English 100: Academic Writing [W]
Focuses on rhetorical awareness. In this course, students will explore the reading and writing practices of the academic community. Through primary and secondary research, and through guided writing practice, students will critically examine what these practices mean and consider how students’ own reading and writing practices fit into those of “the Academy.” While additional texts may be assigned, writing produced by students in the class will serve as the principal texts of the course. Additional texts may include Graff & Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say, Harris’ Rewriting: How to do things with Texts, and Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose. Prerequisite for all sections: FYS. First-year and sophomore students only.
ENG 100-01 TR 9:30 – 10:45 am. Prof. Kang. Additional prerequisite for section 01 ONLY: permission of the instructor.
100-02 TR 8:00 am – 9:15 am. Professor Kelenyi
100-03 TR 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm Professor Falbo
English 135-01: Misfits, Outcasts, & Loners [H, V]
What is normal, and who gets to decide? These are simple questions that are actually hard to answer. Although “normal” seems to describe what most people think or do, once you stop to ponder these questions, you might start to wonder if the very idea of normality is connected to social or political regulation—after all, to be labeled “not normal” is to be placed on the margins of some (usually imaginary) group or society that calls itself normal. In this course, we will read literature concerned with misfits, outcasts, and loners in order to understand how writers have challenged the very idea of normality as it relates to a variety of human experiences. Given that many well-known writers have been interested in the broad question of normality versus abnormality, we will have the opportunity to read literature ranging from the 19th Century up to the 2020s. Along the way, we will study some of the most significant works of literature written in the last 150 years, as well as lesser known—though no less powerful—work. Our method will be to combine close attention to the language of the text with explorations of the social, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts that help these works come alive. Throughout the course, we will explore also what is distinctive about literature and literary inquiry and ask why so many people across so many different times and places have thought literature vital to better understanding themselves and their relationship to wider culture.
Professor Belletto
TR 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
English 146: Black Writers: Intro to Early African American Literature [GM1, V]
This course follows the development of African American literature from the 19th century to the mid-20th century. Through an array of novels, autobiographical texts, essays, and poetry —paired with contemporary secondary readings— we will interrogate how literature informed and reflected the evolving relationship between African Americans and their sense of social, political, and legal belonging in the United States. We will grapple with the following questions: How did African American writers understand and articulate race, citizenship, and belonging in the context of the nation? How did literary experimentation open up new ways of engaging with these issues? And how might we begin to see the early formation of an African American literary tradition? Course authors will include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Saidiya Hartman, and Ralph Ellison.
Professor Griffiths Brown
MW 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm
English 151-01: Introduction to Creative Writing [W]
An introduction to the fundamentals of creative writing, focusing on strategies for generating, developing, revising, and editing across genres such as poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Through intensive reading, writing, and discussion, students will explore ways to enhance their own creative processes as they identify and attempt to duplicate techniques employed by imaginative writers. Corequisite: First Year or Sophomore Standing.
151-01 MW 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm Professor Campbell
151-02 TR 9:30 am – 10:45 am Professor Awake
151-03 TR 1:15 pm – 2:30 p.m Professor Awake
151-04 TR 11:00 am – 12:15 pm Professor Gilmore
151-05 TR 1:15 p.m. – 2:30 pm Professor Gilmore
English 175: Native American Literature
This course samples the diversity of contemporary Native American literary forms such as novels, political essays/speeches, poetry, graphic novels, science fiction. We will examine the tribally specific contexts in which 20th and 21st century Native American authors are writing, and consider how they choose to represent their identity, their Nation, their homelands, and history. The course will emphasize how Native American literature today demonstrates the enduring significance of oral tradition and storytelling to Tribal Nations, as well as resistance to the ongoing oppression of settler colonialism. Through the course texts, we will explore interdisciplinary topics at the forefront of Indigenous / Native American Studies, such as: survivance; decolonization and land back; the possibilities of literary recovery; tribal sovereignty and self-determination; environmental justice; museums and NAGPRA law. Course texts include D’Arcy McNickle’s Wind from an Enemy Sky, poetry from Joy Harjo and Layli Long Soldier, the graphic novel Ghost River, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, and more.
