FALL 2025 Courses
ENG 100 |
| It is strongly Recommended that all incoming freshmen with a declared English major should take this course, which serves as an introduction and orientation to the benefits and requirements of majoring in English. You will learn about literary fields including American, British, and African-American literature, and Creative Writing. You will meet professors, hear about the Creative Writing Option, learn how to earn honors and do internships in English, and also hear about study abroad options. You will meet your classmates and have opportunities to get involved with extra-curricular activities in English. Most important, you will develop your own personalized four year plan. This class will put you on a track to excel and get the most out of your major. |
ENG 107 001 |
| Welcome to college. This class will break your heart, blow your mind, and show you what it means to be a creative reader and writer. In order to learn to write, we must also learn to read. In this class, students will be asked to respond to weekly reading assignments, as well as weekly creative writing prompts. Peer critiques will also be employed throughout the semester. Please note that this is an introduction to the genres (namely fiction, nonfiction, and poetry); students seeking more advanced and particular courses should consider enrolling in ENG 207, ENG 407, or ENG 507. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
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ENG 107 002-005 |
| An introduction to the genres and craft of creative writing, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students will study and practice writing in various modes through composition, peer critique, and research. Lecture or lecture with discussion section. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
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ENG 107 006-009 |
| This course is designed to offer an introduction to multiple genres and the craft of imaginative writing, including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Students will read and discuss the work of published writers and practice creating their own original writing in various genres. This is an introductory course in creative writing for the novice. Successful participants will demonstrate a willingness to examine their personal feelings and memories and demonstrate an understanding of how poetry and prose can be used to express ideas and emotions. Classes will consist of large lectures, reading, discussions, in-class writing exercises and practice, journaling, Literary Community Engagement, and peer editing in small groups. Some sessions may occur online. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
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ENG 107 010-011 |
| 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. |
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ENG 107 013 |
| Writing Craft: Introduction to Imaginative 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. |
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ENG 107 014 |
| This is an introduction to the craft of creative writing and three of its genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Students will read and practice writing in these genres (and possibly others), and work frequently in small groups to develop and critique the writing. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
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ENG 107 015 |
| This course introduces creative writing framed within the parameters of style and genre. Students will not only be asked to read contemporary writers, but also to join in the conversation and produce their own stories. The assigned reading for this class is intended to be a North Star for students to find inspiration and as a model for their own creative vision. Simply put, you are what you eat intellectually. Ideally, students shall use these stories and poems as they were intended - as a lens through which to view and understand their own experiences. Furthermore, students will leave this class with a portfolio of work and a rudimentary knowledge of how publishing on small scale works. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 003 |
| What is time? What is memory? How do we individually experience these concepts differently from other people and how do they affect our own perceptions and retellings of events? Why do some stories begin where they end? These are but a few of the questions we will seek to unravel over the course of the semester. In this class, we will discuss the unique abilities that multiple perspectives, as well as narratives that play with time and memory, give an author in crafting a story. Through discussion of novels, poetry, music, television, and film, as well as creative assignments geared towards understanding our own comprehension of time and memory, we will uncover society’s fascination with chronicling each passing moment, and hopefully understand more about how we process our own lives. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
| ENG 130 004 LITERARY ENCOUNTS: Social Minds in the Novel TR 12:30-1:45 Lisa Zunshine |
| This course centers on the development of the novel as a genre, with a particular emphasis on its depiction of social minds. We will start with a brief sojourn in Ancient Greece and then move promptly to England, exploring novels written between 1770 and 2010, with their undercurrent of dark forces lurking beneath the daily comedy of living. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 005 |
