Spring 2026 Course Descriptions

Major restrictions have lifted!

Most upper-division English courses are restricted by major for the first six days of registration. More information is available on the English registration FAQ page.

Course Descriptions

100-Level English Courses

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

View CRNs and DAY/TIMEs on Browse Classes in Web4U.

Prerequisites Notes: May not be taken concurrently with ENG 100. GUR: ACOM.

Overrides and capacity overrides are never granted for ENG 101.

A writing course designed to prepare students for college-level creative, critical, and reflective writing. Because writing looks and works differently in different contexts, this course teaches the rhetorical competencies that students need to write across multiple disciplines. The course introduces students both to the processes of building and analyzing ideas, and to ways of communicating those ideas in context-specific genres for targeted audiences. This course has the immediate goal of preparing students to succeed in their writing at Western, but it will also serve them personally and professionally. Students needing to satisfy Block A of the communications section of the General University Requirements, which ENG 101 does, are required to do so prior to completion of 45 credits. Students with a 4 or 5 AP score are encouraged to take this class so they can learn to adapt their test-taking skills to college coursework.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 Writing in Humanities: 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or 4/5 AP English Language Exam.

CRN: 21587 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Fai Inthajak

Writing with Impact means transforming ideas into communication that makes a difference to the reader and achieves a specific goal. This course integrates historical and rhetorical inquiry where students read critically, formulate challenging questions, and develop original perspectives. Through a series of written and multimodal projects, students will learn to investigate complex social issues, articulate persuasive claims, and adapt their writing for diverse audiences.

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 20104 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Zoe Redwoman

A writing course designed to help students develop the skills of close reading and careful analysis of literary texts, with particular attention to how language, style, and form contribute to a text’s social or political claims. Introduces students to the challenge of situating themselves in relation to a literary text and the critical conversation about that text, and crafting multi-draft critical essays with a focused, arguable thesis supported by thoughtful sequence of claims and carefully selected textual evidence.

CRN: 20195 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Eren Odabasi

The main objective of this class is to improve your reading and critical thinking skills by focusing on how language, style, and form contribute to a text’s social or political claims. Throughout the class, you will develop multiple skills that are important for the study of both literature and other audiovisual forms of (mass) communication alike. These include:

Forming compelling arguments and using a variety of argumentative strategies
Gathering, citing, and properly documenting sources that support your claims
Writing a well-organized and persuasive research paper
Practicing important peer review skills and providing constructive feedback

In this section of ENG 202, we will focus on various cases of self-adaptation; authors adapting their own literary works into audiovisual media. We will read and analyze a diverse set of novels from the US, South Africa, and Japan. We will compare each novel with its film adaptation, unpacking medium-specific elements in each version and discussing the creative changes the authors make while transporting their own work to another art form. Identifying such “deviations” or “discrepancies” between the texts will be our first step towards making sense of the evolving social and political contexts that inform the adaptation process.

TEXTS

“The 25th Hour” by David Benioff, film adaptation directed by Spike Lee

“The Face of Another” by Kobo Abe, film adaptation directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

“Waiting for the Barbarians” by J. M. Coetzee, film adaptation directed by Ciro Guerra

CRN: 20527 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Simon McGuire

CRN: 20530 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Amy Raduege

Science fiction and fantasy are all about possibility. In this class, we will study the way the three major classes of literature-- poetry, drama, and story—address modern problems and (sometimes) offer solutions for them. From futuristic bug creatures to Ukrainian folklore, we explore the implications of a genre unlimited by the constraints of what is and open to the questions of what if? Because other writers have asked that simple question, we now have helicopters, iPhones, GPS, credit cards, and 3D printers. Students will discuss the ways meaning is created and how ideas shape both text and world. We invite speculation and envision what the world might be with a little hope and imagination.

CRN: 20531 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Jean Lee

CRN: 20860 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM Instructor: Simon McGuire

CRN: 21382 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Michael Bell

CRN: 21382 is restricted to English-Interest students only. If you are interested in declaring an English major and want to take ENG 202 with a cohort of other prospective English majors, consider this section.

This section of English 202 involves critical inquiry into the literary effect of “speculative fiction,” which for our purposes we can define as the literatures of the imagination: fantasy, science-fiction, horror, alternate history. Such fiction has become arguably the dominant mode of contemporary narrative production, so there is rich opportunity to explore the power these literatures have had on history and culture. The specific forms we will study will of course include the written word, but because so much of our contemporary culture is expressed and reflected in the visual realm, we will be making constant connection to TV, film, comics, and game narratives in our inquiries.

All of our study will assume that whatever form it takes, fictional narrative has the power to construct and inform our worldly experience, even our reality. To sometimes great extent, we model our identities on literary stories, and build our perspectives from them. By making connection to our experiences and histories, stories illuminate the world, permitting us to see more texture and variety and possibility in our lives. Through intensive reading, discussion, activity, and writing we will further develop our ability to make meaning from the texts we study, focusing our analyses through formal critical practices as well as rigorous play and experimentation. You will emerge from the course a stronger analytic writer and reader with greater appreciation of the power of literature to bring you to deeper self-knowledge and increased awareness of a wider, richer, more complex world.

ASSIGNMENTS: In addition to reading assignments and participation in class activities, requirements will comprise one formal analytical paper, several informal writing assignments, and a final project.

CRN: 24012 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00 AM - 09:50 AM Instructor: Amy Raduege

ENG 216 American Literature 5 cr

CRN: 23777 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Laura Laffrado

CONTENT: This course focuses on writing from the nineteenth-century United States, a racially charged period in which authors practiced resistance, outrage, entertainment, struggle, and deception in their work. We will read, analyze, interpret, and discuss a wide range of texts by writers of different race/ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and other identity markers.
ASSIGNMENTS & EVALUATION:

Requirements include exams, quizzes, lots of reading, and lots of thinking.
TEXTS:

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, 1820 to Reconstruction, ISBN 978-1-55481-465-7
Ella Higginson, Mariella, of Out-West, ISBN 978-1-968635-00-8

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5 cr

CRN: 23351 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Theresa Warburton

Introduction to Native and Indigenous Literatures of North America

Using a place-based method, this course will provide students with the historical, theoretical, and artistic contexts through which to engage with Native and Indigenous Literatures. Recognizing that Native land is the literal foundation of the United States and Canada, we will focus on literature (broadly defined) from around Turtle Island (North America) in order to ask how the study of American literature might look different if we take Native and Indigenous literatures as foundational rather than ancillary. Rather than providing a survey of an extremely diverse and wide-ranging set of literatures, this course will provide students with the skills they need to engage texts written by Native and Indigenous writers on the terms set by Native and Indigenous authors, scholars, and activists themselves.

At the end of this course, students can expect to: have familiarity with the history of Native and Indigenous literatures; have read texts from contemporary Native and Indigenous authors; be comfortable discussing the diverse approaches to the study of texts by Native and Indigenous authors that have developed through the field of Native literary studies; be able to analyze such texts on their own using theoretical approaches from the course; and communicate effectively in both written and verbal forms about Native and Indigenous literatures.

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: Sound and Agency 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or ENG 203; or instructor permission. Restricted by major. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday February 26 by 4:30pm.

CRN: 20067 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Jeremy Cushman

Sound and Agency

In most of our workaday worlds, including our writing lives, screens and other kinds of visuals dominate. So it’s easy to overlook (overhear? underhear?) the pervasiveness of sound. But talk radio, ambient music, mobile device alerts, animal and human voices, construction sites, and random noise all combine to form an ever-present sonic backdrop with and through which we engage our media ecologies, including the writing we do. So together, we’ll obsess about to the multiple and often surprising ways sound participates within our own workaday worlds.

What that means is that we’ll do our best to unpack the wide-ranging and often neglected persuasive qualities of sound. We’ll practice (because it does take practice!) attending to the multiple and overlapping senses that sound activates, learning to treat sonic events as physical encounters that produce powerful if subtle arguments about listening, space, and agency.

Listening:

Listening impacts much more than our ears. In fact, Steph Ceraso gives the kind of listening we do only with our ears a name: “Ear-ring.” Ear-ing, obviously, plays a principal role in experiencing sound, but it’s only one mode or sense in the multimodal practice of listening. A multimodal listening accounts for the ecological relationship among sound, bodies, environments, and materials. Such an approach to listening is rather compelling, particularly when we consider that Evelyn Glennie, one of the world’s most accomplished percussionists, cannot hear with her ears.

Space:

Scholarship on sound and space has a long and complicated history. In the 1960’s R. Murray Schafer popularized the term “soundscape,” which is a term that has been accepted and challenged in academic fields like environmental studies, sociology, philosophy, and even english. So, we’ll read about, worry over, and try to experience the ways sound participates and makes its own arguments about space, including the ways sound takes on agency in particular spaces.

Agency:

The field of professional writing and rhetoric has, not always but often, treated sound the same way it has treated print texts: as a static object of analysis rather than as an embodied experience. We’ll read and respond to those treatments, but we’ll also read and listen to scholars who argue that sound acts on different bodies, creating and causing responses, sometimes uncontrollable and even harmful responses. To best get at the possible agency of sound, we’ll have to not only engage with this line of inquiry, we’ll also have to work directly with sound, making our own compositions and reflecting on the ways sound participates (or not) in our own acts (agency!) of composing.

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or ENG 203; junior status; and/or instructor permission. Restricted by major. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday February 26 by 4:30pm.

