Courses

Course Description

This class will explore three genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Class periods will focus on the building blocks of all creative work—images, voice, character, setting, conflict, structure, and perspective. We’ll learn about these topics from reading, discussing, and critiquing professionally published work.

Over the semester, you’ll submit drafts in our three different genres.  Everyone will have an audience for these drafts in our class workshops. Students will discuss what you’ve done well and how to make your draft even better than it already is, building up the work rather than knocking it down. Reading and responding to the work of other students will help you practice your writing vocabulary while thinking through all the possibilities for a draft. In addition, you’ll be part of a supportive writing community.

Based on these workshops, you will revise all of your drafts and submit the revisions in a portfolio at the end of the semester, a point at which you should have developed an understanding of the basic elements of craft.

Requirements

• Participation in workshops and class discussions
• Short written responses to assigned reading
• Short craft-building exercises
• Three original poems
• One piece of original creative non-fiction (5-15 pages)
• One original short story (5-15 pages)
• A portfolio of revised work to include three poems and one piece of prose

Readings

We will read online poetry selections by Maya Angelou, James Arthur, Linda Bierds, Billy Collins, Joy Harjo, David Lee, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Matthew Olzmann, Dudley Randall, George Santos, Arthur Sze, Natasha Tretheway, and Kevin Young.

We will read short stories by Denis Johnson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O’Brien, Daniel Orozco, and Leslie Marmon Silko. These will come from The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction.

And we’ll read Creative Non-fiction by Kelly Grey Carlisle, Annie Dillard, Dinty Moore, Ira Sukrungraung, and Ryan van Meter. These will come from The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Non-Fiction.

Course Description

This course is an introductory creative writing workshop that encompasses the composition of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students will study work by established authors, experiment with new techniques and practices, and participate in the workshop model. This course will introduce students to workshop expectations, behavior, and how to be a supportive and active member of a creative community.

Course Description

English 2010 is designed as an introduction to professional writing and a gateway to the Professional and Public Writing track within the English major. In this course, students will  learn foundational concepts, principles, and practices associated with writing in contemporary professions; they will develop strategies for designing, composing, revising, and editing documents for specific audiences and purposes; and they will apply their learning in the context of individual and collaborative research and writing projects. Through these activities, students can expect to develop conceptual knowledge and practical skills that will be of use across a range of workplace and community settings.

 The course should be of interest to any undergraduate looking to refine their skills in professional writing. In addition, it can serve as an entry point to the Technical and Professional Communication minor. Any student who wishes to learn more about these themes is welcome to email the course instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.    

Course Description

How do different professions write? Where do these writing expectations come from? Why do they
exist? How do we learn to produce writing in professional contexts? How can we write more
effectively? How do we study professional writing?
As the gateway course to the Public and Professional Writing (PPW) track within the English major,
ENGL2010 seeks to answer these and other questions through sustained study and practice of
professional writing. Together, we will discuss different rhetorical principles, professional practices,
and research skills that will support and inform your work within PPW and beyond. To do so,
students will direct their own learning on communities and organizations of personal, academic, and
professional interest. Through a series of projects, we will apply key concepts in professional writing
and rhetoric as we research and produce a variety of documents that circulate within your
professional organizations. Students will leave with an increased knowledge of the reasons for
specific professional writing and strategies for producing texts more effectively.
At the end of the semester, each student will produce a final ePortfolio that will include practical
documents that showcase your emerging identities and skills as a professional writer.

Course Description

English 2020 introduces students to the academic study of literary texts in English with an emphasis on formulating an argument about a text, developing goals and strategies for research, and managing the different stages of the writing process.  Unlike other 2000-level literature courses offered at Auburn, ENGL 2020 is not a historical period survey or an introduction to a specific form such as poetry, fiction, or drama.  Rather, the aim of the course is to develop a set of skills that will serve students across a wide range of upper-division (3000 and 4000 level) literature courses and equip them to engage with literary texts and secondary criticism in focused, strategic, and scholarly ways. Some of the questions we will consider include:  How do we talk about literature, both in class and in other academic settings?  How do we write about literature? How can we use research to help a writing project evolve?  Alongside these practical questions, we will take up the equally important claim made in the course title—that there is indeed something magical about the literary imagination. What draws us to literary studies in the first place and how can we articulate the personal, professional, and social rewards of immersing oneself deeply in literary texts from across history and across cultures? We will use Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as a shared platform for exploring these questions and developing these critical skills. By the end of the course, students will be well equipped as readers, researchers, and writers to join the critical conversations that fuel literary studies and to get the most out of their future English courses.

Requirements

literary research project and related writing assignments; library research exercises; literature review; reading journal and quizzes; research portfolio

Readings

(print versions required)  Joanna Wolff and Laura Wilder, Digging into Literature; Elizabeth Brookbank, MLA Guide to Undergraduate Research in Literature; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield  

Course Description

Why should legal writing matter to you? The answer is obvious if you plan to go to law school. Even if you don’t, though, you likely will need to analyze and sign legal contracts and forms, work with lawyers during major life decisions, understand how jurisdictions and statutes affect you, and so forth. In any case, you will benefit from learning how to write clearly, concisely, and effectively. This course will introduce you to multiple genres of legal writing, each with its own nuances; in the process, you will read, analyze, edit, and compose legal writing. You will also write a personal essay, one that you can use directly for your law school admissions application or indirectly as you apply to jobs and graduate programs in other fields.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to major ideas about literature and its interpretation from Greek antiquity to current academic criticism. It will explore how practical questions regarding interpretation of individual works are anchored in larger questions of (a) how and what does literature communicate, (b) what is literature’s role in society, (c) what makes a work good or bad, (d) how does an account of literature fit into accounts of human nature and truth.

The course begins with discussion of Plato’s argument that poetry is morally and politically corrupting, followed by discussion of Aristotle’s defense of poetry, which he sees as instrumental in linking reason, ethics, and emotional life to one another. Noting that the issues Plato and Aristotle raise are revisited and reworked by later writers, we will then consider Matthew Arnold’s 1869 program of making literary education integral to democratic citizenship and Nietzsche’s 1888 philosophical critique of language. Then we will turn to the 1970s emergence of new forms of literary criticism—including deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies—that came to shape university-centered reading of literature from the 1980s to the early 2000s. We will conclude with a look at recent ethical, neurocognitive-affective, and “post-critical” approaches to literature that in the past fifteen to twenty years have come to challenge the dominance of 1970s-80s theory and criticism within academic scholarship.   

Requirements

two papers (typewritten, double-spaced, the first 3-4 pages, the second 6-8 pages, including some research); a final exam; a midterm; one-page writing exercises; reading quizzes; class participation; class attendance

Readings

Texts will include Murray, ed., Classical Literary Criticism, Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, selections from Adams and Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since 1965 (1986), Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015), and Cave, Thinking with Literature (2016).

Course Description

This is a class in the writing of short stories. Students will write two-three short stories each. We will workshop them in class. Students will read the stories that their peers write, and be expected to write short responses to every one. We will emphasize editing, revising, rewriting, and reworking these stories: not just writing first drafts, but polishing them up to the point where they are ready for publication. Finally, students will research the literary marketplace and prepare cover letters to submit their work to literary magazines for publication. 

Course Description

Class periods will focus on the building blocks of poetry—beginnings and endings, line and stanza breaks, image, defamiliarization, metaphor, speaker, mood, repetition, and titles. We’ll also look at different modes of poetry, such as ekphrastic, erasure poetry, found poetry, list poetry, formal poetry (such as the sestina or ghazal), lyric and narrative poetry, occasional poetry, and protest poetry. We’ll engage with these topics through readings and discussions of contemporary poems, as well as attendance at campus events with published poets like Claudia Rankine.

