Courses

Course Description

This class will study the art of the short story. Class periods will focus on the building blocks of the short story--beginnings, character, voice, point of view, structure, time, plot, conflict, time, endings, setting, and dialogue. We’ll learn about these topics from reading, discussing, and critiquing professionally published literary fiction, essays on writing by established writers, and student work. Then we’ll apply these writing lessons in our own work, moving through the process of drafting, re-thinking, and revising two stories.

Requirements

• Requirements include the following:

  • participation in workshops
  • responses to assigned reading
  • short craft-building and revision exercises
  • drafts of two stories (7-15 pages each)
  • a portfolio of revised work to include at least two short stories (7-25 pages each)

Readings

We will read story selections by primarily contemporary writers and short story masters— Aimee Bender, TC Boyle, Edwidge Danticat, Louise Erdrich, Percival Everett, Manuel Gonzales, Vanessa Hua, Jamaica Kincaid, Daniel Orozco, and John Edgar Wideman. We’ll also read craft essays from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House and Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

Course Description

In this offering of Poetry 2, we will develop our powers of poetic observation and turn our gazes beyond the immediate experience of the “I” to other sources of material, particularly visual art. While the skills taught will be relevant to writing about any topic, the class will be framed around a collaboration with Jules Collins Smith Museum of Art. It will include tours of exhibitions, such as one on the theme of public monuments, during which we will consider images and their historical, national, personal, and metaphorical associations. We will also attend campus poetry readings and discuss what we can learn from the featured writers, visit the university’s archives to gather ideas, and each class member will research a topic for their poetry of their choosing.  Most importantly, we will study exemplary, contemporary, published poetry. All of these activities are intended to inform the growth of students’ own poetic craft and inspire rigorous revision practices that will serve writers throughout their careers. At the culmination of the semester, students’ poems composed in conversation with art at the museum will be displayed on the walls of the galleries, and refined for inclusion in the final portfolio assignment.

The course approaches poetry both critically and creatively. As a member of the class, you must read assigned texts and analyze them in group discussions and written responses. You must also generate new poems, participate in peer workshops, and revise your poems extensively for your final portfolio. Many activities will take place outside of the classroom and class period.   

Readings

Reading will include poems by Paisley Rekdal, Derrick Austin, Rick Barot, Chiyuma Elliot, Mary Syzbist, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, Robert Lowell, Adam Vines, Ashley M. Jones, Kwoya Maples, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Roger Reeves,  Beth Ann Fennelly, John Berryman, Gabrielle Bates, Christopher Kempf, Robin Conte Lewis, Tarfia Faizullah, John Ashberry, and many others. Students must print poems available online and linked in the online classroom and buy a poetry collection by one of the writers we study for a book review project after the semester has begun.

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

This is a course whose content includes theoretical approaches to law and justice, the representation of some of those approaches in literature, and the more practical applications of those approaches by studying, and writing about, actual legal judgments.  

Requirements

Assignments will include two papers and a final exam.

Readings

Our readings will include Supreme Court cases, Sophocles’ Ajax, Electra, and Philoctetes, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?; and David Edmonds’ Would You Kill the Fat Man?  

Course Description

This course explores how fossil fuel has powered the aesthetics and forms of literature and culture in modernity. We will range widely across literature and film, periods and places in the course.  We will begin in the early 1800s with British novelists such as Emily Bronte and Mary Shelley. In the former, we will study how home fires in Wuthering Heights are powered by “wood, peat, and coal,” marking the novel’s slippage between periods and energy regimes. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, we will explore Victor Frankenstein’s obsession with “electricity and galvanism” which of course produces the being we know as “the creature” or in film, the monster. We will see how for American modernist Ernest Hemingway, the “proper way” for men to cook in the outdoors is “over coals,” while for British modernist D.H. Lawrence the threat of potentially running out of coal results in plots that produce no children. More recently in the twentieth century, we will study classic films such as Giant (1956) and Wild River (1960) which epitomize an American aesthetic that links privileged races, classes, and genders to seemingly endless supplies of energy. Such representations are challenged by Black novelist Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower which envisions a culture run out of fuel and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were which represents the fictional community of Kosawa fighting back from the environmental damage wrought by an American oil company. Along the way we will learn ecocritical concepts and practices. 

Requirements

one short paper, one longer paper with research, a midterm, final, and quizzes 

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

Study of topics that apply across genres of creative writing and an introduction to genre- specific principles. Assigned reading, writing exercises, and other forms of creative experimentation will develop confidence in analyzing, constructing and discussing poems, stories and other forms of imaginative expression. This course is a required prerequisite to all other creative writing classes.

Course Description

In the early years of science fiction, space frequently figured as the American West writ large—the final frontier. While less immediately evident, science fiction has long drawn from and contributed to a range of southern imaginaries. Even as some white writers, in the twilight of American empire, set their dystopian survivalist fantasies in the region (The Road, The Walking Dead), self-consciously “southern” varieties of Afrofuturism and speculative blackness, ranging from OutKast to novels such as Kiese Laymon’s Long Division and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, represent it as a site of vibrant black futurity contesting and sometimes transcending both the nation’s plantation past and its carceral present. Meanwhile, cli-fi and ecofiction set in the South, from Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is on the rise as the region’s coasts begin to sink. 

This course seeks to make sense of these and other “southern turns” in science fiction and related speculative modes, broadly defined across multiple media and subgenres. What happens when speculative fiction goes from western to southern and/or when our understanding of “the South” shifts its gaze from past to future? How does the speculative allow writers to conceive of the South in ways that transcend the black/white binary that has long shaped how the region is imagined?

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

This course serves as the gateway class for the professional and public writing (PPW) track in Auburn University’s Department of English. The track seeks to provide students with key skills for writing in various fields that place a high priority on skilled communication, whether in business or in the non-profit sector, including editing and design, education, and the law. In this course, we will consider what constitutes professional and public writing, and practice various types of audience-centered communication. You will gain practice in research, editing, design, and writing for a variety of different communicative contexts.

