Courses

Course Description

This course will help students develop an understanding of Creative Writing through critical reading, the drafting process, and class workshops. Drafting and revising will be a major component of our creative work. We will read and analyze popular works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry with specific attention to craft elements, such as setting, characters, point of view, symbolism, description, and tone. The course will focus on creating original works, workshopping peer writings, and studying published literature. Assigned class readings will provide inspiration for student work and opportunities to hone analytical skills. Class activities include reading discussion, online activities through Canvas, digital research, and attendance at creative reading events. This coursework will prepare students to write a personal essay, a work of fiction, and a series of poems. Students are encouraged to practice presenting their work at public readings, explore possible venues for publication, and work together in writing groups. 

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

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

As a shared platform for exploring these questions, we will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Frederick Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, and The Awakening, a novella by Kate Chopin.

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

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 is for students who have some writing experience while being eager to learn more about the dynamic and expansive world of fiction writing. We will read a mix of contemporary and classic short stories to explore elements of craft including plot, character, dialogue, and setting and will discuss how to build rich characters, worlds, and premises. Students will submit two short stories to workshop and will also work on short skill-building exercises along the way. Toward the end of the course, we will work on significantly revising your work for a final portfolio as well. 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 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

"The gay revolution," remarked the novelist Christopher Bram, "began as a literary revolution."  But what exactly constitutes an LGBTQ+ literary history, and how have the evolutions of LGBTQ+ identity been prepared for, described, and transformed by it?  This course seeks to examine this question, paying special attention to how LGBTQ+ writing tries to shape a common history for a diverse community--a community which is itself always being reshaped by the culture around it.  We will begin by examining the "pre-history" of LGBTQ+ writing--works by authors who lived and wrote before the modern understanding of alternate sexualities and genders as distinct identities was framed--as a way of envisioning how a template for describing a lived experience might be formed.  Then we will examine several key texts by Anglophone writers that explore that lived experience in light of shifting cultural and social norms.  Topics within that historical chronology might include the dynamics of repression and acceptance; political opposition and activism; family and religious expectations; the AIDS crisis; the enlarging of the gay and lesbian spectrum (and the internal divisions within the community); the role of humor and camp in LGBTQ+ representation; and the growing body of LGBTQ+ literary representations for children and young adults. 

As befits such a broad focus, this is a course that is also very "universal" in spirit: it doesn't presuppose anything about students' own identities, backgrounds, or political sympathies--just that they are interested in seeing how one community has tried to reflect its experience, in part, through the things we read.

Readings

The reading list is still evolving, but likely candidates would include fiction (long-form and short) and drama by James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Peter Gill, Tony Kushner, E.M Forster, Bernardine Evaristo, Sarah Waters, and Carmen Maria Machado.  We will explore Alison Bechdel's memoir, Fun Home, as well as poetry by authors such as Elizabeth Bishop, Carl Phillips, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, Rick Bardot, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Lee Mokobe.

Course Description

Dystopian literature emerged not long after early utopian literature and has evolved alongside its optimistic kin. The popularity of this genre grows during periods of rising authoritarianism, as evident in its response to Soviet communism and European fascism in the mid-twentieth century. Social engineering, eugenics, and religious intolerance are among the fears that this genre has addressed. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen dystopian literature rising again, even in young adult fiction series such as The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games. This class will center its study of this genre on seven novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P. D. James’ The Children of Men (1992), Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).  Additionally, we will read scholarly articles and short stories to further contextualize the evolution of the genre.

Course Description

This course will broadly survey contemporary literature written in English but produced outside the Anglo-American core to explore how theoretical dimensions of globalization, migration, gender and sexuality, and natural disasters engender or refute notions of worldliness. Some of the debates that we will ponder include but are not limited to: the centrality of English as the lingua franca for peoples/writers from different parts of the world, how those writers oscillate between the standard English and multiple “englishes”, the impossibility of reading “world literature” without contextualizing the imperial project of Europe, and many others. 

To anchor these overarching topics, we will look at several core literary texts from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In this course, we will be able to build connections between politics, language and representations. Some of the writers that we will read are Laila Lalami, Amitav Ghosh, Saleem Haddad, Michelle Cliff, Athol Fugard, Ahdaf Soueif, and others.

