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.