Courses

Course Description

This class will explore the basics of three genres of creative writing: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. In addition to creating our own work in each of these genres, we will learn to read as writers by engaging with contemporary writers of each form and basing our discussions around the craft and method that these writers employ. Students will also engage in workshops and learn about proper ethics of the workshop environment. This class should help those who are interested in continuing their creative writing studies to have a better sense of which genre they are interested in, while also allowing students who are interested in exploring creative writing for the first time a good foundation from which to explore.

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 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 means to understand what is lacking.

Course Description

This course is a beginner creative writing workshop which introduces students to the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Students will create original pieces in these genres and will receive class feedback for their work. No previous creative writing experience is required. In addition to the reading required for workshops, mentor texts will be read and analyzed, as well as readings about specific elements of craft. This class is about foundation and exploration. Students taking this class will explore their creative writing interests and will build a strong foundation based on technique.

Course Description

English students take this course as the gateway to the Professional and Public Writing major track or the Technical and Professional Communication minor. Students from other majors are welcome, too, and will benefit from learning about how discourse works in professions.

In this course, you’ll study what professional and public writers do and how and why we do it. For starters, as writers, we research discourse communities and communication situations. We evaluate communication for different contexts, and we offer insight. We adopt and adapt writing styles that fit audience and organization needs. We write and design iteratively, often working collaboratively. And we even test documents, which can be quite fun. This course will introduce you to these practices and how professional and public writers use words and visuals to create knowledge, advocate for the people using our work, and promote action. During this course, you’ll create a draft of an ePortfolio, as well as craft samples to include in your portfolio; your samples will reflect your professional goals.

Course Description

English 2010 introduces students to professional writing as an academic discipline and contemporary practice. In this course, you will learn foundational theories and methods associated with writing in the professions; you will acquire strategies for designing and composing written and multimodal genres; and you will craft documents for field-specific audiences and situations. You will also compose a digital portfolio that reflects your emerging expertise in the creative and technical aspects of writing and information design. Through these activities, you will develop a combination of conceptual knowledge and practical skill that you can apply across a range of academic, workplace, and community settings. 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).

Requirements

Readings

Course Description

ENGL 2020 will introduce you 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, you will develop and strengthen a set of skills that you will apply across a range of upper-division (3000 and 4000 level) literature courses. You 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 you begin to think critically and reflectively about your work and development as an English literature major? We will explore these questions together through the shared reading and discussion of poetry, prose, epic, and drama.

Requirements

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.

Course Objectives

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

Requirements

3 short papers, 2 in-class exams, 1 final exam, Reflections on the readings posted on a discussion thread

Readings

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 3rd edition, Jonathan Culler, A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory, Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Epic, Other readings are on Canvas. 

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 course will introduce students to the craft of poetry. Students will compose and revise their own poetry and participate in writing workshops to examine and critically engage with the work of their classmates. In addition to workshop, students can expect course meetings to consist of generative assignments and analysis of contemporary poetry, including discussion of craft elements and poetic techniques. The course culminates in a final portfolio of revised poetry alongside an analysis of student’s creative work from throughout the semester.

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 undergraduate fiction workshop explores the craft of writing for readers ages 8 to 18, (spanning two different publishing niches: Middle Grade and Young Adult literature). Through close reading of mentor texts, students will study how authors create authentic youth voices, control pacing, and build characters driven by strong desires and high stakes. In this class, students will conceptualize, plan, and outline an original novel for either Middle Grade or Young Adult readers. They will also draft the first two chapters of this novel for workshop critiques. The course concludes with an introduction to the publishing process, including querying literary agents and navigating today’s MG and YA markets. As a final project, students will compile a “pitch deck” for their novel, including the components listed above, among other elements.

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

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 class, we will explore the opportunities and limitations that digital composing and communication present. We will assess tensions between the potential that many digital forms and structures possess to democratize communication and access to information and the ways in which they isolate individuals and form closed feedback loops. We will consider how digital forms and spaces inform the ways we see and position ourselves in the world. By digging into the complexities of all of these possibilities, we will consider how we might equip ourselves with rhetorical strategies and critical thinking to engage and communicate in generative ways that align with our particular goals and values.