| Reading, at times, offers a welcome escape from life’s ups and downs, solace in a tale that ends happily ever after, the pleasure of fantasy, or relief that a narrative is, after all, neither real nor one’s own. But literature also records and shapes our perception of disasters, both in the moment and in the years that follow, offering us, if not always comfort, at least new perspectives, understanding, and aesthetic experiences. This multi-genre course will use the theme of “disaster” to focus our discussion while also introducing you to ways of appreciating, thinking critically, and writing thoughtfully about a range of poetry and fiction. After completing this course, you will understand the fundamentals of close reading skills, be able to analyze a literary passage, and write a sustained and supported argument about a literary text. Reading literature that explores disturbing and, yes, disastrous events, we will examine how authors have presented disaster in varied forms—personal and interpersonal; local, national, and even planetary; religious and secular—and attempt to find meaning and inspiration in their accounts of introspection, natural disaster, war, and even death. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 006 |
| Lady Macbeth, Irene Redfield, Galadriel, Amy Elliot-Dunne: some of the most compelling, complex, and contested characters in literature are those who choose to stray from accepted social norms. In this course, we will examine depictions of controversial characters in novels, plays, poetry, music, graphic novels, and memoirs to investigate what it is they seek to be free from, to achieve, to create, or to destroy. How do they (attempt to) break out of a prescribed mold of decency and morality? The texts in this class will portray characters who are sometimes unpopular and morally gray and sometimes admired and respected. Ultimately, literature engaging with controversial characters can help us understand not only the expectations placed on people in the past and in our current moment but also the ways in which we can imagine pushing the boundaries of the status quo. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 007 |
| The Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, is a well-beloved genre for a variety of reasons. Foremost, it connects deeply with our personal experience; we have all experienced the joys and pains of growing up. These journeys toward maturity — although certainly individualistic and unique — share deep commonalities. We all must face questions, such as: “What is the world really like? How should I live? What is truly valuable?” Although easy to ask, these questions resist clean-cut answers, throwing us into the messy business of growing up. In this course, we will explore how early loves, losses, successes, and traumas help mold our identities and beliefs. This inquiry will engage the Bildungsroman across genres, including novels, short stories, poems, and films. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 008 |
| How often have you been reading a book and the bad guy seems so much more appealing than the forces of good? Or how often have you wondered whether the villain in the book is really so guilty of wrongdoing? Is the "good guy" really so clearly beyond reproach? In this course we will explore plays, novels, short stories, and poems in which villains clearly emerge, but our goal will be to look beyond good and evil. What is the nature of the villainy? What is its significance? Does the bad character represent something bigger than himself, or is he an anomaly? Is evil always some version of the same thing, or does it work differently depending on the context? How does the literature contain the threat he or she poses, and are you buying it? Readings will be drawn from British and American sources from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. The class will feature a few papers as well as a midterm and final exam. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in Arts & Creativity. |
ENG 130 201 |
| This particular section will study poems in order to uncover and apply specific craft elements. Over the course of the semester, you will learn more about basic poetic forms and techniques. You will then demonstrate understanding of these elements by writing your own poems. 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 180 001-004 |
| In this class we’ll explore the kinds of movies that Hollywood loves to tell and that audiences return to over and over. Whether we’re talking about romantic comedies, westerns, or science fiction films about robots or AI, there are certain storylines audiences can’t get enough of. Over the course of the semester, we’ll examine why this is and work to understand how and why particular stories appeal to audiences. We’ll also explore what happens when filmmakers play around with familiar formulas and consider the impact of such changes. Throughout, our conversations will serve as springboards for developing your own critical and creative skills. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 005 & 008 |
| This course explores the historical foundations and contemporary evolution of world cinema, focusing on non-Western contexts, particularly the Global South—Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Students will examine how films capture local, national, and international narratives, using technical, formal, and content analysis to study cinema as both art and text. Through works by renowned directors such as Ousmane Sembène, Wanuri Kahiu, Raoul Peck, Dziga Vertoz, Tunde Kelani, Satyajit Ray, Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino students will analyze visual representations of identity, exploring diverse genres such as social realism, avant-gardism, magical realism, and melodrama. The course highlights the artistic, cultural, and social dimensions of film, fostering critical thinking and visual literacy while addressing themes like ideology, globalization, gender, memory, migration, corruption, and human rights. By the end of the semester, students will gain a deeper understanding of how cinema shapes and reflects global narratives, developing the skills to critically engage with films as both art and commentary. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 006 |