Throughout the semester, you will complete in-class exercises and homework assignments, leading to drafts of at least six poems.

Everyone will have an audience for these drafts in our class workshops. Students will discuss what you’ve done well and how to make your draft even better than it already is, building up the work rather than knocking it down. Participating in workshops will help you practice your writing vocabulary while thinking through all the possibilities for a draft. In addition, you’ll be part of a supportive writing community.

Based on this feedback, you will revise all of your drafts and submit the revisions in a portfolio at the end of the semester. You will also write an introductory essay for your portfolio. In it, you’ll reflect on the poets and class discussions that influenced your writing choices and helped you develop your voice.

Requirements

• Attendance at two on-campus poetry events, usually held once a month on Thursday evenings
• Participation in workshops and class discussions
• Short written responses to assigned reading
• Craft-building exercises
• At least six original poems
• A portfolio of revised work to include at least six poems and an introductory essay

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the basic elements of creative nonfiction. Students will read a range of published essays that may include the personal essay, the lyric essay, the humor essay, the braided essay, the character portrait, science writing, and more in order to understand the scope and elements of the craft. They will write two essays which will experiment with at least two different forms, using the published works for inspiration. We will discuss point of view, research, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and how elements of craft from fiction writing, such as character, plot, and setting, can be used to tell a true story. Students can expect to participate in writing workshops and to have thoughtful discussions of published works throughout the course.  

Course Description

Too often, we treat dialogue as a secondary concern to other craft elements such as character, story structure, setting, descriptive writing, and narration. In this course, we will put the study and practice of effective dialogue writing front and center. Students will read fiction and creative nonfiction by authors notable for their skill in imagining and capturing human speech in writing (authors might include Charles Chesnutt, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Henry Green, Joan Didion, Richard Price, and Lydia Davis, among others). Students will also read contemporary teleplays and watch corresponding television episodes to gain a deeper understanding of how popular episodic TV (widely considered a “writers’ medium” compared with the “directors’ medium” of feature-length film) is grounded in expertly crafted dialogue (shows might include Stranger Things, White Lotus, Succession, Andor, and Righteous Gemstones, among others). Students will write and submit for peer review feedback exercises in fiction and creative nonfiction that require them to write extensive dialogue, and they will write and receive peer review feedback on an example of “spec” teleplay writing, in which the students will write dialogue in the voices of already existing characters. The course will culminate in a longer final project in the student’s chosen genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, or teleplay/screenplay).

Course Description

Our visions of the world’s end reflect the symptoms of anxieties humans have entertained—and how we imagine the apocalypse is born out of political, social, ecological, and aesthetic concerns unique to time and place. This survey course explores representations of Apocalypticism both as worldview and genre, tracing the apocalyptic imagination from the Age of Enlightenment to present day. Apocalyptic visions by authors, poets, artists, and filmmakers will serve as our critical entry points, and students will be challenged to consider how multiple, often intersecting contexts inform representations of “apocalyptic moments” and their aftermaths. More broadly, this course sets out to examine why we find apocalyptic scenarios so captivating.

Course Description

This course covers several popular graphic novels that have been converted to equally famous films. We will look closely and critically at texts and films like Watchmen, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Blue is the Warmest Color, and Persepolis, among others. Students will be asked to consider the cultural value of both the graphic novel and its cinematic counterpart in order to place these texts amidst the larger social discourse on violence, sexuality, race, economics, and more. Our average reading will require either one graphic novel or one work of criticism per week. While some class time will be reserved for screening films, students will also be asked to screen films as homework. In our study of both graphic novels and films, students will learn how to talk about both subjects using the appropriate language within the field.

Course Description

Grammar? Punctuation? Sure, but there’s a whole lot more to technical editing. Come find out! You will, of course, learn the principles and practical applications of copymarking, print and electronic copyediting, and comprehensive editing. But you'll also learn how to be an advocate for the reader, manage projects, create in-house style guides, and work tactfully and effectively with authors. We'll work with a variety of technical writing pieces; these pieces may include professional writing from technology, business, and science, as well as texts intended for academic publication. We’ll cover the standard details you expect, but this course will take a broad approach to editing. NOTE: We’ll also break myths. For instance, you can split an infinitive and end a sentence or clause with a preposition! (E.g., "You’ll learn to effectively use references that editors rely on.”)

Requirements

Assignments may include the following: reading quizzes, short editing assignments that focus on specific facets of editing, a presentation on a concept in editing, a midterm, and a longer editing assignment

Readings

Readings likely will include the following, plus resources linked from Canvas: Saller, C. F. (2016). The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226240077 (Kindle edition available), Cunningham, D. H., Malone, E. A., and Rothschild, J. M. (2019). Technical Editing: An Introduction to Editing in the Workplace. Oxford, UK: Oxford U Press. ISBN 978-0190872670

Course Description

A document conveys meaning in many ways. In most cases, the extra-textual components are as important, or even more important, than the written words. Picture a round, green sign with the word STOP on it, for example. Would you be confused? Design matters, particularly when there are cultural associations attached to shapes, colors, and more.

This course will approach document design as a rhetorical practice with the understanding that a document is any place where one agent may mark information for later use. This situates a document broadly as a container for meaning in a variety of media. Here, we will focus on physical and non-web-page design. We will consider a variety of material and cultural artifacts over our studies, and engage with scholarship on ethics, visual and cultural rhetorics, perception, and accessibility, among others. You will study real-world scenarios and users and produce documents under a variety of use constraints.

This course will entail both hands-on and analytic work. By the end of the course, you should be able to apply and discuss principles of design; apply and discuss theories of design; discuss how differences in design shape your message; and use tools in document design to create rhetorically savvy documents.

Course Description

Roughly fifteen hundred years ago, a bunch of German-speaking barbarian-types decided that invading the island of Britain was a Good Idea. It was. The next millennium and a half saw their language take over this island from the Welsh, the Scots, the Cornish and the Manx (the islanders not the cats), absorb a great deal of French (the language and quite possibly the pastries), but then functionally conquer the world (cats had done this earlier, pastries somewhat later). By 2024, English had become the language of international commerce, international travel, the Internet, and apparently international competitive baking shows. It had also produced such texts influential to world civilization as the King James Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the plays of William Shakespeare, and the Dictionary of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the novels of Jane Austen, as well as countless others. How did an obscure language spoken on an average-sized island by a people with an enviable understanding of tea achieve such success? Our exploration of the history of this language attempts to answer the question while exploring how English began, developed, and appears in the world around us.

Requirements

Etymology Paper, Neologism Paper, Dialect Project, Quizzes, Final Exam, an appreciation of the pun.

Readings

Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language

Course Description

This course will introduce students to rhetorical theories of technology and to research methods for interrogating technological design and decision-making processes. The course will encourage students to ponder broad questions about the role and impact of technology on human societies and the natural environment and to critically examine the effects of digital information and communication technologies on their own lives. 

Readings

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, & Wise, J. Macgregor. (2014). Culture and Technology: A Primer. 2^nd Edition. Peter Lang Inc.  ISBN-13: 978-1433107757

Course Description

This course will be an in-depth study of contemporary fiction. We will read and discuss work by published authors, focusing on craft elements such as point-of-view, character, and setting. We will discuss not just what a story does, but how it does it. You will write and workshop and revise your own short fiction, learning how to think critically about your creative work.