Course Description

As digital writing technologies continue to grow in influence, power, and ubiquity, it’s tempting to see composing as ephemeral or even superficial. Yet, writing still remains a fundamentally material activity that unfolds with physical tools, across concrete bodies, and in specific places. In this class, we’ll explore what it means to conceive of writing as a material practice across academic and public spaces. While we will explore these questions from theoretical and academic perspectives, this class will also invite students to compose across a variety of material genres and tools.

Course Description

This course is for students who are experienced in creative writing—and excited about continuing to hone their craft. Students will be expected to produce two short stories, as well as to write a significant revision of one of them, and to reflect on their writing and revision process in a final portfolio. We will be reading three short story collections and students will work on writing two stories that could theoretically end up in the same story collection. Through a range of contemporary realist and speculative fiction, we will discuss the key elements of craft that are essential for any short story, with an emphasis on character, worldbuilding, and plot. Students will be encouraged not only to polish their work, but also to experiment with a variety of writing styles and genres on the never-ending journey to finding their voices.

Course Description

This offering of Poetry 2 will have a special focus on the work of writers visiting Auburn’s campus during the semester. Some poets will come to our classroom for Q&As and you will be invited to attend evening readings by others at Pebble Hill. We will learn about poems from their sources—the poets themselves—and through close study of elements of texts’ craft such as line, stanza, syntax, diction, tone, musicality, imagery, and metaphor. We will also consider source in the sense of the subject matter: the influence of hip hop and current events on Marcus Wicker’s Silencer, film as the inspiration for A. Van Jordan’s The Cineaste, Christopher Kempf’s contemplation of the South and Civil War history in What Though the Field Be Lost, and how place infuses Alabama-born Ansel Elkins’ Blue Yodel. Published poetry, which we will analyze in discussion and critical writing, will provide models for your own poems, which you will workshop and rigorously revise for a final portfolio.

Readings

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. 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

How did early modern readers engage with books? What did books look like during this period, and how did their physical form and design elements shape the ways people interpreted their contents? What forms of literature were most popular, and how did readers justify reading for pleasure? This course explores these questions by examining the reading practices of early modern England and the print conventions that emerged from them, many of which we no longer see in modern editions – such as elaborate frontispieces, letters to the reader, commendatory poems, marginalia, and other forms of paratext. Designed specifically to guide the reader’s interpretation of the main text, these elements reflect a literary culture that prized active engagement rather than passive consumption, one in which readers were expected to compare, annotate, imitate, adapt, and respond to what they encountered in order to make it relevant to their own lives.

The readings for this course will range through the rich variety of literary genres that circulated in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including sonnets, emblems, sermons, plays, prose fiction, epic poetry, and broadside ballads. By examining these works in the formats in which they first appeared, we will recover aspects of the reading experience often lost in modern editions. Class discussions will focus on why these works were so appealing to early modern audiences and what they can tell us about this period’s blurring of boundaries between pleasure and instruction, manuscript and print cultures, and even the oral and the written.

Drawing on rare materials from Special Collections and digital archives such as Early English Books Online, students will learn to analyze books as physical artifacts, compare different editions and adaptations, transcribe and edit early modern texts, and create a handwritten commonplace book modeled on Renaissance reading practices. Throughout the semester, we will ask not only what early modern works mean, but also how early modern print conventions taught their audiences how to read. Above all, we will treat literary works as material objects whose forms shape the reading experience.

Requirements

Lively participation, a commonplace book, a research project, and two exams.

Readings

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. In this course we will examine the far-ranging world 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. What sorts of ideas, conduct, and ethical lapses did the Victorians consider shocking? How did literary texts demand reassessment of those same values? How have similar debates today reshaped the ways we interpret the Victorian period?

Other major authors studied in the course include Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells.

Requirements

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

Course Description

This advanced undergraduate course explores the rich and sometimes strange landscape of American writing from its colonial beginnings to the 19th century. Students will engage with a wide range of genres—including poetry, autobiographies, captivity narratives, sermons, essays, and fiction—written by authors who shaped the cultural and intellectual foundations of the American colonies and later the United States.