| Blood. Seduction. Sex. Eternal life. What more could describe the allure of the vampire in today’s popular culture? From the folktales of the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe and early 19th century literature comes one of the most enduring creatures to capture the audiences: vampires, Dracula, night walkers. This undead creature has its roots in folklore, and in Romanian history with Vlad Tepis, or Vlad the Impaler, and has found its way into short stories and novels, and especially, early and recent films. This class will examine the roots and the ongoing development of this genre of film that has indeed given the vampire eternal life. Weekly films, some quizzes, short writings and discussions are the expectations for the class work. We might even make our own short films. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 007 |
| 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. 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. In this course, you will gain a better understanding of film as a creative medium and of filmmaking as a creative process by paying attention to and thinking about the impact of artistic choices and decisions at various stages of the filmmaking process. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 180 201 |
| 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. ENG 180 is also a creative class. The skills you learn by studying film will be put to work in your own creative mini-projects: you will write a film synopsis, make a storyboard, and shoot a scene. As you make your own artistic choices, you will reflect on how these affect the viewer. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry Arts & Creativity |
ENG 191 001 |
| 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. Part of the Law & Justice Major. UK Core: Community, Culture and Citizenship in US OR Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 207 001 |
| A beginning workshop in the craft of writing fiction, teaching students how to read critically and how to revise work in progress. The students provide an audience for each others' work. Exercises involve practice in aspects of craft and promote experimentation with different forms, subjects, and approaches; outside reading provides models and inspiration. |
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ENG 207 002 |
| This is a beginning workshop in the craft of writing poetry. Students will read and discuss the work of published writers, build their poetry vocabulary, interrogate various traditional and new forms, and focus on crafting original work, editing, and revision. There will be multiple opportunities to engage in a variety of Literary Community Engagement. Some sessions may occur online. |
ENG 207 003 |
| A beginning workshop in the craft of creative nonfiction, teaching students how to read critically and how to revise work in progress. The students provide an audience for each others' work. Exercises involve practice in aspects of craft and promote experimentation with different forms, subjects, and approaches; outside reading provides models and inspiration. |
ENG 230 001 |
| A course on Mythology and Literature, including classical myths and legends from Greece, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. Focus will be on modern adaptations of older tales, with background reading by Joseph Campbell and others. We will read Homer, The Odyssey and Madeline Miller’s bestseller, Circe; Neil Gaiman, Norse Myths; Peter Ackroyd’s The Death of King Arthur, and Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian bestseller, The Winter King. From the Irish tradition we will read Lady Gregory’s adaptation of the legend of Cuchulain, The Hound of Ulster. Credit toward Minor in Folklore and Mythology. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 230 003 |
| Mark Dery famously coined the term Afrofuturism, which he defines as “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of the twentieth-century technoculture” in his essay “Black to the Future” in 1994 (180). Yet, in many Black speculative texts, the technocultural aspect of the future is comparatively inconsequential as opposed to the social, economic, and political contexts of twentieth and twenty-first century America and beyond. Bringing in various forms of Afrofuturistic media including literature, film, and music, this class will trace an Afrofuturist tradition, while learning to read closely, relate texts to contexts, and craft a persuasive written argument. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 230 004 |
| This section of English 230 will explore what it means to leave home and what can happen to us when we get where we’re going. Looking at a range of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts that describe leaving England for new worlds—either real, as in the first Virginia voyages of the 1580s, or imaginary as in utopian texts like Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines—as well as some of their classical antecedents, “New Worlds” will invite students to imagine the trials of crossing vast space in order to arrive somewhere new, and the ways in which travelers had to try to make themselves new as well. What were the limits and the consequences of pulling up stakes and planting yourself somewhere else? How did economics, politics, race, and their own history (again, both real and imaginary) shape and complicate Britons’ yearning to start over? Authors will include Defoe, Shakespeare, and Aphra Behn as well as writings by poets, planters, and explorers. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 241 001 |