CRN: 20113 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Nicole Brown

Students engage with the rhetorical and technical practices for creating artifacts that help people do things with technology, such as usability testing, screencasting, web authoring, document design, and information architecture. The course covers a variety of technical genres and focuses on the ethical and social implications of a technical writer’s choices.

CRN: 20259 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Geri Forsberg

English 302, the English department’s introductory 300-level course in technical writing, is a 5-credit workshop that requires 15 hours of work per week. It strongly emphasizes the writer-reader relationship in various academic and non-academic writing scenarios. As a writing intensive course, it equips students with practical skills such as identifying an audience, developing objectives for their written documents, organizing the content of their documents, and revising documents for readability. Students will master the art of writing memos, resumes, letters, proposals, white papers, infographics, and visual presentations. They will also learn to work in small groups and collaborate on writing. The culmination of this course is a digital professional portfolio that showcases the writer’s technical writing skills, providing tangible evidence of their newly acquired abilities in technical writing, critical thinking, and collaboration.

CRN: 20305 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Geri Forsberg

CRN: 20350 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Rachel Sarkar

English 302 addresses the essential elements of technical writing—or writing in action. My underlying objective for English 302 is to explore the power of language to change people, events, and self. We’ll explore ways to use writing skills to accomplish personal, professional, and ideological goals. In the process, we’ll also consider the use of humor, empathy, ethics, and storytelling in technical writing.

CRN: 20412 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Rachel Sarkar

CRN: 23948 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Matt Homer

Technical writing in its simplest form is communicating particular information to a particular audience. Whether that information is about spacetime or an eggplant parmesan recipe, technical writing is the conscious use of language, design, and other elements to effectively communicate audience-specific information. Core concepts include user research, AI writing, document design and accessibility, and more. We will work with real world situations and our own lived experiences to create ethical and culturally responsive communication that not only communicates but accomplishes. That is, we will produce technical communication that affects action in the world.

This section in particular will focus on place, embodied knowledge, and lived experience in the theory, methodology, and practicality of technical communication. In other words, we will examine how different cultural perspectives influence different forms of technical communication. This course will be relevant and productive to students from any departments and colleges, including in STEM fields as it will help you write across disciplines, genres, audiences, and purposes.

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restricted to English majors with literature emphasis and teaching endorsement majors only. Opens to English majors with Creative Writing Emphasis and Film and Media Studies emphasis on Monday March 2 at 10am. All major restrictions lift on Tuesday March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21750 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Kathryn Vulić

Course Description and Objectives: Get ready for a wild ride – medieval literature is not what you think it is, especially given the ways that medieval texts and history are represented in popular culture! There’s a lot more subtlety, sophistication, humor, and literary variety in the surviving literature than the Middle Ages get credit for. This course covers the first era in the Literature and Culture sequence, from the earliest surviving texts in English to the advent of the printing press in England. The Middle Ages span about a thousand years, and during this time there is a considerable amount of social and cultural change, much of which is reflected in surviving writings. We will sample a broad array of genres, techniques, forms, and themes from that literature, many of which texts establish models and expectations for the writings of later eras. We will also trace the effects of an increasingly literate population and increasingly sophisticated writing technology (like the introduction of paper and the printing press to England) on literary culture.

This class aims at breadth of coverage (with course readings consisting of excerpts as well as whole texts), rather than depth, though this course could be designed productively either way. This class focuses on what it meant to read and write in Middle English in a trilingual culture, and therefore strives not only for a general understanding of the politics and other social factors that influence writing in one language over another, but also examines the range of writing interests expressed by those who chose to compose in English.

Textbook: Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1: The Medieval Period (3rd ed., 2014, or 3rd Revised Ed., 2023 – both are acceptable) and supplements posted to Canvas that you will need to print and bring to class.

Tentative assignments: I assign a variety of assignments that encourage both formal and informal writing, as well as both deep, analytical investigation (which manifests in essays) and broad, synthetic thinking (which manifests in exams).

Weekly Canvas postings, to ground daily discussion in your questions and interests (10%)
Research project, offering multiple approaches so you can pick a topic that interests you (20%)
Analytical essay, giving you the opportunity to dig deeper into a text you enjoy (20%)
In-class review activities, giving you a chance to synthesize what you learn in class (20% each)
Participation, encouraging you to get the most out of our class time (10%)

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5 cr

CRN: 21589 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Jennifer Forsythe

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the rise of European colonialism and racial capitalism coincided with the rise of witch hunts across Europe and the Americas. For medieval people, witches could be students of the natural world or folk healers. But 16th- and 17th-century demonologists came to define witches more narrowly as collaborators with demons who embodied their own worst fears (challenges to Christian hegemony, expressions of feminine power and gender transitivity, the downfall of colonial regimes and tyrannical monarchies, sexual and reproductive freedoms, etc.) While early modern demonologists were elite white men with access to printing presses, the people they labeled witches often could not read or write. How can we understand the lives and experiences of people accused of witchcraft if the only records we have of their voices are filtered through the writing of their accusers at the worst moments in their lives? How can we make connections between the ways 16th- and 17th-century writers imagined witches and the systems of power they believed so-called witches threatened?

In this class, we will build skills in literary studies and historical analysis to better respond to questions like these. Because this course is a seminar, we will spend significant time in class developing and pursuing our own original research questions about the history of witch trials, the witch idea, and contemporary appropriations of 16/17C texts about witches. In the second half of the class, we will collaborate with theatre historian and theatre-makers Prof. Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy and WWU theatre students to research questions related to The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and to Jen Silverman’s 2022 retelling, Witch. This is an analog seminar. Whenever possible, we will be reading on paper and writing collaboratively in person. You’ll need to buy one coursepack (a spiral-bound set of photocopies available in the bookstore) and three books: La Celestina (1499), The Witch of Edmonton (1621), and Witch (2022).

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5 cr

CRN: 21021 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Laura Laffrado

CONTENT: This courses focuses on the time period that scholars have recently named the long eighteenth century—that is, the era that extends from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. These are such dynamic years in the literature of what becomes the United States. We will read literary works by people of various races, ethnicities, religions, and economic positions that explore vital issues of the day such as liberty, literacy, revolution, and science. We will examine the various ways in which a dominant rich male Whiteness is challenged as America and American identities are formed and defined.

ASSIGNMENTS: In this course you will write both extensively and intensively, producing multiple drafts of papers, revisions, and finished essays. We will devote class time for instruction and practice in disciplinary research methods and writing strategies. Students will write short responses to the reading, shorter essays, and one twelve-page critical research paper that engages with current scholarship on an eighteenth-century text or texts assigned for class. Much reading, writing, and thinking will be asked of you, along with steady attendance, a participation grade, group work, and various out-of-class assignments.

TEXT: Broadview Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A, Beginnings to 1820

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5 cr

CRN: 21022 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Christopher Wise

“The Decadents”

In this course, we will focus upon the “Decadent” poets and novelists especially of the mid- to late 19th century, especially those based in Paris, France, “the capital of the 19th century” as Walter Benjamin put it. This is the apex of European colonialism, which generated the wealth that led to the reconstruction of Paris in the era of Napoleon III. Authors studied will include Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Zola, Huysmans, Proust. We will also read Houellebecq. No electronic devices are allowed in the classroom.

ENG 311 Seminar: The 20-21st Century 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restricted to English majors with literature emphasis, film and media studies emphasis, and teaching endorsement majors only. Opens to English majors with Creative Writing Emphasis on Monday March 2 at 10am. All major restrictions lift on Tuesday March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21023 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Dennin Ellis

(Post-)(Post-)Modernism

Have you noticed that the present is, well… weird? Why do we live in such weird times? That’s what we aim to discover in this class – examining the weird, uncanny age we live in, and how we got here.

We’ve got three terms here – modernism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism – and, to grossly oversimplify, they correspond to eras of relatively contemporary history, art movements, and more. Between these three, we’ve got the three major paradigms of Western thought in the 20th and 21st centuries (that is, the dominant “systems of logic” that determine how, why and what we do as a society). But there’s more (there’s always more). It’s not just modernism we’re talking about, but modernity and modernization. Same with postmodernism, which also splits off into complementary terms; same with post-postmodernism. It all gets very complicated, and yet, we need to understand it all because these are the preeminent systems of logic, production, symbolic exchange and meaning-making dictating our recent past, our “eternal present” and any eventual future we may have. Thinking about the evolution, and overlap, of dominant ways of thinking (the “common sense” of an age), technological advancement, and ever-expanding capitalism in the context of three somewhat distinct phases (in which, to put it as simply as possible, things get increasingly weird) allows us to make sense of it all (and maybe even do something about it – such as dialing back the weirdness a little!). In the words of the renowned postmodern scholar, Fredric Jameson, “Always historicize!” That is to say, figure stuff out by placing it in its proper, and properly detailed, historical context. Only then can we proceed.

We need a lens through which to do that, and literature makes a fine one. Literature and art are always reflections of the time in which they’re made, so this class aims to use literature as a gateway to understanding our often-contentious three terms up there. What is modernism? Let’s figure it out through reading James Joyce or T.S. Eliot. What’s postmodernism? Let’s ask Philip K. Dick or listen to Radiohead (OK, we’re getting weird now). What is post-postmodernism? Let’s watch Barbie or look at whatever wacky stuff you young people are into these days (yes, seriously – I did say this would get weird, didn’t I?). Along the way, we’ll have the usual essays, group projects and discussions, culminating in a final project wherein you choose a text from one of these eras and consider how it descends from, predicts, or serves as a transition between these three eras.