Course Description

This course approaches the study and practice of writing poetry both critically and creatively. Students will read extensively this semester. You will read published texts and analyze them in group discussions and informal essays. You must also compose poems, contribute to peer workshops, and refine a selection of your poetry for inclusion in a portfolio. You will also strengthen class members’ poems through the process of workshopping and extensive revision. This course focuses on the techniques used to craft poems, as well as the content from which their ideas originate. We’ll study collections of poems and how their authors employ lines, stanzas, diction, syntax, musicality, and other poetic elements; we’ll read these collections to discover how authors have used their writing to examine their interior lives or their surrounding societal, political, or historical conditions. Then, you will be able to unlock the true power of the literary arts so that you can give voice to your own distinct stories.

Course Description

This course is for students who have learned the basics of creative nonfiction—and who are excited to continue to hone their craft. Students will be expected to produce two to three essays, with a choice of a variety of essay forms that includes the personal essay, the lyric essay, the humor essay, and more, and will be asked to substantially revise one of the essays. They will also work on creating essays that are thematically linked, which could theoretically appear in an essay collection together. We will discuss the elements of craft and read essays that reflect a variety of styles and subjects, with an emphasis on the autobiographical or personal essay, the blurry lines between fact and fiction, and a discussion of how our real-life experiences can be shaped into a meaningful narrative.

Students will read a range of published essays and will use them as inspiration for their own work. They can expect to participate in writing workshops and hearty discussions of published works.  

Course Description

Shakespeare and his queen came to exemplify the brilliance of early modern England—one as a playwright and poet whose work transcends the constraints of time, geography, and national culture; the other, as the most successful female monarch in English history. In this class, we will listen to Elizabeth’s voice and examine her rhetoric, reading the queen’s poetry, speeches, and letters for the signs of their author’s ingenious hidden and overt messages. We will read these monarchal writings against the backdrop of the political and cultural challenges faced by England and its queen. As our discussion moves back and forth between Elizabeth and Shakespeare, we will draw the connections between the two most luminous figures of the period, marking Elizabeth’s role in the development of Shakespeare’s work and noting the extent to which the writing of both is integrated in the same web of cultural, political, and gender-specific concerns. About 4-5 weeks of the semester will be dedicated to playing a role-immersion game from the Reacting to the Past series in which two factions will advocate for their candidate to succeed Elizabeth. As always in my classes, students’ individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

This course is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies.

Requirements

Lively participation, in-class writing, 5–7-page essay, 10-page research essay, strategic imaginative writings, speech based on a 3-page position paper, final exam.

Readings

Tentative readings: Elizabeth’s poems, letters, and speeches; Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Midsummer’s Dream, Winter’s Tale; short readings by Elizabeth’s contemporaries; supporting materials from visual culture.

Course Description

In this class we will study a wide variety of crime and crime narratives, from the beginning of the colonial era to the emergence of crime fiction in the early nineteenth century. Topics include the New England witch trials, piracy, kidnapping, supposed acts of cannibalism, treason and the instigation of revolts and uprisings, as well as other political, religious, social, and ethical transgressions that were seen as punishable offenses. Please understand that some of this course’s content may be quite graphic. Students will produce a podcast as their major research project. This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

Course Description

In a draft of an unpublished manuscript, Octavia E. Butler wrote, “there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” It seems rather fitting that Butler devoted her writing career to exploring the possibility and potential of these new suns. Her pathbreaking oeuvre foregrounds the interior lives of black protagonists, the generative potential of multicultural, and multigenerational, communities, and alien intervention as a corrective to human hubris. Butler’s science/speculative fiction seriously attends to matters of apocalypse, mutualistic symbiosis, survival, and world-building. In conversation with scholars in the fields of black (literary) studies, dis/ability studies, environmental studies, posthumanism, black feminism, black studies of the human, and OEB studies more broadly, students prioritize the practice of close, and sustained, reading as a primary method for developing, and strengthening, a critical understanding of Octavia E. Butler’s work.

Course Description

If we stop and think about it—and we should—it’s rather curious that America is a nation that defines itself in terms of a “dream”—that is, a fantasy, an image, perhaps an illusion. The idea of an “American dream” immediately raises a number of questions that much American literature, particularly from the second half of the 20^th century (since the phrase “American dream” did not even appear until 1931) explores. Is such a dream attainable? Is the dream an ideal that guides how we construct our collective future? Is the dream a reality of which we have now lost sight and can only regard with nostalgia? Alternatively, is the rhetoric of the dream a kind of ideological cover for constructing various communities—ethnic, gendered, racial, sexual—as other, marginalized, ultimately excluded from the rewards of the dream? Does the pursuit of what dominant groups in America define as the dram result in an experience of nightmare for all those not placed at the culturally privileged center of American society? These are only some of the questions we’ll investigate as we read six novels written in the period 1983-1993.These novels range in tone from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a masterfully comic and satirical exploration of American consumer culture to Toni Morrison’s Jazz, a lyrical evocation of the urban experience for African-Americans in Harlem during the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s. No matter the tone or the content, these novels all raise profound and thought-provoking questions about the nature of America.

Requirements

A 4-5 page essay (20%), a 10-12 page essay (30%), a reading response to each novel (20%), midterm and final exam (each worth 15%)

Readings

Don DeLillo, White Noise; Joan Didion, Democracy; E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair; Percival Everett, Suder; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

Course Description

Paradise Lost famously opens with Milton’s aspiration to perform “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” The fact that he was entirely blind when he dictated these words to his daughter only accentuates the sheer audacity of such a venture. Since then, of course, generations of critics have praised his epic as one of the most influential poems of the English language, thus proving his ambitions both well-placed and well-achieved. Yet, Milton’s literary experiments began long before he turned to the epic genre; in fact, it was during his years as a student at Cambridge that he first demonstrated the kind of linguistic resourcefulness that attracts so much admiration in his later works. This course will explore the range of genres that Milton practiced, including the sonnet, elegy, epistle, essay, masque, political pamphlet, epic, and play. As we trace the development of his poetic skill from his youthful college days to his final years writing in blind isolation, we will also consider the various cultural and political issues that shaped his literary choices. Milton lived in tumultuous times; even as new technologies and scientific discoveries were promoting a sense of cultural progress, deep religious controversies were propelling the nation into the horrors of civil war and regicide.

Together, we will explore Milton’s various responses to this politicized combination of hope and crisis—a combination that can feel oddly familiar when observed from within the divisiveness of our own cultural moment. As we read Milton’s stylistic techniques against his religious, educational, and political convictions, we will ask (and attempt to answer) some big questions: What is the role of art (both in Milton’s age and in ours)? Does good literature need to be both pleasurable and edifying? Is censorship ever justified? What should an ideal education look like? And perhaps most pertinent of all, does reading Milton still matter and why?

Requirements

Students will undertake individual projects which they will explore over the course of the semester through both creative and critical work; the creative components will be determined together as a class, the critical work will include a final research essay (10 pages) and a final exam.

Readings

an ample selection of Milton’s poems, supplemented with a selection of his letters, essays, and prolusions (school exercises); excerpts from Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes; all required readings for this course will be available online, either through Canvas, the library’s digitized collection, or The John Milton Reading Room (hosted by Dartmouth University professor, Thomas H. Luxon). Those who prefer print and paper should purchase The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library Edition).

