English Spring 2026 Course Offerings
ENGLISH SPRING 2026 COURSE OFFERINGS
100 level courses
126. Intro to Nonfiction Food Writing
In this course, we will learn how to read and articulately discuss and write about the various forms of nonfiction by using the tradition of food writing. While we will read popular forms such as memoir and general nonfiction on eating’s cultural, historical, social, and environmental significance, we will also read personal essays, epistolary essays, lyric essays, and other, more experimental examples of the form.
200 Level Creative Writing Courses
241. Techniques of Fiction
NO SENIORS In this introductory course on the basics of writing prose fiction, we will read and analyze a variety of short stories with an eye toward becoming better fiction writers ourselves. By reading diverse authors, periods, and approaches to storytelling, we will become more adept at important techniques such as narrative form, characterization, and point of view. We will compose a series of short exercises that may be reviewed in workshop for possible inclusion in a portfolio of significantly revised and polished work.
242. Techniques of Poetry
Techniques of Poetry. An introductory study of prosody and poetics. Class attention is divided among student writing, theory and published models. Weekly writing assignments address a variety of technical issues connected with both traditional and experimental verse, while reading assignments providing examples to follow or possibilities for further study. Matters of voice, affect, intuition, chance and imagination are given as much attention as those analytic skills necessary for clear communication. All students are required to share their oral and written work for group discussion and critique.
243. Techniques of Creative Non-Fiction
Techniques of Creative Non-Fiction. In this introductory course on the basics of writing literary nonfiction, we will read and analyze a variety of examples of creative nonfiction, including memoirs and personal essays, with an eye toward becoming better nonfiction writers and readers ourselves. By encountering diverse authors, periods, and approaches to storytelling and sharing insights and knowledge about our personal encounters with the world around us, we will improve our application of various important techniques such as form, structure, persona, characterization, and voice. We will compose a series of short exercises that with revisions may become longer memoirs and personal essays to share with the class workshop, and assemble a final portfolio of revised and polished work. Fulfills ARTS Distribution.
200 Level Literature Courses
200. Your Favorite Books
Your Favorite Books - What is your favorite book? Why? How did it affect your understanding of yourself, our world, and/or your relationship to it? These are some of the questions we will consider in our seminar focused on books selected by you and the other students in our class. By starting with your interests, we will create an opportunity for you to reread and clarify the meaning of these texts for you. By discussing them with others, you will also deepen your understanding of their significance in relation to questions central to a liberal arts education: questions about your rights as individuals, your responsibilities as members of our society, and the possibilities of shaping your own life story. After registering for the course, each of you will submit a list of your top three books (including plays, epics, etc.) with brief descriptions of why they matter. Books may be anything by anyone: Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Shakespeare's King Lear, etc. The point is to start with your interests. I will then compile a list of these books, and you will vote on your top choices. I will make the final selections based on number of votes and length of texts (if you all want to read War and Peace, we won't have time to read ten more novels!). I will order the books at the Bookstore and send you a list before the end of the semester.
225. English Literature I
Survey of English Literature I. In this course, students will learn about the history of British literature from the 8th through the 17th centuries. The course invites students to explore developments in British literature through the lens of history and its relation to the development of the concept of the individual as well as competing philosophies of religious, political, and social life. Within this context, the course traces literary movements and the evolution of literary forms. It features a variety of drama, poetry, and some fiction and nonfiction from writers whose gender, class, and cultural outlook vary widely from historical era to era. Some of the texts we read are by famous authors like Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton; others are composed by less well-known and even anonymous authors. Some of the texts we read are in languages other than English, so we'll read those in translation, with the exception of Chaucer, whom we'll discover in his original middle English; others employ syntax that, though the same as our modern English, differs in exciting and beautiful ways. With each new text, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the volume, breadth, and variety of written work created in the British archipelago from the Medieval Period to the Restoration. Students contemplating graduate study in English are strongly recommended to take this course.
General course description for ENG 250: Methods of Critical Analysis
This course introduces students to a range of scholarly methods used to interpret literary works. While each section may focus on a different theme or group of primary texts, all sections encourage students to recognize and to apply a variety of literary critical methods. In addition, students learn the citation and formatting conventions most commonly employed in the field of literary study. Topics vary according to instructor and semester, so please view specific sections to find the different section descriptions.
250-01. The Art of Story
This class will consider the purpose of telling stories from a broad range of historical and cultural perspectives. What makes a story “good”? How does our taste in stories reflect larger assumptions about the purpose of art and the life that inspires it? If stories reflect reality, can they also be used to change that reality? We will consider these and related questions through the work of various writers and literary thinkers.
