General Literature Courses Fall 2025
ENGL 203: African American Women's Coming-of-Age Stories
Instructor: Jade Harrison
27078 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Fraser 206
27079 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Fraser 208
For decades, African American coming-of-age narratives have amplified critical explorations of identity, self-discovery, and lived experience in the U.S. This course offers an introduction to women’s fictional coming-of-age narratives during the 21st century, drawing from the writings of contemporary authors including Z.Z. Packer, Angie Thomas, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Brit Bennett, and Jacqueline Woodson. It examines how women writers negotiate concepts such as community, belonging, and individualism to illustrate how children, teenagers, and young adults navigate both physical and digital spaces to create their own unique identities and achieve self-understanding, while facing personal challenges and societal pressures. We will explore how stories centering on adolescence and young adulthood foster a critical, in-depth understanding of concepts like social advocacy, the power of voice, healing, and community-building in the contemporary moment. Required coursework consists in-class assignments (reading responses and group discussions), three essays, and a final revision project.
ENGL 203: Literature of Sports
Instructor: Philip Wedge
15313 | By appointment | Online (Aug 18-Oct 10)
26514 | By appointment | Online (Oct 15-Dec 12)
In the Literature of Sports course students will study and write essays on a significant body of sport literature, examining such topics as sports as character-building, sports hero types, hero- worship in fans, violence in sports, corruption in sports, the translation of sport literature to film, and so on. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays and a revision assignment (50%), and a comprehensive Final (20%). Homework (30%) includes group work and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Eric Greenberg, The Celebrant; Clifford Odets, Golden Boy; Angie Abdou, The Bone Cage; Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart; August Wilson, Fences; F.X. Toole, Million Dollar Baby; H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights.
ENGL 314: Major British Writers after 1800
Instructor: Colleen Morrissey
26515 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4023
English 314 will introduce students to a selection of major authors, texts, and aesthetic innovations of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. We will focus on a group of authors whose works represent the formal and stylistic developments of the English literary tradition from the late 18th to the early 20th century, including Jane Austen, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Using close reading and textual analysis as our lens, we will trace how these authors and their works emblematize the social, political, and aesthetic movements of this time period while developing our critical engagement with various forms of poetry and prose.
ENGL 332: Shakespeare
Instructor: Geraldo Sousa
26521 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4035
We will also explore Shakespeare’s career as a professional man of the theater, and the theatrical and cultural conditions of his time. Life and theater often intersect. We will consider many other topics, such as Shakespeare as a storyteller, representation of family and home, genre and form, Shakespeare’s language, and so forth. We will proceed at a rather fast pace. Class sessions will consist of lecture, discussion, and student presentations/reports and group work. Students are expected to contribute to classroom discussion; to master the material from lectures, discussion, and readings; to participate in various group projects; and to work independently on a research project. As an upper-level English class, this course assumes commensurate writing and research skills, as well as proficiency in reading and interpreting literature. Attendance is required. Excessive absences will lead to final grade penalty, including failure in the course. This course fulfills the Literature, Language, or Rhetoric prior to 1850 or equivalent requirement for the English major.
ENGL 334: Jane Austen & Thomas Hardy
Instructor: Philip Wedge
26522 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4023
This course offers the opportunity to study two major 19th century British authors, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, who helped shape the novel as a form. We will read three major novels from each author and study the issues they explore, from the roles of women in society, to social class issues, to the evolution and potential demise of rural life; from modes of genteel courtship to the struggle to rise out of the laboring class. In the process we will also examine the evolution of the novel as a form from 3-volume edition to serialization and beyond. Required coursework consists of 3 major Essays (60%) and a comprehensive Final Exam (25%). Homework (15%) includes pop quizzes and short writing assignments. Class participation is also of considerable importance. TEXTS: Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion; Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
ENGL 334: Colson Whitehead & Daniel Woodrell
Instructor: Mark Luce
26523 | Th 7:10-10:00 PM | Regnier 354 (Edwards)
ENGL 338: Introduction to African American Literature
Instructor: Zay Dale
26524 | MW 3:30-4:45 PM | Wescoe 4037
An introduction to prominent works of African American literature from the 18th century to the present as well as to the basic approaches to study and principles of this body of work, including its connection with African sources. Literature will include a wide variety of genres, and course materials may be supplemented by folklore, music, film, and visual arts. Prerequisite: Prior completion of the Core 34: English (SGE) requirement. Recommended: Prior completion of one 200-level English course.
ENGL 390: Romance Fiction as the Practice of Freedom
Instructor: Hannah Scupham
27441 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4023
Often maligned and misunderstood, popular romance fiction is both a best-selling and under-studied genre. In this course, we will explore the wide, wild, and wonderful world of the romance novels and its critical reception by scholars and readers alike with an emphasis on gender, race, sexuality, and disability. Our course begins with the bodice rippers of 1980s and 1990s and the early scholarship/critiques of the genre. We will then shift to discussing how romance media from the past 20 years depicts dating/relationships, pleasure, agency, joy, and readership. In our final unit, we will examine current trends in romance, readership, and publishing, including BookTok, Bookstagram, dark romances, the emergent New Adult genre, and fanfiction, just to name a few. Whether you’re a romance lover or a romance hater, this course is for you. Looking forward to exploring the delightful world of popular romance with you!
ENGL 507: Examining the Future through a Science-Fiction Lens
Instructor: Phillip Drake
26553 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4020
This course examines technoscientific presents and futures through close readings of science fiction and nonfiction texts. Our inquiries explore a range of social issues, including questions about scientific beliefs and practices, economic enterprise, colonialism/globalization, bodies/identities, ecological futures, utopia/dystopia, what it means to be a person, and more. Assignments will include papers, presentations, exams, and several informal reaction papers. The broader goal of the course is to foster the critical tools and perspectives that enable us to better conduct ourselves as actors in our respective social, ecological, and technological communities. Likely texts include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; George Schuyler, Black No More; Karl Capek, RUR; Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; and a number of short stories and critical works that will be available on canvas.
ENGL 521: Epic: Heroes, Gods, & Rebels
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
26553 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 1009
Epic has lain at the heart of the European literary tradition for twenty-seven hundred years. The most prestigious and the most ambitious of literary genres, epic explores human nature, promotes and questions political ideals and social principles, defines nations and communities, and examines the nature of heroism. Through stories of human heroism and super-human adventures, epic poems ask what it means to be human, how to find meaning in mortality, and how to live within—or overturn—power structures and the rulers who manipulate them. Epic endures because it offers its readers tools for living. In this class, we will encounter four of the greatest European epic poems, culminating in the greatest English epic: Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
ENGL 565: The Gothic Tradition
Instructor: Geraldo Sousa
26554 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4035
This course explores and defines the Gothic tradition from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to more recent twentieth-century texts in literature and film. The Gothic presents intensely psychological states of fear: portals open to phantasmagorical parallel realms of darkness and shadows. It disturbs and de-stabilizes the natural, empirical, logical boundaries of reality and pursues supernatural possibility, a night world of nightmares and shadows, realms of mystery and magic. This course will focus on the Gothic’s recurring topics, themes and concerns, such as the Uncanny, Doubles, live burial, life after/in death, haunted houses, vampires, and monsters, as well as their cultural implications, asking why these concerns come together to form the conventions of Gothic literature and why these conventions have proven to be so compelling. The final research paper for this course will require you to analyze and combine a range of historical, literary, and critical texts in order to pose new questions and/or offer new perspectives on literary texts of the Gothic tradition. Attendance, preparation for Class, and participation in classroom discussion are required. Excessive absences could lead to failure in the course. This class meets in person, and you must come to class, fully participate in the course, and contribute to classroom discussion.
ENGL 590: Black Bodies in British Literature
Instructor: Zay Dale
27666 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 1003
This course examines how Black bodies are represented and understood in British literature from their early presence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to their presence in the twentieth century. We will explore how the physicality of Blackness shapes and challenges the British literary tradition by raising important questions about race, culture, identity, and social-political exclusions tied to Black bodies. Half of our class takes place pre-1850s to analyze how Black bodies disrupt the existing social and cultural order of British identity. We will study Blackness as both a racial category and as a cultural rupture of the traditional boundaries of subjectivity. This class will then move to Modernism to focus on how Black bodies and Blackness continue to challenge and reshape British literature. By analyzing these two moments, this course examines how Black bodies and Blackness inform and transform British literary aesthetics. The final research paper for this course will involve analyzing literary, archival, and historical texts to explore new perspectives on the role of Black bodies in British literature from the sixteenth century to the Modernist era.