Professor Katelyn Lucas
Date & time TBD
ENG 202: Writing Seminar [W]
Writing seminars are courses that make writing and language their explicit subject. Examples include seminars in writing genres (memoir and travel writing), in rhetoric and argument, or in the way language and discourse constitute particular cultural constructions (“the animal” or “race”). While each seminar has a specific focus (to be announced in its subtitle), all seminars emphasize the process of academic reading and writing and use student writing as a primary text. Prerequisite for all sections: FYS
202-01 and 02: Human Rights Rhetoric
Can literature teach empathy? Can rhetoric prevent a war? Can words change the world? These are some of the questions that will drive our examination of the language and history of universal human rights. In this course, students will study human rights literature and analyze foundational human rights documents. We will discuss both historical and current events, including the Holocaust, the Syrian refugee crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. To examine how writers and artists have used the language of human rights advocacy in different contexts, we will examine a variety of genres such as memoirs, short stories, films, graphic novels, and investigative reporting. We will also discuss historic human rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (the latter of which was drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette). By exploring rhetorical strategies through the lens of human rights, we will analyze how writers appeal to human rights values to instigate political and social change in the world. Students will also practice advocacy writing by creating their own texts.
Professor Uzendoski
100-01 MWF 9:30 am – 10:20 am
100-02 MWF 10:35 am – 11:25 am
202-03: I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
What if Zen philosophers and contemporary neuroscientists—and Emily Dickinson, quoted in this course’s title—are all right? What if we really are nobody? In this course, we’ll read and write about the question of selfhood from a variety of perspectives, including autobiography, literature, neuroscience, religion, and philosophy. Is the self just a story we tell about who we are? Can it be identified with the “default mode network” of the brain (and, if so, can it be turned off)? Are reported accounts of “boundary-dissolving” (in meditation, psychedelic experience, etc.) any kind of evidence for the self’s non-existence (anattā, in the vocabulary of Buddhism)? Or was the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes right all along when he argued that the self is the one thing we cannot do without: the prerequisite of thought itself? It’s often said that writing is a good way to make up your mind. This course will ask you to consider whether that mind is really yours.
Professor Wadiak
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
202-04: Practical Criticism for the Novel
Course Description: When we read a novel, we are not passively consuming a story. We are encountering narrative structures that provide models for thinking about our own lives and the lives of others. We are negotiating between our own default settings for interpreting the world and those alternatives that a novel provides. We come face-to-face with characters, settings, cultures, events that are different from ourselves and our experiences, differences that we must consider and reconcile. Through these forms of active reading, we as readers are placed in a position of relation with a novel. We co-constitute a novel as we interpret its myriad elements, contributing actively to the process of narrative meaning-making. We collaborate with a novel to theorize some aspect of the human experience through narrative organization. Such theorizing is what we call novel criticism.
This course introduces students to key tools, concepts, and discourses for producing original novel criticism. Students will hone critical reading and writing skills while gaining proficiency in the art of novel criticism. Focusing on four novels as case studies, we will dissect various formal aspects of the novel—e.g., plot, character, time, narration, resolution—and compare their various manifestations in the novels we read together. We will see how these concepts inform classic as well as recent examples of novel criticism, providing students inspiration and models for composing their own analyses. As students produce their own examples of close-reading essays, analytic arguments, comparative analyses, and research-based revisions, they will build communities of writing with their peers and learn best practices for supporting fellow writers through peer feedback. Course readings will include novels by Henry James, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, and Ocean Vuong as well as critical and theoretical essays.
Professor Stone
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
English 205: Introduction to English Studies [H]
English 205 is an inquiry-based course that introduces students to methodologies, concepts and questions central to the discipline of English Studies, especially the subfields of literary criticism and theory, rhetoric and composition studies, and creative writing. Students will be asked to identify their own assumptions about reading and writing and will have many (and varied) opportunities to generate compelling readings of a diverse array of texts. Particular attention will be paid to the ways race, class, gender and sexuality can influence the interrelated processes of reading and writing. Prerequisite for all sections: any introductory English Department course (101-199) or AP credit or permission of instructor
205-01: Texts, Making, Meaning
Centered around a diverse set of short-stories, poems, novels, and graphic novels, this course is designed to initiate you into the practices of literary appreciation, analysis, and interpretation– practices vital to your success as an English Major or Minor. We will be interested in what makes texts “literary,” and in how analyzing texts from a scholarly perspective opens up ways of reading. We will also use art-making in the classroom to respond to literary works, and try our hand at writing creatively. In doing so, we will experience innovation and diversity through personal creativity.