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20068 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Jeremy Cornelius

In 1417, an Italian book collector named Poggio Bracciolini translated Roman poet Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which, according to Stephen Greenblatt’s controversial claim in The Swerve, sparked the European Renaissance. While Greenblatt’s claim is highly debatable, Lucretius’s poem does express radical claims about free will, pleasure, and atoms circulating in (what Lucretius calls) “the swerve,” which can make and create new worlds. Taking this approach, our course will consider interpretation and world building to think about how these concepts relate to criticism and theory in English.

Readings will focus on relationships between aesthetics, politics, embodiment, and identities. Stretching from antiquity to the 19th century, we will read pieces that consider world building through debates on the interpretation of religious texts and their relationship to analyzing literature. Considering specific forms such as tragedy in Aristotle’s The Poetics to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy as well as arguments on poetics and interpretation by Boccaccio, Sir Philip Sidney, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, our class discussions aim to focus on thinking about how and why we interpret texts. By questioning whether theory and criticism is a form of world building in and of itself, we will also look at hybrid work by Margaret Cavendish. Additionally, readings include work that focuses on the political aspects of world building such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women along with Marx and Engels’s Capital. Assignments include a writing journal and multiple critical writing assignments.

CRN: 22169 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Christopher Wise

A survey of critical theories and practices from the pre-Platonic era to the present. No electronic devices are allowed in the classroom.

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21753 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Dennin Ellis

“Hey, what’s the big idea?!” Well, when it comes to post-1900 literary theory, the big idea is… Marxism! Yes, it’s true, there’s simply no way getting around it – almost all literary theory of the past 100+ years is indebted to a jolly bearded fellow whose dream was to see the people showered with gifts from above. No, I’m not talking about Santa Claus - I’m talking about everyone’s favorite Marx brother, Karl! And he will stop being relevant when capitalism is no longer relevant!

This class will take Marx as a starting point and progress through the premier literary theorists and movements of the 20th century to trace the influences of Marx's thought on that big body of work we call 'literary theory' - which, in truth, expands well beyond literature and into sociology, political theory, psychology and just about every way we try to understand culture and power.

We’ll begin with the foundational question - what does economics have to do with poetry? (The answer may surprise you!) From there, we’ll follow the chain reaction Marx set off. We’ll see how thinkers from Freud to Foucault built on Marx with the psyche, language, and systems of power as the hidden engine of society. We’ll track how later thinkers – feminists, postcolonial critics, critical theorists – took Marx’s tools to fight battles over gender, empire, race and reality itself. And we’ll land in our own oversaturated moment of digital selves, ecological crisis, and postmodern irony, asking, “Is theory still haunted by Marx’s ghost?” (The answer may not surprise you!)

This is a boot camp in thinking critically about where ideas come from, who they serve, and how they shape everything from the novels we read to the ads we scroll past. By the end, you won’t just know theory, you’ll understand why it matters. Prepare to read densely, argue passionately, and see the world (and the word) with a fresh pair of eyes.

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21809 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Kathryn Vulić

Textbook: Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 1: The Medieval Period (3rd ed., 2014, or 3rd Revised Ed., 2023 – both are acceptable) and supplements posted to Canvas that you will need to print and bring to class.

Assignments and evaluation: This class uses contract grading to help you work toward a grade of your choosing – the more assignments you successfully complete, the higher your grade in the course. The assignments are a mix of daily reading and discussion preparation, small research or analytical or creative projects meant to help you explore connections between our class material and our contemporary lives, and a series of check-ins that let me see what you are learning and how.

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21755 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Jennifer Forsythe

In this class, we will build skills in literary studies and historical analysis to better respond to questions like these. Because this course is a survey, we will also spend significant time in class fine-tuning our close reading skills and discussing the changing shapes imaginative writing took in the 16th and 17th centuries. Our reading list includes a dialogue, a romance, several trial records, some folk tales, and a scientific treatise created before 1700 and featuring discourses and representations of witches. We will also read a play, a satirical novel, and scholarly essays from the 20th and 21st centuries that critically reimagine and reframe the lives and complex identities of people accused of witchcraft before 1700. This is an analog seminar. Whenever possible, we will be reading on paper and writing collaboratively in person. You’ll need to buy one coursepack (a spiral-bound set of photocopies available in the bookstore) and three books: La Celestina (1499), The Tempest (1611), and I, Tituba (1986).

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th Century 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21024 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Christopher Loar

Style:

An instrument made of metal, bone, etc., having one end sharp-pointed for incising letters on a wax tablet.
The manner of expression characteristic of a particular writer (hence of an orator), or of a literary group or period.
features of literary composition which belong to form and expression rather than to the substance of the thought or matter expressed.
A mode of deportment or behavior.
A stylus, used as a weapon of offense, for stabbing.

(Adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary)

"Style" is a highly unstable term: originally a simple name for a writing instrument, the term now refers to a variety of loosely connected and rather abstract concepts. Style is, most often, a manner of presentation: an empty category that can describe the way a sentence is written—the way a ballet is danced——the way a wardrobe is selected. It can also, in the right hands, be a weapon in high-stakes rhetorical battles.

These battles were everywhere in the eighteenth century. Literary style played a key role in Britain's construction of a canon of English literature as well as in its production of new genres and forms. Interpersonal styles, too, played a key role in establishing and contesting the role to be played by women and the middle classes in an increasingly complex society. In this class we will consider some of the ways that style (in literature, clothing, and cultural taste) in the eighteenth century helped to define new kinds of personalities, identities, and experiences through the public presentation of selves in language, body, and art. We will examine popular fashions and the arts, but we will focus particularly on the style of the written word and the importance that choosing a writing style had for the literate in this period.

ENG 331 Studies in Gender Theory 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or WGSS 211. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 23352 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Jean Lee

This course will examine gender theory, with varying emphases, including but not limited to feminist, queer, trans, intersectional and critical race theory.

ENG 334 Texts Across N. Am and Eur 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent.

CRN: 23353 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Kathryn Trueblood

This course serves as an introduction to the literature associated with the countercultures of the 1960s, beginning with the social impacts of WWII and ending with the feminist manifesto of the early 1970s. The 1960s saw the first televised war coverage and civic protests; international unrest hit Prague, Paris, Rome, and London. Just as the civil rights movement in America sought to create a just society after the legacy of slavery, Western European countries moved into a post-colonial new world order when former colonies liberated themselves. The Cold War dominated both Eastern and Western Bloc countries and the build-up of nuclear arsenals on both sides seemed to guarantee mutually assured destruction. The world seemed poised on the brink of destruction, much as it does today.

"Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born."

—Song to Woody by Bob Dylan

So many movements emerged from the crucible of this time—the Anti-War Movement, The Free Speech Movement, New Journalism, Civil Rights, Feminism, Gay Rights, Environmentalism, and Postmodernism—students will be invited to consider how this literature has shaped our national discourse as well as our individual lives. The class will apply race-class-and-gender analysis to the literary texts to enable students to understand the readings as the products of particular moments in history and the role of art in revolutionary social movements.

Overall Expectations:

Total engagement. In keeping with the spirit of the Sixties, students will be involved in shaping the material we cover.

Texts:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Ken Kesey
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am&Eur 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101 or equivalent. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 23354 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Eren Odabasi

This course explores the rich tradition of South Asian diasporic literature by highlighting the works of three widely celebrated authors writing in English. We will study Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Through a close reading of these books, we will analyze how experiences of immigration and diaspora formation have been depicted in literary fiction by notable authors of Indian or Pakistani descent, who are situated between multiple cultures, storytelling traditions, and languages.

In order to complement our analysis, we will read excerpts from classic works of English-language fiction by Indian authors (such as Anita Desai, Kiran Desai’s mother) and novels from other countries in the region (like The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka). We will also watch two critically acclaimed films by Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair; her film adaptations of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) and The Namesake (2006, based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s eponymous novel).

Repeatable once with different topics. May be taken only once for GUR credit.

TEXTS

“Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid

“The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202 or instructor permission. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20294 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Sean Golden

English 347: Studies in Young Adult Literature will be about journeys. The lives of young adults are often framed as journeys. They go through incredible pivotal moments at such young ages because childhood is a fleeting temporality that happens so quickly! Each week (or two) we will spend time examining how specific moments of a young person’s life are constructed through literature and media. We will look at each work in its cultural context, discussing how such issues as race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, science, technology, and popular culture influence the production of the text. These texts frequently address issues that are controversial. In taking this course, you do not have to adopt any particular way of thinking. However, you do need to listen and respond to others’ ideas with sensitivity and respect.

At the end of this course, students can expect to have a strong writing practice focused on clear and concise literary analysis; a working knowledge of the contemporary state of Young Adult Literature; an understanding of how the story of adolescence is created and mapped onto our current realities; the ability to analyze critical and creative texts in the field; and to communicate effectively in both written and verbal forms about this body of work. 

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20114 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Nancy Pagh

In this section of Introduction to Creative Writing we examine and practice the fundamentals of craft: imagery and figurative language; sound; character and setting; voice and perspective; form and structure. We will focus on “close reading” of model poetry and prose; brainstorm creative expression and response; draft poems, stories, and creative nonfiction personal essays; share some of these projects with peers; and revise selected works--learning how to communicate about and make practical use of feedback on drafts. Evaluation will be based on completion of a sequence of activities and full participation in the class. 5 credits

Required Textbook

Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology (print edition)

CRN: 20355 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Simon McGuire

Examines the fundamentals of at least two genres, such as fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, or poetry. The course will include both lectures, focused on model texts, and workshop-style discussions, focused on student work. This course has been approved for study abroad.