| In English 241, we’ll read selected representative examples of literature in English from its beginnings to the early seventeenth century. Our goals will include developing a sense of the major modes of writing in this long period and recognizing changes in the English language itself, as well as understanding connections between our texts and the historical events surrounding them. By the end of the course, students will also have begun building a critical vocabulary for discussing and analyzing British literature. |
ENG 251 001 |
| This course is an immersion in the literature of the United States before the Civil War. We will read a diverse array of famous and currently lesser-known significant authors, in a variety of genres (novel, short story, essay, poetry), as we seek to understand their works both formally and historically within an American culture defined by rapid economic change, slavery, and debates over women’s rights. The last several weeks of the term will be devoted to the stunning outpouring of work produced by American writers, including Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Douglass, Jacobs, Poe, and Stowe, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Grade will be determined by a combination of short essays and in-class exams. |
ENG 260 |
| This course traces the long arc of the slave narrative in African American writing from the 19th to the 21st century. In this tradition the literary text has always been a political discourse in which the writer explores questions of subjectivity, freedom, authenticity, and performance. Beginning with the 19th century slave narrative, the course will examine how writers negotiated political commitment with aesthetic strategies as generations of black authors advanced or contested one another’s approaches to realism, sentimentalism, and historiography. By examining these discussions over aesthetic form and literary style in the black tradition, students will develop a critical understanding of literature’s relationship to history and come to appreciate debates over the role of the writer in society. Writers will likely include Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead. In addition to primary texts, we will explore critical essays that help us contextualize and discuss our texts in relation to literary history and theory. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 265 001 |
| Take this course to read a diverse range of amazing texts in the African American literary tradition. In this course, the first of a two-part sequence offered on African American literary and cultural studies, we will examine the work of foundational writers, thinkers and activists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will read poetry, novels, autobiographies, speeches, and short stories by early African American authors. For each text, students will assess the venue of publication, consider thematic scope, and interrogate political and ideological aims. Among the topics that we will discuss are black radicalism, citizenship, race, feminism, masculinity, interior consciousness, youthfulness and the emergence of the New Negro. We will explore important critical and theoretical essays that evaluate the concerns of the literary texts, and we will examine the major authors, themes, traditions, conventions, and tropes in early African American literature. |
ENG 280 001-004 |
| 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. In this course, you will gain a better understanding of the filmmaking process and of the impact that filmmaking choices and decisions have. You will be better able to recognize formal elements and other aspects of film, and develop a vocabulary with which to describe and analyze them. Ultimately, you will become more familiar with and proficient in the methods and terminology of film studies. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
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ENG 280 201 |
| 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. In this course, you will gain a better understanding of the filmmaking process and of the impact that filmmaking choices and decisions have. You will be better able to recognize formal elements and other aspects of film, and develop a vocabulary with which to describe and analyze them. Ultimately, you will become more familiar with and proficient in the methods and terminology of film studies. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
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ENG 280 202 |
| Course description forthcoming. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 290 |
| Love, intimacy, violence, family, illness, and all manner of mayhem. This introduction to literature by women focuses on North American women who changed the scripts that we read and hear. This pre-major class is designed to instruct you in the kinds of assignments that you are likely to encounter in other English courses. You will be instructed in close-reading techniques, identification-type exam questions, and literary critical essay writing. UK Core: Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities |
ENG 330 001 |