Professor Rohman
TR 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
205-02: Introduction to English Studies I
This course will introduce you to some of the important questions that you should be asking yourself as an English major: How do we read a text? Why are certain texts “literary”? How does literature relate to culture? What is critical theory and why should we care about it? We will spend much of our time carefully reading, re-reading, and thinking about complicated but richly rewarding literary texts and examples of critical theory. You will learn not only to close read these texts, but also to view them from a number of different angles. By the end of this course, you should be prepared not only to write and speak knowledgably about different literary genres—short stories, novels, poetry, drama—but also to create compelling, well-supported arguments about such texts, and to think flexibly about the different ways one might approach literary and cultural questions.
Professor Belletto
TR 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
English 206: Literary History [H]
How is literary history constructed? What is the canon of great works and how is it formed? This course inquires into the specific cultural practices that construct literature and engages students in an exploration of canon formation, marginalization, intertextuality, and influence. Readings are chosen from British, American, and Anglophone literatures and from various genres; texts from at least three literary periods are studied in depth. Prerequisite for all sections: Any introductory English Department course (101-199) or AP credit, or permission of instructor.
206-01: Medieval-ish: The Idea of the Middle Ages
The problem with defining the Middle Ages, as one scholar notes, is that everyone sees what they want: “The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape themselves.” The upside is that one can learn a lot about how a given period saw itself by looking at its idea of the Middle Ages. This course takes some foundational medieval and early-modern texts—Beowulf, Hamlet, and tales of King Arthur—and asks how later periods made these stories their own. We’ll find that Hamlet, for instance, draws on much earlier medieval ghost stories even as Shakespeare’s play itself continues to haunt the Gothic imagination centuries later. As we read these texts in relation to one another, we’ll consider how the idea of the Middle Ages helped give rise to the very notion of a literary tradition in English. We’ll also explore the ways in which this tradition depends critically upon the imagined colonization of a variety of marginalized borderlands, from the Welsh marches to the past itself as a “different country” that’s always threatening to encroach upon our own modernity.
Professor Wadiak
MWF 9:30 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
206-02: Literary History: Theorizing Early Modernism
This semester we will focus on texts that were originally written during the Early Modern period (16th through 17th centuries) and then radically re-written or re-interpreted according to romantic, modern and postmodern sensibilities. Our primary texts will be supplemented by critical essays on the question of periodization and the origins of terms like “classical, “ “Renaissance,” “Reformation,” “Early Modern,” “Restoration,” “Romanticism” “Modernism,” and “Postmodernism.” One of our goals will be to determine the range of choices made by readers, publishers, critics, authors that contribute to the construction of literary history. Primary texts will include Beowulf, Gardner’s Grendel, More’s Utopia, Huxley’s Brave New World, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee’s Foe, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest in relation to postcolonial reimaginings of Shakespearean romance. This course satisfies the literary history requirement for the English major.
Professor Cefalu
TR 9:30 am – 10:45 am
English 231: Journalistic Writing. [W]
This course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of journalism through its most basic form: news writing. Students will learn how to write clearly and concisely using Associated Press style, conduct interviews, gather information and craft engaging and relevant news stories.
During the Sept. 25 vice presidential debate, which will be held on campus, students will serve as fact checkers, assessing the accuracy of claims made by candidates, identifying misinformation and verifying sources. Throughout the semester, students will explore the role of fact-checking in holding public figures accountable and maintaining the integrity of the democratic process.