Course Description

“So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble … William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer.”  – Toni Morrison 

In this course we’ll aim for a richly nuanced apprehension and a commensurately nuanced appreciation of William Faulkner and his work. Organized around a representative survey of his fiction, the course will take as its focus the implications of this inspiring, disturbing oeuvre upon what it means to be a young person alive in the New South and striding toward a wider world -- including all the pitfalls, pressures, and possibilities at play in that liminal subjective dynamism. Our Yoknapatawpha drive-by offers particular promise to future writers, filmmakers, musicians, actors, artists, activists, attorneys, and teachers committed in their professional practice to a critically astute engagement with a culture in social and political flux. As always, the professor will rely upon the informed generosity of his students to promote a spirit of enthusiastic collaborative inquiry.

Requirements

daily reading quizzes, a midterm exam, a final exam, a term paper (3000 words), weekly contributions (250 words each) to the Canvas discussion forum, consistent in-class participation.  

Readings

The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Course Description

This course examines the convergence in contemporary literature of the impulse to travel with concerns about climate change and other threats to the natural world and the species who share it with us.  How can individuals pursue the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual benefits of travel in ways that work to sustain rather than deplete or threaten the world’s natural resources?  What does it mean to travel ethically and responsibly in today’s world amid the many political and social challenges facing it? The course begins by looking at how several foundational literary texts written in the early stages of Western industrial and imperial expansion used travel as a way both to justify and critique these trends, imagining alternative forms of social and environmental engagement. Turning to more contemporary literature, we will examine the ways different literary genres and subgenres—including travel writing and utopian/dystopian fiction—provide a forum for working through the sometimes competing urge for mobility and the responsibility to address the ecological crisis facing our planet. Our guiding question will be: in what ways can travel—and the literature of travel—be part of the solution to these challenges rather than contributing to them?  Major texts will likely include: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; William Morris, News from Nowhere; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Alex Garland, The Beach; Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild; Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts; Amy Liptrot, The Outrun; Robert Macfarlane, Old Ways; Shanaz Habib, Airplane Mode.  Major assignments include a midterm exam; final exam; research essay; group presentation; and reading journal.

Course Description

Affect studies has always had a race problem. Despite its universalizing appeal as a critical turn after its reemergence in the academy in the 1980s within queer theory, there remains a lack of attention to scholars and writers of color, even when feeling figures centrally in their work. This course will consider this tension between oft cited texts within the field from Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick, and Lauren Berlant and black and queer writing that precede and exceed the affective turn within the academy. Students will grapple with the following: How does an attention to black affect or feeling animate a reading of a text? How does it structure various narratives from the dramatic, the novel, the anthology, the cinematic, or the poetic? Students will engage writers like Donja R. Love, Audre Lorde, Daniel Black, Toni Cade Bambara, Barry Jenkins and others who contend with feelings like desire, anger, grief, regret, and loneliness. This reading and discussion intensive course also prompts students to be self-reflexive, noting how their individual histories and reading experiences impact how they approach the texts, reflections that should find their way into the final projects of the course.

Course Description

If the end of college is a time to look forward, it also offers an opportunity to think retrospectively about the experience of “becoming educated.” This class will focus on contemporary writing about that. We will read several novels about the experience of being students, including Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot as well as a selection of short stories on the subject by writers including John Updike, Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Allegra Goodman, Susan Minot, and Brandon Taylor. We’ll also read a few essays about about college education in the United States in the twenty-first century. As we go, we’ll explore avenues for research related to the topic of our seminar, including the representation of college education in young adult fiction, in the digital archives of the Auburn Plainsman and Glomerata, and in contemporary journalistic writing. Like all sections of Seminar in Literature, we will devote attention to learning the skills necessary for writing an effective and successful research paper; such a research paper will be the major assignment in the seminar.

Course Description

What does it mean to major in Public and Professional Writing? Which parts of your journey through the major have been the most formative? How do the knowledge and skills you’ve learned in this major translate into professional environments as well as other rhetorical contexts? ENGL4810, Capstone in Professional Writing, will work to answer these questions: together, we will read, discuss, research, and compose in order to reflect on your time in the major as well as to articulate your identity in relation to your work in the major. 

While this course asks you to reflect and act upon the expertise you’ve gained in the

major, it is also flexible enough to accommodate a variety of interests, professional and personal goals, and specialty areas. To that end, your work in ENGL 4810 will center around regular readings and responses, a cover letter/resume, a major revision of a previous project from another course, and a self-determined research project where you will explore a question related to your academic and/or professional interests. These assignments will culminate in a professional ePortfolio which will showcase your identity and skills as a Professional and Public Writing major. 

This semester, you can expect to: 

• Identify, discuss, and practice foundational concepts in the PPW major. 
• Compose documents in a variety of genres and for a variety of audiences, both scholarly and public. 
• Articulate and reflect critically on your own composing practices and rhetorical decision-making
• Refine the skills you’ve developed throughout the PPW major, including research, revision, argumentation, document design, and reflection. 
• Contextualize, synthesize, and present personally and professionally meaningful work from your time in the PPW major. 

·      Create an ePortfolio targeted for your post-graduation goals. 

Course Description

The Capstone is the culminating experience of a student’s time studying creative writing at Auburn University. Revision is the primary focus for creative work, as portfolios will be made up of substantially revised versions of stories/poems/essays that students have drafted in their earlier courses.  The Capstone will also work in tandem with Auburn’s Third Thursday Reading Series, as our assigned texts will be comprised of the poems, essays, and works of fiction published by our visiting writers.  Students will attend these events, as well as featuring as guest readers for the Series at the end of the semester.   Information on publishing, applying to graduate schools, and other next steps for writers and professionalization opportunities will also be included

Course Description

This is an introductory study of the craft of creative writing. We will be working in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Extensive writing experience is not a requirement. The emphasis of the course will be divided between the students’ own writing and the study of published works. Good readers make good writers, but this is not a literature class; the focus of our reading will be on the elements of craft, the techniques and strategies used by these more experienced authors. In addition, we will learn to critique peer work with a particular focus on supporting the execution of the writer’s intention and discovering what is “right” about a piece as a means to understand what is lacking.

Course Description

ENGL 2010 serves as the gateway course for the professional and public writing track in the English Department. The track seeks to give students the wide range of skills that they will need to work as professional writers whether in business, industry, or government or in the non-profit sector. More specifically and in this class, you will gain practice in research, editing, design, and writing for a variety of audiences and situations. Given the nature of professional writing, the course will involve both individual and collaborative work. 

Course Description

English 2020 introduces students to the academic study of literary texts in English with an emphasis on formulating an argument about a text, developing goals and strategies for research, and managing the different stages of the writing process. In this course, we will develop a set of skills that will serve us as students of literature across a range of upper-division (3000- and 4000-level) literature courses. We will learn how to engage with literary texts and the critical conversations surrounding them in focused, strategic, and scholarly ways. Some of the questions we will consider include: How do we talk about literature, both in class and in other academic environments? What is literary research and how is it produced? How do we use research to help a writing project evolve? How do we begin to think critically and reflectively about our work and development as an English literature major? How do we see a literary text as a document that speaks from and to a culture of readers?

Readings

Texts will include works by such authors as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Toomer, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, Amiri Baraka, Denis Johnson, and Annie Proulx.