| When Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in 1985, it was a great success, the breakthrough novel of an author who had been writing clever if somewhat niche fiction for fifteen years. It would both earn the National Book Award and persist unto the present day as a cult classic, its period’s exemplary document of postmodernism. (Noah Baumbach recently adapted it for Netflix as a very expensive and barely watched feature film.) DeLillo’s book is a satire, a melodrama, a detective thriller—but above all, a fantasia of what critics and historians have come to see as a specific civilization—we might call it the US Empire—in its late phase. While the historical moment DeLillo chronicles can make some of the novel’s scenarios seem dated, what’s striking is how relevant if not timely many of the book’s other scenarios remain in 2025. We’ll look at both the context in which the book was written—the post-1960s decade that ushered in the “Reagan Revolution”—and the concerns that the book treats with a remarkable prescience: paranoia and conspiracy theories; consumer culture and its discontents; ecological crisis; the rule by and failure of experts; reality as virtual experience; hyperbolic nostalgia; the implosion of the nuclear family. These are some of the chief matters on which White Noise touches. DeLillo’s text will be the focus of our reading (it’s a fun read but not a short one). But because postmodernism is a multimedia aesthetic, we’ll also look at some other materials representative of postmodern style, from (for example) David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to the Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman. Coursework will tentatively consist of two brief exams (or, at your discretion, two 5pp papers), a midterm exam, and a take-home final exam. |
ENG 330 002 |
| Paradise Lost is perhaps the greatest poem written in English. In the wake of the mid-1600s English Civil War, which we will look at in this class, John Milton wrote England’s great epic poem, modeled on the traditions of Greece and Rome, and he chose Satan’s rebellion and the book of Genesis as his subject-matter. In this course, we will carefully read through this epic poem with attention both to the poetry itself and the contexts that drove Milton to tackle such divine material in the language of his day. Course requirements may include short close-reading papers, a regular journal of one’s reading experience, reading quizzes, and longer papers that investigate literary and historical contexts. |
ENG 335 001 |
| Law and literature, legal studies, and literary criticism: All deal in the currency of claims and evidence, as well as the telling and interrogation of stories to get to a Truth or some Truths. Legal cases and principles have served as inspiration for literary texts. Literary examples have suggested or illustrated legal principles. In this class, we will do a deep dive into a few literary and cinematic works that derive from true cases related to literature. Our work in this class consists of reading or viewing texts, writing evidence-based arguments, and scripting narratives. |
ENG 336 001 |
| Democracy has dominated public discourse recently. But what is meant by “democracy,” and what are democracy’s stories? This course explores narratives about America, its aspirations and failings, and government for and by the people. Since this is an English class, we will place special emphasis on the role of language and representation in the creation of American identities and democratic ideals. We will explore the allure of the American Dream and the desire to “sing America” alongside forces that propel democracy's decline. We will probe topics in our fictional landscape that seem unrelated to democracy at first: utopianism and dystopianism, worldbuilding, conspiracy theories, truth and its erosion, political emotions, charisma and celebrity, and more. You can expect lively discussions about the timely topics and powerful works we’re reading this semester. |
ENG 343 001 |
| This course studies Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries. Although most people identify Shakespeare as the representative Renaissance playwright, he was only one member of a distinguished generation. Students will encounter a variety of popular dramatic genres: revenge tragedy, city comedy, unperformed “closet drama,” the history play. In readings by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Ben Jonson, we’ll explore topics such as sex, romance, and marriage; urban life and the value of money; and racial and religious difference. Prerequisite: completion of UK Core Composition & Communication I-II requirement or equivalent. Fulfills the ENG Early Period requirement. Provides ENG Major Elective credit and ENG minor credit. |
ENG 359 001 |
| A course exploring the rich literary heritage of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the greater Appalachian region, surveying its local history and diversity as well as its wider significance for American art. Authors covered may include early figures such as William Wells Brown, the first African-American novelist, and John Fox Jr., the first million-selling novelist; Robert Penn Warren, first Poet Laureate of the United States and author of All the King's Men; Elizabeth Madox Roberts; Harriette Arnow, winner of the National Book Award in 1954 for The Dollmaker; counter-cultural writers of the 60's and 70's such as Hunter S. Thompson, Gurney Norman, and Ed McClanahan; contemporary Kentucky writers such as Wendell Berry, Erik Reece, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sara Jeter Naslund, C. E. Morgan, Kim Edwards, and Gayle Jones; and contemporary award-winning poets such as Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney, and Maurice Manning. |
ENG 361 201 |