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, analysis, and editing 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); LaRocque, P. (2013). The book on writing: The ultimate guide to writing well. Grey and Guvnor P. (~$10); Williams, R. (2014). The non-designer’s design book. Pearson Education. ($16 for electronic)

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? 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 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

Reading theory is a bit like reading a foreign language, the language of advanced literary and cultural analysis. In this course, we will discuss readings from a broad (though far from exhaustive) range of theoretical schools. We will practice explicating theory in clear and accurate terms, applying it as a framework for textual analysis, and considering which approaches make sense when. No prior knowledge of literary theory is necessary.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Identify, define, and use concepts from literary and cultural theory
• Apply strategies that will help you understand and respond to difficult pieces of writing
• Use concepts and ideas from our readings in order to make an argument about a text
• Justify the use of one framework over another or a synthesis of multiple theories

Readings

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Jonathan Culler, A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory; Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Epic

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the basic elements of creative nonfiction. Students will read a range of published essays that 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. Students will also write a series of short assignments along the way, which may include portraits of family members, research-based discussions of musicians, athletes, or historical figures, investigations of life-changing personal experiences, humorous depictions of ordinary situations, and more. 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

This topics course in literature aims to explore how writers of texts represent things, ideas, or individuals. This course semester’s theme, The Social Lives of Plants, asks students to read, discuss, and write about literature that engages the new landscapes and knowledge gaps we encounter in our lives and relations, human and non-human, within the Anthropocene—or the current geological age in which human life and activity most intensively influence all other forms. Guided by scholarly writing in history, microbiology, Caribbean ethnobotany, medicine, Indigenous and African religion, and more, we will read a wide-range of genres and texts; these include scientific treatises written on the colonial plantations of Haiti, a nineteenth-century American novel, contemporary documentary and dramatic films, science fiction novels about climate change, and more. Like the writers we read, we will consider ways of reformulating ideas about modernity, the natural, the social, and the human.  

Course Description

This course considers popular American culture from around the turn of the twentieth century as emblematic of the major changes in modern life. We will begin the class by reading selections from Scott McCloud’s important book Understanding Comics (1993) that will give us examples and vocabulary to analyze comics as narratives that communicate visually. We will then focus on comic strips and single-panel cartoons that appeared in newspapers and magazines from the 1890s through the beginning of Word War II, considering how the comics of the time depicted and shaped changing ideas about urbanization, immigration, women’s rights, and other concerns of the era. We will also consider how comics participate within a wider media landscape, borrowing strategies from other art of the time including slapstick comedy and collage. We will read the essays of the time that responded to the widespread popularity of comic strips and consider the adaptations of comics into other media that took place then (plays, ballets) and now (video games).

Requirements

Reading journal, two exams, formal analysis of a comic strip, summary of a critical essay, cultural critique of a contemporary comic book/web comic/graphic novel.

Readings

Primary readings: Hogan’s Alley/The Yellow Kid cartoons by R.F. Outcault; Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay; flapper comics by Nell Brinkley, Rose O’Neill, and other women cartoonists; Krazy Kat by George Herriman; The Seven Lively Arts by Gilbert Seldes.

Secondary readings: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, How the Other Half Laughs by Jean Lee Cole, George Herriman: A Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand.

Course Description

English 4020 will familiarize you with principles and practical applications of copymarking, copyediting, comprehensive editing, and proofreading. We will work with professional writing from technology, business, science, and academics. We will work with both print and online documents, both inside and outside of class. You will learn general knowledge about, and advanced skills in, editing:

• the various roles of editors
• strategies for working as part of an editorial team
• the concept and application of “levels of edit”
• strategies for using standard tools for electronic and online collaboration, editing, and manuscript preparation
• strategies for solving common problems in usage, syntax, and organization such as wordiness, faulty parallelism, and lack of cohesion
• conventions and nuances of punctuation in standard written English
• ways to use standard reference works (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style) that editors rely on
• the concept of “house style” and the process of creating a style guide and style sheet

Requirements

Assignments may include the following: reading quizzes and class preparation assignments, in-depth practice assignments, and major editing assignment

Readings

Rude, C. D., and Eaton, A. 2011. Technical Editing, 5/e. New York: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-205-78671-8

Course Description

We’ve all heard the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,' but what is it exactly about a picture (as Jay Lemke puts it) that not even a thousand words can explain? In this course, we’ll investigate visual rhetoric from several theoretical perspectives: semiotics, visual culture, document design, rhetorical theory, and visualizing data. Students will complete short and more complex design exercises as well as a client-based final project.

Course Description

In this course, students will learn about language structure, language in society, and language acquisition. Throughout the semester, students will study and analyze linguistic patterns from several languages that will, in turn, allow them to gain insight into the structures of a specific foreign language that they are studying, know, or are interested in.

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, absorb a great deal of French, but then functionally conquer the world. By 1900, English was spoken in every inhabited continent in the world. By 2000, English had become the language of international commerce, international, travel, and the Internet. 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, as well as countless others. How did an obscure language spoken on an average-sized island achieve such success? Our exploration into 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

“At the Grand Concourse 149th Street Station in the Bronx, graffiti writers gather at what they call
The Writer’s Bench.” –Style Wars, 1983
“I still wake up every three weeks from some dream where I’m in a down low sneaker store that no
one knows about that doesn’t exist buying some discontinued model that doesn’t exist anymore
either. I wake up in a bliss.” –Bobbito Garcia, Where’d You Get Those?
This course offers students an opportunity to explore the intersections of subculture, space, and
rhetoric. More specifically, this class will consider the spaces of subcultures, contending that these
real and imagined spaces are essential to understanding subcultural orientations towards the
mainstream. Through a variety of individual and collaborative projects, we will unpack the various
social and spatial factors that constitute subcultural identity. Using two subcultures as our starting
points—graffiti writers and sneakerheads—we will examine the ways that subcultural style depends
both on particular rhetorics and on alternative spaces of belonging.
Together, we will engage with a range of texts—from tweets to the freight trains that roll through
Opelika to theoretical texts and everything in between—that offer us grammars and perspectives to
account for the relationship between subculture and various rhetorical spaces. From there, students
will select and study their own subcultures, using the spaces and writings of these communities to
construct rhetorical histories.

