Department of English

From a child's cry to the onomatopoeia of an expression like "yuk!" through the complex development of extended metaphors in public orations to the slogans for advertising campaigns masterpieces or television shows, and even to so-called hive consciousness -it is all communication. But what is communication? Why do we communicate? What do our communication practices say about how and why we relate to each other and the world? This course offers a wide-angle lens on the "problem" of communication, with a particular eye toward topics that make up the concentrations of the Major in Communication, including media, journalism, production, creative writing, and organizational exchanges. The point is to examine the means by which human beings interface with each other and express their sense of things in the world. We will do this by exploring communication as it appears in speech, constructed texts, visual imagery, digital realms, and elsewhere. Specifically, we will carry out thought experiments around the abovementioned topics. At each step of the way, we will transpose these thought experiments into thought pieces (short written audio essays) that demonstrate your thinking-and rethinking-about communication as something that exists at the heart of our meaning-making and message-making activities.  
 

This is a course in the fundamentals of public speaking. Emphasis is on content and delivery of the most common types of short speeches, such as introducing a speaker, presenting information, persuading an audience, and demonstrating a technique or process, as well as impromptu speaking. Detailed evaluation, videotapes, and conferences will be used to encourage the process
of improvement.

This course will be run primarily as a writing workshop, wherein students will learn about the genres of scientific and technical writing, and practice composing select examples of documents in these fields. While students will spend significant time working on improving stylistics (grammar, syntax, word choice, etc.), more fundamentally, they will learn about the ideological, rhetorical, and organizational principles that underlie scientific and technical methods (versus, for example, their counterparts in the humanities), and which guide writing in these professions. Given that work in the sciences is frequently a team effort, we will examine best practices for writing collaboratively. Additionally, students will consider strategies to convey technical concepts to non-specialist audiences, and to appreciate their obligations as prospective practitioners of these professions to laypersons who may be affected by their work.
 

This writing course emphasizes planning, composing, and revising. Specifically, the course deals with strategies for generating ideas, recognizing audience, clarifying purpose, focusing on a perspective, and choosing effective arrangements of ideas. Techniques of revision, which are central to the course, focus on appropriateness of language and effectiveness of development, as well as on editing. 

This course is designed to acquaint the students with the form and structure of various genres of literature. Readings are mainly drawn from English and American literature. Class discussion and writing assignments will make use of such critical concepts as point of view, imagery, and tone. 

This course provides a broad overview of British literature from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. We will read a variety of literature and historical works, examine their historical and cultural contexts, debate issues of periodization and canonizataion, and consider questions of genre and innovation. 

A forerunner of Romanticism, Gothic fiction influenced the development of several types of popular fiction, including horror and ghost stories, the uncanny or weird adventure tale, the detective story, fantasy and science fiction, the sensation novel, magazine serials, and graphic novels. Women writers, marginalized by the mainstream press, found success writing for the magazine trade in the 19th century. Readings will include Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and representative ghost and horror stories and films. 

This course looks at the intersection between race, ethnicity, and gender in American literarure by examining narratives by African-American, Asian-American, Chcana/Latina, and Native American women. While each author represents her ties to her ethnic community differently, we'll look at overlapping concerns between cultures such as the negotiation of the roles of mother, wife, lover, and daughter, family relationships, class position, the construction of sexuality and consequences of sexual transgression, the formation of a collective ethnic or racial consciousness, and concepts of nationalism and Americanization. 

Humor is an index of culture. That is, what people find humorous at any moment in history tends to go well beyond standards of comic judgment, revealing insights into social trends, shared beliefs among in-groups (and out-groups), and conventional wisdom about what matters (or not) and why. This course will consider various ways in which humor represents a cultural zeitgeist-or, a spirt of the times-particularly in the U.S., but also, where appropriate, in transnational contexts. More specifically, it will highlight how humor represents personal frames of mind as well as generational or collective mindsets in specific times and places. It will therefore enable an examination of humor that locates what is funny, comical, laughable, etc. in certain forms of expression in public life. Such an examination will begin with a critical reflection on what students consider to be their own senses of humor and end with a robust notion of what it can mean to recognize a comic spirit as a shared sensibility associating any one self to others. 

