Courses

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

What does writing look like across varied professional contexts? How should we study it, and how can we learn to produce more rhetorically effective documents as professional writers? As the gateway course to the Public and Professional Writing track within the English major, ENGL 2010 seeks to answer these questions, introducing you to the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills that will inform your work in the track and beyond. To do so, this course will center around understanding how various discourse communities function and will ask you to both analyze and enter into a specific professional discourse community of your choice. You will learn about and apply key concepts in professional writing and rhetoric as you conduct research on and produce a variety of documents for this professional discourse community. This work will culminate in a final reflective analysis, where you will showcase your identity and skills as a professional writer.

In this course, you can expect to:

• Learn about and apply key concepts in professional writing and rhetoric
• Analyze and enter into a specific professional discourse community
• Produce a variety of documents for a specific professional discourse community
• Conduct primary and secondary research in both academic and professional contexts
• Consider the ethics of professional writing and rhetorical practices 

Articulate and reflect critically on your own composing practices, rhetorical decision-making, and emerging professional identity

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, 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? How do we begin to answer the question that interests us about the text? 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 my work and development as an English literature major? How do we see a literary text as a document that speaks from and speaks to a culture of readers? The objective will be to show the student beginning the Literature Track how to understand the field of literature. Think of each class as a track and field event.

Course Description

Throughout history, and throughout the history of literature, we have been inspired by visions of utopia—visions of a perfect community, a perfect society, a perfect nation, where humans live in harmony with nature and with each other; where social justice has been implemented; where our stewardship of nature ensures no environmental crisis will arise; where dedication to the betterment of humankind prevents war. The number of utopias, however, are dwarfed by the fictions of dystopia—the literature, films, TV and streaming series that represent the natural world as a site of ultimate crisis and the human world as a place of either authoritarian power or chaotic breakdown. From George Orwell (and before him) to The Hunger Games (and after) our books and screens are haunted by images of absolute and unstoppable human disorder. What’s more, we seem to love this at one level. Yes, dystopian texts are ways to offer social and political commentary, but they’re also bestsellers and big box-office; they cross the lines between literature and popular genre fiction. Why do we thirst for bigger, “better” disasters, is only one question we’ll explore as we examine five classics of the dystopian genre. We’ll begin with Aldous Huxley’s famous Brave New World, one of the novels that defined the dystopian genre. Written only thirteen years after the end of World War I, it is a frightening (and, at times, funny) satire on the very idea of progress towards an utopian World State of perfection. Next, we turn to the most important dystopian novel written during World War II, the Swedish author, Karin Boye’s Kallocain, a work that uses the devices of dystopian science fiction to paint a chilling picture of the Nazi regime at a time when Hitler was scoring military victories and the prospect of his conquest of Europe seemed plausible. We then will read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a perfect text to enquire about the lines between literature and popular culture. A literary work that was also a popular bestseller and adapted as a film in the 1980s, it was adapted again by the streaming platform Hulu in 2017, where it proved so successful that five additional seasons were ordered, written by Atwood, that go far beyond the events in the book. The novel concerns the overthrow of the US government and the establishment of the Republic of Gilead in what used to be America—a “Republic” where women become “handmaids,” allowed to reproduce only if their children are given ti the Commanders of Gilead, the political and economic leaders of the new society. Following Atwood, we’ll read P. D. James’ The Children of Men, in which a mysterious plague no longer makes it possible to reproduce children. Once the last baby is born., society descends into a violent state of nature opposed by a group of dissenters, one of whom…is pregnant! We’ll conclude with Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. Hokinson is Jamaican-Canadian, and the heroine of the novel, Ti-Jeanne, opposes the vicious rulers of her world by calling upon Jamaican spirits, spells and magic—elements specific to her culture, which has been marginalized in her new world. These novels paint convincing pictures of a world in crisis, but they do entertain as well. They also raise important questions about techno-scientific rationality, the use of political power, class, gender ethnicity, the line between literature and popular culture, and why do we devour books and films about worlds in which we’d be terrified to live.