Requirements

Students can expect to: read key texts on subculture, space and place, and rhetoric; produce
consistent short writing assignments that mobilize some of the concepts we examine in class;
compose major projects on topics of subculture, space, and writing; contribute to a course
soundtrack; and present on final course projects.

Course Description

This is a class in the writing of short stories. You will write two-three short stories. We will workshop them in class. You will read the stories that your peers write, and you will write responses to those stories. Every one. We will emphasize editing, revising, rewriting, and reworking your stories: not just writing first drafts, but polishing them to the point where they are worthy of publication. Finally, you will research the literary marketplace, prepare cover letters, and submit your work to magazines for publication.  

Course Description

Have you ever wondered how your environment affects what you think and create? or how the stories that we tell about a place influence its fate? Such questions have fascinated scholars and poets long before the genre of “nature writing” became popular or words like “eco-criticism” and “environmentalism” became a part of our academic vocabulary. In early modern England, as new technologies and scientific discoveries began to change the nation’s physical and ideological landscapes, expressions of concern over the environment also began to change its literary culture. Country estates became focal points of interest as a growing number of landowners began transforming their properties into extravagant works of green art, full of rare and costly hybrids. These large-scale transformations, in turn, prompted poets and writers to describe the landscape in ways that were increasingly less symbolic and more realistic. This course will focus on early modern descriptions of the green world from an eco-compositional perspective. We will begin with two classical works that deeply influenced early modern literary culture: Plato’s Phaedrus, with its famous rendition of the locus amoenus (or pleasant place) as an inspiration for poetry, and Horace’s second Epode with its iconic celebration of the Sabine estate. From there, we will range through a number of early modern genres known for their descriptions of the green world, from gardening manuals to country-house poems, from pastoral fantasies to landscape poetry. As we explore these genres and their contexts, we will keep returning to the connections they make between environment and creativity, botanical cultivation and literary composition. Our class discussions, in particular, will center on how early modern concepts of the environment can provide useful points of departure for analyzing our own present relationship with the green world.

Note: This course is cross-listed with the Sustainability Studies program; if you would like to learn more about the requirements of the Sustainability Studies Minor, feel free to send questions and comments to Becki Retzlaff, the program director of Sustainability Studies, at rcr0001@auburn.edu.

Requirements

Weekly discussion posts, three short writing assignments (with a creative component), a final 10-page research essay, and two exams (midterm and final).

Readings

Our primary reading list will include selections from the work of Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Phillips, and Abraham Cowley. Secondary texts will focus on key voices in the study of early modern ecology, including Raymond Williams, Diane McColley, Ken Hilter, and Robert Macfarlane, among others.

Course Description

This course studies a wide variety of literature that responds to revolutionary movements in Britain, the Caribbean, Europe, and America from the end of the 1700s to the middle of the 1800s. Works and authors may include Rousseau’s Emile, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Percy Shelley’s poems and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Mary Prince’s The History of a West Indian Slave, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft’s  A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and the anonymous Trinidadian novel, Adolphus, a Tale.  Issues we will study include the abolition of slavery, the rights of women and children, the “rights of man” to self rule, the rise of industrialization and nationalism, and the replacement of absolutist monarchies.  

Requirements

one short paper, one long paper with research, one midterm, one final, quizzes 

Course Description

This advanced undergraduate seminar in literary studies is an examination of black aesthetic culture from 1980 to 1990. Herein we employ multidisciplinary theories and practices that support our deep study of the intersections of blackness, gender, sexuality, and being in black expressive cultures of the 1980s. We will consider the ways that black novelists, poets, playwrights, and others express, and contend with, the beautiful and terrible contours of black life during this decade. We give particular attention to the ways in which black aesthetics in this post-Civil Rights era prefigure, and usher in, blackness that is always and already (be)coming. In so doing, this seminar offers an in-depth introduction to key texts and themes of The Black 1980s, including works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Ernest Gaines, David Bradley, Rita Dove, and others. 

Course Description

In this course we will survey some of the American fiction and poetry that gave contour to the modernist aesthetic.

Our exploration will include the period influence of the Parisian avant-garde (painters Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Gris; poets Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Pound; performer Josephine Baker), some of the foundational figures of American jazz (Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson, Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, et al.), and several exponents of the Harlem Renaissance (Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman).

The hope is to arrive at a contextual understanding of the disparate thematic, stylistic, and structural concerns of the modernist project in its plurivalent American incarnations. As always, the professor will rely upon the informed generosity of his students to promote a spirit of enthusiastic collaborative inquiry.

Requirements

Consistent in-class participation; one term paper (3000 words); midterm exam; final exam; weekly contributions (500 words each) to Canvas discussion forum.

Readings

Three Lives, Gertrude Stein, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore

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

weekly discussion posts, two short writing assignments (with a creative component), a commonplace book, a final research essay (10-12 pages), and two exams (midterm and final)

Readings

An ample selection of Milton’s poems, supplemented with a selection of his letters, essays, and prolusions (school exercises); substantial 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

This course focuses on five poets whose work has helped to shape American poetry in the 21^st century: Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Ed Roberson, Charles Wright, and Jorie Graham. We will consider the distinctive achievement of each poet we read but we will also work to frame a conversation among them, across the wide range of their writing, about what poems are and do in our time and what the making of art has to do with justice, human well-being, and the future of the earth.

Requirements

A reading notebook with regular, brief entries; two critical essays of 1200-1500 words; and a final project.