This course focuses on the bloodiest of William Shakespeare's tragedies, including Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Coriolanus. We will attend to Shakespeare's structure and language, discuss the conventions of the genre, and examine the plays in the context of the social, political, and religious tensions of the Renaissance.

This course will familiarize students with canonical writers in the African American literary tradition, while at the same time examining how particular genres, themes and events simultaneously resurface and change throughout African American literary history. We will explore how African American writers have challenged themselves and each other to examine what it means to be "American" at different historical and political moments, and how these identities are complicated by issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will focus throughout on literature as a site where struggles over self-representation, identity, citizenship, and freedom take place. 

This course examines literary representations of warfare primarily (though not exclusively) by American and British writers, with particular attention to conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through novels, short fiction, and poetry, students will explore how literature gives shape and voice to the lived experience of war and its aftermath. Readings will consider the perspectives of both soldiers and civilians whose lives are altered by modern conflict.

Above all, the course focuses on the psychological, moral, and social dimensions of war during and after combat: the immediacy of battle, the strains of military life, and the difficult passage home. Texts will also explore the wider reach of war into civilian life, including loss, displacement, memory, trauma, and the long process of reintegration after conflict.

Students will examine how narrative voice, poetic form, and perspective shape literary representations of combat, military culture, and life on the home front. The course will also consider how writers confront the ethical complexities of war and how stories of conflict help shape cultural memory and national identity.

FALL 2026: Special Topics in 20th-Century American Literature: Six Versions of America In 1630, during the Arbella's voyage to New England, John Winthrop, founder and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered a sermon titled "A Model of Christian Charity" to the Puritans assembled on board. In the most-quoted phrase from the sermon, Winthrop declared, "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." The thrust of the sermon was the need to build and maintain a community devoted to Christian ideals, which Winthrop argued would help the new arrivals survive in an untamed wilderness. 350 years later President Reagan would modify Winthrop's phrase, referring to the United States as a "shining city upon a hill," morphing Winthrop's insistence on community into a celebration of individual freedom, material prosperity, and American power (military, political, and financial). Reagan's celebratory adaptation of the phrase brought forth an entirely different vision of America, one diametrically opposed to Winthrop's: the individual vs. community, material prosperity vs. spiritual devotion, power vs. Christian love. This course examines six recent books by American writers, each offering a different version of America, often pitting a self-reliant individual against emblematic political, geographical, and social landscapes, and revealing the constraints and limitations masked by Reagan's upbeat formulation. We will practice the art of explication, leading to two short papers, and our discussions will culminate in a final paper in which students compare two of these books to each other: Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections; Christie Hodgen, Boy Meets Girl; Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men; Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America; George Saunders, Vigil. 

Capstone Course English Majors complete a senior seminar in literature, with the instructors and topics rotating through the department. The seminar culminates in a significant seminar paper or project shared with an audience of professors and peers. For a detailed description of the offerings during any given fall semester, contact the department chair.

This course is intended to help students gain the ability to analyze and appreciate autobiographical writing and to produce powerful autobiographical writing of their own. Students will develop the ability to construct a close reading of an autobiographical text based on an analysis of such elements as imagery, dialogue, voice, and structure; and the ability to write an autobiographical story characterized by a powerful voice, imagery, narrative, structure, and meaning. 

Ideally suited for-but by no means limited to, students who have taken ENG 209 Creative Writing-this course will extend the discussion of craft begun there. Our goal will be to learn to tell a story in writing in such a way that the writer disappears, so that what is left, for the reader, is a shimmering, three-dimensional reality that in no way betrays study of story structure, the discussion of published and student stories, and the writing of exercises and complete stories, we'll labor to produce fiction that has the look, texture, and flavor of professionals.