Course Description

From World War II, the Cold War, and into the 21^st century, novels, films and television programs dealing with spies and the dangerous world of espionage have been some of the most popular forms of entertainment in the realm of popular culture. The international success of the James Bond novels and, later, the Bond films—we’ve been watching Bond on screen for over 60 years!—attests to the crowd-pleasing nature of thrillers dealing with spies. It’s worthwhile asking why the literature of spies is so popular, and that is a major question we will follow as we read five representative examples of different kinds of spy novels ranging from one written upon England’s entrance into World War II to one written during the final days of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. We’ll begin with Agatha Christie’s N or M, a novel that mixes the genres of spy novel and mystery novel as a pair of detectives try to figure out who is a dangerous Nazi agent in World-War-II era England. Next, we’ll read the second James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die—the novel was written over 20 years before the film was made, so see how the man who created Bond and wrote all the Bond novels imagined him. Next, we’ll read John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a kind of anti-Bond novel. Like Ian Fleming, le Carre, had served with British Intelligence before writing spy novels, but where Fleming’s Bond novels romanticized the world of spying, creating unequivocally good heroes and evil villains, le Carre’s novels show spying as a dirty, morally ambiguous business, where the “good guys” will use questionable tactics to achieve their ends. Next, we’ll read Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the comparatively small number of spy novels written by an African-American author. Set during the turbulent 1960s, Greenlee intertwines the spy novel with a narrative examining how this country underwent profound change during this decade. Finally, we’ll conclude with Ian McEwan’s The Innocent, an example of what happens a serious literary writer uses he genre of the spy novel to meditate on the nature of contemporary history—specifically, the Cold War. Our reading of these novels will leave you “shaken, not stirred” (if you recognize that quotation, this is definitely the course for you! Even if you don’t, this will be a fun course.)

Requirements

Two 5-page essays (each worth 20%), midterm (20%), final (20%) reading quizzes (20%)

Readings

Agatha Christie, N or M; Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die; Charles Greenlee, The Spook who Sat by the Door; John le Carre, The Spy who Came in from the Cold; Ian McEwan, The Innocent

Course Description

This is an introductory study of the craft of creative writing. We will be working in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Extensive writing experience is not a requirement. The emphasis of the course will be divided between the students’ own writing and the study of published works.  Good readers make good writers, but this is not a literature class; the focus of our reading will be on the elements of craft, the techniques and strategies used by these more experienced autique peer work with a particular focus on supporting the execution of the writer’s intention and discovering what is “right” about a piece as means to understand what is lacking.     

Course Description

What do professional writers do? More than you probably realize. We research communication situations and even test documents. That testing part can be lots of fun! We evaluate communication for different situations, and we offer feedback. We write in a particular style, write and design in an iterative process, and often work collaboratively. This course will introduce you to these practices and how professional writers use words—written and oral—and visuals to create knowledge for professional purposes. We’ll also look at a wide range of career opportunities.

Requirements

You will complete short writing/editing and analysis projects appropriate for professional settings. You will design and conduct a usability test. The course will have an exam.

Readings

Krug, S. (2013). Don't make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web usability (3rd edition) (Voices that matter). New Riders. (~$16 for electronic), Possible choices: Van Laan, Krista.  (2022). The Insider's Guide to Technical Writing (2nd ed.). XML P. ISBN 978-1937434786.  ($22 as All Access, $19–25 as Kindle, $36 as paperback) OR Williams, R. (2014). The non-designer’s design book. Pearson Education. ($16 for electronic), Possible choices: LaRocque, P. (2013). The book on writing: The ultimate guide to writing well. Grey and Guvnor P. (~$10) OR A comparable book on style.

Course Description

What do professional writers do? More than you probably realize. We research communication situations and even test documents. That testing part can be lots of fun! We evaluate communication for different situations, and we offer feedback. We write in a particular style, write and design in an iterative process, and often work collaboratively. This course will introduce you to these practices and how professional writers use words—written and oral—and visuals to create knowledge for professional purposes. We’ll also look at a wide range of career opportunities.

Requirements

You will complete short writing/editing and analysis projects appropriate for professional settings. You will design and conduct a usability test. The course will have an exam.

Readings

Krug, S. (2013). Don't make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web usability (3rd edition) (Voices that matter). New Riders. (~$16 for electronic), Possible choices: Van Laan, Krista.  (2022). The Insider's Guide to Technical Writing (2nd ed.). XML P. ISBN 978-1937434786.  ($22 as All Access, $19–25 as Kindle, $36 as paperback) OR Williams, R. (2014). The non-designer’s design book. Pearson Education. ($16 for electronic), Possible choices: LaRocque, P. (2013). The book on writing: The ultimate guide to writing well. Grey and Guvnor P. (~$10) OR A comparable book on style.

Course Description

ENGL 2020 is designed as a gateway course for those who are or wish to be literature majors. It combines training in research with the cultivation of clear and effective academic writing in order to prepare students for upper-division (3000 and 4000 level) literature courses. Thus, instead of focusing on a particular historical period or genre, you will engage with a variety of textual forms in order to acquire a set of research-related skills that will benefit you in any future scholarly venture; some of these skills include how to formulate an effective argument about a text, how to develop appropriate goals or strategies for research, and how to manage the different stages of the writing process. Along the way, we will also explore what it means to be a good literary critic and how we can fashion our own scholarly personas or identities to be not just valuable for others but also deeply rewarding for ourselves. So many of us choose to be literature majors because we love reading. Yet, the study of literature as an academic discipline requires a kind of critical expression and analysis that reaches far beyond emotional response. During the course of the semester, we will explore what this means for our own work: How can we cultivate pleasurable reading experiences that enhance rather than distract from the rigors of conducting research or composing meaningful critiques? What exactly is literary research and how is it produced? How do we begin to answer questions that interest us about a text? How do we begin to locate a literary text in its various cultures and contexts? What is the relationship between reader and text? How do we effectively talk about a text – and our discoveries about it – in an academic environment? Together, we will explore these questions through a selection of shared readings from both poetry and prose.

Requirements

regular attendance and lively participation in class, five short writing exercises, a presentation, and an e-portfolio

Readings

• Joanna Wolfe & Laura Wilder, Digging into Literature (ISBN-10: 145763130X)
• a varied selection of literary texts for discussion and analysis (no purchases necessary)

Course Description

English 2020 introduces students to the academic study of literary texts in English with an emphasis on formulating an argument about a text, developing goals and strategies for research, and managing the different stages of the writing process. In this course, students will develop and strengthen a set of skills that they will apply across a range of upper-division (3000 and 4000 level) literature courses. Students will learn how to engage with literary texts and the critical conversations surrounding them in focused, strategic, and scholarly ways. We will consider questions about reading and writing about literature such as: What is the relation between reading for pleasure and reading for academic analysis? How do we talk about literature, both in class and in other academic environments? What is literary research and how is it produced? How do we use research to help our thinking and writing evolve? How do I begin to think critically and reflectively about my work and development as an English literature major? We will explore these questions together through the shared reading and discussion of poetry, prose, and drama.

Readings

Katherine O. Acheson, Writing Essays About Literature 9781554815517, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 9781603841238, Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady 9780871403179, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 9780811216029, All other readings will be found on Canvas under Files or will be available online.

Course Description

English 3060 is designed to familiarize students with rhetorical principles and textual practices commonly associated with writing in the health professions. Toward these ends, the course will emphasize two principal areas of instruction: for the first, students will learn concepts and develop strategies for navigating the breadth of writing activity in medical and health-related fields; for the second, they will draw on those concepts and strategies to design, compose, revise, and edit documents for diverse audiences and purposes. Students can expect to work with a variety of genres (e.g., personal statements, proposals, reviews, abstracts, reports, educational materials, editorials, presentations), adapt assignments to their professional interests and expertise, and collaborate with other members of the class on group projects. The course should be of interest to anyone pursuing careers in medical and health-related fields as well as humanities majors who would like to develop their proficiency as writers, designers, and editors of medical and health-related communication.

Requirements

Reading assignments will draw on a common textbook and selective articles related to topics in health and medicine. Writing assignments will be research-based and emphasize practical strategies for composing different types of documents for a range of audiences and situations.

Students can also expect to take part in weekly writing activities and use them to develop more formal professional materials throughout the semester. The course will involve periodic quizzes, discussion posts, and collaborative research and writing assignments.

Anyone who would like to learn more about the course is welcome to email the instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.   

Course Description

Languages vary greatly across cultures and times, but language is fundamental to our humanity: it is implicitly present in every situation we find ourselves. Linguistics doesn't ignore the differences among languages, but its principal inquiry explores the nature of language in general, aiming to make explicit its characteristics, to establish techniques that enable us to analyze it, and to grasp the ways it enables and influences our understanding and experiencing of the world.  As such, its reach, questions, and methods are wide and diverse. This course surveys that enormous range, aiming to provide familiarity with the basic concepts of scientific linguistics, the key philosophical debates about language, and some of the most important extensions the field has produced. We’ll ask how words are structured and how they combine into sentences, how language means, and just what is the meaning of meaning anyway? We'll also explore animal language and talking computers, how and why languages mix, vary, and change, and what language can tell us about the brain and the mind. This course not only covers the basics methods and ideas of orthodox linguistics, but also engages with the most exciting challenges to that orthodoxy.

Course Description

This class surveys the theory and practice of rhetoric from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. Students will gain experience applying rhetorical theories in the analysis of texts and will produce original work informed by rhetorical theory, including essays, presentations, and multi-media projects.

Course Description

ENGL 3130, Survey of Critical Theory, is an advanced undergraduate course that surveys the histories of, and approaches to, critical theory. We will examine foundational principles of critical theory, as well as theoretical concepts that have significantly impacted the ways we think about, and practice, literary/cultural criticism in the twenty-first century. We will develop tools for reading, understanding, and applying critical theory to literary studies (broadly speaking).

Course Description

This course aims to explore the concept of influence.  Our readings will be focused on contemporary American poetry.  The class will generally alternate between days of workshop and days dedicated to the study and discussion of published work.  Students can expect to workshop at least six poems over the semester, along with composing regular reading responses.  The class work culminates in a portfolio of revised poems and an Essay on Influence in which students will map out their literary influences across the course curriculum.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the basic elements of creative nonfiction. Students will read a range of published works of nonfiction, focusing on the overlapping categories of essay and memoir. They will write two separate pieces of creative nonfiction (one intended as essay, one as memoir), using the published works for inspiration. Students will also write a series of short assignments and exercises along the way. We will discuss the blurry lines between fact and fiction, how to incorporate research in creative nonfiction,  and how elements of craft from fiction writing, such as character, plot, setting, point-of-view, and theme can be used to tell a true story. Students can expect to participate in writing workshops and to have thoughtful discussions of published works throughout the course.  

Course Description

This course examines the variety of ways in which contemporary fiction engages with pressing questions about climate change. We will explore the emerging genre of climate change fiction (“cli-fi”) that highlights artistic portrayals of the precarious position of humans in the twenty-first century. We will parse these challenging human conditions that include displacement, homelessness, lack of agency, and trauma. We will consider the following questions: how and why does literary fiction matter in the context of climate change? How do writers grapple with the question of what it means to live amid and through ecological destruction? How do writers envision new possibilities for better ways of living and surviving climate catastrophes? Some key themes that we will study include the Anthropocene, petro culture, displacement, utopian and dystopian futures.

Course Description

Once upon a time there were stories told and written. Tales—of obedient (and disobedient) young girls and women, of men and women who had been transformed by magic or otherwise, and of resourceful youngsters—have occupied the imagination of diverse cultures. In this class we will explore the multiple versions and adaptations of some of these narratives to further our understanding of cultural transfer. Ranging from Greek and Roman texts to European medieval renditions, from Asia, Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere, ours will be a cross-cultural and trans-historical examination of fairy tales (and perhaps fairies, too).

This course which will be run as a seminar. This implies an active engagement and participation, where all members of the group are ready to share ideas and questions. Moreover, students will have the opportunity to lead class discussion.

Course Description

What are the rhetorical lives of things? What role do things play in our own rhetorical lives?
In this course, students will tell their own stories by researching “things,” and in doing so, learn
various methods and theories of cultural and rhetorical analysis. In Writing Studies, things have
become, you might say, rather popular lately. Within scholarship under headings like “new
materialisms,” “material culture,” “object-oriented ontology” and others, scholars have highlighted
the active role that things play in our cultural lives. Things, this work argues, are more than static,
lifeless material objects. Rather, they are persuasive and active rhetorical agents producing, and
produced by, our social experiences.
In this class, we’ll attend mostly to the biographical nature of things. We can learn a lot—about
ourselves, our cultures, and our relationships—by learning about the things that populate our lives.
We’ll consider a diverse range of things. We’ll read about iPhones. We’ll read about sneakers. We’ll
read about typewriters, bicycles, and chairs. And in thinking about these things and many others, we
will work to better understand how our own things are active in the stories of our lives.
To do this work, students will participate all semester in the production of an autoethnographic
season of a podcast, which we will collaboratively name. Briefly, autoethnography is the rigorous
attempt at writing culture through and with the self. Our course podcast will sonically tell our
cultural stories, and the stories of our things.
Please note: Students are not expected to have any experience with podcasting or audio engineering.
We will learn and experiment together.
Students in this course can expect to: read and discuss key works on materiality and rhetoric/writing,
autoethnography, and sound writing; produce regular short writing; conduct field research on
different things; design, execute, and circulate an episode of a course podcast; and contribute to a
course Spotify playlist.

Course Description

English 4020 is designed as an introduction to the art and craft of professional editing. In this course, students will learn key concepts and techniques; practice different types of editing (e.g., substantive, copyediting, proofreading); develop strategies for working with authors and organizations, assessing situational needs, and coordinating workflow processes; generate style sheets and other forms of documentation to guide editing projects; and draw on field-specific standards to edit documents accurately and ethically for diverse audiences and workplace environments. Students can also expect to work with different types of documents and technical subject matter (e.g., from science, technology, business, law, and health and medicine). The course should be of interest and value to majors pursuing careers in technical and professional communication and to other students who would like to develop their proficiency in writing and editing more generally.

Requirements

The course will draw on a common textbook, and assignments will provide students with opportunities to apply their learning through a variety of writing and editing activities. Some assignments will be focused on the individual student; others will involve collaboration with members of the class. All work will be designed help students refine their craft as editors and build a portfolio they can continue to develop and apply beyond the course.

Anyone who would like to learn more about the course is welcome to email the instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.   

Course Description

Professional writers not only compose a range of documents—including memos, letters, reports,

slideshow presentations, web pages, brochures, flyers, forms, instruction sets, documentation and help files, and many others—we also design these documents. A document’s visual elements are often as important as the written words themselves. This course, then, will equip you to analyze how the design of documents creates meaning, and will ask you to design a number of your own rhetorically-informed documents.