CRN: 21122 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Caitlin Roach Orduña

In this course, we will explore the ways creative writing is both an art form and a mode of social engagement; a tool for witnessing, documenting, and intervening with the world around us. We will read fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that engages ‘the social’ in a variety of ways—writers whose work confronts questions of power, [in]justice, and identity—whose work might create a creative-political vision of what’s possible. Students will learn foundational craft skills across genres and will put those skills into practice in their own writing via prompted exercises. They will also have their creative work workshopped in either small and/or large-group workshops.

CRN: 21756 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Nancy Pagh

Required Textbook

Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide & Anthology (print edition)

CRN: 21757 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: José Roach Orduña

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to English majors with creative writing emphasis. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20240 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350.

As a community of writers, we will strengthen our competencies through reading, writing, discussing and reflecting. You will be tasked with developing fictional worlds, characters and predicaments. We will have conversations about the fundamental elements of fiction (e.g. tense, pov, dialog, voice, conflict), as we examine a diverse body of published works and the early drafts (stories) written by you and your peers. Expect this to be an exciting and challenging course. We hope you will develop new ways of thinking, working, writing and communicating. We hope you will take risks. Count on being brave, respectful, and a hard worker.

We will examine a diverse body of published work across genre boundaries. I attempt to keep course costs as low as possible, but I require access to a few critical materials:

Wonderbook ($14) by Jeff VanderMeer
An electronic device (e.g. smartphone) that will allow you to access podcasts

CRN: 20356 DAY/TIME: TR 4:00 PM - 5:50 PM Instructor: Kelly Magee

English 351 is an introduction to the art of storytelling with a focus on short stories and novel excerpts. It requires intensive reading and writing, completing creative exercises designed to practice narrative skills, composing and revising full-length pieces, and practicing the art of peer revision through group workshops. We’ll cover things like creating memorable characters, crafting vivid scenes, maximizing tension, working with form, and searching for insight. Most importantly, we’ll investigate how to tell the kind of story a total stranger would want to spend an hour or so of their life reading—the kind of story people will believe, no matter how far-fetched the premise.

The bulk of each class—and your grade—will be driven by:

large- and small-group discussions of reading
short craft lectures and discussion
prompted writing and creative exercises
group workshops of student writing

CRN: 22399 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Kami Westhoff

This course is designed to introduce you to the craft and culture of writing fiction as well as the complex world of critique and workshop. We will read the work of established authors, studying the ways they make their writing successful through unique use of voice, description, language, dialogue, setting, character development, and experimentation. While reading and studying these authors, you will begin your own journey into short story fiction writing with the help of various writing exercises and assignments, revision, and most importantly, your imagination and individuality.

ENG 353 Introduction to Poetry Writing 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to English majors with creative writing emphasis. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20069 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Caitlin Roach Orduña

In this course, we will read and practice writing a wide range of poetry and poetic forms. We will spend the quarter reading, discussing, writing, and workshopping poems, focusing our attention to elements like the poetic line, image, metaphor, sound, rhythm, and form in relation to content. We will constantly ask and attempt to answer: how can poetry document, witness, and confront history? What can a poem do that other genres cannot? What must it do in this historical moment and contemporary literary landscape? Students will be responsible for submitting original work, participating amply in class discussions of assigned texts, and offering thoughtful observations and feedback to peer work.

CRN: 21383 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Jane Wong

Language is curious. Language is an archeological dig, a translucent fish. In this class, we will turn over the rock and see what’s underneath. We’ll discover that language is malleable, evocative, elusive, and ferocious. In addition to language, we will test our curiosity with genre, form, and content. We will read and write poetry. And then we will question these genres. Be prepared to challenge yourself aesthetically, thematically, and formally. Throughout the quarter, we will return to certain questions: How can we use language to convey the unconveyable? How can words on a page move us? How can we play with language and form in an innovative, challenging, and productive way? English 353 is a foundational-level course that introduces writers to the history, craft, and practice of poetry writing. To help us explore the above questions, we will read the work of diverse writers, including the work of your peers. By exploring these texts as readers, we will get a better sense of how language and structure can move us and how we can begin to cultivate our own styles and literary voices. You will be expected to generate creative pieces for workshop, feedback responses, and a final portfolio of revised work. Additionally, we will invite visiting guest poets to our class this quarter, moving writing from the page and into the real world! It is such an exciting time in the world of poetry!

ENG 354 Intro to Creative Nonfict Writ 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 350. Restricted to English majors with creative writing emphasis. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20257 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Noam Dorr

An introductory course in writing nonfiction prose, such as personal essay, memoir, autobiography, travel writing, and other forms.

ENG 364 Introduction to Film Studies 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101.

CRN: 20357 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Jamie Rogers

+ Film Viewing T 4:00 PM - 6:50 PM

Overview of the conventions and techniques of narrative cinema with some readings in film theory.

CRN: 22400 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Greg Youmans

+ Film Viewing M 4:00 PM - 6:50 PM

The course introduces the foundations of film studies. We will explore core vocabulary, concepts, and skills that help us look and listen more closely to motion pictures. We will also develop practices of critical thinking, argumentation, and analysis through various writing exercises. Our course screenings will present films from around the world and from the historical beginnings of cinema to the present day. In the second half of the term, we will shift focus to a video-production project that will further enrich everyone’s understanding of how movies are put together.

Textbook: David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Jeff Smith. Film Art: An Introduction, 13th edition. New York, NY: McGraw Hill Education, 2023. (You are welcome to use the 10th, 11th, or 12th edition instead to save money.)  

ENG 367 Equity Representation Film/Med 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 22934 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Felicia Cosey

+ Film Viewing W 5:00 PM - 7:50 PM

Equity and Representation in Film and Media: Contemporary Representations of Black America

In this course, we will look at the ways Black Americans are depicted in film, television, and social media in the 21st century. Through works like A Thousand and One, Lovecraft Country, and Sinners, we will study the ways Black creators tell their stories and challenge traditional narratives about Black identity.

We will tackle such questions as: How are Black artists using different media platforms to express the complexities of Black life? What happens when Black creators reclaim control of their narratives? How do factors like gender, sexuality, and class intersect with racial identity in contemporary Black storytelling? We will also examine how Black Americans use these various media forms to encourage social change and challenge systemic injustice.

Expect engaging discussions about everything from groundbreaking films to viral Black Twitter movements, along with readings that will deepen our understanding of representation in modern media.

Course work consists of Annotation Assignments, Quizzes, and Media Analysis.

Readings will be available in Canvas

Please note regular attendance at screenings is an essential part of this course.

Content Warning: Course materials may contain violence, strong language, or other disturbing content.

ENG 371 Rhetorical Theory 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 101, ENG 201, or ENG 203; Junior status or instructor permission. Restricted by major. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday February 26 by 4:30pm.

CRN: 22935 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Melissa Guadrón

Rhetorics of Advertising

Ever bought something you didn't need because an ad made you feel like owning a certain product would make you cooler, smarter, or part of something important? Welcome to the jungle of modern persuasion, where ads don't just sell products—they sell ideas, identities, and the cure to loneliness. As such, they give us a perfect inroad for studying the field of rhetorical theory.

Rhetorical theorists argue that our everyday culture—from the media we consume to the products we buy—is not neutral, but a primary site where social power, ideologies, and identities are negotiated and produced. In this class, which serves as an introduction to rhetorical theory, we will treat advertising as a central force in the process of molding culture, and you’ll learn to apply the core framework of rhetorical theory to analyze how media texts function.

Guided by rhetorical theorists like Kenneth Burke, Jenny Rice, Maurice Charland, and Celeste Michelle Condit, and aided by culture studies scholars like Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Theodor Adorno, you will learn to critically read advertisements not just as sales pitches, but as cultural documents—ideas you can apply to culture at large. We will trace their evolution from print to the digital algorithm, examining their role in constructing consumer culture, defining identity, co-opting dissent, and branding the self. The ultimate goal is to become a more literate critic of the persuasive cultures that surround us, understanding the complex relationship between power, persuasion, and desire in modern culture. 

ENG 385 Systems Thinking 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from: UEPP 116, SUST 116, ENG 203, ENG 301, ENG 302, or SALI 201; or instruction permission.

CRN: 21145 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Nicole Brown

Seeing things from a systems thinking perspective not only helps us to better understand the complexities of our lives and, in particular, these times, as but it also provides an approach for interacting with systems in persuasive and responsive ways. A systems thinking approach shapes frameworks for approaching rapidly changing worlds as interconnected challenges and opportunities. Included in this understanding, is a focus on leverage points for systems change — the opportunities that exist where small targeted actions in the system can have profound effects (change) on the system's behavior or outcomes. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, is important to such systems change because it is through rhetorical praxis that the public’s perceptions and behaviors can be persuaded to adopt new ways of thinking, seeing, and acting.

This systems thinking course takes a human-centered approach towards understanding complex systems through research, story, and information sharing. By shifting the focus from the parts to the interconnected whole of our complex world, this course offers an introduction to the specialized language, habits-of mind, and methodology of systems thinking. In addition, we will do close reading and analysis of the language we receive and that we create to shape an understanding of the ways in which human and beyond-human materialities intra act and co create to form complex and unified wholes.