Requirements

Two 5-page essays, midterm and final exam; class participation

Readings

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Karin Boye, Kallocain; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; P. D. James, The Children of Men

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 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

English 2010 is designed as an introduction to professional writing and a gateway to the Professional and Public Writing major. In this course, you will learn about the history and trajectory of the field; develop strategies for writing in professional environments; design, compose, revise, and edit documents for diverse audiences and purposes; take part in collaborative research and writing projects; and create a digital portfolio that reflects your emerging expertise in writing, information design, user advocacy, and content management. Through these activities, you can expect to develop conceptual knowledge and practical skills that will be of use across a range of academic, workplace, and community settings.

For some of us, professional writing is an occupation. For others, it is a key element in more specialized forms of work. This course will explore both, providing you with opportunities to develop and refine your craft as writers and professionals. 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).

Requirements

Writing for the course will emphasize a variety of professional genres and practices, including but not limited to workplace correspondence, proposals, project management documents, reports, technical descriptions and documentation, and digital/multimodal compositions.

Readings

Kathryn Rosser Raign’s The Origins of the Art and Practice of Professional Writing and Deborah C. Andrews and Jason C.K. Tham’s Designing Technical and Professional Communication.

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

This course uses game writing and writing about games to introduce methods of literary research and genres of writing about literature and culture. 

"The New Game Journalism" (a term coined by Kieron Gillen) is now over twenty years old, and literary and cultural analysis of games in the academy is still older. "Are games art?" is seemingly in constant debate, even with generations of scholars taking the idea seriously. Debates around the nature of games have not only shaped popular discussions about art but also have had widespread impact on the wider political and cultural landscape. As games, their makers, and players continue to innovate, there's few better places to see the work of literary analysis and criticism actively shaping media in real time.

Together we'll explore the history of game journalism, the academic field of game studies, literary games and interactive fiction as ways into discussing the larger field of literary studies. Class guests will include a variety of working critics in and out of the academy, game writers and designers, and those who use games in the creation of other forms of art. The course will also include out-of-class and in-class play from Dr. Friedman's library of games, with required play session reports and reviews. Students will also be responsible for weekly reflections and scaffolded assignments leading to a final work of games writing and analysis of their devising.

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.

Upon completion of the course, you should be able to:

• identify and describe the fundamental features of the novel, the short story, the poem, the essay, and the drama
• identify and analyze stylistic and narrative elements of a literary text
• describe and practice fundamental skills of literary analysis including close reading, contextual analysis, and response to critics

Readings

Katherine O. Acheson, Writing Essays About Literature 9781554815517, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis Translation) 9780143106494, 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

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

What is rhetoric, and how has it been used to create reality, truth, and community? How have rhetorical theories and practices changed across time, space, and cultures? And how does this matter to your work as a student, citizen, and professional?

This course, Survey of Rhetoric, will attempt to answer these questions by tracing the history and evolution of rhetoric beginning with the ancient Greek Sophists and ending with contemporary approaches such as digital and posthuman rhetoric. We will explore the ways in which rhetoric has been used to create a shared reality, to change reality, and to secure power within that reality. In the process, we will discover the intimate connections between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric and community, rhetoric and media, and rhetoric and the world you occupy.

Although we will focus primarily on the “traditional” canon of Western rhetoric, we’ll also work to disrupt that canon, questioning how and why it came into existence, and what its limitations are. Ultimately, this course will enable you to combine the intellectually rigorous study of rhetorical history and theory with practical techniques that you can apply across the diverse contexts of school, work, and community life.

In this course, you can expect to:

• Understand, analyze, and put in dialogue the ways in which rhetoric has been theorized and practiced in various cultures and time periods throughout history.
• Explore the ways in which different movements relate, counteract, or dialogue with and among various time periods/movements.
• Work to trace common themes and trends between and amongst rhetorical concepts over different periods/movements.
• Draw connections between recurrent rhetorical themes and contemporary life.
• Learn practical methods and techniques for analyzing and producing arguments.
• Compose analytical texts that are well-researched, stylistically engaging, and persuasive.
• Work toward developing a well-rounded and critical understanding and definition of rhetorical theory and practice.

