forces of
literature, but as a network of authors formed in the crucible of shared historical circumstances,
writing in as much in response to each other as to their times.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4150/6150
Lee Morrissey
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Description: Readings include Behn, Locke, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Wheatley, Jefferson,
Equiano, and more.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4310/6310
Wayne Chapman
Modern Poetry
Description: This course will concentrate on twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and
American poetry, beginning with Yeats, Pound, Eliot and their circles. It will consider the poets
of the "Auden generation" in England and the endurance of Frost, Stevens, and Lowell in
America. Besides major poets, including selections from their criticism, lesser figures with
magnificent designs will be featured (e.g. Plath) as well as a visiting poet (Margot Douaihy). One
aim of this class is to become confident readers of modern/contemporary poetry by appreciating
the complex, deliberate marriage poets effect in terms of content and form, matter and manner.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4320
Gabriel Hankins
Modern Fiction
Description: This course centers on wonderful and strange major works that bridge Victorian
realism and modern experimental fiction, including some of most influential novels and short
stories of the twentieth century. Our primary goal is to understand the various paths taken by
the English-language novel in the twentieth century, in context and as a resource for the present
moment. Secondary themes will include the tension between utopian idealism and fictional
realism, the lives and work of women, the emergence of new identities and experiences, and
the resonance of the last century within contemporary fiction. Authors will include Henry James,
Lev Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, Italo Calvino,
Marilyn Robinson, and Junot Díaz. The class requirements will stress brief daily writing as
preparation for class discussion, along with one short and two longer papers.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4420/6420
Garry Bertholf
Cultural Studies
Description: This course will bring together readings both historical and literary-theoretical,
attempting to introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to the history of ideas
about culture, cultural production, the culture industry, cultural hegemony, and countercultural
modes of resistance. It will broach the histories of several cultural and socioeconomic
institutions (including slavery, colonialism, and capitalism) in order to form tentative conclusions
about culture and its relation to other fundamental dimensions of human identity (particularly
race, gender, sexuality, and class).
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4460/6460
Jillian Weise
The Poetry Workshop
Description: Prerequisite: The Structure of Poetry (ENGL 3460). Significant time will be
dedicated to the discussion of student work. We will also visit with poets who are coming to
Clemson. In February, we are pleased to present Cathy Park Hong, author of Dance Dance
Revolution (2008), Empire Engine (2013) and the essay "Delusions of Whiteness in the AvantGarde." In April, we'll meet with poets visiting for the Ninth Annual Clemson Literary Festival.
Learning outcomes: read and interpret poems; collaborate with peers; compose new poems;
prepare poems for publication.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4590
Lindsay Thomas
Special Topics in LCT: Digital Literary Studies
Description: With the digitization of many literary texts, more kinds of literary data are
available today than ever before. But what do we do with all of this data? How can we use
computers to analyze literature, and, most importantly, why would we want to? This class will
seek to answer these questions by exploring the “digital humanities,” a relatively new field of
study in literature. The course complements the training in literary analysis that all English
majors receive by providing an introduction to the digital methods being used today to study
literature in new ways. We will experiment with a wide variety of digital methods, including text
encoding, quantitative methods of text analysis, social network analysis, mapping, and data
visualization. We will also read a shared literary text and talk about more traditional methods of
literary analysis, like close reading. In all of our discussions, we will explore how digital methods
can be integrated with traditional methods to make new discoveries about literature. Student
projects will include semi-weekly lab reports, two papers, and a collaborative digital research
project.
No prior knowledge of digital methods or computer programming is presumed or needed, but all
students in the course will learn some basic principles and methods. A laptop, and a willingness
to try new things on your own and with others, to learn more about digital technology, and to
work through – and in spite of – frustration and difficulty are all required.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4630
Andrew Lemons
Introduction to Old English
Description: This course introduces the Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) language, of which
Beowulf is only one of many literary monuments. Learning this foreign language is no easy task,
but this course’s vigorous pace and rigorous attention to grammar, syntax and vocabulary will
yield great rewards. By the end of the course students will be able to read, with the help of a
dictionary, virtually any of the literary and historical vernacular works written in Anglo-Saxon
England between 600 and 1000AD. Readings will include selections from poetic texts such as
Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood, and prose texts such as the works of
Aelfric, Alfred the Great and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. In addition, as students become
acquainted with Old English, they will find that they’ve also acquired, as a happy side-product,
the basics of historical linguistics and English etymology.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4640
Erin Goss
Topics in Literature, 1700-1899: The Comedic Jane Austen
Description: This course will read Austen’s novels closely in order to discuss their humor,
which is admittedly often subtle and which depends upon a careful attention to tone, perhaps
one of the most elusive of literary elements. Along the way we will consider Austen's novels
within a tradition of comedy that both precedes and follows them, considering how her work
both draws from classical notions of comedy and anticipates the understanding of comedy that
is crystallized in, for example, the contemporary romantic comedy. Our task will be to consider
what expectations we bring to the reading of Jane Austen and what her work might offer us
above and beyond those expectations. We will also use our reading of Austen to unearth our
assumptions about comedy and humor and what it means to engage with both while also
pursuing the study of “serious” things. Reading will likely include all six of Austen’s completed
novels, selected criticism on comedy, and selections from contemporary adaptations in various
media.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4650/6650
Angela Naimou
Topics in Literature from 1900
Description: When a group of local artists in Berlin this past summer were hired to scrawl
Arabic graffiti all over the set of a refugee camp for the US television series Homeland, the
artists did their job—but they did so by writing “#Black Lives Matter,” “There is no Homeland,”
“This show does not represent the views of the artists,” and “Homeland is a joke, and it didn’t
make us laugh” on the set walls. In doing so, the artists draw attention to the highly contested
cultural and artistic terrain of responding to and representing current wars. This course invites
students to examine contemporary literary and visual art that responds to current forms of war
and its wide-ranging and stunningly disparate effects on people and environments, nationally
and globally. We will also read texts of criticism and theories of art in relation to war—including
forms of violence that follow or precede wars but that may not be recognized as militarized
force. Special emphasis is on artists and theorists (TBD) who are based in the United States
and throughout Latin America and the Middle East. The course will consist of intensive reading
and writing, and may involve a collaborative project at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4750/6750
Tharon Howard
Writing for Electronic Media
Description: This course involves hands-on projects using the theories, practices, and
technologies of writing in a digital age. Special emphasis will be placed on the design of user
experiences in online environments, particularly for business, industry, and government
organizations. Topics we will cover include strategies for designing usable websites, writing for
web-based readers, creating and online “footprint” and persona, social media design and
community management, copyright and intellectual property issues, etc.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4830/6830
Garry Bertholf
African-American Literature
Description: This course will examine African-American literature since Reconstruction.
Authors may include Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Alain Locke, Zora
Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler,
and Samuel R. Delany, Jr.
Course:
Instructor:
ENGL 4890/6890
Megan Eatman
Title:
Activist Rhetorics and Design
Description: In this course, we will focus on analyzing and producing texts that advocate for
social justice causes. The course begins with the assumption that studies of rhetoric, design,
and social justice are complementary. Just as better understandings of persuasion, deliberation,
and affectability enhance social justice work, an attention to social justice can enhance our work
as writers and designers. To this end, we will combine analysis of both the theory and practice
of activist work with discussion of best practices for composition and design. Major assignments
will require students to track and analyze the rhetoric around a historical or contemporary
movement, produce accessible and critical multimodal projects, and collaborate with classmates
to create a digital or physical public argument engaging with a locally relevant social issue.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4920
Brian McGrath
Modern Rhetoric
Description: In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argues that
rhetorical tropes (like metaphors) must be eliminated if we are finally to understand each other.
We should just say what we mean and mean what we say. Conversely, in Metaphors We Live
By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not only rhetorical flourishes that
we add to discourse but also tropes that shape and determine the world we live in. We can’t get
rid of them quite so easily because they are essential to the ways we understand the world. In
this course we will explore the problems that rhetorical language poses to understanding, but
we will also explore the ways rhetorical tropes condition the very possibility of understanding.
Beginning with Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, we will also read several
recent Supreme Court decisions in which the law tried to solve particularly knotty interpretive
issues. Modern Rhetoric will help students develop a rich vocabulary to describe how rhetoric
continues to shape modern life.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4960
Michael LeMahieu
Senior Seminar: Civil War Memory in Civil Rights and Contemporary Literature
Description:
In this course we will study representations of Civil War memory in literature
from the civil rights era and the contemporary period. Readings will likely include works by
James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Robert
Lowell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Natasha Trethewey, Robert
Penn Warren, and Kevin Young. Emphasis on active reading, informal writing, and class
discussion. One shorter literary analysis paper and one longer research paper.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4960
David Coombs
Senior Seminar
Description: In De Profundis, the letter Oscar Wilde wrote from prison to his former lover,
Alfred Douglas, Wilde remarked, “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and
culture of my age.” This statement might seem megalomaniacal coming from almost anyone
else, but in Wilde’s case it’s true. Wilde was the public face of the Aesthetic Movement in Britain
and America, his lectures, plays, essays, and fiction popularizing the aestheticist belief that art
is autonomous and should not be judged by social or moral standards (a belief summed up in
the slogan, “art for art’s sake!”). But he also brought that movement into disrepute after he was
convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of having
sexual relationships with other men. In this class, we’ll think about Wilde’s “symbolic relations”
to both his age and our own. We’ll read Wilde’s plays—The Importance of Being Earnest,
Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, and An Ideal Husband—and his major essays along with his
novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, his prison meditation, De Profundis, and the transcripts of his
trials. Then we’ll turn to Wilde’s place in the present, examining his ubiquity in contemporary
literary criticism and theory as well as on coffee cups and T-shirts. Finally, we’ll watch the Todd
Haynes’ film, Velvet Goldmine, a movie about the glam rock movement in the early 70s that
opens with Wilde as a little boy being left by aliens in 1850s Dublin, suggesting that if Wilde is
our past he is also, paradoxically, our future.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 4960
Elizabeth Rivlin
Senior Seminar: Hamlet, Again: Shakespeare and Adaptation
Description: Who or what is Hamlet? Answering that question has occupied actors,
audiences, writers, and readers for centuries. Through reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet in two
early editions as well as its sources, and through studying several twentieth-century and twentyfirst-century dramas, films, and novels that adapt the play, we will seek our own answers. That
is, we will ask how adaptations change the essence of this famous work. We will move toward
another question: What does Hamlet do? Specifically, what functions, whether cultural, political,
or aesthetic, do these various Hamlets perform? In studying not one Hamlet but many, we have
a unique opportunity to explore not only the meanings attached to Shakespeare’s work in his
own day but also how and why we continue to put Shakespeare to work today.