Systems thinking can be applied to every discipline and context. It engages with different cultural, ecological, technological, and disciplinary perspectives to find problems, reframe language and stories, and to discover leverage points for enacting systems change.

Course projects include weekly writing assignments that incorporate visual and verbal elements, including experimenting with new media and/or multi modal compositions. For the major project you will be a part of a team that applies a systems thinking approach to develop systems maps, stories, and critical analysis of an issue that you care about. We will use these models to articulate solutions through written and oral proposals. You should leave the course with excellent writing samples: mappings, systems and rhetorical analyses, research displays, and proposals, as well as a new vocabulary and methodology to facilitate systems-based analysis, communication, and change.

The course also invites guest visits from social change leaders in our community. This broad spectrum of disciplinary viewpoints will offer unique perspectives on systems thinking as a practice and field of study and work. Together we will identify the properties and engage in the process of writing/building a viable, desirable, resilient, and sustainable future.

400-Level English Courses

ENG 401 Topics in Rhetoric & Writing: Cultural and Global Rhetorics from the Margins 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 313, ENG 314 or ENG 371, or instructor permission. Restricted by major. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday February 26 by 4:30pm.

CRN: 22170 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Fai Inthajak

Cultural and Global Rhetorics from the Margins

While rhetoric has traditionally been defined by the Western canon, its practices thrive across a global landscape of diverse voices and nontraditional perspectives. This course centers on the rhetorics of different cultures. We will apply critical lenses to question who has the authority to speak and how Western frameworks can be decentered.

ENG 410 Lit Hist: Gothic Sensations 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 202; plus three from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 313, ENG 314, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320, ENG 321, ENG 331, ENG 333, ENG 334, ENG 335, ENG 336, ENG 338, ENG 339, ENG 341, ENG 342, ENG 343, ENG 347, ENG 364, ENG 371. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20623 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Katherine Anderson

Gothic Sensations

When Matthew Lewis published The Monk in 1796, his Gothic masterpiece provoked social uproar, outrage, and disgust. For many readers it was just too visceral. In forcing the reader to confront gory and tangible violence and sexual assault, the novel evoked body horror instead of the more sublime terror associated with imagination and the supernatural.

This class surveys the literary history of the Gothic as it evolved over the nineteenth century, representing and commenting upon various sociocultural changes and anxieties via its insistent attention to the body in two specific forms: bodily sensation as an individual experience and constructions of embodied selfhood and identity. Moving from Lewis’s The Monk to a variety of Gothic subgenres including sensation fiction, we’ll interrogate the way these texts represent gender and sexualities, race and imperialism, class, science, religion and the supernatural, and more, in relation to the ethics of body horror creation and consumption.

Along the way, we’ll also read scholarly work to deepen our conversations and inform our analyses. Some of the questions we’ll consider include: Which cultural fears and anxieties does the nineteenth-century Gothic engage and why? When, how, and why does the nineteenth-century Gothic transgress or uphold cultural norms? How, if at all, does the Gothic change its formal elements and/or its cultural fears or preoccupations across the nineteenth century, and conversely, how has it stayed the same throughout its many forms and cultural histories? What does Gothic horror have to do with the body? Why does Gothic horror both frighten and fascinate us? Ultimately, what can the nineteenth-century Gothic teach us about ourselves?

Content Warning: As its title and subject matter indicate, this course incorporates mature themes. Some of the texts we’ll engage include representations of racism, graphic violence, gore, suicide, and/or violent sex (including sexual assault). I did not assign these texts lightly, nor is it my intent for us to dismiss the problematic things they depict. Rather, it is my goal for us to confront those elements sensitively, thoughtfully, and deeply, as I hope we do when we encounter them in the real world. These realities are particularly important to consider in relation to the intertwined histories of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, cisheteropatriarchy, and white supremacy that accompanied the British Empire and literary canon and continue in our present political moment. Literature exists in part to help us bear witness to, process, and cope with human crises, trauma, and atrocities, and in asking us to confront these things, it also actively encourages our empathy with and for others. Please be certain when signing up for this class that you can commit to reading and discussing this material and further, that you can do so in a mature, respectful way.

Student Learning Outcomes (what you’ll get from your work in this class):

Advanced understanding of nineteenth-century British gothic literature, history, and culture, their significance, and how they connect to your life and literary journey.
Advanced ability to analyze literature responsibly, relating its concerns and its modes of expression to its specific historical and social contexts as well as to our current historical and cultural moment.
Advanced ability to analyze literary genealogy by comparing related (sub)genres, making connections while noting evolutions in form, style, and content over different historical moments.
Advanced fluency and increased autonomy in assessing multidisciplinary scholarship and applying it to literature.
Advanced ability to perform and then apply proactive research in relation to both nineteenth-century periodicals (primary, archival research) and literary scholarship (secondary research).
Advanced ability to write cogent and incisive literary criticism.
Increased ability to participate in an ongoing academic conversation
Increased consciousness of and control over personal reading, writing, and methodological practices.

Required Texts:

Listed in the order we’ll read them:

Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview, ISBN: 9781551112275)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Broadview, ISBN:
9781551113579)
Richard Marsh, The Beetle (Broadview, ISBN 97815511114439)
Additional required short texts and secondary readings are available on Canvas
as pdfs.

ENG 415 Special Topics in National Lit: Black Anarchy and Black Reconstruction 5 cr

CRN: 22936 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Tony Prichard

National Literatures: Nation On No Map (Black Anarchy and Black Reconstruction)

We will look at how the project of Black Anarchy in the United States has resisted traditional forms of nationhood. The course’s title comes from William C. Anderson’s 2021 book which “interrogates how history, myth, and leadership have been used within Black social movements to rehabilitate that state and undermine revolutionary forms of abolition”. The readings in the course will assist us in exploring Anderson’s interrogation. A key supporting document for the course will be Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois. Within this context, we will look to how contemporary speculative fiction offers different imagined futures, often ones where abolition and the crafting of support systems that move “beyond the state”. Specifically, our quarter-long examinations of the novels from adrienne maree brown’s Grievers trilogy will work as a test site for our thinking, dialogue, and writing.

Required Texts

Anderson, William C., The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition
brown, adrienne maree, Grievers, Maroons, & Ancestors
Du Bois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: Reading Los Angeles in Contemporary Black and Latinx Literature 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: Senior status; ENG 313 or ENG 314; and one course from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310 or ENG 311. Restricted to English - Literature Emphasis students of senior status only. Literature juniors can register on Monday March 2 at 10am. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20314 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Lysa Rivera

READING LOS ANGELES in CONTEMPORARY BLACK AND LATINX LITERATURE

This senior seminar explores how contemporary L.A.-based Latinx and Black writers traverse the built and natural environments of Los Angeles – its neighborhoods, dried riverbeds, fields, freeways, and ports – to surface submerged histories and everyday experiences of migration, labor, policing, dispossession, and ecological harm. Reading Los Angeles through contemporary fiction, particularly works by Black and Latinx writers, invites us to understand broader environmental dynamics of the so-called Anthropocene, as the city-as-text makes visible how planetary crisis is not the result of "humanity" in the abstract but is instead produced through racial capitalism and uneven exposure to toxicity, labor extraction, displacement, and infrastructural neglect. This framework is especially urgent in light of the recent wildfires in the Los Angeles region, which disproportionately impacted historically Black neighborhoods, underscoring how environmental disaster follows existing lines of inequality. The texts we will explore together invite a more critical engagement with "natural" disasters like these by situating ecological catastrophe within longer histories of land use, housing segregation, and the chronic abandonment of vulnerable communities – an approach echoed in recent Latinx scholarship in environmental justice and the Black Anthropocene.

As we work through these texts and walk the streets of L.A. alongside them, we will consider how, rather than resigning themselves to hopelessness, these writers and the Los Angeles they imagine gesture toward narratives of regeneration and change. As L.A.-native Octavia Butler reminds us, "civilization is to some extent an agreement to ignore the ugly, the dangerous, and the threatening." The cultural work examined in this course pushes boldly against that agreement by illuminating what is too often kept out of view and opening space for imagining alternative ways of living in and with the city they love.

Required Readings:

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Dana Johnson, Elsewhere, California: A Novel
Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries
Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus

ENG 418 Senior Seminar: Emily Dickinson 5 cr

TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Allison Giffen

An advanced seminar offering an in-depth exploration of specialized topics. Requires students to develop scholarly projects integrating course material with their own literary, historical, and theoretical interests. This course is not repeatable.

Emily Dickinson

This course offers an intensive study of the work of Emily Dickinson. While the poems will always be our central focus, we will read them in the context of Dickinson's biography as well as her cultural, historical and literary moment. In addition, we will be attending to Dickinson’s idiosyncratic methods of literary production and distribution. We will look to her use of variants, her decision to bind her poems into handmade chapbooks called “fascicles,” and her inclusion of hundreds of poems into her letters. We will also consider the editorial decisions that went into the many and varied editions of Dickinson’s poetry as we read the poems in manuscript as well as print.

ENG 423 Maj Authors: Édouard Glissant5 cr

CRN: 20198 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Tony Prichard

Édouard Glissant

This course will examine the work of Glissant as a poet, novelist, and philosopher with a rigorous examination of how those three aspects of his work relate to one another. We will examine Glissant’s relationship with the Middle Passage and how in the words of Katherine McKittrick his work presents it as a “nonworld” which tasks “enslaved and postslave subjects…to imagine and live the world differently”. Our labor will consist to reading, researching and writing about the various ways in which Glissant’s oeuvre offers new pathways for living, reading and doing poetics.