The course equips aspiring journalists with the skills and knowledge necessary to critically analyze political discourse, utilize reliable sources and databases, and produce accurate and well-researched journalistic pieces. The course will also examine the changing media landscape and the role of journalism in a democratic society. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Parrish
231-01 TR 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
231-02 TR 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm
English 240: Introduction to Writing & Rhetoric [W]
This course examines the history, theory, and practice of the expansive and interdisciplinary field of Writing Studies. Beyond learning about the type of writing that happens at college, we will study writing’s role in constructing and maintaining social identities, paying close attention to how our written selves both liberate and constrain us while engaging in various forms of self-expression. The central concern of the course is how writing is entangled in societal expectations for and understandings of appropriateness, conventionality, and value; we will look at how scholars in Writing Studies reveal, resist, and teach about and around writing’s dominating effects. For example, we will explore the intersecting racial, classed, and cultural forces that propel efforts to standardize written English. While an important goal for this class is to gain familiarity with the foundational commitments of Writing Studies, an equally urgent one is for you to gain a critical awareness of your own research and writing processes and add and refine flexible strategies to these processes for enactment in college coursework and beyond. To do this, the course positions you as critical consumers and producers of information. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Kelenyi
TR 9:30 am – 10:45 am
English 247-01: Nature Writing [H, GM1, W]
Nature writing as a genre has long been concerned with questions of how to understand humans within and as nature. In this course, we will study a range of writings, from Thoreau to today, as models for our own writing, emphasizing close observation and revision as vital ways to consider small intricacies of natural life as well as complexes of gender, race, and the engineering of space — all of which make up our own ecosystems. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Campbell
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
English 247-02: Nature Writing [H, GM1, W]
This critical-creative writing workshop might be better titled, “(De) Nature Writing” as its fundamental question is to ask students to destabilize romantic notions of “Nature.” Positioned within critical race and feminist thought, the course challenges students to not simply consider the subject of “Nature” as that which is preoccupied with trees, lakes, pastoral landscapes, and humankind’s corresponding interior meditative reflection, but more expansively, to ask ourselves, what is the nature of the Human? If we decide certain behaviors are natural, then what behaviors are unnatural? How do we consider issues of contagion and toxicity within such parameters? How do different “natural” disasters reveal our own social and political commitments? In her seminal book, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Donna Haraway even critiques the romanticism of the “natural” as dangerous for women, people of color, and first nations communities. She suggests that our understanding of “nature” and the “natural” is too biologically deterministic and seeks to marginalize vulnerable populations from positions of access, representation, and power. In this course, students will be expected to read a variety of texts related to the concept of “Nature” and write twenty pages of revised creative and critical work on the subject. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Fernandes
MW 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
English / FAMS 252: Writing for Television [W]
In this class, we will be exploring the craft of writing for television. We will learn the essentials of script formatting and practice how to develop an original idea into a show with intriguing characters and storylines. Through in-class screenings, discussion, and play-acting, we will analyze characters and plot, the structure of both half-hour comedic and hour-long dramatic episodes, series-long story planning, and strategies for writing compelling dialogue. We will develop a vocabulary for discussing TV productions while also examining the industry’s history and evolution to streaming. Writing assignments will build from one-sentence loglines to revised scripts. Particular emphasis will be placed on drafting, group work (“writers rooms”), and revision. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Awake
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
English 257: Intermediate Poetry Workshop [W]
An intensive workshop course in poetry writing at the intermediate level. Students will compose poems, study the art and craft of major poets, and participate in revision and editing workshops. Students will strengthen close reading and workshop skills, produce a polished portfolio of poems, experiment with different writing prompts, and analyze contemporary poetry. Prerequisite: FYS.
Professor Campbell MW 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm
English 300: Chaucer [H, W]
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1386-1400) dramatizes the story-telling competition among a group of travelers thrown together by chance. As the contest evolves from a way of passing the time into a wide-ranging and sometimes heated debate, the question of how we should engage with fictional narratives—whether to laugh, shudder, get mad, get even, or break down in tears—takes center stage in a poem that asks us to think about the ultimate value of the stories we tell each other. We will read (almost) all the tales—from romances and animal fables to tales of seduction and trickery—along with Chaucer’s great love poem, Troilus and Criseyde, and a selection of his other verse. We’ll explore these stories both for themselves and for what they might tell us about Chaucer’s evolving sense of himself as a writer doing something unprecedented. Readings are in the Middle English of Chaucer’s day, but no prior experience is assumed. This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Prerequisite: ENG 205 or permission of the instructor.