In this course, you can expect to:

• Discuss and apply theories and principles of design

• Understand how design elements work within different types of documents

• Demonstrate an awareness and understanding of the impact of visual rhetoric on society

• Utilize various tools in document design to create rhetorically savvy documents

• Consider the ethics of document design

• Describe, analyze, and justify your design decisions

Course Description

We live in unprecedented times that call for new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting together. Yet climate change, persuasive/deceptive AI, social and political polarization, and more fracture our ability to come together as members of publics to engage in democratic deliberation, participation, and action. In this class we’ll ask how we make meaning together given the felt sense that we’re living not just in unprecedented times but also in deeply divided, apocalyptic times. What roles do feeling and sensation—vibes—play in moving people to public action on the big problems facing humanity today? How does advocacy work when publics are so fractured? How might young people today be involved in catalyzing new publics to address wicked problems like climate change? What ancient tools and capacities of our species help us humanize in response to compounding crises? What new social worlds might we imagine and create together as we write publicly at the end of this one?

We’ll take time to breathe and feel together as we read contemporary scholarship that will help us begin to answer these questions. We’ll learn about publics and counterpublics, public feeling, sensory rhetoric, wise panic, ecological grief, earthly coexistence, how the climate crisis is changing rhetoric, and how our species reinvented itself socially in the ancient past, all of which suggest ways we might answer these questions. Assignments include translating an academic argument for a public audience and applying contemporary rhetorical concepts from class—public feeling, sensory rhetorics, wise panic, etc.—to address one of today’s wicked problems with a specific message for a specific public.

Course Description

This offering of Poetry II focuses on the techniques used to craft poems, as well as the content from which their ideas originate. We’ll study collections of poems and how their authors employ lines, stanzas, diction, syntax, musicality, and other poetic elements. We’ll investigate how these books are in conversation with other pieces of literature, inspired by the natural world, concerned with current societal issues, and informed by historical research. And, after learning from these exemplary texts that look outside the self, we will turn to poems that draw from personal reflection. During visits to Auburn’s arboretum and archives, and through participation in events associated with our Witness Prize for Poetry and guided writing exercises, we will discover sources of ideas for original poems. Finally, we’ll strengthen class members’ poems through the process of workshopping and extensive revision.

Requirements

The course approaches poetry both critically and creatively. You must read published texts and analyze them in group discussions and informal essays. You must also compose poems, contribute to peer workshops, and refine a selection of your poetry for inclusion in a portfolio. Many of our activities take place outside of the classroom and readings by visiting writers, which class members are required to attend, are held on Thursday evenings.

Readings

Our texts will include books by Victoria Chang, Rick Barot, and Jennifer Grotz, with additional poems by W.S Merwin, Jericho Brown, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jake Adam York, C.D. Wright, and Nicole Sealey.

Course Description

Building off the groundwork that was laid in Creative Nonfiction 1, this workshop will focus on essays that reside more toward the lyric end of the Creative Nonfiction spectrum.  The content of the essays we will focus on in class will traverse the familiar ground of literary journalism, creative criticism, and place-based writing, yet all will take on a markedly lyric or experimental approach. While the terms lyric and narrative in regard to the essay are not mutually exclusive, most of the creative work we will be studying looks to resist, complicate, or distract the reader from narrative, making use of such techniques as associative leaps, fragmentation, and/or other formal inventions to de-center a linear narrative structure.  At the end of this class, we will also move to consider more extended forms, looking at two complete books that operate as sustained lyrics. 

Students will study a wide range of professional work and attempt to emulate it in their own creative essays.  End-of-the-semester portfolios will consist of two substantially revised essays.  Regular Reading Responses and quality peer feedback are also required of the course.

Course Description

The popular idea of the Victorian period remains one of a rather dour, serious time with strict codes of personal behavior and conduct. Yet, somehow, there was no shortage of writers willing to push those boundaries, take up the scandalous, and shock the senses. “One should always have something sensational to read on the train,” as one of Oscar Wilde’s characters observes of her own diary.  To be sure, there was a lot at the time to offend and scandalize readers:  embezzlers, two-timers, ne’er-do-wells, dandies, decadents, flaneurs, fallen women, new women, free-thinkers, Chartists, Nonconformists, and mad scientists, to name just a handful. Then, there were the not-so-mad scientists who proved just as threatening—the geologists, biologists, and astronomers who seemed to committed to undermining everything the Victorians thought they knew about the age of the earth, the origin of species, and how long the sun had to live.  It was a time of scandalous people, scandalous writers, and scandalous ideas, with an emerging mass media eager to propagate and profit from the scandalous. We will examine all of these dimensions of Victorian scandal culture, while also spotlighting some of the public scandals that broke out involving the lives of our authors, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde.  We will consider what these scandals reveal about Victorian codes of class, gender, sexuality, and public vs. private identity and how similar debates today have reshaped the ways we study the Victorians.     

Requirements

research essay; midterm exam; final exam; response papers; reading quizzes and other in-class writing; group project

Course Description

The twentieth-century literary and cultural movement of modernism is known for the mantra, “Make It New”—a call to writers and artists to sever from traditional styles and dismantle familiar forms. In a society that had just witnessed the catastrophe of the First World War and was struggling to navigate its traumas, modernists sought new ways to represent a world dramatically transformed. And yet, despite the compulsion to break with tradition—or in an effort to satisfy that call—many modernist writers and artists paradoxically turned to the past as a repository of materials with which to shape radical new forms. This class will examine how British and Irish modernists turned to human prehistory, ancient civilizations, and even the more recent past, excavating its materials to understand themselves and their modernity. We’ll consider how First World War poets mediated the traumas of the war through engagement both deep time and the classical past. We’ll examine how Irish writers turned to folklore and Ireland’s landscape to simultaneously recover and innovate a distinctly Irish literary tradition. We’ll consider how writers pondered the unconscious and grappled with ghosts in eerie examples of the Modernist Gothic (around Halloween!). And we’ll uncover how modernist writers reveled in the Renaissance to explore radical notions of gender and sexuality.

Requirements

attendance and participation, discussion posts, a presentation, a digital exhibition project, an annotated bibliography, and a final multimodal essay.

Readings

include poetry by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, and T.S. Eliot; short stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce; drama by J.M. Synge; travel writing by Vita Sackville-West and E.M. Forster; and novels by Virginia Woolf and Mary Butts.

Course Description

Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century revolved around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth century as being defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of both blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographical place? Through what cultural forms is the South represented? The course will take a cultural studies approach to these questions, examining recent literary texts by southern writers alongside a range of other media, including television shows, films, magazine, music, etc. Our investigations of these texts and media will draw on recent interdisciplinary work in southern studies.

Course Description

This course focuses on the poetry of our time. We will spend the first weeks of the semester with an anthology of contemporary American poetry, exploring the remarkable range and vitality of poems written over the last thirty or forty years and developing strategies for reading and talking about them. Then we will make a series of deeper dives, looking at five recently published books by contemporary poets, each of them an invitation to deeper consideration of the world we live in and the work of poetry in it. The course is designed to help you expand your knowledge of American poetry and your capacity to read it with interest and pleasure, whether you are an experienced reader (or writer) of poems or a novice. 

Requirements

weekly entries in a reading journal; two essays or multimedia presentations; and a final project.

Readings

Likely texts include: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry; Maurice Manning, One Man’s Dark; Carl Phillips, Then The War; John Lee Clark, How to Communicate; Nikki Finney, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry; and Rose McLarney, Colorfast.