| This fabulous course investigates selected writers of the early African American tradition, primarily from the mid-eighteenth century to post- Reconstruction. We will trace representations of black girlhood in early African American print and visual sources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a span of time that ranges from the early decades of the new republic to the eve of the New Negro Renaissance. During this period, black writers used black girls as tools to advance their social and political agendas. Often these agendas touched upon national issues of concern to the black community, such as safety and survival during the decades when the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, strategies for achieving full citizenship rights, working for the abolition of slavery, finding work in the post-Civil War industrialized North, and crafting strategies for educating the next generation. Just as often, black writers relied upon black girls as emblems of home and family. Whatever platform they chose for their writing, the black girls they wrote about carried stories of warning and hope, concern and optimism, struggles and success. This course will examine how early black writers had important messages to convey to black girls. Some writers wanted to control them. Others sought to empower them. All of them saw their potential power. We will explore important critical essays and examine major authors, themes, traditions, conventions, and tropes to help us discuss and evaluate early representations of black girlhood. |
ENG 368 001 |
| Encompassing an array of genres and forms, this course examines black culture, literature, and performance from mid-20th century to present. It engages aesthetic, critical, and political issues related to seminal periods such as the Black Arts Movement of 1960's, the Third Renaissance of 1980's-90's, and the ascent of the first U.S. president of African descent. This course examines how forms of performance such as folklore and work songs, the blues, jazz, and rap, all shape cultural and literary production. Authors may include Lorraine Hansberry, Ernest Gaines, Gloria Naylor, Ice Cube, Cornell West, Marlon Riggs, Tupac, India Arie, Percival Everett, Nikky Finney, Natasha Tretheway, Barack Obama, and others. |
ENG 407 001 |
| This is a course focused on the art and craft of fiction writing and available only for those students who have already satisfactorily completed ENG 207 (Beginning Workshop in Fiction Writing). This course assumes that students have a solid foundation for understanding the basic elements of fiction writing, and over the course of the semester we will look to enhance and challenge that understanding. This course assumes that you have a serious interest in writing fiction, and together we will focus on the work of becoming serious writers. We will examine how various craft elements are at work in the stories of professional writers, and very often these texts will serve as templates and inspiration. However, this class will primarily follow the workshop model, and therefore student work, and the discussion of same, will be our main focus. To that end, over the course of the semester students will be required to produce two complete stories, as well as a revision and a paper about the revision process. Additional requirements include reading responses, writing thoughtful and constructive critique letters, and frequent participation. |
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ENG 407 002 |
| This class is devoted to poetry writing by you and others. It is an intermediate workshop-based poetry course. You will be given writing assignments and readings to designed to unleash your creativity and spark your powers of observation, imagination, and memory. You might now that we have a first-rate art museum on our campus, but you have ever spent much time there? In this course, you will not only write poems but also write a number of ekphrastic poems inspired by visual art. We will visit the UK Art Museum’s current shows in person 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 cover key poetic terms and devices in order to talk about the art and of writing poetry, and we will learn the art of the workshop, 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 Bumpo, 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 440G 001 |
| A course on modern British poetry exploring the representation of place, landscape and cityscape in the work of a range of 20th century writers, from the field of battle in the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Keith Douglas to the waste landscapes of T.S. Eliot, the cityscapes of Hilda Doolittle and Eavan Boland, and the hills and boglands of writers like Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney. We will explore gendered landscapes, threatened landscapes, pastoral or antipastoral landscapes, and land as home, conflict zone, or terrain to be crossed. National landscapes as the space of inclusion or exclusion, and the natural environment as a place for living, working, and loving. Works to include Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets; H. D., Trilogy; W.H. Auden, In Praise of Limestone; Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, Ted Hughes, Hawk in the Rain; Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger, Eavan Boland, Outside History, and others. Three papers and a take-home final exam. |
ENG 450G 001 |