We will examine how early American writers grappled with questions of immigration, settlement, nationhood, religion, a centuries-long slave economy, civil rights, and the natural world. Readings will include works by major figures such as John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, William Bradford, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, alongside lesser-known voices that reflect the pluralism of early American experience.

Through close reading, discussion of primary texts and scholarly works, and analytical writing, students will develop a deeper understanding of how early American writing laid much of the foundation for what we think of today as the American way of life. Special attention will be paid to the evolution of literary forms and the emergence of distinctively American voices in the decades after the American Revolution.

Requirements

weekly writing exercises, midterm and final exams, and a final research project. 

Course Description

In The African American Theatrical Body (2011) Soycia Diggs Gilbert argues that Black dramatic texts respond to the legacies of historical trauma and enact a reparative impurse. If that is true about African American theatre in general, then can the same be said for Black queer theatre? How do contemporary Black queer playwrights grapple with the Black/queer past, both the personal and the historical, and to what end? The course will begin with an overview of some key texts within the African American dramatic tradition from Lorraine Handsberry, Ntozake Shange, and August Wilson that will help to frame a sustained engagement with works in contemporary Black queer theatre. Students can expect to read the works of Assotto Saint, Robert O’Hara, Sharon Bridgefort, Christina Anderson, and Terell Alvin McCraney, alongside key texts in Black performance studies and queer theory.

Requirements

Readings

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. Division has multiplied, adding to the subtraction of support for Richard. 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. Both popes want to maintain armies to defeat the other, which has increased monetary demands on the faithful of Christendom who are now indulging in pardons. 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 monetary gift in the name of the queen to win back his favor. Think of it as a Princess Bribe. 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. In all these divisions, the question emerges: Which side will win? 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, playing a game by telling stories in English as they go. Essentially, it is a tale spin.

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

In this course we’ll aim for a richly 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 oeuvre upon what it means to be a young American 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 teachers, attorneys, creative writers, public writers, artists, and mindful young citizens interested in a critically astute engagement with a culture in social 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, daily reading quizzes, a term paper (3000 words), and 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

Few figures have inspired such recurring popular cultural fixation as the American housewife. This course focuses on the figure of the housewife in mass media including the short story (e.g. Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife, Zitkala Ša’s American Indian Stories), the novel (e.g. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives), the periodical/magazine (e.g. Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook), the sitcom (e.g. The Donna Reed Show, I Love Lucy, The Jeffersons), and reality television (e.g. The Real Housewives franchise, Wife Swap, 90 Day Fiancé). We will engage domesticity as a philosophical and practical framework for interpreting American literary culture of the mid-nineteenth through late twentieth century. This course will investigate how the housewife emerges as a central character, metaphor, and problem for thought in American literary, sociolegal, and popular culture. Through in-class discussion, visits to Special Collections and Archives, and the curation of a digital exhibit, we will study how American writers, scholars, creators, and performers have imagined the relationship between gender, labor, and the private sphere. Authors, performers, and makers studied in this course are likely to include Alice Walker, Lydia Maria Child, Teresa Giudice, Zitkala Ša, NeNe Leakes, Lucille Ball, Louisa May Alcott, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Kate Chopin, Pauline E. Hopkins, Nara Smith (@naraazizasmith), James Baldwin, Ira Levin, Donna Reed, Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm), Luisa Capetillo, Dorothea Lange, Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer, and Jill Zarin.

Requirements

Course Description

Queen Victoria may not have said, “We are not amused.” Allegedly, she had a fine sense of humor which, according to anthropologist, Kate Fox, is a necessary part of the English psyche. Whether it is the appreciation of a clever turn of phrase evident in the rhyming couplet of an English Sonnet or in Oscar Wilde saying that “Everyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination”; understatement, such as when Professor Minerva McGonagall claims that “we teachers are rather good at magic”; or even in silly characters, such as George Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter, Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins or P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, English comedy stands for American readers as compelling and yet baffling. It mixes educated comedy with the raucous bawdiness of the music hall. How does a culture that can make jokes about Classical Greek entablature, local cheeses, or the non-effectiveness of King Henry III (r. 1216-1272) find foul-mouthed Cockneys, flatulence, and derogatory comments about the French remotely funny? In this course, we will attempt to understand the elements that construct English comedy. As a lens to focus our analysis, we will begin with habitus, or the unwritten code of behavior that humans must practice to be accepted into a society. We will then read some selections of Fox’s Watching the English to get a sense of the English habitus, which we will apply in some readings of English comic culture in order to answer the question of who are the British when they laugh?