Because this is a capstone seminar, we will use the questions above to develop and refine skills
essential to the English major, including literary analysis, argumentation, and original research.
You will write extensively and present your research to the class. Perhaps most importantly, the
class is run as a seminar that depends on your regular and active participation.
Course:
ENGL 8030
Instructor:
Title:
Sean Morey
Environmental Rhetorics and Ecologies of Writing
Description: This course explores the relationship between writing & rhetoric and natural
environments & nonhuman nature. The course will examine various rhetorical approaches to
environmental issues (e.g., ecospeak, greenwashing) in a variety of contexts such as
professional communication, science, politics, journalism, marketing, advertising, entertainment,
and how writing and rhetoric play a significant role in the framing and discussion of
environmental problems and solutions. This course will also explore how environments
themselves affect writing practices (e.g., ecocomposition) and how visual rhetorical strategies
represent nature and environment. Finally, the course will examine how concepts of ecology are
currently influencing conversations in rhetoric and writing studies.
Course:
ENGL 8210
Instructor:
Lindsay Thomas
Title:
Digital Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
Description: This course will provide an introduction to the digital humanities from a literary
and cultural studies perspective, with a special emphasis on methodology. What methods do we
use to produce knowledge about literature? How are digital technologies and techniques
changing these methods? What new or different things can digital methods teach us? Major
topics include the relationship of the digital humanities to media studies, cultural criticism, and
the humanities in general; close and distant reading practices; the logic of text encoding and the
creation of digital archives; methods of text analysis, including topic modeling and network
analysis; and data visualization, including mapping. We will also read a shared literary text. In
our discussions of contemporary scholarship in the digital humanities in conjunction with this
text, we will aim to discover how digital methods can be integrated with traditional methods as
we discuss current literary and cultural studies research problems. Student projects will include
producing your own website, weekly lab reports, a conference abstract, and a digital project
prototype or mock-up accompanied by a conference-length paper.
No prior knowledge of digital methods or computer programming is presumed or needed, but all
students in the course will learn some basic principles and methods. A laptop, and a willingness
to try new things on your own and with others, to learn more about digital technology, and to
work through – and in spite of – frustration and difficulty are all required.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 8310
David Blakesley
Special Topics (Future of the Book)
Description: This course explores the rapidly changing landscape of the book publishing
industry as it adapts to emergent digital technologies and the demands of a connected public,
the continuing presence and influence of printed books, the nature and future of the book as an
artifact, and the book's possible evolution as transmedia, as augmented, and as social.
Students will also explore the future of the digital and printed book from practical and generative
perspectives, focusing on methods of producing high quality content for mobile platforms or
other ebook readers and using Adobe's Creative Cloud and Digital Publishing Suite (DPS).
Students will develop existing books and work with authors to explore emergent models and
processes of composition, design, collaboration, production, dissemination,
promotion/marketing, and distribution. All students will use Adobe's Behance and Creative
Cloud to manage book projects and share their own work.
Together, we will work on a wide variety of book publishing projects, share work in progress in
professional networks, and create case studies of this work with emergent technologies. Some
course readings will focus on what others write and say about the future of the book. Based on
these readings and experiences, students will develop portfolio content for publication in
professional social networks like (Behance) and a web-based professional portfolio (ProSite).
Students in the course will be prepared for possible careers in the publishing industry. Pending
confirmation, the course will be offered in the new Watt Family Innovation Center.
Course:
Instructor:
Title:
ENGL 8530
Megan Eatman
Visual Communication
Description: Visual Communication will focus on the analysis and production of visual texts for
a variety of purposes and audiences. The course will engage with theory through practice, with
students building visual projects that reflect on and critique visual theory. Students will then
compile this work into a digital portfolio that comments on visual theory and culture. Our course
will also address the limits of the visual, and students will be asked to consider how their visual
projects can be made accessible for the broadest possible audience.