Course Description

This course will offer students a tour of one of the academic foundations of literary study: critical theory.  Unlike literary interpretation (arguments about specific texts), theory involves the methodologies and language on which those interpretations are based.  As such, it's often more akin to reading philosophy, and that, as we know, can sometimes be an intimidating prospect!  The goal of this course, then, is to provide an introduction to theory in a manageable and (hopefully) sane way.  We will begin long before any of us ever cracked a book--with classical ideas about aesthetics--and move through representative samples of some of the major theoretical schools, such as formalism, post-structuralism, Marxism and post-colonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies; our goal will be to read these samples as texts but also as the providers of ways of reading other texts.  Then, we'll marry our theoretical reading with literary works and other cultural texts in order to practice how theory can be utilized, modified, and reinvented, and how--ultimately--it makes us more ambitious readers ourselves.

Course Description

This course is for students with some fiction writing experience who are eager to hone their skills as storytellers. We will explore the craft and art of writing fiction, using the work of contemporary and classic masters of the short form as models. Students will deepen their understanding of such fundamental craft elements as character, scene, plot, narrative perspective, and image and apply their knowledge to create two compelling, character-driven short stories. These pieces will be workshopped in class and revised for inclusion in the student’s portfolio. Students will be encouraged to stretch their skills and thinking beyond their comfort zones to produce exciting new work and continue to develop their aesthetic.   

Course Description

This course blends creative practice with literary study, guiding students through the composition and revision of original work. Over the semester, students will draft six poems, participate in workshops, and refine their work through revision, all while engaging with contemporary American poetry. Classes alternate between discussions of poems from the textbook—examining their history and techniques—and workshops focused on constructive feedback. Students will keep a reading journal to reflect on assigned texts and their own creative processes. By the end of the course, students will have assembled a portfolio of revised poems and a personal anthology of works that influenced their writing.

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 multi-genre workshop will center on writing about music.  For each day’s assigned texts, you will be given both a literary and musical playlist—with essays, poems, and/or short stories that have been paired with specific songs or music videos.  Our first unit will focus on writing about music/artists that we dislike (including guilty pleasures), the second unit on music/artists that we love, and the third unit will be a collage work of prose that incorporates multiple songs by one or more artists.  In each unit, students will engage with a wide variety of writers and musical artists, discussing the styles and strategies employed, and looking to emulate this inside our own creative work.  End of the semester portfolios will consist of a substantially revised portfolio, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

Course Description

Few terms in American culture carry as much stigma and baggage as “white trash.” Since before the nation’s founding, those on the fringes of “civilized society” have been thought of as at best backwards outsiders that cannot exist within the mainstream and at worst potential dangers to the social fabric. This segment of the population is, if not willfully ignored, often vilified and devalued to the point of becoming expendable; in other words, “trash.” This course seeks to present the category of “white trash” as a complex intersection of class, race, and identity that is unique within the culture of the United States. We will trace the concept’s development from precolonial social writings to novels and films of the present day with an eye toward how views of “white trash” continually shift with historical events and range from the accusatory and disdainful to the sympathetic. Importantly, rather than being a condemnation of the white, rural poor or an anthropological taxonomy of who counts as such and why, this course seeks to explore how the controversial categorization came to be, how it has been presented in American literature and culture, and how it continues to be used as a convenient and dismissive yet poorly understood catchall label.

Course Description

This course will dig into the modern themes haunting the horror genre, from fungus and deer to family and the social order. Reading works like Mexican Gothic and What Moves the Dead, as well as listening to podcasts such as “The Magnus Archive” and looking at TV shows like “The Haunting of Hill House,” we’ll think about the history that modern horror plays into and plays up. We’ll think about texts that revisit and update older fiction, considering what they change and what drew them to adapt these texts in the first place. We’ll also consider what genres, from books to miniseries to podcasts to movies, do for our consumption of horror and how that affects the themes it imparts and the ways we interpret it. Along the way, we’ll consider what the genre of horror does and why we like it in the first place, and we’ll write both about specific works as well as our larger understanding of the movement of the genre.

Course Description

This course will examine rhetoric of health and medicine as a focal topic and an area of specialization within the wider field of professional and public writing. We will ask: Who authors information related to health and medicine in our culture? Who authorizes it? What forms does it take? Where and how does it circulate? How does it shape our understanding of and relationship to illness? How does it facilitate or restrict our access to healthcare systems?
These are big questions, and as a class, we will use them, first, to explore the rhetorical and distinctively human aspects of health and medicine, and second, to develop expertise in genres and practices associated with medical and health communication. Both will inform the scope of our reading, writing, and research throughout the course.

The course will also involve a research component, and you will have the opportunity to
develop a project that reflects your personal interests and engages with topics relevant to the current landscape of health and medicine, broadly understood. At the end of the semester, you should have multiple examples of writing—personal, professional, public—that you can continue to develop and/or include in your writing portfolio.
Anyone with an interest in these themes is welcome to email the course instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.

Requirements

Writing in the course will take a variety of forms, including personal narratives, expository and analytical essays, and genres of medical and health communication that seek to make complex information accessible to non-specialist audiences (which may extend to graphic, multimodal, and digital texts).

Readings

Reading in the course will emphasize topics in health and medicine, combining academic scholarship (rhetorics of health and medicine) with popular and narrative-based genres (autobiographical memoirs, graphic novels, podcasts and other media forms). Key texts may include Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is; The Invisible Kingdom; Brain on Fire; Graphic Medicine Manifesto; Pain is Really Strange; Brittle Joints.

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

The goal of English 4030 is to introduce students to the theory and practice of document design.  To accomplish this, the course will introduce design theories and design tools and teach students how to use these theories and tools to produce visually compelling and effective documents in a variety of print and online genres.

Requirements

Assignments will include reading responses, rhetorical analyses, informational poster, and client-based design project 

Course Description

This course is designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of public writing. In this
particular section—Public Writing: Past, Present, and Future—we will consider where public writing
has been, where it is, and where it might be headed.
To do so, we will begin by engaging a set of theoretical texts that build a framework and vocabulary
for understanding publics and public writing. Through active reading and practice, we will work to
define a series of key concepts in this conversation. With these concepts, we will examine the public
writing we encounter in our everyday lives, from the sanctioned texts that constitute our publics to
the emergent ones that challenge them. We will also examine and employ new writing technologies,
specifically GenAI, and consider what it means for the future of public engagement.
Once we’ve established a framework for understanding actually existing writing within the public
sphere, students will design a public-writing project around an issue of individual or group concern.
In all, this course will introduce students to the resources they have for engaging with, and ultimately
building, publics and public spaces. It will prepare students to interrogate the ethics of public
writing, to understand the impact of public contexts on writing, and to engage and build interested
publics.

Requirements

Students can expect to: read and discuss key texts on publics and public writing; produce consistent
short writing assignments that mobilize the concepts we discuss in class; conduct a series of
rhetorical analyses on public writing they encounter in Auburn-Opelika; design and execute a
campaign of public writing; contribute to a course soundtrack; and present on final course projects

Course Description

This course is for students who are experienced in creative writing—and excited about continuing to hone their craft. Students will be expected to produce two short stories, as well as to write a significant revision of one of them, and to reflect on their writing and revision process in a final portfolio. We will be reading more than one story by the same author and students will work on writing two stories that could theoretically end up in the same story collection. 

Through a range of contemporary realist and speculative fiction, we will discuss the key elements of craft that are essential for any short story, with an emphasis on character, worldbuilding, and plot. Students will be encouraged not only to polish their work, but also to experiment with a variety of writing styles and genres on the never-ending journey to finding their voices.