Required Texts

Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.

——. The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant.

——. The Fourth Century

——. Mahagony

——. The Overseer’s Cabin

——. Poetic Intention

——. Poetics of Relation.

ENG 423 Maj Authors: John Milton 5 cr

CRN: 20374 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Jeremy Cornelius

John Milton: Liberty and Revolution

What is liberty? How does it relate to politics and poetics? Focusing on the work of early modern English civil servant and writer John Milton, we will delve deeply into these questions by looking at a range of Milton’s political prose on reform, anti-censorship, and divorce along with a range of his poetic works. Milton’s most famous poem Paradise Lost encompasses much of the philosophical intricacies of liberty–a keyword across much of his writing and political career. Beyond only this poem, his body of work investigates many philosophical and political debates around freedom that extend far beyond the borders of early modern England.

Prior to penning Paradise Lost, Milton was also a famous polemicist, political orator, and activist before and during the Interregnum and English Civil War (1649-1660). During this period of political instability in England, Milton was heavily involved with the newly established government (The Commonwealth of England). As he worked through a time of civil conflict and political upheaval, Milton became focused on developing ideas of liberty in his poetry and prose. Invested in poetic forms as a means of protest, Milton’s work has many political dimensions through its form, particularly ideas around liberty and revolution. Our discussions will involve close reading his work alongside focusing on the context of his life. Additionally, we will think about the many political and poetic afterlives of Milton’s work.

Assignments include weekly writing assignments, multiple analysis essays, a group facilitation, and a final essay. Readings for the course include Milton’s lyric verse, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and numerous selections from his political prose. All readings are available through The John Milton Reading Room.

ENG 424 Major Filmmakers: Kathryn Bigelow 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 22401 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Felicia Cosey

+ Film Viewing M 4:00 PM - 6:50 PM

Kathryn Bigelow

From biker gangs in The Loveless to the war on terror in Zero Dark Thirty to the 1967 uprisings in Detroit, this course explores the films of Kathryn Bigelow, one of contemporary cinema’s most stylistically distinctive and politically debated directors. We will trace her career across genres—biker film, vampire Western, surfer-heist movie, police thriller, and war films—to ask how her visual choices and storytelling shape what we see and think about violence, gender, race, and the American state.

Together we will practice close reading of film form (framing, sound, editing, performance) alongside cultural and political criticism, treating Bigelow’s movies as both genre films and contested ideological objects. Are these films “just” thrill rides, or do they reproduce and legitimize pro-war, pro–US empire perspectives, even when they seem critical on the surface? How do they invite us to identify with soldiers, cops, and state agents, and what happens when that identification is racially and gender coded?

Screenings will include early works such as The Loveless and Near Dark, studio films like Point Break and Strange Days, and later works such as The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit. Alongside the films, we will read interviews and essays, to consider how Bigelow understands her own practice and how critics have framed her position as a woman directing traditionally “masculine” genres.

Course work will consist of short analytical assignments, a group presentation, and a final paper.

Required Text: Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews, edited by Peter Keough

Additional readings will be provided in Canvas.

Please note regular attendance at film screenings is an essential part of this course.

Content Warning: Course materials may contain violence, strong language, or other disturbing content.

ENG 441 Language and the Sec Classroom 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302 or ENG 371; ENG 347; ENG 350, ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354; two from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320 and ENG 321. Restricted by major. Major restrictions do not lift for this course.

CRN: 21759 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Anthony Celaya

This course will explore language structure and use in the Secondary Language Arts classroom, including cultural and equity issues, dialect and discourse style bias, ESL learners, and the challenges of standard grammar and conventions. We’ll spend some time addressing linguistic fundamentals as a means of understanding language diversity. This methods course requires the same kind of individual initiative, dedication, and professionalism that you will apply to your future work as a teacher.

In this course, we will examine language in context. Therefore, students will be asked to write regularly practicing and applying what we learn in class within the context of writing. Additionally, students will be asked to critically engage with the language practices they experience and witness outside of class over the course of the quarter.

ENG 443 Tch Eng Lang Arts in Sec Sch I 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 301, ENG 302 or ENG 371; ENG 347; ENG 350; ENG 441 or concurrent or MLE 444 or concurrent; and two courses from: ENG 307, ENG 308, ENG 309, ENG 310, ENG 311, ENG 317, ENG 318, ENG 319, ENG 320 and ENG 321. Restricted by major. Major restrictions do not lift for this course.

CRN: 20532 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Anthony Celaya

In this course, we will engage with a variety of theory, research, methods, and resources for the teaching of writing within a secondary English language arts context. Together we will write in a variety of genres, including multimodal genres. We will collaborate and work together as we develop a teacher-writer practice to support our development as writers and skills as writing teachers. Additionally, throughout the course we will practice designing, delivering, and revising writing activities and assessments.

Students will:

Write in a variety of genres.
Read and discuss research, articles, and chapters on methods for teaching secondary composition.
Access a variety of resources when planning and designing writing activities.
Design, deliver, and revise writing assignments and writing lessons.
Develop an understanding of compositional strategies beyond scripted curricula and formalized modes.
Discuss, collaborate, and interact with classmates and future colleagues.

ENG 444 Tch Eng Lang Art in Sec Sch II 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 443

CRN: 20075 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Steven VanderStaay

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar:Fiction 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20116 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Kami Westhoff

English 451 is designed to introduce you to the craft and culture of writing fiction as well as the complex world of critique and workshop. We will read established authors of various identities and study the ways they make their writing shine through unique use of voice, description, language, dialogue, character development, and experimentation. While reading and studying these authors, you will begin your own journey into short story fiction writing with the help of various writing exercises and assignments, revision, and most importantly, your imagination and individuality.

ENG 451 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Fiction 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20411 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Kelly Magee

English 451 is an advanced course in fiction writing with a special emphasis on motivation. What motivates you to write, and how can you maintain that motivation in the face of whatever life throws at you? What motivates your characters to do interesting things that you (and your readers) would want to follow? This emphasis on motivation will have you looking deeply into your characters’ psychology, asking again and again why characters do what they do, and writing to discover possible answers. It’s a course that practices empathy, in short, and one that will hopefully inspire you to write towards the questions and subjects that fascinate you, whether or not you ever find answers. The class will cover advanced methods of creating voice and crafting narrative, including writing with urgency, using defamiliarization, worldbuilding, and working with forms of escalation. Students can expect to write a lot words, and to put a great deal of effort into providing feedback for their peers during workshop. The course will culminate in a portfolio modeled on the types of submissions writers often do after graduation.

ENG 453 Creative Wrtng Seminar: Poetry 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 353. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20316 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Jeanne Yeasting

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354

Forms of Verse: This course is a seminar in learning about, and writing in, some of the many poetic forms available to poets. Students will write and extensively revise their own verse. We will explore the histories of some forms (old and new) and undertake intensive reading of examples from different time periods. We’ll also talk about ways to make our own poems better through a direct application of our newfound knowledge. Class will be a mixture of discussion of assigned writing models, collaborative presentations, writing exercises, and workshops.

EVALUATION: Based on active class participation and fulfillment of assignments, including collaborative projects, writing literary reviews, and a Final Project.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, editors. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. ISBN paperback: 978-0393321784
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy is My Middle Name: Poems. W.W. Norton & Co. 2025. ISBN paperback: 978-1324110675
Oliver de la Paz. The Diaspora Sonnets. Liveright. 2024 ISBN paperback: 978-1324095170
Lara Egger. Flop Era: Poems. Pittsburgh University Press. 2025 ISBN paperback; 978-0822967583

ENG 454 Creative Wrtg Sem: Nonfiction 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 354. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 21026 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: José Roach Orduña

An advanced workshop course in the writing of nonfiction, building on skills learned in prior courses. Repeatable with different instructors to a maximum of 10 cr.

ENG 459 Editing and Publishing 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20359 DAY/TIME: MWF 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM Instructor: Kami Westhoff

Welcome to English 459! This class will ask you to engage in various exercises, activities, research, and projects related to the world of the writing, editing, and publishing in literary journals. By the end of this course, you will have gained a more complex understanding some of the nuances, complications, opportunities, and rewards of being a part of this community. Though we will cover an array of publishing elements, this course is geared toward literary journals, which are often a writer’s first interaction with the publishing world.

CRN: 22172 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Elizabeth Colen

This course will give students an overview of professional editing and publishing practices across a variety of genres and professional venues. Students will conduct an analysis and assessment of their own writing and publishing aims and engage in exercises and assignments geared towards individual goals. To that end, we will read, respond to, analyze, and try our hand at composing and refining a wide range of essential texts, including cover letters and query letters, synopses, back cover copy, blurbs, bios, book reviews, and interview questions. Additionally, students will exercise and cultivate research, copyediting, and proofreading skills and closely examine how an author may utilize and refine grammar, syntax, and other elements of style to improve their writing and begin to take part in wider literary community and conversations.