Course Description

In a recent article from The Atlantic, Matthew Kirschenbaum asks, “What if, in the end, we are done
in not by intercontinental ballistic missiles or climate change, not by microscopic pathogens or a
mountain-size meteor, but by…text?” This question would have made very little sense five years
ago, but today, it feels appropriate. It captures the ominous mood around writing and technologies
of literacy.
With the mass uptake of so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI), including large language
models (LLM) like ChatGPT, our relationship with writing is changing. And it’s changing fast. As
has been the case historically in moments of significant literacy change, this paradigm shift has been
met with a range of different reactions: from a panic anticipating the next “literacy crisis” to an
almost utopian enthusiasm for a more efficient and democratic writing future.
In this class, students will work to understand this moment in writing history by both studying past
literacy crises and working to unpack the implications these new technologies have for their own
present and future as writers. As we experiment with these emergent writing technologies, and
document the impact they are having on our writing processes, we will collectively theorize the
future of writing and of writing studies.
To that end, students can expect to: produce consistent short writing assignments, with and about
LLMs; compose major papers on AI and literacy crises; compile and present on a multimodal study
of writing processes; and contribute to a course soundtrack.

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

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

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

Course Description

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

The concept of “ecology” appears widely in contemporary scholarship, and over the past two decades, has emerged as a critical site of research and theory building in the field of writing and rhetoric studies. Among its varied uses, scholars have drawn on ecological perspectives both to define the scope of rhetoric (as material, discursive, affective, and relational) and to engage with complex environmental problems (as a site of rhetorical intervention). In this course, we will explore rhetoric’s “ecological turn,” and through focused reading, writing, and research activities, we will consider the affordances and limitations of using ecological models to inform our work as professional communicators. The course will begin by familiarizing students with established and emerging approaches to rhetorical inquiry centered around the theme of “ecological rhetoric and rhetorical ecologies”; we will in turn use those approaches to examine environmental issues, broadly construed, through discourse- and field-based research methods. Complementary to these aims, assignments will focus on the development of term-length projects that reflect student interests and contribute to a portfolio of work that represents their expertise in different areas of professional and public writing.   

Texts for the course will include Bridie McGreavy, Justine Wells, George F. McHendry, and Samantha Senda-Cook’s Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke’s Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion, and Kenneth Walker’s Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics. The course will also draw on a diverse set of readings that develop variations on the concept of “ecology” as a theoretical and practical orientation to research, writing, and advocacy.

The course should be of interest and value to students who are looking to develop their expertise in professional and public writing and related areas of language and rhetorical study. Anyone with an interest in these themes is welcome to email the course instructor, Dr. Chad Wickman, for additional details: cwickman@auburn.edu.

Course Description

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

Course Description

This offering of Poetry II focuses on the techniques used to craft poems, as well as the content from which their ideas originate. We’ll study collections of poems informed by history, inspired by the natural world, and drawn from images in fine art. And we’ll investigate how these poems’ authors employ lines, stanzas, diction, syntax, musicality, and other poetic elements in critical responses and discussion. We’ll find material to use in writing original poems in visits to Auburn’s archives, arboretum, and art museum and practice combining exploration of sources outside ourselves with introspection. And we’ll refine class members’ poems through the process of workshopping and extensive revision.

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

Readings

Our texts are The Galleons by Rick Barot, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and A Girl by Diane Seuss, and The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck.