Readings

Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins; Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, Susan Howe, Debths; Spontaneous Particulars The Telepathy of Archives, Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World; Ask What Has Changed, Charles Wright, Negative Blue, Jorie Graham, [To] the Last [Be] Human

Course Description

This course examines intersections of travel, mobility, and the literary imagination across a range of British and American texts. Starting with the nineteenth century, when new technologies of travel and transportation, and increased emigration globally, helped to reshape concepts of individual growth and movement, we will explore a diverse range of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose, including travel writing.  Some of the questions that will inform our study include:  why does one travel, whether voluntarily or involuntarily? In what ways were travel and mobility informed by identities of race, gender, and class? How would local, Indigenous, and national identities survive and adapt in this expanding, accelerating, and interconnected world? What did and does it mean for individuals to be “connected” in new networks of travel and technology? This is a course, however, not just about how literary characters travel, but about looking back at your own journey as an English major and the skills in research and writing you have developed along the way.  Students will hone these abilities with a substantial research paper for the course.  Students will also develop a reflective e-Portfolio project intended to help them better understand and articulate the kinds of skills in interpretation, research, and communication they’ve cultivated through the study of literary texts.

Requirements

research paper; e-Portfolio; midterm exam; short response papers and research projects.

Readings

Required reading (subject to change): Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies.

Course Description

For most of its history before the 20th century, the word “Modern” has meant “Bad.”  This is perhaps because the “modern” can seem uncomfortably or dangerously different from the “traditional” or “usual” way of doing things.  Modern music, modern fashion, modern technology, modern architecture, modern art, modern romance: they are not always easily accepted, are they?  Disruption sometimes accompanies Modern things.   In literary terms, the “modern” can mean new techniques (new ways of writing) but also new ideas (new ways of thinking or even new ways of living).  This capstone seminar will address “modern” artistic, social, and cultural changes occurring at the close of the nineteenth century, nudging into the famous period in the early 20th century when experimental art and writing began to emerge, bringing us new, sometimes confusing terms like “Modernism” and “modernist.”  To sort through some of these interesting developments, we will consider key American writers as a portal into the evolving tension between “traditional” and “modern” concepts.  Our main objectives: identify modern themes as they emerge in our literature, learn about American literary texts in terms of style, structure, and content; explore advanced scholarship related to our topics; and improve writing, research, and speaking skills.

Requirements

class participation, midterm examinations, weekly writing exercises, brief oral presentation, 20-page final paper.

Readings

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868); Henry James, Washington Square (1880); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1892); Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1893);  Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

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 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. 

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 ePortfolio which will showcase your identity and skills as a professional writer.

Course Description

For more than 20 years, J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series has taken over popular culture leading to a major theme park, pilgrimages to King’s Cross station (complete with a platform 9 ¾ sign and props for us to imagine we are en route to Hogwarts), and countless other cultural objects and products. Additionally, conversations about Harry Potter’s impact on issues such as race, class, gender, ethics, and heroism have permeated cultural discourse—Rowling herself having engaged in these conversations on platforms like Twitter. In this course we will read Harry Potter as literary and cultural critics, joining the burgeoning scholarly conversation about the texts, using these texts to think critically about our past, present, and future. Students will be sorted into houses and work in these groups (houses) to help the larger class explore, children’s and young adult fiction, textual themes, fans, mythologies, technologies, politics and issues of class, race, and gender in the Potterverse. In order to better be part of the Harry Potter fan community, our class will create one of our own, using Twitter to engage in public-facing discourse. 

Our central course questions will include: What makes these books so successful? In what ways are they traditionally literary and imaginative? How or why should we read Harry Potter (or popular literature in general) as “serious literature”? What does it mean to do so? Why do these texts resonate so deeply for recent generations of students? How do they change/develop over the course of the series? What are the major issues, topics, and ideas they address, and how do they respond to them? What does it mean to read these texts a cultural objects that comment on and critique social, political, and cultural codes? What is the impact of the fan culture on our understanding or interest in these texts and the “Potterverse”? 

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

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?  Our course title, in effect, gives the binding idea to this set of focuses. How do we continue to give lives to literary texts, even perhaps long after they were written?  How does our work as readers and writers demonstrate the hold that literature exerts?  And how does our work of interpretation make texts live again and live in a different way?

Readings

Readings will include Joanna Wolfe & Laura Wilder's Digging Into Literature, and a sampling of representative literary texts.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to the elements of creative writing. We will study the genres of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry, both by analyzing published works and holding rigorous workshops where students will share creative work of their own. We will discuss the fiction elements of plot, character, setting, dialogue, and more, and will consider how creative non-fiction can include many of the elements of fiction while also focusing on research, memory, and the tricky distinctions between truth and speculation. Our discussions of poetry will include standard craft elements such as line and stanza breaks, diction, and various poetic devices. The goal of the course is to give students a deeper understanding of the various genres of creative writing, to hone their skills of literary analysis, and to begin the long journey to finding their voices. Students will be expected to participate in hearty discussions, to give meaningful feedback to their peers, to turn in thoughtful work, and to focus deeply on revising their work throughout the course.  

Course Description

The aims of ENGL 2010 are to introduce you to the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills you will need as a professional writer in a variety of industries, fields, and contexts.

Requirements

Assignments will include instructional texts, user research reports, and presentations.

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. Informed by contemporary scholarship and trends in workplace communication, the course will emphasize three related areas of focus: students will read about and engage with key issues and approaches in the field; they will develop practical strategies for researching, analyzing, and composing texts for a range of audiences and situations; and they will develop projects that both reflect their interests and contribute to their emerging expertise in writing, editing, design, user advocacy, and content and community management.

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

Students will be asked to read, analyze, and draw on conventions of professional genres throughout the course. Assignments will include the following: reflective writing, discussion posts based on assigned readings, brief reports that engage with issues and approaches in the field, project management documentation, deliverables for a collaborative project that engages with a local community issue, and multimedia presentations.

