ENG (English, English and Comparative Literature)

ENG 101 Ancient Literature (4 hours)
This course will examine the literature of the ancient world. The primary focus will be on Greek and Roman literature. Works and authors might include: Homer, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, Terence, Seneca, Petronius, Ovid, and Virgil. Offered every fall.

ENG 102 Medieval and Renaissance Literature (4 hours)
This course will examine the transition of the cultural world of Dante to that of Shakespeare and Milton. Although the primary focus will be Western, non-Western works may also be studied. Texts and authors might include: Beowulf, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Rabelais, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Offered every spring.

ENG 103 18th- and 19th-Century Literature (4 hours)
Authors in this course might include: Defoe, Pope, Austen, Wordsworth, Brontë, Hardy and George Eliot. Offered every fall.

ENG 104 Modern and Contemporary Literature (4 hours)
This course will investigate the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Authors might include: T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Forster, Joyce, Beckett, Zadie Smith, and Rankine. Offered every spring.

ENG 105 Global Literatures (4 hours)
This course will survey contemporary works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature in translation around the world. Authors include Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Higuchi Ichiyo, Jorge Luis Borges, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood, and Chimamanda Adichie.

ENG 150 Intro to Literary Studies (4 hours)
Readings in both poetry and prose to cover forms and genres commonly encountered in literary studies (sonnet, villanelle, sestina, dramatic monologue, short story, novella, novel), and focusing especially on the fundamental building blocks of poetry (rhyme, meter, stanza form) and prose (narrative form).

ENG 200 Independent Study in Literature and Composition (1-4 hours)
This course provides the opportunity for an intense study of diverse topics under the direct supervision of the instructor. The student and instructor will collaborate to develop the content of the course, which must be approved as outlined by the Independent Study Policy.  (Sec. 6.15.)

ENG 204 Shakespeare: Early Plays to 1603 (4 hours)
This course will examine the genres and plays that define Shakespeare’s career up until 1603, the year marking the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the start of James I’s. This chronology will allow a focus on the genre Shakespeare defined known as the “History Play,” comedies through Twelfth Night, “problem comedies” such as All’s Well That Ends Well, and tragedies up through Hamlet. Offered in alternate years. Fulfills English Department requirement for Shakespeare or Chaucer. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course (the last with a grade of “C-“or higher). Students who have taken ENG 206 may take ENG 204 for 300-level elective credit.

ENG 206 Shakespeare: Late Plays, 1603-1613 (4 hours)
This course will examine the genres and plays that define Shakespeare’s career after 1603, the year marking the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the start of James I’s, up until the playwright’s presumed retirement. This chronology will allow a focus on most of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and his best “Romances.” Offered in alternate years. Fulfills English Department requirement for Shakespeare or Chaucer. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course (the last with a grade of “C-“or higher). Students who have taken ENG 204 may take ENG 206 for 300-level elective credit.

ENG 220 Literary Tribalism: How to Read Race, Class, Nation, and Gender (4 hours)
Beginning with a rereading of Harper Lee’s seminal To Kill a Mockingbird in terms of region, race, and class, students then move from a discussion of whiteness and The South to depictions of immigration, transnationalism, black and Native American culture, all while also reading important essays of Cultural Studies that should inspire students to come up with their own research questions for the course. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102 (concurrent enrollment acceptable). Cross-listed as WGS 290.

ENG 240 Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies (4 hours)
This course aims to provide a foundation in intermediate literary and cultural studies skills via a topics approach that allows for greater breadth of coverage across multiple time periods and different genres within British, American, and global literature. Possible topics include “Postcolonialism,” “Modernity,” “Nation and Community,” or “Women’s Writing.” Topics vary by semester. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course.

ENG 241 Topics in Genre Studies (4 hours)
This course examines a selected literary genre (including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction) within and across a range of historical periods and cultural and national contexts. In addition to learning about genres, students will develop skills of close reading, textual support, inter-textual analysis and critical thinking. Topics vary by semester. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course.

ENG 242 Television and Reading: Critical Literacy and American Narratives (4 hours)
Students will compare the narrative production of American cultural identity within seminal works of nineteenth-through twenty-first-century writers (Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel) alongside American television series, including I Love Lucy, The Bernie Mac Show, and Master of None. This course may be counted towards the AAS and FMS minors. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102.

ENG 243 Children’s Literature and Coming of Age (4 hours)
Students will explore the works of twentieth-century canonical Children’s Literature, including novels by L.M. Montgomery, C.S. Lewis, Beverly Cleary, and Louise Fitzhugh, while tracing conventional literary templates through more contemporary examples of the genre, as found in the works of multicultural writers such as Christopher Paul Curtis and Sandra Cisneros. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102.

ENG 260 Freedom Seekers and Narrative (4 hours)
Offered under the African American Studies minor, this course will explore narratives that resist social displacement and racial oppression in texts ranging from classic enslavement narratives by Harriet Jacobs to more contemporary black fiction and essays by Colson Whitehead and non-print narratives found in 1960s soul music, rap, film, podcasts, and docuseries. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102.

 ENG 261 The Lady Rebel: Transnational Women’s Literature (4 hours)
Offered under the Women’s and Gender Studies minor, this course features nineteenth-to-twenty-first-century transnational, multicultural women’s fiction, drama, and poetry, including work by Louisa May Alcott, Mary Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Colette, Zora Neale Hurston, Hanan Al-Shaykh, and contemporary writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102

ENG 290 Special Topics in English and Comparative Literature (1-4 hours)
Courses of selected topics will be offered periodically as determined by the needs of the curriculum. Prerequisites can vary based on the topic selected. See individual course listings for each semester for the specific topic and any prerequisites.