Course Description

This course aims to familiarize students with the intricacies of the genre, with a primary focus on work that falls under the broad label of Narrative Nonfiction.  The course will look both at early practitioners of the genre and contemporary innovators to help establish a useful lineage for one’s own creative work. Narrative Nonfiction is commonly defined as fact-based writing that uses the techniques of fiction to bring its stories to life—including such craft elements as description, dialogue, character development and scene.  Our workshop will center on three sub-genres of Creative Nonfiction: literary journalism, creative criticism, and nature/travel writing.  While writers in these forms often incorporate personal elements into their work, all strive to also transcend them, consistently turning to outside research and cultural meditations that extend far beyond the self.  Students will study a wide range of such professional work and attempt to emulate it in their own creative essays.  End of the semester portfolios will consist of work from each sub-genre, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

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, 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

Although Irish Literature and its bardic traditions stretch back centuries, this course will begin with the Irish cultural revival of the late 19^th century, a time in which literature participated in cultural, political, and sporting movements that sought to distinguish Ireland from Great Britain and thereby advance the cause of political independence. We’ll begin by examining the work of two major figures from this colonial period—W.B. Yeats and James Joyce—then proceed on to writers, such as Colm Toibin,  who portrays Irish life under the Catholic theocracy of the Republic and, later on, Anne Enright, who documents the sudden prosperity of the “Celtic Tiger” economy, and end with contemporary writers such as Sally Rooney, whose characters inhabit a more global Ireland. Our readings in literature will be augmented by some other significant recent cultural highlights, such as Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inishirin, scenes from Derry Girls, and music by Fontaines DC and Lankum.

Requirements

Two papers (7-8 pages), presentations, final exam.  

Course Description

In her foundational essay, “The Race for Theory,” Black Feminist critic Barbara Christian writes that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.” Black writers, Christian continues, theorize through “narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.” Taking Christian’s insight as our jumping off point, this class will explore how Black authors in the 18^th and 19^th-century United States theorized through literary form. We will read poetry by writers such as Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, fiction by Julia Collins and Frank Webb, and selected other works. Alongside these primary works we will read a carefully curated selection of foundational and recent secondary works from writers including Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, and Christina Sharpe. Throughout the semester, we will focus on teasing out and exploring the theories that early Black writers offered through their literature, and use contemporary writers to help us better understand some of those theories.

Requirements

Students will complete a series of short writing assignments including a paper abstract and two annotated bibliographies, as well as a longer research essay.

Course Description

This course explores American literature published during the earlier 20^th century.  Focusing primarily on works of fiction, we will examine how these texts and their authors responded to the major social, political, and cultural transformations, including the emergence of modernist literary styles, upheavals caused by two world wars, Jim Crow-era racial discrimination and a growing civil rights movement, and the increasing influence of women’s writing. Students will have opportunities to learn about scholarly approaches to American literature of this period, while receiving regular guidance and practice in literary research and advanced expository writing.

Requirements

Weekly writing exercises, oral presentation, midterm and final examinations.

Readings

Readings will include works such as: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

Course Description

In a draft of an unpublished manuscript, black speculative fiction writer 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 speculative fiction seriously attends to matters of apocalypse, worldbuilding, mutualistic symbiosis, and survival. 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, seminar participants 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

This course will explore the emergence of a new form of prose fiction, the novel. As a literary genre, the novel is a response to revolutionary shifts in conceptions of identity and significance brought about by concurrent consolidations of modern, secular culture, capitalistic socio-material forms of life, and the nation-state. The course presents competing models for a “novel” form of narrative fiction depicting and reflecting upon social affections and economic relations, on the one hand, and interior, private, intimate emotional-affective experience, on the other hand. The course will explore how this dual focus reshapes the framing of questions about religion, politics, ethics, class, material power, and gender.

Requirements

two papers (the first 4-5 pages, the second 6-8 pages, typewritten, double-spaced); a midterm; a final exam; three writing exercises; reading quizzes; a 15-minute presentation on an optional eighteenth-century work of fiction; class participation and class attendance.

Readings

Texts: Richardson, Pamela (Broadview); Haywood. Anti-Pamela and Fielding, Shamela (Broadview); Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Penguin); Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Penguin); Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (Oxford); Austen, Northanger Abbey (Penguin)

Course Description

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? This class will consider the many ways that contemporary drama recreates, arranges, adapts, and mashes up U.S. history. Our central readings will be plays from the past thirty years or so. The history that they reference, though, goes all the way back to the eighteenth century. We will discuss musicals, documentary dramas, realistic plays and fantastic ones. They all consider the ways that personal history intersects with larger cultural and political trends, using their staging to meditate on what it means to retell a story.