Readings

Students will read a variety of texts that introduce them to concepts, principles, methods, and practices related to the work of professional and public writing. Readings will reflect current scholarship in the field (focused generally on areas of writing, rhetoric, and technical communication) and will be made available through the Auburn University Bookstore and AU Canvas.

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 I 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? 

Requirements

regular attendance and well-prepared participation in class, a notebook of research exercises, short writing assignments, and reflections; a research proposal, a presentation, and an e-portfolio.

Readings

Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research; Joanna Wolfe & Laura Wilder, Digging into Literature; The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story; The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

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 selection of short stories and lyric poetry (no purchase necessary)

Course Description

In this class, you will learn to analyze different communication situations and to write, revise, and design medical and health-related information to meet the needs of different readers (experts and non-experts) through several document genres: reports, magazine articles, and scientific posters. This course is designed for students pursuing careers in medicine and health-related fields as well as English majors interested in learning how to write more effectively in these scientific areas. Students will be encouraged to adapt assignments to their specific area(s) of subject matter interest and to share and discuss their work in class. 

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 principle 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 vary and change, what happens when languages meet, and what language can tell us about the brain and the mind.

Course Description

This course will introduce students to major currents in critical theory, with a particular focus on the schools of thought that influence contemporary approaches. Towards that end, we will be concentrating on structuralist theory from its foundations in the early 20 -century to its manifestations in contemporary theories of race, gender, culture, and the environment.

Course Description

This course will help students develop an understanding of Poetics through critical reading, the drafting process, and class workshops. Drafting and revising poems will be a major component of our creative work. We will read and analyze published poetry with specific attention to craft elements, such as diction, syntax, line, stanza, meter, form, point of view, symbolism, sensory details, and tone. The course will focus on creating original poems, workshopping peer writings, and studying published poems. Assigned class readings will provide inspiration for student work and opportunities to hone analytical skills. Class activities include reading discussion, online activities through Canvas, library and digital research, and attendance at poetry readings. This coursework will prepare students to write three series of poems, culminating in a final portfolio of comprehensively revised poetry. Students will be encouraged to practice presenting their work at public readings, explore possible venues for publication, and work together in writing groups.

Course Description

This class will serve as an introduction to the genre of literary nonfiction. We will cover both memoir (writing from your personal experience) and literary journalism (writing from reporting and research). We will consider various questions as we write, chief among them how we shape our personal experiences into stories, and what meaning we bring to bear on those stories. We will learn different modes of research—interviewing, observation, archival research—and how to synthesize all the material you gather into a cohesive essay. We will learn and use the technical elements of writing craft: Scene versus summary, point-of-view, plot, dialogue, etc. The readings assigned for this class will include sports writing, personal essays, science writing, lyric essays, and other kinds of writing that fall under the vast umbrella of literary nonfiction. You will be assigned a few short writing assignments (one to two pages) and then you will each write and workshop one memoir essay and one literary journalism essay, each ten to twelve pages. No experience in writing necessary.

Course Description

Our class will read and explore ample selections from the Bible, one of the most influential collections of texts in the Western world. Although we will examine selections from both the Hebrew Scriptures (which Christians often refer to as the “Old Testament”) and the New Testament, the course will not be a “Bible study” in the sense of that phrase perhaps most current in America today. Rather, we will adopt approaches prevalent within literary studies, considering, for example, how knowledge of the specific cultures, historical periods, and places within which the books were initially produced might influence how we interpret them. We will also explore literary strategies used within the Bible (for example, metaphor, allegory, irony, word play, symbolism, and hyperbole) and apply other strategies commonly used in literary studies, such as analysis of rhetorical devices and of literary forms or genres (prophecies, creation myths, histories and chronicles, legal codes, wisdom literature, proverbs, apocalypses, gospels, parables “acts,” and doctrinal letters). As part of this approach, we will at times consider the influence of non-biblical literature upon various biblical passages. Our class will study as well canon formation, or the process by which major versions of “the Bible” as readers today know them took shape. As time permits, we will take into account some later commentary upon and exegesis or interpretation of relevant passages from the Bible.

This course should enhance students’ appreciation of the Bible’s literary dimensions and deepen their understanding of the meanings of various books of the Bible for some of their earliest audiences. Of course, learning more about the Bible’s stories and their themes should also help students to better understand numerous later works of art and literature influenced by these scriptures.

Course Description

In the 2015 documentary Sneakerheadz, the rapper Wale considers what sneakers mean to him.
“Sneakers,” he notes, have always reflected “who you wanna be, who you believe you are, or where
you come from.” Sneakers, in other words, are not just material objects that cushion your feet from
the ground. They are biographical, telling a story about the wearer. They are persuasive, making
arguments as they step. They are significant, creating meaning as they move through different
cultural spaces. We might, therefore, consider sneakers an example of “wearable rhetorics,” sartorial
technologies that augment, and are augmented by, our experiences of everyday life.

In this course, we will consider this rhetorical and cultural potential of the things we wear. Together,
we will read work on objects like sneakers, Apple Watches, jeans, baseball caps, and other everyday
things. As we read, we will interrogate our own relationship with wearable rhetorics. Once we’ve
developed this framework for understanding the relationship between wearing and rhetoric, students
will select a specific object and conduct a sustained study on it: its rhetorical history, its cultural
circulation, and its impact on different social contexts. We will pay particular attention in this class
to writing about wearable rhetorics, the challenges of designing and executing a writing project on a
seemingly mundane, everyday object. As we discuss and practice this research, the hope of this
course is that students leave considering rhetoric not just as something we do or make, but also as
something we wear.

Students in this course can expect to: read and discuss key work on wearable rhetorics; produce
regular short writing; conduct field research on different wearable rhetorics; design, execute, and
present on a study on one specific rhetorical object; and contribute to a course Spotify playlist.