Course Description

This course is an in-depth study of the craft of poetry. Students will participate in writing workshops to examine and critically engage with the work of their classmates. In addition to workshop, students can expect course meetings to include generative assignments and analysis of contemporary poetry via discussion of craft elements and poetic techniques. The course will culminate in a final portfolio of revised poetry alongside an analysis of the student’s creative work from throughout the semester

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 mid-fourteenth century was hit by and recovered from a pandemic known as the Black Death when in England between a third and a half of the people died. It was nothing to sneeze at. During this period as well, the Western Church was first led by a French-aligned pope and then two popes (one Italian and the other persisting in being French). England was mired in a conflict with France known as the Hundred Years’ War with the English doing astonishingly well and the French being immune to victory. Things were, as some would say, a mess. But what develops in the fifty years after this event is an English-language literature determined to create its own national identity in opposition to being, well, others, such as the French, or Scots, or Flemish. In this course, we will focus on texts written between 1360 and 1420 to answer the question of what did it mean to be English. In learning about this culture, we will play an interactive role-playing game to create a medieval English society.

This class will involve work in history, historical linguistics, close-reading of late medieval texts, the production of a substantial research paper, and a delight in the pun.

Readings

Texts could include works from John Gower, the Gawain-Poet, the Paston Family, Thomas Hoccleve, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pisan.

Course Description

Using selected early American texts as portals into the new wave of literary modernity, we will study artistic, moral, political, and cultural developments of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Practical challenges registered by the era’s most significant writers include rapid growth of urban centers such as New York City and Chicago; unprecedented mass immigration to the United States; virulent racist activism in local, regional, and national politics matched by increased advocacy for civil rights by women and people of color; and major scientific and technological changes.  Technologies such as the automobile and railroads, audio recording, electric lighting, the telephone, broadcast radio, and photography and the film industry were all invented and/or refined greatly during this period and shaped the perceptions and values of readers and writers alike.  In more ominous developments, modern instruments of war such as armored tanks, machine guns, chemical weapons, and military airplanes were first used during these years.

Readings

Primary texts will include works of prose and poetry such as Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1892); Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1893); Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1898); Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle (1903); Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913); Robert Frost, Collected Poems 1913-1923.

Course Description

Much ink has been spilled arguing about “the Great American Novel” (spoiler: it’s Moby-Dick). In this course we will engage with this white whale’s smaller cousin: the American short story. We will begin the semester at the end of the century, with collections by writers including A. M. Homes, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, and Annie Proulx. We will then read seminal works by American modernists (e.g., Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, and Flannery O'Connor) and mid-century African American writers (e.g., James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Alongside these canonical texts and authors, we will read work that engages with popular genres, such as science fiction and horror (examples include H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Octavia Butler). Together, these works provide a wide-ranging and diverse set perspectives on twentieth-century America.

Course Description

This course will introduce the eighteenth-century novel through the novels that influenced Jane Austen, the games these novels play both literally and literarily, and how these novels have been played with in game adaptations. Together we will read Austen's most playful novel, Emma (1815), as well as novels that may include Heywood's Fantomina: Or Love in a Maze (1725), Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Burney's Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), Georgiana Devonshire's The Sylph (1778), as well as a novel of each student's choice.

Many of the challenges of adaptation and representation now playing out in big-budget, mass media film and television screens, in fandom and enthusiast organizations, have been playing out for much longer in the world of smaller-budget, niche video, roleplaying, and board games. We will weave our readings with examples from current scholarly debates around the eighteenth-century novel as well as playing modern game adaptations that attempt to play with eighteenth-century literature and culture, including tabletop roleplaying games Good Society (2018) and TEETH (2023), mobile game Regency Love (2015), visual novels The Lady’s Choice (2016) and Truths Untold (2020-), board game Obsession (2018), letter-writing game The Page I Didn't Write (2019), as well as a game currently in professional development. We will also be visited (in-person and virtually) by scholars, game designers, critics, and content creators who think and play about the eighteenth-century today.

The course will also include out-of-class and in-class play from Dr. Friedman's library of games, with required play session reports and reviews. Students will also be responsible for weekly reflections and scaffolded assignments leading to a final project of their devising according to their larger research and/or career goals.