ENG 310 Research Methods and Critical Theory
This course is designed as an introduction to the methods and tools of research in the study of literature, including textual, critical, social, historical, and cultural approaches. Readings, exercises, assignments, and discussions are designed to help students develop transferable research and writing skills, applicable to both academic and non-academic settings. Prerequisites: COR 101 and COR 102; completion of one 100-level English course strongly encouraged.

 ENG 321 Poetry of Love and Heartbreak (4 hours)
Poetry that focuses on the difficulties of being in love and of suffering heartbreak. Poets depict obsession, despair, unrequited love, unspeakable desire, intoxication, and repulsion. Secondary readings on the philosophy of love, the political context of non-normative desire, and the philosophy of sex and power. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course; or permission of the instructor.

ENG 332 The 18th-Century Novel (4 hours)
This course surveys early fiction from the period credited with the “rise of the novel,” though most of these works pretended to be anything but fiction. As we read these early novels, the first written in English, we will consider the association of this emerging genre with newness and originality. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course.

 ENG 334 The Modern Novel (4 hours)
This course asks what it is to be modern as well as what it means for the novel as a genre to be modern. The course texts take up issues of gender, sexuality, marriage, what it is to know (or not to know), character presentation (do all characters have an inner life?), among many other innovations. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course.

 ENG 336 Comics and Graphic Novels (4 hours)
In this course we’ll read a diverse sample of comics and graphic novels (ca. 1980s-present) alongside of comics theory and practical criticism. Touching on underground comix, graphic memoir and biography, queer comics, and superhero comics, among other possible topics. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102 and one 100-level English course.

ENG 340 Advanced Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies (4 hours)
This advanced level course will explore a particular topic in a Literary and Cultural Studies sub-area, including both specific British, American, and global authors, and specific eras of English and global literature from the Medieval Period through the present. Students will read and write critically about literary texts (written and visual), cultural theory, and avenues of inquiry that theoretical approaches open. Students will also learn how to locate and evaluate the resources that literary and cultural studies depend on, and how to use disciplinary-specific methods of presenting and documenting work. Topics vary by semester. Prerequisite: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

ENG 341 Advanced Topics in Genre Studies (4 hours)
This advanced level course will facilitate the intensive study of the historical development of a selected genre (poetry, drama, fiction, literary non-fiction); major critical theories and approaches, current as well as foundational; and the historical, cultural, and ideological conditions under which specific genres have been produced and received. Students will also learn how to locate and evaluate the resources that genre studies depend on, and how to use disciplinary-specific methods of presenting and documenting work. Topics vary by semester. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

ENG 345 Modernist Literature (4 hours)
Literary modernism (circa 1900-1941) is less a movement than a cluster of styles of writing, or a series of heated arguments. This seminar-style course will consider British, American, continental, and global modernism, as well as the relation of the Harlem Renaissance to modernism, and representations of gender and sexuality in modernist texts. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

 ENG 346 Hyper-Contemporary Literature (4 hours)
This course will entail serious and sustained reflection upon the two terms invoked in its title: “literature” and “the contemporary.” Because we will build our reading list from a series of very recent literary prize winners, our primary task will be a critical examination of the creation of cultural value by tracking ongoing shifts and mutations in notions of the literary. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course; or instructor permission.

 ENG 360 The Master’s House: Postcolonialism and Writing Back (4 hours)
Using the lens of Critical Race Theory via Postcolonial Criticism, students will investigate to what extent some of the most beloved masterpieces in British literature are actually agents of imperialism. Readings will compare literary relationships between Charles Dickens and Salman Rushdie, between Mary Shelley and Arundhati Roy, and others. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

ENG 370 Jane Austen in Context (4 hours)
Reading all of Jane Austen’s novels against the backdrop of her life, historical context, and writings of other novelists and poets with whom she was competing in the literary marketplace. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course; or permission of the instructor.

ENG 371 Woolf and Morrison (4 hours)
The pairing of these two writers may seem, at first, incongruous, for one is a descendant of American slaves, and the other an heir of the British intellectual aristocracy. Yet both Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf address issues that shaped the last century and haunt the first three decades of this new one, including gender, race, class, and colonialism. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

ENG 393 Special Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies (4 hours)
Courses relating literature with aspects of social and intellectual history or a particular issue or theme. Possible offerings may include women in literature, American civilization, African-American (or other ethnic) literature, popular culture, the literature of a single decade, children’s literature and myth and folklore in literature. Usually offered in alternate years. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, one 100-level English course, and ENG 210.

ENG 394 Special Topics in Major Authors (4 hours)
An intensive study of between one and three major authors or texts. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, one 100-level English course, and ENG 210.

ENG 400 Advanced Independent Study in Literature and Composition (1-4 hours)
This course provides the opportunity for an advanced, intense study of diverse topics under the direct supervision of the instructor. These offerings are generally suited for junior or senior students. The student and instructor will collaborate to develop the content of the course, which must be approved as outlined by the Independent Study Policy.  (Sec. 6.15.)
Specifically, this English course is supervised study in specified genres or periods. Prerequisites: COR 101, COR 102, and one 100-level English course.

ENG 490 Advanced Special Topics in English and Comparative Literature (1-4 hours)
Advanced courses of selected topics will be offered periodically as determined by the needs of the curriculum. These offerings are generally suited for junior or senior students. Prerequisites can vary based on the topic selected. See individual course listings for each semester for the specific topic and any prerequisites.

ENG 495 Internship in English and Comparative Literature (1-12 hours)
An internship designed to provide a formalized experiential learning opportunity to qualified students. The internship generally requires the student to have an application (which satisfies all internship requirements developed by the academic program that oversees the internship) and to obtain a faculty supervisor in the relevant field of study. All internships are graded on a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites are determined by the academic program overseeing the internship course.