Course Description

We are quickly approaching the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, over a decade of the streaming platform Twitch and indie games website Itch.io, and the ninth generation of video game consoles. The most successful TV/film Kickstarter of all time funded the animated series for D&D livestream Critical Role. Game Studies has existed as an interdisciplinary field for over three decades, with its own subfields and debates.

This course will explore tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) as storytelling engines. We'll read academic articles, games journalism, and video essays, and think about what makes for successful writing about games. We'll think about the new narrative frames introduced by Actual Play (performed TTRPGs) and livestreaming as well as games as transmedia phenomena, influencing and being influenced by television, film, comic books, and many other genres and modes. We'll examine representation in games: both what is depicted and who creates them.  And of course, share a lot of games, big and small, with one another. For those not already familiar with TTRPG and Actual Play, recommended preparatory listening/playing will be provided after Registration.

Students will gain knowledge of the fields of narratology (the study of the structure of stories), ludology (the study of actions and events in games), and other related fields, and have opportunities to participate in ongoing research.

Course Description

In the beginning of the medieval period, London was the large Roman town that grew up north of the only bridge that spanned the River Thames until the sixteenth century. By the end of the medieval period, London was the principal city of the Kingdom of England and, arguably, the whole island of Britannia. It has not lost this significance. How did London gain its pre-eminence over other political and economic rivals, such as Colchester, Tamworth, Winchester, and even York? How did writers of the medieval period describe life in this city? In this course, we will examine some texts that create cities as cultural space with its own laws and accepted behavioral practices. In other words, how did the English invent London? Our texts will be largely drawn from England but may include both translations and material in an earlier form of the language known as Middle English. Texts in Middle English will be in heavily glossed, friendly editions. Our objective will be to see how texts reflect the culture of an early urban space. Or, how medieval London fits English culture to a tea.

Requirements

Semester-long Research project (c. 20 pages), Interactive Game, Final Exam, Vibrant Discussion, and a healthy sense of humor

Readings

Readings will include texts by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and others.

Course Description

Shakespearean theater came into its own during the period of transition from a predominately manuscript culture to the steady advance of print. How was manuscript culture adapted to serve the functions of communication, record-keeping, and legal documentation, along with writing and dissemination of literary texts? What were the materials of this culture, and what can we learn from the process of making and using these materials? What were the attractions and anxieties associated with the culture of print? How did the technologies of writing and reading mark and imprint Shakespeare’s works? We will examine manuscript and print materials in the library’s Special Collections, experiment with making our own ink using a 16^th-century recipe, writing with quills, and creating letters according to early modern practices. About 4-5 weeks of the semester will be dedicated to playing a role-immersion game from Reacting to the Past series in which two theater companies will advocate for a play and compete for a theater license (the knowledge of manuscript and print cultures, and especially the skills of letter-writing and printing your own strategic writing will surely come in handy). As always in my classes, your individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

Requirements

Requirements will likely include faithful attendance, response papers, short essay (5 pp.), research essay (10 pp.), short position paper and speech (3 pp.), short assignments related to the reacting game, final exam, and enthusiastic and meaningful participation.

Readings

Reading list may include a selection of manuscripts, writings of Elizabeth I, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s selected Sonnets, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, as well as secondary readings.

Course Description

This is a class in the writing of short stories. You will write two short stories. We will workshop them in class. You will read the stories that your peers write, and you will write responses to those stories. Every one. We will emphasize editing, revising, rewriting, and reworking your stories: not just writing first drafts, but polishing them to the point where they are worthy of publication. Finally, you will research the literary marketplace, prepare cover letters, and submit your work to magazines for publication.

Course Description

In this class, you’ll learn how to edit and revise documents from three different perspectives: substantively, at the sentence and paragraph level, and in terms of copyediting and proofreading. You’ll also learn how to work effectively with authors as well as revise and edit your own writing by working in peer review groups. We’ll work with a variety of documents created in subject matter disciplines that may include technology, business, and science as well as texts intended for academic publication.

Course Description

This class introduces students to the major theories of rhetoric, dating back to classical times, and to study the ways these theories have been applied. Students will get a chance to see these theories in action and to use them as tools of analysis of rhetorical performances. Although the class will number about 25, we’ll depend heavily on discussion.

Requirements

Students will write two papers, each about 6-8 pages in length, and take a final exam.

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 (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, Euphoria, White Lotus, Succession, Andor, and Righteous Gemstones). 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).

Course Description

This is an advanced study of the craft of fiction writing. Successful completion of Intro to Creative Writing and Fiction Writing I are prerequisites for enrollment. The emphasis of the course will be divided between the students’ own writing and the study of published works. The major assignments for the course are 2 fiction stories (12 pages min.) which will be submitted for workshop

Course Description

The course is about learning how to draft and refine original poetry through reading, discussion, and workshopping. When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: An Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia will be the central texts in this offering of Poetry 2, and the sources from which we will draw ideas for your writing practices.  The contents of these two anthologies are very different. One collects indigenous poetry and groups it by geographic areas across the continent and beyond. The other collects poetry about the natural world by a range of writers, all of whom live in the bioregion of Southern Appalachia. What the books have in common is that both encourage us to think about place, identity, and various forms of categorization, representation, breadth, and focus. Whether or not it seems the themes relate to your writing, you will encounter diverse models and poetic styles to inspire your decisions about what to include, omit, and other elements of craft.

About half of class time will be devoted to discussing exemplary published poetry, and about half will be devoted to workshopping student poems. The course will also incorporate writing prompts, critical response assignments, and activities such as participating in events with poets including Joy Harjo, former Poet Laureate of United States and editor of the anthology of Native poetry. You will be expected to attend several evening readings and class meetings outside of the classroom.

The course will culminate with a pair of projects. For the critical project, you will have the opportunity to choose an anthology with a focus that interests you, such as A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poets, Vinegar and Char (an anthology of verse about Southern food), What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People, literary field guides to other regions, and more.