Course Description

Writing and books are magic, and the history of magic lore is bound to the history of writing and printing. This course will explore the connections between magic and literacy in the Harry Potter series through the Shakespeare lens. We will read Shakespeare’s plays before we turn to Rowling’s novels, learning about magicians and alchemists in Shakespeare’s time, exploring the rich medieval and early modern lore recorded in manuscripts and print, and tracing the historical and literary roots of Rowling’s wizarding world. Our special focus will be on Rowling’s construction of literacy and its multifaceted relationship with magic. As always in my courses, students’ individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

Course Description

Literary and cinematic engagements with encounters between men, women, and non-human or quasi-human animals are ubiquitous in twentieth-century popular culture, and such narratives persist in the twenty-first. Why do such literary and filmic representations of encounters between humans and other animals maintain such cultural currency and fascination? This course will investigate the cultural history of such representations, including Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel, Tarzan of the Apes (1914); Merian C. Cooper’s film, King Kong (1933); Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Pierre Boulle’s novel, La Planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) (1963), as well as literary reimaginings of these narratives, such as Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban (1982), Phillip José Farmer’s “After Kong Fell” (1973), and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013). As these narratives develop and iterate, concerns about race become increasingly tied to those about gender and sexuality, and the pervasive threat of violence gives way to both the threat and the promise of intimacy. These texts and films, as we will see, provide screens through which readers and viewers encounter questions concerning race, sex, gender, and what it means to be human.

Course Description

In his magisterial critical study American Renaissance (1941), published at the outset of World War II, the famed literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen reflected that “My starting point . . . was my realization of how great a number of our masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression: the half-decade of 1850-55.”  He had in mind such works as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851); Henry Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854); and Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855). Matthiessen emphasized such books because of the quality of their writing but also because “the one common denominator of these writers . . . is their devotion to the possibilities of democracy.” Our seminar will include selections from these writers, while expanding the American Renaissance time frame to include other important mid-19th-century works whose authors shared a strong commitment to democratic ideals, such as Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).  Students can expect to study these key works of American literature in light of their historical context and also from the perspective of advanced scholarship of the present day. In addition, the course will support and advance student writing and research skills throughout the semester, drawing on individual instruction, class discussion, and group workshops to assist in the completion of an original research paper.

Course Description

Many American fiction and poetry classes explore how representative examples of their genres examine the question of American identity, but there is less attention paid to the vital and significant contribution made by American playwrights and the genre of American drama to looking at the question, what does it mean to say “I am American,” particularly since we live our national identity at the intersection of multiple other social identities—class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, etc. We are going to look at two plays each (plays are short compared to novels) by seven of the most significant American playwrights from the period 1959-2024; that is, from a period that took America from the Civil Rights Movement to a time of general economic instability and uncertainty about the strength of democracy itself. There have been American triumphs during the period we’re covering, but there also has been a sense of chaos and instability that makes the question of what we mean by American identity all the more pressing and urgent. That doesn’t mean that the works we read are all tragic and depressing. Writers like Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel and Suzan-Lori Parks bring a welcome (if bizarre) comic touch to their works, and the styles will range from the realism of Lorraine Hansberry to the surrealism of Suzan-Lori Parks to the kind of documentary drama Anna Deavere Smith writes. You don’t need to have had any experience of theatre, since we’ll be exploring these plays as literary texts (much as you would Shakespeare). They are fascinating, thought-provoking works that give their readers much to consider  when we ask, what does it mean to claim an American identity. You may not be familiar with some of the plays or playwrights, but they leave a powerful impression long after you close the book.

Requirements

A 20-page research essay; a 4-page essay; an oral presentation on your research paper; class participation

Readings

Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced and The Who & the What; Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window; Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars and Topdog/Underdog; Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House and Eurydice; Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class and True West; Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Paula Vogel, Indecent and Mother Play 

Course Description

English 4810 is designed to assist students in making the transition from life in the university to life in the professional working world. Toward that end, the course is structured around two related focuses. The first portion of the class examines the history, theory, and practice of user interface design, leading up to a user experience test of a workplace writing technology. In the second portion of the class, students will utilize these writing technologies to build their professional portfolios and preparing for the job market. Both focuses, together, will help students integrate the knowledge they have gained during their time at Auburn University and apply it toward their post-graduate lives as writers, workers, and citizens.

Requirements

Assignments include reading responses, analytic essays, job application materials, and a research project.

Readings

TBA

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.