Professor Wadiak MW 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm
English 331: American Novel from 1945 to the Present [W]
This course introduces students to the American novel after 1945. Since there are potentially hundreds of excellent novels that we might have read for this course, an organizing theme is necessary to tell a coherent story about the period. For this course, we look at a range of novels exploring the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world to see how and why novelists have been concerned with “globalization.”
Since the Second World War, it has become increasingly difficult to think about the United States without thinking about the rest of the world: political developments such as the Cold War meant that the United States felt compelled to intervene around the world in order to check the spread of global Communism. This is how we got the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and why the U.S. had interests in places like Central America or
central Africa. During the post-1945 period, the Third World was likewise becoming newly independent from their former colonial masters; and yet, as many of our authors acknowledge, these newly-formed countries were not entirely independent as they relied on foreign capital to sustain their economies, a situation some observers referred to as “neocolonialism.” In exploring the American novel after 1945, then, we find writers interested in many forms of global circulation, from military actions to more subtle kinds of contact or influence. For much of the postwar period, the United States was, with the Soviet Union, one of the two superpowers in the world. But after the end of the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, the United States entered a new phase in its relationship
with the rest of the world, and we end the course by looking at a recent novel that depicts this new global situation. In general, we will find our authors imagine very complex relationships both among different countries and among the ordinary citizens in those countries, and we will make sense of these relationships through broad themes such as nationhood, history, personal identity, and cultural imperialism. In recent iterations of this course, we have read Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Toni Morrison, A Mercy; Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer; Teju Cole, Open City; Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters; and Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange. Students are also required to read and present on one other novel written since 2000 that explores the relationship between the U.S. and the world. Prerequisite: ENG 205 and ENG 206, or permission of instructor.
Professor Belletto
TR 2:45 pm – 4:00 pm
English 342: Modern British Literature [W]
In her 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “about December 1910, human character changed.” “All human relations have shifted,” she continued, and “when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” Woolf’s passage describes the profound upheavals and experimentation with all things artistic in the period between 1890 and 1940. What came to be known as modernism was—in literature and elsewhere—an approach that was obsessed with innovation, avant-garde thinking, radical change and rejection of tradition. “Make it new” became the battle cry for revising almost everything in aesthetics—and what we call literature has never been the same. This course immerses us in the intense literary innovations of the British modernist period. Among our considerations will be how science and technology, race and colonialism, evolutionary theory, and the New Woman, upend traditional notions of what it means to be human at the turn of the twentieth century. We investigate these changes in texts by writers such as Joseph Conrad, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and, of course, Virginia Woolf.
Professor Rohman
TR 11:00 am – 12:15 pm
English 350: Writing & Community Engagement [W]
What are writing and rhetoric’s roles in enacting social change with/in communities? How do academy and community members collaborate to identify and achieve mutual goals? What role can writing play in community partnerships? In this class, we will explore how community-engaged writing, research, teaching, and activism within sub-fields of Composition and Rhetoric (such as cultural rhetorics, professional and technical writing, writing center studies, and rhetorical studies) have used writing and rhetoric to build and maintain cultural communities as well as enact social change in a variety of contexts. In addition to reading about community-engagement and class discussions, you will be invited to listen to the stories of everyday writers from various communities and think critically about how they use writing to achieve their personal, professional, collective, and activist goals. In collaboration with the Landis Center, students will learn about and contribute to the writing that community partners engage in to achieve their goals. Through this community engagement, we will arrive at a deeper understanding of how writing and rhetoric work for diverse communities, thereby recognizing the social dimensions and public consequences of community-engaged writing and research. Prerequisite: ENG 205 or permission of the instructor.