Course Description

This class examines American writing from the early twentieth century, as well as the film adaptations of these modern stories. We will begin the semester by reading and writing about film, orienting ourself to the vocabulary and techniques of this type of criticism. We will then consider the relation between modern American fiction and the film, reading short stories, novellas, and novels from the 1920s and 1930s and screening adaptations of those novels produced from the 1920s all the way to the present day. Our discussions will focus on issues of American cultural modernity including nostalgia and tradition; changing representations of race and ethnicity; the relationship between city and country; changing gender roles; the relationship between high and popular culture; and developments in technology. Writing assignments will include a shot analysis, analysis of a movie review, and a research paper that discusses a specific adaptation in relation to its source. We will discuss the adaptation process and conclude the class with an adaptation assignment.

Readings

Readings and Screenings will draw from the following pairings:

“The Day of Atonement,” Samson Raphaelson (1922)/The Jazz Singer film, starring Al Jolson(1927)

42nd Street, Bradford Ropes (1932)/film directed by Busby Berkeley (1933)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos (1925)/ film starring Marilyn Monroe (1953)

Green Grow the Lilacs, Lynn Riggs (1930)/Oklahoma! (1955)

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Horace McCoy (1935)/film directed by Sydney Pollack (1969)

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (1939)/film directed by John Schlesinger (1975)

Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)/ film directed by Rebecca Hall (2021)

Course Description

It is 1392. King Richard II has turned 25 and just declared his majority, meaning that he can rule without advisors. He has sworn vengeance on five lords who engineered a coup against him a few years ago, dividing loyalties among the nobility. The Church itself is divided with a French-allied pope (Clement VI) reigning in Avignon and an English-allied pope (Boniface IX) reigning in Rome. The needs of both popes to maintain armies to defeat the other has increased monetary demands on the faithful of Christendom. Finally, the City of London has endured a decade of internal rivalries between two factions that appear to have subsided but at the cost of turning King Richard against the richest city in England and causing him to demand an enormous bribe to win back his favor. The kingdom, the Church, and the cities are divided over questions of sovereignty and the role of money. Lastly, the language of the royal and law courts has been French since the Norman Conquest of 1066. But pressure is mounting to make English the language of these courts instead of French. At this time, a royal functionary named Chaucer seems to have begun work on a story in which several pilgrims representing different types of people in England travel to Canterbury, telling stories in English as they go.

In this course, we will read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which is not as scary as it sounds. As we study each tale, we will explore how Chaucer’s tales and pilgrims reflect the growing sense of commercial power in the kingdom as they question how they may speak for themselves in a time of division and uncertainty. Our task will be to master Chaucer’s language as it will also be to create a substantial research paper to explore in detail a topic that interests you and on which we will work for the entire term. This paper will require a proposal, a first draft (Opus Minor), and final draft (Opus Major). This course will involve active learning and role playing with our summative assignment being an enactment of the 1392 Parliament where many of these issues are discussed. Students will participate in the parliament as a representative of some group or as individuals from Chaucer’s England to understand better how groups practiced their function in this world and sought to take power in it.

Requirements

Presentation, Opus minor (8-10 pages), Opus major (15-20 pages), Final Exam, Parliament “Game,” Exercises, and Vibrant Conversation

Readings

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Course Description

From the solid wood of the carefully designed theater building where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, to the players’ clothing, props such a Yorick’s skull manipulated on the stage, poignant evocations of objects of sentimental, political, or philosophical value, the works of Shakespeare are steeped in material culture. In this course we will read the plays with a keen eye for the ways in which objects may shape human emotions, evidence that even the most metaphysically minded of Shakespeare’s characters cannot escape the grounding materiality of the world. We will seek to reconstruct and comprehend the material underpinnings of life in the Renaissance (Early Modern) England and particularly theater. About 4-5 weeks of the semester will be dedicated to playing a role-immersion game from the Reacting to the Past series in which two theater companies will advocate for their own play and compete for a theater license. As always in my classes, students’ individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

Requirements

Lively participation, in-class writing, 5–7-page essay, 10-page research essay, strategic imaginative writings, speech based on a 3-page position paper, final exam.

Readings

Tentative readings: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Cymbeline; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; secondary readings; supporting materials from performances, visual and material culture.

Course Description

On May 17, 1963, the world woke up to James Baldwin gracing the cover of Times Magazine. Central to the capture were Baldwin’s eyes, those big and piercing symbols of his accepted position as witness. By 1963, Baldwin had distinguished himself as one of America’s fiercest critics, and, more importantly, as one its most dexterous writers. This course is a curated journey into the interior, imaginative, and inspiring worlds of the beloved author. Readers will be invited into the sacred spaces where Baldwin textualized conceptions of what it means to be Black, to be American, to be Black in America. This seminar will invite the student into a discursive place where we will figuratively dance, sing, laugh, fight, and cry alongside Baldwin, where we will wrestle with ideas of humanity and home, of living and loss, of art and freedom. Moving through poems, novels, essays, plays, film, and more, the student who dares to travel with us during Baldwin’s centennial moment, will learn why the father of the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka, fondly eulogized James Baldwin as “God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth.” Ultimately, this seminar will offer a baptism into the depths of what it means to love, to suffer, and to love again.

Course Description

It’s a simple enough concept: a person goes from one place to another and writes about the experience. Indeed, travel writing seems to be everywhere: no bookstore would be complete without a travel section, and on-line, travel-oriented websites abound. Clearly, we like to travel, we like to write about it, and we like to read about people who travel. In this course, we’ll try to understand why.  Focusing on a wide range of American, British and Anglophone nonfiction travelogues, essays, and graphic writing, this course will explore the unique ways travel writing intervenes in contemporary debates about cultural politics, national and regional identity, and the environment. The course will also devote close attention to how travel is portrayed in contemporary visual media, including film and television. Some of the questions that will inform our analysis include:  what motivates one to travel in the first place?  How do travelers seek to authorize or authenticate their accounts? How do contemporary authors negotiate travel writing’s legacy with forms of colonialism and class privilege? What does it mean to travel ethically and responsibly in today’s world? The course will also serve students as an introduction to travel writing studies as a discipline, featuring critical and rhetorical approaches to travel texts that can be applied across a range of historical periods and contexts.

Requirements

research essay; midterm exam; final exam; oral presentation; reading quizzes and other in-class writing

Course Description

This course will explore the relationship between Black print and Black organizing during the long nineteenth century, focusing simultaneously on Black print practices and the ethics of studying Black print and life. How did African Americans use a variety of print forms to share and advance issues of import to Black life in the United States? How did the specific print forms they chose to work in and with influence such issues? We will concentrate on a small number of Black authors (e.g., Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Jarena Lee, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) and organizations (e.g., colored conventions, committees, newspapers) to trace how they made and engaged with multiple forms of print. We will focus our attention on three primary formats: the pamphlet, the newspaper, and the book

Requirements

Students will complete a series of short writing assignments as well as a longer research essay.

Course Description

This Capstone course will serve as a rigorous, in-depth examination of your creative work and process. In this multi-genre course, we will look carefully at the fiction, poetry, and nonfiction you have already produced and engage in thorough, exacting revision through workshop and individual conferences. You will also generate new material, with the aim of expanding your artistic abilities. You will be asked to examine your creative trajectory, and reflect upon your artistic growth as both a critic and an author. The end goal of this class is to create a substantive and cohesive portfolio. We will read and discuss contemporary literature as both a means to understand the field and to contextualize yourself within it. 

Your portfolio will be comprised of thoroughly re-envisioned poetry, fiction or non-fiction, as well as critical writing in which you identify your literary influences, examine your creative process, and reflect upon your growth as both a reader and an author.