Because this course is the capstone experience in the Literature Track, you will create a substantial research paper. You will also have an opportunity for you to reflect on your journey through the field of Literature. Think of it as a Track and Field Event.

Requirements

Paper Proposal, Opus minor (8-10 pages), Opus major (15-20 pages), Reflection, Country House “Game,” and a deep reverence for the Pun.

Readings

Kate Fox, Watching the English; Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Jerome, Three Men in a Boat; Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest; Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm; Wodehouse, Right-ho, Jeeves!; Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Course Description

English 4810 is designed as a culminating experience for undergraduate students in the Professional and Public Writing major. Toward that end, the course will provide you with opportunities to integrate, expand, and apply your learning to real-world scenarios and writing situations. Assignments will specifically center around two focal areas of inquiry and application: for the first, you will develop a multi-part writing project that builds on your interests and engages with a topical issue in professional and public writing; for the second, you will create a digital portfolio that showcases your writing and highlights different aspects of your professional expertise. Together, these activities will strengthen the foundational knowledge and skills you have developed throughout the major and help you to bridge your academic experience with life beyond the degree. 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

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

In 1953, at the historic Hotel Commodore in New York City, Ralph Ellison took center stage and shared “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” after winning the National Book Award. Speaking in a tone that was both quietly sermonic and wonderfully sublime, Ellison offered those gathered a glimpse of Blackness in bloom. His words, though committed to that ceremonial ritual where honors and distinctions are punctuated by formal recognition, were as instructive as they were accepting. For him, Invisible Man was born from his “dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity and individual self-realization.” This seminar is a delving into that dream, a careful consideration of how Invisible Man moves beyond genre and tradition, how it breathes through the complex and animated language of the folk, how it magnifies the hidden and the beautiful – the nuanced and dynamic lives of people. This seminar is the echo of Ellison’s endeavor towards the experimental, a mingling with the often-missed shadows of artistry and aesthetics. It is an exercise in close reading, an invitation for us to reimagine how we read – to learn how to read again, if you will – closely, carefully, critically. This course is a singular and focused tending – the intimate holding of a novel that was written by a Black man who dared a new way of languaging the human condition. This course is about one novel; one chapter; one page; one word at a time. Let us read…

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

The aims of ENGL 2010 are to introduce students to the rhetorical principles, professional practices, and research skills they will need to write professionally in a variety of industries, fields, and contexts.

Students enrolled in English 2010 will:

• Deepen their knowledge of professional writing in the workplace and society;
• Broaden their knowledge of writing technologies, cultures, and practices;
• Develop a writing style and tone appropriate to post-graduate (i.e., professional & public) audiences & contexts;

• Gain experience producing and editing examples of business, technical, and public-facing writing.

Requirements

Assignments include document analyses, usability report, design projects, and a Wikipedia article.

Readings

TBD

Course Description

Despite variations in genre, setting, and style, popular literature tells us more than just which books are popular right now. Popular literature is a tool through which we can draw inferences about our contemporary society, what we value, desire, or yearn for, as well as our titillating fears. With that in mind, this course, centering around Black Popular Literature, will critically engage works by and about Black folks published within the last few years and which also happen to be book club selections (from Oprah’s book club to Reece Witherspoon’s, Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List, as well as pop star Dua Lipa’s reading group Service95). Collectively we will ask what books like Erin Crosby Eckstine’s Junie (2025), Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants (2024), and Nana Kwama Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All Stars (2023), among other, have in common and what do they tell us about the state of the world and our collective socio, political, and cultural investments?

Course Description

This course is a beginner creative writing workshop which introduces students to the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Students will create original pieces in these genres and will receive class feedback for their work. No previous creative writing experience is required. In addition to the reading required for workshops, mentor texts will be read and analyzed, as well as readings about specific elements of craft. This class is about foundation and exploration. Students taking this class will explore their creative writing interests and will build a strong foundation based on technique.

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

How do different professions write? Where do these writing expectations come from? Why do they
exist? How do we learn to produce writing in professional contexts? How can we write more
effectively? How do we study professional writing?

As the gateway course to the Public and Professional Writing (PPW) track within the English major, ENGL2010 seeks to answer these and other questions through a sustained study and practice of
professional writing. Together, we will discuss different rhetorical principles, professional practices,
and research skills that will support and inform your work within PPW and beyond. To do so,
students will direct their own learning on communities and organizations of personal, academic, and
professional interest. Through a series of projects, we will apply key concepts in professional writing
and rhetoric as we research and produce a variety of documents that circulate within your
professional organizations. Students will leave with an increased knowledge of the reasons for
specific professional writing and strategies for producing texts more effectively.

At the end of the semester, each student will produce a final ePortfolio that will include practical
documents that showcase your emerging identities and skills as a professional writer.

Course Description

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, a 10-page essay (written in stages over the course of the semester), a presentation, and an e-portfolio

Course Description

English 3060 aims to familiarize students with rhetorical principles and textual practices commonly associated with writing in the health professions. Informed by a combination of contemporary scholarship and best practices, the course will emphasize two major areas of instruction: for the first, students will research and develop strategies for navigating the breadth of writing activity in the field of health and medicine; for the second, they will conceptualize, design, and compose documents for different audiences and writing situations. Students can expect to develop proficiency in multiple genres, including personal statements, narrative reviews, structured reports, informational resources, perspective essays, and multimedia presentations. They will also have opportunities to collaborate with other students, share their writing with the class, and apply their learning to personal and professional interests. The course should be of interest to anyone pursuing careers in health-related fields as well as liberal arts majors who would like to develop their expertise in areas of medical and health communication.

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.  

Requirements

Reading assignments will draw on a course textbook and published scholarship on subjects relevant to the field of health and medicine. Writing assignments will be research-based, centering around genres that prepare students for writing in professional settings. The course will also involve periodic quizzes, discussion posts, and collaborative research and writing activities.

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 conversation analysis and other 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, talking computers, and translation, 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

TBA

Course Description

This course will offer students a tour of one of the academic foundations of literary study: critical theory.  Unlike literary interpretation (arguments about specific texts), theory involves the methodologies and language on which those interpretations are based.  As such, it's often more akin to reading philosophy, and that, as we know, can sometimes be an intimidating prospect! 

The goal of this course, then, is to provide an introduction to theory in a manageable and (hopefully) sane way.  We will begin long before any of us ever cracked a book--with classical ideas about aesthetics--and move through representative samples of some of the major theoretical schools, such as formalism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, Marxism and post-colonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Our goal will be to read these samples as texts but also as the providers of ways of reading other texts.  (Indeed, how we read and why we read will be central questions of the course.)  Periodically, we'll train our theoretical lenses on imaginative works--mainly short stories, poetry, and film--in order to practice how theory can be utilized, modified, and reinvented, and how, ultimately, it can make us more ambitious readers ourselves.

Requirements

Likely assignments will include several short extension papers (c. 2 pages), a project (with literary and pedagogical options), a midterm and final exam, and active participation.

Course Description

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

Course Description

This 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 narrative writing: 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.

Course Description

This multi-genre workshop will center on writing about music.  Our first unit will focus on writing about music that we dislike (and/or guilty pleasures), the second unit on music that we love, and the third unit will be a collage work of prose that incorporates the work of multiple artists.  For each unit, we will study essays, poems, and stories that fall under these broad categories, discussing each writer’s style and strategies, and looking to emulate this inside our own creative work.  End of the semester portfolios will consist of a substantially revised portfolio, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

Course Description

For more than two centuries, gothic and horror stories have returned to a recurring figure: the gothic heroine. Whether wandering through a dark castle, confronting a haunted house, or uncovering buried family secrets, this character has become one of literature’s most enduring archetypes.

This course explores the construction and evolution of the gothic heroine from the origins of the genre to contemporary horror. Beginning with early gothic fiction and continuing through nineteenth-century classics, later reinterpretations of gothic traditions, and modern horror, we will examine how writers have reimagined, complicated, and transformed this archetype across time.

Readings

Readings will include works such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, gothic stories by Angela Carter, and contemporary novels including works like Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Hart’s Weyward, and Harrow’s Starling House, along with selected films such as Crimson Peak. Together, these works trace how the gothic heroine has been continually reinvented as writers use the archetype to explore changing ideas about women’s identity and agency.

Course Description

The Salem Witch Trials fascinate us. Perhaps the most famous miscarriage of justice in American history, they serve as a spooky reminder of how far superstition and religious fervor can go. We invoke the term “witch hunt” any time we think an ignorant mob is ganging up on a few individuals, anytime we think someone has been falsely accused. But we rarely bother to put ourselves in the Puritan mindset. Fortunately, the Puritans were excellent record keepers. In this course, we will try to understand how the Puritans conceived of witchcraft, how they dealt with it as a legal problem, and how things ever got so out of hand. We will discover that the Puritans were not as ignorant as we like to think. And we will be forced to ask ourselves some difficult questions about the evidence available to us in the historical record. How did political and economic tensions contribute to the witch hunt? How did the legal system break down? And, perhaps most importantly, is it just possible that we have misunderstood everything? That is to say, is it just possible that some of the accusations were at least partially true? As we try to answer these and other questions, we will read first-hand accounts of witchcraft from the Puritan era. We will also consult various histories of Puritan New England and the Salem Witch Trials. Finally, we will read the available transcripts of some of the court proceedings associated with the trials themselves. 

Requirements

There will be one major paper and several shorter writing assignments, in addition to occasional reading quizzes.

Course Description

At the end of the 2015 documentary Sneakerheadz, DJ Clark Kent is asked how he might define a
sneakerhead. “What is a sneakerhead?” he repeats. “I have no idea. I’m just a guy who likes sneakers
a little more enthusiastically than you.”
This course is about that enthusiasm for sneakers.
Specifically, this section of ENGL4010 is designed to introduce students to sneaker culture through
sustained study of its history, its cultural resonances, and its potential futures, all while attending to
its intersections with various topics in rhetoric and writing studies. Students will produce a variety of
individual and collaborative projects as we seek to unpack the place of sneakers within and beyond
the academy. Together, we will design multimodal projects that explore the value of sneakers as
cultural symbols of mobility and as commodities reflective of larger social and rhetorical trends.
Students will chart a trajectory of sneakers from counterculture to mainstream, while interrogating
their own relationship to fashion, rhetoric, culture, and materiality.

Course Description

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

Requirements

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

Readings

TBD

Course Description

As digital spaces become more and more ubiquitous, they are also becoming increasingly important public sites, spaces where citizenship, identity, and meaning are created and negotiated. How, then, have digital writing technologies changed our understanding of publics, and, conversely, how might public sphere theory inform how we understand, use, and teach with digital writing technologies? How might we best define the contours of these digital publics? What does it mean to access and compose in such spaces, and what are the ethical implications of doing so? In this course, “Writing (in) Digital Publics,” we will engage with and contribute to these conversations as we explore and interrogate (sometimes competing) approaches to publics, digital spaces, and writing technologies. Together, we will endeavor to better understand how digital publics inform our work as writers, students, and citizens.

Course Description

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

Course Description

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

Course Description

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 place-based 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 two substantially revised essays, and an ongoing critical component will also factor into student grades.

Course Description

In this course we will survey some of the American fiction, poetry, music, and painting that helped give contour to a transatlantic 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, Aaron Douglas, 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; daily reading quizzes; midterm exam; final exam; term paper (3000 words).  

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

One hallmark of literary fiction in the twenty-first century is what scholars have called “the genre turn.” The term identifies a phenomenon whereby “literary” writers (that is, writers identified with serious literary fiction) adopt the forms and modes of so-called “genre” fiction (science fiction, romance, horror, etc.). What is at stake in this promiscuous commingling of generic modes? What becomes of “the literary” when it encounters popular generic forms? What effects does popular culture have on “high” (or perhaps “unpopular”) art? What does literary fiction have to offer genre fiction, and vice versa? Does the literary exist apart from popular generic forms, or has it simply become one genre among many? What aesthetic qualities or social orientations distinguish literary engagements with popular genres from their (literally) generic counterparts? In this course we will read books by contemporary North American writers with an eye to thinking through the promises and perils of the genre turn in literary fiction.

Course Description

Theater is inherently a place where identity flickers in and out of sight. In the first publication of Much Ado about Nothing, instead of the character names Dogberry and Verges, we find the names of the actors who played these parts: Will Kemp and Richard Cowley. Shakespeare created characters that played to his fellow-actors’ strengths. Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, timeless as they are, were written with Richard Burbage in mind and would perhaps be very different if Shakespeare meant these parts for another player. In theater, one’s performance can hide one’s identity or be enhanced by it; the audience is asked to accept the conventional substitution of selves; and some characters carry out their increasingly layered performances where their “real” identities glimmer nevertheless, unbeknownst to the audience.

In this course, we will ask how identity is constructed against the backdrop of the demands of public and private spheres. To what extent are Shakespeare’s characters able to shape their own inward and outward selfhood? How do these processes occur in our own lives and how much control do we have over our own identity? And, finally, what role does performance play in construction of identity? In what way is performance—and early modern theater as an institution—engaged with political, social, and other agendas? Along with these questions, we will consider a multitude of additional issues, using your individual interests as an important factor in class discussion, research, and creative projects. We will also experience the Shakespearean theater culture through a Reacting to the Past role-playing game. As always in my classes, your individual interests will be an important factor in class discussion and research projects.

The fundamental goals of this course are to familiarize you with Shakespeare’s plays; to explore and understand the social and political forces at work in Shakespeare’s England and their direct relevance to theatrical production; to acquaint you with the genre variety in early modern drama; to improve your ability to read literary texts closely and with understanding; to develop your skills at writing about literature and culture clearly and perceptively; to collaborate on projects and work both individually and in a team.

Requirements

Lively participation, close-reading essay, scaffolded research project, position paper, speech, and strategic writings for the game, final exam.

Readings

Tentative readings: Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Lear, As You Like It; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Course Description

This course will do a deep dive into the text, context, and afterlife of a single novel by Jane Austen. Together we will read Austen's most playful novel, Emma (1815). We will also take a look at Austen's world and culture, Emma's publication history, its reception by contemporary readers, the many different scholarly readings of the novel, and how those readings have shaped numerous adaptations of the novel, from comics to movies to games. We will also be visited (in-person and virtually) by scholars, game designers, critics, and content creators engaged with the eighteenth-century today.

​In keeping with Austen's world, this course is intensely analog: students will be responsible for annotating their copy of the novel and keeping a handwritten commonplace book. Students will be guided through a series of scaffolded assignments leading to a final project of their devising according to their larger research and/or career goals.

Course Description

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) published it’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 5, 1981 detailing the rare occurrence of pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in otherwise healthy, young, homosexual men in Los Angeles. A month later, the New York Times published an article about a cancer seen in 41 homosexual men. The AIDS epidemic would go on to shape and impact politics, art, medicine, and communities across the globe. This course will expansively explore some of the poetry, prose, dramas, films, and other media, created by and about folks with HIV. So while canonical texts like Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1989) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) will be discussed, we will also read selections by Black folks across the diaspora like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), poetry by Essex Hemphill and Danez Smith, films by Marlon Riggs and television shows like HBO’s It’s a Sin, as well as stories that center the experiences of Black women from Pearl Cleage and Sapphire. Through each of these texts we will ask questions and pursue analysis that asks what can we glean from dwelling within this particular historical moment, to linger with those we lost and are still losing, and how they expand how we see the world around us.

Course Description

Unlike other literary periods within African American literary history like the Literature of Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the period of Realism, Naturalism and Modernism, and the Black Arts Movement which have identifiable themes and conventions, the contemporary period is a little harder to categorize. What constitutes contemporary African American literature? When does the period start? What links the texts together outside of their publication dates at the turn of the 20^th century and into the 21^st century? This course will explore Black literature of the contemporary, stories of the black past, speculative fiction, poetry, and essays from writers within the US and abroad. By the end of the course students will be able to articulate what makes contemporary African American literature contemporary and why it is still worthy of study.