Your creative and ultimate goal as a member of the class will be to revise the poetry you generate during the semester into a polished final portfolio.

Course Description

This course will explore the celebrated “university wits” of sixteenth-century London—a group of innovative young writers whose plumes one glib critic accused Shakespeare of stealing! Imagined by Stephen Greenblatt as a “fraternity of restless, hungry writers” in a rapidly evolving print marketplace, these talented young authors experimented with a wide range of genres, including poetry, plays, proto-novels, and journalistic pamphlets. Reading and discussing key selections from their prolific output alongside scholarship on this formative literary period will provide a shared frame of reference for exploring current conversations taking place around matters of form, gender, reading practice, social satire, and material book culture. The ultimate goal of our readings will be to help you discover a research topic that contributes directly to your career goals. Thus, close attention will be paid throughout the semester to the cultivation of research-related interpretive skills, specifically those needed for the crafting of a 20-page scholarly article. For example, we will strategize together on how best to use library resources in finding material, how to formulate an effective critical methodology for our chosen topic, or, more generally, how to manage the various stages of a substantive research project. Ultimately, this intensive research seminar, required for the completion of the Literature Track, serves as excellent preparation for anyone planning to go to graduate school.

Prerequisite: the successful completion of ENGL 3130: Survey of Critical Theory

Requirements

Attendance and well-prepared participation; regular, short writing assignments; a seminar paper (20 pages); one presentation, and a final ePortfolio.

Readings

Tentative readings include Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Lodge’s Rosalind, Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale, Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, and a selection of pamphlets and paratextual material.

Course Description

The Capstone Class will focus largely on revision as you prepare your e-portfolio. We will assess the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry you have written during your undergraduate career at Auburn with the goal of assembling a creative portfolio that is representative of your work as a writer. The basic requirements for the Capstone portfolio will remain the same (consisting of heavily revised work from two of our three genres), but the assigned texts, the class visits, as well as aspects of the professionalization component of the Fall Capstone, will focus on 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

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 read and spend time discussing 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 see other successful pieces, practice your writing vocabulary, and think 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 (7-15 pages)
• One original short story (7-15 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, Margaret Atwood, Linda Bierds, Richard Blanco, Billy Collins, David Lee, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Arthur Sze, Natasha Tretheway, and Kevin Young.

We will read short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O’Brien, and Daniel Orozco, and ZZ Packer. These will come from The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction.

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

Course Description

Fifty years after Title IX was passed, marking a significant increase in the opportunities and resources available for women to demand, women now make up 41% of college athletes. Yet, women’s sports receive only about 5% of the total coverage in media, according to a 30-year longitudinal study.[1] While sport is a highly visible and influential aspect of modern culture, women’s stories in sport remain few and far between. This course will look to literature to investigate how we think about sport as a social and cultural phenomenon – as well as how those ideas are bound up in our concept of women as athletes. Sport both reflects and shapes our society, which means studying the literary texts produced around sport allows us to unpack essential dynamics about modern culture, especially at the intersection(s) of gender and other interwoven identities. We will explore narratives from the worlds of track & field, soccer, tennis, baseball, field hockey, squash, and gymnastics.

[1] Cooky, C., Council, L. D., Mears, M. A., & Messner, M. A. (2021). “One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019.” Communication & Sport, 9(3), 347–371. https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795211003524

Readings

Texts will come from a variety of genres and modalities, including scholarly writing, literary works, film, television, journalism, and memoir. Examples may include:

• Good for a Girl – Lauren Fleshman
• Running While Black – Alison Mariella Désir
• The Keeper – Kelcey Ervick
• We Ride Upon Sticks – Quan Barry
• The Resisters – Gish Jen
• Carrie Soto is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Western Lane – Chetna Maroo

Course Description

How do you choose what to write and share online for an organization? What to remove? How to reach different audiences? How to make sure that the content you include is engaging, relevant, useful, ethical, and a pleasure to interact with? This course will teach you strategies to create written content and help you make those decisions. Throughout the semester, we’ll use a case-study approach and work on a focused project. 

If you like to write and analyze . . .

If you want to apply your critical thinking to reaching specific public audiences . . .

If you want to be a decision-maker who can guide an organization’s public writing . . . this course is for you.

Requirements

You will use established techniques to research a site’s content. You will write short-form content that is engaging, relevant, useful, ethical, and, as much as possible, a pleasure to read and use. You also will develop a strategy for an organization to manage their content in the future.

Readings

Tentative selections: Gawande, A. (2011). The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. Picador. (~$9), Halverson, K., & Rach, M. (2012). Content strategy for the web (2nd ed.). New Riders. (~$21 for electronic), Redish, G. (2012). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works (2^nd ed.). (starting at ~$18 for electronic), and Selected short essays.

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 topic for this course comes from a line by poet William Blake, considered by many the father of British Romanticism. Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,” from which the line is taken, sharply critiques England’s fall into the ravages of industrial capitalism (what Blake calls the “dark Satanic mills”) while holding out hope that there is still the possibility of overcoming the violence and exploitation of capitalism in order to transform England into a new Jerusalem, an harmonious and socially just social order. Jerusalem is also the name of one of the most significant British plays of the 21^st century, that updates Blake’s social criticism and dreams of social change to our present historical moment. Going back to Shakespeare (even further if you like), British drama has been a vital, energetic and significant part of British literature, as it offers withering social criticism—often through comedy—of the way we live now. Not content with stopping at critique, the best of this drama has explored the possibility of change at the social, cultural and political levels. American drama is certainly more well-known in this country, but if you take this course you’ll find yourself introduced to a wide array of writers running from the comic to the tragic, from mainstream realism to more adventurous forms of writing, and whose subject matter ranges from the ethics of cloning to how the development of major cities creates disenfranchised people. Since many of our courses cover African-American literature, we’ll be doing a unit on African-British drama. While you may not know most of the playwrights coming into this course, I can promise you their writing is thought-provoking, rewarding and exciting.