Course objectives: By the time you finish this class you should be able to: 1. Evaluate an essay's argument, 2. Apply an essay's argument in a different context, 3. Use digital sources for research and source management, 4. Analyze theatrical texts and productions, 5. Revise and expand on earlier writing, 6. Devise and carry out an extended research project.

Requirements

reading journal, short research and writing assignments, annotated bibliography in Zotero, research paper (12-15 pages), artistic response.

Readings

Arbery, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Kaufman, The Laramie Project, Kushner, Angels in America, Miranda, Hamilton, Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3), Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me, Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Weidman and Sondheim, Assassins

Course Description

Following the respectable success of The Hobbit, a novel directed toward clever children, J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of English Language at Merton College, Oxford, was asked by his publisher, Allen & Unwin, to provide a sequel. The result twelve years later was The Lord of the Rings, the best-selling English-authored work of the twentieth century. This course will be a slow walk through what has been considered the greatest example of epic fantasy. First, we will read one of the medieval English works that Tolkien translated and which did not leave his intellectual universe throughout the composition of the Lord of the Rings: Beowulf. In essence, we will read Tolkien’s epic through the lens of the earliest English-language epic. We will conclude the term by reading The Silmarillion, a book whose concept he was greatly interested in but could never finish, strangely predictive of his audience’s experience with it as well. We will also approach Tolkien through a theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of the habitus since Tolkien went to great lengths creating a habitus for every race in his epic. In the course of the semester, we will explore the intersections between sociological theory and medieval texts on Middle-Earth, perhaps discovering how, with Tolkien, such an examination is hobbit-forming.

Requirements

Opus Minor paper (6-8 page), Opus Major (15-20 page revision), Creative Project, Group Projects, Final Exam, an irrepressible appreciation of the pun

Readings

Beowulf, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion

Course Description

Myths created by the cultures around the world are some of the most powerful stories that we look to for the insights into the human psyche, meaning of life, significance of historic events, and more. Joseph Campbell, one of the most prominent mythologists, said that we look to myths to experience our own lives meaningfully. We also look to myths for entertainment and inspiration. As students of literature and culture, we find in the multicultural myths the underlying frameworks that, throughout the human history, have been present in the stories across cultures. In this course, we will explore the logic of myths; we’ll look for wisdom, beauty, and psychological potency of the stories and ponder how they resonate and transform in literature, art, film, and even branding to this day. As always in my classes, your individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion, research, and creative projects.

Requirements

Requirements will likely include faithful attendance, response papers, short essay (5 pp.), research essay (10 pp.), creative project, final exam, and enthusiastic and meaningful participation.

Readings

Reading list will include a selection of Greek, Norse, Slavic, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese myths and their later reimagining in various media.

Course Description

From the 1970s through the first decade of the 21^st century, postmodernism was arguably the most vital and significant movement energizing literature (and the other arts), critical theory and Western philosophy. Among other thing, postmodernism questioned the idea of a final, ultimate and irreducible truth and meaning; interrogated conceptions of History that were premised on the idea that History unfolded like a master narrative with a definite beginning and end, possessing an inherent meaning that determined the nature of the events we find intelligible; it rejects an aesthetics based on the principle of realism, that is, the principle that we can unproblematically know and have direct access to “reality,” instead advocating more surreal and experimental artistic forms in order to represent/create the real. This is only a very introductory definition for purposes of a course description. Our seminar will work towards a fuller understanding of postmodernism both by reading sections of Brian Nicol’s wonderfully informative book The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction and by examining six novels—three works of American literature, two works of English literature, and one work of contemporary Indian literature. Like all sections of Seminar in Literature, we will devote attention to learning the skills necessary for writing an effective and successful research paper; such a research paper will be the major assignment in our seminar.

Requirements

a 20-page research paper (50%), a 4-5-page essay (20%), lively and consistent participation (20%), and an oral presentation on your research paper (10%)

Readings

TEXTS: J. G. Ballard, High-Rise; Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research; William Burroughs, Naked Lunch; Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve; Don DeLillo, Players; Toni Morrison, Tar Baby; Brian Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction; Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown.

Course Description

This course is designed for majors in Professional and Public Writing (PPW) to reflect and expand
on the work they have done up to this point. As we read, discuss, and write, we will develop a more
robust understanding not just of PPW as a discipline, but also of our own relationship with it: where
we situate ourselves within the field; what we’ve learned; and how that work might translate to other
rhetorical contexts, professional, public, or otherwise.
In this specific section of 4810, we will ground this work in a close examination of core curricular
and extracurricular documents that have shaped, or will shape, our place in the field. Our entry into
this work will be “genre,” or more specifically, rhetorical genre studies.
Since Carolyn Miller’s groundbreaking article “Genre as Social Action,” scholars of writing have
attempted to build on a notion of genre not as a static set of textual conventions, but rather as
“typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” That is to say, increasingly scholars and
teachers of writing have become more interested in what a genre does as opposed to what it is. In this
course, we will begin by describing, discussing, and debating this turn towards a rhetorical
understanding of genre. Once we have developed this vocabulary, we will turn our attention to
genres we have encountered in PPW. We will ask: Who/What/When/Where/Why is a discipline?
How do individuals in the field use genres to produce, mediate, and challenge disciplinary
knowledge and identity? What are their limitations? What assumptions are embedded in disciplinary
genres?
To get at these questions, students can expect to: produce consistent short writing assignments;
compose major genre papers; compile and present a multimodal portfolio of disciplinary work; and
contribute to a course soundtrack.

Course Description

This Capstone course focuses on poetry and creative nonfiction. As a member of the class, you will rigorously examine and revise the poems and essays you have written during your time at Auburn University with the final goal of creating a portfolio of your highest-quality work. Along the way to this culmination, you will participate in workshop, study books by visiting writers and attend their readings, and reflect on techniques and concepts you have learned from influential texts and courses in a craft essay to accompany your portfolio. Other activities will include classes on submitting work for publication in literary journals and a public reading by you and the other graduating creative writers.

Our special project in Spring ’24 will be designing, printing, and displaying letterpress broadsides featuring excerpts of your writing. Creating these broadsides will be another exercise in examining each word of your composition and the finished product will showcase
our poets’ and essayists’ accomplishments for the larger campus community.

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

This 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 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 (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, Billy Collins, Joy Harjo, David Lee, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, 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

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

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

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

This 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

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

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

Course Description

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

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

In this course, you can expect to:

• Discuss and apply theories and principles of design

• Understand how design elements work within different types of documents

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

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

• Consider the ethics of document design

• Describe, analyze, and justify your design decisions

Course Description

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

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Readings

Readings and Screenings will draw from the following pairings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course Description

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

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

Requirements

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

Readings

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Course Description

One of the most influential literary creations of the Middle Ages in Britain was King Arthur. Allegedly based on a plucky Romano-Celtic chieftain who managed to defeat an army of Saxons, Arthur was first a Welsh national hero, then a pan-European conqueror, and ultimately a king who presided over a court of knights and ladies having their own adventures usually independent of his influence. Tales of King Arthur and his knights have appeared in many European languages and in many centuries beyond the dim origins of his story. In most of these tales, Arthur is the ideal king. But what does that mean? This seminar will examine Arthur as a sovereign power and how his presence is important to the stories that feature him. We will begin with reading Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer to gain a vocabulary to discuss sovereign power. We will first apply Agamben’s theory to a reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II, a play which describes a king who is overthrown by his cousin. Think of it as an Unpleasant Revolt. We will then read several Arthurian stories to examine how Arthur’s role appears and changes over time. Although much of our material will be medieval, it will all be in translation. Since the focus on the course will be to produce a research paper, we will do so in several stages: a topic proposal, a first draft (Opus Minor), and final draft (Opus Major). This course will also involve active learning, a role-playing game, minstrels, sword distribution from ponds, vicious animals, and knights who may or may not say Ni.

Requirements

Opus minor (8-10 pages), Opus major (15-20 pages), Ricardian Reaction Paper, Arthurian “Game,” Exercises, Vibrant Conversation, and an awed reverence for the pun

Readings

Agamben, Homo Sacer; Shakespeare, Richard II, Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Course Description

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

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