250-02. The Making of James Joyce
In this section of English 250, we will read three works by James Joyce—Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and selections from Ulysses (1922)—tracing how the same characters and setting evolve through different genres, styles, and a complex publication history. Alongside, we will read critical texts that have shaped Joyce studies, evaluating their arguments for Joyce's literary contribution to feminism, postcolonial studies, Marxism, and queer theory to name a few. Your papers will respond to both critical and textual scholarship.
253. Troy and Its Aftermath
Troy and its Aftermath-This course explores the city of Troy and the mythology that grew up around it. Once a flourishing center of trade between the East and West in the ancient world, Troy remained a center of cultural contact long after its physical demise through the stories that Greek and Roman authors told about it. But why did Troy and the actions of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and Helen so thoroughly capture the attention of ancient audiences? And why do they continue to fascinate people today? We'll begin to investigate these questions by delving into the world of ancient Greece and Rome, reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and a selection of plays about the heroes of Troy. We'll also interrogate our own culture, asking why what happened at Troy many millennia ago can become successful motion pictures - like Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 movie Troy, for instance - and why television shows like The Simpsons can successfully satirize the Trojan War. To complement our study of literature and media, we'll also consider how the history of Troy's rediscovery in the nineteenth century and its present day excavation in the city of Hissarlik, Turkey, perpetuate the myth of this famous city. Fulfills HU Distribution (2013 curriculum)
200 Level Special Topics (3,000-3,999)
3092. Business in Literature
Why do we trade? What is the relation between trade and peace? If, as Bernard Mandeville says, business encourages private vices, how does it also encourage public virtues? What, if anything, should be the government's role in regulating business? What kinds of government harm or enable prosperity through policies? And how do films and literary texts depict the good, the bad, and the ugly of business? We explore these questions and more through reading essays, fairy tales, poems, and novels, as well as watching films and television shows. Texts may include selections from Cato's Letters and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; classic poems by Voltaire and Bernard Mandeville; excerpts from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, and F. A. Hayek's The Fatal Conceit; trade cards by eighteenth-century businesswomen; fairy tales such as "The Emperor's New Clothes," the Brothers Grimm "Snow White," and Disney's latest adaptation of it (2025); excerpts from Atlas Shrugged; short videos such as Andrew Heaton's "Why Do So Many Jobs Require a License?"; films such as Cash McCall, Wall Street, and The Big Short; and select episodes from television shows such as House of Cards.
3122. The Book of Beasts and its Descendants
The medieval book of beasts (bestiary) has always been a wild, motley, and beautiful invention. Copied out and illuminated by hand, emerging the same century as the first encyclopedias, and collaged from myriad sources, these text-and-image works mingle moral philosophy, natural history, etymology, and travel writing--and they have impacted centuries of thought and book making. Through reading and writing assignments, in this course we will ground in the history and practice of bestiaries older than the printing press in order to better connect with current writing about animals and the natural world. We will research fact and myth alike as we work collectively and in collaboration to culminate our practice with the production of a one-of-a-kind artist book of a modern bestiary.
3136. Writing the European City
Writing the European City: Visual Landmarks, Naratives, and the Art of Representation-This course examines how major cities have been represented in literature, travel writing, and visual art across two pivotal moments: the early 1600s, when the modern metropolis began to emerge in Europe, and the early 1900s, when the city became an emblem of modernity. Through critical reading, analysis of artworks, and creative writing, students will explore how painters, writers, and travelers transformed urban spaces into symbols of power, morality, desire, and innovation. Students will produce weekly exercises (journals, vignettes, etc.) and ultimately a short novel set in Paris, Rome, Naples, Amsterdam, London, New York, or another major city covered in the course. Fulfills ARTS requirement.
300 Level Creative Writing Courses
310. Advanced Fiction Writing
Building upon the craft techniques acquired in ENG-241, Techniques of Fiction, students encounter authors who challenge basic assumptions about the nature of fiction through writing narratives that experiment with the givens of traditional story forms. Discussion of student-produced manuscripts in a workshop setting is one of a number of pedagogies employed. Emphasis is on writing improvement through increasing awareness of the technical dynamics of the short story genre and through cultivating an understanding of contemporary idioms and the uses of the imagination. Prerequisites: ENG-241. Fulfills ARTS Distribution.
311. Advanced Poetry Workshop
An extension and intensification of ENG-242. The class combines workshop critique of student poems with discussions of readings in twentieth century and contemporary poetr (including Modernism, Confessionalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and Ellipticism). Poetic theory is also discussed. Students are required to submit a formal manuscript of poems, an arts poetica or manifesto, and to read from their work in public. Prerequisite: ENG-242. Fulfills ARTS Distribution.
300 Level Literature Courses
316. Medieval Drama
Medieval drama offers a world rich in textuality, performance, and culture to explore. In this course, we'll focus on the drama of late-medieval England, taking a particular look at morality, miracle, saints, and cycle plays from fifteenth-century East Anglia. East Anglia was the center of dramatic production in late-medieval England, and part of our task in this class will be to understand why East Anglia was such a hotbed for dramatic activity and why this region of England produced so many different types of plays. (Plays were performed in other regions of medieval England, but in those regions, the genre tended to stay fixed to cycle plays.) We will also spend a considerable amount of time understanding the current critical discourses surrounding medieval drama, including those surrounding its past and current performance productions. Weekly writing assignments, an article presentation, and a final research paper will comprise the majority of the work for this class. Also offered through European Studies.Fulfills HU distribution ( 2013 curriculum)
300 Level Projects For Juniors
389, 390. Projects for Juniors
Student-initiated projects involving significant study and writing carried out through frequent conferences with a faculty sponsor. These projects are completed in addition to the five courses required for the advanced level of the major. Prerequisites: junior standing, a 3.4 GPA in English, and approval by the departmental Honors/Independent Projects committee. Proposals must be submitted to the committee by March 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of fall projects, and by November 1 of the semester preceding spring projects.
300 Level Special Topics (4,000-4,999)
4046. Conspiracy in U.S. Fiction and Film
This class will look at the representation of conspiracies in novels and films from the late 20th to the early 21st century. We will begin with the “classic” era of conspiracies dating from the Cold War and work our way through contemporary narratives implicating technology, health, and global power relations since 2001. Our investigation will not center on conspiracies themselves; instead, we will explore how and why conspiracy narratives persist and how writers and filmmakers respond to these narratives’ capacities to shape—and warp—our sense of reality.
4047. Literature and Modern Thought
This course begins with nineteenth-century "masters of suspicion": Marx, Nietzsche, Freud - reading them historically as interlocutors of their society's social, economic, and moral crises. We'll then turn to the philosophical movement that adapted these thinkers to unpack the hidden repressions and alienations engineered into "advanced" societies: the "critical theory" emerging from the wreckage of the two world wars. Core readings will be drawn from Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. In the last weeks of the semester, we will read and perform two plays by Samuel Beckett, whose desolate and irrational world proved to be a cipher for the problems raised by critical theory. What connection did these thinkers see between the totalitarianism of 1930s Europe and the culture industry of 1930s Hollywood? What possibilities remain despite the barbarity of late-stage capitalism? We will think hard, laugh bitterly, and hope resolutely.
Senior year experiences
450. Welcoming the Other: Hospitality in Contemporary Global Fiction
What do we owe distant Others? Hospitality, simply defined as the welcoming of the foreigner, was a cherished virtue in ancient history and has served as an important philosophical ideal in modern times. In the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, an era of unprecedented displacement, hospitality offers a rich site of possibility for approaching cross-border alliances and encounters with mobile others. This class will examine contemporary novels and films from across the globe that engage with the ethics and politics of welcoming the Other. Providing compelling roadmaps for hospitality, these texts will allow us to consider a range of contemporary crises—waves of global migrants and refugees; climate change and ecological disaster; the ravages of capitalism and its seemingly endless capacity to regenerate; militarized conflicts and their devastating aftermaths; and technological determinism, to name a few. We will look at how hospitality is thematized within these stories as well as how they grapple with the difficulty of narrating suffering and the limits of empathy. Attuned to the need for solidarity in a world increasingly defined by inequality, we will question whether literature can offer new modes of imagining a shared planet in the twenty-first century.
489, 490. SYE: Projects for Seniors
Projects for Seniors. Student-initiated projects involving significant study and writing carried out through frequent conferences with a faculty sponsor. These projects are completed in addition to the five courses required for the advanced level of the major. Prerequisites: senior standing, a 3.4 GPA in English, and approval by the departmental Honors/Independent Projects committee. English majors who complete a senior project will earn the Honors in English designation if, at the conclusion of the semester they complete their project, their English GPA (including the project grade) is at least 3.7. Proposals for fall projects must be submitted to the committee by March 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of fall projects, and by November 1 of the semester preceding the beginning of spring projects.