| This course focuses on the rise of an eclectic genre of novel writing that overwhelmingly concerns environmental crisis, transformation, hope, and dystopia. While ecological literature has been around for millennia (think nature poetry, or Henry David Thoreau’s Walden), its frequency in the 21st century is both self-conscious and urgent, a response not just to the impact of anthropogenic actions on the natural world but also to the robust body of environmentalist theory and activism that flourished in the 1960s, a movement with which contemporary novelists are in close dialogue. We are going to look at novels that center on what some critics have taken to calling (somewhat controversially) the “Anthropocene,” on the view that human activity has been the dominant factor in shaping the ecosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Given the prevalence of apocalyptic thinking about the ecological future, a number of our texts will either be science fiction or closely adjacent to it. On the same note, we shall be reading some books, under the rubric of “speculative fiction,” that proceed from the seemingly fanciful claim that nonhuman or even non-animal life might be sentient if not fully conscious. Texts include Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower; Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood; Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl; Ned Bauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; Omar el Akkad’s American War; Daniel Mason’s North Woods; Joy Williams’s Harrow. If we’re lucky enough to make our way through these books with time to spare, we’ll end the semester by viewing three recent films the plots of which pivot on ecological havoc, whether through resource wars and social collapse (Denis Villeneuve’s Dune; George Miller’s Fury Road) or through toxic and alien ecosystems (Alex Garland’s Annihilation). Major assignments will include a take-home midterm and take-home final (or, if you choose, a research paper of at least ten pages). Short response papers and in-class presentations will also be on the syllabus. |
ENG 495 |
| British literature has a long and fractious history with the politics of the left. Some of the twentieth century's leading writers have described themselves as socialists, communists, and fellow travelers--including George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Doris Lessing, and Salman Rushdie--and yet these figures have also been the quickest to rebuke, criticize, and disown the parties and causes cherished by the left. In this seminar, we will study the thought and writing connected to three major political phases of the twentieth century: the Popular Front era of the 1930s, the British New Left of the 1950s and 60s, and the era of multiculturalism and anti-Thatcherism of the 1980s and 90s. Assignments include a class presentation and a substantial research paper. |
ENG 507 001 |
| This is a course focused on the art and craft of fiction writing and available only for those students who have already satisfactorily completed ENG 207 (Beginning Workshop in Fiction Writing). This course assumes that students have a solid foundation for understanding the basic elements of fiction writing, and over the course of the semester we will look to enhance and challenge that understanding. This course assumes that you have a serious interest in writing fiction, and together we will focus on the work of becoming serious writers. We will examine how various craft elements are at work in the stories of professional writers, and very often these texts will serve as templates and inspiration. However, this class will primarily follow the workshop model, and therefore student work, and the discussion of same, will be our main focus. To that end, over the course of the semester students will be required to produce two complete stories, as well as a revision and a paper about the revision process. Additional requirements include reading responses, writing thoughtful and constructive critique letters, and frequent participation. |
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ENG 507 002 |
| This class is devoted to poetry writing by you and others. It is an advance workshop-based poetry course. You will be given writing assignments and readings to designed to unleash your creativity and spark your powers of observation, imagination, and memory. You might now that we have a first-rate art museum on our campus, but you have ever spent much time there? In this course, you will not only write poems but also write a number of ekphrastic poems inspired by visual art. We will visit the UK Art Museum’s current shows in person 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 cover key poetic terms and devices in order to talk about the art and of writing poetry, and we will learn the art of the workshop, the method by which we discuss and critique one another’s work with enthusiasm and care. |
ENG 518 001 |
| This course explores the development of English from its roots in Indo- European, through Old, Middle, and Early Modern English(es), culminating with a review of the English languages of today. It focuses on the phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes of the language, as well as on the social contexts of the rise and spread of English as a contemporary world language. Special emphasis is given to a linguistically informed understanding of how the language has changed in response to political and historical pressures. Fulfills the ENG Early Period requirement. Provides ENG Major Elective Credit and ENG Minor credit. |
ENG 570 001 |
| Literature has the power to influence, inspire, and transform societies. This course, "5 Books That Made America," invites students to explore literature's important role in shaping American experiences, beliefs, identities, and memories. The final list of 5 books will be determined later, but we will begin the course by reading two 19th century classics: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Students can expect that at least two of the books studied in the course will be from the 20th and 21st centuries. This course includes the opportunity for each student to select their own “book that made America” and present it to the class. |