Professor Kelenyi
TR 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
English 352: Special Topics in Black Literature: Slave Testimony Across the Americas [GM1, W]
This course will engage with testimonies from enslaved people of African descent across the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and broader Latin America. Benefitting from a more hemispheric view of American slave testimony, our varied course readings will respond to the misconception that slave narratives are solely the purview of the US. The sources we engage with will also move across a range of forms: self-written autobiographical narratives, dictated written testimony, audio recordings, visual art, fiction. Such formal diversity will expand our understanding of what counts as slave testimony. These readings, paired with some more recent secondary literature, will guide us to think beyond the modern concept of writing as the primary evidence of thinking and being. We will ask, what is a slave narrative? What methods were available to the enslaved for expressing their experiences, identities, and ideas? And how do these sources variously represent their narrators’ voices? Prerequisites: ENG 205 or permission of the instructor.
Professor Griffiths Brown
MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
English 353: Advanced Journalistic Writing [W]
Advanced Journalism takes the fundamental principles of news reporting and writing acquired in ENG 231: Journalistic Writing to the next level. The goal of the course is to hone and sharpen students’ journalistic writing and reporting skills while producing engaging, relevant and useful stories. There will be a progressive emphasis on research, interviewing, writing, and editing as well as the strategic use of data as a reporting tool.
The centerpiece of the course will be live fact checking the Sept. 25 vice presidential debate, which will provide students with invaluable real-world experience in assessing the accuracy of claims made by candidates, identifying misinformation, and verifying sources to uphold the integrity of the democratic process.
The course aims to equip aspiring journalists with the essential skills and knowledge necessary to critically analyze political discourse in a rigorous and responsible manner on deadline. Through hands-on practice, discussions, lectures and guest speakers, students will sharpen their ability to conduct research, discern between reliable sources and misinformation and communicate their findings effectively to the public.
The course will delve into ethical considerations inherent in journalism, including the responsibility of journalists to report truthfully, fairly, and with integrity, while navigating potential conflicts of interest and ethical dilemmas. Students will examine the essential role of journalism in a democratic society, exploring how fact-checking contributes to the accountability of public figures, fosters informed citizenship, and safeguards the integrity of the electoral process. Prerequisite: ENG 231.
Professor Parrish
TR 9:30 am– 10:45 am
English 362: Advanced Fiction [W]
Writing the Past What is the past? Is it last year? Centuries ago? Yesterday? We are constantly ordering and narrativizing the past and we will examine in our own work what constitutes the past and how to approach it in fiction. How do we fictionalize truth? What happens in the transformation from the “real” to the fictional? How do historical events inform plot, setting, and characters? What is dramatic distance? This course considers the role of research and historical material as well as our personal and familial pasts to examine how what has occurred outside the world of the story has profound effects on the world within it. This writing workshop deepens student understanding of narrative technique and process, with an emphasis on revision, through constructive workshop critique of student work, as well as the stories and novels of published fiction writers, such as Susan Choi, Kelly Link, Art Spiegelman, and Brandon Taylor. Prerequisites: ENG 250, 251, or 255.
Professor Gilmore
W 7:00 pm 9:50 pm
English 374: 19th-Century Science Fiction [W]
This course offers a transatlantic survey of science fiction written in the 19 th century. Students will understand how the genre emerged alongside historical developments in Europe and around the world. Science fiction became a recognizable genre in a century defined by political and scientific revolutions. Beginning with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, a text often celebrated as the genre’s first masterpiece, this course will examine the dominant trends and figures in early Anglophone science fiction. Students will discuss how both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideas informed the writing of Frankenstein. We will also consider the legacy of the Enlightenment on utopian fiction by reading texts by Edward Bellamy and Samuel Butler. In addition, the course will also examine connections between science fiction and colonialism. Students will study how the popularization of science fiction in the late 19 th century became intertwined with histories of colonial expansion. For example, we will analyze how the “Scientific Romance”—a subgenre made famous by writers such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle—reflected colonial discourse at the end of the century. Throughout the semester, we will discuss how scientific concepts and technological innovations helped shape science fiction. By studying the many ways that science fiction authors responded to technological, political, and social transformations, students will build an understanding of how science fiction first became a popular literary genre. Prerequisites: English 205 & 206 or instructor permission.
Professor Uzendoski
MW 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm