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ENGL 176: English First-Year Seminar, Trap: Serious Fun: Exploring Identity through Graphic Novels

Instructor: Sheila Murphy
65051 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Fraser 224

Storytelling is one of the most important ways we have to make sense of who we are and who we want to be in the world. Graphic novels offer an amazing array of powerful and enduring stories, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novels to cultural critiques on a huge range of topics. In this course, we will examine issues of identity through graphic novels that are specifically nonfiction personal memoirs. Key questions we will explore include: How do personal stories help us understand the ways our identities develop, change, and interact? How can we better understand social and cultural issues by exploring the personal stories of a diverse range of writers and artists? What insights might my own story-as-graphic-novel hold? For example, we might explore different ways Art’s identity was shaped more by his father’s memories and experiences than his own in "Maus." Through this course, you will be able to sharpen your visual literacy skills, enhance your analytical thinking as you critique non-traditional texts, and explore your own creative abilities by producing a short graphic memoir (no art skills required!).

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ENGL 205: Freshman-Sophomore Honors Proseminar: The Odyssey and Its Adaptations

Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
57609 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4019

A victorious hero, cast adrift on uncharted seas on his return from a cataclysmic war, struggles through unimaginable dangers and powerful temptations to return to the wife and home he left twenty years ago. The Odyssey—one of the oldest surviving works of European literature—continues to inspire films, plays, novels, poems, graphic novels, and artworks: war stories and love stories, postcolonial and feminist revisions, parodies and tragedies. We will discover how contemporary authors and directors from Derek Walcott to Madeline Miller to the Coen brothers reinvent myths for new audiences and examine the nature of adaptation itself. Students will explore these adaptations and ask why Homer’s tales of Troy, with their questioning of ideals of honor and glory, their awareness of the human cost of warfare, and their struggle to find heroism in human experience, remain necessary today.

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ENGL 301: Topics in British Literature to 1800: Literature of King Arthur

Instructor: Misty Schieberle & Victoria Wamsley
64661 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4008

Literature about King Arthur and his knights has been hugely influential on modern fantasy, romantic comedies, and coming-of-age stories. This course explores how Arthurian literature started and how it has been adapted throughout the centuries for literary, historical, and even propaganda purposes. We will follow a few symbols (e.g., the sword in the stone, the Holy Grail) and important characters and their actions (e.g., Arthur, Gawain, the Lancelot-Guinevere love affair) through various iterations. Texts will range from medieval literature like Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (in translation) to Tudor-era propaganda, nineteenth-century adaptations, and more modern media. Questions driving the course will include how Arthurian material is represented differently in different genres, how authors reinvent Arthurian narratives to address changing cultural contexts, and, of course, is Arthurian literature some of the first fanfiction? Course requirements include: regular class attendance and participation, quizzes and two short essays and exams. This course fulfills the English 312 or equivalent requirement for the English major.

ENGL 302: Topics in British Literature Since 1800: Monstrous Expectations

Instructor: Mark Luce
64980 | Th 7:00-10:00 PM | Regnier 154 – Edwards

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ENGL 318: Topics in American Literature Since 1865: American Modernist Poetry

Instructor: Paul Outka
63545 | MW 3:30-4:45 PM | Wescoe 4037

This seminar will focus on one of the richest periods in American poetry. Emerging from the collapse of Victorian ideals in and around the First World War, Modernism expressed both cynicism, despair, and a shattering loss of cultural and religious authority for many, as well as a new freedom, acceptance, and quest for new forms of literary and personal expression for others. We will examine the different responses of a variety of poets to this charged moment in America’s cultural self-definition, especially with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, and aesthetic philosophy. We will discuss roughly a poet a week, including the high Anglo-American Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; the canonical local American versions of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Williams, and Hart Crane; Langston Hughes’ voice from the Harlem Renaissance; and women modernists Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore. We will finish the course with a look back—or forward—at the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson. By the conclusion of the course, students should be broadly familiar with modernism and significant poetic works in that tradition.

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ENGL 381: Topics in Rhetoric & Composition - Writing for Nonprofits

Instructor: Sean Kamperman
64665 | By appointment | Online

This course offers an introduction to the principles of professional communication in nonprofit organizations. Through analyzing the rhetoric of successful nonprofits and investigating case studies, students will learn how to create a range of documents central to the operation of a successful nonprofit—grant proposals, brochures, newsletters, and donor reports, among others. Readings and assignments will emphasize the ethical and rhetorical complexities of nonprofit work and prepare students to engage with a range of audiences, from donors to clients to staff. Students will hone their professional writing and strategic communication skills by undertaking service learning projects on behalf of actual nonprofit organizations. This course is designed equally for students who are interested in nonprofit careers and those who simply want to learn more about how to be an effective communicator in an organizational setting.

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ENGL 390: Studies in: Reading Novels as a Writer

Instructor: Laura Moriarty
58318 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4075

In this course, we’ll read several novels, mostly contemporary, that have enjoyed critical and/or commercial success, and we’ll try to analyze what made them successful. We’ll read these novels as novelists, paying attention to their structures, narrative devices, story arcs, and techniques that might be useful in our own work. We’ll look at what the opening chapters accomplish, and how each author keeps the reader engaged through a novel’s middle and end. We’ll take novel-writing axioms (e.g. “The protagonist has to want something, and want it badly.”) and see if they hold up against real novels. Each student will write short papers and give presentations over the course of the semester. Students can also expect regular reading quizzes.