ENG 460 MultiGenreWrtg: Finding Form 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 20296 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Cori Winrock

The Work of Art: Finding Form
“Doing and making are acts of hope, and as that hope grows, we stop feeling
overwhelmed by the troubles of the world. We remember that we—as
individuals and groups—can do something about those troubles.”
—printmaker Corita Kent

How does an emotion become a building? A joke, a musical? A single image, a poem? At what moment does the intangibleness of an idea become the somethingness of a work of art? And how does an artist find their form—the one that will best express what they want to communicate, that will eventually turn all those many drafts into the shape of a completed piece? Using Adam Moss’s The Work of Art as a grounding source for imagining different takes on how artists’ work comes to be, this course will focus on the process for finding form. Specifically, we will look at writers whose work is not easily described by a single category, such as a lyric zombie novel, a spreadsheet diary, a breakup in footnotes. Over the course of ten weeks, we will consider what it means to invent the form a particular narrative needs, diving into work that often crosses boundaries between genres with subversive fervor. We will read work by writers such as Anne de Marcken, Jenny Boully, Sheila Heti, and Sun Yung Shin. Alongside researching, writing, and designing your own form, we will also delve into the sociocultural climate where boundary-pushing art is often born. By honoring form and the mess of process we will take part in a long tradition where to make is to hope.

ENG 462 Prof Wrtg 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: One course from ENG 301, ENG 302, ENG 371, or ENG 385; or equivalent experience and instructor approval. Restricted by major. Major restrictions will be lifted on Thursday February 26 by 4:30pm.

CRN: 23870 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Jeremy Cushman

Storytelling Research & Professional Writing

Storytelling threads itself through all the joys, difficulties, and nuances that emerge from the theory and practice that we often call Professional Writing. I mean, it makes good sense to walk into a restaurant, into a new job, into a new town, into a new project and ask the simple question: "What's the story here?" It's a question that helps frame the exterior and interior of a most situations, including those that we call professional. And it's a question that helps make the implicit more explicit, the unfamiliar and the new more comfortable and graspable. Obviously, and to put it super mildly, storytelling does a lot of work to shape the worlds in which we act.

More recently, scholars working in Organizational Management, Public Sphere Theory, Critical Race Theory, and certainly Professional Writing have developed storytelling practices and research methods that help us better approach the "structuring structures" of all kinds of organizations and writing situations. These storytelling research practices offer writers concrete opportunities to surface the underlying and powerful stories that shape what's possible in each professional situation. But storytelling research and practices don’t stop at analysis. They also help us reimagine the ways any given professional situation could be otherwise. Storytelling is a theory and practice for change!

This course invites you to practice writing as an act of organizational and public storytelling. This course offers you opportunities to engage storytelling research as a means for understanding how professional publics communicate who they are, what they do, and why they do what they do. In the course, you'll apply storytelling research methodology to generate your own public acts of storytelling.

ENG 464 Topics in Film: Cinemas of Social Change: Third Cinema Revisited 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or instructor permission.

CRN: 21982 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Jamie Rogers

+ Film Viewing T 4:00 PM - 6:50 PM

Cinemas of Social Change: Third Cinema Revisited

This course begins with the premise that film is a mode of communication that both shapes and is shaped by the world around it. Together, we will examine the development, deployment, and legacy of a variety of socially conscious, political filmmaking practices that emerged with the intensification of political mobilizations on the left beginning in the 1960s. Theorized variously as “cinema of hunger,” “imperfect cinema,” and “Third Cinema,” these militant films reflected and participated in anti-imperialist struggles for liberation across the globe. We will begin with the core canon of Third Cinema, including films by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Argentina), Sara Gómez and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), Sara Maldoror (France and Guadeloupe), Gillo Pontecorvo (Italy, France, Algeria) and Assia Djebar (Algeria). The second half of the class will focus on films and movements that draw from, and reassess, the earlier movements. These include films by Haile Gerima and Julie Dash (U.S./LA Rebellion), the Karrabing Film Collective (Australia), Farahnaz Sharifi and Jafar Panahi (Iranian), and Maysaloun Hamoud (Palestine). Along with our analysis of narrative and form, we will examine different production and distribution practices associated with political and socially conscious cinema. The class will ask after the potential and limits of such practices, drawing comparisons to contemporary, larger budget films. In the process, we will become conversant in debates around global and independent cinemas, as well as theory related to the analysis of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and class on screen. Students can expect to read one or more theoretical texts a week (PDFs of articles and chapters will be provided) in addition to attending weekly film screenings. Assignments will include weekly in-class writing exercises, exams, class curation of a film, and a final paper or project.

ENG 466 Screenwriting 5 cr

Notes & Prerequisites: ENG 364 or one from: ENG 350, ENG 351, ENG 353 or ENG 354. Restricted by major. Major restrictions lift on Tuesday, March 3 at 10am.

CRN: 22173 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Greg Youmans

+ Film Viewing W 5:00 PM - 7:50 PM

The course introduces screenwriting with an emphasis on the art of storytelling. We will focus on the writing of narrative screenplays, both short and feature-length. To guide our efforts, we’ll explore and analyze a range of examples, both as screenplays and final films, ranging from art cinema to indie films to mainstream Hollywood movies. Although our focus will be on linear narrative storytelling, we may also look at examples of screenwriting for other genres and formats, such as television, online video, and interactive storytelling.

Students will often work collaboratively in class on exercises geared toward developing stories, characters, dialogue, and screenplays. Although some time will be set aside for in-class writing, most of our time together will be devoted to inspiring and guiding the projects you’ll be working on outside of class. The term will culminate in substantial work toward a full treatment and at least ten pages of a feature-length screenplay.

Graduate Level English Courses

ENG 504 Seminar in Writing Poetry 5 cr

CRN: 22403 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Cori Winrock

Restricted to MFA students only until Tuesday, March 3 at 10:00am.

THE CONVERSATION

“Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.” —Mary Ruefle

Poetry as a form has been around the block. It’s shifted and changed, become and come undone, and always—as a thing made of language—holds the space to be remade. In each act of making and remaking we create space for a different conversation. If we’re lucky, one that speaks wider and wilder. In this course, students will consider the conversation of poetry—from miniscule aspects of craft, such as punctuation, to the cosmic accumulation of stanzas and lines that make up a finished collection, to the ways this particular form incites arguments about its sociocultural purpose and place. We will look at how lines are in conversation with each other, how poems are in conversation with other poems, how a collection creates a conversation between poems, and also how collections chat and gossip and contend with each other across time and space and landscape. In this studio-based class, students will focus on craft and creation as well as intensive close reading. By the end of this course, students will create chapbooks/swarms of poems in conversation and a conversation.

ENG 505 Seminar in Writing Nonfiction 5 cr

CRN: 23355 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Noam Dorr

Restricted to MFA students only until Tuesday, March 3 at 10:00am.

Individual projects in nonfiction along with examination of classic and modern models of nonfiction. Repeatable with different topics and instructors up to a maximum of 10 credits, including original course.

ENG 510 Seminar: Topics in Rhetoric 5 cr

CRN: 23356 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Melissa Guadrón

Rhetorics in/of the Bodymind

Rhetoric is often likened to persuasion, and with good reason—over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle described it as “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion.” But when we limit ourselves to definitions of rhetoric that articulate it merely as persuasion (or worse, manipulation), we do ourselves, and rhetoric, a disservice.

This course takes a more expansive approach to defining, studying, and producing rhetoric, positioning it as how we use symbol systems (language, art, movement, etc.) to make meaning. Rhetoric then becomes about emphasizing the importance of tailoring a message toward a specific audience and situation; it becomes about meaningful communication. Doing so then allows us to turn toward the human body and mind, and to ask how we use rhetoric to make meaning with, about, and around what we call the bodymind.

This course uses the lens of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) and its focus on the bodymind as a portal and stepping stone to the broader field of rhetorical theory, research, practice, and methodologies, and their implications for contemporary issues of the political, social, economic, legal, and cultural variety. Our goal is to not only get the big picture of rhetoric as a field, but make critical, informative stops at subfields like Disability Studies and apply them to the world around us. We will ask questions such as: how do metaphors about the bodymind (e.g., “running on fumes,” “broken heart,” “feeling like a million bucks,” etc.) shape our relationship to ourselves?; how are diagnostic criteria for psychological disorders shaped by sociopolitical factors such as war and capitalism, and not just science (or even ‘science’)?; how do various media depict the bodymind and shape how we think about it?; how do we use rhetorical appeals to better understand and respond to anti-science and/or conspiracy discourses?; and what does it mean to provide “dignified care” to patients?

In this class, we’ll read foundational theorists in the field (and subfields) and students will be given the opportunity to co-create the course through steering us toward particular topics of theory and research according to their particular interests.

ENG 560 Studies in British Literature: Victorian Pulp 5 cr

CRN: 22404 DAY/TIME: TR 4:00 PM - 5:50 PM Instructor: Katherine Anderson

Frankenstein. Dracula. The War of the Worlds. Despite frequent contemporary stereotypes about the past that peg them as boring, repressed, and prudish, it was the Victorians who ushered in the pulpy, popular genre fictions that we still consume ravenously and across the globe. They were the Anglophone originators of the gothic, science fiction, the adventure romance, fantasy, future war fiction, and the spy thriller, and they blended all these new genres together in multiple subgenres and iterations. Ironically, many of the texts which were frequently dismissed as vulgar, ephemeral, and formulaic popular fiction for undiscerning mass audiences now stand as canonical icons of Anglophone literature.

This course seeks to analyze, enjoy, and unsettle standard conventions about the pulp fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as it appeared as a transimperial phenomenon across and beyond the British Empire.

We’ll ground our analyses in genre fiction’s insistent centering of the body, attending to the importance of embodiment, physical sensations, and the pulpy matter of the human as it manifests across these texts. Along the way, we’ll investigate how they engage with race, class, gender and sexuality, and other intersectional forms of personal identity, tangling with political, scientific, theological, ethical, ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological conceptions of what we do to bodies (both our own and other people’s); what bodies do to us; and how bodies factor into both our selfhood and the ethical and practical ways we live our lives. We’ll also read multidisciplinary scholarship to inform our conversations and analyses, likely including theorizations of genre, translation, (anti)colonialism, globalization and transimperial networks, gender and sexuality, print and popular cultures, history, the archives, affect, embodied cognition, narratology, and reader response.

Course Objectives and Active Learning Practices:

This course is designed to do two things: 1) to give you an in-depth understanding of the transimperial genre fiction, issues, and developments of the nineteenth and early-twentieth British Empire and its relevance to contemporary issues, and 2) to equip you with some of the professional skills you will need going forward.

Assignments will likely consist of in-class participation and weekly discussion posts, a choice between a teaching presentation and annotated syllabus or an op-ed piece, some archival research, and a choice between an article draft or creative piece draft.

Workload and Content Notification: It is always your responsibility as a student and developing professional to assess your own ability and willingness to take on a given course’s workload and content. In signing up for this course, you agree to do the work and engage with the materials wholeheartedly and in good faith. As its title and subject matter indicate, the course incorporates mature themes. Some of the texts we’ll engage include representations of racism, graphic violence, gore, suicide, and/or violent sex (including sexual assault). I did not assign these texts lightly, nor is it my intent for us to dismiss the problematic things they depict. Rather, it is my goal for us to confront those elements sensitively, thoughtfully, and deeply, as I hope we do when we encounter them in the real world. These realities are particularly important to consider in relation to the intertwined histories of imperialism, (anti)colonialism, cishetpatriarchy, and white supremacy that accompanied the British Empire and literary canon and continue in our present political moment. Literature exists in part to help us bear witness to, process, and cope with human crises, trauma, and atrocities that took place in real lives, and in asking us to confront these things, it also actively encourages our empathy with and for others. Please be certain when signing up for this class that you can commit to reading and discussing this material and further, that you can do so in a mature, respectful way.

Required Texts:

The course is still under construction, but we will be reading texts produced by British, Bengali, Egyptian, and other transimperial writers as made possible despite limited archival access, translations, and knowledge of non-British popular genre fictions. Some of the texts under consideration include:

Dusé Mohamed Ali, In the Land of the Pharaohs and “Katebet the Priestess”
Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian
Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay), Rajmohan’s Wife
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt
Kylas Chunder Dutt, “A Journal of 48 Hours of the Year 1945”
Shoshee Chunder Dutt, “The Republic of Orissá: A Page from the Annals of the
Twentieth Century”
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag
Henry Meredith Parker, “The Junction of the Oceans: A Tale of the Year 2098”
Dinendrakumar Ray, Pishach Purohit (The Zombie Priest)
Hemendrakumar Roy, The Inhumans
Jagadananda Roy, “Voyage to Venus”
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

ENG 570 Topics in Lit & Cultural Crit 5 cr

CRN: 23778 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Sean Golden

Fugitive Literacies

Literature and storytelling in Black communities have, and has, been a historical practice rooted in truth-telling and resistance. It is a practice that consistently centers the refusal of Black people’s inhumanity as dictated by the anti-Black world. As Jarvis R. Givens notes, “Blackness has not only been a site of experience. It has also been a site for intellectual inquiry and incisive analysis of the human condition." In this course students will inquire and analyze texts through a specific Fugitive framework that encourages the reader to note how the specific resistance of living in the wake is manifested through various mediums of storytelling. This framework of reading attempts to illuminate--for those also marked as monstrous--how we can construct liberatory spaces that resurrects ancestors and rewrites revisionist histories.

Authors we will engage with: Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, Jarvis R. Givens, fahima ife, Shannon Gibney, Esi Edugyan, Nnedi Okorafor, and other prominent scholars in the field of fugitivity. Through these authors we will look at the technology of Black Storywork (Justin A. Coles) and how Black cultures have resisted technologies of oppression. How blackness is reinvented and the culture and history of the diaspora is sustained through the past, present, and future of our timeline.

At the end of this course, students can expect to have a strong writing practice focused on clear and concise literary analysis; a working knowledge of the contemporary state of the field of Black Critical Studies (BlackCrit); a familiarity with some of the core critical theorists in Black studies; the ability to analyze critical and creative texts in the

ENG 598 Sem Tch Eng: 5 cr

CRN: 21233 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Steven VanderStaay

This seminar approaches Research in the Teaching of English from two perspectives. In the first, we study evidence-based methods of teaching literature. This component of the course is designed to prepare students trained in teaching composition to propose and teach introductory literature courses at the college level. Topics include the teaching of reading and reading comprehension, close reading, the role of reading and literature in teaching for social justice, and methods of scaffolding student growth from reading to interpretation and criticism. Student work in this component of the course includes teaching a close reading lesson and outlining a model syllabus for a 200-level introduction to literature course. We use Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as the central text with which we try out and apply the methods of teaching literature we study.

In the second and parallel component of the class, we study approaches to conducting research on the teaching of English, focusing on journals and genres that emphasize lesson sharing and narrative accounts of teaching and learning, such as teaching stories and reflections. Student work in this component of the course includes a class presentation on an academic journal, a personal teaching statement, and a draft lesson plan or reflection written for possible submission to one of the journals we review.

Spring 2026 Course Descriptions

Major restrictions have lifted!

Table of Contents

100-Level English Courses

200-Level English Courses

300-Level English Courses

400-Level English Courses

Graduate Level English Courses

Course Descriptions

100-Level English Courses

ENG 101 Writing Your Way Through WWU 5cr

View CRNs and DAY/TIMEs on Browse Classes in Web4U.

200-Level English Courses

ENG 201 Writing in Humanities: 5 cr

CRN: 21587 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Fai Inthajak

ENG 202 Writing About Literature 5 cr

CRN: 20104 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Zoe Redwoman

CRN: 20195 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Eren Odabasi

CRN: 20527 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Simon McGuire

CRN: 20530 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Amy Raduege

CRN: 20531 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Jean Lee

CRN: 20860 DAY/TIME: MWF 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM Instructor: Simon McGuire

CRN: 21382 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Michael Bell

CRN: 24012 DAY/TIME: TR 08:00 AM - 09:50 AM Instructor: Amy Raduege

ENG 216 American Literature 5 cr

CRN: 23777 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Laura Laffrado

ENG 235 Native/Indigenous Literatures 5 cr

CRN: 23351 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Theresa Warburton

300-Level English Courses

ENG 301 Wrtg&Public: Sound and Agency 5 cr

CRN: 20067 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Jeremy Cushman

ENG 302 Technical Writing 5 cr

CRN: 20113 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Nicole Brown

CRN: 20259 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Geri Forsberg

CRN: 20305 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Geri Forsberg

CRN: 20350 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Rachel Sarkar

CRN: 20412 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Rachel Sarkar

CRN: 23948 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Matt Homer

ENG 307 Seminar: Medieval 5 cr

CRN: 21750 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Kathryn Vulić

ENG 308 Seminar: Early Modern 5 cr

CRN: 21589 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Jennifer Forsythe

ENG 309 Seminar: The Long 18th Century 5 cr

CRN: 21021 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Laura Laffrado

ENG 310 Seminar: The Long 19th Century 5 cr

CRN: 21022 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Christopher Wise

ENG 311 Seminar: The 20-21st Century 5 cr

CRN: 21023 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Dennin Ellis

ENG 313 Critical Theories & Prac I 5 cr

CRN: 20068 DAY/TIME: MWF 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Jeremy Cornelius

CRN: 22169 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Christopher Wise

ENG 314 Critical Theories & Prac II 5 cr

CRN: 21753 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Dennin Ellis

ENG 317 Survey: Medieval 5 cr

CRN: 21809 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Kathryn Vulić

ENG 318 Survey: Early Modern 5 cr

CRN: 21755 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Jennifer Forsythe

ENG 319 Survey: The Long 18th Century 5 cr

CRN: 21024 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Christopher Loar

ENG 331 Studies in Gender Theory 5 cr

CRN: 23352 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Jean Lee

ENG 334 Texts Across N. Am and Eur 5 cr

CRN: 23353 DAY/TIME: MWF 1:00 PM - 2:20 PM Instructor: Kathryn Trueblood

ENG 335 Global Texts Outside N.Am&Eur 5 cr

CRN: 23354 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Eren Odabasi

ENG 347 Studies in Young Adult Lit 5 cr

CRN: 20294 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Sean Golden

ENG 350 Intro to Creative Writing 5 cr

CRN: 20114 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Nancy Pagh

CRN: 20355 DAY/TIME: MWF 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM Instructor: Simon McGuire

CRN: 21122 DAY/TIME: TR 8:00 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: Caitlin Roach Orduña

CRN: 21756 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Nancy Pagh

CRN: 21757 DAY/TIME: MWF 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Instructor: José Roach Orduña

ENG 351 Intro to Fiction Writing 5 cr

CRN: 20240 DAY/TIME: TR 12:00 PM - 1:50 PM Instructor: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

CRN: 20356 DAY/TIME: TR 4:00 PM - 5:50 PM Instructor: Kelly Magee

CRN: 22399 DAY/TIME: MWF 11:30 AM - 12:50 PM Instructor: Kami Westhoff

ENG 353 Introduction to Poetry Writing 5 cr

CRN: 20069 DAY/TIME: TR 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM Instructor: Caitlin Roach Orduña

CRN: 21383 DAY/TIME: TR 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Instructor: Jane Wong