Requirements

A 4-page essay (20%); a 10-page essay (30%); 5 reading responses 1 ½ pages (20%); hour exam and final exam (15% each).

Readings

Alan Bennett, The History Boys; Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem; Caryl Churchill, A Number; Martin Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness; David Hare, Straight Line Crazy; Natalie Ibu, Contemporary Plays by Black British Writers; Martin McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore; Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt; Kate Tempest, Wasted

Course Description

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, distrubing 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

a midterm exam, a final exam, a term paper (3000 words), weekly contributions (500 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

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

As readers, most of us rely on the judgements of others to navigate the expansive world of new books and literary writing. We might be guided by the number of stars on Goodreads or Amazon, by interviews and reviews we read, or by recommendations from others whose perspectives we care about or whose judgment we respect. Some of us are also happy to join the reviewing fray, sharing our assessments with others. It is easy, and often accurate enough, to attribute our literary preferences and reading pleasures to “taste,” for which there is, as the saying goes, no accounting. Over the last few decades, many literary critics—Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, Postcolonial, Cultural alike--have thought about individual reading preferences in light of cultural and economic forces that form us as readers, shape our reading practices, and hold sway over the production and reception of literary writing. Such culture-focused approaches represent a turn away from aesthetic concerns, which have to do with how we experience literary texts, how we think about their value to us as individuals and to the world, and how we frame and defend judgements of them. The past four or five years have brought evidence of a counter-turn, a renewal of interest in how we experience literature and talk about its value, with the publication of books like Timothy Aubry’s Guilty Aesthetic Pleasure (2018) and Michael Clune’s In Defense of Judgment (2021) and a special section devoted to aesthetics in a recent issue of PMLA. In this class, we’ll consider these questions of pleasure, use, and value in a selection of short novels and a range of poems, all written between 2012 and the present.

Requirements

well-prepared attendance and participation; regular, brief reading responses; two shorter essays (1200-1500 words); and a longer essay (2400-3000 words) or a final project.

Readings

Likely readings include novels by Jenny Offil (Department of Speculation), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Danielle Dutton (Margaret the First), and Maggie Millner (Couplets: A Love Story) and poems by C. D. Wright, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Robin Coste Lewis, Rose McLarney, Nikki Finney, and others.

Course Description

In her 1993 Nobel Prize speech, Toni Morrison shared, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Black folks have always done language, have always found ways to aestheticize articulations of Black life and living. Yet, despite this doing, despite this practice of sublime creativity, the merits and measures of Black art remain fraught by the fictions of race. This seminar quietly beckons the questions of what we read, how we read, and who we read. It places readers within the presence or pretense of “prestige,” asking of them, of us, a daring to delve into the depths of African American writings that have won Pulitzer, National Book Award, or Nobel Prizes. Coloring the Prize occasions a meditation on how Blackness and Black literature muddled or muddied the conception of literary merit. This seminar will survey works of poetry, drama and fiction that were able to achieve prize-winning recognition in spite of the absurdity of race. More importantly, it invites us to complicate our orientations to a literary world undone by African American writers who, through the doing of language, were able to curate disruption.

Course Description

This course explores literary engagement with issues surrounding gender from the High Middle Ages to contemporary times, starting with entanglement of culturally dominant attitudes toward sexuality and cultural views of women. Movement from associating heterosexual love (amor) with sin or selfishness (cupiditas) to associating it with ennobling spiritual piety and civilizing social virtues may be seen in the letters of Abelard and Héloïse, and in Chrétien de Troyes’ chivalric romance, Lancelot. We will then turn to the depiction of self-assertive, playful female agency, and of courtship as a contest of wits and education of desire, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, before looking at nineteenth-century contractions and marginalizing of gendered agency as depicted in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. The course then addresses the emergence of literary evocations of heteronormative gender identities in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando before exploring intersections of gender and race in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.

Requirements

one short page; one longer paper; midterm; final exam; reading quizzes; class participation.

Readings

The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse; Chrétien, Lancelot; Shakespeare, As You Like It; Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Mann, Death in Venice; Woolf, Orlando, Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions.

Course Description

This course explores a broad range of nineteenth-century British fiction with a focus on parents and children and the related social concerns that shaped their portrayal.  As we will soon discover, supposedly stable, two-parent households and nuclear families were the exception, not the norm, in nineteenth-century fiction, which is overrun with orphans, adoptees, single mothers and fathers, stepparents, guardians, and other varieties of non-traditional and surrogate families.  Families were thus a central concern of the time period, as well as the public side of family life and whether the impulses that connected parents and children could be cultivated on a larger societal scale in the in the interests of the ‘Great Human Family,’ as Charles Dickens was fond of remarking. We will begin with the idea of the ‘Romantic Child’ as developed in the early nineteenth-century and its afterlife in Victorian fiction, considering also how ideas developing in the biological sciences and the still new field of psychology influenced fiction of the time.  The course examines related issues and themes such as marriage, education and schooling, and changing attitudes toward nature and the environment and their impact on education. Other questions we will consider include: in what ways did family identities in turn shape different gender roles and expectations—and potential resistance to these expectations?  How did British imperial identity and objectives influence notions of child development and education?  The course also devotes special attention to the place of fiction in the wider Victorian literary marketplace, including the development of serialized publication.  We will read Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby in its original monthly parts (with the original advertising) while also examining the magazine context in which his later novel Great Expectations was published, dwelling alongside poetry and a range of nonfiction essays and articles. By the end of the course, students will have developed a strong understanding of nineteenth-century British fiction in its wider literary, social, and cultural contexts. 

Requirements

research essay; midterm exam; final exam; response papers; reading quizzes; group project

Readings

Major texts studied (subject to change):  Jane Austen, Persuasion; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; George Eliot, Silas Marner; Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman