Spring 2025 Courses
ENG 107 001-004 |
| This course introduces creative writing in a framework of style and genre. Students will not only be asked to read a diverse selection of poets and writers, but also to join the conversation and produce work of their own. This course offers the opportunity to join a community of other beginning writers in a workshop environment. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a portfolio of writing and the encouragement to publish. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
|
ENG 107 005-008 |
| Writing Craft: Introduction to Creative Writing is an introduction to the genres and craft of creative writing, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry and etc. Students will study and practice writing in various modes through composition, peer critique, and research. During our class times, we will meet to consider the ways creative writing is expressed in varied genres. The course will challenge students to critique and create writing in many different genres. The course will also discuss how and why authors choose to express themselves using different genres and hybrid texts. Fulfills ENG pre-major requirement and provides ENG minor credit. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
|
ENG 107 009 |
| This course is an introduction to three genres of creative writing: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Students will first learn the craft elements unique to each genre by reading widely from professional examples before applying that knowledge toward the composition of their own original stories, essays, and poems. This course fulfills the UK Core requirement for Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
|
ENG 107 010 |
| This introductory course in creative writing will explore the various genre: we will play with poetry, fiddle with fiction and nonfiction, as well as grace our souls with other genre. The class will read and discuss literature in various delightful forms to help us understand technique and voice, and practice writing and critiquing our own writing. We will often work in small groups (depending on the number enrolled) as a workshopping method for finding our voices as writers, and for helping our classmates find theirs. By the semester’s end, we will have a mini portfolio of writing. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
|
ENG 107 011 |
| This course introduces creative writing in a framework of style and genre. Students will not only be asked to read a diverse selection of poets and writers, but also to join the conversation and produce work of their own. This course offers the opportunity to join a community of other beginning writers in a workshop environment. At the conclusion of the course, students will have a portfolio of writing and the encouragement to publish. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 |
| This class will explore the unique relationship between monsters and those who name them so. Who “deserves” the term, and who has the power to decide? Including Frankenstein’s classic grapple with mortality, the slippery Grecian lore in Stone Blind, and the reimagining of evil in Ring Shout, we will trace literary representations of monsters and monstrosities and wrestle with the possibility that there are monsters among us, too. Projects will include in and out-of-class writing, discussion participation, reading quizzes, and a final creative project. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 |
| In this course, we’ll examine stories about college life in literature, film, and TV from both the past and the present. Along the way, we’ll ask questions: why does one go to college? What does the “college experience” look like? How does what we learn shape how we view ourselves—and how others (parents, friends, mentors) view us? In a literary sense, we’ll think through how literature, film, and television represent college life, as well as the common threads and profound questions that tie together stories set on college campuses—from concerns about coming-of-age and the meaning of a life well-lived, to concerns about class, status, and power. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 004 |
| In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian Party uses propaganda to control the masses. The Party proclaims, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This class will examine stories about the dystopian—societies of control, fear, and suffering. Conversely, we will also explore attempts by writers and artists to articulate utopias—ideal worlds of prosperity. We will study a variety of texts across time, exhibiting how artists have consistently found this ideal compelling. How do characters react to brutal regimes? What hope can be found in hopeless worlds? Does dreaming of a better future change the world around us? This course introduces students to a more complex and nuanced means of thinking about literature. We will develop our tools of critical thinking and analysis, and we will then apply them to multiple forms of media across time and genre. Our perspective will be informed by history and culture, and we will pay careful attention to the ways in which class, race, and gender impact our understandings of texts and society. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 009 |
| This course addresses a problem that is at once historical and aesthetic: how do you represent the environment in narrative fiction? The environment is an elusive object: usually a background to human action, it is hard to capture on the page. The environment is also a historical object: it wasn’t always part of human stories, and has only recently come into our consciousness as an entity in its own right. “The Novel and Climate Change” introduces fiction by Octavia Butler, Helena María Viramontes, Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma and others in order to examine the formal means by which narratives endeavor to represent the environment as well as climate change. Our discussions revolve around these authors’ uses of a variety of forms, such as: generic innovation or “genre-blending”; forms such as analepsis, prolepsis and other experiments in temporal sequencing; and the trope of a long journey (or odyssey) as a means of organizing narrative time and space. We consider how such techniques help us to envision the devastation of extreme weather events, in particular on people and communities that are already disadvantaged. And last, but not least, we will consider how fiction attempts to map out future possibilities, beyond climate crisis, as it rethinks the relationship between the environment and capitalist totality. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 201 |
| Are you looking for a flexible class schedule option? For this online UK-Core Arts & Creativity class, you will read classic and contemporary poems, write your own, and see what your classmates are composing. Here's how the class works: Each week, you will read some assigned poems in advance of our weekly synchronous class meeting. During these online class sessions, we’ll focus on specific craft elements, the artistry if you will. During those synchronous meetings, I’ll also go over our asynchronous work for the week, that is, assignments you will do and submit to Canvas before the next synchronous online class. In sum, expect to read some poems, to write a poem, and to review a few of your classmates’ poems each week. Please note that in order to submit your poem for the week and to do the reviews, you must, must, must attend the weekly synchronous class during which the assignment is explained. Disclaimer: If you tend toward sporadic attendance and/or if you are prone to missing deadlines, this class is not a good fit for you. If you can (realistically) commit to attending synchronous class each week and to completing a draft and your reviews on time, I think you'll enjoy your poetry excursion. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 142 001 |
| Global Shakespeare will expose students to selected productions and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays by authors and acting companies from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and from European nations other than Great Britain. In our globally connected age, Shakespeare has crossed borders, occupying an honored place in the school curricula and cultural aspirations of many formerly colonized nations. In a post- colonial age, he has become the medium through which multiple cultures articulate their own values and enter into equal intellectual and aesthetic exchange with the English-speaking west. Students in the course will be asked to ponder what there is about Shakespeare that makes his plays such rich raw material for these encounters and exchanges. UK Core: Global Dynamics OR Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 171 001 |
| This course is designed to introduce you to skills and approaches essential to the study of literature. We will read novels classified as “postcolonial and global literature,” meaning that they were written by authors affected by European colonialism. Colonialism, as we’ll learn, was a form of political control that brought new technologies, institutions and languages to the colonies while establishing relations of economic and racial oppression. As we engage with 20th- and 21st-century literature from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South Asia, we examine the relationship between legacies of European colonialism and literary form. Our special interest will be to explore literature’s potential to shape moral principles, taking as a case study the special relationship between morality and the novel. You’ll learn that because novels ask us to sympathize with the main character, they were helpful in establishing the following moral principles: bans on violence, physical abuse and torture; beliefs in the sanctity of the human body; beliefs in the ability of each individual to determine their own life; and the notion that suffering in a fellow human is a cause for empathy. But you’ll also learn that the novel’s account of right and wrong is tied up with a single individual’s perspective—usually the narrator’s or the main character’s perspective. That is, the reader gets only “one side” of the story, not the “full” or objective story. (Think of crime novels: usually, you want the criminals to get away with their crime, don’t you?). Given that this is the case, we’ll ask: what if our sympathy with the main character leads us to inadvertently condone a heinous crime? How can we be sure that we have been told the truth in a novel, and that characters are as right as they seem? Each of the novels or plays we read will include a crime of some sort; a central issue for the class will be to discuss whether we should sympathize with the crime or condemn it, and how to decide either way. UK Core: Global Dynamics |
ENG 180 001 |
| Humans love journeys. We are invested in the hero’s quest across great distances, the underdog’s arc towards victory, and the outcast’s road to self-discovery. In ENG 180 Great Movies: Journeys, we will embark on an adventure through films that capture journeys of all kinds. Prepare to travel across genres, time, and space as we explore narrative strategies and elements of film production. In addition to watching and discussing a wide array of movies, students will generate their own creative works inspired by personal journeys. As Homer writes in The Odyssey, “the journey that stirs you now is not far off.” UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 002 |
| In “ENG 180 Great Movies: Race on Screen” we watch and discuss film from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These films center on issues related to race: accordingly, we explore race as a visual phenomenon and discuss how different movies engage topics such as identity, inequality, representation, and stereotypes. We attend to these films as texts, and acquire a basic understanding of film terminology and analysis. You will learn how to pay close attention to film as a form of visual media, and you will practice active viewing by paying attention to and reflecting on artistic choices made by film directors. Our selection focuses on American film, including Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but we will end the course with a global emphasis through Gilberto Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and Mati Diop’s Atlantics. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 003 |
| Through an examination of various themes common in filmmaking, students will analyze the evolution and impact of animated storytelling. Specifically, students will examine the roles of heroes and anti-heroes in animated films, how real-life themes are represented in animation, and how adaptation of comic books change/affects the narrative on-screen. Students will watch screenings, engage in discussions, and do assignments, to develop a deeper understanding of animation as an art form and a narrative medium. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 |
| Science fiction movies have been around since the beginning of cinematic history. Filmmakers have taken us on space odysseys to the moon and beyond, have shown us futures both utopian and dystopian, have celebrated the possibilities of science and worried about its risks, have stretched the bounds of the imagination and pushed the possibilities of film. Along the way, we’ve had close encounters with aliens, robots, artificial intelligences—but also with ourselves. Over the course of the semester, we will watch and engage with a variety of science fiction films and stories, thinking about how and why they tell their stories, about what is at stake in their representations of technology, of the alien, and of humanity, and about what the worlds that they imagine want to tell us about the world in which we live. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 006 |
| This course is designed to answer two simple questions: What are the kinds of movies we love to watch over and over and why do we keep coming back? Whether we’re talking about romantic comedies where love triumphs over everything, or movies where the underdog unexpectedly triumphs, there are certain storylines audiences can’t get enough of. Over the course of the semester, we’ll examine the appeal of some of these storylines and work to understand their basic structures. In particular, we’ll examine the cultural archetypes on which they’re built and use these discussions as springboards for critical analysis and for your own creative productions. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 191 001 |
| Part of the Law & Justice Major. In this course, we will use literature to help us think about what “citizenship” has meant in the United States. Citizenship is a term with a legal meaning, of course, and we will use that to incite a good deal of thinking about what citizenship has really meant as an inclusionary/exclusionary idea for Americans over the last century. The books that we will read all feature heroes and heroines who quest for something better, who feel a restless pull toward freedom or a better life just around the corner. Our readings will combine some of the most famous and worth-reading-again books in American literature and other books that are equally amazing, but which you are less likely to have read, or perhaps even to have heard of previously. UK Core: Community, Culture and Citizenship in US OR Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 207 001 |
| In this beginning creative writing course, we will develop our abilities to read, write, and revise poetry. We will learn about the craft of poetry by studying a diverse range of contemporary poets, responding to imaginative writing prompts, and entering into a community of peers who will provide feedback on our work. This class is a workshop environment in which we will share, discuss, and critique one another’s creative projects with care and attention. |
|
ENG 207 003 |
| This is a beginning workshop in the craft of writing, teaching students how to read critically and revise work in progress. Students will provide an audience for each other’s work. In this class, we will strive to write, as Lee Gutkind put it, “True stories, well told”. The course will explore various subgenres of creative non-fiction including personal essays, memoirs, lyric essays, epistolary writing, and travel writing. Our emphasis will be on truth-telling through creative nonfiction and personal essays. Students will be asked to read and write essays for the semester, some informal and some not. |
ENG 207 004 |
| This is a generative workshop. Students will be asked to read a variety of published works by experts of the genre and write (and share!) many short responses to course-specific prompts. Use of AI will count as plagiarism. |
ENG 230 001 |
| What even is a minority? This course will address this question by introducing to students literature from the US that is concerned with power imbalances and unjust social hierarchies. We will read works of literature that portray and question the distribution of privilege and wealth in this country through the perspective of members of underrepresented and disenfranchised groups. In doing so, we will go beyond the conventional understanding of ethnic and racial minorities to expand the possibilities of this idea through other social categories such as gender, sexuality, class, and disability. This course will provide an introduction to the study of literature by engaging with different genres and forms of writing by minority authors. We will read poems, novels, short stories, and essays, to think about them collectively and learn how to perform literary analyses, close readings, and how to develop argumentative writing. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 230 002 |
| A course on Literature and Mythology, including classical myths and legends from Greece, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. Focus will be on modern adaptations of older tales, with selected background reading by Joseph Campbell and others. We will begin with Homer, The Odyssey and Marianne Miller’s bestseller, Circe; then Neil Gaiman, Norse Myths; Peter Ackroyd’s adaptation of The Death of King Arthur and Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King; as well as Lady Gregory’s adaptation of the Irish legend of Cuchulain, The Hound of Ulster. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 230 004 |
| While introducing you to literary periods and styles—such realism, modernism, and postmodernism—this course explores energy and its shaping impact on our everyday lives—on our work, on human interrelationships, and on nature. Despite their promise of mobility, progress, and abundance, fossil fuels often dispossess people and communities, restrict their freedoms, and wipe out their futures. Through literary texts we will examine such consequences of the modern dependence on fossil fuel energy, and we will situate this dependence in the context of the mechanization of human labor, as well as the worldwide spread of capitalist social relations. Readings may include texts by Rebecca Harding Davis, Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, Octavia Butler, Helena María Viramontes, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ling Ma and others. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 242 001 |
| This class is a survey of British literature from the early eighteenth century to the present, with emphasis on different genres, periods, and cultural characteristics of the later English literary tradition. Authors covered may include the Augustan poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope; the early and later Romantic movements; novelists and poets of the Victorian period such as Charlotte Bronte, Alfred Tennyson, and Elizabeth B. Browning; the early twentieth-century Modernism of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot; and more. Lecture or lecture with discussion. Fulfills ENG major Historical Survey Requirement. Provides ENG minor credit. |
ENG 252 001 |
| This survey of US literature will focus on what we will call the long twentieth century, expanding from the end of the nineteenth century to our present moment. We will consider influential authors and literary movements that have shaped the ways that we think about literature, culture, and tradition in this country. Additionally, we will reflect on how literature responds to major historical events unfolding during this time and how authors envision having an impact on their social surroundings. We will read and discuss writings by Emily Dickinson, Zitkala-Ša, Jean Toomer, Muriel Rukeyser, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cathy Park Hong. |
ENG 260 |
| From hauntings to elevators to vampires and mysterious fungi, this course explores the literary shift from feeling alien to being alien in 20th and 21st century Black American fiction. We will examine how Black speculative fiction has shifted over the last century, as well as how changing cultural aesthetics have informed contemporary narratives of Black alienation. Example texts we’ll explore in this class include Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005), and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021). UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
|
ENG 260 |
| Course description forthcoming. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 266 001 |
| This course is a survey of African American literature from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. We will engage major moments in African American literature through texts written over this period, with particular attention given to the form of each text and the criticism that surrounds each of the texts. We will cover fictional works by Ralph Ellison, Kiese Laymon, and Octavia Butler, among others. In this course, we will examine topics including genre and its limitations, black feminist theory, critical race theory, and Afrofuturism. Provides ENG minor credit. |
ENG 280 002 (2ND PART OF TERM) |
| The purpose of this course is to examine a selection of films as a means of understanding and analyzing the thematic and stylistic aspects of films in general and as a way of examining how they are products of their specific cultural moment and circumstances. Our discussions will draw on chapters of the textbook, Film Art, and on 12 films (including, American Movie, The Graduate, The Searchers, Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, and Fresh), which students will have to view outside of class. Because this is a 6-week course, it will be very compact. It will include a double-class meeting on Tuesdays, the viewing of online lectures, and regular online, multiple-choice exams. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
|
ENG 280 003 |
| This course will introduce you to the study of cinema as a medium, and to the tools and vocabulary of film analysis. By learning about and attending to key elements of film production and form (genre, cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound and lighting, etc.) in a variety of films, we will consider the ways in which filmmakers shape our experience of their work and create meaning within it. We will move beyond watching films passively toward thinking about them analytically, both in artistic and aesthetic terms, and in terms of the ideas they explore, engage with, and articulate. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
|
ENG 280 005 |
| This course is an introduction in two senses: to the wild array of possibilities of the medium and to the careful study of those possibilities. The anti-theme of the course is, therefore, variety. We will watch moving images as unlike each other as possible, in a range of formats (celluloid, digital), modes (fiction, documentary, animation), intended audience (mainstream, niche), and national origin. Coherence will be provided by patient attention to the technique and form of cinema: to the properties of the moving image itself (mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound) as well as the conditions of spectatorship. The question that has occupied critics, scholars, and theorists for decades—what is cinema?—will goad us throughout the semester. Assessment will involve weekly quizzes and responses, a midterm exam, and a final paper. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
|
ENG 280 |
| Course description forthcoming. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 290 |
| This course introduces students to women’s literature that explores love, paying particular attention to the roles that class, race, gender, and disability have in these stories. Looking at literature ranging from the 19th to the 21st century, we will examine how love is socially and culturally constructed, what love can endure, change, and repair, and why readers love stories about love. In addition to reading fiction and nonfiction novels and poems, we’ll listen to podcasts and music that focus on love and related themes. Example texts we’ll cover in this class include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, All About Love by bell hooks, poetry by Audre Lorde, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 307 001 |
| This course is designed to offer an immersive experience in Historical Poetry. Students will read and discuss the work of established poets and their award-winning collections. In addition, participants will be expected to generate original creative work grounded in historical figures and events. Successful students will demonstrate reading comprehension and intermediate and advance composition, crafting, and editing of poetry. This course is generative and not for the novice. Classes will consist of lectures, discussions, and peer editing workshops. There is an expectation that participants will engage in the local literary community by submitting to student journals, presenting at open mics, and attending presentations by Guest Authors in the Visiting Writers Series and other like events. |
ENG 330 003 |
| Course description forthcoming. |
ENG 330 002 |
| Few texts have had afterlives as long and rich as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this course we’ll explore some of Hamlet’s many reappearances in literary criticism, philosophy, theatre, and film. We’ll also look at some of the primary sources that Shakespeare drew on to create the play and discuss its relationship to various late sixteenth-century religious and sociopolitical contexts. We’ll also read a few other plays from the same period that take up similar issues (e.g. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy). This course will introduce students to Shakespeare’s work in its historical and dramatic contexts; foster the development of a critical vocabulary and set of strategies for analyzing complex texts; and help students to develop close reading and critical writing skills. |
ENG 336 001 |
| Dystopia exists in the vacuum of democracy. While there is no such thing as a perfect democracy, this course aims to examine the roles of symbols and language to better understand the worldview of the few who would wish to control the majority as well as the spirit of the few who rise against tyranny. We will investigate the forces of politics, greed, and sophism that work to diminish freedom and replace it with fear. Predicated on the belief that literature and art provide a portal into the very heart of culture, this class surveys some of the most influential dystopian novels of our time not as a checklist, but as a literary methodology of resistance and recognition of oppression. |
ENG 338 001 / USB 351 001 |
| In this course, we will explore narratives of the American West, tracing American expansionism from Jeffersonian and Tocquevillian visions of prosperity through manifest destiny, the gold rush, and the rise of the industrial “machine.” We will follow these trajectories into the late twentieth century, engaging a variety of genres and mediums (non-fiction, fiction, film, and poetry). During class discussions, we will explore the intersections of culture, business, history, and myth, developing a more robust understanding of the West and its continued importance in our social imagination. Through our readings and discussions, we will simultaneously develop an appreciation for literature in a variety of genres; think critically about literary forms, devices, styles, conventions, and effects; and notice how a “literary approach’ can enrich our engagement with other disciplines of knowledge. |
ENG 342 001 |
| Here in the 21st century, Shakespeare has become a global cultural institution. ENG 342 goes back to his 16th century beginnings to survey his career and the genres in which he wrote, as we try to discover some of the reasons why his plays and poems have endured. Reading early and late work, observing his development within dramatic kinds, finding the patterns and themes that he tended to return to and reimagine without merely repeating himself, students will see his stagecraft grow and learn to hear his poetry. What did he say that still speaks to us and makes us want to talk back? How has he become ours? Four quizzes, a paper, and two exams. |
ENG 347 001 |
| What is the novel and how did it begin? Why did it development at a specific moment in history and what counted as fiction before that time? What makes one novel “literature” and another “trash”? In this course we explore the early decades of the novel to better understand prose fiction and how it came to be a dominant genre in English literature. Readings can include works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen (including selected cinematic adaptations), and more. Topics can include the novel in history and the history of the novel; the evolving cultural practices of novel-reading; eighteenth-century fiction and contemporary popular culture. |
ENG 352 001 |
| This course examines the concept of journeys as a central theme in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. We will explore how physical, spiritual, and metaphorical journeys have shaped the American experience and national identity. As the United States more than doubled its physical size during its early history, the nation’s borders were constantly redrawn and Crevecoeur’s revolutionary 18th Century question of “What is an American?” gradually shifted onto continental and global scales. Students can expect to engage with a diverse array of authors from every conceivable background, reflecting the rich tapestry of voices that contribute to the American literary landscape. We will pay special attention to the connections between specific literary works and the historical events that may have shaped them, including conflicts over slavery, the national policy of Indian Removal, debates about American Empire in the 1850s, and the Civil War and its aftermath. |
ENG 357 201 |
|
History is a major thematic preoccupation of American literature, and especially the fiction that wins prizes or gets canonized. According to Alexander Manshel, between 1950 and 1979 historical fiction accounted for “just over half of all the novels shortlisted for a major American prize,” while in the decades between 2000 and 2019 historical novels comprised “nearly three-quarters of all shortlisted novels.” These numbers should lead one to ask—why does the creative writer turn to history when in search for content, forms or materials? And why has she done so with increasing regularity in recent decades? This course explores the imaginative appeal of the past for the ethically and politically- motivated minority writer. As authors such as Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Leslie Marmon Silko, Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler and Jesmyn Ward draw on the legacy of slavery, land dispossession or other injustices, they experiment with literary style to connect the present moment to the past. Our course explores topics such as haunting, ghosts, and undeadness, while we attend to textual play with temporal sequencing and narrative order. And, finally, we consider the affective responses as well as the political results these novels intend to solicit from the reader. We ask: to what end is the past being mobilized today? If historical injustice is being used to contextualize today’s oppression in a long legacy of pain, and thereby to elicit empathy and pity, what avenues of political action and possibility are suggested by that contextualizing move? This course is available to register under A&S 300-203. It will appear as ENG 357 on your transcript. |
ENG 355 001 |
| This course explores the history of film from 1945 to 2000—between World War II and the new millennium—emphasizing transformations in American filmmaking alongside landmark instances of international art cinemas. In addition to closely analyzing movies by notable directors, we will consider changes in film production and exhibition, the development of film technology as well as the emergence of new forms of audiovisual entertainment, and the ways that movies emerge from and respond to changing social, cultural, and political conditions. Movies may include The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler/Goldwyn, 1946), Crossfire (Dmytryk/RKO, 1947), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962), Bonnie and Clyde (Penn/Warners, 1967), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974), Do the Right Thing (Lee/Universal, 1989), and In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000), among others. |
ENG 382 001 |
| This course explores the history of film from 1945 to 2000—between World War II and the new millennium—emphasizing transformations in American filmmaking alongside landmark instances of international art cinemas. In addition to closely analyzing movies by notable directors, we will consider changes in film production and exhibition, the development of film technology as well as the emergence of new forms of audiovisual entertainment, and the ways that movies emerge from and respond to changing social, cultural, and political conditions. Movies may include The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler/Goldwyn, 1946), Crossfire (Dmytryk/RKO, 1947), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962), Bonnie and Clyde (Penn/Warners, 1967), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974), Do the Right Thing (Lee/Universal, 1989), and In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000), among others. |
ENG 384 001 |
| With a thematic focus on romance, the chosen films in this course traverse genres such as comedy, fantasy, drama, and war, and examine the point wherein they intersect. This course pairs important works of fiction with their corresponding movies not only to better understand what is gained and what is lost in adaptations, but also to search for answers to the age-old question: What is love? From Jane Eyre to James Baldwin and Roman Holiday to 10 Things I Hate About You, this class reaches for a better understanding of the nature of romance in film and literature. |
ENG 391 001 |
| Since the 1940's "literary theory" has emerged as a vibrant and vital aspect of literary studies. The term covers a wide range of formal, historical, and critical approaches to literature and culture that have changed the ways we read. This course investigates selected trends and schools of modern literary theory in diverse texts and contexts. These can include formalism, Practical Criticism, and the New Criticism; French Structuralism and the various modes of post-structuralism (Semiotics, Deconstruction, Reader-response, Speech-act theory); historicism and the New Historicism; as well as broader modes of cultural critique such as Feminism, Marxism, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, Post-colonialism, Critical Race Theory, and more. |
ENG 407 001 |
| This is an intermediate-level, generative workshop in the genre of autofiction, also sometimes known as metafiction. Students will be asked to read a variety of published works by experts of the genre and write (and share!) several short responses to course-specific prompts. Use of AI will count as plagiarism. Active participation and attendance are key components of a student’s grade. ENG 207 is a mandatory prerequisite. |
|
ENG 407 002 |
| This class is devoted to poetry writing by you and your peers. It is a workshop-based intermediate poetry course. You will be given writing assignments on poetic form and specific readings to designed to push your work as poets and as readers of poetry into unknown territories of craft. One major component of this class will be "Writing on Art." You might know that UK has a first-rate art museum on its campus, but have you ever spent much time there? In this course, you will write a number of ekphrastic poems inspired by visual art. We will visit the UK Art Museum’s current shows as well as explore its permanent collection. We will collaborate and think about how we, along with our fellow peers in the workshop, enter, explore, and take inspiration from visual art in unexpected and fruitful ways. We will read, as examples, a selection of poems from various early and contemporary poets (including international poets) who have used art as subject and together we together we will consider the endless possibilities. We will explore key poetic terms and devices in order to talk about the art of writing poetry, and we will workshop our poems, the method by which we discuss and critique one another’s work with enthusiasm and care. |
ENG 425 001 |
| Fiction, non-fiction, poetry and many other artistic genres have taken us to task in our treatment of the environment we humans share with all life. Whether James Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers showing the destruction in the town of Templeton of a flock of passenger pigeons to the disgust of Natty Bumppo, or John Muir telling about the grandeur of CA’s mountains (seeing it as nature untouched, not realizing the millennia of Indigenous Peoples who had “tended” their natural world), or Annie Dillard watching frogs leaping toward water, humans have admired “nature” often as an object -- not as part of the living organism that is our planet. This course will both examine nature as amazing life but more explicitly examine our effects on that life: animal and plant.We have always had voices countering these behaviors. We will read from a variety of environmental writers from 19th century’s Thoreau to 20th century’s Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry to Linda Hogan and other Native American voices that to this day confront the abasement of the environment whether of a wall being built through sensitive landscapes and habitats or of a pipeline moving oil sludge through sacred waterways and hills. As well as reading and researching, we will write, following our minds and eyes to a better understanding of humans’ effect on the natural world through their construction, extraction, and other actions to build “civilization.” |
ENG 495 001 |
| A course on Irish modernist authors including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. We will explore the lyric poetry and verse drama of Yeats in the context of the Irish Literary Revival and the movement leading to Irish political independence. We will read Joyce’s great modernist epic, Ulysses, in the context of the international modernist movement, and conclude with a study of the extraordinary modernist fiction and drama of Samuel Beckett who revolutionized the language of theatre in plays like Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape. |
ENG 507 001 |
| Course description forthcoming. |
|
ENG 507 004 |
| The goal of this course is to make art out of experience. A successful piece of creative nonfiction should make the world appear a more intense and interesting place than its reader previously imagined. Anthropologists tell us that the very first stories were told by hunter-gatherers, sitting in a circle, around a fire. They were stories of the hunt and the foraging, and they bound the tribe together with ties that were, I would argue along with the philosopher Richard Rorty, stronger than the laws that came much later. In other words, we are a storytelling species. Story is vital to who we are. In this class, we will replicate that early storytelling. We will sit in a circle and talk very thoroughly and helpfully about how to tell true stories and how to help each other tell the best stories possible. Story builds solidarity—that was Rorty’s notion. In this course, we will aim for solidarity among ourselves and with our readers. |
|
ENG 507 005 |
| This Fiction Workshop is a creative writing workshop and course that explores fiction writing and literary craft. Our class meetings will consider how craft and content collide to influence our writing. This course will introduce/reintroduce many writers to some of the various elements of fiction writing. This class will explore the different narrative theories that are evident in traditional and contemporary fiction. Therefore, many twenty-first century writers and narrative arts associated with contemporary literary writing will be discussed. The course will also challenge students to critique and create fiction and prose writings. The course will emphasize the some of the future considerations and freedoms associated with writing fiction and contemporary literary practices. We will learn the rules of fiction and how to break them. Experimentation is welcome. |
|
ENG 507 006 |
| The oldest human paintings we know of, those in the caves at Lascaux, France, are about 12,000 years older than the first written language. But at least since the time of Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, poets and writers have been describing (ekphrasis) works of art. My goal for this course is to introduce you to as many different forms of ekphrastic writing as time permits. As such, we will examine a great variety of writerly responses to visual art. We will look at the three genres of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and we will consider many sub-genres within those forms. These will include autobiography, criticism, prose poems, lyric essays, short stories, novels, persona poems, collage-texts, and more. For the most part, you will not be required to write in any particular genre, though I hope you will feel compelled to move beyond your own primary field. We will study the craft of ekphrastic writing, and we will also enact it. That means this course will have a small workshop component. |
ENG 570 001 |
| This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we’ll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro’s fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claims of anticolonial political thought take shape in literary writing? This course will be taught in conjunction with a parallel course offered by Professor Harris Feinsod at Johns Hopkins University. We anticipate building opportunities for cross-campus research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale collaboration. |